Socks, to hide ugly swollen ankles. Woolen watch cap. Mustn’t upset visitors with bald head.
Back on the landing, she nudged the thermostat upward another two degrees, not looking at the numbers, not caring about the numbers. She was always cold.
Three thirty. Carol had said four. With nothing better to do, Glynis peeked out the foyer windows, looking for the car. What she saw instead flushed her with a familiar, helpless, Pavlovian loathing.
One of the neighbors, running. In his fancy sweat pants with their little stripes, in his fancy shoes with more little stripes. A jaunty headband. Looking so proud of himself. Exuding the same covert self-pity layered up with self-congratulation that she detested in her husband. In his fancy matching sweatshirt and special sporty gloves, he was running around the golf course. Aglow with manly discipline. Not to be deterred by a whipping February wind with a hint of snow. Yeah, sure, run your heart out, you sanctimonious prick. Think I didn’t used to run? Just you wait. You’ll see. One day you’ll get some, ha-ha, routine checkup and the doctor will bombast you with a lot of long-winded Latinate claptrap and there you go, you won’t be running around any golf course; you’ll thank your lucky stars if you can still get out of bed. So run, run, run. For now. Because don’t kid yourself. It just hasn’t happened yet.
Sometimes Glynis rued the fact that mesothelioma wasn’t contagious.
Granted, Glynis herself had gone to fitness classes and installed a variety of exercise regimes to keep what she had now been robbed of through no flagging of discipline, no indulgence or sloth, no laziness, no lack of resolve. During those workouts, she, too, would have imagined that she was exerting her willpower, at times to its maximum strength. Wrong. And that was the central source of the scorn that her neighbor inspired as he rounded the hill at the top and loped down the far side. He thought he was “pushing himself,” when this very afternoon she had required fifty times that much strength of will just to walk up the stairs. He thought he was “braving the elements,” yet had no appreciation for how kind was a mere February gale in comparison to an ill wind ripping through your own body. He thought he was forcing himself to do something he didn’t especially want to do, and didn’t realize that he did want to run, that running, like the A&P, was a privilege. He thought that he was building endurance, but was in for a big surprise when his own plague ship came in, at which point he’d discover that he had not built one scrap of the kind of endurance that newly unpleasant circumstances demanded. He thought, hilariously, that he was overcoming pain.
Sure, Glynis could no longer run from the porch to the mailbox. But the last year-plus? Cancer had required real endurance, real discipline, real willpower, in comparison to which a little step aerobics, a mince around the golf course, was a joke.
The half hour of waiting passed like a century. How disconcerting to have discovered that time was so precious at the precise point at which every judder of the second hand became excruciating. What did you do when the same quantity that was precious was also hateful? It was sadistic, an epiphany coupled with the perfect incapacity to act upon it. When the likes of Petra clamored for their Truth from on high, that’s really what she should have spit at them: Just you wait. You’ll get your beloved revelation in due course. But only once it’s too late.
At 4:00 p.m. precisely, the car pulled in the drive. Glynis dragged open the front door and tried to look welcoming. Since her worthless family and fair-weather friends had left her to fend for herself, she’d had little practice of late at any welcoming.
Carol waved from the car, then helped Flicka from the passenger seat. Extricating herself from the vehicle by leaning heavily on her mother’s shoulder, the girl seemed visibly weaker and more ungainly than on her last visit. Skinny as ever, flat-chested, and wearing thick, sexless glasses, she looked closer to nine than seventeen. The girl had been almost adorable when she was little, but as she’d aged her face had grown more out of whack: her nose was flatter; her chin bulged. Bouts of ill-wishing notwithstanding, Glynis was not so hard—not so made of metal—that she took any pleasure in Flicka’s decline. Rather, she felt a camaraderie that she was glad for. Compassion by its nature was meant to be directed outward, and with no other object worthy enough Glynis’s sympathy too often circled back pointlessly to herself.
