Things You Should Know(58)

“What are you, a doctor? Suddenly you know everything about cancer, about menopause, about everything?”

In the morning her hair is falling out. It is all over the pillow, all over the shower floor.

“Your hair’s not really falling out,” Enid says when we meet them for dinner. Enid reaches and touches her hair, sweeps her hand through it, as if to be comforting. She ends up with a handful of hair; she has pulled my wife’s hair out. She tries to put it back, she furiously pats it back in place.

“Forget that I was worried about them shaving my pubic hair, how ’bout it all just went down the drain.”

She looks like a rat, like something that’s been chewed on and spit out, like something that someone tried to electrocute and failed. In four days she is eighty percent bald.

She stands before me naked. “Document me.”

I take pictures. I take the film to one of those special stores that has a sign in the window—we don’t censor.

I give her a baseball cap to wear to work. Every day she goes to work, she will not miss a day, no matter what.

I, on the other hand, can’t work. Since this happened, my work has been nonexistent. I spend my day as the holder of the feelings, the keeper of sensation.

“It’s not my fault,” she says. “What the hell do you do all day while I’m at the hospital?”

Recuperate.

She wears the baseball cap for a week and then takes a razor, shaves the few scraggly hairs that remain, and goes to work bald, without a hat, without a wig—starkers.

There’s something both admirable and aggressive about her baldness, as if she’s saying to everyone—I have cancer and you have to deal with it.

“How do you feel?” I ask at night when she comes home from the hospital.

“I feel nothing.”

“How can you feel nothing?”

“I am made of steel and wood,” she says happily.

As we’re falling asleep she tells me a story. “It’s true, it happened as I was walking to the hospital. I accidentally bumped into someone on the sidewalk. Excuse me, I said and continued on. He ran after me, ‘Excuse me, boy. Excuse me, boy. You knocked my comb out of my hand and I want you to go back and pick it up.’ I turned around—we bumped into each other, I said excuse me, and that will have to suffice. ‘You knocked it out of my hand on purpose, white boy.’ I said, I am not a boy. ‘Then what are you—Cancer Man? Or are you just a bitch? A bald fucking bitch.’ I wheeled around and chased him. You fucking crazy ass, I screamed. You fucking crazy ass. I screamed it about four times. He’s lucky I didn’t fucking kill him,” she says.

I am thinking she’s lost her mind. I’m thinking she’s lucky he didn’t kill her.

She stands up on the bed—naked. She strikes a pose like a body builder. “Cancer Man,” she says, flexing her muscles, creating a new superhero. “Cancer Man!”

Luckily she has good insurance. The bill for the surgery comes—it’s itemized. They charge per part removed. Ovary $7,000, appendix $5,000, the total is $72,000 dollars. “It’s all in a day’s work,” she says.

We are lying in bed. I am lying next to her, reading the paper.

“I want to go to a desert island, alone. I don’t want to come back until this is finished,” she says.

“You are on a desert island, but unfortunately you have taken me with you.”

She looks at me. “It will never be finished—do you know that? I’m not going to have children and I’m going to die.”

“Do you really think you’re going to die?”

“Yes.”

I reach for her.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t go looking for trouble.”

“I wasn’t. I was trying to be loving.”

“I don’t feel loving,” she says. “I don’t feel physically bonded to anyone right now, including myself.”

“You’re pushing me away.”

“I’m recovering,” she says.

“It’s been eighteen weeks.”

Her blood counts are low. Every night for five nights, I inject her with Nupagen to increase the white blood cells. She teaches me how to prepare the injection, how to push the needle into the muscle of her leg. Every time I inject her, I apologize.

“For what?” she asks.

“Hurting you.”

“Forget it,” she says, disposing of the needle.

“Could I have a hug?” I ask.

She glares at me. “Why do you persist? Why do you keep asking me for things I can’t do, things I can’t give?”

“A hug?”

“I can’t give you one.”