Florence Gordon (22 page)

The magnets, in her case, would be trained on the brain. Maybe when she came out of this thing she’d be a neoconservative.

Finally the gentle technician—his name tag said
HUDSON
—showed her into the room, directed her to lie down on a sort of table covered by the usual paper sheet, and asked her what she’d like to listen to. “Classical? Light jazz? Elton John?”

“Do you have any hip-hop?” she said, just to mess with him, and when he hesitated, she said, “Classical will be fine.”

He left the room and, shortly afterward, her table went sliding into the narrow tube of the MRI machine. She felt like a corpse on a TV show, lying on a shelf in a morgue. They slide you out, because the detectives have some hunch they want to check, and then they slide you back in again.

She was inside the drawer. It was a very tight space.

She could see that this would be distressing if you were claustrophobic, but she wasn’t.

A tremendous banging started up, as if insane people with hammers had taken over the hospital. Florence began to see that if you had even a slight touch of claustrophobia, this could be very uncomfortable.

The banging kept up mercilessly, and after a while she started to get used to it, and then it stopped, and then another noise took its place, even louder and more noxious—it sounded like the grinding noise of an airplane that was about to crash.

She thought of an old friend of hers, Joanna, who hated elevators. If Joanna ever had to have an MRI, how would she get through it?

She could see how this could get to you if you even knew someone who was claustrophobic.

She was confined so tightly in this small space that, rather than a corpse, she began to think of herself as a mummy.

That’s probably a bad idea. Don’t think of yourself as a mummy, tightly bound—

Several of her friends had become serious meditators over the years, and had become proselytizers for the practice, claiming that it could cure high blood pressure, insomnia, problems of concentration, and more or less everything else. Florence’s attitude toward it had always been a mix of curiosity and scorn, but now she wished that she had taken it up.

How on earth had they figured out they could use jumbo-size magnets to peer into your brain? Magnets that enabled doctors to see what was going on inside your head—it didn’t even make sense. On the other hand, how had they figured anything out? How had they invented the telephone? How had they invented the camera?

Finally the banging stopped, and the table moved out again. Hudson took her arm and helped her off the pad, and she felt a childish wish for approval. She wanted him to say something like, “We monitor your vital signs in there, and I’ve never seen anybody remain so calm.” She was a seventy-five-year-old woman, and she wanted a word of approval from this child.

But one of the fine things about life is the difference between what goes on inside you and what you show to the world. After he took her arm, she withdrew it, putting on an air of irritation that she didn’t actually feel. She valued his kindness, but she was damned if she was going to let anybody treat her like an invalid.

She went to the locker room and put her clothes back on. Young Hudson was waiting for her in the hall. He reached out to take her arm again and then stopped himself, which made her like him all the more.

“That thing can shake a person up.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Do you have anybody with you?”

“No. Just me.”

“Anybody you can call? Anybody who can take you home?”

She thought about it. Any one of a number of her old friends would have been happy to pick her up.

There was Vanessa, of course—but no. Vanessa was too tuned in to Florence’s feelings. Vanessa would feel all of Florence’s anxieties, but without Florence’s ability to suppress them, and Florence didn’t want to put her friend through that. There was Cassie—but Cassie had written two books about the American health-care system, and she’d want to know the details of what Florence was going through, and Florence didn’t want to talk about the details now. There was Ruby, but Ruby had been throwing herself into solidarity work with women in Egypt, and although Florence admired the headlong way in which Ruby had pursued her political passions, she didn’t want to listen to news about Egypt this afternoon.

The problem with Florence’s friends was that they were all as intense as she was, and she couldn’t deal with that kind of intensity right now. She needed someone who would just let her be.

The only person she seriously considered calling was her granddaughter. She had no idea why. It wasn’t as if Emily were that impressive. She was all too obviously a member of her generation, with one eye on the world and one eye on her fucking smartphone. Emily had a lot going for her, but she also had a lot going against her, and there was no reason to think that her promise would win out over the impairments she’d suffered as a result of having been born in a certain time and place.

“Nope,” Florence said. “I can get home on my own. There’s no reason to dramatize things.”

He wouldn’t let it go, though.

“What’ll it cost you if you ask somebody to help you out?”

“Mind your own business, young man,” she said, in a tone that she hoped sounded at least somewhat playful.

“Lone wolf, are you?” he said. “Well, all right. Your life.”

“Indeed it is,” she said, and instantly regretted the fusty “indeed.”

The young man turned back to the unit, smiling and shaking his head.

On Friday, Florence’s doctor called. This time it wasn’t his secretary, calling on his behalf; this time it was Noah himself.

“So what’s up?” she said.

She tried to make her voice steely and ready for anything, in the hope that this would help her feel steely and ready for anything.

“Got your test results. Still nothing definitive. But you should come in, so we can talk about our next few moves.”

“Can’t we just talk on the phone, Noah?”

“I want to see you. I want to get your blood pressure, take some blood, maybe tweak your meds a little bit.”

She didn’t believe this. He’d taken blood a few months ago, and the only medication she took hadn’t needed “tweaking” in years. She knew that he had bad news to give her and that he didn’t want to give it over the phone. But finally she acquiesced to the fiction that he wanted to see her for reasons that were more routine.

She walked to Noah’s office. It was an unseasonably chilly day in the middle of August; a thin, ungenerous rain kept spritzing from the sky. It was a perfect day to stay home and read and write. But here she was.

Now that her ankle was better, she was more aware than ever that there was something wrong with her left foot. She wasn’t sure it was anything that anyone would notice, but when she was walking, it was as if her left foot didn’t want to come along.

When she got to his office, she wasn’t asked to wait in an examining room. This was a first. She was shown into his office, where he was sitting behind his desk.

“I’ve been looking over your results,” he said.

