At the near juncture where the long separating curtain met the wall of windows, Tilda stood on a chair. Responding to Alice’s direction, she was lifting the end of a series of taped-together pages, stretching them so they were no longer sagging but taut. Running across half the partition, a thick-markered message read: CANCER SCHMANCER SO LONG AS YOU’RE HEALTHY.
Alice paused and acknowledged her husband. Mischief and delight danced across her face. “We’re making headway, don’t you think?”
He took three steps and reached her bedside. For the second time this day he placed a hand on each of Alice’s cheeks. Once again he held his wife in place.
Every kiss had to let her know.
“Hello, my heart,” he said.
Her expression was satiated and dreamy, and he tried to memorize that moment. “You two’ve been busy.”
“I was going to call and ask if you could bring a rug.” Alice’s eyes danced again. “You know, something big and patterned. Tilda felt that might be a bit too, I don’t know…arabesque.”
“It’s already quite arabesque up in here,” Oliver answered. “Knowing you two, it’s only going to get arabesquer.”
Oliver accepted Tilda’s remonstrations about making time in his busy schedule to grace them with his presence, and dutifully apologized for how long it had taken to make it back uptown. He assured Alice the baby was doing great, really great, and asked how she was, if the doctors had said anything (or even been in yet). He told Alice about the calls from her mother, ready either to come down to the city or to have the child come up to her (naturally). Lifting the mask back up to his nose, he said, “These things smell like baby poo.”
“Oh, let me.”
Her inhalation was that of junkie needing a hit; Oliver recognized he had to change the conversation, keep Alice from sulking.
“I like these yellow ones,” he said. “They’re jaunty, more…optimistic.”
“We were talking about that.” Tilda tried to hide a glance, checked her beeper.
The requisite knock of doom. Entering now, a lithe Dominican woman moved with efficiency and pep. Her hair was frizzy and reached in eight directions. A mole about the size of a quarter was conspicuous over her right brow. “Vitals time,” she announced, then eyed the amount of water Alice had left untouched in her glass. The nurse made an unhappy sound. “You been through this already,” she said, “so you know drinking water and sucking on ice chips is a major importance. And still I got to flog that dead cat.” Her voice changed now, her words came quicker, as if she were recounting newly memorized facts before they disappeared: “We got four pillars for chemo patient recovery. Uno: hydration. Number two, protein. Then exercise. And mouth care.”
“Oh, Carmen.”
“Looking at that lunch tray, on one and two, you already off to a bad start.”
“In the name of the Green Gay Goddess—”
“When you start up with that chemo, you going to lose your appetite something serious. How abouts we load up on the food while we can?”
“Look at that sad little gray chicken patty,” Alice said.
“I want to be a team player,” Tilda interjected. “But honestly, Meryl Streep couldn’t convince the Donner party to bite into that thing.”
“Completely through the looking glass.” Converted to the mode Oliver referred to as her fashion voice, under the ostensible premise of speaking to Tilda, Alice performed for the room. “Do you know the hospital won’t give me fresh fruits or vegetables? How can it possibly be in my best interest for them to shove canned fruits at me?”
“You want to do this again?” Carmen asked. “We can do this again.”
“Every single bit of received wisdom about good food turns upside down.”
“Your counts get low, and if there’s a stray germ on a piece of fresh fruit—”
“I have Oliver throw the microwave out of our home, yet you insist on nuking anything that comes to me?”
“In a can, we control. What’s so hard to understand ’bout that?”
“My counts are good, Carmen. They told me this morning.”
“Your counts are good considering you got cancer.”
“I do not have cancer,” Alice stated. “I am en remissyionne.”
“You in here for a reason, mama—”
He used to stare at their door in Dartmouth-Hitchcock, counting the hours, then the minutes, until Alice’s mother arrived, as if wanting hard enough would somehow will her presence. Some days he had more patience, managed the boredom, the procedural small talk with doctors, nurses explaining what the next test was, all the waiting, the begging Alice to eat, listening to her looping monologues (how could she do this, it was all so hard). Also the stretches when he had the opposite problem: getting through the quietude, Alice sleeping, red glowy numbers on the alarm clock ticking away their savings, their dreams.
But once Grandma and the baby arrived, then wham, the clock started eating into his holy and awaited break time. As if rushing out of a building’s flaming wreckage, Oliver would hightail it for the parking lot’s courtesy van, heading to one of the places downtown, grabbing a chicken sandwich from a sports bars near campus, some sad Chinese lunch from a buffet table of greased food rotting beneath heat lamps, maybe an Indian special that was as thick and spicy as cow dung. If the weather wasn’t too foul, and he really needed to clear his head, he might just walk, away from the old gentrified district, out toward the town perimeter and the strip malls. Overprocessed, grease-fire-charred garbage: his official coping mechanism. He made sure to binge away from the hospital, out of sight of Alice; she’d disapprove big-time, and about the last thing he wanted was to have her see anything that revolted her, anything that even had a chance of teasing her for her lack of appetite. He wouldn’t let her see anything that might cause her faith in him to waver.
When Alice’s face had still been pretty swollen, and her counts were still in the shitter, and she’d barely had the strength to hold up a glass of water, and couldn’t eat so much as a third of Dartmouth’s version of scrambled eggs, Oliver had realized: This is one way it could happen. The fear that had followed was visionary. Whether or not her hunger strike was intentional or drug induced was beside the point. No matter how much the doctors, nurses, Tilda, Oliver, or even Alice’s mom prompted her, no matter whether Alice understood their words, caught their implications, without eating, Oliver had realized, she’d keep fading: turning too weak to try and pick up a plastic fork, too weak to chew. At which point, her inability to put a piece of food into her mouth, the impossibility of her chewing, the momentum of her weariness and weakness and lack of appetite, they’d spur more weariness and weakness, furthering her lack of appetite. Liquid nutrition would not matter.
This was one way she could vanish.
“These eggs actually look pretty good,” he’d said. “Why not go for one more bite?”
~ ~ ~
