Dirty Secret (16 page)

“But Jessie, look what I found,” she says, and is suddenly fanning dollar bills in my face. Hundred-dollar bills.

“Where did that come from?”

“From the bank! I went this morning. I wanted to have some cash on hand in case I can't get there while I'm recovering after the surgery.”

“How much is it?”

“Three thousand dollars!”

“From your savings account?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me,” I say, and go over to the bureau where I've put envelopes, pens, and pads of paper. I grab three envelopes and on each I write one of the upcoming months: May, June, and July. I put $900 in each one, and seal them. I give her the extra $300 and tell her to put it in her wallet. “And that should last you until the end of the month.”

“Where's my wallet . . .” she says, walking away, looking down at the floor as if it'll magically appear there.

“It's in your purse, which is hanging on one of the hooks near the front door.”

I find her in the hallway a few minutes later, still looking through her purse.

“Will you remember where those envelopes are?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Where are they?” I want to make sure she pictures the location, to help her remember.

She squints her eyes in concentration and speaks in a dreamy tone: “In that cabinet where the record player is . . . in the top drawer.”

“And you'll be able to make each envelope last for a whole month?”

“Oh, yeah. That's not a problem.”

“Good. Now come on,” I say. “It's our last day to clean, so we need to get started.”

“Let's not clean today! Let's go out for Mexican. I know a place on Lake Street that has the best guacamole.” She always says the “mole” part of guacamole as mole, like the rodent. My husband and I pronounce it that way now, too; it started as a joke but now we just do it all the time without thinking about it.

I miss my husband. I miss my life—my real life. This is my secret life. I haven't told any of my friends about my mother. They might know vaguely that she has some “mental issues” but that's it. It's easy to explain that I'm visiting my mom because she has cancer and needs surgery, but how do I explain that what I'm really doing is gutting her house of trash, digging through years of muck, and speaking to her as if she's a five-year-old?

She's looking at me expectantly.

“Mom, I want your house to be clean for when you're recovering.”

“It is,” she says, opening her arms. “Jessie, it's marvelous.”

Since I've been in Minneapolis, I've hardly let myself worry about her cancer. But it is
cancer.
And now, looking at her hopeful face, barely wrinkled even at sixty-three, I think, What if this is the last time I see her? What if something happens during the surgery or her prognosis is terrible?

“Okay, I'll tell you what, Mom. Let's clean until one o'clock and then we'll go to the Mexican place for lunch.”

At the end of the day, after the guacamole and then a few more hours of cleaning, I survey the results. It's better. Much better, though there's more to be done. The living room is still packed with too much furniture, four cardboard boxes need to be gone through, and something needs to be done with the overflow of books that wouldn't fit on the shelves. But at least the house is back to the mild pack rat but not unsanitary state it was in when Roger was alive. That's something. And for now, it'll have to do.

THE NEXT MORNING, ON THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT, I ASK my dad to stop off at my mother's house so I can say good-bye. My dad waits in the car. Early tomorrow my mom's going into the hospital; we're supposed to find out at some point between now and then if the new polyps are benign or malignant. Those results will determine how much of her colon will need to be removed during the surgery and give the doctors some idea of her prognosis.

My mom opens the front door and steps aside so I can pass. She follows me in, holding her arm out toward the living room and the kitchen as if I've just won a prize on a game show. “You've done such a marvelous job. Just look at it! Ooh, Jessie, here,” she says and goes over to the china cabinet we unearthed from a mountain of clutter in the hallway. It was actually in great shape, even neatly organized on the inside. It holds ceramic
figurines, china cups and saucers, and a collection of clutches and other small purses. “Here,” my mom says, opening the hutch's glass door. “I want you to choose something to take home.”

I select a boxy red purse that looks like it's from the '40s. I don't really want it—it's just another thing I'll have to give away or find space for in my tiny apartment—but I can tell my taking it would mean a lot to her.

