“Okay,” she says. “But mostly you. I get too short of breath. It’s getting worse. Have you noticed?”
“Yes.”
She nods. “Yeah.”
“What should I talk about?” I ask.
“Me,” she says. “Tell me a story about me. If I seem to fall asleep, make sure I’m not dead. I think you have to call somebody if I am, right?”
“Right. The coroner.”
“Yes. And call Michael, too. You be the one to tell him. I don’t want his father to. He’ll fuck it up. But if I’m just sleeping, don’t get offended, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “All right: the story of Ruth. So to speak. Well, the first time I saw you, you really pissed me off.”
“You were jealous,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “Everybody was. But also you were being a pain in the ass.”
“Exactly wrong,” she says. “You’re projecting again.”
“Exactly right,” I agree.
I don’t like parties. I hate parties. They make me nervous and irritable and slightly nauseated. And they make me feel exposed in a terrible way, as if I’m walking around with the back of my dress missing and everybody knows but me. But of course I go to parties. You have to, sometimes, the way you have to go to the dentist. At a party is where I met Ruth.
She was sitting in a corner of the living room, surrounded by people, and she was saying things that were making them laugh. She was irritatingly beautiful: raven-haired, blue-eyed, neatly petite. She had perfect teeth and she was wearing expensive-looking boots with a gorgeous blue skirt and sweater. I’d heard about her, about how talented an artist she was, how interesting, how much fun. “I hate that woman,” I told my husband, pointing in her direction.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Ruth Thomas. Can’t stand her.”
“How do you know her?”
“I don’t. But I know about her. Can’t stand her.”
“So don’t talk to her,” he said, and I said fine, I wouldn’t. But when I went into the tiny downstairs bathroom to hide, she came bursting in the door.
“Oh, sorry!” she said, and started to leave. But then, seeing that I was sitting, legs crossed, on the closed lid of the toilet, drinking my martini, she stopped. “Are you—have you finished?”
“Finished what?”
“Do you need the toilet?”
“I’m sitting here,” I said.
“Yes, I can see that. However, you can sit a lot of places. Whereas someone who has to take a piss needs to sit right here, okay?”
I got up, started to squeeze past her. “You can have it back when I’m done,” she said. “This is the best place at this party.”
I waited outside, finished my drink. I heard a flush, then her voice saying, “You can come in now.” I waited for her to exit and when she didn’t, I went in with her. She was washing her face at the sink, splashing cold water on herself. Obviously she didn’t worry about her mascara smearing. When she looked up, I saw why: she wasn’t wearing any. It wasn’t a good political statement, though, because she didn’t need any. “Hand me that towel, will you?” she asked, and I gave her a paper guest towel. “I hate these things,” she said. “Makes you feel they believe their guests are diseased.”
I shrugged. I was warming up to her a little. I’m afraid I like critical people when they rag on others because it makes me feel exonerated.
She threw the towel away, looked at it lying in the white wicker trash basket. “Jesus,” she said. “Little pink hearts!”
I extended my hand. “Ann Stanley.”
She shook it firmly. “Ruth Thomas.”
I held up my empty glass. “Would you like a martini?”
“I’ll mix, okay?” she said. “No one can make them like I do.”
I leaned against the kitchen counter, watching her while she made our drinks. She had a flask in her purse, a lovely silver thing filled with gin. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“A Christmas present from my husband,” she said. She nodded in the general direction of the living room. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “It was an attempt to bring us closer. See, we can now, at a moment’s notice, get drunk together. Isn’t that romantic?”
We sat at the kitchen table and got through the what-brings-you-here material. And then it was on to movies. She asked if I’d seen Sophie’s Choice and I said no and she said I should, it was terrific, ripped your heart out and flung it onto the floor. “I’ll go with you and see it again,’” she said. “You should see it with a woman.”
My husband came into the kitchen, looked at me sitting there with Ruth. I gave him a slight raise of eyebrow, a tiny defensive shrug. He sat down and introduced himself, then had the good sense to leave.
“All right, how long have you been married?” she asked, sighing, and I knew we had a lot to talk about. I could forgive her good looks. She was capable of a scary kind of honesty I was ready for, although until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.
She is sleeping. I do make sure, of course. I watch for the rise and fall of the sheet over her. You must stop your own breathing to do this. Otherwise, you count your own movements as that of the person you’re watching. You also must never check for a person’s pulse using your thumb, or you’ll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I’m the one who’s here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.
I move off the bed slowly, tiptoe into the living room. I call home, the machine answers, and I say I’m staying over tonight, that I’ll call back again later. Then I go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, look for something to eat. There is a collection of things here, different efforts by her friends: a pan of spinach lasagna, fruit salad in a flowered bowl, banana bread wrapped in Saran Wrap and ribbon, wild strawberry Jell-?, half a baked ham. In the freezer is a container of homemade ice cream. Ruth’s boss, Sarah, brought that. She said, “I was ready to put it in a container and all of a sudden I thought, wait—how big? If I put it in something small, will Ruth think I think she’s going to die sooner?”
“I know,” I said. “It’s very confusing. This is all very confusing.”
