For existence now depended upon scraping together enough capital to launch an eleventh-hour invention. Backs to the cliff, the Research Department garnered more patents in the period 1932–39 than the company had filed for in its previous hundred years. New chemical revolutions began to cascade from one another: hydrogenation, nitrogenizing, and most important of all, synthetic detergents.
The Germans, as usual, were first into that virgin realm. Henkel produced a proto–commercial detergent back in 1907. Clare’s chemists found it only natural that this most rational of races would come up with the first scientific improvement for soap since soap itself. A synthetic replacement for fats and oils promised to break nature’s last bottleneck and bring hygiene into its dreamed-of scale. When aromatic compounds were treated with sulfuric acid and salted out with alkali, they produced a sticky paste that could wet any surface and strip it of dirt in the hardest or coldest of waters.
Detergents represented a lasting victory through chemistry. By any measure, they were a miracle surfactant, the greatest breakthrough in health and cleanliness for millennia. They sudsed beyond all reasonable expectation, and what “our girlfriend, Mrs. Housewife,” wanted more than anything else was suds, suds, and more suds.
As the economic desperation receded, Clare became one of detergent’s American licensees. The company built modern, stripped-down plants in New York and Los Angeles, plants that could deliver ten times more work with only four times as many hands. It developed its own clever spray-drying process, and it plugged the resulting tiny spheres as “hollow cleaning nodules, exploding on contact with dirt.”
Soon the miracle Oxygon had its own radio program, a crime show called The Racket Breakers. Lacewood, whose most egregious crime in recent memory involved a quartet of hoodlum-capped fourteen-year-olds defacing the motto on the Belleau Wood monument, listened weekly, entrapped and entranced.
Clare touted its “all-scientific” detergents at the Clare Centennial Exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. Stocked with the full larder of goods that the company now made, garlanded with stylized images of benzene rings, the exhibit depicted a busy humankind “Making the World We Imagine.” NBC televised the fair’s opening for a few hundred experimental viewers. Before the Clare, exhibit officially closed that fall, Oxygon’s licensing country was rolling into Poland.
Within three years, the Lacewood plant went from stuffing sacks with fertilizer to stuffing artillery shells with explosives. In the same year, an aging British botanist who escaped the South Pacific just before the outbreak of hostilities published a squib in Botanical Studies declaring that Utilis clarea was not a distinct species at all but a bit of early American scientific overzealousness in renaming an obscure, unusual, but previously documented succulent lily.
Are you unpopular with your own children? Nidoritis rarely announces itself to the victim. Do your colleagues avoid you in the workplace? Science has shown that most cases of halitosis are accompanied by “coated tongue.” Perform this simple test to see if you are suffering from “coated tongue” syndrome. Are you the unwitting victim of harmful B.O. (Body Odor)? You may not be able to detect it yourself. And your closest friends may be too polite to tell you. “Gosh, Lil, I hate to say this, but I guess I really ought to.” Science tells us that a full 83 percent of all cases of detrimental B.O. can be cured by simple preventative hygiene. Don’t let your body tell people more about yourself than you want. Do your children refuse to bring their friends home to visit? Is your blood starving for essential minerals? Do you look older than you are? Is your scalp leaving behind flecks you cannot see? Is stress making you ill? Tired of those unsightly stains? Are your husband’s yellowed shirts holding up his career? Would you knowingly take chances with your children’s health? Do your pots and pans tell tales out of school? Do your friends talk about you behind your back? Are you always the last to know? Is your world cracking up around you? Could your loneliness have a reason? Research has found a way. Science can teach you how to relax. Four out of five doctors agree. You may not know what you need.
A simple procedure. Tiny incision across the midriff. Absolutely routine. All over by one o’clock, quarter past one at the very latest. Only: it’s two-thirty now, and nobody has come by to tell them word one about anything.