For her own part, Glynis had banished photography. (And it was amazing how crass people could be, always trying to stick an aperture in her face. Utterly oblivious to the morbid it’s-now-or-never implications of their impulse, friends were eager to immortalize her image now she had mouth sores and no hair. How often had they arrived with cameras when she looked great?) Sporting neither eyebrows nor lashes, her countenance was undemarcated, incompletely drawn. Fair enough, the eerie smoothness of her legs obviated hot wax treatments. But hairless forearms on a grown woman were creepy. Carol wouldn’t know it to look at her, of course, but the biggest loss in the hair department was lower down; Shepherd had always celebrated her exuberant furze. It was a disagreeable discovery what a fifty-one-year-old pudenda looked like bald: shriveled, wrinkled, flapping, and strangely purple. Aesthetics weren’t meant to matter anymore, of course, and in truth Glynis had found in the degeneration of her body a perverse and obsessive fascination, a debauched thrill. Yet whenever she glimpsed earlier photographs—her wedding album, her formal portrait for gallery submissions, the few framed shots from travels abroad—she looked at that fuller, younger face, the regal figure she’d once cut, and felt jealous. Jealous of herself. So dressed this afternoon in shapeless velour and these ludicrous fluffy slippers that were all her feet would fit into, Glynis battled shame. For that matter, ever since her diagnosis she’d been nagged by a persistent sense of having done something wrong. The hospital had never differentiated itself in her mind from a prison, and whenever she was incarcerated there she had that Kafkaesque sensation of never being sure with what crime she’d been charged.
Carol, by contrast, looked terrific.
It wouldn’t do to hate Carol.
“Hey, Glyn!” Flicka whined, and opened her arms. For Glynis, it was like embracing her own torso—all the little birdlike bones discernible in the girl’s back. Birds of a feather. Flicka was shorter, but otherwise they were the same size.
“She’s not really well enough to be making trips to Westchester,” Carol said with a hug. “But she insisted.”
“Want to come upstairs to my nest?” Glynis invited.
“Sure,” Flicka slurred. “But only if you turn off the fucking Food Channel.” Fortunately, Flicka’s high nasal tonalities occupied a register that Glynis could still distinguish; Shepherd’s deep drone often faded to the plow of a faraway lawn mower.
“Okay. But only for you.” Glynis gripped the banister and pulled. “Everyone else has to learn to make curried egg salad.”
“Yuck.”
“Is there anything you like?”
“Ice cream.” Dragging herself up behind Glynis and winded by the fourth stair, Flicka darted a glance down at her mother and muttered, “I’m not supposed to have it, but sometimes I sneak a bite of Heather’s when Mom isn’t looking.”
“I think I want things. But then it turns out that I don’t.” They were not yet halfway up, and Glynis slumped onto a stair. “Let’s stop here, shall we?”
Having been watching the crips from the foyer, Carol called up, “I’ll leave you to visit for a while just the two of you, okay? Glynis, don’t worry about me, I can read the paper.”
“Glad somebody will,” said Glynis, relieved that Carol wasn’t going to hover. Flicka found her mother oppressive, and in her presence tended to clam up and scowl.
“At least we’ve finally found a brand of g-tube port we can change at home,” Flicka rasped, having collapsed on a stair as well. “So I don’t have to go to the damn hospital every time it breaks. Dad’s right, stupid country can’t make anything that lasts a week.”
“But don’t you notice, in the hospital, how you start to feel weirdly at hom
e?”
“Sort of. You do get to know the drill. Like, which nurses come at you with a hypodermic like a hole punch. I can’t feel it, but when they jab-jab-jab on my arm for half an hour trying to find a vein it gets incredibly boring. Hey, you still afraid of them? Needles?”
“Horrified. Shepherd expected the phobia to go away, but if anything it’s worse. After every chemo, he has to give me five injections to boost my white blood cell count. I don’t know how he stands it. I can’t even set eyes on the needle. I make him get the thing ready behind my back, and beforehand I have to take lorazepam. Or ‘marzipan,’ as it’s affectionately known around here. The first time, before I knew to take the marzipan, I fainted. I’m a total baby.”
