In the Body of the World (11 page)

Now, thirty-two years later, pot was the way through chemo and I needed a way through. The most surprising people were instantly out copping for me. As most of my friends in my present life had never known me at my lowest or been with me when I drank or drugged, there was much excitement at coming over to watch me get high. It was theater. It was sport. I was suddenly a pot-smoking, meat-eating bald person with a bag. A holiday. Of sorts.

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RIDING THE LION

Sue: “Ride the lion with all of the strength and love that you have found in your community. Although this anguish is very lonely, there is a new infant being born, in a community of love, protection, tenderness, and ferocious caregiving. We are all around you with our blessings. You are here with me. The life force in you is being released. Kali is being purged from your cells, so that your cells run clean of cancer, and your selves run clean of the projected not-you badness that has riddled you all of your life. Washed clean, you are finding your original goodness.”

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CHEMO DAY FIVE

Vagina pain, deep throbbing vagina pain

Crushing bone ache

Feet no longer feel the floor

Desire to die while you are at the height of fighting death.

Desire to vomit when you know the poison you want to eject is supposed to be saving your life.

Bag stinks of toxic fumes

Burning

Salem

Witches

Cells, exploding emoticons, committing suicide right and left

Loss of will

Exhausted but no sleep.

THINGS NOT TO THINK ABOUT ON DAY FIVE:

Global warming

Six million dead in the Congo

The pointlessness and expense of the UN

Garbage, where it goes

How much women spend on beauty products

Rush Limbaugh

Bankers

Health care in America

Friends whose cancer just came back

My mother’s loneliness

C never calling even though I know he knows

BP

UNICEF

Larry Summers

Liberals

Republicans

Postracial anything

Afghanistan

Drones

Transsexual bashing

Polar bears drowning

Birds falling out of the sky

Climate change deniers

The bodies of decomposed women alone in the Congolese forest.

One cannot underestimate the importance of pot.

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ON THE COUCH NEXT TO ME

My sister’s existence utterly threatened my existence. I will never recover from the horrendous moment of her birth. I was already a scrappy two-year-old fighting for even the remotest glance from my blond beauty-queen mother. My sister could not exist. It was unbearable. So I made her disappear. I am not proud of this. She became a blur, a blob, a smear of existence—something that on occasion appeared out of the corner of my eye and then, with a blink, was made to go away. Of all the things I have done in my life, I am most ashamed of this. I have no doubt it is why I became a feminist—to somehow right this wrong. The concept of sisterhood was at such odds with the almost homicidal competitiveness that lived in me. Our parents, Chris and Arthur, sucked the life and air out of every room and party. Now there would be two of us fighting for what wasn’t there.

I do not remember having outright murder fantasies about my sister, but I do remember the annihilating rage—a rage that once exploded in me so forcefully that I threw her under a chair and kicked her.

In the family hierarchy my sister was on the lowest rung. This both protected her and rendered her invisible. My father had all the oxygen, the resources, the money, the power, the charm, and the rest of us lived off the fumes. The closer you were to him, the more chance you had of breathing, but the proximity also meant serious danger. Who knows what makes each of us who we are. I got the idea wrongly or rightly that my survival was based on being heard, being seen even if it meant being abused and attacked. In securing the spotlight, I was anything but sisterly. Invisibility was the greatest enemy. This idea became the architectural framework of my life.

It took stage IIIB/IV cancer, a shamanic cleansing, and exorcising of the original narrative to allow me to begin to see that perhaps this story was not my story.

Of all the destructive things my father did—and there were many—nothing was as devastating and long-lasting as the way he divided us and turned us on each other. This was his deepest and most sustained legacy. I see how the division plays out everywhere, how this early destructive mutation of the family, just
like that of a cancer cell, determines the psychic and social patterns of our existence. The world seems to be constructed on empires born of these mutations—of poor pitted against poor, ethnic group against ethnic group, elevating one group over another—a seduction that keeps the powerful in place. What if we weren’t so susceptible to being the adored, the most, the cherished, the winner?

