One time she told me about lying in her son’s bed while he asked her questions about how to ask a girl to a dance. I like to picture her in the dark like that, her head on his pillow, her confident, firm voice steadying the night. I can imagine exactly what it would feel like. It is a remarkable thing to feel the hug of the world keeping you safe—almost like standing out in the middle of six lanes of a chaotic highway, but tucked inside the pod of a tollbooth.
When I come back to the dinner table, my mom has disappeared—the food on her plate barely touched. John and my dad are doling out dessert to the kids. I find her lying on the couch in the salon. “I’m okay,” she says, not opening her eyes. “Now tell me all about Dr. Cavanaugh’s latest plan to save the day.”
18. Hospice
I answer the door the first time the hospice nurse comes to visit my parents’ house. My mom is perched in the salon and my dad is making lunch. The kids are playing Wild West out in the yard—riding two tipped-over garbage cans as horses and wielding lassos. “Eat my dust, partner,” Freddy is yelling. Benny is squealing and neighing.
“Oh my!” the hospice nurse says, with a smile that suggests she is more used to the hushed version of her job. “Ms. Riggs! It’s wonderful to meet you. I didn’t realize you had young kids.”
She thinks I’m my mom. She’s noted the baldness and the surgical drain hanging clipped to my shirt that had to be reinstalled when my mastectomy site kept filling and refilling with fluid.
“Oh no, I’m the daughter,” I say. “Sorry. I know it’s confusing.” Her smile wavers and also softens a little. “I’ll show you to my mom.”
Imagine this: Even hospice nurses retain a sense of the way the world should work.
19. The Blade
Book club moves from the living room to the salon so my mom can lie down on her couch while we discuss. We have just read a graphic novel we all loved—chosen in part because she is struggling to focus when there is too much text—but I can’t relax. All I can think about is the part at the end of the discussion when we pick a date for our next meeting.
I know that everyone in book club knows that the hospice nurse has suggested that given her status, my mom probably has about a month to six weeks left—but I’m wondering if they remember. I am panicking at the thought of choosing a date that she isn’t around for any longer. I feel like I’m six years old and about to be caught in some horrible lie—hurtling like an egg through midair. And I’m shocked at my inability to say something out loud to confront it, diffuse it even: So do they have book club in the afterlife?
I am positive that the possibility that she won’t live to see our next meeting is not lost on her either, but she seems distracted tonight—disconnected from the discussion.
“Are you okay?” I mouth to her.
She nods, but then winces. “Can you ask Dad to bring me in my pain pills?”
Then quickly to everyone else: “Don’t go, don’t go! This is just a new version of me having another glass of wine.” She never wants the party to end.
Anne saves the day: “Seems like many of us will be unavailable for the month of August with summer vacations and all. Wouldn’t it be easier to leave the date open-ended for now?”
Linda saves it again: “And maybe it would be fun for each of us to just come and report on our favorite book from the last year, from book club or not.”
Tita nudges my arm as we stand to leave. “Call me when you get home if you want to talk.”
Of course they all remember; of course it is not only me, trying to both preserve and crack open the lie that time doesn’t pass, that loss isn’t a blade so sharp that it can make you bleed long before you ever feel the sting.
My mom stays curled up on the couch, her tiny body somehow seeming to have become a little smaller over the course of the evening.
“You all be good,” she is saying, starting to doze. “I love you.”
These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you. Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?
20. The Purple House
Next door to our little green bungalow is a house that has been painted deep purple for as long as I can remember, with symmetrical hot-pink pillars supporting the portico. For years, a black POW flag hung like a banner between the second-story windows.
Years back, when John and I first moved to Greensboro for me to start grad school—before we lived here in Westerwood, our current neighborhood—I remember there was also a row of impeccable toilets that lined the front yard.
At that point, I only vaguely knew that the purple spectacle was an act of protest. It had something to do with the eclectic, bungalow-y, artists-filled neighborhood being turned into a historic district with covenants and codes that would mean you needed to ask permission to paint your house a new color, among other things.
Dan, our now-neighbor—decorated Vietnam vet and one of the few black residents of our largely white neighborhood—wasn’t having it. He saw the move to make a historic district as invasive of property owners’ rights and thought it smacked of underhanded segregationist techniques to keep the neighborhood white and upper-middle class.
So, he and a smattering of other neighbors decided to paint their houses outlandish shades of purple. Dan’s was by far the most conspicuous, though—plus the toilets. And the signs that read, Jim Crow Is Alive in Westerwood. The contrast with the architectural stateliness of his Dutch colonial house and his immaculately manicured yard along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare gave the gesture maximum impact.
As it turns out, Westerwood never did become a historic district. But Dan also never repainted his house.
Twelve years later, the toilets and protest signs are long gone and the purple is faded, but if I’m giving directions to anyone who has lived in our town for more than a few years, all I have to say is, “We’re next door to the purple house,” and they know exactly where I mean.
I adore the purple house even though—and possibly because—it’s not in my own nature to be conspicuous. As a bald woman, I noted stricken looks from other moms at PTA meetings and grocery parking lots. I noted our mailman hurrying to avoid me on the stoop. Discomfort from waiters and shop attendants. The worried brow of the guy who hands me my locker key at the gym.
I hated it. But, as my head began to resprout, I also note that baldness served a role—like mourning clothes. I am going through something, it announces. Be gentle with me.
“I miss my bald head,” emails my high-school friend Christy who also did chemo this year. She’s a couple months ahead of me in her treatment.
“That is one very complicated emotion,” I reply.
*
Departing from baldness also denotes a departure from treatment. Whether cured or beyond a cure, there is still fear. Because treatment itself—effective or not—is a kind of solution. Dr. Cavanaugh says that her patients have told her that the hardest part of their treatment was the day they finished, the day they make the see-you-in-six-months appointment.