Helen (sharpest knife in the drawer, a critic’s critic; she’s been called many things in her seventy-three years) contributes little to such conversations. Her focus has narrowed, she knows what she wants; in this case, it’s the flowers—to look and look. At night, and in the afternoons when the pain clamps her hard inside its jaws, the garden follows her, a dreamscape unspooling, brighter than the wildflowers and the white-pink roses grown spindly on her own trellises; brighter too than her own walled garden, bee balm blooming now, asters on the verge, the lupine (over) with its fuzzy, blackened rattle pods that could be cracked for seeds to nick, soak, plant.
Once, she used to fertilize, divide, deadhead, mix in annuals for color. Then for a while she hired a gardener, but eventually, she let her garden go. This summer, she has rediscovered it, sitting inside its low stone walls on the green plastic chair (the cedar bench finally collapsed) or watching it through her bedroom window. No matter that it’s untended; the blooms impress her with their persistence, and the interlopers—Queen Anne’s lace, chicory, goldenrod, thistle—are unruly gifts. Night or day, she does not draw the shades in her room, but even bare, her windows are not big enough for the profusion they try to frame, nor for her pleasure, saturated, magnified (is it the morphine? not just). She’d knock the wall down if she could, let the roof go, lie beneath the sky and spread herself wide. She’d screw the whole world if she could—as in screw its petty cares and intractable truths. As in, make love to it.
She’s let it all go, at the same time that she is holding tighter, coming into meaning, into understanding. It’s better and cheaper than psychoanalysis, this
thing
she’s undergoing, she told Dossy on the phone this morning. It’s
fun
(a word she once tried to ban from her children’s vocabulary). A few things she has learned: (1) This is her home; (2) She is, when it comes right down to it, an animal; (3) Knowledge is overrated. This last means No to prognoses and timelines, No to Percy’s wife telling her that the Uh-Ohs’ tulips are fake since out of season, brought in for planning purp— (Helen cuts her off.) No to statistics about the oil spill—this many dead birds, that many contaminated shellfish beds. No to the pain charts with their bloated cartoon faces and scale of 1 to 10. No to the world she has designated the Sassy Sickos or SS: pink ribbons, Susan Love, support groups, self-help, the use of
journaling
and
collaging
as verbs.
Yes to a different kind of order: the Uh-Ohs’ garden changing stripes and colors, her own garden wilding itself. The phases of the moon—waning now, with a new moon due in a few days, on September 9. (But they’ll be gone, packed up; she has chemo in New York two days before.) Yes to the tides. All summer she has tracked them on the tide chart left by Anchor Real Estate in the mailbox. She swims each day at high tide unless thunder, lightning or (rarely) insurmountable pain keeps her inside. Even the low point of each day, late afternoons, she observes with a certain detached interest—not that she likes them, they’re the pits—but they come at the same time every day, though worse right after chemo, and it’s oddly liberating to lie in her room with only André or Jane granted access and just
give in
, she who has always been a thrasher, striver, fighter, as in the first time she got sick, when they lopped off her breasts and she put on falsies and got back to the archive a few weeks after surgery and was (twelve years passed, good ones, good enough) fine.
Now it’s in her bones. When she found out, a little over a year ago, she disbelieved, then raged, but only briefly; in her bones, she knew it to be fact. André found the best specialists, set up consultations, hauled medical books past her to his room (some years ago, they had tacitly agreed to sleep—or, in her case, not sleep—apart). At appointments in the city, Helen laid herself out, gave herself up to scans and dyes, prods and probes, but she was clear from the beginning:
I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW
. “Denial Is a River in Egypt,” she read once on a bumper sticker. She has not turned her back on treatment—she is no martyr and has no wish to die—but she approaches it like a necessary chore. How have you been feeling? asks her doctor at Sloan-Kettering. Very well, thank you, Dr. Upadhyaya. Good, good, the doctor says. How is your research going? she asks him then, or, Would you ever want to go back to India and be a doctor there? He has an attractive accent and clean, pink fingernails. He grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, where his parents own a store called Perfection House. He has three young daughters named Mira, Mina and Maya, an engineer wife. Each appointment she learns a little more.
