Now it was my turn to pause.
“Linda? You’d trade me for my sister Linda?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“No,” I corrected her. “No. You’re trading me, not eliminating me. You have to trade me for someone else. You can’t just cancel me out.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because eliminating is fine, and I don’t know what difference it makes.”
“It makes a difference!” I yelled. “You can’t trade me for a daughter you already have!”
“Maybe I can have two Lindas,” she suggested. “Linda twins.”
“Mom, pick one of your friends’ daughters. Which one would you rather have instead if me?” I insisted.
“Ooooooh,” she said, thinking. “I know! I know! Debbie, my friend Erna’s daughter—I’d rather have her.”
“Why?” I asked calmly.
“Because she takes Erna out to lunch all the time and even bought her carpet,” my mother explained.
“I thought Erna lived in a studio apartment,” I said.
“Yeah. So?” my mother replied.
“That’s like buying someone a bath mat,” I shot back. “Your house is five thousand square feet. I’m not buying five thousand square feet of carpet.”
“Maybe that’s why I’d rather have Debbie,” she said smugly. “And maybe that’s why I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“Doesn’t Judy have a daughter?” I asked.
“Judy with the tattoo?” she answered. “I don’t know.”
“All right, fine,” I replied quickly. “So how do we work this new arrangement, what’s the plan? Do we get a proxy to be our communication surrogate, or are you calling for a complete blackout?”
“A blackout,” my mother decided.
“Even when I visit?” I asked. “The blackout is in effect when I come home, too? You’re just not going to talk to me?”
“Yeah,” my mother answered.
“Wow, I had this dream once!” I exclaimed excitedly. “So I say something to you, and you just stay quiet?”
“Yeah,” my mother confirmed.
“Can we practice now?” I asked.
Silence.
“Entitlements,” I whispered.
I heard her take a breath.
“Health care for everyone,” I said a little louder.
She exhaled.
“Obama!” I said in a full voice.
“That’s enough!” she cried.
“I am so wearing my Arizonans for Obama T-shirt when I get off the plane!” I exclaimed in joy, and I couldn’t wait to tell my other sister, Lisa. “I bet Lisa’s going to start writing about you, too!”
“Whatever,” my mother replied. “I’ll trade for three Lindas.”
“So when does the blackout start?” I asked. “How will I know that you’ve started not talking to me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to think about it.”
“All right,” I said. “Will you call me when it starts?”
“Sure,” my mother agreed.
“Because I don’t want to miss it,” I added. “I want you to tell me when you’ve stopped speaking to me.”
“Okay, I’ll call you,” she confirmed. “Maybe Sunday.”
“Sunday’s good,” I agreed. “I’ll be here when you call.”
“So I’ll talk to you then to stop talking?” she asked.
“Yep,” I nodded. “I’ll talk to you then.”
“Talk to you soon about not talking,” my mother said.
“All right, Mom,” I said, “we’ll talk then.”
REWINDING
A pack of werewolves in human form are gathered beneath a tree, circling the torn and bleeding carcass of a man they have all fed from. An older woman, her face drawn and sunken like a rotting apple, addresses another man, wounded and bleeding, and insists he feed from the corpse, too.
“Wait—” my friend Kartz says as she freezes the frame with the remote. “Do you care if I rewind that?”
We are lying on Kartz’s bed with her standard poodle, Massimo, stretched out between us.
“Uh-uh,” I reply, shaking my head. I don’t care, just as I didn’t care the time before that, or the time before that, or the time before that. We’ve been rewinding a lot. An episode of True Blood is only an hour long, but it’s taken us at least that long to get halfway through the show.
“Are you going to put this in the book?” she asks me as she rewinds it too far before she hits play and we end up watching something we just watched the last time she rewound it.
“Probably,” I admit, and with perfect timing, Massimo kicks me to make me give him more room. I scoot over a little bit.
