Beach Trip (47 page)

“I don’t know why she stays with you,” Mel said to him once.

“Well, Sister, why does anyone stay with someone who makes them miserable?”

“I don’t know—why?”

“Money.”

“It’s not all about money,” Mel said coldly.

“Spoken like someone who’s always had plenty.”

“I don’t want your money. I don’t even cash your checks anymore.”

“Don’t matter to me if you do or you don’t,” Leland said. “Everything I got is yours one day, whether you want it or not, Sister.”

“I don’t want it. Leave it to your favorite charity.”

“You’re my favorite charity.”

“Leave it to Mercedes.”

“Huh!” He snorted loudly. “I put that old
puta
in my will and I’ll be dead by sundown.”

“You should marry her, then. She’s perfect for you.”

“Now, Sister, don’t be jealous. I loved your mama, in my own way.”

“The same way you loved Junior?”

“A man does things he’s ashamed of later on. We can’t all be saints.”

“That’s a clever way of putting it.”

“I might not have been the best daddy in the world, but I did the best I knew how to do.”

“Well, that’s all right then.”

The summer she turned thirty-eight, she came home to Howard’s Mill. She flew into Nashville and rented a car, coming in on the south side of town. It felt odd driving through the quiet streets where she had spent so much of her unhappy childhood. She drove past the country club, past the Dairy Freeze, past the Dixie Drive-In and the ramshackle high school where she had spent long hours counting down the days until she could get the hell out of this hayseed town. The high school was abandoned now in favor of the new county school built out from town. Someone had broken out most of the windows, and the darkened building stood back from the road in the middle of a weed-choked lot covered in kudzu. Everything looked smaller than she remembered, and dirty. The whole town seemed to be drying up, at least the older downtown section, where desolate storefronts advertised
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
sales or optimistically proclaimed
FOR LEASE.
All the growth over the last few years had occurred out by the expressway, miles and miles of fast food chains and strip malls and gas stations that sprouted up around the exits like hemorrhoids. At night, the town looked like the Vegas Strip. Leland had sold the downtown car dealership years ago, and a modern new dealership had sprung up on the outskirts of town, complete with rows and rows of shiny new automobiles and signs that advertised
FAST EDDIE’S AUTO! NOBODY WALKS, EVERYBODY RIDES! FAST EDDIE—THE WORKING MANS FRIEND!

She’d come home to see Leland because she’d been dreaming about graves. Every night. Not newly dug graves with their fresh mound of dirt, but ancient sunken burial spots covered in creepers and twisting vines. Her therapist said that the graves symbolized unfinished business and that it might be time to go home and confront Leland once and for all, but Mel thought that interpretation weak and decided to stop therapy instead. She had a problem with the direction the therapist was taking, not to mention her fixation on the so-called maternal aspects of her relationship with Booker. Mel was pretty sure the dreams would stop once the therapy stopped.

But they didn’t stop. They got worse. They got so bad she couldn’t sleep,
she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t write. So, in desperation, she went home to do battle with Leland. She came home for the Mother of All Battles, the Armageddon of Dysfunctional Family Meltdowns. She hated to leave Booker home alone—there was no telling what he might get up to, but she had no choice. There was something she had to get off her chest.

Still when she saw the frail, diminished Leland she was unprepared for the effect it had on her. She had come home expecting to do battle with the bully of her youth, and instead she found a doddering old man. Leland, the rogue tyrant, had disappeared, and in his place was a thin, frail creature, a wispy little gnome of a man who looked like he might blow away in a heavy breeze. He was as small as a child now and walked with a cane, bent over at the waist and moving with the small mincing steps of a geisha. His hair was long and yellowed with age, and his big hairy ears sprouted on either side of his head like toadstools.

The sight of him compressed her heart like a vise. All the ugly things she had saved up to say, all the poison she had stored in her heart for thirty-eight years, stayed buried where they were. She could no more confront him than she could kick an old lame dog who showed up on her doorstep looking for a meal.

