What We Have (31 page)

My history had its finger on me, whatever it was I thought I wanted.

 

WHAT I WANTED THEN WAS
not what I’d been given. I wanted a different set of stories. I liked the Christian ones more than Jewish ones, which were filled with begetting and smiting and names I couldn’t keep straight: Nimrods and Davids and Shems and Noahs. I liked the Christian story better: one big tragedy with a transcendent ending.
Easter Wings
. I wanted to be a poet, and there was such a great tradition of American poets converting to Anglicanism abroad.

When I started graduate school at Oxford, I decided to give the Church of England a try. Under the thrall of Donne’s ornate sermons, stone cathedrals, and sweet-faced choirboys at evensong, I tried to prompt myself into a conversion experience. My old life was so un-decorated, so unlofty. I went faithfully to evensong all that first year, and in the cramped, cold pews, tested myself for inner stirrings. All winter I held out hope. I felt something, I was sure I did! I’d stare with experimental reverence at the choirboys, their gray eyes lifting as they sang. Was that devotion I was feeling? I tried, driven by my passion for everything British and elite and saturated with tradition, but as the days grew longer my enthusiasm dimmed, and I began to suspect what I’d been feeling was closer to loneliness than religious fervor. By spring I gave it up, keeping only the religious poets as souvenirs. I got religion secondhand through them: Donne and Herbert and Milton, reading their poetry out loud to my students with so much emotion my voice would hang in the linoleum gloom for a minute or two after I finished. No God, only poetry about God. Maybe for me, that was enough.

I was thinking about all of this now because when people found out my mother had metastatic cancer, a lot of them said things about prayer. Sometimes this was direct: “I’ll pray for her,” someone would say, and you just had to say thank you. Sometimes you couldn’t help thinking to yourself,
OK! Now we’re getting somewhere, someone’s rooting for us
. It was like a fresh band of cheerleaders fanning out across the field even though the score wasn’t looking great for the home team.

My mother, I happened to know, didn’t believe in God. History, yes. Family. Stories. Sheer good luck. But not God. And so, I guess, not prayers.

I liked it when people prayed for her, since I couldn’t do it myself without feeling like a fraud. I was happy for any kind of help these days, whether it had scientific backing or not. Who were we to be choosy? Anyway, I much preferred people who prayed to the ones who talked about friends of theirs who were pulling through and beating this thing because they had such a positive outlook. I know this may sound like sour grapes on my part, because so far my mother was proving to be a nonresponder, but the positive-thinking school of cancer cure really bothered me. Even Annie fell prey to it. Each time Annie called me now, she kept coming back to the story of her mother’s friend and her remission until finally I begged her to stop. It’s not that I don’t like miracle tales. I’ve always liked the idea of the exception, light cutting through a dark curtain. My problem is that if you claim positive attitude really makes all the difference, what does that say about people who aren’t doing well—and at this point, my mother appeared to be one of them? Doesn’t that mean by definition their attitudes are bad?

Of course, the whole argument is circular. It’s much easier to have a positive attitude when the treatment works, even for a while, and you seem to be getting the upper hand. When your doctor explains to you—patiently, patiently—that your cancer cell type is very rare and very aggressive and doesn’t seem to want to respond to any of the initial kinds of treatment—no to the Megace, no to the Fuck You—none of this necessarily inspires positive thought.

The second week of August, I flew back to Michigan with Sacha and kept my mother company through round two of F-U at Rougemont. My father joined us, and he and I took turns sitting with my mother and taking Sacha for walks down in the lobby.

 

THE TREATMENT SEEMED TO BE
going OK, but my mother looked terrible. Smaller, much more frail. I brought her glass after glass of water, trying not to look at the places where her bones were sticking out like pins. In the evenings my mother napped upstairs in the Hilton and my father and I pushed Sacha in her stroller around the darkening streets and tried to talk about other things. Teaching. Annabel. Charlevoix.

I came back to Boston. The Monday Annabel started working for us, my parents went in to review the latest set of bone scans with Dr. Brenner.

“What did they say?” Julie demanded, in that ragged, out-of-breath voice of postpartum sleeplessness. We were on the phone, comparing notes. I’d been able to get through to my mother before Julie did. But there wasn’t any news yet.

