Don't Cry: Stories (21 page)

He wondered what kind of girl would preen at sexual praise from a homeless guy—but it was true: Marisa was supple and functional as a glove. There was no waste, nothing excessive in her words or movements, not even during sex. When she broke up with him and he tried to make her change her mind, she said, “Don’t make me feel sorry for you.” And that was that.

Then he had to sit through a three-hour class with her every week. It was Janice’s class. Two days after the breakup, they read a story by Chekhov in which a cruel woman scalds a girl’s baby to death. Janice read aloud the part where the girl is returning home

from the hospital on foot, at night, in the woods. She wanted them to notice the “soft and open quality” of the description, of the darkness and its sounds—animals, insects, the voices of men. Joseph sat across from Marisa, immersed in darkness. He was astonished that such pain could have been roused by this small alert girl who would not meet his eyes. He told himself it would pass, that he only had to ride it out. “Yours is not the worst of sorrows.” An old man in the story said that to the young girl who had lost her child; he said it to comfort her.

Janice asked them whether they could imagine such a scene, written now. The suffering girl walking in the live darkness, the vast world of creatures all around. The girl and her suffering a small thing in this mysterious, still-soft, and beautiful world. Through this description of physical life, said Janice, mystery was bigger than human feeling, and yet physical life bore up human feeling as with a compassionate hand.

Joseph slowed his pace and looked at physical life: bushes, mountains, stones. The warm sun dappling the path, a tiny red rag someone had tied to the branch of a small tree. Grasses. Bugs. He could not connect any of it with Janice’s talk about mystery or compassion. But at the time, her words had moved him. He had looked at Marisa and had known with certainty that his was not the worst of sorrows.

Two weeks later, his mother had called and said she had cancer.

“Am I walking too fast for you?” Kevin was turned around, walking backward.

“I’m just not in a hurry,” said Joseph, picking up his pace.

Kevin slowed to wait for him; the path was now wide enough for them to walk abreast.

“I’m thinking about what I’m going to do,” said Joseph, “like for a job.”

“Yeah,” said Kevin, “I know. I am, too. People think it’s going to be easy for me because of the essay. But I doubt it.”

Easier for you than for some, thought Joseph. He looked up at the tree line on a ridge above them, at the branches moving gently against the sky.

“What is it?” asked Kevin.

“When my mom was sick, I would sometimes come out of the apartment at night and watch the trees move against the sky. It made me feel better. I don’t know why.”

"I understand that,” said Kevin. And his back gave off a different kind of feeling.

Joseph’s mother and father had been divorced for eight years. His younger brother, Caleb, was in Ohio studying theater. His mother lived alone in Westchester, where she ran an upscale women’s clothing store that made money. She did not have a lover, but she had a lot of friends. She told her friends about the tumor in her breast before she told anyone in her family. When she told him, she’d known for nearly a week.

“Why?” he asked, astonished. “Why did you wait?”

“I was afraid you might cry,” she said. “I didn’t want to make my sons cry.”

God, how ridiculous was that? Ridiculous and theatrical. He hadn’t cried since he was about ten. He felt guilt for being annoyed with her, then sick-making pity.

She said that the prognosis was good, that they were doing the mastectomy just to be sure. She was going to have a reconstruction done at the same time; they would use tissue from her stomach. “I

hope you don’t think that’s grotesque,” she said. "But fifty is the new forty, and forty-three is too young to be disfigured like that.” She laughed. He said he would come to be with her. She said he didn’t have to do that, that she didn’t want him to miss school. “Don’t be silly!” he snapped. “I’m going to come.”

“1 think of Max when I hear certain songs on the radio,” said Kevin. “Songs 1 know he really likes.”

Kevin’s brother, Max, was a marine; he’d been in Iraq almost a year. “How’s he doing?” asked Joseph.

“Okay, I guess.” Kevin paused. “I’m not sure. He calls. But I’m not sure he tells us what’s really going on.”

When Joseph called his brother to talk about their mom, Caleb said, “This could not have come at a worse time. I guess stuff like this always does.”

“Are you coming to New York?” asked Joseph.

“No,” said Caleb. “She said she didn’t want me to.”

“She says that, but she doesn’t mean it; it’s obvious.”