“Did you tell him how bad he fucked up your life?” Booker asked when she got home. “Did you beat him within an inch of his life?”

“Shut up, Booker.” She’d made the mistake of telling him about her therapy dreams, a decision she now regretted.

“I knew you couldn’t. I knew you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.” He sat in a recliner with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs resting on his lap, looking as fresh and rosy-cheeked as an English schoolboy. The older he got, the younger he looked. There was only three years’ age difference between them, but Booker seemed to be regressing further and further into boyhood as she began the steep climb to forty. It was just a matter of time, Mel knew, before people started mistaking her for his mother.

“Why don’t you stay out of it? It’s none of your business.”

“It’s none of my business when you can’t sleep at night? It’s none of my business when you walk around the house all day in an old robe and a pair of ratty slippers?”

“Fuck off.”

“You fuck off.”

“Next time I’ll send you. You’re so eloquent. You’re so good at cleaning up messes.”

“Why would I want to go down there where everyone talks like Gomer Pyle?” He put his hand up like a traffic cop stopping traffic. “Sha-zam!” he said. “Ga-aw-lly.” He laughed and dropped his hand.

Booker was one of those people who laughed at his own jokes even when they weren’t funny.

“That’s right. Why would I send you to do my talking for me when you can’t even string a coherent sentence together?”

“Down where everybody talks like they’ve got marbles in their mouth. Down in the land of ignorant hillbillies.”

Mel knew at that moment that her marriage was over.

Two months later she found a lump in her breast, and shortly after that, Booker left for good.

One word. Two syllables. Can anyone who’s never heard the diagnosis
cancer
truly understand what it conjures? (Dread. Despair. Death.) Mel walked out of the surgeon’s office feeling like a reprieved felon.
(You won’t be executed today, but perhaps tomorrow, or maybe even the day after that. I really don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?)
Mortality is just a word until cancer. Every night you go to sleep aware of one more day of amnesty, and every morning you wake with fate hanging over your head like a noose. A trapdoor waiting to be sprung. A guillotine blade waiting to fall. A nightmare without end.

On the day Mel walked out of the surgeon’s office, it was a bright, glorious spring day. The trees along Central Park were in full leaf. Traffic crowded the streets; plumes of exhaust disappeared against the pale blue sky. Everything was the same, and yet everything was different. Mel watched an old woman tottering along the street and she thought,
I’ll never grow old.
She watched a young couple kissing in the park and she thought,
I’ll never laugh again. I’ll never love.
Despair settled over her like a thick, dank cloud. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. As she walked she was thinking,
I can’t live like this, I can’t live like this.
It ran through her head like a mantra. By the time she reached her apartment, the mantra had changed.
I don’t have to live like this, I don’t have to live like this.

It was her life. She could end it any way she chose.

Somehow that changed things. The idea that she could end her life if the despair became too much to bear caused a sudden shift in her perspective. It was odd, but the idea that she could step off a ledge or walk in front of
a train or slip into a drug-induced coma if she so chose was strangely comforting. It gave her back a feeling of control over her life.

She told two close friends and then swore them to secrecy. She couldn’t bear the idea of people looking at her with pitying eyes. She couldn’t bear the thought of people whom she didn’t like, or who didn’t like her, being kind to her because of pity. She didn’t want to see the fear in other people’s eyes. She had her own despair to deal with; she didn’t want to deal with theirs. She jettisoned all the negative people in her life, the depressives, the therapy addicts, the naysayers. She couldn’t afford to have them around her anymore. It would take everything she had just to get well again.

“What are you going to tell Booker?” her friends asked her.

“The truth.”

When she told him, he went into the bedroom and shut the door. Later he came out and his eyes were red and puffy. “What is it you want from me?” he said. “What is it you expect me to do?” She saw then that the tears had not been for her; they had been for himself.

“I want you to leave,” she said. She hadn’t decided until that moment but now that she’d said it, she knew it was true. She couldn’t get well with him here. She couldn’t take care of herself and Booker at the same time.

