The Potty Mouth at the Table (22 page)

“You’re hilarious,” I argued.

“Name one thing I said that was funny,” she challenged me.

I cleared my throat and launched into my best Mom voice, complete with a thick Brooklyn accent. “ ‘So I went for my first iPad class today, and there were ten people in the room. I was smarter than nine of them.’ ”

My mother waited for me to finish the joke.

“That’s not funny!” she finally said. “They were all touching their screens, making them filthy, like little animals. Your father bought me a special pencil that I use. Why would you dirty your screen if you could just use a magic pencil? That’s not funny. That’s using your head!”

I launched into exhibit B, my second impression.

“ ‘So I said to my friend Judy, “Here, this is the stupidest book I’ve ever read. You’ll love it,” ’ ” I finished.

Again, my mother paused.

“Oh,” she said. “That James Patterson book. You know,
he is my favorite author. But that book stunk. It was terrible. And you know what? She loved it! Did I ever tell you Judy has a tattoo?”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Every time you say her name.”

“You know,” my mother said, pausing, “to think that I was so excited when you were born. When, in fact, I should have looked at you and said to myself, ‘This is the one. This is the one that’s going to kill me,’ ” my mother said. “Because I would have been right!”

“Well, if you’re so unhappy with me, who would you trade me for?” I challenged her. “Any daughter in the world: who would you trade me for?”

She giggled a little bit. “You know,” she said. “You know.”

Now it was my turn to pause.

“Linda? You’d trade me for my sister Linda?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“No,” I corrected her. “No. You’re
trading
me, not eliminating me. You have to trade me for someone else. You can’t just cancel me out.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because eliminating is fine, and I don’t know what difference it makes.”

“It makes a difference!” I yelled. “You can’t trade me for a daughter you already have!”

“Maybe I can have two Lindas,” she suggested. “Linda twins.”

“Mom, pick one of your friends’ daughters. Which one would you rather have instead if me?” I insisted.

“Ooooooh,” she said, thinking. “I know! I know! Debbie, my friend Erna’s daughter—I’d rather have her.”

“Why?” I asked calmly.

“Because she takes Erna out to lunch all the time and even bought her carpet,” my mother explained.

“I thought Erna lived in a studio apartment,” I said.

“Yeah. So?” my mother replied.

“That’s like buying someone a bath mat,” I shot back. “Your house is five thousand square feet. I’m not buying five thousand square feet of carpet.”

“Maybe that’s why I’d rather have Debbie,” she said smugly. “And maybe that’s why I’m not talking to you anymore.”

“Doesn’t Judy have a daughter?” I asked.

“Judy with the tattoo?” she answered. “I don’t know.”

“All right, fine,” I replied quickly. “So how do we work this new arrangement, what’s the plan? Do we get a proxy to be our communication surrogate, or are you calling for a complete blackout?”

“A blackout,” my mother decided.

“Even when I visit?” I asked. “The blackout is in effect when I come home, too? You’re just not going to talk to me?”

“Yeah,” my mother answered.

“Wow, I had this dream once!” I exclaimed excitedly. “So I say something to you, and you just stay quiet?”

“Yeah,” my mother confirmed.

“Can we practice now?” I asked.

Silence.

“Entitlements,” I whispered.

I heard her take a breath.

“Health care for everyone,” I said a little louder.

She exhaled.

“Obama!” I said in a full voice.

“That’s enough!” she cried.

“I am so wearing my Arizonans for Obama T-shirt when I get off the plane!” I exclaimed in joy, and I couldn’t wait to tell my other sister, Lisa. “I bet Lisa’s going to start writing about you, too!”

“Whatever,” my mother replied. “I’ll trade for three Lindas.”

“So when does the blackout start?” I asked. “How will I know that you’ve started not talking to me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to think about it.”

“All right,” I said. “Will you call me when it starts?”

“Sure,” my mother agreed.

“Because I don’t want to miss it,” I added. “I want you to tell me when you’ve stopped speaking to me.”

“Okay, I’ll call you,” she confirmed. “Maybe Sunday.”

“Sunday’s good,” I agreed. “I’ll be here when you call.”

“So I’ll talk to you then to stop talking?” she asked.

“Yep,” I nodded. “I’ll talk to you then.”

“Talk to you soon about not talking,” my mother said.

“All right, Mom,” I said, “we’ll talk then.”

A
pack of werewolves in human form are gathered beneath a tree, circling the torn and bleeding carcass of a man they have all fed from. An older woman, her face drawn and sunken like a rotting apple, addresses another man, wounded and bleeding, and insists he feed from the corpse, too.

“Wait—” my friend Kartz says as she freezes the frame with the remote. “Do you care if I rewind that?”

We are lying on Kartz’s bed with her standard poodle, Massimo, stretched out between us.

“Uh-uh,” I reply, shaking my head. I don’t care, just as I didn’t care the time before that, or the time before that, or the time before that. We’ve been rewinding a lot. An episode of
True Blood
is only an hour long, but it’s taken us at least that long to get halfway through the show.

