What We Have (25 page)

Nursing was tough. With the boys at home, and the long hours— and then, Gretchen added, forgetting where she was for the moment, all the anguish—

My mother nodded, commiserating. She’d forgotten that she was part of the long hours and the anguish.

Had Gretchen ever thought about going back to school? Did she know about the master’s program in history at Oakland Community College?

Sara reported all this back to us. “You wouldn’t believe it. Before you know it, Gretchen has her notebook out and she’s writing down all this information—people to call, courses to take.” My mother had gotten her master’s in history at Oakland. She knew everyone in the department. If Gretchen wanted, she could make some calls—

Only Mom, we agreed, could mentor her chemo nurse right out of nursing.

Sara told us Dr. Brenner stopped by on Day Two to see how things were going. He called my mother a “trooper” and patted her on the leg.

She was more than halfway through the first course.
Just let those fuckers get in her and do their work,
we thought.
Blow those cancer cells to hell and back
.

By the end of the second day, my mother was jubilant. She could do this! It wasn’t that bad!

It was almost July. Almost her birthday. She didn’t look that great—her skin was pale, she had shadows under her eyes—but Dr. Brenner said that was a good sign. That meant the F-U was doing its job.

Maybe, my mother theorized, she was already in remission. That was what Dr. Brenner was hoping. Knock those cancer cells out and give her back her life. Maybe not forever, but, my mother said, who needs forever? A while, at least. That was all she wanted.

We inched back into making plans again. The Fourth. Charlevoix. My mother called and booked the condos.

“I’m telling you one thing,” she said. “This year, I’m hosting Thanksgiving. I’m making you guys do the traveling—babies or no babies.”

 

SHE DID IT. SHE FINISHED
round one and she didn’t get mouth sores and she didn’t throw up, so now she could move on and look forward to all of us coming in for her birthday. Dr. Brenner told her he was relieved, because now he admitted that some of his patients couldn’t tolerate F-U, not even one course of it, and he’d been a little worried after her bad response to the Megace. But she’d done well. This was good news. Round one was done, and they’d let the chemo do its work and in a while—after round two or three—they’d take another set of scans and reassess.

 

EVEN WHILE SHE WAS GETTING
chemo, my mother and I talked every day, somewhere between three and four o’clock, as if by unspoken agreement. We both seemed to think of each other around this time every day—whatever else either of us was doing—and sometimes I wondered if that had to do with the old patterns, coming home from school as a girl, opening the front door, calling out to her—“I’m home!”—or when I was younger, waiting for her outside in the snowy gloom, waiting for her headlights to pick me out from the others, sliding across the vinyl seat into the warmth of the car, the smell of Dentyne and her perfume (Charlie), Carly Simon on the radio. Three thirty, four. Do we associate people we love,
our
people, with certain times of day? Strange, how even the heart has its clockwork. Sometimes I called, sometimes she did. In each case, we’d start up light—“Hi Mellie” (her); “Hey” (me); “So—what’jdya have for lunch?” (her); “Half an organic squash puree” (me); “Tried to eat a Granny Smith and cheese, but it tasted like tin” (her)—back and forth, light, darting, daring each other to see how long we could go before I couldn’t stand it anymore and I caved in and asked her how she was feeling.

“Like the cat’s meow,” she’d say. Or, “Like something the cat dragged in.” A surprising number of cat metaphors proliferated, considering there’d had been no cats in the family since the one that died when it ate Sylvia’s tinsel all those Decembers ago in Chicago.

My mother hadn’t counted on this, but instead of feeling better after the chemo stopped, she felt worse. Dr. Brenner said that could happen sometimes—the chemicals build up, accumulate in the system. She just felt “off,” she said, like she was sitting next to herself, somehow.

