Forty-five

A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body is a Rockette doing the can-can. Use me use me use me, they cry, I’ll be the easy child, the I-won’t-wake-you-up-in-the-night child. Wasn’t she through with all that – after years, on streets, in restaurants when all she saw were schlepping, wrung out, haphazard, misbuttoned mothers pushing strollers loaded with groceries, a dreadful toddler riding shotgun?

Now every city block boasts the popular miracle of children’s faces. Keep away, she says to civilized men who stop at crosswalks, Do you see this glittered fertility, this fishnet stocking hunger?

The possible calls and the body lunges – rapacious – for what? – every last urgency to be the body?


--Victoria Redel, "Suddenly" just published in Granta  (2010) [Follow link].
 
A very interesting vignette that explores the physical origins of what we might suppose are merely psychological urgings.   Redel's piece does not offer the sentimental rendering of last chances that we might expect, but instead, leaves us to contemplate what one becomes when one is no longer a "productive" body.   Can one pass this threshold without a "lunge" ---smoothly, gently, oblivous? 

Empty as Lettuce

 "Over the weekend, while the Baby sleeps, the Mother and Husband sit together in the Tiny Tim Lounge.  The Husband is restless and makes cafeteria and sundry runs, running errands for everyone.  In his absence, the other parents regale her further with their sagas. Pediatric cancer and chemo stories: the children's amputations, blood poisoning, teeth flaking like shale, the learning delays and disabilities caused by chemo frying the young, budding brain. But strangely optimistic codas are tacked on---endings as stiff and loopy as carpenter's lace, crisp and empty as lettuce, reticulate as a net--ah, words.   'After all that business with the tutor, he's better now, and fitted with new incisors by my wife's cousin's husband, who did dental school in two and half years, if you can believe that. We hope for the best. We take things as they come. Life is hard.'  

'Life's a big problem,' agrees the Mother....Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge--no need to watch Oprah. They leave Oprah in the dust.  Oprah has nothing on them.  They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars, in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them."  

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)



The title of Moore's story references a comment made by a friend of "The Mother " who is surprised by the "bromides" through which the parents in the ward narrate their experiences. I read that after the publication of the story, that some parents at a hospital near to Moore became upset, thinking that her critique was directed at them.

There is something about Moore's piece that seems to hover at the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction and that could lead an unknowing reader--one unfamiliar with Moore-- to misread her piece and its genre.  I suspect though that these parents correctly surmise that Moore's intent is to expose the conventions of tales of illness (the mandate to "stay positive!"  is fairly conventional these days) to reveal the lack of control that underpins such talk, such posturing.  Yet she also shows that the parents' platitudes serve as important guideposts as they navigate through their harrowing journeys.  For the Mother, who has not yet been fully inducted into this world, they can only seem horrifically discordant, part of the nauseous atmosphere of the ward.

Wine of Christ

"We'll see how the surgery and histology go.  Then we'll start with chemo the week following.  A little light chemo:  vincristine and----"

"Vincristine?" interrupts the Mother.  "Wine of Christ?"

"The names are strange, I know.  The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called 'dactinomycin.'  People move the D around to the front."

"They move the D around to the front," repeats the Mother.

"Yup!" the Oncologist says.  "I don't know why--they just do!"

"Christ didn't survive his wine," says the Husband. 

"But of course he did," says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor.  "I'll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery."  And with that, the Oncologist leaves.

"Or rather, Christ was his wine," mumbles the Husband.  Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell.  "His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea."

"A little light chemo.  Don't you like that one?"  says the Mother.  "Eine kleine dactinomycin.  I'd like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o'cash."

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)

Moore's story originally ran in The New Yorker; while there are many passages that more adequately capture the subject matter, tone, and unique style of this piece, oddly enough, this is one that I recall from my initial reading of the piece in the magazine over a decade ago.  Moore's depiction of the typical Oncologist as part mathematician, part "mad, overcaffienated scientist" is exemplified through this dialogue in which the doctor's superficial and somewhat lighthearted description ("Yup!") of the chemotherapeutic agents stands in stark contrast to the desperation, confusion, and enervation of parents in the pediatric oncology ward.

The story is told through the perspective of "The Mother," a writer whose point of view shifts precariously between the darkly comedic and the abject.  Her eighteen month old son has been diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, a kidney cancer, and the reader follows her on her dizzying journey into the pediatric oncology ward and the experiences of parents who endure the ineffable.  The narrator's stream of consciousness disorients and then reorients the reader, revealing that what seems as surreal as a nightmare is actually a reality.

The next entry will also come from this piece. 

Erosion

"Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion. She was all edges, on tender hooks, which is what she thought the expression was."

---Beth Ann Fennelly, excerpt from the poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate" in Tender Hooks

Sagging jaw-lines, drooping breasts and stomachs and behinds, fuzzy thinking, and enervated tempers---aging is the process whereby the sharpness, tautness, firmness, elasticity, flexibility and endurance of youth give way to softening edges of all sorts.  Ironically, we seek one anaesthetic or another to bring us comfort, to soften us further, to numb us to the sharpness we perceive in our environment.  However, Fennelly is wise enough to know that we lay down new sediment in addition to eroding. Aging isn't entirely a disappearing act.

Mother Love

"At bedtime, instead of my charming boy, ... I found a lifeless corpse--laid out in the white robes of innocence and death.  Though I wept and pressed him, he could not look at me.  How could I endure it--much less compose myself--but by believing him gone to perfect rest and happiness.--there to wait for his father and mother."


        ---Diary of Louisa Park,  qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000).  Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and  quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.

I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form.  This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century  that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead.  What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss.   The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed.  The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child. 


In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby  who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33.  Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?"  comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work. 

Grief

The Honeybee is fascinated by stories that make reference to sign language. Perhaps this is because sign language is at once very expressive and yet very limited in its pared-down status as an "informational language" that eschews details and  in some sense, defies nuance. But sign language as performance conveys a deeper message than a simple translation will allow. Perhaps we might consider it as a form of dance. Amy Hempel's story makes especially poignant use of sign language in this story, in which the simplicity of this performative language conveys the experience of grief in an understated way:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

---Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, 2007.

Numbness

Jhumpa Lahiri captures at once the displacement of the immigrant and the enervation and ill-fittedness of modern motherhood:

His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen's concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. "It's delicious," she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn't like the tastes; she'd told him so once in the car. He also knew she didn't eat lunch at work, because the first thing she did when they were back at the beach house was pour herself a glass of wine and eat bread and cheese, sometimes so much of it that she wasn't hungry for the pizza they normally ordered for dinner. She sat at the table as he ate, drinking more wine and asking how his day was, but eventually she went to the deck to smoke a cigarette, leaving Eliot to wrap up the leftovers.

---Jhumpa Lahiri, "Mrs. Sen's," Interpreter of Maladies (1999)

Absent Parents

Micky Thompson continues to show himself as charming child, with cheerful disposition, good manners, and excellent health. Enquiry reveals that he is an orphan, which does not surprise me in the least. Have often noticed that absence of parental solicitude usually very beneficial to offspring.

--E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady