Tessie: If it’s really you, tell me something that only you and I know.
When there’s not an immediate response, her heart takes a dive. Goddammit. She’s about to fire off a nasty note to Will when I tell her, “Give it a minute.”
Forty-four seconds later this pops up:
Birdistheword: Me and Bee.
Tessie: :)
She’d never told Will, or anybody else, about Birdie’s “imaginary friend.”
Birdistheword: I’m sorry you have cancer. I didn’t mean it when I told you that I wished you were dead.
Tessie: I know.
Birdistheword: I feel really, really, really, really bad. I think I gave it to you. I stuck some pins in a voodoo doll.
Tess looks over at me and laughs. “I bet that’s why she hasn’t gotten back to me before now. She’s been feeling guilty.” This will be a quick fix. She’s pretty good at reassuring Birdie.
Tessie: You didn’t give me cancer, Bird.
Birdistheword: Okay. Did you scatter Louise’s ashes yet?
Tessie: If it’s alright with you, I decided that it’d better if the Finley sisters did that together.
Another long pause, during which I remind my friend of one of the most basic, but effective techniques to center herself, “Breathe.” She gets three good ones in before her sister types back.
Birdistheword: Let me think about it.
Now, that could take a spell. When you’re obsessive, reaching a decision on the simplest questions can take hours, months, even years, so Tess takes her time walking back to the kitchen to make another cup of Earl Grey. When she returns to the sunroom, there’s been no new communication, so she looks to me for advice. “Prod her a little.”
Tessie: Don’t you want to be sisters again?
Birdistheword: Yes, but….
Tessie: What?
Birdistheword: I don’t know if I can trust you.
Tess understands her sister’s skittishness, but doesn’t feel the same way. She trusts Birdie implicitly. The locating of Gammy and not sharing her had only temporarily shaken her belief in their relationship.
Tessie: What can I do to prove to you that I’m trustworthy?
Birdistheword: Send me a little something. A present.
No surprise. Gifts mean a lot to Birdie because it was the only way that Louise showed her love when they were kids—a candy bar here, a hula hoop there, and balloons on their birthday. Those “wants” would be a breeze to fill, but generally, the more het up Birdie was, the stranger the requests could get. She might ask Tess for something so incredibly odd that no matter how much she wants to, she’ll be unable to fill her request. Her sister might decide she needs an assortment of Mexican jumping beans. (She’s always been partial to them.) Or a pair of genuine lederhosen. (The Sound of Music is her all-time favorite movie.) A Bob Mackie original. (She’s nuts about Cher’s way-out costumes.)
My friend clenches her jaw and types out:
Tessie: Like what?
Birdistheword: Go to Ma’s and get me four pairs of those wax lips. The really big red ones. Not those small pinkish ones.
Due to her compliant personality, Birdie had always been an easier target than Tess. When their mother would do something extraordinarily humiliating to her, like the time she hung out the pee sheet off the front porch or forced her to get up on a scale during a church fair and called her a freak and “Two-ton Robin” over the PA system, Tess would inevitably find her lying curled up in their bed later than night wearing those smooth red wax lips that she’d bought at the neighborhood candy store. Only after her big sister pressed her soft lips against the wax ones four times, would little Birdie fall asleep.
Tessie: I love you as much as the stars and the moon. I’ll send the lips.
Birdistheword: FedEx. FedEx. FedEx. FedEx.
When her sister signs off, Tess is basking in the glow of the Hallmark moment. “The Tree of Life Has Many Limbs. If One Should Break…Go Out on Another!” is exactly what the both of them had semi-accomplished during the chat.
She removes a pen from the cup holder on her desk and takes it to her list:
5. Get Birdie to talk to me again.
Experiencing a rare sense of satisfaction, she leans back in her chair and tells Garbo and me, “Six down…two to go.”
The Horse Is Out of the Barn
We’re waiting patiently, well, I’m waiting patiently. Tess is hugging her lucky purse to her chest and pacing in front of the bank of elevators at St. Mary’s North office building because she has a follow-up visit scheduled with Dr. Whaley after her recent surgery to remove the hematoma. She’s berating herself, calling herself a lily-livered chicken, a loser, fat slob, stupid, worthless, and every other name in the book all because I suggested it’d be nice if we didn’t have to walk up three flights of stairs this morning.
When an opportunity presents itself, it’s part of my job description to pounce on it. “Ya know that quote you love so much from the Mockingbird story?”
“Which one?” she asks. “I love a lot of ’em.”
I nudge her closer to the elevator doors. “I was thinkin’ about the one in which Atticus describes courage.”
She stops pacing long enough to recite how Mr. Finch explained it to his son, Jem, at the end of Chapter Eleven: “‘It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.’”
“That’s the one.” I take another step closer to her. “He’s right you know. All of us have to figure out a way to get past that two-edged sword. Fear is real good at keepin’ us safe, but it’s also real good at keepin’ us from living.” On my cue, the elevator door opens. “Think of all the things you’ve given up because you were too afraid to take a risk. Travel…museums…truffles.” Of course, I already know the answer to the question I’m about to ask, but I want her to tell me because speaking aloud about our fears can loosen their hold. “Say…why are ya afraid of truffles anyway?”
