With the chemo, I’m back on the steroids. Before the kids get home from school, I fly down the hill on Mendenhall Street all wild and nonbraking. I zip along the greenway, bugs flying into my mouth, and realize I am both laughing out loud and completely out of breath.
On the way home, I have to walk the bike up the Mendenhall hill. I pass a neighbor walking his dog who stares blankly at me and my heart-attack face after I say, “Hey! How are you?” until I gulp, “Nina! The green house with the red door! Breast cancer!” Why do I say that last part?
It registers. “Oh hi,” he says, “Are you okay?”
First of all—Ha. Yes. Totally.
Second of all, I do not know. I wish there was someone else we could ask.
11. The Ache
Right before all your hair falls out, it aches. Like a ponytail pulled back for too long. And even after it’s all gone, the ache resurfaces. You run your hands through the air, but assuage nothing.
John and I get a babysitter so we can join Mark, Anne, and my dad at the bar the first Friday after the memorials. I sit in the car for several minutes before we go in, trying to shake loose the hairs that have already let go. I am noticeably patchier when we sit down at the table than when we left the house. I am fighting enormous tears and Anne reaches out and squeezes my hand and asks how I’m feeling. Mark says, “This is not fair.”
My parents and Mark and Anne had a standing Friday night date—almost up to the end. When she was too unwell to go out, my mom and Anne would hang out in the salon while Mark and my dad went to the corner bar. Then, blood full of cocktails, they would all reconvene for food—sometimes around my mom’s bedside—where’d she’d be sipping a gin and tonic and they’d all be laughing their heads off and telling dirty jokes and sometimes singing and playing music until past their bedtime.
My mother was the queen of dirty jokes, mortifying Charlie and me from middle school into adulthood. How do you make a woman scream twice? What did the pilot say to the stewardess? She had predictably poor timing and a knack for fumbling the punch line, which made the jokes far funnier than they normally would be.
I’m sitting next to my Dad at the bar. I am a B-list standin for my mother, who would never be crying like this. Who would be making this whole table laugh as the cancer gnawed on her bones.
12. The Little Brick House
We return to Massachusetts for a family wedding a month into the latest chemo. We leave the kids at home with friends. I shave my head tidily. I go bald-headed to the rehearsal dinner. My aunt Cami, who has gone two rounds with breast cancer, takes me in her arms and sways with me for a moment.
We stay with my Emerson cousins in Concord. Their house is just a brisk walk through the Estabrook Woods away from where we lived when I was young, long before Charlie was born, in the tiny brick cottage on my great-grandparents’ estate. Past Punkatasset Hill, the sledding hill, and Hutchins Pond. Past the ghostly stand of white birches. Across the meadow and up along the fire road. My cousins lived in my dead great-grandparents’ house across the field, and more cousins lived in a house just down the road.
The estate was sold decades ago to a family with the money to keep it up: Fancy stables now sprawl over the site of the old barn and an immaculately shingled farmhouse stands where my great-grandparents’ rambling homestead once stood—a grand but unsettling house with three stories and back stairways and a ghost named Mr. Dutton. The old driveway where my cousins and I learned to ride our bikes has been regraded as a gentler slope—almost like a trick of memory. But the little brick house still stands on the far side of the field.
It is much quainter than it used to be—a rose-covered trellis, a picket fence around the perimeter, dormers, a bright blue door—but completely recognizable. John and I walk toward it along the fire road. The house appears to be empty.
My mother often described the time we lived here as the happiest in her life, which is odd, considering she—born and raised in Panama—was transplanted here into the Yankee den from California for the snowiest winter in years. That year—the winter of 1981—snow fell through April in impossibly huge, magical piles that my mother and I had never dreamed of. One November morning when I was four, while I was sleeping in a makeshift bed of blankets by the back door while my dad built a stairway up to the attic—which was being converted into my bedroom—I woke up under a drift of snow from a blizzard that had blown the door open in the night. I remember my toes cold and wet, thawing between my parents’ warm, sleepy bodies when I scrambled into their bed.
My father taught my mom and me to cross-country ski, and we would clamp on our skis sitting on the back stoop and disappear within minutes into the silence of the Estabrook Woods. Even by age five, I understood that this life was unsustainably simple. If you wandered into the barn you would find: chickens, an uncle tinkering with a tractor engine, a half-built kite, the echo of my dad chopping wood across the field. Once, I remember hearing screaming and then laughter as my cousin Bonnie and I dug holes in the yard by the brick house. It came from our mothers in the garden. Mine had stepped on a garter snake and it had bitten her. “You are brave,” I remember saying to her as she iced her ankle in the kitchen while cleaning lettuce. “I can’t believe you survived a snakebite!”
The earliest seeds of anxiety: I am lying in bed in the attic on the night before the first day of kindergarten, afraid to roll over, afraid to breathe deeply—for fear that I will miss the first crackle, the first hint of smoke from a fire that could burn our house to the ground and keep me from ever becoming a kindergartener or being able to wear the new red turtleneck and tan corduroy skirt that matches Bonnie’s, laid out on my dresser for morning.
In two years, my grandparents’ bodies will be filling with cancer. The grown-ups will be older and thinking about careers and next steps and houses of their own. The houses at Estabrook Woods will need to be sold or repaired. My mother will have grown to despise winter—its isolation, its piles of coats, its metaphorical kinship with the Yankee heart.
“Talking to you about your feelings is like sliding down an icy road,” she will say to my dad. “Sounds kinda fun,” my dad will say. They will slip and spin out and glide and slip again for the next thirty-five years.
“Will you take a picture of me here by the steps?” I ask John as we prowl around toward the stoop of the empty brick house where I remember, with Bonnie, burying a cereal bowl in the dirt that we hope anthropologists will discover thousands of years from now as a key to civilization.
I adjust my chemo cap.
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