We just think leukemia is the greatest. But don’t take my word for it! Here’s some testimony from some annoying pirates!
EXT. LEGO PIRATE SHIP — DAY
PIRATE KING
Arrrr! ’Twas a day the likes o’ no other, athwart the starboard bow upon the rottin’ maggoty beard o’ Davy Jones hisself!!! Upon the horizon did Two-Eyepatch Bill not espy the hideous sucker’d limbs o’ the mighty Kraken—fast amidships all cannons astern and swab the decks, ye filthy motherless bilge rat SWINE!!!!!
INT. DEATH STAR — NIGHT
DARTH VADER
Uh . . . sure.
INT. GREG’S DESK — DAY
PLASTIC FIGURINE OF SERPENTOR
with a snake accent
I am Serpentor, Cobra Emperor, of the evil Cobra Command! Leukemia is my favorite thing in the world! Now, because I love leukemia so much, I am going to go make out with my sister, the Baroness Anastasia DeCobray! You can tell she’s evil because her last name has the word “Cobra” in it!
BARONESS
I love making out with my nasty-ass brother! Because I’m disgusting as hell!!
SERPENTOR
How do we kiss again?
BARONESS
My goddamn mouth won’t open.
SERPENTOR
Neither will mine.
BARONESS
The hell we supposed a do now.
INT. DEATH STAR — NIGHT
DARTH VADER
We sure do love leukemia! Don’t believe me yet? Why don’t you ask this spinning tarantula paperweight?
INT. GREG’S DESK — DAY
The tarantula paperweight is a dead tarantula encased in glass. The magic of stop-motion animation is causing it to spin around in a circle.
SPINNING TARANTULA PAPERWEIGHT
with a German accent for some reason
Nothing makes me happier than leukemia.
Christ.
So this was Plan D. Maybe it would have been good. I don’t know. I doubt it. What I do know is, it took forever to do, and a few days before Thanksgiving break, Rachel and Denise decided that they were done with chemotherapy, and being in the hospital, and getting treatment. They were just going to let things run their course, they decided.
At that point I didn’t really know what to do.
So Rachel moved back to her room. Things were different, obviously. Actually, she was in a pretty good mood those first few days. The first day she came back was a Friday. It was late November but not cold yet.
“They’ve stopped shooting me up with chemicals,” she explained.
“So that’s over?”
“They just didn’t seem to be doing me any good.”
We silently contemplated this morbid utterance. For some reason, I said, “Certainly not in the hair department.” I was trying to make things less depressing, which of course had the effect of making things more depressing. But Rachel actually laughed. It was sort of a different kind of laugh, like she had to reengineer the shape of her mouth during laughter, because the old way was too painful. I did a surprisingly good job of not thinking about this.
Pretty soon I was just talking a lot and I wasn’t trying too hard to make her laugh and it felt a lot like before she went to the hospital and got all depressed. We were just sprawled out in her kind of dark poster-and-pillow-intensive room and I was going on at insane length about my life and she was just listening and absorbing it all and it felt like we were back on normal terms with each other. It was possible to forget that she had decided to die.
By the way, when someone stops cancer treatment and you point out that this is a decision to die, everyone freaks out at you. Mom, for example. I don’t even want to get into it.
But yeah.
“So Gretchen is just acting nuts.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh man. Girls at that age are just impossible. There’s just a lot of shrieking and stomping around. Some of it doesn’t even make any sense. Were you like that? At like age fourteen?”
“I fought with my mom sometimes.”
“Gretchen even gets pissed off at Cat Stevens. She’ll be petting him and then he’ll freak out and bite her, which he’s been doing for his entire life, and then suddenly she’s like, Oh my God, I fucking hate stupid Cat Stevens. She says he looks like a big garden slug. Which he does, obviously, but that’s sort of what’s so great about him.”
“That he looks like a slug?”
“Yeah, he’s just this ugly stripey slug color. He’s like the biting champion of the slug world.”
I guess it actually wasn’t possible to completely forget that she had decided to die. Because the whole time as we were talking, it was in the back of my mind and it was stressing me out a little bit, the idea that Rachel was close to the end of her life. Or not stressing me out, but just kind of weighing on me and making me feel a little short of breath.
Eventually, Rachel said, “How’s your latest film coming?”
“Oh, the latest one! Yeah. It’s pretty good.”
“I’m really excited to see it.”
Something about the way she said this made me realize that she knew about it. I mean, it was stupid to think she wouldn’t find out.
“Yeah, uh . . . Hey. You should probably know: It’s for you. Like, it’s sort of about you, and uh, yeah.”
“I know.”
I was trying to be cool about this.
“Oh, you knew that already?”
“Yeah, some people told me.”
“Oh, like who?” I was talking kind of loud and high-pitched. I actually sounded a little like Denise Kushner at that moment.
“I don’t know. Madison told me about it. Mom sort of mentioned it. Anna, Naomi. Earl. A few people.”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh. That reminds me. I have to go talk to Earl about something.”
“OK,” she said.
Earl and I had never been in a fight. That was mostly because I am cowardly, and also partially because we had a pretty good working relationship with well-defined roles. The point is, I had never really gotten angry at him, and also I am terrified of conflict. Especially with Earl, because of the windmill kick to the head that he can do.
But I was pissed that he had told Rachel. So I went over to his house to yell at him.
Even just writing about this is giving me sharp stabbing armpit pains.
The whole time on the walk over I was kind of muttering to myself. Specifically, I was rehearsing the stuff that I was going to say.
“Earl,” I muttered to myself, “the foundation of any good working relationship is trust. And I can no longer trust you in any way. By telling Rachel about this film, which was supposed to be a surprise, you have betrayed my trust.”
I was lurching through the streets of Earl’s not-so-great part of Homewood, moving my lips, making semi-coherent noises, walking faster than is graceful for an overweight person to walk, and emitting maybe a quart of human sweat.
“I don’t know if I can work with you again. You will have to earn my trust back if you want to work with me. I don’t even know how you would go about doing that.”
I was on his block, and the sight of his ramshackle weird house jacked up my heart rate even worse than it had already been jacked up.
“You’re going to need to convince me that I can trust you.” That was another inane thing that I said.
I walked up the walk where I had broken my arm, and stood there, no longer muttering. Somehow I was terrified to ring the bell. Instead, I sent a text.
hey i’m in front of your house
But before Earl came out, Maxwell wandered out onto the porch.
“Fuck you want,” he said, although sort of casually and unthreateningly.
“I’m just waiting for Earl,” I said, in my new loud middle-aged-Jewish-woman voice.