Of course, the doctors started late. Didn’t even put her on the gurney until past twelve-thirty. And who knows how long it took them to get started, once they knocked her out. It’s like O’Hare in there: once they scratch your scheduled departure, it’s hard to get back into the queue. The assembly line goes on without you: Jenkins, Archer, the surgeons all running around, booked to do four procedures at the same time.
Don can feel the kids starting to twitch. Tim paces around in front of the Coke machine, punching the buttons in studied sequences, trying to beat the level and win a free game.
Ellen slams through the stack of ancient Mademoiselles and Vogues, twice each. She’s rubbed herself up against all the aging perfume inserts and now smells like a civet with mumps.
“I just don’t see why we have to sit here like idiots,” she repeats for the third or fourth time. “It’s not like she knows we’re here or anything.”
“You want to be here when your mother wakes up.”
“Fine, Daddy. I’ll meet you back here on Tuesday.” She buries her face in the cover story, “Ace Accents with Affordable Accessories.”
He’s making it worse on everybody. Don knows it, but he can’t help himself. Every time any medical-looking person comes anywhere near the waiting room, he’s on his feet and over at the information desk. And if ten minutes goes by without anyone coming through, he’s on his feet and over there anyway. Ellen’s gone from flinching each time he leaps up to registering soft disgust on the roof of her mouth.
A tiny incision, shorter than your pinkie. They feed some kind of fiber-optic cable up in there, pliable, like a plumber’s snake. Like those robotic arms in Tim’s favorite sci-fi film, only more amazing. A TV camera and a mechanical scalpel attached to the end. The surgeon performs the whole operation by steering things around on the monitor screen. Maybe that’s what’s holding up the show. Bad reception. Channel on the fritz.
“Sit down,” his daughter berates him. “You’re stark-raving me. What floor’s the loony bin on? I’m going to go see if they take walk-ins.”
He sits. And when a bedraggled woman in surgical scrubs enters the room, Don doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even recognize her, at first. He’s looking for someone pretty, young, lively. Dr. Jenkins. The canary-yellow dish.
But it’s her. She recognizes them, comes over. Don looks up, connecting at last, ashamed at finding her so haggard, here on a subsequent viewing.
“Hello, Bodeys,” she greets them, cheerful but spent. She focuses on Ellen and Tim. “Your mother’s fine. She’s going to be a little while yet, waking up. We had no trouble with the laparotomy. Here.” She hands a videotape to Ellen. “It’s a film of your mother’s insides. Everything we saw when we were looking around in there.”
Ellen examines the thing in helpless panic. She hands the cartridge to Tim, for explanation.
“So what did you see?” Don manages to ask. Casual, curious, mature.
“We need to wait for some other results. We want to follow up with some scans.”
“What do you mean? How come? What kind of scans? Did you see something?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bodey. Can we talk about this when we know what we’re talking about?”
They go to see Laura in the recovery room. “Hey,” she tells the kids, her words still slurred from the anesthetic. “Cheer up. Cheer up! It’s not the end of the world.”
The cancer has come back. It’s now sprinkled in her abdomen. Don sees it on the tape, confiscated from Tim. He watches it late at night, with the kids asleep upstairs and Laura in her shared room at Mercy, across town, suckled by a plastic bag on a metal pole. Little dark peppercorns, visible even to an amateur, once he learns ho
w to read the pulsing pink masses. They must start all over again, from nothing.
Dr. Jenkins finally calls him, with the results of the scans. Two new nodules. Remote colonies, delayed growths that Laura’s old tumor has planted, even after its surgical removal. “There is a shadow on her liver and another one under her armpit.”
Don lays into her. “This is the fault of the surgery, isn’t it?”
“Mr. Bodey, surgery did not cause—”
“The knife spread the cells around. How else could they have gotten—”
“Mr. Bodey, I know you’re upset.”
“Upset? Why? Just because what you’re calling her treatment has practically killed her? And for what? What did all the torture do for her but speed up her—”
“That’s enough, sir. I’m not going to talk to you like this. When you’re calm, we can discuss Laura’s medical options.”