Very well. The truth is more complicated, worse and better. Increasingly, she needs more pain meds; André makes them appear. Always thin, she is even thinner now and has to keep a sheepskin under her hips in bed. She must, she thinks, be a scientific curiosity to be able to take this much pain medication and still not fall asleep. In January, she fell on the ice and broke her arm; it healed but hangs slightly off and aches a little all the time. In her chest they have installed a port for chemo. Her wig is made from real hair; Jane and Dossy took her to get fitted for it as if for a wedding gown, at Joseph Paris Naturally, which might have been a lark—Joseph, the Toupée Titan, was stylist to Frank Sinatra and Burt Reynolds—had Helen not been a customer/client/patient/cancer ghoul. At the hospital, they inject her, hook her up, slide her into tunnels, which whir and bang. Once, she might have been curious to see her body mapped. Now she’s driftwood, a jellyfish, single pulse, all egg white slosh and take me where you will.
A pill, another; she downs them without looking. The dosing, the side effects, she leaves to André, who has risen to this role with a kind of devotion that might be slavish were it not so dignified and, she realizes, necessary (she refuses to hire a nurse, cherishing her privacy). He mixes fiber into her orange juice for her constipation and clears a path before her, removing sand spades, tennis balls, beach towels, anything that might trip her up. He brings her water, Coke, coffee, tea, more water (she has never been so thirsty). He runs interference. Over and over, people ask her: What can we do, what do you want?
What does she want? She’s done with Freud, done with poking in the bushes of the past or worrying about the future, done, even, worrying about her children—all married save for Caroline, and all employed, though none spectacularly. There’s a young man, Bernie, from the New Jersey Historical Commission, whom she still talks to on the phone every few days; he’s passionate and smart, fat and scared, half black. He adores her. She is mentoring him and helped him get a grant for his project on Florence Spearing Randolph and the Colored Women’s Clubs. She finished one entry for
The
Encyclopedia of New Jersey
this summer and has committed to two more, but she hasn’t worked on them since April. This bothers her only insofar as she is aware that it doesn’t bother her at all.
André, who turned eighty last year, takes her swimming every day. Occasionally he goes in himself; mostly he hovers on the dock. Sometimes the other women come swimming with her—Jane, Holly, Caroline on the Fourth of July. The men and boys jump in, get out; it’s always been that way. Only her father used to stay in for any length of time, and only now does Helen truly understand why: antigravity, your limbs return to you, the pain recedes. Horizons flatten, glassy green. And to be touched all over, to be touched without it hurting. She sees her father in the water sometimes, not as a vision nor even a memory, simply
there
as a tern or duck or gull is there, some distance away and apparently indifferent to her presence.
What do you want? For months after her diagnosis, she couldn’t say. It was a slog of a fall and winter, but she didn’t complain, which caused people to exclaim over how brave she was. In truth, it wasn’t bravery at all, but rather the strictest kind of necessity; she had—for the first time in her life, it seemed—no choice. Her body hurt. The house in Bernardsville was at once too big and too small, overstuffed with her parents’ and grandparents’ gold-rimmed china and dark furniture, the papers in her study endlessly disorganized. She couldn’t seem to read for long, a great frustration. Never a television watcher, she nonetheless gave the History Channel a try, only to find that it devoted entire seasons to military blunders, UFOs and the (not even sexy) history of sex.
In February an antidepressant was added to her cocktail of pills, but it was only as spring greened in New Jersey that desire landed in Helen’s lap, and it changed everything. She can pinpoint when it happened—stepping out of the car, steadying herself on the hood, looking over the lawn at the frothy yellow wall of forsythia in bloom and feeling a kind of shock, a pulse-quickening surprise. A moment before, she’d had no plans, not an idea in her bald, wigged, wiggy head. Now, she knew what she wanted: to spend the whole summer, an extended one, as summers were when she was small, on Ashaunt.
They arrived in May and have stayed through, with only a few trips back for chemo. To be here has brought her the deepest kind of happiness, of the sort she’d not known for . . . how long? Ages and ages (since Charlie was a newborn? since before her brother died?). How
lucky
she is. She thinks it all the time now. Lucky to have the sky and sea before her at any time of day or night. To have her grandchildren and children for weekends and, in July and August, entire weeks at a time—except for Caroline, who has come once. To have André, become more handsome, even though his own bout with cancer some twenty-five years ago left his face half paralyzed. To see Charlie married, this past December—married!—to a historian like Helen, lively and bright and not contrary like Charlie, the type who could have been a Brearley girl, though when Helen told her this, she laughed and said, Oh my god no, I went to public school!
