Jane sighed. “Mark certainly wasn’t afraid of girls. He was sort of contemptuous, actually. There was always this underlying attitude: it’s only a body, what’s such a big deal about touching it?” She sighed again. “Sometimes I think I just liked him because he’s bossy and mean. Like Dad. Like I was used to. I was addicted to mean.”
“Oh, me too.”
“Plus the class thing about doctors. I know it’s a joke—my son the doctor, all that—but it’s really strong. Our mothers really wanted doctors for sons, and sons-in-law.”
“How about girls?” asked Connie. “They’re encouraged to go to med school?”
Jane hesitated. “I don’t know, I’m really not sure about that. In my day we weren’t especially.”
“God knows we weren’t in mine.” And then quite suddenly Connie laughed. “The other day I thought of something funny. Years ago when the children were in kindergarten and I was driving a car pool, there were two little boys who drove me absolutely crazy with bathroom jokes. You know, all that poopoo-doodoo stuff. Every day, on and on. Gary Solomon and Eric Winston. And those are the two boys out of that car pool who went to med school—by now they’re doctors. Interesting, don’t you think?”
“Very. I’ve always thought doctors were sort of hung up that way. Honestly, some of the jokes they think are really funny. They might as well be four-year-olds.”
A pause, while both women munched on vegetables, sampled the bread, agreeing that it was good, all very good. And then Connie asked the question that had been in her mind for some time, as they went back and forth on this general topic of doctors. “Are you really going to do it?” she asked. “Do you think? Leave Mark?”
Jane hesitated. Then, “Yes,” she told her friend. “But it may
take longer than I thought. I don’t think things are going too well with him right now. A doctor he really respects—Douglas Macklin, do you know him?”
“A little.”
“Anyway, Macklin is really ticked off. He thought Mark goofed badly over a case, someone he’d referred. They’ve been arguing over the phone at night. Macklin says Mark should have paid more attention to an MRI, and of course he could be right. Mark sounds very defensive about it. This woman whose sinusitis turned out to be an ugly tumor. Malignant.” Jane paused, then looked directly at Connie. “Actually, it was that Molly—”
“Oh, the friend of Felicia.”
“Right.”
There was a pause, during which both women pondered the bad luck of Molly, whom neither of them knew; they had only heard of her as the friend of Felicia Flood, whom they did not actually know either.
“And there’s something bad with a Dr. Tanamini,” Jane continued. “This Japanese woman Mark really likes. He really respects her, he says. He means as a doctor but someone else told me she’s beautiful. But she seems to be mad at him too.”
“I think there’s something bad with Felicia and Raleigh too,” Connie contributed. “He’s acting so crazy. Angry. He just stares around, in this furious way. And at night he sometimes goes out and then he comes back in a very short time. I mean half an hour or so. Not like the old days when he had all these so-called emergencies at the hospital—of course some of them actually were. I guess. But these days he could hardly do more than drive around the block a couple of times.”
Alta Linda. Gradually all Molly’s doctors, including Dave, began to mention this name, in a hushed and reverential way. A hospital and treatment center where a rare and special, cutting-edge form of radiation was available. “Particle therapy.” Much stronger and more accurate than radiation. Alta Linda was somewhere in Southern California, not far from L.A.; this treatment was available there, and in only two other centers in the whole country, one in Boston, the other in Minnesota.
At first all this talk seemed to Molly simply part of the background noise of doctors’ conversations; they liked to exchange news of breakthrough treatments. But then very slowly she began to understand that what was actually being discussed was the possibility of
her
going there. For treatment. Particle therapy. Two weeks at Alta Linda.
“No,” she said, having finally grasped what they meant. “
No.
I hate Southern California.”
“But—”
“And how can I need any more radiation? After six weeks here.”
“How can you take a chance on something so important?” Dave countered.
“But there’s at least a chance I didn’t need it at all. If Donovan really got it all.”
“You did have to have radiation.” Dave spoke with more force than logic, Molly felt: everyone had radiation after cancer surgery, and so she must have it too. Just in case some tiny grain—or rather, cell—of the great green golf ball lingered on.
