The Kissing List (18 page)

Will she also remember the fierce competition between the two of you? According to your adolescent accounting, she was naturally smart, and you worked very hard. She starred in school plays; you played power forward on the basketball team. She was student body secretary; you were History Club president. You took calculus, she took AP Physics. She applied to one Ivy League, you to another. Will all this jockeying for position figure into the chapters devoted to ages thirteen to eighteen? Scientists say that memories of bad things are more tenacious than those of good ones. Jealousy, insecurity, anger, fear—you
can no longer remember all the reasons for the feelings—but these emotions never go away completely. This is why you will not be surprised if you learn that you are only a minor character in the section on her teenage years—or even, to find no trace of yourself at all.

A
new noise captured my attention: the sound of someone driving a nail into sheet metal. I couldn’t stop listening to it, and I couldn’t stop shaking. Each time the nail was struck, vibrations moved from my head, down through my arms and legs, out the tips of my toes and fingers, and into the air. I glanced around the living room, expecting to see ordinary objects like the coffee table and the bookshelves and the fringed lampshade reflecting the way I felt, but everything seemed normal, except for the woman in the African batik, whose beaded
headdress began to streak like tears down her head and neck. I closed my eyes, and the pounding continued for what seemed like hours until gradually the sound became gentler, and I realized that it was noon, and someone was knocking.

Very few people came to my door because my house was hidden. It was off the street, across a gravel lot, and through a gate that swelled in the heat and rain and would not budge unless you threw your weight against it. The path from the gate to the house was blocked by an overgrown pomegranate bush covered with rotting fruit that had been recently infested with small black bugs. When I left the fruit unpicked, I imagined flocks of dark birds covering the small bush and pecking at the dry husks. The person at my door had most likely walked underneath the pomegranate bush, oblivious to the threat of the bugs raining down—not that this had happened, but I imagined it happening. I had grown accustomed to always expecting the worst, except for the flock of birds, which would have been beautiful, like a handful of confetti suspended in the sky.

I eased myself up from the couch. My pants were damp. This was not unusual; the pain that pinned me to the couch was so intense that I often lost control of different things. It was as though my body still wept, even though I no longer cried.

Through the front window, I saw a woman without a head. I pressed my knuckles into my eyes, hoping that when the static cleared she would be gone, though I didn’t count on it. In my experience, the universe was more apt to bring things than to take them away, and just as I expected, the woman remained. Her shoulders were like an empty table, an unexpected horizontal
line. Her T-shirt wasn’t crooked, even though she had no neck to anchor it. I squinted. In one hand, she cradled her head as if it were a baby, while with the other, she rapped steadily on the door. Suddenly she stopped knocking and lifted her head up to the screen and swiveled it back and forth, taking everything in.

“Hello,” she said. “Anyone home?”

I screamed.

“Am I catching you at a bad time?” she asked, as if by screaming, I’d told her nothing more than that she was inconveniencing me. “I can come back …”

I tiptoed back to the couch, but behind me I heard the door opening. I screamed again.

“I can come back,” the woman repeated, now standing in my living room in front of a poster of impressionistic pastel-colored sunbathers that my nurse had brought to cheer things up.

I turned and faced her. She was holding her head in both hands and nodding it up and down. A red cooler was at her feet. There was a chance I could escape; though I moved as if the ground shifted beneath me like choppy water, she would surely be slowed by having to navigate without her head in its normal place.

“If there’s a better time …” She trailed off.

She was so polite that I started to feel inhospitable. And also curious. The truth was, I wanted her to go away. But I also wanted to know how she got by. She reminded me of a blind man I’d met who took photographs. He didn’t even pretend he could see; he usually held his camera right under his chin or
above his head. When the film was developed, he asked people to describe the pictures to him. “I had a sense,” he’d say about every image. He photographed me eating lunch. I was having a bad year, but that day was especially bad because I couldn’t stop thinking about the MRI I had scheduled for the following week, when I’d find out whether any new tumors had germinated in my skull. I was wearing a silk scarf instead of the long red wig that everyone admired, because it was very hot, the hottest week on record since the summer of 1927. The next day, the blind man appeared at my table, where I was trying to stay cool by sipping tea, and handed me a white envelope. “I have a sense that you’re sad,” he said. “But melancholia is exquisite.” We talked for a while, and later we went to bed. Often, before I had an MRI, I’d wind up in bed with someone—sometimes a stranger, sometimes a friend around whom I’d been too shy—aroused by my fear that it could be my last intimate act. It was like breakup sex, my friends teased, except that it wasn’t like that at all. The blind man played the flute beautifully, but as far as the sex went, he was clumsy and rough.

When I woke up after our lovemaking, he handed me a photograph: “Tell me what you see here,” he said. The picture was bright and blank, as if he had pointed his camera at the sun or the surface of a lake. I had a terrible feeling that this was what the blind man saw, but that he couldn’t put it into words since it was the only thing he’d ever seen. “Why are you leaving?” he inquired when he heard me snapping my shirt. “Not disturbing, is it?” It scared me to tell him that it was both
dark and bright at the same time, nothing and something. I had enough problems of my own.

Meanwhile, of course, the woman was waiting.

“Why are you here?” I wanted to put on my wig before having a lengthy conversation with this stranger, but the Styrofoam head was bald. Then I remembered I was already wearing it. “Was I expecting you?” I said, twirling a strand of hair. Doing this soothed me.

“We had an appointment,” she answered, shaking her head in an exasperated way. Her brow scrunched together, and she moved the head both up and down and sideways. It must have taken her a long time to master the gesture with her hands, instead of her neck. “I can check my calendar …”

“I believe you,” I said, even though I didn’t. I had a terrible premonition that she was peddling something, like knives, that her head was a prop that she would use in her sales routine. I imagined her pitch: “I’ll cut off my head before your very eyes. Slides through gristle, clean as a whistle.”