The options are more of the same. Dr. Archer comes to Laura’s bedside, to lay them out. “We can go after the secondary mets with another operation,” he tells her.
Laura, in bed, doused in bladeless surgery, smiles up at him apologetically. Shadow on the liver. What exactly is it that the liver does?
“We can follow that up with second-line intraperitoneal chemo. We’ll try some other drug combination. One that you can tolerate. Carboplatin, doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide . . .”
They can transfuse her. They offer her bone marrow transplants. Another try at radiation. And maybe it’s the operation, still. The stuff they have given her, coming in through her wrist. Maybe it’s not her at all but all these chemicals making her wonder, but she wonders: Why so many decisions? Shouldn’t things be getting simpler, now, at their most visible? Surely she’s reached the obvious stage. Only, still nothing is obvious. Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs: everyone wants a decision from her.
She thinks back over the last year, the one she has just gagged on. They seem to be saying: now gag on another. More time, time at any cost, even at the cost of time. She hears trucks rumbling through the hospital double-glass, and she thinks it might not be hard to leave so choked a place, a place with so many choices.
She goes home without deciding. Don, the doctors, Tim, Ellen: each takes silence to mean what each needs it to mean. Days pass without her electing any treatment from the menu offered her. Then the day passes when it’s clear, the kind of time she’s chosen. And still no one names her choice out loud.
Back at home, the phone starts to ring off the hook. Each ring is a big, circling desert bird. The word goes out. Nervous, excited, almost. Every day around 2 p.m., she gets a call from another one of the Realtor girls. A perfectly arranged round-robin. Independently, each of her old colleagues volunteers, “Now, if you aren’t feeling up to a visit, you just say so.” She says so.
Lindsey calls. “You hurry up and get better, babe. We need you back here, but bad. It’s getting to be crunch time, you know.”
Her brother calls every week now. “How about if Jen and I come out at Easter with the kids?”
“That would be great,” she tells him. “Or June, if you can stay longer then.”
Stephanie and Hannah hook her into a conference call. “The Three Sheets,” Steph manages to say. “United again by high tech.”
Hannah snorts: “New York, D.C., and . . tell us where it is that you live, again?”
“One of us has to remember our roots,” Laura banters. And quieter, “I always said you two would make it big.”
Hannah’s a rock. “Listen, hick. We’re coming out on the twenty-seventh. Me and Steph are meeting in Indianapolis at four and we’re renting a car. We’ll be at your place by . . .”
“Please,” Laura begs. “Please don’t. I need you guys. I need you to be . . . what we were.”
They fight her feebly, but hear. Hannah seems to get it; Steph is close to hysterical. They hang up, nobody saying goodbye.
Neighbors come by with pies. How many of them will be at her service? Will there even be a service? If she still went to church, if she had brought the kids up in some congregation . . . Not for the faith so much as for the routine. Religious people would know what to do now. Janine, that door-to-door witness: for her, this would be like going to the PTA. Atheists are not damned but lost. Lost in too much possibility.
Marian sends her a book about the importance of preserving a positive attitude. Cheer: Your First Line of Defense. Well, actually, it’s your immune system that’s the first line. And a bad attitude is this fifth column in the cells’ trenches, working the immune system to give in.
Cancer is a mind disease. She has brought this disease on herself, by being unhappy. And she didn’t even know she was unhappy. Now she must fight it mentally. The book calls her back to her old visualizations: picture your immune cells fighting the tumor. Only now she no longer knows which of her countless immune cell types to activate.
Even now, she is responsible for her own, ultimate cure. And if she dies, it’ll be her own fault. It’ll be because she doubted, took her eyes off the road, let negative thoughts poison her.
Somehow, everyone’s read this book, or one just like it. People tell her three times a day: hold your body together with hypnotism. Ellen won’t let her watch any old movies except comedies. Don refuses to help her sell the car. Dr. Jenkins cannot mention the word “death” for fear of malpractice. There’s not a person she can talk to about what’s happening.
