More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It hurts in an unexpected way, like doing yoga for the first time in a long while and realizing you can’t bend the way you thought you could; a new soreness.
In the world of procreation and Punnett squares, our bodies were not on equal footing. I possess the dominant traits: black hair, brown eyes, skin with warm undertones. For weeks of the babies’ development, I imagined my genes looming large over his in the egg, devouring them. Something in it felt greedy. Also, powerful.
Let me tell you something: children are tickled by wrongness. Or maybe they just love knowing something you don’t.
Sometimes I dream of being a children’s book author. I can picture my byline on the glossy cover. All the kids will put their sticky hands on my name but never say it out loud. (This is okay. I find comfort in this, actually: a near-anonymous dependability.)
Truthfully, I’m not sure how to tell people my stories yet. The characters in my own family are starting to feel so opaque to me; it seems like an awful lot of effort to create new life and to get to know them, too.
When you’re texting a woman, it’s incredibly probable that you’re talking not just to her but to one or two of her closest friends as well. You need a group consensus.
When we first started dating, eventually Sam caught on to this and sent a message that went something like, “Hello, ladies.” Ladies? “Ladies?” I had replied. “Yeah, since you’re going to show this to Darlene anyway,” he joked.
My voyeuristic obsession reminds me of the allegory of the cave. Prisoners facing a wall, doomed to watch the puppet show of life play out in front of them. How different reality is from here. How stubborn we are not to see what’s lurking, right behind us.
A man and a woman walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a very old joke, and it is. It is also the start of an affair.
When my husband told me about Maggie, we were out, kidless, at a nice Indian restaurant. I should have known something was up. But the restaurant we were at was actually an all-you-can-eat buffet, so one can imagine the excitement that blinded me.
In romance movies, when you meet the person you’re supposed to be with, time parts. It has a way of happening around the two lovers. In action films, when someone dies, there is that similar slowing down. Time bends for those on the precipice.
I almost have to hand it to my imagination for the speed with which it could create a dozen vignettes: images (lives, love stories) flickering through my mind like the flame from the tea candle on the table.
The whole rest of that meal, I remember, Sam kept his gaze firmly fixed on me. You could’ve warmed my plate with the heat of his stare. It reminded me of that advice about being robbed or held up at gunpoint. You’re supposed to make as much eye contact with your villain as possible, to solidify your humanness. It was like Sam was trying to telepath to me some proof of his humanity.
A man and a different woman walk into a restaurant, and it sounds like the start of a very old joke, and it is. It is also the end of a marriage.
There was a young couple—high school—making out on the platform. They had an impressive height difference between them, and backpacks. They did not look popular, which made me hope they were happy. Don’t spend it all in one place, I telepathed to them.
The closer we got to home, the harder the questions got. But I held on to why. I thought I knew the answer to this one: he had simply met someone better. In truth, I think I had always felt a tad inferior to Sam. The lack of my why made this clear. Besides, the other questions were more fact-based, whereas why tiptoed into an emotional realm I wasn’t quite ready for. It required more personal excavation. I could be roped into the why.
I fumbled with the lock because it sticks at inconvenient times, and then I let us both in, and it is not a metaphor for anything. It’s not a metaphor, not a blur, I remember it all so crystal clear.
Coming home was like being jolted from a dream, jarred into a small and insignificant life. Tinged with embarrassment, too.
My dreams are so heavy now. When did that happen?
You’re never too old to be afraid of what you can’t see. How scary it is to be in the dark of things.
There’s a video somewhere on the internet of a raccoon who has gotten his hands on a tuft of cotton candy. Off he goes to the river—he can’t believe his luck! He begins to wash it, as is his routine, but the cotton candy disappears, slips right between his fingers without his comprehension. That’s what my dreams feel like some days. I wake up and I can’t quite say what happened to them. Wrenched from my hands; lost to the river.
What really happened: a woman walks into an examination room. And it’s cancer. There, that’ll knock ’em dead.
