Sing It to Her Bones

1

When I got cancer, I decided I wasn’t going to put up with crap from anybody anymore. I would have quit work right then, too, but even with Blue Cross/Blue Shield paying 75 percent, the surgery and the chemo treatments cost me too much to ditch the job.

I thought about it, though. I imagined walking into her cubicle and announcing, loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, “Fran, I quit!” Just like that. And she’d look hurt and confused and go, “Buh-buh…” and I’d say, “As of right now!” Then I’d strut right out, past all of them standing in a line behind their desks. I imagined they’d be smiling at me and clapping.

My husband thinks it’s the job that made me sick. “All that stress,” he says. “It can’t be good for you, Hannah.” One morning while I was sitting at the kitchen table hugging a bowl of cornflakes and trying not to throw up, he handed me an article he’d torn out of a magazine in the doctor’s office, “Stressed to Kill.” Families can be so helpful. My sisters are always sending me stuff like that. “The Anticancer Diet,” “Super-food for Women,” “Cancer: Facts vs. Feelings.” I keep it all in a manila folder by my bed, so when they visit, they think I’m reading it.

The truth is, I was born stressed. The pediatrician told my mother he had never seen a kindergarten kid with ulcers before. In first grade I went hyper when Mom brought home college-ruled notebook paper. “It says wide-ruled,” I wailed. “It says so, right-here-on-this-list.” And I fussed and whined and carried on until she drove out to the 7-Eleven after dinner and bought me exactly the right kind. I stopped having stomachaches after the second grade, so I suppose I learned to cope. You have to stay in school, don’t you? So you manage. You work it out. The same goes for jobs. And bosses.

I’m not sure when my boss, Fran, started acting like a fruitcake. She was always a little weird, kept her desk locked up tight even while she was sitting at it. Once she attended a two-day seminar at an executive hotel outside the Beltway and came back all fired up about Total Quality Management. Right away she selected six of us to form a group to meet during lunch hour for weeks in order to come up with four or five suggestions to improve our service, like making a telephone training video, installing a second fax machine, and hiring a stress management consultant. When we submitted our list to Fran, she studied it for a long time, then grabbed a black Magic Marker from the ceramic mug on her desk and drew a heavy line through the “stress management consultant.” “We don’t have stress here,” she said. We all gasped, and I swore to everyone in the lunchroom afterward that I saw the papers on her desk flutter.

So this is how I’m dealing with the stress we don’t have at our office. I tell myself I’m in it for the benefits and the money, the paycheck that lets me get on with my life. I have hopes! I play the lottery when I think about it, and every year I order a magazine or two by licking and sticking those itty-bitty picture stamps. But face it, the Prize Patrol from Publishers Clearing House is not going to knock on my door with a check for ten million dollars. So I show up at the office, day after day, or visit the doctors when I have to, like an actor in a long-running play who knows his lines and doesn’t have to think about them much anymore. It’s a show, one act following another.

Emily Jean, in an uncharacteristic display of pragmatism, thought that one up. “Look, Mother,” she said to me one day when I was feeling particularly exhausted and depressed because my hair was thinning out. “It’s like you’ve got these two missions. Remission, that’s one, and you’re working hard on that. Then intermission. Those are the good times between the acts that make all of this other shit bearable.”

“God, yes!” I agreed, but all the time she was talking I was thinking, The way I feel right now, I’d have to rally to die. I didn’t tell her that, though. I didn’t want her to worry. “You’re absolutely right, pumpkin,” I said instead. “Let’s get to work on those intermissions.”

I had been contemplating a weekend at Virginia Beach or a two-week cruise in the British Virgin Islands. England, maybe. As it turned out, that cute little cottage in the Cotswolds was going to have to wait. Like I read somewhere, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

It’s called downsizing or rightsizing. Reduction in force. A RIF. Whatever. It means you’re fired. A quality management team somewhere on the tenth floor had been throwing darts at our organizational chart, pinning a major portion of Whitworth & Sullivan’s Technical Support Department to the wall, smack dab through the o in Support.

Fran, we heard later, had gone all glassy-eyed and sullen when they told her, refusing to believe that half her staff was about to be tossed onto the street. “It’s a business decision,” they explained, and gave her two days to get with the program. She stonewalled, so they called in the managing partner, an ex-marine named Cooper, who had no qualms about summoning us individually to the firm’s best conference room, offering coffee or juice-the charming, disarming, oh-so-personal touch-and then, whack! kneecapping us with the news.

When it was my turn, I chose an upholstered chair opposite Fran with about as much enthusiasm as a candidate for a root canal. Nobody said anything at first. While Coop thumbed through the papers stacked in front of him, as if trying to remember my name, I settled uncomfortably into the chair, attempting to blend inconspicuously into the gold damask, a little hard to do when you’re wearing a red plaid dress. I crossed my right leg over my left, then, because I was nervous, tucked my right patent leather toe behind my left calf. It’s a bad habit I picked up somewhere. It makes me look like a pretzel.

