The Other Women in the Room
Fiona is in the next bed. She is a trim blond woman with a worried
face and a breathless, whispery way of speaking. She's always
hot. At night, when I'm huddling under the blankets, hugging myself
for warmth, Fiona is resting under a single bed sheet while an
oscillating fan, placed above her bed, makes whirring sounds like
rain falling. Perhaps she is going through menopause, but I am
unable to confirm this one way or another, as she is also currently
menstruating, as am I. Fiona is 53: a fairly standard age for
menopause. I, however, am only 43. Both of us carry thick hospital
sanitary pads back and forth to the one shared bathroom. Fiona's
husband died more than 20 years ago, of cancer, after only three
years of marriage, in this very same hospital. Fiona recognizes
some of the oncology nurses from then. "So I guess you figured
that you've had enough crap dropped on you for one lifetime?"
I ask her on the third day of our being neighbors in the two beds
on the west side of the room. "Something like that," Fiona says.
The Repeat Offender, whose actual name is Jean, is in the bed
opposite my own. She is in her early 60s, a retired nurse. Five
years ago it was the left breast that came off. This time it is
the right one. But as she repeatedly says: "At least I'm even."
She has three grown adopted sons -- the children of her husband
-- and many grandchildren, who make her get-well cards. She tells
us of their exploits. She has a pile of trashy magazines by her
bed: British gossip rags with photographs of Princess Diana's
butler's house; Cherie Blair; and various movie stars and singers.
She also reads the junky, slightly right-wing The Daily Mail.
I read The New York Times and the Baton Rouge
Advocate on the web, and now also read either The
Herald or The Guardian, depending on what my husband
picks up on his way home from the university, where he is ensconced
this year -- this much looked-forward-to sabbatical year in Glasgow,
Scotland -- in an office overlooking the ancient University Chapel,
with its stained-glass windows and soaring spire. The Guardian
is a better paper, but it sometimes lapses into such politically
correct posturing that in recent weeks I have done nothing but
write letters to the editor, protesting its stand on everything
from the Middle East to the Midwest. None of my letters to The
Guardian have been published. I miss Baton Rouge.
The Old Lady isn't actually older than the
Repeat Offender, but because her short boyish hair is white-white,
without a trace of underlying blond or gray, her person is long
and somewhat shapeless, rather like a cartoon character's body,
and because she hums while she does needlework, I think of her
as The Old Lady. The Old Lady also snores, loudly, but this doesn't
bother me much, as I'm zonked out on painkillers. I decide that
of my three roommates the Old Lady is the one I am least likely
to bond with. ("Bond with" is a term that both my mother and brother
use, and I've always thought it sounds new-agey and intellectually
flaccid, but I can't think of a better way to put it.) The Old
Lady has had one breast removed, prompting the Repeat Offender
to say that she will now feel like she has a "spare tire," which
prompts me to say, "a spare tire and a flat tire." A few hours
after her surgery, the Old Lady is visited by one of the hospital
chaplains. He closes the curtains around the bed. I feel a small
wave of envy. The next day, the Old Lady pads in her nightgown
over to my bed and recites a verse from Deuteronomy.
It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you;
he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.
She says that when she went into surgery she had this verse
taped on her stomach and another one, from the Gospels, taped
on her thigh. She explains that she was born a Catholic, but became
a Baptist, whereas, as everyone in the room already knows, I'm
Jewish. She wears a series of silky, sexy nightgowns in soft colors
-- peach, cream -- trimmed with lace, and her husband comes to
see her every night, bringing a sense of peculiarly male bewilderment.
The Setting
The Western Infirmary, Glasgow, is a place filled with people
who say "wee," as in "will you have a wee tea, then?" and "you
mean this wee tiny lump here?" It is so drab that I am already
deciding how I will describe it to my friends in the States: as
a hospital out of the Gulag perhaps? Or something left over from
the Great War? Already I am planning on telling them: "Even if
I survive the cancer, I might have to commit suicide just to get
out of this place." The acoustic ceiling tiles are stained and
falling in. The linoleum is peeling. The walls are covered with
ancient pea-green paint, cracked and streaked with water stains.
