It’s heartening to see that despite their differences, Teenie, Lois, and Mom click and hum in perfect synchrony like an antique glockenspiel that’s never a minute off. I’ve been thinking about that all day because we’re celebrating a monumental milestone in their relationship—the anniversary of the summer Lois and Teenie saved my mother’s life.
It was five years ago when Dad called me at work to say Mom had breast cancer and had already undergone a lumpectomy. After that, he didn’t want to talk about it. Not a peep. He also didn’t want to visit her in the hospital or discuss her “female problems.” It was no business of his.
“Every woman in your mother’s family gets
this thing
,” he said, unable to say the words “breast cancer.” “Her mother. Her grandmother. Her sister. They all had it. It’s no more than a toothache to them.” And then he went off to see what dinner my mother had left for him in the refrigerator.
Meanwhile, I was left holding the phone, shaking with anger, and debating whether to remind him that Mom’s older sister, the bossy but loving Aunt Charlotte, procurer of the ugly green china, had
died
of breast cancer. A bit more than a toothache, in my book.
Looking back, I’m ashamed of how grumpy I was during that whole ordeal. First I was mad at Mom for not telling me she’d found a lump. (Though, in all fairness, she didn’t tell anyone except Lois and Teenie.) Then I was mad she went into surgery without telling me. Then I was mad at Dad for being pig ignorant and selfish. But that wasn’t all.
My anger grew delicate shoots that flared up at the least little slight.
I was mad at other drivers on the road, people in the grocery store who blocked the aisles, the mailman for dropping a letter in the mud, Mrs. Crebbin, whose dog, Brutus, regularly defecated on our lawn. I was daily peeved at all my friends and family members. There seemed to be no end to the potential sources of my aggravation. My fists were balled 24/7.
Finally, Lois took me aside and slapped some sense into me. “Look, Julie, your mother didn’t want anyone to know about the cancer because she didn’t want you all to worry until she knew how bad it was. So why don’t you snap out of it and stop causing her more distress by acting like a petulant child.”
“I’m not a petulant child,” I said, acting like, well, a petulant child. “My father is. He’s not even visiting her in the hospital.”
“So what, your father can’t deal.
You’re
not married to him.”
That shut me up. For a day.
“Men are weird,” Mom once observed when Lois and I were waiting for Mom’s last radiation treatment, yet again without Dad. “When their loved ones get sick, they see it as a personal affront to their abilities as protectors. Men hate to be helpless.”
“That’s no excuse,” I said. “Dad’s a—”
“Ahem.” Lois cleared her throat and gazed at me sternly. “Your mother knows what your father is, Julie.”
“He’s my hero.” Mom took a stitch in her needlework, a small pillow of a butterfly she worked on only during radiation days.
“He’s your hero?” I could have gone off on that, but I was too cowed by Lois to try.
“Your father loves me very much in ways that you don’t know and never will,” she said quietly, concentrating on each stitch. “It’s not for you to say what he does or doesn’t do is right or wrong. Yes. To me, he’s my hero.”
Hmph.
Mom might believe her own hype, but I knew who the real heroes were. The real heroes were Teenie and Lois.
On the days I couldn’t drive Mom to radiation, Lois or Teenie did. Afterward, they took her home and fed her tea and homemade thin ginger cookies to settle her stomach.
Then they’d draw her a nice hot bath with lavender bubbles and put her to bed in crisp, clean sheets. If she wasn’t too tired, they watched old movies with Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, or those goofy On the Road flicks with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
They laughed. They ate tapioca pudding and Jell-O and held Mom’s head when she threw up. And when the movies were over and/or when Mom was too tired, they lay on the bed with her and traded secrets like schoolgirls. Secrets to which I could never be privy. They let her cry. They let her vent and probably let her swear up a blue streak. (Though Mom never ever swears in front of me or Em.) They held the pillow while she punched it.
They held
her
.
My father, meanwhile, continued to pretend as if Mom had gone to Arizona to visit her cousin Justine. He moved to Paul’s tiny apartment in New York and made it his mission to make my brother’s life a living hell until Mom’s own hell was in remission.