“She doesn’t want us to keep asking her about it,” I told Julie. “She said they’ll call when they know something.”

My father called back later to tell us what we’d more or less guessed. He set up a conference call so he could talk to all three of us at once. The scans showed the cancer was worse.

I could hear from my father’s voice how bad this was. Physically, of course, because she’d had absolutely no response now from either round of F-U. But also psychologically. It was horrible. The worst possible outcome.

“It sucks,” Julie said, starting to cry. “If she could just get
one
little bit of good news—”

My father didn’t want to stay on the phone long. “We’re trying to get a handle on this,” he told us. “Trying to figure out the next step.”

 

I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS
during a lull in a moment that might, from the outside, have looked like a photo on the front of a holiday greeting card. It was the first weekend of September, Labor Day weekend, and we were sitting, all twelve of us, on a small sandy beach in Charlevoix, a resort town on Lake Michigan. Surrounded by the detritus of an afternoon at the beach: a large umbrella; bottles of sunscreen, sand sticking to the caps; an upside-down novel with a gum wrapper stuck inside for a bookmark. The cooler, open, filled with the remains of lunch: skeletons of grape twigs; wads of silver foil; lonely sandwich crusts. Soda bottles with pastel droplets at each base.

It had been a haul to get down here from where we were all staying, in a row of just-painted condominiums overlooking Lake Charlevoix. The whole town seemed to have been scrubbed and renovated since we’d been here last. Baskets of impatiens hung from every lamp pole, and boys with wagons of water and specially outfitted hoses came around twice a day to keep them fresh. All the tatty stores we’d loved as children had been replaced with upscale boutiques selling pink and green sandals or coffee tables studded with shells. Everything was freshly repainted, barely recognizable from the dim lakefront town we remembered with its shabby Fudge Shoppe and shuffleboard courts on the green. Now it was all redone, resplendent, and somehow we’d managed to get ourselves here, even Julie and Jon and Maddy, the way we’d planned months back, when the things we thought we’d do still held.

Now, of course, this was more than an ordinary get-together at the lake, and we all knew that. We’d arrived late the previous day and spent the better part of the evening helping my parents unpack the car and set up their condo. After we helped Julie get Maddy in, we unpacked my parents’ car: the black-and-white hamper stuffed with before-dinner delicacies; cold bottles of wine sweating from exposure to the late summer air; folding beach chairs; the familiar striped towels we’d brought up here summer after summer as girls. Back when we stayed in a rooming house instead of condos, back when two weeks up here felt like an eternity, each day opening into the bright blue eye of Lake Michigan, the lighthouse throwing off its long pale beam, when my sisters and I lay on the burning sand, scooping up the silvery grains and letting them run through our fingers, dreaming of something vague and imperceptible—some kind of happiness that might, if we squinted hard enough, resemble the place where we were right now.

Getting things inside had been easy enough. Even getting Maddy set up went well. But getting my mother up to the condo had been hard.

She stayed in the car till the last minute, resting. We could see how much the drive had taken out of her—it usually takes four hours from the airport, but yesterday, given that we’d driven in caravan, given Sacha’s need for changing and stretching and being released from her car seat, given Julie’s need to find a comfortable position to nurse Maddy, given my mother’s need to find something cold to drink that didn’t make her feel worse, and my father’s conviction that stopping for lunch was a good idea, just to give everyone a chance to pull themselves together, it had taken over six hours. By the end my mother was extremely pale, breathing harder than usual, but each time one of us asked if we could help her inside she just said no, she was fine, go on in, she’d just be a minute. A teeth-grit of a smile.

There’d been endless discussion about how to manage this. The pros and cons, for instance, of renting a wheelchair from Rougemont, none of which was shared with my mother until my father had all the details worked out and then she was furious. She was
not
going anywhere in a wheelchair, thank you very much, and if it came to that we could just
cancel
the entire trip. So we backpedaled, of course we didn’t need a
wheelchair
! We’d be fine! I was struck by the irony that this was the first trip Jacques and I had taken with Sacha without feeling completely weighed down by equipment—maybe we were beginning to lighten our load. But now, my mother needed things. Her cane. Extra pillows. Painkillers packed in a cooler. Two kinds of folding chairs my father hoped would make sitting on the beach easier.