We were at dinner one night about six months ago when she mentioned that she thought she was losing her memory because she met a coworker in the hallway and couldn’t remember his name. I just laughed.
“Oh whatever, you take Ambien!” I reminded her. “I flew all the way to Idaho with a stop in Seattle and got a manicure and don’t remember it. The only reason I know that at all is because I made the girl doing my nails stop and take a picture.”
“Okay,” she said, visibly relieved. “And it could be stress, too, right?”
“Of course,” I reassured her. “You’re starting a new school session and you have a ton of stuff to do to get ready for your students. This is always a big rush time for everyone at the university.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she agreed. “I have a lot to do. You’re right. I’m not going to worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I laughed and had a sip of wine.
“I won’t,” she said, and then paused. “But I forgot an appointment I made with this woman.”
“Stress,” I reminded her. “What was it for?”
“I don’t remember.” Kartz shrugged, and then pulled out her iPhone, swiping the screen with her finger. “Here. It was for yesterday. At six thirty. With someone named Melanie. Who is Melanie?”
I stopped but didn’t put the wineglass down. I looked at her. Kartz has tremendous, beautiful ice-blue eyes, a color so pale that they almost seem transparent, like aquamarine. They were fixed on me. She was not going to look away.
“Melanie,” I said, pausing and looking back, “is one of your best friends.”
A few days later when I called Kartz, she said she had felt dizzy earlier and that she was trying to make an appointment with a doctor. She thought it might be some new medication she had been taking, and that the memory loss was probably related. I agreed, relieved, and when I called her back the next day, she said she was feeling fine and wasn’t worried about it anymore.
On Saturday, I checked my messages during intermission at a play my husband and I were seeing in Ashland, where we were spending the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. We had dropped our dog, Maeby, off at Kartz’s earlier that morning and I called before dinner to make sure everything was okay. Kartz had been feeling great but I was still a little worried, despite her protestations that she was perfectly fine.
But she hadn’t called back. Instead, there was a voice mail from Tannaz, a professor in the art department who taught with Kartz. I couldn’t hear the message, the noise in the theater lobby was too loud, but I could tell it was urgent and that something was wrong.
“Laurie,” Tannaz said as soon as I stepped outside and called her back. “Kartz is in the hospital. She has a brain tumor. They’re operating as soon as possible.”
I looked at my husband. It was clear to him something bad had happened.
“What?” he mouthed, his eyes widening. “What?”
After we dropped Mae off that afternoon, Kartz was walking both of our dogs in the park across the street when she saw a tree that had been knocked down by a recent storm. She took the dogs back home, returned to the park, and dragged half of a twenty-foot-tall tree across the street to her backyard, deciding it would make good firewood. Then she went back across to the park to get the second half of the tree. It was ther
e that she collapsed and regained consciousness sometime later, not knowing why she was hanging on to half of a dead tree in a park.
She got on her bike and rode to the urgent care, where they immediately asked her to hold both arms up in front of her. One of them was lower than the other. That was when they sent her to the emergency room, and the attending physician ordered a CAT scan.
When my husband and I walk into the hospital room, we aren’t sure what to expect. I’d imagined a solemn occasion, or at least a scary one—the kind that makes everyone anxious. But past the door is Kartz, propped up in her bed with a multitude of pillows, and friends, like Melanie and Tannaz, surrounding her with Massimo on one side of the bed and her other dog, Rocky, snuggled on the opposite side. Those dogs go everywhere with her. On bike rides in a pull-behind trailer made for kids. On shuttles up to Portland. On flights to Los Angeles, where her sister lives. She asked her doctor to write a note, then she got them service dog ID cards with Massimo’s and Rocky’s headshots on them, taken at a passport photo place. They are laminated.
“How did you get them in here?” I laugh, not talking about Melanie and Tannaz.
Kartz waves her hand and laughs. “I said I wanted my dogs. So Tannaz went home and got them,” she says simply.
