One True Thing Read online

  I don’t know whether my father knew I knew. Our relationship underwent a change after that. I was less supplicant, more judge, and I was a person who, when called upon to judge, always judged harshly. A girl once dropped out of our creative writing seminar at Harvard because we had to read aloud and then talk about one another’s work, and after four sessions she could not bear, she told the instructor, to hear what I would do to her stories, based on what I had done to others. I was unrepentant when the instructor told me this. “That’s her problem, isn’t it?” I said.

  I judged my father just that harshly, or maybe more so because I’d imagined he had adjudged me wanting for so long and in so many ways. But nothing seemed to have changed between my parents, then or ever. And it was much later that I made the connection between what had happened and my enduring love affair with Jonathan, in which I wanted and hated him in relatively equal parts. When we went back to Cambridge after that Christmas vacation, Jonathan was amazed to discover the things I had now decided to do when we were in bed together. And not just in bed—I once slid my hand into his lap and inside his fly during an art history lecture, an explication of the Arnolfini wedding portrait, those two whey-faced people in elaborate robes preparing for a tedious eternity together. It is amazing to me now how far I was willing to go to mimic my father. It would make an interesting case for any psychiatrist.

  We never spoke of what had happened, my father and I. The closest we ever got was when I came home six months later for summer vacation. I told my father of an encounter I had had with a professor in the Harvard graduate English department, who was also a novelist of some note, after I sent him some stories of mine. He had not liked the stories, I could tell by his careful and rather empty comments, although he had told me he had never seen brown eyes quite as dark as mine—“really, truly black!” he fake-marveled. I knew after only a year at school that this was clumsy code for “Be friendly and I’ll take you to dinner and to bed.”

  I told my father of how, looking at my name at the top of each page, he had said, “There was a George Gulden in my grad school group. He was a smart guy but kind of a pain in the ass. He just dropped off the face of the earth after he got his degree.”

  We both knew what that remark was code for, my father and I, as we sat eating vegetable lasagna and Caesar salad, but he did not flinch and I told the story casually. My mother turned away, turned to the stove, and Jeff and Brian gaped. My father smiled thinly and said, “He’s a very poor writer, and he was a very poor doctoral candidate. Did he like your stories?”

  I didn’t answer, and my father smiled again, knowing what that was code for. I remembered I had answered the writer in my mind, had imagined saying, with hauteur, turning away his offer of another beer, “He’s my father. And you’re an asshole.” I imagined myself stalking out and leaving my manuscript on the table. Instead I had ducked my head and said nothing, took my stories and walked home in a driving rain, so that the manila envelope was the consistency of cereal by the time I got inside my dorm room. Jon was waiting on the bed in his underwear, reading a biography of Jefferson. “Did you sleep with him?” he asked. “You are a pig, Jonathan,” I said, dumping my ruined manuscript in the basket. “Yeah, but I’m your pig,” he said, crooking his finger at me, and over I went again.

  Hospitals are a little like the beach. The next wave comes in, and the footprints of your pain and suffering, your delivery and recovery, are obliterated; the sheets are changed. But transient as it all is, if I went to Montgomery Medical Center today it would be a kind of homecoming, although one of the small desires of my life is that I never ever see the place again, its awkward red-brick bulk, its tiered parking garage and automatic double doors.

  For four months it was our sometime world, where my mother saw her doctor and had what she still preferred to call her treatments. Its floors were covered with gray linoleum speckled with white and black so aggressively ordinary as to be offensive; its intercom interruptions and the glass-fronted cabinets filled with pointed things became the backdrop of our life together.

  Off one of the corridors that fanned out from the lobby we waited in molded plastic chairs to be ushered into a cubicle where the closest thing my mother had to salvation, before morphine became her saving grace, could flow slowly into her veins and try to kill off the cells run amok. They’d wanted her to check herself into the hospital for the chemotherapy but she’d refused, and so I brought her every three weeks and we spent the day amid the sharp smells and clamor of the outpatient unit.