She says to the floor, “I’m not afraid of truffles. I’m afraid of the snot that’s leaking out of the pig’s snout when it snarfs around for the truffles.”
I give her my hundred-watt smile, take two giant steps into the elevator, lean against the back wall, and say, “Maybe you could learn to acknowledge the fear, but instead of runnin’ away, just get about your business. The best way to do that is to just say, ‘fuck it.’”
Tess shakes her head. “I can’t do that.”
“But you already do when the children need you to.”
“That’s different.”
“So you can overcome terror to drive to far-off places for Haddie’s art shows, and eat food that someone coughed all over at Henry’s high-school basketball games, because it’s for them?”
“Right.”
“But when it comes to dealing with something that would benefit you, no dice?”
She strokes her lucky purse.
“I believe in you, Tessie. I know you could deal with the things you’re scared of all the time with a little practice and a stout heart.”
“I want to but….” It’s not like she’s afraid of just a few things. For reasons that I’m not privy to, Tessie has been given a heavier load than most to tote. “How would I…I mean—”
“First thing you gotta do when you feel the panic coming is to think to yourself—what’s the worst that can happen?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Let me put it another way,” I say. “If you trace fear back to its roots, what do you think that folks are really scared of. It might seem like it’s flyin’ and speakin’ in public and spiders and snakes, but that’s smoke and mirrors. What ya ’spose is at the bottom of it?”
She toes the lobby carpet and shrugs.
The correct answer is death, of course. An inevitability that the truest part of her isn’t scared of anymore. Getting a glimpse at the place people most often call Heaven when she was put under for
the first surgery has taken away a chunk of her fear. (She hasn’t consciously realized this yet, but that’s fine, her soul KNOWS that it’s paid a visit to home, sweet, home.) But earthbound Tessie, the one who’s cowering and fidgeting, the one who’s so thoroughly imprisoned by her brain, thinks about my question and says, “I don’t know. I remember a time when the fear was something I had, but now…it’s who I am. I’ve tried and tried, Grace, but I can’t beat it.”
“Damn,” I say as I throw my hands up, “that right there…that’s what you’re doin’ wrong, baby! You’re settin’ your goals too high. Nobody walks God’s green Earth without stepping into the shadows. It’s part of why y’all are here. To work these things out. Heck, even I’ve got a coupla of bad fears.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
I sense an opening.
“If I tell you what strikes terror in my heart, will you get in here next to me? Trust yourself enough to rise above your fear?”
She winces at the pun, but then, like she’s approaching the edge of a bottomless pool, nonswimmer Tess inches toward me.
“Your turn,” she whispers as the elevator doors slide shut behind her. “What are you afraid of?”
Before I get into that, I make the elevator lights flicker just long enough to increase her fear of getting stuck. What I’m about to tell her needs to imprint deeply into her PTSD brain and the more scared she is, the more of an impression it’ll make. “My biggest fear is that I might fail to get through to you.”
When the lights stop flickering and the elevator comes to a bouncy stop on floor three, Tess doesn’t rush out. She searches my face, slowly exits, and makes her way down the hallway to Dr. Whaley’s office. She hesitates in front of the door and asks me, “What’s your second-biggest fear?”
I hem and haw a little before I admit, “I’m petrified of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.”
Tess is laughing as she steps into Whaley’s office to find Patience sorting out the magazines in the waiting room. “Well,” she says to the first patient of the day. “That’s music to my ears.”
Into the exam room they go. Patience wastes no time getting to what’s on her mind. “Now that you’ve finished with the surgeries, I hope that you’ve given some further thought to joining The Pink Ladies.” She removes a Kleenex from her uniform pocket and blows her pink-tipped nose. “It’s so important to recovery to spend time with others who are, or have been, in the same situation as you. You can draw strength from the other women while you go through your radiation treatments.”
Sometimes Tess felt buoyed by breast cancer patients’ commitment to staying upbeat, but mostly she thought their attempts came off like Birdie trying to stay one step ahead of her problems by surrounding herself with Hallmark cards. And what if during one of the meetings, she had a hyperventilating panic attack in front of the other women? She didn’t need that kind of stress and neither did they. Even if she did share her journey with them, she couldn’t very well ask every Pink Lady to keep her cancer to themselves. Word would get out. Henry knows now, but Haddie’s still in the dark and her mother aims to keep her there for the time being.
“I know your heart is in the right place, but please, stop asking me to join the group,” Tess tells Patience. “You’re beginning to make me feel like I’ve got a life-threatening disease and need all the help I can get.”
The receptionist grins, but clears her throat like she’s about to deliver a speech, which she is. “You told me that you’re afraid of speaking in public, but I noticed on your employment history that you’re a stand-up comedian.” Tess starts to explain that doing a bit in a club is not the same as sharing her innermost feelings in an intimate setting, but Patience pulls down the paper sheet on the exam table and ignores her. “Cancer can be alienating, and the psychological healing process mysterious. One woman can pull out of this illness to go on with her life with renewed hope, while another lets it take the best of her. About the only thing experts seem to agree upon in terms of treatment is the importance of keeping one’s spirits up.”