The molded plastic chairs date from the early '60s, and come in
colors that shouldn't exist: avocado; aqua; pumpkin-orange. The
one pay phone is in the day-room, itself decorated with un-matching
chairs in various stages of decomposition. The windows are filthy,
which is a shame because the views of Glasgow from the 10th floor
ward (breast cancer and general surgery) are magnificent: to the
south, the River Clyde and the sprawl of what was once the might
of industrial, dirty Glasgow; to the north the sandstone tenements
of the West End climbing up the hills and glowing in the sun as
if on fire. It is December, and night comes early. By 4:30 we
can see electric lights twinkling for miles in every direction.
The Staff
Contrary to what my father, in Washington, D.C., (who wants to
fly me back to the United States for treatment) seems to believe,
my doctors appear to know what they are doing. They sit on my
bed, look me in the eye, laugh at my jokes. The head surgeon,
who is actually rather famous, notices that I am sharing my bed
with two small well-loved creatures. "Who are these wee friends?"
he asks. "This one," I say, pointing to a small black elephant
with red ears and an extraordinarily compassionate and wise expression
on his face, "is Elephant." "Ah," the famous breast surgeon says.
"And this," I add, indicating a larger and less elegant animal
who seems, to the untrained eye, to be either a dog or a rabbit,
"is Bumby." Bumby, I explain, has been with me since I was a toddler,
and she is a rabbit. A bunny, actually. Bumby has her own rather
complicated history, but I don't go into that with the famous
breast surgeon. I will save the story of Bumby's complicated history,
which is really the story of my own complicated psychic history,
all mixed up with my search for God and for comfort and for feeling
at home in the world, for my new friend Debra, who is also an
American, also in her 40s, and also (even though she's a serious
scholar with a bunch of books to her name) has a family of stuffed
animals. I love Debra. I met her just four months ago, at a cocktail
party in a beautiful, high-ceilinged Victorian flat in the West
End. The kind of place that's furnished with priceless art, antique
Oriental rugs, and books. At that point in time we had been in
Glasgow for only four days, and going to the cocktail party in
the beautiful flat gave me a real estate envy attack unlike any
I had previously known.
Joyce is the night nursing aid. She's big -- big --
with a fat woman's jolly laugh and good humor. Clear white skin.
Thick brown hair. "Well, girls, what will it be tonight? A wee
dram? Vodka or Scotch?" she likes to say as she is clearing the
tubing that drains our incisions or helping us to the toilet.
"We need to get you some sexier knickers," she might add. One
night when I can't sleep I join Joyce out in the fluorescent-lit
corridor and learn that she was once married to an Arab, and that
the Arab is now long gone. Joyce thinks the Arab is pure shite,
but she loves America. "I love America," she says. She went there
last summer, on holiday with a girlfriend. "I'm like 'I'm in America!
I'm really in America!' Only the women kept saying something that
bothered me, you know? What was it? Right. It was 'wow.' They
kept saying 'wow.'" She says wow in a thin, whining American
accent, and I picture New Jersey.
Joyce: a good name for a nurse, and I think of the Joyce I know
at home in Baton Rouge; the Joyce who works as a caregiver at
Saint Anthony's Home, a hospice for AIDS patients, where until
our departure for Glasgow in July, I did volunteer work. The work
was dull: reading the Bible, primarily Psalms and various pieces
of the Gospels, to the residents; running errands; hanging out.
But I'd loved it. I'd felt a profound sense of having been embraced,
of counting, and I came home every week with stories
about kindness, mercy and faith. Before we'd left Baton Rouge,
I'd asked Joyce to give me a blessing to keep me safe on my travels,
and she'd burst forth with the full gospel treatment, with the
patients chiming in with Yes, Jesus and Amen!
I have always been fairly terrified of flying, but we'd arrived
in Glasgow safely. Now I get out my notebook, write myself a note:
Write to Saint Anthony's. Ask them to pray for me.