“Joseph, I can’t. I’m playing Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross. I’m rehearsing nonstop. She’s going to be all right; she said the doctor said that. It’s awful, but breast cancer is so common now, it’s practically normal for a woman her age.”

He had to call his father several times before he got him on his cell. He was driving in his car, going somewhere with his wife, who was almost twenty years younger than Joseph’s mother. When Joseph told him, he was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Well, I never would’ve wished that on her. She was so vain about

her body, it’s going to be bad for her.” Joseph rolled his eyes, but it was true: His mother was vain. She had reason to be. Just five years ago, his friends had said, “Dude, your mom is hot,” and they were only half-joking.

“Call me anytime,” said his father. “I don’t want you to be alone through it.”

“Can you call Caleb?” asked Joseph. “Can you tell him to come? Mom told him it was okay if he didn’t, but I know she wants him to. And if something happens to her, he’s going to feel horrible.”

His father sighed. “I know how you feel, Joe. But I don’t think you can tell someone to do something like that.”

“You ought to be able to,” said Joseph. “If you’re his father.” And he hung up.

The path narrowed, but they continued to walk abreast, so close that their shoulders rubbed together. “Ruskin’s ideas are pretty ironic,” said Joseph, “considering the way he treated his wife.”

“What do you mean?”

“He refused to have sex with his wife. After courting her for years, starting when she was something like twelve. He’d written these passionate love letters to her when she was a child. Then she got old enough to marry and—forget it. Wouldn’t touch her. It went on for years. Finally, when she was nearly thirty, she said, Enough. It was the most notorious divorce trial of the time. ”

He went to see his mother a day before the operation. She met him at the train station, smiling and waving. She was wearing

tight pants and a down jacket, like a woman in her twenties might wear. They went to the store to shop for "nice ham and tomatoes”; she wanted to make sandwiches the way she’d made them on some occasion that he could not remember. She loaded the cart I with ice cream, imported cookies, sardines, artichoke hearts, paper towels, and cleansers. She got upset because the fancy-ham counter was closed, then angry because there weren’t any good tomatoes. Angrily she chose processed slices of ham and hard, pale tomatoes. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should’ve come earlier, and now it’s too late. Our night is ruined.”

“Really, it’s not.”

On the way home, they rented a comedy about a dysfunctional family and watched it while eating the sandwiches from plates on their laps. Then he put things in the dishwasher while she talked to Caleb on the upstairs phone. When he turned off the water, he could still hear her voice through the ceiling. He went into the living room and finished up the rest of the artichoke hearts.

The path opened onto a small meadow of pale grasses with a single tree standing in its middle. It was a large tree, with branches stretched in all directions; roughly half the branches were alive, with flourishing leaves and rich-colored bark, but the other half looked dead—blackened, dry, naked of bark or leaves.

“Want to hear how he explained himself?” asked Joseph. “Rnskin, that is.”

I "Sure.”

“He said, ‘It was not made to excite desire.’ Meaning his wife’s pussy. Or maybe her breasts. Or maybe just her body, period.”

She was in surgery for fourteen hours. She came home with plastic tubing attached to the wounds in her stomach and chest, tubes that functioned as drains, collecting the pus in detachable plastic bulbs. He could see the tubes under her clothes- he was aware that she took the bulbs off, emptied them of pus, put them back on. While he was with her, he was not squeamish about the tubes and bulbs— if shed asked, he would have detached, emptied, and replaced the bulbs himself. He didn’t mind the new breast made out of stomach either. He scarcely thought of it, and when he did, he was glad it was there, if it made his mom feel better. He couldn’t help feeling superior to Caleb, who obviously squirmed even to hear about it on the phone.

" 'It was not made to excite desire,’ ” repeated Kevin.

“I guess it was a little too human,” said Joseph.

“A little too old, it sounds like.”

“It amounts to the same thing,” said Joseph. “Anyway public opinion was overwhelmingly on her side. She won the case and married Ruskin’s protege, Millais. They had eight kids.”

“Something poignant about the whole situation,” said Kevin. “For both of them.”

In Westchester, it was okay But the first night he got back to Albany, he had a nightmare in which his mother’s breast was a piece of gnawed cake. He woke from the dream feeling depressed.