Now Lu was on the couch next to me, putting a washcloth on my head, rolling me joints (turned out she was as good at this as she is at everything), and reminding me to breathe, to take the Xanax, to stop reading the book on genocide. She had, it turned out, grown up and made a valuable life, devoted herself to her husband and daughter, done extraordinary work in the world. She had become a major somebody. And for whatever reason, she was here, taking care of me. I had been given a reprieve and so I shut up. I listened. I asked her questions and I was sincerely curious about the answers. At first I tolerated her substantial existence, but as the days passed I came to rejoice in it.

It was fragile, our new beginning. I was terrified of blowing it. I learned to be still, some days to do very little. I would be burning. We would eat a chicken, look at handbags online, play with her new iPad, cry at ridiculously bad movies, carefully and sporadically talk about Arthur and Chris. Lu had a threshold. I learned to
respect it. I was not better or braver for being a tragedy magnet. Lu’s presence, her simple, soft-skinned, maternal-sister presence was a healing. My sister and I, on an island called Manhattan, with my body on fire, nausea racing through me, fell in love. That’s the only way I can describe it. We found another direction for our attention, not up toward the impossible father or out toward the unreachable mother, but across to each other.

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I LOVE YOUR HAIR, OR THE LAST TIME I SAW MY MOTHER

I feed her chocolate ice cream and want to believe there was a time she did this for me. I have no memory of her putting food in my mouth. I hate her. Here I am, having climbed out of my chemo cocoon to fly south to feed her chocolate ice cream. Here I am, again taking care of her, hoping she might one day feel compelled to take care of me. An old shrink used to say, “You think if you paste arms on her, eventually she will hug you.” I am shocked at my rage, shocked that she didn’t pause when I entered her hospital room just now to say, “My god, you came. You flew here in the middle of chemotherapy to be with me.” Instead, in her gradually descending dementia, she talks about how much she loves my hair. She has told all the nurses that I will set a fashion with my hair and it will be the rage in New York.

I have never set fashions. Most of my life I could
barely figure out what to wear. She insists I take off my scarf and I do because she is so ill. I want to make her happy. And she says, “I love it. I love your hair.” I want to scream. “Are you looking at me, me, me? I am bald. Feel it, feel my head. There is nothing there. There is no hair. I have cancer, Mom. I just had half my organs removed. I have bloody poison in every pore and I could die and I am not eighty-five, I am fifty-seven, and I got on an airplane and risked infection because my white blood count is very low, I risked my fucking life to fly here for you, you, you.” But I don’t say that. No, I never do. I laugh and pull my nonexistent hair. Then she talks about my niece Katherine’s long blond hair and stunning face, identical to her own.

She can’t stop talking about my pretty niece, how pretty she is. I am bald and my niece is pretty. So pretty, just like her. Then she catches herself and says, “Oh, you are pretty too. You are all pretty,” she says to the room, like “Drinks on the house,” and I say, “I do not look like you. I never have. I am therefore not pretty.” And this conversation feels so familiar, I crave the chemo antinausea medication.

Her long red fingernails look strangely out of place with her hospital gown. They are the only part of the invented her that remains. She is bone and moles and catheter tubes and bruises and itchy IVs. Her long
white hair is so fine, it gets caught in everything. I think she is dozing when she says out of nowhere, “Guilt.” My sister and I say, “What?” And she says, “Guilt. I am guilty that I did not love you all more.” I lie. My sister doesn’t lie. I say, “You have been a loving mother. There is nothing to be guilty about,” and I think, What will this guilt do for any of us? Will it give me back the years I hurt myself and almost drank myself to death? Will it reverse the bruises on my legs and ass and neck from being choked and whipped and punched? Will it undo your taping me to chairs, putting underpants on my head for an entire day to teach me a lesson? Will it make me understand why you woke my drunken, raging father from his stupor to report things to him, things you knew would incite him to violence—“Come quick Arthur, she’s at it again, she’s smoking. I’ll show you. Come quick. She snuck out with a boy. She’s missing from her bed. Come quick, Arthur. You must handle this.” And he did. Usually with his fists and curses, a half-awake, drunken, raging monster that you steered in my direction. Guilt. I lie.