“Oh, Jessie, you can take that to Italy with you! It will be perfect there.”

“Sure,” I say, knowing I won't.

“Thank you for all you've done, honey,” my mom says.

“I wish I could've done more.”

“No, it's gorgeous.”

“You'll go through those today, right?” I point to the cardboard boxes we didn't get to.

“Sure,” my mom says.

“And you'll call me from the hospital tomorrow, right?”

She nods.

“Or sooner if you find out about those other polyps.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to be all right here on your own?” I feel so bad leaving her. But I have to get back to New York—one of the classes I teach meets tomorrow and I can't cancel another one.

“Oh, yeah, I'll be fine.”

I hug her good-bye. It's awkward in the way it's always awkward.

And then my dad honks his horn and I head for the door.

ON THE PLANE
back to New York, the aching sets in. My back, shoulders, and arms, from all the hours of hauling, scrubbing,
sweeping, cobweb clearing, and stacking. I'm so sleepy, but something's keeping me from drifting off: the papers at the lawyer's office, putting my mother's house in my name—they're a thick chain around my neck, an anchor ready to drag me down. I fear, however irrationally, that the lawyer will forget our deal and accidentally file them. I cannot be legally responsible for that house. I do
not
want that house.

There's one other thing that keeps me awake: my ankle. It itches like crazy. A cluster of five or six welts that look like mosquito bites, only smaller. I scratch them, but the itching only intensifies. It must be some kind of poison ivy I got when I went for a walk with Sandy a few days earlier along the Mississippi River.

When my dad dropped me off at the airport, he gave me sixty dollars and told me to treat myself to a cab home rather than take the subway. So after the flight lands, that's what I do. David and I live in a walk-up building, on the fifth floor. “Free exercise!” we said when we moved in. Usually the stairs are no problem, but today I'm moving a little slow. When I finally open the door to our apartment, David comes toward me and lifts my backpack from my shoulders. He sets it on the floor and puts his arms around me.

“The Magpie,” he says, using his nickname for me.

Our dog, Abraham Lincoln, is hopping around, trying to put his paws on my calves, his mini hot dog–size tail wagging.

“I'm so happy to be home,” I say, my face against David's chest.

“Look,” David says and pulls away from me. He points to the tall two-person table against the wall in our living room.

“You didn't,” I say, walking toward the table.

“I went this morning.”

It's a feast from Sahadi's, the Middle Eastern deli in Brooklyn
that we love: hummus, baba ganoush, olive-flecked pita bread, a wedge of creamy Saint André cheese, a circle of goat cheese brie, the garlic-tinged flatbread crackers I like, two samosas, this sun-dried-tomato and feta-filled pastry that David and I constantly crave, juicy black olives, and fanned-out slices of pear. Behind the spread is a bouquet of orange gerbera daisies.

“You are too good to me,” I say and slice off a piece of the Saint André. “Thank you.” I take a bite of the cheese and bend down to let Abraham Lincoln lick the rest off my finger.

“I wasn't sure how hungry you'd be,” David says, “but I figured we can save it for tomorrow if we need to.”

“Famished,” I say, and put my hand down on the floor for leverage as I stand up. A sharp pain shoots from my wrist to my shoulder. “Ow,” I say, as I stumble to my feet. “My mom's house really beat the crap out of me.”

“I'll give you a massage, if you want,” David says in the fake-reluctant tone we use with each other sometimes as a joke.

“Maybe if I take a long bath first you won't need to,” I say, reaching for a slice of pear.

“It's o-kay,” he says in an exaggerated singsong, and I know he means it, that it really is okay, but I still hate asking David to do those kinds of things. It's leftover humiliation from when I became so helpless that he had to do almost everything for me.