To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward verse.
Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you . . .
She writes it in the margin of a newspaper; it flutters in the wind of the fan, drops to the floor. Who cares? Writing takes work, and for what? Sleep might be the thing, but still elusive no matter how overmedicated she is. A few times a day, Dossy calls. They talk, hang up. One of them thinks of something she forgot to say and calls again. “They’ll write on my gravestone, ‘She Talked on the Phone,’ ” she tells Dossy, and they decide to have an active phone line running between their graves, this despite the fact that Helen cannot, in even the most approximate way, begin to imagine what it will be like to be dead, the project so hemmed in by its own design problems (how to think of a time when you cannot think?) that one may as well bash one’s head against a concrete wall. Jane fills the bedroom with flowers in vases, and while Helen doesn’t really want them, not indoors, wilting, fouling their water, she thanks her sister and waits until she can blunder out again into the light.
Today after lunch—it’s Sunday of Labor Day weekend—Percy’s son Charles, age eight, will wander into the Red House living room and tell her fretfully that at Y2K, computers and electricity and banks and the national defense system will all stop working, and time will stop. His parents worry about him; he reverses letters and has odd rituals. Time stopping could be interesting, she’ll say. He’ll shake his head: We’re gonna die. Oh, I highly doubt it, dearie, Helen will say and pat the couch, and he’ll settle at her side. If the computer uses four numbers instead of two, he’ll say, it might be okay. Like, um, 1999, not ’99, which could be 1899 or 1999 or even 2099. Did you figure that out yourself, she’ll ask, and he’ll say yes, and they’ll talk about numbers for a while, what infinity is, what a google is, how a negative number isn’t quite a number but more like a number’s shadow (his words). He is named after his maternal grandfather, not Helen’s brother or her son. His hair, by summer’s end, is bleached to nearly white, corn silk; his blue eyes have Gaga’s almost Asian slant. The only thing wrong with this child is that he’s brilliant, Helen will think, then catch herself. Another thing she has learned, Number Four on her list (it will go in her diary, which she still manages to keep): she has wasted a great deal of energy expecting too much from herself and everybody else.
I’M HAVING THE BEST SUMMER OF MY LIFE
. In the water later that afternoon, she says it to Jane, who dives under without answering and comes up with her head tipped back, her face streaming beneath her white swim cap, and moves into breaststroke again, Helen following her, their favorite stroke. The ocean is flat calm and warm with spots of cold, a few red jellies floating—global warming, Holly claims—and there are smaller moon jellies that slip between her fingers, soft, membraned packages. They swim to the raft, stop to rest, swim to the dock, then to the raft again, avoiding the big red jellies (André calls out warnings from the dock), though Helen almost wants to get stung, the pain a zigzag, visible and numbing, the tentacles’ lashed trail. Come to dinner tonight, she asks her sister for the second time, but Jane has a houseful, everyone has a houseful. Maybe Holly can come, she tells her sister (Percy has taken the Whaler to Cuttyhunk; Will left on Friday for Dubai), but Jane says keep it small, it will be nicer, you can really talk to them.
Halfway in, Helen floats on her back, eyes shut, arms wide, palms turned toward the sky. She could do this forever except Jane is waiting, André is waiting, Charlie and Rachel are coming to dinner, and then Jane’s voice, at once muffled and amplified, reaches her, and she turns her head to let one ear out: Helen! Please!
Come in!
She flaps an arm to show she heard, then tortures her little sister by lying there some twenty seconds longer.
Get out
, André and Jane call in unison, and she rights herself and treads water as she pees, feeling her own warmth spread and dissipate. She swims to the stairs and slowly climbs, then, Jane spotting her from behind, André from above, until she reaches his outstretched arms, her open towel coat, which is when one leg gives out, and she buckles, stumbles, and they catch her, surround her in a humiliating embrace, and who are those people (blurs without her glasses) watching her lose her balance on the dock?