“You picked the wrong disease, then. Should have gone for something where they throw up their hands. Something incurable.”
“Mesothelioma is incurable,” said Glynis softly. She’d never said this out loud.
Flicka looked embarrassed. “Sorry. Guess the word I meant was unteatable.”
“I don’t mind what word you use. You don’t have to be careful with me.” They started up the stairs again: one foot up, the next foot to the same step, rest.
“Don’t you get sick of that?” asked Flicka. “The carefulness. Like, ooh, ooh, mustn’t ‘upset’ Flick! Mustn’t say anything ‘insensitive’ to Glynis! They treat you like a retard.”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to say retard anymore.”
“Nah, that stuff doesn’t apply to us. We can say,” Flicka smiled craftily, “anything we want.”
“Sometimes that bothers me, to tell the truth. I had a big fight with Shepherd around Thanksgiving. About the fact that he does let me get away with anything. It’s not human. It’s patronizing.”
“Yeah … Once in a while Mom gets mad at me, even though she’s trying not to, and I kind of like it. Like, she’s being a regular mom. Not some fucking saint.”
In the bedroom-cum-entire-universe, Glynis crawled onto the king-size bed and arranged her five pillows, while Flicka grabbed the remote from the mattress. “Sorry about the state of things,” Glynis apologized. As ever, the room was littered with prescription bottles, dirty glasses, and the congealed breakfast that Shepherd should have known better than to bring her in bed this morning. The chairs were rumpled with cast-off fleeces and sweaters, while the bed swirled with coverlets of varying weights. Nest was the word.
Without asking, Flicka turned off the TV. She had that bossy quality of a kid whom adults were always trying to please. “That’s better.”
“It creates the illusion of activity.”
“Nah, I’ve experimented in the hospital. Having the TV on all day makes for a gross atmosphere. Silence is better. It doesn’t make you feel dirty.” Losing her balance half on purpose, Flicka fell back into the bean-bag chair that she always had trouble getting out of. “So. You get tired of this? Having to talk to people when you don’t have any stories?”
“I don’t like it when people come here and expect me to entertain them.”
“But if they tell you about all the cool shit they’re doing, you get pissed off.”
Glynis shrugged. “I don’t know what I want. So no one can please me. Funny—except you.”
“Of course,” Flicka said casually. “Misery loves.”
“You know, a few nights ago I had a—an episode.”
“So you do have a story.”
“Not much of one. I haven’t told anyone else about it. That night Shepherd had given me—sorry, this isn’t the sort of thing you’re supposed to talk about—an enema.”
“That’s okay. Mom has to give them to me all the time. With FD, constipation comes with the territory. Me, I’d rather skip digesting anything to begin with, but that solution in my house isn’t too popular.”
“Well, with Shepherd … I’m not sure people were meant to be that intimate.”
“But you’re married, right? So you must be used to his sticking a sort-of finger into another hole. What’s the diff?”
Glynis’s laughter degenerated to a cough. “Sex is a little better than an enema.”
“Not that I’ll ever know.”
“You can’t be sure of that. Don’t you sometimes like boys?”
“There was one guy last year who asked me to the end-of-term dance. But he was obviously trying to impress the other kids with what a mensch he was. Earn points with his parents and teachers for having such fine character. You wouldn’t believe the look on his face when I turned him down. I loved it. I’m not about to hire myself out for other kids’ college application essays.” In the last year or so, Flicka’s manner had grown not only sarcastic but flip. “But back to your story.”
“Well, the enema wasn’t very effective, and the—well, the shit was … badly compacted. Dry. Almost like dirt. He had to … dig it out. I’ve worked on not feeling embarrassed, but leaning over the side of the tub with my ass in the air—well, the embarrassment comes back. My husband used to think I was beautiful. He didn’t used to touch me and get his fingers cakey with shit. He’s sweet about it, tender and businesslike at the same time, but still. That was part of it. Just basically being disgusted, with myself, with what we’ve come to.”
“That wasn’t the ‘episode’?”