One afternoon, while she was napping, Sara called and told me they’d gone out that morning to get a wig. Advance planning: My mother’s hair was already thinning, and she didn’t want to be caught unprepared when it started to fall out for real. “It was horrible,” Sara said. They’d gone to a place out in Pontiac, in a neighborhood neither of them knew. They got lost and it took forever to find the store. My mother’s back was killing her, and every time Sara hit a pothole, she moaned. But at last they got there, and with the help of the store-owner, my mother found something. “It’s made of real hair, not synthetic,” Sara said. “Real hair” sounded creepy to me, but apparently that was what you wanted.

“What does it look like?” I asked, trying to picture this. My mother had worn her hair the same way for twenty years. She got it “done” every Friday at a place in Birmingham she called “the beauty shop.” Washed, set, and dried. It always made her look a little like Nancy Reagan to me, her hair acquiring the luster and texture of steel wool. I couldn’t imagine her any other way.

“It’s kind of a pageboy,” Sara said. “Picture Thoroughly Modern Millie with highlights, and you’ve got it.” She hesitated for a minute. “It’s rakish,” she said at last.

 

SARA WAS GETTING THE BRUNT
of my mother’s pain, being with her for those weeks before, during, and after round one. On the phone with Julie and me, my mother was resolute, even chipper.

Distance helped. The phone helped. We didn’t know she was losing weight, though we could’ve guessed from the way she talked about food. Or didn’t. She did talk about the wig a little, though. Probably preparing us for the Fourth of July. She said it itched.

By the last week of June, her hair was coming out by the handful. Sara told us her scalp looked like an old sponge. “You know when little wads of the sponge come off, and there’s bare patches?” That’s what my mother’s head looked like.

“She looks different,” Sara added, voice low. Trying to prepare us.

I brushed it off. Julie and I had seen her just a few weeks ago! I remembered her Lucite cane. I knew what was what.

A week before her birthday, my mother started feeling better. She had some mouth sores, which made eating harder, but nothing worse. She called Dr. Brenner’s office to schedule the second round of F-U for mid-July. Dr. Brenner was proud of her. She was a “trooper’s trooper,” he told her.

Now that she had a little energy back, she started planning for the Fourth. It fell on a Sunday that year, but the plan was to have our ritual barbecue dinner on Saturday night. We were all coming out on Friday, different times of day, and my mother was command central, setting up meeting points to share cabs at the airport, detailing flight numbers and arrival times.

Next, she had to map out sleeping arrangements. Sara and Geoff liked staying with the girls down in the finished basement, where my mother had set up trundle beds and a sleep sofa. Julie and Jon were getting the Hilton. At this stage, Julie—almost eight months pregnant—needed the best bed.

The Hilton used to be Julie’s room, but my mother had turned it into a guest room, wallpapering and adding plantation shutters, packing all signs of Julie’s girlhood away and heaping so many odd-shaped throw pillows on the bed we all decided it looked like a hotel room. Julie nicknamed it the Hilton, and the name stuck. In fact, not many actual guests had ever stayed there. Despite the pleasure she took in providing plush towels and miniature soaps, my mother was fundamentally guest-averse. She threw a fit once when a colleague of my father’s, passing through to attend a conference in Ann Arbor, stayed overnight with his partner, a dashing lawyer named Allison. They’d been living together for years, and they were both in their fifties, presumably old enough to run their own lives, but my mother was horrified when she found out they weren’t married at breakfast the next morning. “How can they
do
that?” she kept asking us—much to our conjoined amusement—and after they left, she aired the Hilton out for days. They didn’t get invited back.

With Julie and Jon in the Hilton, Jacques, Sacha, and I would be relegated to my old bedroom, now converted, like most rooms in my parents’ house, into an auxiliary study. I tried not to think about four nights on an unyielding sofa bed, wedged between Sacha’s Pack ’n Play and an outsized printer.