The doctors were guardedly optimistic. “It’s early stage, and with the right treatment you have a ninety-five percent chance of making it five years,” they said, as if they were granting her a boon. But then, in case her spirits should rise too high, they would add, “Of course, with breast cancer there are no guarantees. The literature is filled with cases of women diagnosed with Stage IV who live twenty years and women with Stage I who live nine months.” They had been trained not to give hope. How much better to paint a bleak picture first, and then when things turned out to be not so dire after all, the patient would kiss their hands in gratitude.

By the time she’d finished treatment, Mel hated them all.

Gradually, she began to pull herself out of despair. She agreed to surgery to remove the lump, and afterward she agreed to chemotherapy, putting her head down and plodding through it like a dumb animal, saying I can do this. I can do this. But first she bought a wig (she refused the bald head and scarf that loudly proclaimed
Victim)
and then she had herself hypnotized to alleviate the hair loss and nausea. She ate a healthy diet and took
large quantities of vitamins; she learned to meditate. She read every book she could find on miraculous healings and promising alternative therapies. She followed her doctors’ orders but she supplemented them with whatever alternative therapies made sense to her. She learned to trust her intuition. (After all, the doctors could not guarantee success with their horrific treatments, so what did she have to lose?) Her hair, which had fallen out soon after the first chemotherapy treatment, began to regrow after the fourth. With her healthy diet, her constant exercise, and her afternoon naps, she began to feel better than she had in years. She didn’t work, she didn’t call friends, she didn’t fritter her time away on meaningless pursuits. She spent all her time trying to get well.

When she called Leland and told him, he cried like a baby. Later, he said, “Don’t you die up there with all those Yankee strangers. You come home to die, Sister.”

She knew then that she wouldn’t go home. And she wouldn’t die either. She was strangely grateful to him, grateful for the anger he always roused in her, for her sudden determination to outlive him no matter what. She was glad now for his money, thankful that he’d pulled himself up from poverty and turned himself into a self-made millionaire. She had no health insurance, and he paid for everything, the doctors, the trips to Germany and Mexico.

She went to see a new therapist to help lighten her load of childhood anger and regret. She kept a dream journal. She paid close attention to her fourth-chakra issues. She meditated and tried to open her heart to love, trust, and compassion.

After her last chemo treatment, she went out with her friends to celebrate.
When do you start radiation?
they asked her.

I don’t
, she said. It had just occurred to her. She would do no more damage to her body. No scarred lungs, no late-blooming leukemia. Enough was enough. Quality of life was more important to her than quantity of life, although she knew most cancer patients didn’t share her philosophy. And that was okay, too.

Her surgeon, when she told him her decision, wasn’t happy.

“Well, if I’d known you weren’t going to do radiation, I would have just taken the breast.” His attitude was so condescending, so cavalier, as if her breast was his to do with as he pleased. He was blond, blue-eyed, the darling of the ward. But by then, she had had enough.

“Really?” she said coolly. “Well, how about if I just take your balls? Hmm? How about if I just cut them off? Would you like that?”

His eyes flashed anger (no one had ever spoken to him like that), then concern, and then fear (My God, she was crazy She was capable of anything. Did no one screen these women?) as he turned and hurried out to find the nurse, leaving her chart behind on the table in his haste.

Mel watched him go. As the door closed behind him, she felt hope welling up inside her, swelling like a sail. She put her head back and laughed.

She knew then that she’d get well.

What else is there to say? Human beings are resilient; they can adapt to anything. Life returns in degrees, in increments, like the sun inching its way across a bare floor on a winter’s day.

Mel continued meditating, she chanted and opened her heart to the Infinite, she walked in the park and drank her wheatgrass shakes and ate brown rice and seaweed until she could stand it no more. She went for her three-month checkup and then her six-month checkup, endured the X-rays, the scans, the gentle prodding of competent fingers. Her new doctor (a woman) patted her arm and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep up the good work.”

Each visit was a milestone, a celebration. Six months cancer-free, one year, two years, and you give a deep sigh of relief. By five years, it’s all begun to fade.