Oddly, everything seems normal. Everything seems all right. It is going to be okay. This is not going to be a big tumor, I thought to myself. Not at all. This is going to be a little one, if there is such a thing. This is going to be a Sheryl Crow kind of brain tumor, the kind that’s manageable and just sits within your skull like a jelly bean. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t grow, it is just happy to sit there without causing trouble. This is not a glioblastoma, I said to myself, it is not.
One day, several years ago, during a phone call, my nana started calling my sister a “he” instead of a “she.” While there was no question about my sister’s gender, we laughed when Nana caught her mistake, because she could often be kind of goofy. When it didn’t stop and she replaced the word “cup” for “dish” and had trouble making sense out of anything that she read, we suspected ministrokes. My mother took her to a doctor who ordered a CAT scan. We knew by that night that she had a brain tumor.
And it was not a jelly bean. It was a glioblastoma, the kind that would kill Ted Kennedy the following year. I had never heard that word before. It’s a mean sort of brain cancer, it swells and it grows and it sends out tentacles with hooks on the ends to establish cancer cells in every part of the brain, like a spiderweb. Like a mean spiderweb. And my ninety-year-old grandmother had it. She also had a choice: let it be, or undergo brain surgery and then chemo and radiation.
“No,” she said quietly as the neuro-oncologist held the MRI film of her brain with a large white ball sitting right above her ear. “I don’t want any of that.”
So I am shocked when Kartz asks the nurse to bring up the MRI on the computer screen that is next to the hospital bed. There’s no film anymore, it’s all digital on a screen. And on that screen is a big white ball above Kartz’s ear, the size of a golf ball.
But it’s still too early to tell. There is still hope. It is not a jelly bean, but it may not be a spiderweb. It could still just be a nameless big white ball.
Kartz is scheduled for surgery the next day after her sister and family arrive. I am dumbstruck when I walk into the room and meet them for the first time. Nana is sitting next to the bed—or at least, she looks just like I remember my nana when I was a kid. I don’t even realize it’s not Nana for a moment until I understand that it’s not possible, and then I am introduced to Kartz’s sister, Maria. I want to hug her, and I do.
Kartz shows no sign of hesitancy when Maria and I see her in pre-op and she has the right side of her head shaved. It’s been a week exactly since we had dinner.
“I am not worried,” she assures the both of us, and laughs. “It’s going to be fine. I know that. I just needed a haircut.”
Then she lies back, looks at the ceiling, and is quiet.
The surgery doesn’t take long; it takes much less time than any of us thought. We’re not sure if that’s good or bad, but we expected it to last into the evening. My husband and I had gone home to let Maeby out and had just backed out of the driveway to head back to the hospital when Maria called.
“The surgery is over,” she says. “The doctor said he got it all. It’s all out! She’s not awake yet, but she’s in recovery in ICU, which is normal.”
I agree that it’s marvelous news.
“The surgeon said by looking at it he can tell what kind of tumor it is, but they still need to do tests on it to make sure,” Maria continues, repeating what her husband, Frank, is saying in the background. “He said it’s a glio— What is it, Frank? It’s called a glioblastoma.”
We walk into the OR waiting room, which is vast, modern, and tries to look comfortable. I remember fireplaces everywhere. We see Maria’s family sitting in a circle of puffy, stuffed, neutral-colored chairs. They look stunned. They have been crying. We have all been crying.
“I’m sorry,” I say as I take Maria’s hand, incapable of saying anything else. “I’m sorry.”
When the bandage—which is just a square of gauze and tape—comes off, the suture is substantial. Shaped like a backward question mark, the incision winds from Kartz’s temple to behind her ear in a wide, sweeping curve. The skin is puckered and fastened by staples, about fourteen of them, holding Kartz’s scalp together. It is difficult to see at first, but it’s startling what you can get used to in a matter of hours.
