Eating Heaven (9 page)

S
o much can change in just three days, although they are long, gray days spent waiting. I’d give anything for sunshine—even just a sun break, Portland-speak for those rare glimpses of sun between clouds. The poststorm reprieve didn’t last long, and now it’s back to the usual spring routine: mist, drizzle, sprinkles, showers, rain, and flat-out downpours. Oregonians have nearly as many names for rain as Inuits do for snow.

I keep busy when I’m visiting Benny, which is most of the time, rearranging his cards and flowers, filling his water pitcher, clicking through the channels on the television mounted high on the wall in front of his bed, trying to find him something decent to watch. We don’t talk about what the future may hold, just the safe topics of his current pain level, the drugs keeping it at bay, and our usual everyday natterings. He’s worried about his house, although I check on it every day. “The stove is off,” I try to convince him, “and I’ve set the timer on the light in the living room,” but sometimes he forgets and asks again. His confusion comes and goes, and they’ve scheduled another scan, this time for his head.

Aunt Yolanda is my aunt again, although she still plays it cool with Benny, visiting him only briefly each day. She avoids his eyes, which tear up when he sees her. Yesterday, I watched as she smoothed his blanket where he’d rumpled it, then withdrew her hand quickly, as if she
suddenly realized what she was doing and found even that small intimacy too painful.

We no longer watch CNN in Benny’s room. Anne has been reduced to a media villain, five seconds of videotape shown over and over, a late-night talk show joke. She’s laying so low she doesn’t even answer the phone.

Christine, who calls Benny every day, is considering the option of single parenthood. Reid apparently threw a tantrum over the fact that she would not choose him over their baby, coloring his arguments with his whiny and extreme eco-liberalism. “How can we bring a child into this world?” he said. “This self-destructing, polluted, out-of-control world?”

“How can you not?” I ask her this morning on the phone. I’m at home reading the Sunday
Oregonian
and watching Buddy play on the rug, batting a pencil around like it’s a dead snake with serious rigor mortis, the shaved patch on her chest pink and tender beneath the stitches. I’m trying not to think about what still looms ahead. At one o’clock today, Benny, Yolanda, and I will meet with the doctors about the results of his biopsy.

“They’d have told us immediately if it was good news, don’t you think?” I ask Christine. Quietly, I eat another chocolate chip cookie, holding the mouthpiece away from my face while I chew.

“Maybe you should just not think about it until the meeting.”

I snort so hard I inhale crumbs into my windpipe, and cough for a full minute before I can speak again. “I’m sorry,” I tell her finally, “but isn’t that like saying maybe you shouldn’t think about the baby until it’s born?”

“No,” she says, “I don’t think it is.”

We’re quiet for a moment, then I say, “Did I tell you I have a cat?”

“Really?” Christine says, sounding skeptical.

We aren’t exactly pet people in our family. We once had a gerbil that died after less than twenty-four hours under our care. Looking back, I doubt it was our fault. Shopping mall pet stores are breeding grounds for disease, but it shook our confidence and bolstered Dad’s arguments against our desire for something warm and cuddly in our lives. We never asked for another pet.

It was Christine, in fact, who insisted upon a proper burial for our still-unnamed gerbil, which meant squatting in late-winter rain, digging mud with soupspoons we’d pilfered from the utensils drawer in the kitchen while Mom chatted on the phone in her bedroom. After school, Christine had rescued the dead animal from the trash, where Dad had deposited it the night before, and placed it in her school pencil box, surrounded by pink toilet paper.

When the hole kept puddling with rain, Anne and I gave up. “Come on, Christine,” we begged. “It’s just a gerbil.”

She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, but she was fiercely determined to do the right thing by this creature, and long after Anne and I had retreated to our bedroom, where we kept an eye on her through the window, she worked the ground until the hole was big enough to hold the box; it bobbed and floated as she spooned wet earth back over it. Then we saw her stand and clasp her hands in front of her, speaking solemn words that only she could hear, periodically stomping at the pile of mud that kept rising against her good school shoes.

It’s still early after Christine hangs up, only nine thirty, so I refocus and try to get a jump on what surely will be a tough workweek. I’m avoiding an e-mail from Stefan titled
RE: Re: Article???
Instead, I turn my attention to a new assignment from
American Family
: “Home Cooking: The Comforts of Old Family Favorites.”

Easy. Baked macaroni and cheese with crunchy bread crumbs on top; simple mashed potatoes with no garlic and lots of cream and butter; meatloaf with sage and a sweet tomato sauce topping. Not that I experienced these things in my house growing up, but these are the foods everyone thinks of as old family favorites, only improved. If nothing else, my job is to create a dreamlike state for readers in which they feel that everything will be all right if only they find just the right recipe to bring their kids back to the table, seduce their husbands into loving them again, make their friends and neighbors envious.

I’m tapping my keyboard, thinking,
what else?,
when it hits me like a soft thud in the chest. I want to write about my family’s favorites, the strange foods that comforted us in tense moments around the dinner
table. Mom’s Midwestern “hot dish”: layers of browned hamburger, canned vegetable soup, canned sliced potatoes, topped with canned cream of mushroom soup. I haven’t tasted it in years. Her lime Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, walnuts, and canned pineapple; her potato salad with French dressing instead of mayo.

I have a craving, too, for Dad’s grilling marinade. “Shecret Shauce” he called it in those rare moments of levity when he’d perform the one culinary task he was willing to do. I’d lean shyly against the counter and watch as he poured ingredients into a rectangular cake pan. Vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and then he’d finish it off with the secret ingredient: a can of fruit cocktail. Somehow the sweetness of the syrup was perfect against the salty soy and the biting garlic. Everything he cooked on the grill, save hamburgers and hot dogs, first bathed in this marinade overnight in the refrigerator. Rump roasts, pork chops, chicken legs all seemed more exotic this way, and dinner guests raved at Dad’s genius on the grill. They were never the wiser to the secret of his sauce because the fruit bits had been safely washed into the garbage disposal.