Outside that window in Washington, D.C., two floors down, I knew K Street would be alive with lunch-hour traffic. Attorneys and secretaries, bankers and lobbyists, folks who still had jobs would be heading out to drop a small fortune at Charlie’s Crab or a few bucks over at the Lunch Box. It was a day to take your lunch to Farragut Square and sit in the sun. Let it soak through your skin and warm your bones, bones like mine, which had been sucked cold by the air-conditioning.

Inside, while Coop oozed on about severance pay and maintenance of health benefits, I stared at Fran, who sat straight-backed and immobile, like an ice sculpture. I willed her to look at me, but she focused on his reflection in the tabletop. If Jones of New York had issued shotguns along with its suits, I thought, Old Cooper’s shirtfront would have been a sodden mass of red and we would have been picking bits of lung and rib out of the oriental carpet. I concentrated on the way his yellowish hair sprouted from his upper forehead in spiky clumps and how his earlobes wobbled when he talked. Frankly, when he laid the news on me, I didn’t know whether to run out and hire a lawyer to sue his ass or fall down and kiss his feet.

The first week, though, I was mad as hell. Poor Paul learned to lay low at home. He’d nursed me through all five stages of grief when I lost my breast, and he told me, in a good-natured way, that he wasn’t sure he could face starting all over again at stage one. In the evenings he would retreat to his basement workshop, where he’d bang away with a hammer or cut wood into curious shapes, coaxing hideous screams out of the table saw and claiming between trips upstairs to the refrigerator for a cold beer that the job didn’t matter. Even after the unemployment checks stopped coming and my severance pay was exhausted, even then, he insisted, if I hadn’t found another job, we’d manage. I knew we weren’t anywhere near qualifying for food stamps. Paul was a full professor, after all, with tenure. He taught math at the Naval Academy.

One evening several weeks later, as I was sulking in front of the TV-watching some gawd-awful made-for-TV movie and plotting some fantastic but improbable revenge involving Coop, Fran, handcuffs, cockroaches, hidden cameras, and the FBI-Paul’s sister, Connie, called. “The next time you need a wig, Hannah,” she complained, “call the Cancer Society first and get a recommendation. You have no idea how many shops I had to call before I found one that didn’t specialize in wigs and accessories for the transgender community!”

Mentally I smiled and added leather collars with studs to my revenge.

Connie wasn’t really as put out as she sounded. “Thanks awfully, Connie,” I told her. I could hear ice clinking in a glass as she drank. Her usual, I suspected, a diet Coke with lime. If she’d had what she called a Good Art Day, there’d be rum in it. “I really appreciate your help. I just wasn’t up to it, and I’m damn tired of wearing this stupid turban.”

“I thought you looked kind of cute in that psychedelic hat I gave you. Whatever happened to it?” The ice clinked again, and I could hear the TV in the background. She was watching the same movie as I was. While I was struggling to remember what I had done with that hideous hat, she went on. “It’s at Tysons Corner, this shop I found. A place called Brighter Day. We’ll go there tomorrow, then have a blowout lunch at the food court. That should cheer you up!”

How shopping for wigs could cheer a body up, I couldn’t imagine, especially when underneath one would still look like a nuclear accident victim. But when we got there just as the shop opened, Brighter Day turned out to be a friendly place, with racks and racks of special bras and swimwear, attractive head wraps on wall pegs, drawers of breast prostheses, and a large selection of bangs and wigs. You could practically build a woman out of all the body parts on display. It also had a private room to try it all on in. The saleswoman escorted us there, then left us on our own with a double quartet of heads. I sat on a bench covered with flowered chintz and tried on a cute blond number that, except for my brown eyes, made me look alarmingly like Eva Gabor.

“It’s discrimination,” I complained, half to Connie and half to Eva in the mirror. “Ageism, plain and simple. Or maybe the cancer.”

“They didn’t deserve you, Hannah.” She draped a shoulder-length pageboy bob over the tips of her fingers, smoothed out the bangs, then rotated her wrist until the too-black hair swung crisply back and forth.

“Twenty years of my life I gave them, Connie! Twenty effing years! I clawed my way up from lowly paralegal to head of Archives and Records. And this is the thanks I get? I even chaired the United Way Campaign, for Christ’s sake!” I snatched a halo of Orphan Annie curls off my head and arranged them crookedly on a styrofoam head that stared back at me, eyelessly.

“You’ve got a great résumé. You’ll land another job eventually.” Connie handed me the wig she was holding.

