kitchen and shooting the breeze with Mama, instead of sleeping. I loved Mama’s company, but the lack of sleep was taking a toll on me. I felt run-down and I looked, as my mother bluntly put it, “like shit on a cracker.”
By the middle of October, I’d had my fill of feeling bad, so I went to my doctor and rattled off a long list of symptoms. I told him about my hot flashes and my fatigue. I complained that I was getting forgetful and, James claimed, irritable. I wasn’t willing to tell him the main reason I had decided to see him. I had no desire whatsoever to explain to my doctor that I’d made my appointment because former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt had been showing an awful lot of interest in me lately. I remembered, all too well, how she’d orbited around Lester right before he electrocuted himself, and it had me feeling antsy.
At first Mrs. Roosevelt had only visited me along with Mama, but then she started turning up by herself. Some mornings I would walk into my cramped office off of the cafeteria at Riley Elementary and there she’d be, asleep in one of the rusty metal folding chairs or stretched out on the floor. Occasionally she’d pop up out of nowhere and lean over my shoulder as I did the food orders over the phone. I made up my mind to see the doctor after Mrs. Roosevelt greeted me every morning for a solid week, grinning wide and offering me a swig from her flask. (Mama had been right about Mrs. Roosevelt and the drinking. That woman was at her flask morning, noon, and night.)
Mrs. Roosevelt and Mama sat in the corner of the examining room during my checkup and during the tests that came afterwards. They came with me again a week after that first appointment and listened in as my doctor, Dr. Alex Soo, told me that I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Alex was my friend. He was a chubby Korean man, about a year younger than my son Jimmy. When he took over my old doctor’s practice several years back, I had been his very first patient.
Alex came to town just after my Denise left the house, and as soon as I laid eyes on Alex’s round, smooth face I decided to mother the hell out of him, whether he wanted it or not. When I found out that he lived alone and had no relatives nearby, I badgered him into spending the holidays with me and my family. It was an annual tradition now. Sometimes, if Alex wasn’t careful, he’d slip and call me “Ma.”
Now this kind young man sat twisting his fingers behind a mahogany desk that seemed too large for him. He worked hard at not looking me in the eye while he rattled off the details of what was happening within my body and what needed to be done to stop it. The next step, he said, was to get a second opinion. He’d already made an appointment for me with an oncologist at University Hospital who was “one of the most highly regarded in his field.” He used terms like “five-year survival rate” and “well-tolerated chemotherapy cycles.” I felt sorry for him. He was trying so hard to remain calm that his voice came out robotic and full of bottled-up emotion at the same time, like a bad actor playing a soap opera doctor.
After he got done with his speech, he let out a long sigh of relief. The corners of his mouth curled up slightly, like he was proud of himself for making it over a big hurdle. When he was able to look at me again, he started in offering his most optimistic prognosis. He said, “Your general level of health is very good. And we know a lot about this kind of cancer.” He went on to say that I might be lucky. I might be one of those rare people who sailed on through chemotherapy with hardly any side effects.
His words were meant to comfort me, and I appreciated it. But part of my mind had already left the office. In my head, I was telling my anguished kids not to worry about me. They were adults now and scattered all over the country, but still in need of parenting. Denise was a young mother, still filled with fear and worry over each stage of her children’s development that defied the books she had believed