  They’d made it pretty, the chemo cubicle, with flowered wallpaper and a bright blue leatherette recliner. Even the chemicals were somehow decorative, the crystalline bags glimmering silver in the overhead light of the windowless room. It took almost the whole day to get it all in, drop by drop by God-please-let-it-work drop.

  Oh yes, I prayed in that cubicle and in the hallway outside and in the cafeteria, where I went as much to shake off the feeling of being buried alive that I felt in that tiny room as because I really wanted another cup of coffee. But I prayed to myself, without form, only inchoate feelings, one word: please, please, please, please, please.

  My mother made me wait outside when she was examined by her doctor. She was a rather fierce-looking woman, Dr. Cohn, with the strong and handsome face that you see on old coins. She wore simple sheath dresses of slate blue or taupe or dull prints, as though they were bought mainly because they were unobtrusive beneath a white coat. I remember how firm her handshake was, so definite, like everything else about her. I thought she was rather cold, but since then, since I’ve gotten to know more oncologists, I realize that she only had the slight wariness that so many have, faced as they are so often with certain failure.

  Certainly Dr. Cohn was kind to my mother. She always came downstairs to visit during her chemotherapy, took her hand, and talked with her quietly about her symptoms as the chemicals did their methodical drip-drip dance.

  “There’s platinum in this stuff, Ellen,” my mother said, smiling, during the second round, “just like in my wedding ring. That’s why my mouth tastes like tin.”

  “Is it working?” I said.

  “I can’t say how well it’s working yet,” Dr. Cohn said. “I’ll be doing some tests and I’d like to hear how well you felt, Kate, after the first time.”

  “She threw up the entire next day. Everything. Every bit of food she ate. And when that was gone she had the dry heaves. Plus her hair is starting to come out all over her pillow.”

  Dr. Cohn’s smile was so faint that it was little more than a pucker at the corners of her mouth. “Those aren’t unexpected side effects. But I’d like to hear from Kate about how she’s feeling.”

  “It’s not too bad. I do hate the tinny taste. I’m losing weight, although I never thought I’d see that as a problem. And my hair looks pretty awful.” My mother ran her fingers through her thinning red curls.

  “Oh, come on, Mama. You must have thrown up ten times the last time.”

  “Any pain?” said Dr. Cohn.

  “Nothing to speak of,” said my mother.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Ellen,” said my mother.

  When Dr. Cohn left I followed her out into the hallway. Her stride was long, and I had to hustle to catch up with her.

  “Doctor, I really feel at a loss here. I don’t know enough about what they found during her hospital stays. I don’t know enough about her prognosis, about what to expect. I really need ten or fifteen minutes of your time.”

  She put a hand beneath my elbow. “Come,” she said, and walked me back down the hall.

  “Privately,” I added.

  “I won’t do that,” she said evenly. “This is your mother’s illness. She deserves to be part of any discussions we have about it.” She pushed open the door and walked over to the cubicle.

  “Kate,” she said, and my mother opened her eyes and smiled. “Ellen has some questions about your condition and I wonder whether you’d
like me to answer them now or to see you both upstairs later?”

  “What kind of questions?” my mother said, and for a moment I could not answer.

  “About where the cancer started. About whether it’s spreading. About what comes next.”

  My mother looked into Dr. Cohn’s eyes and not mine as she answered. She recited like a child called to give an answer in class. “The scan showed it was in the liver. And maybe in the ovaries, too, although they can’t find that on the scans. There’s something in the blood test that makes them think maybe the ovaries are involved. The doctor in the city who looked at the pictures and the slides and gave us a second opinion said that’s highly unusual but not unheard of. Do I have it right so far?”

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Cohn.

  “What else, Ellen?” my mother asked.

  “I just feel as if I need to be filled in.”

  “On what?”