I break off a piece of the banana bread, sit at the little kitchen table to eat it, look out the window. There’s a balcony off the kitchen with a turquoise Adirondack chair on it, many years old and sun-bleached to a pleasant pastel color. It faces the voluptuous rise of hills in the distance and looks to me to be alive and seeing. I hear a noise behind me; Ruth is coming slowly into the kitchen.
“Want some banana bread?” I ask.
She waves it away. “No. I hate banana bread. It’s too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.” I look at the piece of bread I’ve been eating. She’s right. I put it down.
Ruth opens the refrigerator, scans the contents, closes the door without taking anything. “I don’t recognize my own refrigerator anymore,” she sighs. “All this sick-person stuff. Where are some lamb chops or something? Where’s the fancy lettuce?” She is wearing her unlaced sneakers as slippers, a striped shirt over her nightgown. She hates slippers, lately, as she hates robes and bed jackets or bed trays and glasses left at her bedside. “If my brain goes and I can’t do anything and they bring those fucking bedpans into my house, shoot me,” she told me.
She sits down at the table, subtly out of breath. “I was sitting there the other day,” she says, gesturing toward the balcony, “watching the sun set. And I was thinking, I am so happy now. I love being alive. I just want to be here. I want to stay. All that terrible anguish I went through, it’s gone! I’m happy now! Why can’t my body catch up to my head?” She looks at me. “Is it really too late, do you think?”
We have both heard the same information from her doctor. We have both asked questions every which way, trying to change the answers. They are always the same. “Weeks to mon
ths, depending on what ‘fails’ first.” And yet.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t. I mean, it’s a mystery how you got this, right? Nobody knows how you got this. And nobody knows how those miracle cures happen. They do happen!”
She nods, examines her hands. “I know they do.”
“Have you been doing any of that imagery stuff?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “I’ve been seeing myself as strong and healthy. I see myself rowing, and running, and dancing. And screwing, of course.”
“You’re supposed to see the bad cells getting attacked by good cells, too.”
“Really?” She is sitting up straight, paying careful attention.
“Well, I mean, remember that book we read, that said you make your good cells killers of some kind?”
“Oh. Yeah, I remember. But that seemed so … negative. Violent. I thought you were supposed to be gentle. Positive and loving. You know, love yourself. Forgive yourself.”
“Well, that’s true, too,” I say. I listened with Ruth to a tape that someone had mailed her. We pulled her curtains, lay down on her bed, closed our eyes, turned it on. A woman spoke about envisioning yourself as a child, about holding yourself on your own lap and rocking yourself. We tried to be serious, but about halfway through we started laughing. I think it was the background music, all this silly tinkling, and then the insult of harps.
“Oh, I don’t know what works!” I say now. “I mean, sometimes I sort of believe that stuff and sometimes I just don’t.”
“Me, too,” she sighs.
“Wait,” I say, “I’ll do it. I’ll cure you. What we need here is something custom-made. You’ve never been a made-for-the-masses type.” I stand up, hold my hands over her head, one above the other, make a low singing sound. It sounds sort of Native American. Maybe I’ve tapped into something I didn’t know I knew. I squeeze my eyes shut, imagine walking in suddenly on Ruth’s cancer. It is caught now, frozen like an animal in headlights. Now that it is seen, its plans spread out and revealed before it, I can tell it to stop, that’s all. I remember meeting a man with cancer who told me that when he was diagnosed he came home, stood naked before his mirror and wept. Then he screamed, “Come out where I can see you! Let me see you!” And I do this now, see Ruth’s outlaw cells, all of them, everywhere. They are asymmetrical, ragged-edged, leering. Their colors are dark red and purple, the colors of abuse. They are slippery and quick and divide and divide and divide. But now I see them and I tell them to stop. That’s all. Just stop. Why not? Why can’t an ending to all this be subtle and arbitrary, when the beginning was that way? Her, sitting at a restaurant with me, with her bacon cheeseburger halfway up to her mouth, saying, “Oh, I’ve got another lump. Want to come with me to have it biopsied? Don’t worry, they’re never anything.”
I open my eyes. Then I hug her. She is so thin now, like a suggestion of her former self. You have to be careful. I don’t squeeze too hard, but I push a lot of feeling across the space between us. “There,” I whisper. “Now you will start to heal.”
She looks up at me and smiles and I see that she believes this might actually help. It is there as a slice of light in her eyes. She thinks this might actually help! And there’s more: I believe it too, because it is all we have left. Oh, the stubbornness and the strength of hope. Every day that I am with her lately, I learn another staggering lesson. Everything about her is too much to bear: the delicacy of her wrist, the arrangement of her living-room furniture, the notices to renew magazine subscriptions that she gets in the mail. And yet we do bear it. She does, especially.
We had gone to the late showing of Sophie’s Choice. Ruth wanted to go when there weren’t so many people. There were far fewer than at the seven-fifteen show, but she still insisted we sit in the back row. “I hate hearing people talking behind me,” she said. “Don’t you?”
I shrugged.
“I’m very particular about movies,” she said. “You’ll have to get used to it. You don’t talk in movies, do you?”
