Live a Little (2 page)

The toilet seat stands at attention, the rim festooned with dabs of pee and hair. For some reason, this detail, this mundane particle of injustice, sends me over the edge.

“Goddammit!”

I slam the seat down, my hand protected by Taylor’s shirt. A puny scream erupts from the now-cracked seat joint, which, like my mind, has never been completely stable. “Fuck!” I yell into the bone-dry hand towels (Phil always wipes his hands on my bath sheet).

Afternoon blurs into evening while I toss and turn, willing the catastrophe on a better equipped individual. Once every 2.5 seconds, I actually forget I have it. My thoughts are weird. For example:
What’s better for the kids, preserving my posthumous reputation by delivering the news with grace and decorum, or maintaining a consistent familial environment by crying and cussing?

At one point I smell my son and open my eyes. Micah is leaning over me, in the process of stealing my cherished heating pad from the opposite nightstand.

“Why are you wearing cleats in the house?” I croak.

Micah kicks a clod of soggy turf off his soccer shoe, which, for the price, should not only have David Beckham’s signature on it but also include a charity fuck for the wearer’s mother.

“See ya later, Mom. I’m taking the car.” He waggles a set of keys.

My keys.

I roll out of bed, stomp across the house, and lock myself in the off-garage toilet, shaking, until I hear the garage door open and my husband’s evening sacraments begin. In preparation for what lies ahead, I try to do the sort of deep breathing they teach you at yoga, in which you’re supposed to cram healing breaths into every possible orifice of your body until you are at peace.

Finally, I go in search of my forever-in-wasted-motion partner in life.

Phil goes utterly still when I corner him in the living room and deliver the news. Then, true to form, he goes on the attack.

“What are you talking about?” he says irritably. His fingers twitch. I can tell he wants to flick the volume button and return to his life’s work: wallowing in flatscreen, high definition television.

With what I believe any reasonably dignified person would call great dignity, I walk calmly toward the father of my children, plant myself in the path of the TV, and obstruct his view of Barry Bonds, my arms crossed just like Barry’s (except that his are big, black, and muscular, and mine are big, white, and flabby). Then I leap on Phil and wrestle the remote clumsily from his hands. I brandish this electronic sliver of power triumphantly as I crawl toward the couch.

This part I accomplish sans dignity.

“What the hell are you doing?” Phil says. We are both panting.

“I have cancer,” I say, experimenting with the pronunciation a bit. This time, I emphasize the “I.”

“How can you have cancer? You haven’t even been to the doctor.” Phil’s green eyes, which I’d once found feline and mysterious, now exude a grim haze as predictable as the sky over L.A. They flicker back to the screen: Giants, 11; Dodgers, 3.

“We need to make the necessary arrangements.”

I finally have my husband’s attention. “What arrangements? Raquel? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I have cancer of the breast. The doctor says it’s stage four, maybe inoperable. Twelve lymph nodes, Philly! Twelve!” Through the window, I watch as Ronnie Greenblatt strips off his soccer jersey and pulls the lawn mower out of the shed. At seventeen and nine months, my son’s best friend has the kind of cobbled abs that could make a nun weep.

“I thought breast cancer was hereditary. Your mom doesn’t have it. Lauren doesn’t have it.”

“Well, apparently, I have it.” I bank the factoid that only 5 percent of breast cancers are inherited for future use.

“Do you have”—a maroon flush of shame saturates Phil’s cheeks—“a lump?”

“Of course I have a lump. That’s why I went for a mammogram and then the biopsy.” I envision myself through my husband’s eyes at this moment: the picture of pale goddesslike piety and patience in the face of doom. Lumpy doom.

“Good God.” I can tell Phil thinks he should have found it himself. My husband is nothing if not dutiful. If someone had slipped it into our marriage contract—
Responsibility number three: Perform breast lump exam on [blank’s] tits bimonthly
— he would have kneaded me like bread dough every other Wednesday without fail. Also, he was probably wondering, as was I, when was the last time he actually touched my breasts. Strangely, it was one of the first thoughts that curdled in my head after my visit with Meissner:
Did Phil touch it?