  I knew what I would have said if the doctor and I had been in the hallway together. I would have said: how long? I would have asked: how bad? I would have wanted a blow-by-blow of disintegration, the road to death. But I could not ask the questions with my mother there. I suspected she already knew the answers, that she’d wanted the same ones I did, and wanted to keep them to herself.

  “That’s all,” I said. “I’m going down to the cafeteria for coffee.” Dr. Cohn followed me out.

  “I’m the kind of person who likes to know things,” I said.

  “So is your mother,” the doctor said. “Why don’t you ask her about some of them?”

  Suddenly I stopped and snapped my fingers. “I just thought of something,” I said. “My mother’s parents owned a dry-cleaning shop. Do you think the chemicals there could have caused this?”

  “Your father asked the same thing,” Dr. Cohn said.

  “And?”

  “And your mother said ‘What does it matter now?’”

  The only time I saw my mother break down during those weeks was when we were passing through the lobby just as a woman was rising from a wheelchair at the automatic doors, turning to take a sleeping newborn from the arms of a nurse to carry it out to a waiting car. The baby’s hand was splayed on the swaddling, a pink star, and my mother’s mouth began to work as she stood and watched mother and child move through the doors. “Ah,” she breathed, and she pressed a tissue to her face.

  Within weeks she knew the names of all the nurses, their family backgrounds, the ages of their children. As she waited they would smile and say her name: Good morning, Kate, how are you? Just a moment more and we’ll get you in. And naturally, the county being what it was, they knew us. One of them had a son who had gone to school with my brother Jeff. Another had a daughter on scholarship at Langhorne. “She says your father is one of the best professors there,” she said. “She says when you get an A from him it really means something.”

  “She is absolutely right,” my mother said.

  “I remember when you won the essay contest,” said a nurse named Gina as she ran a needle into the catheter the doctors had implanted just above my mother’s heart so that the nurses wouldn’t have to hunt around for veins. “The Port-A-Cath will be a lifesaver later,” she’d said to me. “For the morphine.”

  “The morphine?” I’d asked.

  “Well,” she’d said, looking down at a tray of instruments, “maybe not.”

  Usually the two of us were alone, but one morning, I remember, there was an elderly woman who described in detail her hip replacement and the subsequent convalescence which had cast a long shadow over her life. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she asked my mother why she was there. “I need a chest X ray for a life-insurance policy,” my mother replied.

  “If I had told her the truth, I would have been there forever,” my mother said after her treatment was done that day.

  The woman could not have been from Langhorne, or she would have known about my mother’s illness. Everyone in town did. They were all a little too bright, a little too chatty when she went to Phelps’s hardware or the supermarket. “How nice that Ellen’s home,” they said, but no one asked what I was doing there, because they already knew. “How well you look, Kate,” they lied. Lord, I thought, what a shock it would be if any of them ever had the guts to lean across a counter and say, “How’s the cancer?” But despite the scarves and hats my mother began to wear over the ruin of her pretty curls, despite how thin she became, I never heard the word “cancer,” not ever, until after the cancer was gone.

  The only person who used the word was Mrs. Forburg, my senior English teacher. One day soon after I came home I received a note in the mail addressed to me in her angular vertical script. It was short and straightforward, just as she was. “Ellen dear,” she wrote, “I think of you fondly and often, not only because of your mother’s illness but because of your own responsibilities. Would you come to dinner soon? My own mother died of cancer when I was young and perhaps we could be of help to each other. All love, Brenda Forburg.”

  I tucked it in a corner of my desk blotter and took it out from time to time to call. But there never seemed to be the time.

  For despite the chemotherapy, and the days afterward when I could hear her heaving pitiably in the master bathroom, despite the weekly blood tests and exams, I suspect that my mother would have said that those were wonderful and full months for her. She and her daughter finally had the relationship she had always imagined would accompany the canopy she had made for the four-poster bed in the attic bedroom, the scrapbooks she kept of report cards and literary magazine poems, the hours she spent on birthday parties and Care packages to college and camp.