I ask her if she wants to see my scar. She doesn’t. She never has. I decide to show her anyway. The nurse who takes care of her pretends to be interested. I show her my scar—the entire length of my torso. She hardly looks and says, “Mine is so much longer. Mine wraps around my whole body.” My mother does not have such
a scar. It was just the same when she heard I had to have chemotherapy. She told me, “I had it. It wasn’t that bad.” She made it sound pretty easy. Then I discovered she had never had chemotherapy. I got cancer. Then my mother’s cancer came back. Then I went to chemo. Then my mother decided to die. She will win this round.

She is so frail. She looks breakable, but she isn’t. She has outlived everyone who believed she was breakable and treated her like china. She has survived three types of cancer. She said all the time, “I have no desire to live long. Let me out of here before I am that old.” She is eighty-five and she is still fighting with one lung.

I rub her very bony chest and get her to breathe in and breathe out. I calm her down. I am surprised that I am able to do this. She is a child. I am her mother. I get her to close her eyes and then she leans her head against mine. I decide to talk to her through our heads. I decide to tell her everything. I decide this moment will be my freedom. I press my brain right up against hers. I tell her how angry I have been and I say it is over. I say, “I waited my whole life and you are not coming.” I say, “I wanted to believe your wall would come down and you would remember me, and feel for me, and worry about
me.” I say, “This didn’t happen.” I say, “I hated you for this and I have carried this hate my whole life. I hated you because you did not protect me or teach me that through protecting me I had a right to protect myself.” I say, “I got sick. I am done blaming you. It happened. It didn’t happen. It was. It isn’t. I want to be able to move on and not search the world for my mother and not crave adoration. I want this to be the moment where I get free, so I free you.” We sit there head to head and I know that somewhere in there she can hear what I am saying, and I feel my body relax and my aversion and hunger leave me and she relaxes and we fall asleep like this.

I wake at 4:00 a.m. on a cot in her room and she is moaning. She is freezing. The air-conditioning is so cold and lonely. I take my blankets and climb into her bed. I wrap myself around her the way I always dreamed she would wrap herself around me. I enfold the blankets around her shivering bones and I pull her to me and I hold her so tight, her moaning stops. Then in her sleep she says, “I was having a terrible nightmare. I dreamed they came to take our hearts. They didn’t want mine. They wanted yours the most. They are coming to take our hearts.” I want to ask, “Who is they?” But somewhere I know. I hold her even tighter and I hear my voice deepen. I say,
“Don’t be afraid. They will not get our hearts. I will not let them. I promise.”

The next morning they move my mother to the cardiac unit because her heart has now become the problem. It is where we do not live that the dying comes.

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IT WAS A BEACH, I THINK

The sun was setting. Lu wanted to sit outside. It was a beach, I think, but it might have been a parking lot. The wind was sea and salty. It was holding us and tearing things apart. There was nothing to say—we were past recrimination and longing, past who got loved more or who didn’t get loved at all. Florida, the burnt place of fossils and remains.

I took off my hat. The wind blew through my sticky baldness. The humidity was an embrace. Lu and I were stunned at how fast it was all happening. My mother’s dying made us strangely hungry. We ate things that children eat. Everything was fried. We shared. Lu had wine. There was a time when the silence would have pushed me to ask my sister to revisit the family horrors, but they didn’t seem interesting now. The horrors. I thought of Lake Kivu, how once when I was crossing it from Goma to Bukavu, it turned into a raging
ocean, and the waves were higher than the boat loaded with too many bags and people. I wasn’t like the others—worried about drowning. I knew I could swim. I was terrified of what was under the water—all the dead bodies and body parts—the people who had been killed or raped or macheted in the forests, who died with their families and whole villages so they were never missed: the lonely floating bodies reaching out in the dark water, bobbing like capsized possibilities, still waiting their turn. I always thought I would die walking into water. But I am not sure there was any there, that night after we left my mother’s room. It was more the idea of water, the idea of something that comes in really close and then pulls away just as you are coming to understand it. It was my mother. The wind holding Lu and me; the wind tearing everything apart.