Telling the kids afterward is worse.

“Oh my God, Mommy!” Taylor screeches, lunging into my arms in a manner she abandoned at eight.

“It’s okay, honey. I know it’s hard. I know,” I say, rubbing her back, which is bare where her baby tee cowers above her low-slung jeans.

“But Mom, aren’t they even going to try chemo?” Micah, whom I’d considered the smart one until he smoked the joint with Ronnie and plowed the Accord into the side of the Circle K last spring, defaults to calm interrogation. He takes after Phil that way.

“The doctor says we’ll do chemo, radiation, even stem-cell replacement if we have to. After the surgery to remove as much of the cancer as they can, of course.” That’s something I hadn’t understood at the time and had been too addled to ask: How can inoperable cancer be operated on?

“What about Tamoxifen? Ronnie’s grandma had breast cancer, and she did chemo and took Tamoxifen for five years, and now she’s fine.” My son’s denim-blue eyes are wide and panicked.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” I say, impressed.

The blue eyes snap. “Don’t treat me like a fucking idiot!”

“Mike, calm down.” But I don’t really want my boy to calm down. In fact, I don’t want anyone to calm down, anywhere, ever again. My family least of all; as far as I’m concerned, they should start building the shrine now. I can already imagine it: my best photos (all taken in the early eighties and slightly pixilated), my favorite scented candles from Tocca, sympathy cards, a lock of hair, smooth stones to facilitate my journey to the other side—all of it with the faint whiff of idolatry and Catholicism about it. With a dash of Eastern mysticism thrown in. This is de rigueur among the coolest dead young mothers.

“How am I supposed to calm down?” Micah yells. My son goes from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. He takes after me that way.

Taylor lifts her tear-stained face from my soon-to-be ravaged bosom. “Shut up, you douche! Mom’s dying, and you’re making it worse! You’re such an asshole!”

“Kids! Let’s give it a rest, okay? I’m really tired,” I lie. Actually, the conversation has left me weirdly energized. The kids are being so damn attentive, so nice.

“Mom, I love you! You can’t die!” Taylor snuggles against me; it seems I’m now her preferred parenting resource. The runner-up slumps against the couch, his head in his hands.

Micah pushes Taylor aside and folds his five feet eleven inches into the crook of my arm. I am fairly sure that the last time my offspring hugged me willingly was 2001, when our first family dog, Pickle, was laid to rest in a patch of rosemary. Nearly purring, I inhale my children’s gamey teen scent, stroke their silky skin, lap up their delicious need. It is pure bliss.

And that’s when it comes to me: Maybe, now that I am dying, it is time to live a little.

CHAPTER 2

Waiting to Expire

“Mom!”

The cry cuts through my calm, the cloud of misty heat billowing around me, three handfuls of bath salts and a really good life escape plan featuring me, Viggo Mortensen, and a catastrophic earthquake that wipes out three quarters of the population, forcing all—even the perimenopausal—to wildly attempt procreation for the cause.

Mom.

How such a simple, monosyllabic word can be stretched to three parts, I don’t know; its unique, eardrum-piercing delivery is one of the unexplained gifts of childhood. What I do know: Whatever semblance of peace I manage to achieve through sensory or narcotic means, a good strong
“Mom!”
is guaranteed to destroy it with the exuberant finality of a SCUD missile. It’s like the pool guy said when I suggested that, in the future, he leave his stash of weed at home instead of enjoying it on my front porch:
Dude, don’t harsh my mellow.

Reluctantly, I raise myself out of the tub, one of those boxy numbers from the sixties that lacks both neck rest and overflow drain. I hate it; it’s number 531 on my list of domestic insults. A river of water surges over the side, gathering in the grout-filled moat between bath and floor. I should soak it up immediately, before it turns into green mold. Then again, green mold is number 847, so I wouldn’t classify the issue as pressing.

“I’m coming!” I yell.

“ Mah-ah-ahm!” Taylor bellows as if she did not hear my piteous response.