Tess entertains the suggestion. The idea of doing one of her old stand-up routines in front of the women’s cancer group is not entirely unappealing. She truly does love to make people laugh.
Patience ups the ante. “Who knows? You might even get some new material out of the group. The meetings can get pretty funny.”
Oh yeah, I bet that support group is one big yuckathon, Louise cracks.
“A while back, one of the ladies was telling the group about the first time she went swimming after she’d had a mastectomy,” Patience says. “She was having one of those I-am-woman-hear-me-roar moments when she paused to catch her breath after a couple of laps and saw three kids playing keep away with her prosthesis in the shallow end.”
Tess is deciding if she finds that funny or so very sad or a little of both, when there’s a knock on the door and Dr. Whaley steps in. After the usual niceties, and a compliment on Count Your Blessings' meatloaf that he and the Mrs. had last night for dinner, he says to his patient, “May I see the incisions, please?”
Before Patience leaves to answer the phone they can all hear ringing, she tells Tessie, “Just think about what we talked about, okay?”
Dr. Whaley pokes and prods, and says, “Has she been putting the hard press on you to join The Pink Ladies?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did she tell you the keep-away story?”
She nods.
“She was the swimmer,” Whaley says.
Tess says, “Huh,” and sees Patience in a new light. She likes that she didn’t lay that on her in her recruitment speech.
The doctor, who’d been engrossed in the scar on her breast and the one beneath her arm, takes a step back, like he’s admiring a stunning piece of artwork, and says, “These look really, really good.”
“Like they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Tess replies. “I think they make me look like a Picasso.”
Dr. Whaley takes that as a compliment. “On to the next step. Have you made your initial radiation appointment?”
“I’m meeting with Dr. Sherman over at St. Joe’s soon as you give me the go-ahead.”
Tess could tell that he thought selecting a hospital in a part of Milwaukee where there were some terrific rib joints and nobody cared about their lawn instead of posh St. Mary’s North was an odd decision, but he didn’t question her choice of physicians. “Dr. Sherman is top-notch. You’ll be in good hands.” He closes her chart. “You’ll complete the radiation regime, take your Tamoxifen every day, and with a little luck, you’ll live another thirty or forty years.”
“Tell me more about the Tamoxifen.” She’d read about the drug in the plethora of printed material she’d been given over the past months, but she was still unsure if she needed to take it.
“It’s a pill form of chemotherapy,” Whaley says. “You have an estrogen-receptive tumor, so taking the Tamoxifen will be like placing an embargo on an evil dictator.”
She wonders how many times he’s used that line on other women. “I’m not political.”
“You must take the Tamoxifen.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No!” Scarred and scared, quibbling with this dishy guy over a drug she’s frightened to take, shoves her over the edge and into the Valley of Tears.
“Tess,” Whaley says as he sets a box of Kleenex down next to her. “You can do this. You’re strong.”
Before she can stop herself, she shouts, “No, I’m not!” Too ashamed, caring too deeply that people would think she was as repulsive as her mother made her feel if she let them see her symptoms, she’s about to yell something that she’s never admitted to anyone other than mental health professionals and Will. The truth. “I’ve got PTSD and OCD and…and agoraphobia and I can’t swallow pills and…and I can’t go to Paris and I’m afraid of pig snot and—goddamn it all!”
Now you’ve done it.
Had s
he?
Tess is stunned to find that instead of wanting to curl up in a humiliated ball the way she thought she would if someone found out that she colored outside the lines, she doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass what Rob Whaley thinks. It hits her then that what I’d told her in the elevator was the truth. Somewhere along this journey, without realizing it, she must’ve already told herself, “Fuck it,” because she doesn’t feel beaten down, small, and defeated. She feels like…like a heavyweight contender ready to take on all comers!
In response to her outburst, the doc places his hand on her forearm and says, “I don’t mean to overstep my bounds, I’m a surgeon not a psychiatrist.” He gives her a look dripping with concern. “But it sounds like you might have some underlying emotional issues that need to be addressed.”
When she responds to his observation by breaking into fairly maniacal laughter, Whaley tries to make it look like he isn’t hurrying through the exam room door—no sudden moves around crazy people—to fetch a hypodermic full of valium.
Tess stops laughing long enough to holler after the doctor, “Hey, Rob?”
“Yes?” comes warily out of the hallway.
“Your barn door’s open.”
Tattooed
Lou Gehrig’s disease laid claim to the rest of Tess’s favorite diner customer, Richie Mattigan, last week. She’d had his joke and his table ready on his usual day, but his wife had shown up alone on Friday to break the news. In the privacy of the party room, Holly had blubbered, “If you could tell one of your jokes at his service, you know how he loves…I mean…loved them.” Tess rubbed her back, told her she’d be honored, and placed an order for two hot fudge sundaes with extra whipped cream that they raised in a toast, “To Richie.”