Once she’d sorted out sleeping arrangements, my mother threw herself into meal planning. Despite her lack of appetite, she’d spent every minute she felt well enough over the past few weeks baking and freezing: two pies, several batches of brownies, and a raft of appetizers. Not to mention the foundation for her annual Flag Cake, which would require Jenny’s and Rachel’s deft decorations (blueberries, strawberries, and white frosting) on the Fourth itself.

She sounded like her old self.

It was a relief she was cooking. It was a relief she was doling out bedrooms and worrying about towels. It was a relief to have her call me back three times in a row, reminding me incessantly about Julie and Jon’s flight number and arrival time. Telling me
again
where to find the airport van. I was so glad she was feeling better, I wouldn’t have even cared if she made Jacques and me bring our wedding certificate to prove we should be allowed to share a bedroom.

Maybe this was it. Remission. Number one on the list of things she wanted for her birthday. That, and a new laundry room. She hated having to lug clothes all the way down to the basement, she told me one afternoon on the phone.

Remission came first, though.

“If I’m really in remission,” she asked me one afternoon on the phone, “does that mean I can send back all these flowers?”

THREE NIGHTS BEFORE OUR FLIGHT
to Detroit, the phone rang. It was Sara, calling from Michigan. Out of breath. Something was wrong.

“Mom’s in the hospital,” she said, shaken. “Dad thinks you guys should try to come out tomorrow instead of waiting till Friday.”

My heart started to pound. “What is it?” I asked.

“Some kind of infection, I guess,” Sara said. “They had to put her on IV antibiotics.”

My mother had been feeling fine, cooking up a storm. Then, on Monday night, she’d started to feel awful. Really bad, not like the earlier aftereffects of chemo. She’d felt a little better on Tuesday morning, but as the day wore on, she kept asking why it was so cold in the house. Finally Sara took her temperature. She had to hunt everywhere to find a thermometer—all they had was the old-fashioned kind, with mercury. My mother’s temperature was 103. Sara called my father, who called Dr. Brenner, and he told them to go straight to the ER and have her admitted.

“Dad’s there with her now,” Sara added. Call waiting interrupted and it was my father, who gave me the same story Sara just had, only translated into medicalese. My mother had spiked a fever around eleven o’clock, 102.8, evidence of an infection she’d gotten because her immune system was suppressed from the first round of F-U. She’d have to be on IV antibiotics until the fever came down. That was why she needed to be admitted.

“It’s up to you, whether you want to change your plans and come in early,” he said. “She’s not in any real danger. She’s just very weak. But I think she’d love to see you—”

Those were his actual words. But the tone behind them was different.
Emergency! Emergency! Come
now
!

“I’ll call Northwest,” I said. “We’ll come out first thing tomorrow.”

“Good, that’s good,” he said approvingly. “Oh. And another thing.”

I waited.

Apparently, the chemo had killed off the cells in her throat and she was having a hard time talking. They had to keep siphoning saliva out of her throat, it was unpleasant but not dangerous, but—he cleared his own throat here—he wanted us to be prepared.

So: change of plans. Mom in the hospital. Mom unable to talk very well, if at all.

“OK,” I said, numb. I hung up and told Jacques what was going on and we started rearranging things, calling Julie and Jon, calling the dog sitter, calling Northwest to change our tickets. Sacha and I could get a flight out the next morning; Jacques, who couldn’t get away from work on such short notice, would still come out on Friday, as planned.

We were back to Cancer Calendar again. All the festivity had gone out of the trip. We were tense, dry mouthed, moving quickly and unhappily through the house, talking tersely about logistics. Julie was going to fly straight from Portland to Detroit this time—she didn’t want to drive down to Boston at this stage, she was so pregnant. This was the last time she’d be able to fly before the baby was born. She’d meet us either at the house or at the hospital Wednesday afternoon.

I flew out first thing Wednesday morning with Sacha. After we got off the plane, I rented a car and drove straight to Rougemont. It was hot out. Cars shimmered in the parking lot, light rays bouncing off silver tops.