Surely most people have these odd family foods. I could do some research, make the article something interesting instead of rehashing what everyone expects. Show a true slice of Americana instead of the safe one.

I click to my e-mail program to write the editor about it, and Stefan’s e-mail blinks back at me.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I mutter, then click it open.

“No,” I say automatically, but my curiosity gets the better of me and I hit
REPLY
.

I sigh and hit
DELETE
, then begin a new reply:

My affection for him is dimming rapidly.

At ten till one, I’m walking down the hospital corridor toward Room 632, carrying a pan of cream cheese–frosted spice cake, one of Benny’s favorites. A few steps from the door I hear voices, and stop, edge closer. A monotone male voice is saying, “I’ve been working on a protocol for cases such as Mr. Sloan’s, and we’re interested in starting him on it right away. With his approval, of course.”

Benny coughs. Yolanda—I can tell it is Yolanda somehow—sniffles, blows her nose.

I lean against the wall, try to breathe, the cake pan trembling in my hands. Why did I think this would be an occasion for a cake? I straighten up and walk into the room, depositing the pan as quickly as I can on a shelf near the door.

“Well, hello,” I say, acting surprised. “You’re all here early.”

The doctor, lumpy shaped and stringy haired, avoids my eyes, and I
avoid Benny’s. Yolanda looks at me and tries to smile. “Hi, honey. Dr. Krall was just telling us about the test results.” She motions for me to come stand by her, and takes my arm in hers. “This is our niece Eleanor. Would you mind starting over?”

He wheezes a sigh and looks up from beneath heavily lidded eyes. I miss Dr. Scary.

“What I was explaining to Mr. and Mrs. Sloan was that we believe the initial mass to be inoperable. In most cases we prescribe—”

“Wait a minute,” I say, hating him. “What are you even talking about? Initial mass? Do you mean his pancreas? Was it . . .”

I falter, swallowing hard, and Yolanda squeezes my arm. “Yes, honey,” she says, “it was. And they think it spread to . . . to his . . .” Now she wavers and trembles, crying silently beside me.

Benny stares at the floor, touching his head gingerly, as if feeling for the tumors I already know are there. He looks like he’s pondering something from the ordinary world—what socks to wear, what to eat for breakfast.

“But how can it be inoperable?” I say, arguing so I don’t cry, too, so I don’t break down in front of Benny. “Why can’t you just cut it out?”

Dr. Krall clears his throat. “It would seem Mr. Sloan’s cancer is quite advanced,” he begins, but I cut him off again.

“It would seem? Do you not know? Do we need more tests?”

“Honey,” Yolanda says, and I know I am being terrible, I know I’m making it worse, but this is ridiculous, unfathomable. How can someone have the flu one day, and less than a week later have inoperable cancer?

The doctor seems unfazed by my behavior. “I was just starting to tell your aunt and uncle about a new trial—”

“Experimental?” I say. “You want him to be a guinea pig?”

Benny clears his throat, and I finally look at him. “That’s all they got, honey,” he says. His eyes are red-rimmed, his skin still sallow. His combover is now waving warily on top of his head and I want to smooth it back down. I want to lather his face and shave off the stubble he’d never wear in public in any other situation. I want to cover him with the blanket, tuck him in like a child, shut off the lights and shoo everyone from the room so he can get some rest, so his body can heal. Uncle Benny is
steel; there’s no way something as obscure and formerly inconsequential as a pancreas can take him down. This doctor knows nothing.

“So, how long, Doc?” Benny’s asking, and the doctor’s sighing, shaking his head.

“I hate that question,” he says, and attempts a smile meant to look sympathetic. “We’ve had one patient on this protocol beat the one-year mark.”

Yolanda gasps, and Benny closes his eyes, and I turn and grab the stupid cake pan so no one will see how idiotic I was. I stride quickly down the hall past a gowned elderly woman walking an IV stand, past the ponytailed nurse, the waiting room, the nurses’ station, to the elevator. It is just opening and I force my way onto it, past a group of exiting doctors. At the lobby I run toward the front doors, push out into cool gray mist and birds chirping. In my car I throw the cake pan onto the passenger’s seat, squeal from the garage out onto the busy street choked with the remains of lunchtime traffic. I am hungry, so hungry, and I yank the cake pan closer to me on the seat, toss off the aluminum foil, dig a chunk out with my fingers. I stuff it into my mouth and lick frosting and crumbs from my fingers. I’ve barely swallowed it when I am digging again, maneuvering with one hand through the bunched-up traffic, looking for an opening to break free and race ahead. The drizzle turns to hard rain and I hit the wipers, then dig harder at the cake, feel the icing jam under my fingernails. I pull a larger piece free. I don’t look into the windows of the cars surrounding me. I know they are staring at me—thinking,
What a pig. How can she do that to herself? Does she have no self-control?
—but it doesn’t matter what they think. I’ve nearly cleared the contents of the 13 inch × 9 inch pan when suddenly I choke on a glob of frosting, the sugar burning like acid in my esophagus. My eyes water, my chest and throat contract. I cannot breathe. I’m making this horrifying sound—part gasp, part scream—and I can hardly see to drive, barely keep a grip on the wheel. I force myself to cough, hard, painfully, trying to expel the stupid frosting and draw enough air into my lungs so that I don’t black out and crash. So that I don’t die alone with an empty cake pan at my side, fingers sticky with the evidence.