A chaplain comes into the room and sits on the banquette off to the side. Kartz thinks he might be the doctor, because we have still not seen the oncologist, presumably because the test results are not back yet. So she listens to him when he begins talking about the end of life, and what that means, and how different people feel different ways.
I try to catch his eyes to signal for him to stop it. She doesn’t know this, none of us really do, so you need to stop it with the “what does life mean?” talk, but he never looks at me. He pats her on the leg, and despite all of what he has just said, this was the signal she needed to inform him, maybe a little briskly, that she may have had a brain tumor, yes. That part is right. But she has no intention of going anywhere, and Maria will tell you that, and Kartz points to her sister, and that woman over there—and Kartz points to me—will tell you that, too.
I just smile. And I nod.
The next morning, when I get to the hospital, a covered dish arrives on Kartz’s bed tray and she is very excited.
“Look, look,” she says cheerfully. “They let me order my own breakfast last night from a list.”
“Ooooo,” I say, putting my purse down. “What did you get?”
“I don’t remember!” She giggles, then lifts up the silver cover of the tray to expose her carefully chosen meal of oatmeal and salsa.
We both recoil in horror, and then burst out laughing.
“I hope that part of your brain grows back fast,” I say. “Or I’m going to get sick of sharing my food with you.”
When the oncologist finally comes in, four days after surgery, the room is packed. Many of Kartz’s friends are there, so many that there is only standing room. He is young, doubtfully young, and he walks in, introduces himself, and flips open Kartz’s chart. He repeats everything we already know, you had a tumor, size of a golf ball, on the right side (we all nod and look at the massive backward question mark stapled into the shaved half of Kartz’s head), and it’s a stage-four glioblastoma.
Quick as that. He says it as quick as that.
“Yes!” Kartz says, and claps her hands with several tiny beats, and develops a wide, beaming smile. “That’s great!”
The doctor looks stunned.
“No,” he says, looking around the room. “No, I’m sorry. Stage four is the most progressive. It’s not good. It’s a terminal; this type of cancer is terminal.”
She is stopped. Her clear blue eyes look at me. They look at
everybody. The room is quiet, but Kartz won’t let it be quiet and she points a finger at this young, clean doctor in his white coat, with that folder open, and with the precision in which he spoke, she says with assurance, “I am not going to die.” This girl with half a marked and sutured head, my friend who is missing most of her hair, my friend who doesn’t remember that she was once married, says carefully, and with balance, “I am going to live forever.”
We all believe her.
When she comes home, her dogs are waiting; they have missed her. Her head is wrapped in a plaid wool scarf that looks exquisite, shielding the cut from the sun. The swelling has gone down and it already looks better. Flowers fill the dining room and living room and friends stop by, bringing their children. The house is full of babies. Kartz wants to hold all of them.
The noise is happy.
In the week that follows, there are appointments: appointments with oncologists, neurologists, appointments at the university, where she is an art professor, and repeated trips to the lawyer. There are much-needed ventures to T.J.Maxx, Kartz’s favorite place. She buys more scarves, hats, and a shimmery sequined cocktail dress that she puts on as soon as she gets home. It is silver and brings out the color of her eyes. She wraps laces of chains, silver and gold, as well as rosaries, around her neck and wrists. She pulls on her black leather clunky boots. She emerges from her bedroom in this fierce sparkly concoction and announces that this is her battle dress.
During a trip to an imports store, she threads an inexpensive beaded necklace around her hand and tells the teenage cashier that she is taking it, calling out “Something borrowed, something blue!” as she leaves the store.
“Don’t even ask me to take you to a bank,” I inform her. “I don’t want to end up with a red laser dot in the middle of my forehead.”
“I did not shoplift,” she insists. “I told the guy I was taking it and when I was cured, I would bring it back.”
“Of course he didn’t say anything!” I say. “You think a high school senior is going to mess with a shoplifter who’s already got a zipper stamped into the side of her head? Even I’m afraid of you on one side!”