He seemed as matter-of-fact as ever, and she had a little flare of hope. Maybe he asked me here because he likes to give good news in person.

“There are a lot of things we can eliminate at this point,” he said.

“Hangnails?” she said. “Hangovers?”

“Yes. That’s right. It’s not a hangover. We can rule that out.”

“I’m so relieved.”

“Seriously. It isn’t a nerve problem. We can be pretty sure of that. And it isn’t MS. MS can be pretty bad. And I don’t see anything that makes me wonder if you had a stroke.”

She imagined him patiently, matter-of-factly eliminating a thousand things, and finally, at midnight, telling her she had a brain tumor and would be dead by dawn.

“So what are the possibilities?”

“There are still a lot of possibilities, Florence.”

“What are the probabilities.”

“Even there, I’m not sure I’d put it that way. When you’re a doctor, you don’t want to shotgun it; you want to ballpark it, so to speak.”

“Noah.”

“I just don’t want you to think—”

Her dignity had always been her most effective tool. She drew herself up in her chair and, with what she hoped was a tone of starchy imperiousness, said, “Noah. I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for all this beating around the bush. You have to be direct with me.”

She consciously rejected the phrase “I need you to be direct with me,” a phrase that, to her mind, would have been both groveling and manipulative. Better to demand than to plead.

“We still can’t be sure of anything,” Noah said. “We’ll need to do a lot more tests. And it still might turn out to be something entirely transitory and benign. But right now the most likely thing we’re looking at is ALS.”

She took a moment to try to absorb this.

She was struck by how odd it was that she hadn’t thought of the possibility before. But then again, she hadn’t thought of anything before. She’d assumed that whatever she had was trivial. It was as if she thought she’d been taking these tests as a sort of masquerade. It was as if she’d retained her twelve-year-old’s belief that she and she alone would never die.

“What are you thinking?” he said.

“I’m thinking about a writer named Tony Judt. He was diagnosed a year ago and he’s still going strong.”

Tony Judt: the historian who, universally considered an arrogant pain in the ass during his healthy years, had become an inspiration to everyone who knew of him after he was diagnosed with ALS. Unable during recent years to press his fingers down on a keyboard or hold a pen, he was said to be dictating two books, the first a polemic in favor of social democracy, the second a collection of autobiographical sketches. By dint of sheer willpower and unstinting hard work he’d turned himself into a symbol, a reminder that if you have enough courage you can find a way to triumph, spiritually speaking, over anything.

“I’m almost looking forward to it,” she said. “Wasn’t it Lenin who said that a spell in prison is indispensable to an intellectual career? A little bout of ALS is probably the best thing that could happen to me.”

“That’s the spirit. But don’t get your hopes too high. It may turn out not to be ALS after all.”

They talked about the further tests she’d have to take, and then he stood up.

“You all right to get home? Anybody you want to call?”

What the hell was this? All of a sudden everybody was acting as if she couldn’t make her way home without
calling
someone. She lived six blocks away.

“Oh, please, Noah. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

He led her toward the door, and they awkwardly paused there. Then she reached for the knob and turned it.

She could feel how relieved he was—at least she thought she could feel it: how relieved he was to be getting rid of her without having to hug her.

If she had seemed to need comforting, he would have tried to comfort her, but he must have been glad that she didn’t.

After she left the office, she reflected that if she did have ALS, her life from here on in was going to consist of one performance after another. She was determined to play the role of the brave woman. However terrified she might feel, she was determined not to let anyone see it. I’ll make them forget Tony Judt, those fuckers, she thought, though she wasn’t sure who she was referring to.

If she did turn out to have the disease, the conversation in Noah’s office would turn out to have been the first such performance, and she concluded with satisfaction that she could give herself a passing grade.

At home she went online, went to feministing.com, logged in to the Comments section, and started vigorously correcting the errors of the young. For a while she felt alive—not just alive, but unconquerable.

But after half an hour or so, she felt tired. She lay on her couch and fell asleep, woke at midnight, and couldn’t get to sleep again.

She tried hard not to think about ALS. There would be time to think about it later, if this was what her affliction turned out to be. She had a conference to attend the next day—the symposium at NYU on the women’s movement, which was going to include a tribute to her from Martha Nussbaum—and she wanted to make a good showing. She wanted to sail through it with the same aplomb that she had summoned in her doctor’s office. She wanted to comport herself in such a way that no one would suspect that anything was wrong. But it would have been easier if she could have gotten back to sleep.

At two in the morning she’d felt jittery and overstimulated, but by daybreak she felt benumbed. Not the best frame of mind in which to attend an event at which she needed to have her wits about her.

Her buzzer sounded and she wondered what fresh nuisance this could be. She pressed her intercom and asked who was there. It was her granddaughter.

She buzzed her in. As she waited, she was surprised by how happy it made her to know that Emily was here. But she was damned if she was going to let Emily see that.

One of the things that Emily had discovered about herself in the last year was that she might not be as stable as she’d thought she was. In high school she had watched friends and acquaintances go through theatrical breakdowns—because of drugs, because of homesickness, because of heartbreak—and she had always “been there” for them. She was the person you called if your drug experience went bad. She was the person you went to for advice, because she was the only person who didn’t give any: she would listen and ask questions, and from your answers you’d discover what you wanted to do. She was the rock in other people’s lives, and she’d always enjoyed being the rock in other people’s lives.

At Oberlin last fall, once she’d started to feel sure that it wasn’t the right place for her, she was surprised by how quickly she went from unhappiness to misery. She knew her parents would have been happier if she’d stuck it out for the full year and then switched schools in an orderly fashion, without falling a semester behind, but she’d seen two girls in her hall come apart completely during her first year, and she had no reason to believe that she was any stronger than they were.