He didn’t think his mother was going to die. But it was weird to think that men in surgical scrubs had labored to take some of her stomach off and put it where her breast had been, to think of her sleeping with plastic drains sewn into her soft, gowned body, of

the bulbs pressing against her when she turned. In the past, they would’ve just cut the breast off and left it that way. Deeper in the past, she just would’ve died.

He ran his hand across the rough foliage growing beside them; it stirred in his wake.

“How would you describe this?” he asked.

“Why would you describe it?” replied Kevin.

"Feelings,” said Joseph. A dragonfly lighted on a wildflower and made it bob. “It would bring feelings into the story.” The dragon rose off the bobbing flower and lilted in the air.

“Feelings come from people,” said Kevin. “Not bushes. Bushes don’t have feelings.”

“I know bushes don’t have feelings.” He wasn’t actually sure that they didn’t, but he wasn’t going to say that to Kevin. “It’s the character who sees the bushes and has feelings about them.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” said Kevin. “But think of Don Watson. His stories are filled with emotion, but it comes from what the people in the story are doing, an engagement with the human world. They come from the work he does with Israeli and Palestinian writers who deal with the psychotic shit that’s going on there. Not from bushes.” Emotion was coming off Kevin again; Joseph wondered why. Probably there was no why. It was just Kevin’s nature to always be stirred and needing something to butt Up against. It was obnoxious, but even so, he respected the feeling coming off his friend, wanted to stand with it. That was his nature.

Abruptly, the path steepened. They both fell silent and began to hike in earnest.

When he returned to the university, he decided to write a story about a young man whose mother had cancer. The young man would be some kind of business executive, maybe in advertising, or an architect just starting out. He would not have time to go home and care for his mother, and his do-gooder brother would be giving him grief about it. Over the course of the story, his deeper feelings would be uncovered. 

He went to Janice’s office to discuss his story idea. He told her that his mother had cancer; he told her about his father and his brother and the way his mother had been about the ham. She listened and her face grew soft, much softer than it was in class. Her receptive silence felt to him like touch.

But when he told her that he wanted to write about his experience for his next workshop story, she spoke adamantly. “Don’t do that, Joseph,” she said. “It’s such a vulnerable time. More than you know. I’m sure no one would be deliberately cruel about your story. But it's too raw now for public discussion.” Again, he felt touched by her eyes, even the signs of age around them, the soft sagging of the lids. “I don’t think I can write about anything else,” he said.

“It’s fine to write it,” she said. “But don’t turn it in to the workshop. Please. Turn it in to me and we can discuss it privately. Workshop something old, just to keep up appearances.”

And so he workshopped something he didn’t care about and took the real story to Janice in various pieces and drafts.

They had been hiking for nearly an hour when the path forked; they argued about which way to take. Finally, they decided that both ways would come to the same end and they split up. Joseph intuitively chose the smaller trail, which quickly proved steep and jumbled with loose rock.

In the story, it was revealed that the architect who was just starting out was not merely indifferent to his mother. He was angry at her. He did not even fully believe that she had cancer. She had a history of acting out and hypochondria and had ruined his tenth birthday party by saying she couldn’t breathe, insisting that their father break up the party so that he could take her to the hospital. He was also angry at his brother, who was still living at home and didn’t have to make any sacrifices to look after her, angry at the way this brother had bought into her self-mythologizing—the myth of the beautiful woman who could’ve been an actress if she hadn’t been stunted by early marriage and children.

The trail became increasingly chaotic. There were flat sunbakefe outcrops with cool, wet fissures full of mashed pine needles. Bushes, mosses, and little trees grew out of the fissures, pushing their way out of huge rocks. Smaller, broken chunks of rock wobbled under his feet, forcing him to slow his pace; some were dry, some slippery with mud.

In real life, there were two positive lymph nodes in his mother’s body, and she needed chemo. In the story, she needed chemo, too. In real life, she lost her hair; in the story, she lost her hair, too. In the story, she screamed and cried about losing her hair. In real life, she made jokes and shopped for wigs with her friends. In the story, the architect finally came home, and was forced to confront his angry brother. In real life, Caleb came home and delighted their