  We went to the movies, took a day trip to the beach, ate lunch a few times at little restaurants whose ads she had clipped from magazines and newspapers. She got tired very easily, and once or twice the way she breathed made me frightened. But she refused to be housebound, or to let me be.

  “What exactly are you doing all day?” Jules asked one night when she called to regale me with the stupidity and arrogance of the Yale man who had my former job.

  “I’m being a girlfriend,” I said.

  “Picking over the perfidy of men?”

  “Shopping,” I replied.

  I suppose today that I should say that those months were wonderful for me, too, a chance to make amends for a lifetime of taking for granted. The truth is that while it was happening I tolerated it, and when I thought about it I hated it all. In the beginning I thought it was because of all that I was missing, because of the life just an hour away that was passing me by, in the city where you could become yesterday’s girl in a weekend.

  But it was more complicated than that, and simpler, too. As my mother guided me to the right sort of wax for the cherry bow-front chest or sent me out to buy cheese or berries, I felt as though I was sinking beneath the weight of a life I had always viewed with something even more dismissive than contempt, a life I had viewed as though it were a feature in National Geographic, the anachronistic traditions of a distant tribe.

  It was a world without men, too, with my brothers gone away and my father scarcely there, letting my mother take care of her own disintegration as she’d taken care of her house, her children, the life which she had devoted to him.

  “I know what you’re saying,” I told Jules. “I know someday I’ll be able to walk away from this. But what if I just get back into it again? What if I marry Jon and it turns out that what he really expects is a suburban matron who knits sweaters for his children?”

  “What Jon will want in his first wife is the kind of woman who runs charity luncheons and hires good staff. His second wife will be the trophy wife, the one who designs jewelry or something and wears leather pants.”

  “You’ve just reduced three lives to a set of clichés,” I said. “And one of them is mine.”

  “True clichés, El. And I’m betting that one of them won’t be yours. I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on Jon, but how often has he called you? How often
has he written? When will he come to visit? Your mother needs you and you need him and he’s nowhere to be found.”

  Jules was right; Jon had called only twice since I had come home. But I did not care much. The Ellen Jon knew was the other Ellen, the one who always shone with the luster of success. The Ellen who sat in the hospital corridor with Kate Gulden was inevitably a loser; after all her triumphs, this endeavor was doomed to failure.

  One afternoon in early October we went to the big mall outside of town and across the racks at one store my mother saw a woman who had once been part of the group that decorated the village green for holidays—the Minnies, they called themselves, after the childless Mrs. Langhorne.

  “Oh, Ellen, do you remember Sheila Fenner? She was in the Minnies when you were in high school.”

  “And I miss it,” said Mrs. Fenner. “But I’m a working woman now, and there’s no time for anything but the grandkids and Bill’s dinner, and even that comes out of the microwave. But look at you, Kate, you’re a shadow. When did you lose so much weight? You’re a bone.”

  “Oh, you know,” said my mother shrugging. “Running around. Keeping up with Ellen.”

  “Weight Watchers?” said Mrs. Fenner archly.

  My mother looked at me sideways. She knew what I would say if left to my own devices: “No, Mrs. Fenner, it’s the chemotherapy plan. A delicious shake for breakfast, one for lunch, an IV in your chest at teatime, and before you know it you weigh ninety pounds.”

  “No,” said my mother, “I hate those plans. The food is just awful.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you,” Mrs. Fenner said. “And Ellen. Jill said she saw your byline in a magazine a while ago. That must be terribly exciting.” I smiled. “Jill’s husband is at Cornell Medical School. I wish he’d finish up so they could get out of the city. I just worry terribly. Where do you live?”

  “Greenwich Village,” said my mother.

  “Lovely. And how are the Minnies?” added Mrs. Fenner, in the slightly condescending way we speak of the lives whose usefulness we have outlived.