“I don’t have a résumé. I haven’t written a résumé in years! I don’t even want to write a résumé!” I studied myself in the mirror and decided I looked like I was auditioning for a part as an extra in Miss Saigon. I had to laugh.

Eventually I chose an ash brown, Princess Di-ish sort of do that looked very much like my own hair, back when I had some. Combed and styled by the saleswoman, I felt more normal than I had in weeks. With my turban stashed in a wig box, we left the store and headed for California Pizza Kitchen.

I had my mouth all set for the artichoke pizza, but Connie surprised me by walking right past the familiar doorway, forcing me to hurry after her, leaving my favorite pizza lying forsaken and unassembled in the kitchen. Connie was being beckoned by an elephant, serenaded by a tree, inexorably drawn by steam rising from a tangle of jungle vegetation outside the Rainforest Café.

“Well, this is certainly different,” I remarked as Tracy the Talking Banyan Tree delivered a sober report on the harmful effects of deforestation. I wondered what Lord & Taylor thought of its new neighbor.

I pointed to a snake, its tongue flicking in and out. “It’s like a bad drug trip! Are you sure you want to eat here with all this, ah, wildlife?”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun,” she said. “I expect Tarzan will come swinging through on a vine any minute!”

I ordered a Rainforest Rickey while Connie went for Sheba’s Jungle Juice, an unlikely mixture of yogurt, coffee, and Oreos.

Later, over a grilled portobello mushroom sandwich served on an oversize platter-everything must be bigger in the jungle-I was trying Connie’s patience again by talking, half-seriously, about a lawsuit. Behind her, a huge reef tank was set into a pillar, the glass distorting its contents so that the fish swam around like fun house fish. “Oh, what’s the use?” I moaned. “They’ve got all the money and time in the world. I’d probably croak long before the case ever came to court.”

“You’re not going to croak! Besides, you have an obligation to spoil your grandchildren, whenever Emily and what’s-his-name get around to producing any, that is.”

I took a sip of my fruit juice. “Oh, Connie. Whatever am I going to do? No one wants to hire an old woman like me. Not with my medical history.”

Connie put down her cappuccino and touched my arm. “Your medical history is none of their goddamned business.” She leaned close, her breath sweet with cinnamon. “Give it a rest, Hannah. Take some time off to consider your options.”

“Gawd, Connie, you sound just like Fran.” I smiled to let her know that I was just kidding.

She ran her finger around the inside of her cup and licked off the foam. “Why don’t you come stay with me for a while? Hang out at the farm?”

The waiter had put a Chocolate Diablo on the table in front of me, and I had just taken a bite. “On the farm?” I mumbled through a mouthful of devil’s food. “What would I do there?”

“You could help me with my paperwork, Hannah. I’m useless at it. One day the IRS is going to catch up with me.”

“I never thought I’d be seriously considering working for my sister-in-law.”

“Well, the pay isn’t great, but the food is wholesome. I don’t do desserts like this, though.” For the next few minutes, we ate in silence, except for the twittering mynahs and the snarling leopards.

Eventually I stood, lifted my sweater off the back of the chair, and picked up the wig box. “Thanks awfully for lunch, Connie, but I’d like to go home now. I need to think, and I can’t do it in here with all those damn birds and monkeys chattering away.”

While Connie took care of the check, I watched the room darken as it had every few minutes since our arrival with the flashes and rumbles of a mock thunderstorm. A toddler waiting in line with his father cowered, clinging, to his father’s leg. I thought about Connie living all by herself, with no one to cuddle up to when the weather got bad. Connie had been married to a Prince Georges County police officer. Ten years ago they had moved back to the family farm near Pearson’s Corner, an old fishing community on the Truxton River in southern Maryland, to be with her ailing father. Then the old man had died, and Craig had been murdered by a fugitive bank robber following a routine traffic stop on Route 301. Connie had been a widow for almost a year, turning her grief inward and focusing on her art, all the while playing good Samaritan to me.

We walked out of the restaurant past a young man with a pair of macaws perched on his arms. The colorful birds were obligingly doing tricks for three small children who stood off to one side in a little huddle, apparently afraid to approach the birds any closer.

“I feel like crap most of the time,” I complained as we reached Connie’s car. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company. And what about Paul?”

“Paul’s a big boy, Hannah. He can fend for himself for a few weeks.”

“And my doctors? What about them?”

“Pearson’s Corner isn’t exactly the dark side of the moon, Hannah. You’ll be only a two-hour drive from Johns Hopkins.”

Connie had an answer for everything.

I had to admit that the offer was attractive. A quiet place to go where no one would bother me and I could wait, peacefully, for my hair to grow out.

Several hours and a long, hot bubble bath later, I’d convinced myself to do it. Paul could hardly object. Connie was his sister after all.