Seven days in a row the airport driver comes for me in my room in the men’s dorm. We wear paper bathing suits that the staff throws away after each session as if we are contagious. First they feed us green stringy mush with the odor of salt water. Literally they feed us like babies with Teflon-coated spoons, maybe to keep track of how much we actually ingest. I’m guessing it’s seaweed. It tastes like asparagus with too much salt and no butter. As part of the meditation frame of mind, the loud speakers fill with Andean flute music like the traveling carnival musicians at the Essex County Fair. We wash down the mush with something that smells like gasoline. It makes me light-headed and sleepy, but we’re not allowed to sleep during the treatments. If you start to nod off, they jiggle you to keep you awake.
When I try to describe it to Mom at the communal dinner—the bathtub jets and the massages and the three bowls of mush—she pats my hand and smiles. “Thousands of people have been cured here,” she says. Her tan deepens every day and the circles under her eyes have disappeared. She tells me about the card games she plays with Mr. McIntyre. And how sometimes she walks out into the sand hills with the older mother of a young woman who has liver cancer and goes everywhere with her oxygen tank.
Although the treatment room has five cots and five bathtubs, the only patients in it are me and a very old man, Gerald Hovenfelt, whose belly is like a basketball. When the attendants leave, we talk a little. Mr. Hovenfelt has a tumor in his stomach, and over the ten days it shrinks so that he can’t stop grinning. He asks me every day if I’m feeling better. I’m so tired I can’t tell, but I say yes because I know it’s what he wants to hear.
Mom doesn’t ask me any questions. She does say that she talked to Dad on the phone in Director Jenkins’s office and that Nick and Joe are fine. They are all going to meet us at the airport. I want to ask for Meredith to come, but am afraid the police may be part of our homecoming.
“We leave on Friday, right?” I ask her the second week.
“Whenever Director Jenkins says.”
“How will he know? He never comes in to examine us.”
“The nurses must have to file reports.”
“Mom, are you sure these people are trained? The two guys in with me have a gazillion tattoos and they talk about our esteemed Director Henkins like he’s a joke. They mimic his voice and make faces at each other when they’re feeding us, when they think we’re not looking.”
She thinks about what I said. “If you’d read what I gave you at home, you’d have seen the testimonials from people who’ve been here. Their tumors are gone. They’re living regular lives. Playing golf, dancing, going to work.”
“Yeah, well they wouldn’t print what the dead ones said.”
“Daniel.”
After dinner we’re allowed to stay in the main building for movies or games. Mr. McIntyre and Bethany, his daughter, who’s still a stick, usually leave right away. But on the fourth night, when they announce they’re going to show Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she begs her dad to let her stay.
“I can walk her back to the dorm, Spike,” Mom volunteers.
“Please, Daddy.” Her voice barely stirs the air.
He nods without speaking and I can tell it’s hard for him to refuse her, which makes me wonder how many other treatments they’ve tried.
Mom lets Bethany and I sit together and she takes a chair in the back row. Most of the kids have stayed, and a few adults, but still the rows are mostly empty. Perhaps Director Jenkins’s treatment center has seen better days. While they’re fiddling with the film and clearing the buffet table, I ask Bethany about her hometown.
“My friends are scared of me, boys especially. They don’t understand cancer. They think it’s like the flu and they can catch it.”
“People are so ignorant. Did you have chemo?”
“That’s how I got so thin. You won’t believe it, but I used to be fat. I mean really fat, like a plus size. Pizza and french fries and double chocolate fudge cake. Since my mom left, Daddy lets me eat anything I want. I think he feels guilty.”
“About your getting sick?”
“No, about running my mother off with his gambling buddies and his NASCAR trips. They argued all the time. And she drank a lot of wine.”
“My Dad’s in AA.”
“Oh, my mother’s not an alcoholic. Once she didn’t have Dad embarrassing her anymore, she stopped drinking cold turkey. That shows she never really loved him.”
“I like your father. He’s a little loud, but he really cares about you.”
“I know. Mom only married him because he was rich. It wasn’t good for either of them.”
“How old are you?”
“Almost nineteen.”
“I would have said fourteen.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No offense. I guess it’s ’cause you’re so thin.”
“I can thank the cancer for that.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I did. He broke it off as soon as I lost my hair.”
“Wigs are so not cool.”
She looks at me funny, her eyes all squinty, and I realize she’s trying to figure whether I might be wearing a wig.
“Oh, no.” I laugh. “Chemo is poison according to my parents.”
She doesn’t laugh. The lights go off and the movie starts, grainy images on the white wall from a squeaky VCR tape. She could be offended if she thinks I was making fun of chemo. Struggling for a way to change the subject, I reject six or seven ideas until the figures on the wall start talking.
I whisper, “Why do you want to see this movie so much?”
“I don’t. But the room they have me in is a double. I’m sharing it with the woman who has the oxygen tank.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-seven. She hates her mother and that’s all she talks about. I try to change the subject or just not comment, but she rants and rants.”
“I’m lucky. I’m all alone. I could even alternate cots if I wanted to.”
“Maybe I’ll come over and hijack one of yours.”
“Fine with me, but the building says ‘Men.’ How you going to pull that off?”
She shrugs and turns her face up to the screen as if it were sunlight.
Monday night after dinner I’m so bored I sign out the Scrabble game from the dining room collection. Nick would go ape if he knew. Bethany goes out with her dad after dinner. I can see their cut-out silhouettes against the sunset as he walks her to the dorm. Little dust billows collect at their feet as she shuffles along the sand. Alone in my room after saying good night to Mom, I spread out the letter tiles and the board and play two hands against myself. At eight thirty I can barely keep my eyes open. Stripped to my boxers, I lie on the cot on top of the sheets and take out Catcher. They wash the sheets every day and put on clean ones that are practically crunchy from being dried on the line in the hot sun. A blue bedpan sits at the ready by the foot of the bed. We’ve been warned not to use the public men’s room in the night because of scorpions.
Holden’s drunk when he calls Sally back to apologize. Maybe he meant it to be funny, but it was kind of sad the way she humored him. He still hurt her feelings and ruined everything. It’s almost like he intended to do it, to prove to himself he wasn’t a good guy and not worth her attention. I’ve been drunk twice and it does make you think crooked.
Both times I was in ninth grade. Mack and I stole some of Joe’s beer and drank it in Mack’s canoe the first time. We rowed back to the public landing and walked to my house to crash. We were asleep by the time my parents came home. We lost one paddle getting out, and Mack couldn’t use the canoe for a month until he had saved enough to buy a used paddle from the attic at A to Z Antiques. The second time the Petrianos had taken Roger and his dweeb friends bowling in Richmond for his birthday. We invited Yowell because he promised to bring three girls from St. Margaret’s. Only two showed. When the girls came to the front door, we invited them in just like a legitimate party. But Mack was worried about spilling something on his parents’ furniture so we went to his room. Their basement wasn’t done back then. Yowell didn’t want beer. He made drinks for all of us in the bathroom from rum he’d taken from his dad’s liquor cabinet. He explained the way he added water with a funnel after he took the liquor so no one would notice any was missing. I never would’ve thought of that, but Yowell’s smart that way.