To this day I’m convinced that while the nurses, surgeons, radiation, and chemo drugs killed my mother’s rapidly multiplying cancer cells, it was Lois and Teenie who
cured
her. Had they not been there to hold her hand, to clean her house, and drive her back and forth to radiation, she would not be here hulling strawberries today.
“How’s the job going, Julie?” Lois asks as I line up sterilized jelly jars on a bleached kitchen towel. “Any new developments?”
I freeze, my hand clutching the tongs in midair. How does Lois know? I haven’t said a word to Mom, since her idea of keeping a secret is confiding in a close circle of friends. That wouldn’t be a problem except the close circle of friends includes every patron of Mario’s salon and anyone who happens to be standing behind her in the checkout aisle at Shaw’s.
“The job’s fine,” I say, pulling out another jar from the top of the dishwasher. “Nothing big.”
“That’s too bad. We were hoping you’d get that national election assignment. Did they give it to the young girl?”
“Young-
er
.” Geesh. How come everyone keeps making that mistake? “And, no, I don’t think they’ve made up their minds. Not definitely.” There. I didn’t lie.
“Well, take heart, Julie. Maybe this TV journalism gig has run its course. There’s nothing wrong with slowing down and becoming a school librarian, you know.”
The image of me in a long black skirt surrounded by clamoring children sends pains up my arm. “Er, yes. That might be worth looking into.”
“Summers off and school holidays, too. You could plant a garden. Go to Europe in July. That’s the life.”
Actually, that could have its appeal, now that I think of it.
“Okay, we got the fire started,” Em announces, tromping up the back stairs with her friend Nadia—she of big hair and very little brain. “And we did it without lighter fluid because we’re environmentally friendly.”
“Well, you two are a couple of vestal virgins, aren’t you?” Lois says, turning off the stove.
Em and Nadia exchange quick looks. “Vestal
what
?” Nadia asks.
“If they still offered Latin, they’d know this,” says Mom.
“Virgins,” I tell them. “A distant memory for you, I’m sure. Vestal virgins were even more distant, a group of women in ancient Rome considered priests who maintained the fire of the goddess Vesta. Very highly regarded, except if they were found to have had sex. Then they were buried alive.”
“Harsh,” Nadia says. “When my mom found out I’d had sex, she just took me to the doctor for Norplant.”
Oh, I wish she hadn’t said that in the presence of my mother.
Mom frowns and shakes her head. “Call me old-fashioned, but this day and age of friends with benefits is cheating you girls out of real love. Boys are growing up into men who don’t respect women, and girls are growing up into women who don’t respect themselves. And I thought it was bad when Julie was coming of age. Heck, this generation’s three times worse.”
Here it comes, I think, removing another jar, a tirade against the “MTV generation.”
“It’s MTV, that’s the real culprit here,” says Lois, going to the sink to wash her mannish hands. “I’ve only seen it once or twice, but what I’ve seen turns my stomach. All that bump and grind and half-naked dancing. It’s so
demeaning
.”
Shaking a paring knife at Em, Mom says, “I was strict with your mother, stricter than she is with you when it comes to sex. And thanks be to God. Who knows what trouble she could have gotten into if I hadn’t seen to it that certain
temptations
did not present themselves.”
She’s referring to Michael, of course. How did we get on this touchy subject, anyway? “That fire’s not going to stay hot forever,” I say, trying to get off topic. “We should strike now.”
“It’s not as if this generation of girls invented sex,” Teenie adds, either ignoring or not hearing me to begin with. “Think of what it was like during World War II with all those brave men going off to war and marrying any girl they could get their hands on.”
“The operative word being ‘marry,’ ” notes Mom.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Teenie’s expression is turning misty. “There was one soldier I remember in particular, Harry Fordham. Ooh, was he handsome and smart. And he sacrificed so much for our country. Was it so wrong that on one snowy winter evening the night before he was to be shipped off, I tried to show him my gratitude by letting him ...”
Nadia and Em are hanging on her every word.
“Ahem.” Mom pushes back from the table. “That’s enough, Teenie. Julie’s right. That fire won’t stay lit forever.”
Em says, “What did you let him do, Teenie?”
“It sounds so romantic,” says Nadia.
