I thought she would say no, but she spoke up. “I want the radiation,” she said. At ninety-one years old, my mother chose life, chose to fight to keep it. She wanted to live. For herself. She spoke right up. I also had to make a choice for myself. I had to think about finding my own life again. She had spoken up so quickly for hers. Maybe this was a trick I could learn.
Betty smiled at that doctor as if she were still young, ready to line up for the Miss Legs contest at the university.
. . .
All the way home, I thought of places I plan to go when my job here is finished. I want to go all across the world, just as Mammy imagined me doing. I want to learn to take photographs, to write, to maybe try to write a book of my own.
“Did you get to death’s door and decide maybe it didn’t look so good?” I asked Betty, still surprised that she agreed to treatment.
“Dr. Tennan is a good-looking man,” she said.
I took a risk. “Dr. Tennan is a sex machine. Let’s have him over for dinner.” Betty was still chuckling a little when we pulled in our driveway. We had been through something and there was an opening, a crack of light that seemed, surprisingly, to delight her. If I had a photo of her that night, I would put it in a special frame, though I have wondered since if I saw more in her face than was really there.
. . .
The next day, we began radiation. They put stickers with black arrows on both sides of her chest and stomach.
I decided that the good thing about cancer is that wherever patients gather there are snacks. Unfortunately, they are often healthy. On the first day, however, I almost stole a bag of Doritos from a bald woman. I wasn’t going to eat them. It was only to save her.
At the place where my mother goes to get radiation, there is a huge, unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the table in the room where people wait to go in. Every day, there is the same old farmer man, bent over the puzzle that has, like, nine hundred million pieces. He goes in for his treatment after my mom. His wife is dead. He walks on a plain, cheap cane, but he has driven himself to Columbia from High Hill every day for thirty-seven days for his treatments.
I asked him about the radiation. “It don’t hurt more’n a sunburn I’d get out on the tractor,” he told me. He goes to Country Kitchen for biscuits and gravy every night before he heads home. “You get a good plateful,” he said.
“How much longer do you have to come?” I asked him yesterday. “Long enough to finish this damn puzzle,” he told me.
He is a Missouri man. So am I.
It is something to witness, all of them trying, keeping on.
Lesbian waiting for her treatment at Missouri Cancer Institute: “Gay women do better than straight women with chemo. We already have the baseball caps.”
. . .
Coming home from one treatment, Betty said she wanted to go to St. Louis to get her hair done. “I mean someone who can do it right,” she said, “who can make it look halfway decent. You could use a haircut yourself. You look like a ragamuffin.”
“Mother,” I said, “I want you to shut up about your hair.”
I feel better. I have steered my mother through this crisis, taken charge.
. . .
“I am pack leader,” I tell Raj. “I am pack leader. I am fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I was so damn butch, I scared myself, but he paid no attention. Sometimes I think Raj believes I am merely an oddly shaped refrigerator. I smell like dog all the time now, but later, when he is lying on top of me with his head over my shoulder napping, I hear his breathing in my ear and try to forget that he has eaten half the couch.
It is interesting, gratifying even, to watch this almost human let down his guard, warm up, grow less frightened. I have watched him transform from a pup reluctant to leave his mat or crate to a daring household forager who considers it his God-given right to poop copiously in the middle of the living room. “Get some OdoBan,” a neighbor advises when I share our housebreaking problems.
“How much,” I ask, “do I take?”
. . .
On Betty’s journey, I have learned something I had not known: I am very strong, strong enough to stay, strong enough to go when the time comes. I am staying not to cling on, but because sometime, at least once, everyone should see someone through. All the way home.
When Betty got an infection, we went back to the hospital and I returned to my early drives across the dark countryside and my mind turned often to High Hill and the old farmer making his way to his truck on his cane in the cold wind. I have kept going too. Through all the years. Maybe it is time to give myself a little credit.
Sometimes it is okay to be broken open, even if it is sadness that finally connects you to everything you are feeling.
. . .
If I scream at Raj after he has an accident in the house, Betty glares at me harshly. “Now is that any way to talk to him?” she asks.