I grab a bath sheet—fluffy! still sort of white!—off the rack and towel off vigorously. I should probably aim for vigor while I can, before death—preceded by chemo, social isolation, mastectomy bathing suits—claims me.

Robe on, slippers AWOL, I wander in search of the summons. It doesn’t pay to dawdle; they get antsy when you take too long. Once I overheard a woman at the dry cleaner’s liken her family dynamic to sled dogs jostling for raw meat. I can relate.

Micah is in the kitchen. In front of him, on the counter, is a row of whole-wheat tortillas, fanned out neatly, like crop circles. He is busy scooping refried beans out of a can and piling shredded cheese on top. Afterward, he will roll them up with a squirt of habanero. It is his favorite midmorning snack: the fart rocket.

“Have you seen Taylor?” I ask him.

“She went out to the garage.” Micah stops midwrap and turns to me as if just remembering I have an oft-terminal disease. Absorbing the ferocity in his eyes, I think, not for the first time,
I can’t believe Philly and I made this.

“Mom, I’m quitting golf,” he adds.

“Why would you do that?” True, it’s not his main sport— that’s soccer—but the dream of Tigerish endorsements and a job that justifies sunscreen dies hard.

Micah grimaces. “So I can take care of you. You’re going to need help after the operation . . . and, you know, the other stuff.”

This is unprecedented. Three days ago Micah agreed to help me wash the garbage cans—after I threw the spaghetti dinner I was making against the wall, cried, and threatened to revoke his driving privileges.

“Mike, that’s sweet of you to offer,” I manage to say, “but you don’t have to start changing your life around for me. I
want
things to stay the same as before. I’m sure things are going to be just like they were before. I mean, after I get better.”

But what if I don’t?

A finger of unease trails down my neck.

Willing myself not to scream, I shakily fill a mug with coffee and add a dollop of whipped cream and six or seven sugars and carcinogenic sugar substitutes. It occurs to me that I no longer have a need to fear them, so I throw in a couple more.

I set the mug on the counter next to a fart rocket. “I suppose I could use a little help around the house and stuff, but it’s not your job to take care of me anyway, it’s—”

Phil walks in. His tie is broad and rumpled, with a stain in the middle like a third eye. The patch of eczema on his knuckles is raw and red. It gets worse when he’s stressed or annoyed with me. The last time his hands looked normal was August 2004, when he returned from a three-day fishing trip with the neighborhood husband posse. Whatever the skincare benefits, there is nothing sadder than a paunchy middle aged man with a beer cozy and a half-empty cooler of dead spawning salmon.

Panic clutches my throat.
With Mr. Primetime in charge of things, we’d better order that tombstone now.

“How are you feeling?” Phil sounds uncharacteristically syrupy, oversolicitous, maybe even guilty. Perhaps it has also crossed his mind that the source of my sickness is his beloved toxic weed killer, though I expect he is too callow to admit it.

He and Micah are both looking at me. There is something almost reverent in their expressions. It’s as if I have, by getting sick, become more important, more commanding, more
present,
than I was yesterday. I can see that they are really surprised by this development. Like, with another whole person in the room, they are fretting over how they are going to get enough air to breathe, enough space to occupy, enough room to navigate their lives.

“I’m fine,” I snap. Through the laundry room, the door to the garage is ajar. I can hear rummaging that is presumably Taylor making more work for someone—me—to clean up at an unspecified time. After a nice round of radiation, perhaps.

I tug my robe tighter around my waist and storm out of the room before fury executes a bloody coup on my emotional state. Taylor is indeed in the garage. She has managed to unshelve six boxes and rifle through all of them. The floor is littered with old paper, bedraggled Halloween costumes, mismatched gym socks Phil won’t let me throw away, a plaque with the gold leaf flaking off. Last year, when I finally tackled the garage, I’d indulged the bright idea of organizing our lives alphabetically: “H” is for Health Insurance, Holidays, Honors. I was proud of the scheme at the time. It seemed so rational, so clearheaded. That changed. Names of things, I came to realize later, are oblique, subjective, elusive. Who the hell knows if something is called a bank statement (“B”) or a monthly balance (“M”)?