“No, later. Three in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. We got up, but I didn’t want to be up. I didn’t want—I didn’t want to be there. Just be there. After the enema, I’d spent, what, at least an hour in the shower to tamp down the itching, but the rashes on my shins were raging again. The ulcers in my mouth made it hard to talk or swallow or even smile—not that I was doing a lot of that. I was weak and exhausted and with the fluid in my lungs … This not being able to breathe, it’s like drowning …”
“Tell me about it. My scarring from pneumonia only gets worse, and it’s permanent.”
“I—I wanted out. I wanted out so badly I felt crazy. I guess I fell apart. I felt so trapped. It reminded me of the time my sisters ganged up on me when I was twelve. They lured me into a small cabinet in the basement with some kind of dare. And then they locked the hasp. They laughed and left. It’s one of my sharpest memories from childhood. Shrieking. For some reason my parents weren’t around, or they couldn’t hear me. My throat got so raw I lost my voice. I bruised my elbows and knees, pressing against the wood. I guess the cracks around the door must have been big enough that I wasn’t really in danger of suffocating. But at the time, I was convinced that I was running out of air. I was locked in that cabinet for a couple of hours. I still have dreams about it.”
“So what did you want out of, that night?” asked Flicka, but as if she knew.
“My—myself. Everything. I’m embarrassed to say it, but I must have got hysterical. Shouting something like, ‘I want out!’ You know, ‘Get me out, I want out!’”
Glynis’s imitation of herself was deliberately feeble. Her recollection was better than she was pretending. Clawing at Shepherd while he tried to restrain her, she’d drawn blood. He still had the scabs; her fingernails were looser now. Though gasping, she’d still managed to hyperventilate, and had grown light-headed. Since Shepherd would have cleaned everything up it was hard to know, but it was possible she broke things.
“I scared the daylights out of Shepherd,” she admitted. “He was afraid I’d hurt myself, flopping and flailing around the bedroom like that. He finally held me down and shoved some marzipan down my throat, on which I almost choked.”
Flicka looked unfazed. “Add a lot of retching, and what you’re describing is pretty close to an FD crisis. But as for ‘wanting out’—there’s only one way out, Glyn.”
“That’s not true,” she returned hotly. “I have six more chemos, that’s all. My CAT scans could have been a bit better”—the infinitesimal pause was to consider that she was lying; ever since the bad one in September, Glynis had directed her husband and doctor to keep further scan results to themselves—”but we can still beat this. There’s the other end of thi
s. Real remission. That’s the point. Out the other end, that’s the whole point.”
Flicka raised her eyebrows, making Glynis envious of the girl’s having them. Her expression was tolerant. “Uh-huh. And you believe that.”
“There’s nothing else to believe.”
“The cleaner way out. I’m not sure it’s that bad.”
“You can’t think like that.”
“I can too,” Flicka differed, “and I do.”
“I can see having black moments. That’s what I was describing to you. But you have to hang in there.”
“That’s what they tell you.”
“What do you mean?”
“In one more year, I’m a legal adult. I can do what I want.”
“Is that a threat?”
“More like a promise. I’m sick of sticking around as some kind of big favor.”
“My sticking around isn’t doing anyone any favors,” Glynis said quietly. “I’m ruining my husband’s life.”
“I don’t buy that. You’re Shep’s whole purpose now, the whole reason he gets up in the morning. It’s obvious. Not so different from me and my dad.”
“Shepherd would rather go live on some desert island.”
“Pemba’s not a desert. He showed me pictures once. They have a rain forest and everything. Pretty cool.”
Glynis fought a burst of rage. What business had Shepherd showing this poor girl pictures of an island she’d never get to, like flashing dirty postcards?
“But I still think …” said Flicka. “Well, after a certain point, enough is enough.”
“I’m not at that point.”
Flicka shrugged. “Only you know.”
“I can still get better. Some days I feel it—I feel better.”
The girl’s expression reminded Glynis of her father-in-law. It was ministerial.
“As for my story,” said Flicka, abandoning their previous subject as hopeless. “I did this video, for a fund-raising film. For the foundation, for research on FD.”