He added, “And particle therapy—these machines they have—do you know they cost fifty million dollars? Fifty million. At this point it’s mostly used for prostate cancers.”
“Oh, of course. A fifty-million-dollar machine? Prostates, of course. Not breasts.”
“Is that supposed to be some feminist joke?”
“Not particularly.”
Actually, the very contemplation of a fifty-million-dollar machine exhausted Molly, and she was sure that she did not deserve, or require, such treatment.
But: “… fewer side effects—doesn’t penetrate the brain stem,” Dave was saying.
“I’d rather go to Boston.”
“That’s too far, I couldn’t commute to Boston.” He added, “We’ll have to go down one day early so they can measure you for a mask.”
“No. I can’t do that again.”
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Dave muttered. He could have added, “to have me,” but he did not.
In a thick gray wet winter fog, they drove down Highway 5, California’s central artery, the direct and efficient north-south route, for the most part straight and flat, undifferentiated, without the distraction of “scenery” or views or, for that matter, of population, houses, towns. “You see?” remarked Dave. “How fast it is? And this is not exactly weather for the coast.”
“I guess not,” Molly murmured weakly. She had put up a feeble fight for the coastal route, and now she (still) thought that even in the fog it would somehow be beautiful, there would still be something to see. Besides, why hurry to Alta Linda? She saw
no cause to rush. The small amount of packing required by this trip had taken all her strength. In the car, as Dave drove fast and relentlessly, she lay back against the seat, her eyes closed. Dave was right: she could not have seen the view, even had there been one. The fog seemed to exist inside her head, as well as all over the landscape.
Six weeks of radiation at Mt. Watson, or something, had left her with no strength. The basic problem was nausea, not the sort of nausea that makes you actively ill (such a relief if she could be, Molly thought; if it were a question of throwing up, it might be over with sometime), but rather a steady low-grade dizziness in her stomach, so that eating or just drinking soup, or milk, or even water had become nearly impossible tasks. This condition seemed to have settled in; she could not remember a former or imagine a future self who liked to eat. Just getting out of bed had become a terrific chore; packing, thinking of what to take and putting it into a suitcase had been a terrible strain. She had not been able to concentrate, and now, as they drove, she could not remember putting in her toothbrush—any toothbrushes. Of all things to have forgotten.
That day of blank gray driving seemed to last forever—until Dave announced that they were almost there. As things turned out, they were not: there was another hour or so of a highway, off the freeway, an endless area of used-car lots, garages, cheap motels.
They were to stay in the hotel advertised as being closest to the hospital, a Hilton, which, after some confusion back and forth on this highway from hell, Dave managed to find.
Twin beds (a welcome surprise). Molly fell onto one of them, the one closest to the window. “I forgot my toothbrush,” she said just before falling asleep.
“I’ll get you another.”
“Get two! Please.”
“I’m going over to the hospital. Don’t worry if I’m not back right away.”
Molly woke from a small unhelpful nap, happy to find herself still alone. For a moment she crazily thought, If I just moved to another room, and used another name, could Dave still find me? I don’t need any more radiation.
Instead, she dialed Felicia, who asked her, “What’s it like there?”
Molly considered, looking around. “Well, just outside my window there’re some palms, sort of scruffy, and there’s a big black sign that says SUNDAY CHAMPAGNE BRUNCH, ALL YOU CAN EAT $18.95.”
“Oh. What an odd number.”
“Isn’t it.”
But then Dave’s key turned in the lock, and there he was. “I don’t know why they gave us twin beds,” he said. “I told them—”
“I’ll call you later,” Molly said to Felicia.
The hospital was a huge spread of arched and ivy-covered bright new stone, invitingly disguised as a motel. There was even a tall thin black man with a top hat out in front, greeting people, directing traffic. But once inside, in those greenish antiseptic-smelling corridors, anyone could tell that this could only be what it was—a hospital, and mostly for the severely ill.
There seemed a great many middle- to late-middle-aged men in hospital robes, in wheelchairs, or dressed in street clothes and asking directions at some desk, or standing in line. “Prostate patients,” Dave whispered too loudly. “I hope that’s something I can escape. The statistics on impotence—”
The main business of this hospital, the radiation-particle-proton therapy (all romantically subsumed under IMAGING), went on in the lower floor. In the basement, underground. Appropriately, Molly thought: a medical hell. Dangerous machines that cost fifty million dollars.