The thing she needs most is to make some arrangements. But she must do this herself, in secret, so no one can see her shirk the responsibility of living forever. She takes the plastic three-ring binder she used to keep the kids’ after-school schedules in and labels it neatly: “Funeral.” She fills it with hymn numbers, poems she likes, the names of her favorite charities.
She manages the papers so that the kids get everything that’s left and Don gets the bills. She calls Casey Brothers to come flush out the gutters and remortar the flue. She finds Tim a good summer camp and Ellen a therapist who might be able to help with the transition. She gets an estimate from the church and arranges for the crematorium’s cheapest package, a double-sealed sanitary hardened-polyethylene urn.
She can deal with whatever happens. What are things to her, that she can’t live without them? But she cannot, cannot begin to think how she can leave her children without a mother.
Everything else, she learns how to shed. It’s weight off her, almost. A clarification, a spring cleaning. How exhilarated it makes her feel some days, when the pain holds still and she flies out from under this live burial. Things will do their work without her. Things will do their work without her.
All except her one good thing. She can no more relinquish it than she can leave her own children. If she could just get the soil ready again, sink her hands in wrist deep, she might still be all right. She lies in bed, twelve feet away from the plot. She obsesses over that perfect ground, the richest soil in the world, lying there going to waste.
The ripples in her plaster ceiling deepen into furrows as she studies them. She drifts from visualizing her T cells, finds herself getting the visualized poppies in. She decides to do all blooms this year, to leave the vegetables for another life. On good days, when a sprig of breeze leaks in through the casements, she imagines hearing herself turning over spade after spade. Then, one spring day, a day when it smells as if no one in the world has ever sinned, she hears. Hears herself digging.
It takes Laura a moment to be convinced: real. Real. She rises and makes her way to the window, looks out. Her daughter, wearing her boots and gloves, jumping clumsily on the heel of the shovel. God knows where she has gotten seeds. God knows who told her where to put them.
She holds her breath, watching. The stumbles and breaks, the spastic damage and scatter, the rare, glancing good done with every shovelful. Like a four-year-old baking clay balls of bread. If one in a thousand of these seeds grows, it will be a miracle. She holds back in perfect quiet, until that awful telepathy no mother or daughter can silence g
ives her away.
Ellen snaps her head up, enraged. “You’re not supposed to look.” Looking will break the spell, whatever the spell is. Whatever this ritual is supposed to bring off.
Laura retreats from the window, back behind the shroud of her room. The shovel starts up again, scraping, shushing. In a minute it stops, and a voice like her daughter’s calls, “Mom?” She goes back to the window. Her daughter’s eyes stare at her, red with effort and confusion.
“Am I doing it right?”
Yes, she feels herself nodding. Yes. Perfect.
The hospital sends her a staggering bill for the chemotherapy, the treatments she did not even finish. Her insurance has decided that the overnight slow drip—the difference between massive nausea and total devastation—is not considered an essential service. Everything had seemed okay, handled. But now they want her to pay the difference.
“What do I do?” she asks Don. “I can’t afford this.” “Contest it,” her ex tells her. “How?” She doesn’t even know where to start. She has never understood how to do the simplest thing in this world.
“Maybe Kogan and Lewis can have a look at it for you.”
“Kogan . . . ?”
“The firm handling the Clare class action. They . . . they want to see you, anyway.”
“They want to see me? Me? They said that?”
“Well, actually, they want to know if you want to talk to them. But that’s how those guys do things. Always covering their asses.”
“What do they want?” “More ovarian cases. They’re extending the cutoff for ovarian cases. They’ve gotten hold of your records . . .”
“My records?”
“Apparently, they have two scientists. Epidemiologists. Expert witnesses.”
She hangs in the air, on these Martian sentences. Waits, small, for explanation.