The Chaplain
The Chaplain who finally comes to visit me is Church of Scotland.
Previously, when I had put in my request, I'd been asked which
denomination I wanted sent to my bedside. "What are my choices?"
I replied. "Church of Scotland, Church of England or Catholic,"
was the answer. "It doesn't matter," I answered. I have always
been nondiscriminating when it comes to clergy, perhaps even a
bit promiscuous, figuring, as I always have, that if God exists,
as he better, then anyone with a good heart and a specialty in
God Relations can help me out. All of which I try to explain to
the Chaplain, who has an open, friendly face and a sweaty forehead,
which he dabs continuously with a handkerchief, only my words
come out all wrong. Perhaps because I'm talking so fast. Or because
I'm crying. But the main problem is that what I really want to
say to the Chaplain is: "Do you think I'm going to die?" Instead,
what I say comes out in little unconnected bursts. For
example, I tell the Chaplain about how my Catholic psychotherapist
in Baton Rouge had suggested that I pray to God to feel his heavenly
love, and how, though I'd been skeptical, I'd gone along with
the program -- discovering the very next morning a package on
my doormat under the mail slot, which turned out to be a book
from my father in which he'd inscribed, in Hebrew, "With love
from Abba." Coincidence? Or sign from God? The Chaplain seems
to be impressed.
I also tell him about a dream I'd had the previous night, only
"dream" is too solid a word to describe what I experienced, which
was more like a semi-waking fantasy in which I was aware of myself
in the role of stage-manager and director. In the stage-managed
"dream," my old friend, Ronnie Shaab, who himself had died of
cancer a few years earlier at the age of 56, appeared on the balcony
of a hotel-motel, wearing his characteristic white hat, pants
and shoes. In life, Ronnie was a businessman who never quite made
it, and a friend-in-need to all who came his way, the son of a
large family of Syrian Jews who had come to Baton Rouge from Aleppo
in the 1920s and opened a shop, Broadway Linens, on Third Street.
In death he was acting as my broker, signaling that he'd try to
work something out with God. Finally God himself appeared, looking
frail and beat-up, a bit like a bum or a used car salesman, as
my Orthodox grandfather (of blessed memory) might say. For some
time it looked like God wouldn't cooperate, but finally he seemed
to signal that he'd spare my life if I would promise to return
to Saint Anthony's Home. I explain to the Chaplain about Saint
Anthony's -- how I'd volunteered there once a week; how the work,
though boring, was uplifting; how once, when I asked her, Joyce
told me that she could hear the voice of Jesus speaking to her
as clearly as she could hear me. What I don't explain is that
since I've been admitted to hospital, I've decided that I probably
would have made a good Christian, and in fact, though I'm rooted
in Judaism's theology and historical view, and convinced that
Sinai is ongoing, the covenant still being made, I'm more drawn
to certain aspects of certain Christian worship services -- notably
in the black Southern Gospel tradition -- than I am to the public
expression of my own faith. The God of love is what I like best
-- that and the singing. It's Jesus on the cross who died for
our sins that I can't quite get around, not to mention the 2,000
years of Christian anti-Semitism. Not that I have any intention
of arguing theology with the Chaplain. "So what do you think of
my dream?" I finally ask.
"You're obviously a person who dreams a lot, and for whom symbolism
and narration is important," the Chaplain says disappointingly,
and at that very minute, my local rabbi, who is also my son Sam's
bar-mitzvah teacher, walks in. I am a wee bit embarrassed to be
seen talking to the other side, but both men -- the priest and
the rabbi -- are terribly polite.
The Repeat Offender says: "Would you get a look at how Princess
Di's butler lives? A bit of a toff he is, I should say."