“Are you going to put this in the book?” she asks me as she rewinds it too far before she hits play and we end up watching something we just watched the last time she rewound it.

“Probably,” I admit, and with perfect timing, Massimo kicks me to make me give him more room. I scoot over a little bit.

W
e were at dinner one night about six months ago when she mentioned that she thought she was losing her memory because she met a coworker in the hallway and couldn’t remember his name. I just laughed.

“Oh whatever, you take Ambien!” I reminded her. “I flew all the way to Idaho with a stop in Seattle and got a manicure and don’t remember it. The only reason I know that at all is because I made the girl doing my nails stop and take a picture.”

“Okay,” she said, visibly relieved. “And it could be stress, too, right?”

“Of course,” I reassured her. “You’re starting a new school session and you have a ton of stuff to do to get ready for your students. This is always a big rush time for everyone at the university.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she agreed. “I have a lot to do. You’re right. I’m not going to worry about it.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I laughed and had a sip of wine.

“I won’t,” she said, and then paused. “But I forgot an appointment I made with this woman.”

“Stress,” I reminded her. “What was it for?”

“I don’t remember.” Kartz shrugged, and then pulled out her iPhone, swiping the screen with her finger. “Here. It was for yesterday. At six thirty. With someone named Melanie. Who is Melanie?”

I stopped but didn’t put the wineglass down. I looked at her. Kartz has tremendous, beautiful ice-blue eyes, a color so pale that they almost seem transparent, like aquamarine. They were fixed on me. She was not going to look away.

“Melanie,” I said, pausing and looking back, “is one of your best friends.”

A
few days later when I called Kartz, she said she had felt dizzy earlier and that she was trying to make an appointment with a doctor. She thought it might be some new medication she had been taking, and that the memory loss was probably related. I agreed, relieved, and when I called her back the next day, she said she was feeling fine and wasn’t worried about it anymore.

On Saturday, I checked my messages during intermission at a play my husband and I were seeing in Ashland,
where we were spending the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. We had dropped our dog, Maeby, off at Kartz’s earlier that morning and I called before dinner to make sure everything was okay. Kartz had been feeling great but I was still a little worried, despite her protestations that she was perfectly fine.

But she hadn’t called back. Instead, there was a voice mail from Tannaz, a professor in the art department who taught with Kartz. I couldn’t hear the message, the noise in the theater lobby was too loud, but I could tell it was urgent and that something was wrong.

“Laurie,” Tannaz said as soon as I stepped outside and called her back. “Kartz is in the hospital. She has a brain tumor. They’re operating as soon as possible.”

I looked at my husband. It was clear to him something bad had happened.

“What?” he mouthed, his eyes widening. “What?”

After we dropped Mae off that afternoon, Kartz was walking both of our dogs in the park across the street when she saw a tree that had been knocked down by a recent storm. She took the dogs back home, returned to the park, and dragged half of a twenty-foot-tall tree across the street to her backyard, deciding it would make good firewood. Then she went back across to the park to get the second half of the tree. It was there that she collapsed and regained consciousness
sometime later, not knowing why she was hanging on to half of a dead tree in a park.

She got on her bike and rode to the urgent care, where they immediately asked her to hold both arms up in front of her. One of them was lower than the other. That was when they sent her to the emergency room, and the attending physician ordered a CAT scan.

W
hen my husband and I walk into the hospital room, we aren’t sure what to expect. I’d imagined a solemn occasion, or at least a scary one—the kind that makes everyone anxious. But past the door is Kartz, propped up in her bed with a multitude of pillows, and friends, like Melanie and Tannaz, surrounding her with Massimo on one side of the bed and her other dog, Rocky, snuggled on the opposite side. Those dogs go everywhere with her. On bike rides in a pull-behind trailer made for kids. On shuttles up to Portland. On flights to Los Angeles, where her sister lives. She asked her doctor to write a note, then she got them service dog ID cards with Massimo’s and Rocky’s headshots on them, taken at a passport photo place. They are laminated.

“How did you get them in
here
?” I laugh, not talking about Melanie and Tannaz.

Kartz waves her hand and laughs. “I said I wanted my dogs. So Tannaz went home and got them,” she says simply.

Oddly, everything seems normal. Everything seems all right. It is going to be okay.
This is not going to be a big tumor,
I thought to myself.
Not at all. This is going to be a little one, if there is such a thing. This is going to be a Sheryl Crow kind of brain tumor, the kind that’s manageable and just sits within your skull like a jelly bean. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t grow, it is just happy to sit there without causing trouble. This is not a glioblastoma,
I said to myself,
it is not.

One day, several years ago, during a phone call, my nana started calling my sister a “he” instead of a “she.” While there was no question about my sister’s gender, we laughed when Nana caught her mistake, because she could often be kind of goofy. When it didn’t stop and she replaced the word “cup” for “dish” and had trouble making sense out of anything that she read, we suspected ministrokes. My mother took her to a doctor who ordered a CAT scan. We knew by that night that she had a brain tumor.