“Oh Christ,” said my grandmother, turning my way. “We don’t need a lot of theatrics right now. This boy,” she said, turning back to Manx, “never used to throw tantrums.”
Manx crouched beside me, ignoring my grandma. “Belt,” he said, “what’s going on there, buddy?”
“His father,” said my grandma, “in all his life—only once in all his life did his father throw a tantrum. You know how we put a stop to that behavior? Well, I’ll tell you this much: We didn’t give him a pet. We didn’t enroll him in therapy programs.”
“Don’t you want to go see your mom?” Manx asked me.
“He can’t go see her, not for a while, and telling him he can—that’s just the kind of thing,” my grandmother said, “that leads to tantrums.”
Abed said, “But why can’t he see her?”
“She’s not even in this building anymore. She—for God’s sake, she had a seizure, young man,” my grandmother said, “and she’s having some tests done, as well she should be. The tests will take a while.”
“A seizure?” I said.
“This is certain?” Abed said.
“That’s what I was told,” my grandmother said.
I asked my grandma, “Does she still have her tongue?” All I knew about seizures—thought I knew about seizures—I’d learned either from Blackie’s secondhand description of Grandpa Strumm’s seizure (flopping off stool, finger in mouth, overwhite bone) or at my desk in Health class, half-asleep.
“Does your mother still have a tongue?” said my grandma. “What is wrong with you?” she said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Everyone’s been telling you you’re sick is what’s wrong, and you’ve decided you believe it. That’s what’s wrong.”
Abed, to his credit, understood what I’d meant and, speaking over my grandma, answered me as if my question were sensible. “Your mother didn’t swallow her tongue, Belt,” he said. “Nor did she bite it off. Her tongue is fine.”
“Your father had them, too,” my grandma went on. “Imaginary friends. I bet he didn’t tell you. He may have even forgotten. As he should have. But he had them, too. He would try to introduce me. Did I pretend that I saw them? I did not pretend I saw them. I did not pretend to believe he saw them. And guess what happened? He stopped pretending to see them.”
“The human brain,” Manx said, still crouching beside me, “is mysterious, Belt. Some people have seizures without ever really knowing it. It’s just a strange feeling they have, a kind of daze they enter, and then it passes. They forget it even happened. If your mom had been sitting, or lying down, she might not have even known that she’d had a seizure. And sometimes—not an insignificant portion of the time—a person has a seizure once, but then never again.”
Manx helped me stand up, and then I was hugging him, and Abed was palming the top of my head, saying something hummy in Urdu or Hindi.
* L. Manx, K. Tilly, D. Jorgensen, and A. Patel, “The Effects of Companion Animals on Social Interaction Amongst Children Diagnosed with Unspecified Psychotic Disorders,” Applied Behavioral Science 25, no. 1 (1989): 107–21.
LETTERS AND FACTS
“THEN ABED PUT HIS hand on top of my head and sang or said something in Indian or Arab that was probably either a prayer or a spell—here comes Dad with Rick and Jim,” is the last line I wrote in my otherwise daily journal for weeks. Although I don’t remember making the entry, according to its heading (I was big on headings, as was my mother; she’d timestamp greeting cards and grocery lists), I did so in “neurology wig [sic] waiting area, U of C hospital, left of Grandma, 4:01–6:13 PM, 1/23/88.”
So right around, it would seem, 6:13 p.m., my dad arrived in the company of his fishing buddy and his fishing buddy’s son, but I don’t remember that happening any more than I remember making the journal entry quoted above.
With only just a few notable exceptions, my memories of that night and the month or so succeeding it are sketchy and, from a certain way of looking at things (i.e. the way I’ve been looking at things throughout the course of writing this memoir so far), nonexistent. I do know a number of facts about those weeks, but for the most part they’re absent of sensory information, all but entirely disembodied, barely narrative, little more than text. I know them in the way I know my blood type, in the way I know the date of my birth.
I was twelve years old and my mother was dying, and before I got used to that, my mother was dead.
* * *
So those facts, then. Those sketches.
* * *
—
When she got to the hospital, they scanned my mother’s brain and found a growth. They told her the growth might be benign. She told them her breasts hurt. They’d hurt for a while, but she hadn’t gotten checked (because she was young, and youth was protection? because she was busy? because she was scared?). They gave her a mammogram. They found a lot of growths. They biopsied one. The results would take days. She needed to know whatever they could tell her as soon as they were able to tell her, she told them. She needed to know. They understood that, they liked her, everybody liked her, and they muscled an appointment with a better scanner. They scanned her whole body with the better scanner, found a growth on her liver, and two more on her brain, one of which was inoperable. Stage 4 breast cancer. Four to six weeks. If the biopsy came back negative, they said, they would admit not only to never having seen anything like this before, but to having neither heard nor read about anything like this before. Usually they’d counsel a second opinion, but unless my parents were friends with a certain world-renowned oncologist in New York as well as with a certain world-renowned brain surgeon in London, both of whom would, in the end, almost definitely make the same prognosis anyway, and who would, if they gave her a better prognosis, offer her treatments that would be guaranteed to bring on more pain and debilitation whether those treatments succeeded or not, which they likely wouldn’t…a second opinion, given the amount of time and stress and pain and extra cost involved, wasn’t—not by any human measure—worth spending a moment of her life’s final energies on. She had a family. She could go home that night. She should go home that night and be with her family. The opiates and benzodiazepines would help. She went home with us that night. The drugs might have helped.
* * *
—
She stayed on the couch a lot and slept on and off. I stayed home from school and sat on the couch with her. We looked at photos. We watched TV. We played gin rummy. We played with Kablankey. Just before she’d had the seizure she’d gone to the bookstore and bought me a copy of Franny and Zooey, a favorite from her youth, and Breakfast of Champions because she knew I liked Vonnegut, and the salesman recommended it. I read the Salinger and she read the Vonnegut. She asked me what I thought, and I told her I loved it, and that was the truth, and I didn’t tell her that it made me long to have siblings, which was also the truth. I asked what she thought, and she said Vonnegut was funny, the book had made her laugh, but she wanted to talk to me about it after I read it, and we traded books, and after we read them she asked me if when I talked to the inans I felt the way Breakfast’s Dwayne Hoover feels when he starts getting ill, and I told her I didn’t. Dwayne Hoover is certain his hallucinations are real, and I was never quite certain the inans were real, and, except for the inans, I told my mother, nothing I saw or heard or felt was strange, or stranger than what anyone else seemed to see or hear or feel. That’s what I told her. She said Franny and Zooey was just as she remembered, as warm and kind and sad and intimate, and it reminded her that I should read the other Salingers she had on her shelf, which she thought about reading, and would, she said, read, unless I would let her read my journals. She’d admired the pages I’d shown her before, the night we all came back from the police station, and she knew I’d shown them only to prove I hadn’t been lying about what I’d told her and my dad about the inans, and she knew that journals were private things, but soon she’d be dead and she wanted, if she could, to know me better first, she wanted to know me as well as she possibly could, and she said she imagined I’d want that too, and I told her she could read them if she agreed that she wouldn’t show them to my father or talk to my father about them at all, and she agreed. She kept the journals in the drawers of her desk, down in the basement, and when she read one on the couch and my father was home, she would hide it behind a Time or New Yorker or go to the basement and read it down there.