IN 2001, JUST
a few months after David and I had gotten married, we were living in San Francisco and I was working as a producer in the online division of a business magazine. They'd hired me because of my experience at the online magazine in New York; I'd neglected to mention during the interview that I understood nothing about business, nor was I even remotely interested in it.
I was greedy for all the dot-com money that seemed to be flowing endlessly: David had just graduated from his master's program and begun working as a writer at a weekly newspaper in San Jose, and our plan was to save as much money as possible, then go traveling around Europe for six months to a year. After that, we'd move back to New York.

Not long after I was hired at the business magazine, my department launched a huge website redesign, which meant long hours and weekends. My boss, Eric, assured me that there would be a big bonus when the project was done.

I didn't mind the long hours at first. When I got sick of being there or was annoyed that I couldn't go with David to review a restaurant or a band because I had to stay late at work, I'd picture lingering in a Roman trattoria over a plate of luscious pasta, enjoying a velvety beer in a rustic Prague pub, or strolling the wide boulevards of Paris. The bonus from the redesign was going to help make those things possible. And regardless of my long hours, I was waking up early each morning to work on short stories at home. The writing I did on my own was what mattered to me. The magazine producer position was just what I did for money.

When my fingers became heavy and fatigued and my wrists began aching, I figured it was probably from my long hours on the computer, but I knew I'd have time to rest after the redesign. I was too busy to pay that much attention to the pain anyway. My company had begun laying people off, and with each round of layoffs, I acquired new responsibilities. I'd look over from my monitor to see Eric standing in the doorway of my office. “So, they let Jonathan go. I'm going to need you to be in charge of updating the stock tracker.”

The following week, he'd say something like, “It looks like Carla's been laid off. Can you handle updating the white-paper
page? Thanks.” He'd walk away before I could say no or ask what a “white paper” was. Not that I would have said no. I wanted that bonus.

It was a job I'd disliked from the beginning, and with each passing week and each new round of layoffs, there was more and more of it. My fatigued fingers became stiff, tingly, and numb. My aching wrists began to throb and burn. The pain traveled up from my hands to my forearms, all the way to my shoulders and into my neck, which became perpetually sore. One day I mentioned the pain to Anna, one of my few remaining colleagues. She promptly diagnosed me with something called “repetitive strain injury.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“You've heard of carpal tunnel, right?”

“Yes, of course.” Carpal tunnel was rampant in San Francisco. Walk into any office on any day and there would be half a dozen people sitting at their keyboards typing away while wearing bulky black wrist braces; or peek into the freezer of any break room and you'd be certain to find ice packs with people's initials on them. I'd always thought of those people wrapping ice around their wrists and wearing braces as slackers or whiners.

“So,” Anna continued, “carpal tunnel only relates to a certain nerve in your wrist that can get hurt from overuse. Repetitive strain injury encompasses all the nerves.”

“Okay. Repetitive strain injury.” I didn't care what it was called. Once this redesign was over I'd be able to rest my sore hands, and then I'd be fine.

“Or you can just call it RSI, like most people. I've had it for years,” Anna said, shaking her bony hands as if to warm them. She was small, about my size, and pale. “That's why I keep my hair short. So I don't have to hold up a blow dryer.”

That seemed extreme, but I didn't tell her that. Anna advised
me to file a workers' compensation claim because that way my medical bills would be paid even if I was laid off. I didn't want to file a claim. I didn't think I'd
have
medical bills, and I didn't want to be a whiner.

Instead, I stopped my routine of writing before work. Surely, I thought, cutting a few hours a day from the keyboard would help my hands heal. I wasn't happy about it—the writing I was doing at home was the only thing (besides the promised bonus) that made going to an office every day bearable. But I figured it was temporary, just until my hands got better.

Only, they didn't get better. Finally, a few weeks after Anna suggested it, I filed a workers' compensation claim.

At my first doctor's appointment, I was prescribed 600-milligram ibuprofen pills and given exercises to build up my “horribly underdeveloped” trapezius muscles. Dr. Olsen also restricted my keyboard time to six hours a day. She said I should be better in a few weeks.