Charlevoix had always been my mother’s favorite place.

At the center of town, the main road formed a drawbridge over the channel between Lake Charlevoix and Lake Michigan—the road giving way to a section of metal, hinged in the middle so it could lift upward and let the boats through. Every half hour the bell rang, tollgates dropping with a series of graduated warning chimes, and the metal bridge lifted open, bit by bit, until it stood implausibly ajar, like a jaw, letting the taller sailboats through the channel and out to Lake Michigan beyond. When we were little, we used to dare one another to run across the bridge after the first warning bell. I can remember my heart in my throat, panting, running across with terror as my sisters cheered me on. For years I had dreams of something going wrong, the bridge opening while we were still on it, grabbing at the edge of one section of road as we lifted skyward, screaming for rescue.

None of this ever happened, but one year—I was eleven, I think, or twelve—Mr. Larson, the man who owned the rooming house where we stayed, had a heart attack, and my father (psychoanalyst, yes, but MD first, and the closest thing to a cardiologist at the rooming house that week) was allowed to ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital. I heard my father explain when he got back that the bridge had been open and they’d been stuck behind the tollgate for almost ten minutes, waiting, with the insufferable chiming of the bells. Mr. Larson survived, but he was never the same. We still came back, summer after summer, and some things were still waiting for us: the rooming house with its old sloping floors, the lake smell, the flocked wallpaper, and Mr. Larson rocking slowly back and forth on the porch, eyes on the lighthouse, as if he needed the rhythm of the rocking chair to remind his heart to beat.

Now, the Larsons were gone—the rooming house sold, turned into condos. We couldn’t stop saying how different it all was. Where had the bead shop gone? Remember the place that sold fishing tackle? But of course, the biggest difference was in us. Not girls anymore. We were all in our thirties now, with husbands and children. We’d grown up, and now there was a whole new generation: my nieces; Sacha; and brand-new Maddy, who had endured two flights at barely five weeks to be here.

Some things were still the same—the restaurants we went to, one per night, each layered with memories of having eaten there every other time we came: the all-you-can-eat-shrimp place, where my father insisted we turn down the offers of homemade bread and steaming fries in order to buck the system and eat shrimp, shrimp, and only shrimp; the elegant inn an hour away with its buffet fantasia, white-clothed tables groaning under hand-carved melons, platters of iced tortes, and mayonnaise-y salads; and our sentimental favorite, The Park Side, a small restaurant with sparkly Formica tables and a view of the harbor’s bobbing boats.

But so much else had changed. The inn had closed. Mercury levels had contaminated the trout at the “other” seafood restaurant, The Fish Pier; at The Park Side, the hostess with the blue-rinsed hair had retired, we needed a high chair for Sacha, a place out of the draft for Maddy, and Jenny and Rachel were somber and reticent, shy with my mother, sneaking furtive glances at her eyebrows, thinned to self-conscious question marks of hair above her pink-rimmed eyes. We were all determined to have fun and we
were
, but in a self-conscious, look-how-much-fun-we’re-having kind of way, anxious not to fuss over her, and fussing just the same—wasn’t she cold under that air-conditioning vent, did she want a sweater, we could just
ask
them to lower the AC a little, was she sure she couldn’t try just a little sword-fish, it wasn’t local but it was delicious, and so on, each of us locked in an anxious solicitude we couldn’t shake.

Then came the day at our old beach.

It took an effort to get all of us there because the “best beach” was near the old rooming house, blocks from the condos, down a precipitous set of steps, the wood rotted, difficult to manage in the best of times and now was definitely not the best of times. Up at the top, staring down at the crescent of sand, I remembered every other time I’d stood up here, looking down: six or seven or eight years old, my feet cold from the damp gritty sand, my bathing suit clinging to me, the pail’s plastic handle digging into my palm with the freight of our booty: mounds of pale gray Petoskey stones. Now Jenny and Rachel were inching their way down, and I could see their pale feet clenching and recoiling, their thin shoulder blades pulling back like wings as they hunched and stooped and scrambled, and I was just behind them, Sacha warm and sticky in my arms.