“Just during the commercials.”
“You don’t mean the previews, do you?” She was nervous.
“No,” I said. “I mean the commercials. Like when they tell you you can rent the place for parties. I don’t talk during the previews. They’re little movies.”
“Exactly,” she said, and settled in against her seat. Then she sat up again. “You don’t chew gum or eat anything either, do you?”
“What do you take me for?” I asked.
“Forties talk,” she said. “I love it.” Then, as the lights came down, “Okay. Shhh.” She reached into her purse, handed me two flowered handkerchiefs. “My grandmother’s,” she whispered. “You’ll need them.”
I held them up to my nose, to practice. They were softer than Kleenex, and smelled like lilacs and time. I couldn’t wait to cry.
When the movie was over, before the lights had finished coming up, an usher came and stood directly behind Ruth and me. “Please exit to your LEFT,” he shouted. “And remember to deposit your GARBAGE in the clearly marked CANS on your WAY OUT!”
Ruth was right—the movie had left me feeling beat up; I was overwhelmed with sorrow. I was embarrassed for anyone to see me; two hankies hadn’t been nearly enough. I saw that Ruth’s eyes were swollen and red, and her face was splotchy with grief. But she was not embarrassed; she was furious. She walked quickly over to the usher, a sulky teenager who was leaning against the wall now, idly watching the stricken audience pass out of the theater and tonguing off one of his back teeth. “What is wrong with you?” she asked.
He blinked at her, stood up straight. His arms hung too long out of his uniform.
“Why do you have to scream about such inconsequential things?” she asked. “Why can’t you just let us all have a moment of silence after a movie like this?”
The usher smiled nervously, started to answer.
“No,” she said. “Have you seen this movie?”
He nodded yes.
“Well then, for Christ’s sake!”
I touched her arm. “Maybe you have to be a mother to understand,” I said.
She stared at me, wild-eyed. For a moment I thought she was going to start in on me, too. But all she said was, “Well, do you want to go get a drink?”
“Yes,” I said, “but let’s take a walk first.” She went out ahead of me. I turned to the usher, who was making minute, spasmodic movements with his neck and shoulders, throwing off his embarrassment. “Maybe you should wait just a minute to make your announcement,” I said. “This movie is kind of … affecting.”
“Well, I guess,” he said, and started down the aisle, patrolling for the garbage left beside the seats despite his post-film command. Of course this was to be expected. Give an order to someone in pain and they might easily rebel, just for the relief of something feeling good again.
We walked to a nearby bar and sat at a table by the window. We ordered martinis. There was a polite moment of silence, each of us waiting for the other to initiate conversation. Then Ruth said, “Obviously, what I need is to get laid.”
“Well,” I said.
“That kid was just doing his stupid job. I know that. Jesus. He had bad acne, did you see? He’s got enough to worry about.”
“He should have given us a minute,” I said. “Everybody was crying. I even saw a few men wiping their eyes.”
“I know,” she said, smiling, and then, “Are you good at dream interpretation?”
“I think it’s always up to the dreamer what a dream means.”
Ruth took a generous sip of her drink, leaned forward. “Last night I dreamed I came downstairs in the morning, and all my artwork was gone—every painting was off the wall, the one I’m working on off the easel—hell, the easel was gone. Eric had locked everything in the basement, with a white sheet over it, like a shroud.”
I nodded. “He resents the time your art takes away from him.”
“He’s killing me,” she said.
The back door opens, and Sarah is there, her expensive leather briefcase bulging. She hangs up her coat and kisses Ruth, then me. “I think it’s going to snow. It’s all of a sudden so cold.”
She sits down at the kitchen table with us, looks carefully at Ruth. “So. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Does it smell like snow?”
“Beats me,” Sarah says. “How does snow smell?”
“I don’t know … blue,” Ruth says, and I know exactly what she means.
“How are you?” Sarah asks again and Ruth says, “I told you I’m fine.”
No one says anything, and then Sarah says quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Ruth shrugs.
“It’s just that I worry about you all day,” Sarah says. “People ask about you, and I think …”
“You wonder if I’m dead yet, right?” Ruth says.
“I don’t know. Yes.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Ruth says. “I’ll call you right away when it happens. You’ll be the first to know.”
There is a moment of silence, and then I say, “I think I should be the first to know.”
“I’m her boss,” Sarah says.
“But I’m her best friend.”
“Maybe I won’t die,” Ruth says. “Ann gave me the cure today.”
“How’d you do that?” Sarah asks.
“I stood over her and spoke in tongues and believed with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind that this won’t happen.” My voice shakes at the end of all this, and Sarah saves me. “Sounds too Catholic,” she says. And then: “What’s for dinner around here, anyway?”
“Nothing,” Ruth and I answer together.
“Let’s get lobster,” Sarah says. “From that place right up the road from you. That’s actually a very good restaurant.”
Ruth shakes her head. “I don’t want to go out.”
“Then we’ll get it to go.”
Ruth frowns. “I don’t think you can get lobster to go.”
Sarah is at the phone already, dialing. “Why not?”