She sat down. It was strange to see the head lodged in the
V
of her legs and tilted back, looking both up and forward, as if it belonged to a body lying in a dentist’s chair. “It’s a cave in here.”

“It’s because you’ve been outside in the sun,” I answered. “Your eyes will adjust.”

“They won’t, actually. My pupils don’t dilate. It’s a rare condition. Not that it’s terribly severe, but it can be a nuisance. The worst part is that I can’t see in the dark. In fact, I prefer
light of the kind that today has brought us. Bright, glaring light. Then everything appears crystal clear.”

“Can you see me?” I asked.

The woman tilted the head forward. “Say something again, please.”

“I’m without hair.” I had forgotten the word to describe myself.

“Bald?” She turned the head slightly so that it was more or less looking in my direction. “I can see the outline of you. But your features are blurry. Is there a reason you can’t turn on a light or two? It would help me immensely.”

My hands twisted into a knot in my lap. Before this woman’s arrival, before my headache, I’d been trying to remember something about the type of car that I’d rented in Spain ten years ago. My friend Lilly and I had driven around Spain for over a month in the kind of car that didn’t have a top. It was frustrating. I could remember the feeling of the wind in my hair, as if a giant hand were collecting it in a ponytail, and I could recall the smells, the hot brittleness of southern Spain and the heaviness of Barcelona, and I could see the straw-colored fields that ran to the edges of the walled towns. One of them boasted a Roman aqueduct built without a speck of mortar. I couldn’t fathom how I could remember such an odd and unnecessary word like
aqueduct
, but it was lodged in my head, along with
ambivalent, catatonic, deracinate, contumacious, petard, noctilucent, leman, fillip
, and countless other words that I once memorized for standardized tests but never used in conversation. These words were like packing peanuts in my brain, burying the real goods
(like the word for a car without a top) so deep that I’d never be able to pull them out. Each day, I seemed to spend more time up to my elbows in the box, senselessly grasping at anything I could touch.

I had thought about calling Lilly before my headache came and asking her about the car, but I had bothered her last week, phoning her up to find out the word to describe her and her sister, people who are born at the same time to the same mother:
twins
, she blurted out. She had to run but said she would call back soon. You could say I was a twin: me before the tumors, and me after. If you looked closely at pictures of her (minus the hair), the resemblance was there, especially in the eyes. Our personalities had diverged, though. She wore high, strappy heels and befriended people everywhere, even on the subway, while I padded around in ballet slippers that my mother gave me and worried that it was obvious when I wore diapers.

I reluctantly turned on a light. “Is that better?”

“Yes, now I can see.”

“What business do we have?” I asked.

“You told me you wanted a disquisition on tears.”

Here was another word I knew,
disquisition
. A perfectly useless word that was an obstacle to remembering the term for a car without a top. “Why did I want that?”

“You didn’t say. You called and made an appointment. I’ve spent over three days doing the research. But if you’re not feeling well, I understand, and we can make an appointment for another day.”

I could tell the woman was lying. Her shoulders were
bunched together again, and the head in her lap was biting its lips.

“You’re feeling uncomfortable?” she said. “If you’re feeling the slightest bit uncomfortable, I can put on my head pack. Would that be easier for you?”

It was true. I didn’t know where to look when she was speaking. My natural inclination was to focus on her shoulders, but her head wasn’t there.

“Would it be inconvenient?”

“Not at all. Notatall,” she said in a slightly more jaunty voice. “Usually I do put it on, but for some reason, I didn’t this morning.”

I suddenly wondered how she drove. Maybe mounted on the steering wheel was a giant head-size cup. “When did I call?” I had no recollection of calling her, but it was possible that I had called and forgotten. This happened with increasing frequency—conversations were being misfiled in my short-term memory, or disappearing completely, just as the birds would have vanished after lighting on the pomegranate tree and picking it clean.

The woman’s body began to quiver and her eyes pinched closed, and she made incomprehensible sounds, something between hiccupping and singing. I felt alarmed.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“The way you’re dressed. That heavy coat on a hot day like this. Now that I can see, I couldn’t help but notice. Oh.”

The sound was giggling. She was laughing at me. She brought her hand to her mouth to muffle the sound. The gesture
was so strange and small. The whole point of giggling into your hand was bringing it all the way from your lap to your mouth. “Oh,” she snorted. It was true that I was wearing my winter parka, the hood trimmed with fur. I was often chilly, even on these hot days.

“And those,” she said, pointing to my socks with toes like the fingers of mittens. The head began to redden and cough, showering her legs with saliva. When she pounded her chest, I could hardly stand it. “Oh dear me,” she said, “Oh dear me. I think I may be choking.” She spluttered on. “Would. You. Be. Kind. Enough. To. Get. Me …” While her torso shook, her head froze. Her eyes opened as wide as a mannequin, and her mouth twisted, as if someone playing a practical joke had put her lips on sideways.

I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Moving made me realize that I had a rash like fine sandpaper on my butt from sitting in my wet underpants. I considered going into the bathroom to shed my damp clothes and apply talcum powder or a soothing cream, but I was afraid it would take too long. The bathroom was dizzying with all of its similarly shaped containers. I might accidentally slather toothpaste on my butt, in which case I’d have to scrub it off, thus aggravating the rash. Such mishaps had happened before. Once I had brushed my teeth with A+D ointment; another time, I had squirted nasal decongestant into my eyes. In another context, these mix-ups might have made amusing anecdotes, but in the context of my cancer, they weren’t—at least not to others. I might laugh to death about them privately, but that was no fun.