But before they went down to all that: “First I want to show
you some of the rooms,” Dave told her, pushing
UP.
“They’re really nice.”
“Why? I don’t have to stay here.”
What Dave found nice was the fact that the rooms were all two-person suites. “That way all patients get better care,” he chattered. “Less work for the nurses, see? Nice big shared bathrooms.”
“ ‘Shared,’ how horrible.”
“Jesus, Molly.”
“Shouldn’t we go down for my appointment?”
“You’re right, it’s just time.”
As they whooshed down in the elevator, Molly thought as she had before that Dave was much less compulsive than she about times of appointments, as though in some sense he felt himself in charge. Which God knows she did not.
The treatment room was larger and brighter than those for radiation at Mt. Watson, otherwise very similar: a white gurney-table, below the bright and infinitely complex machinery. Several technicians, low-key, friendly, and helpful.
And the treatment took the same amount of time.
Flick.
A fraction of a second.
“I don’t feel any different,” Molly told Dave, back in their Hilton room.
“You’re not supposed to.”
“Neither of us ever knows when the other one is kidding, do we. That’s not a good sign.”
“Oh Molly, for God’s sake, let up.”
If anything, she felt slightly worse in Alta Linda. A more pervasive nausea, an inability to eat that was almost absolute. Bathing, she regarded her naked white body, which seemed to jut sharp bones.
• • •
Dave’s elderly, invalid mother lived in Long Beach, with one of her daughters, Dave’s sister; Molly gathered that they did not get on and that Dave worried about this household. He felt that he should go to see them. “But I don’t see how I can leave you like this,” he said to Molly. “You’re not really trying to eat.”
“Yes I am. And I’ll eat just as much if you’re in Long Beach. Or as little.”
“I doubt that.”
“Please. You’re just adding guilt to my other problems.”
“Maybe a feeding tube,” he mused.
“NO.”
“If you can’t eat we’ll have to do something.”
The something that eventually was done was to put Molly into the Alta Linda Hospital, into one of those two-person suites, with bathroom, that Dave had so admired (had he even then been making this plan? Molly later suspected that he had). At the time she even agreed; she was so weakened, so demoralized by weakness, that she had no choice, she felt. And, somewhere in her enfeebled consciousness she had a dim sense that getting Dave away to Long Beach—getting herself away from Dave—would be an improvement. A step.
But that was not immediately true. The doctor in whose charge she had been left, Dr. Shepherd, was almost never there, and his brief appearances seemed hurried; he sounded harassed. He asked her, “How long have you had this anorexia?”
“I don’t have anorexia—it’s from radiation. Nausea.”
“Well—” His tone implied that one eating disorder was the same as any other. “Dr. Jacobs suggested a feeding tube,” he told her. “We could put it in right there—” He gestured at her stomach.
“NO.”
Startled—such a weak woman and so defiant, still—he hurried out.
“My mother isn’t doing very well,” Dave told her, on the
phone. “And Rachel, they just don’t get on. It’s pretty much of a mess—it may take me a couple of days to sort it out. You’ll be okay.”
“Sure. I’m really much better,” Molly lied.
“Great. I talked to Shepherd—he thought you were doing really well.”
He never looks at me, Molly did not say. He must have me confused with some other patient, some recovering anorexic.
“This is the worst place I’ve ever been,” she whispered to Felicia, over the phone. “You wouldn’t believe. Last night I rang for a sleeping pill, I really needed one, and I got it three hours later. I had a roommate, this very old Filipino lady, but they took her somewhere else. Or maybe she died. My doctor would like to get rid of me. If I’d just eat a couple of meals and go away, he thinks. This place reminds me of a women’s prison in some movie from the thirties.”
Nurses, or maids, orderlies—someone kept turning the TV on, so that despite herself Molly watched wars, bombings, artillery attacks, tanks in deserts, and natural attacks of ferocious weather, floodings and tornadoes, freezings, earthquakes and fires. At some point a doctor muttered in her direction, “Sometimes I think I hate Arabs.”