If I don’t go to the doctor, then we can’t know for sure if something is wrong. The not knowing I can deal with. Being in the dark is, apparently, a state I’m used to. Before I go to the specialists, it can be both biting and banal. Schrödinger’s Tumor. The referral goes into the top drawer of my desk, where I know no one will look.
My husband believed you could tell how good a day it was going to be based on how sparkly the water was. There was a definite shine then.
I’ve been trying to pick answers from the worn fabric of our lives like lint.
His whole youth was spent in a splendid puppet theater that existed solely for his entertainment. He was its lone audience member, and his mother was the one pulling the strings.
Sam’s mother likes to stick to a script. She doesn’t appreciate plot twists. (This is why she reads and rereads and rereads the Holy Bible: she already knows how everything is going to turn out.)
He doesn’t so much walk as he glides. He moves through the world with an obliviousness that I mistook for optimism.
Waiting for your name to be called in doctors’ offices is such a strange thing. You both want and do not want to hear it.
When they call my name, I stand up because I recognize the sound of it, but it has never sounded so foreign to me, so far away or so little like something I want to claim.
I find Darlene waiting, in the designated room. And I have never been more relieved to see her. This is the first time I look at my best friend and see her as someone who could really raise my kids if it came to that. A very good substitute. Better than me, even.
“Yellow, your favorite,” Lily says proudly, and her remembering this tidbit about me means more than I can say.
My husband sleeps flat on his back, a deceptive openness.
I have in my mind that finding these things out might rob them of their intimacy in some small way. I want to know everything about her, so she feels less like a secret and more like something I am let in on. Less like another door that has been closed to me.
It takes me a little while to figure it out: the perfect small revenge. Sam is somewhat meticulous about his socks. I open the top drawer of his dresser and separate each one from its mate. Mix the argyle pattern with the stripes. Slip a Taco Tuesday one between the solid black pair that is reserved for very important business meetings and funerals. I feel deranged but also good. It’ll be moderately disorienting, maybe, but he probably won’t say anything. It would be an insane thing to accuse me of doing.
I panic about how Noah’s going to describe this scene to a therapist, years later.
Sam avoids battles if he knows he’s going to lose them. “He’s used to thinking of you as the victim,” Darlene says when I try to explain this weird tension in my house. “He doesn’t like that you took control of this story.”
The body is a playground for disease.
They say the intensity of your emotions dulls with age, but the complexity of emotions increases—more mixed feelings, things that are bittersweet. For me, this has largely proven to be true, with the exception of one primal thing: fear. My fear has only grown.
In private moments, I find myself touching the lump like a worry stone, the way you might run your tongue compulsively over a toothache or think about an old lover, to see if it still hurts.
Maybe she felt that ignorance was bliss, like knowing was opening the door to something bad. That it was unlucky to poke at the beast. Some superstition in it. Like if you say its name, it will appear.
Is this what I’m doing now? Playing the story back again in a desperate attempt to understand, to hit upon some key, irreversible detail that I missed the first time around? If I play it slower, will I see it coming this time? Will it hurt any less?
Isn’t it funny—the way kids want to mimic our mundanity?)
In the days leading up to the surgery, I find myself telling the kids stories from my own life at bedtime. I’m a squirrel, storing nuts for the winter, just in case.
“Remember when…?” I begin a story that involves the kids, less a question and more a request, a plea. Please remember when.
I hate the word exam, the way that it implies my body is always failing.
At the Barnes & Noble, we are anonymous. At the Barnes & Noble, nobody cares about us. It’s the kind of place where you can be left on your own for hours.
The sad truth of it is, for the patients who show up with friends and family in tow—no matter how loving or affectionate—there will always come a day in which they pass through the doors alone. It’s a reminder that even this could feel sort of routine, rudimentary. Inconvenient.
He puts his hand absentmindedly on the small of my back, guiding me, a reflex, but for the first time ever, I feel the urge to run from his touch.
Sam waves goodbye but doesn’t come in. After he’s gone, the kids can’t wait to hand me rocks from the beach. This year, they painted them with their grandmother. Lily hands me one that says LILY in purple in her bold hand. Noah’s has eyes, like a pet rock. He says, “To keep you company the next time we’re gone.”