“I just . . .” Teenie glances cautiously at Mom. “I better tell you later.” Later, when it’s just the two of us and I’m helping her down the stairs to the outside, where Em, Nadia, and Lois are waiting, Teenie tells me the rest. “It was an incredible night,” she whispers. “What those girls don’t know is that I offered him my all, body and soul. And . . .”
"And?” I’m riveted.
“He turned me down.” She shakes her head, remembering. “He said, Teenie Dawson, tonight would be an incredible night for both of us. But tomorrow, I’ll be gone overseas and I don’t know if I’ll ever be back, and for me to abandon you that way would be incredibly unfair.”
Looking off, she adds, “His plane was shot down two months later.”
“Oh, Teenie,” I gasp, imagining the sacrifice on both their parts and then the irreconcilable pain. “I’m so sorry.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him,” she says, her rheumy eyes getting watery. “They don’t make men like that anymore, Julie. Harry Fordham was moral, brave, and principled. He was the kind of man worth waiting for.”
Like Michael
, I think, catching myself. Why Michael?
“I’m going to go get Mom,” I announce, rushing back upstairs, my heart fluttering.
Like Michael
.
When I get to the kitchen, I find my mother leaning against the refrigerator and clutching a plain plywood box. “I got a bit dizzy,” she says, straightening. “Lost my balance for a second.”
The day picking berries has been too much for her. We were up awfully early. “Do you need to sit down?”
“No. I’m okay now. I got up too fast, was all.” She pauses to brush a tear from her cheek. “Five years is the benchmark, but it doesn’t mean I’m cured. The cancer could come back.”
“It could,” I say, trying to keep my own emotion in check. “But it won’t.”
“I might need this, though.”
“My ass. Let me have one last look.”
Mom opens the box and hands it to me. There lies the tiny pillow with the butterfly half finished, only the orange wings and one green leaf done, the needle with yarn still stuck in the matt. The sight of it brings a lump to my throat. “The pillow you worked on when you were going for radiation treatments. You never finished it.”
“Oh, I finished it several times. Just kept ripping it out, like Penelope. It wasn’t the suitors I was holding off, though. It was death.”
The final suitor, I think, closing the box and handing it to her. “Let’s burn this sucker.”
“But I . . . ?”
“When you burn it,” I tell her, “you’re celebrating your victory over cancer. You conquered it, Mom. You destroyed it before it could destroy you.”
Mom nods, agreeing. “That’s what I did, didn’t I?”
“Come on, Betty!” Lois shouts from the backyard. “Quit yapping.”
“You’re right. It’s time,” Mom says, taking the stairs slowly, her arthritic knees not what they used to be.
From the back porch, I watch Mom, flanked by Teenie and Lois, place the box on the fire in our rusted suburban grill with its caked-on hamburger grease and spilled barbecue sauce. In seconds, it bursts into flames and the last symbol of the scourge that threatened to take my mother from us shrivels and turns to ash at the hands of three old crones and two vestal virgins.
The power of women united, I am again reminded, is an invincible thing.
Chapter Six
Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none
—ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, ACT I, SCENE 2
On my way to work Monday, I grab a
New York Times
, a
Washington Post
, this week’s
Economist
, and the
Wall Street Journal
—enough boring, stuffy reading material to knock out the most hyper insomniac. As a precaution, I pick up a triple-shot espresso to counter the effects. As if.
I’ve got no other choice. Kirk told me to start reading all the major newspapers every morning in preparation for the national election team, and that doesn’t include the mounds of background material I’ll have to consume in order to catch up, the voting records and lobbying reports. Oh, God. The lobbying reports.
Still, there could be worse situations, like finding the national election post was given to someone else—a panicky possibility that crosses my mind as I walk into the newsroom and see Valerie being interviewed by Kirk in Arnie’s glass-walled office.
Uh-oh.
Dolores Poultney, Arnie’s rotund secretary, lifts her gaze from this morning’s sudoku lying next to a heaping quart of pick-your-own strawberries. Seems like I wasn’t the only one with the bright idea. “Take a number, Julie. Arnie told me not to disturb those two unless it’s an emergency.”