My Family
My family is not happy. My husband is one of those very smart
people who look very smart: long thin face, beaky nose, big eyes,
gray hair. He has college professor written
all over him. His father died of colon cancer almost 20 years
ago, and my husband still talks about the horrors his father endured
during radiation. "He'd just lie in bed, moaning and screaming,"
he'll say, looking at me with big mournful eyes in his long, intelligent,
mournful face, until I have to tell him to stop looking at me
as if I'm nearly dead, because if he keeps looking at me like
that surely I'll develop a brain tumor. He is very smart, my husband,
my life companion; he is also good, thoughtful, compassionate.
His impulse is to keep things in, whereas my impulse is the reverse.
Samuel, 13, says he wants to be a rabbi. When I tell my mother
about Sam's plans, she says: you're kidding, right? In
Hebrew, his name is Shmuel. The name means: God Has
Heard. He is funny and sweet and so handsome that I fear
for him, for his robust, graceful beauty. My twins, Rose and Jonathan,
9 years old, are fearful. Am I going to die? Who will take care
of them if I do? Even if I don't die, will I be able to help them
with their homework, pick them up after school? Rose is named
for my father's father's mother. She is down-to-earth, wise beyond
her years, with a certain adult gravitas. She senses
things before they happen. Jonathan is moody, stubborn, eccentric,
clever. School work comes easily to him. He reads a lot. He also
cries a lot. Of the three of them, he is the only one who even
vaguely resembles me.
Over the long-distance wires from Washington, D.C., my father
says: "I've known women who have undergone this kind of thing.
It'll be one, two, three, and it'll all be behind you." Then he
switches to comforting Hebrew words. My sisters, Barbara
and Amalie, telephone daily. My brother David sends flowers.
My mother, however, does not yet know that her second daughter,
who has done everything right -- has breast-fed her three babies
and stopped drinking coffee, has taken up yoga and weighs the
same as she did as a freshman in college -- is lying in a bed
on the 10th floor of the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, recovering
from having a cancerous tumor removed from her left breast and
praying that the pathology report, which comes in on Friday, won't
be too bad -- the tumor invasive, spreading into lymph nodes,
already sending its lethal messengers to other parts of the body.
This is because my mother has an even worse cancer, ovarian cancer,
and has already outlived her doctors' best predictions for her
by several years, much of it marked by illness and suffering.
And now she is once again sick, desperately so -- weak as a nursling,
unsteady as a twig -- and though on the phone she assures me that
there's no need to come home and see her, I can hear how frail
she sounds, how tired, how fed up. But my mother, in classic Jewish
mother style, worries about me even when everything is going well,
which has always made me feel inept and anxious -- as if I can't
get on with things properly without Mom's vigilant care. I'm almost
as worried about telling Mom about my breast cancer as I am about
the cancer itself. I tell Dad: "If Mom knows, she'll give me a
brain tumor."
The Repeat Offender sits up in bed and says that once, when
she'd first lost her breast, she was taking off her bra but had
forgotten how heavy the prosthesis was. "I hit myself in the eye,"
she says, "nearly knocked myself out." Everyone laughs. "The problem
with not having even one booby is that now I can see how big my
stomach is," she says.
Fiona's long-term live-in boyfriend comes every night and looks
at Fiona with worshipful eyes. He is in the construction business.
Fiona is a virologist. Her lab is downstairs. Hence she knows
all the corridors, how they hook up, and where the back stairs
and working elevators are.
Fiona tells me that she'd been adopted as a child but that her
parents -- her adoptive parents -- were truly her parents. "I
knew that my father was dying," she said, "I was driving the car,
on my way somewhere, but I got this feeling -- it was like a sixth
sense -- and I turned the car around to get to mum and dad's.
An hour later he was gone."
The Old Lady, whose real name is Liz, sits
up all night long in a chair by the window, listening to the wireless,
as she calls it, and humming hymns to herself. At dawn, thinking
of her daughter, who is to come up from England to visit her today,
she begins to weep.
Visions
I have been having visions. Visions like I've never had before.
They come at me, day and night, singing. Look up, Jennifer! Open
your eyes and see! And I do: I see black women in white
hospital gowns floating through the blue air; big red flowers
-- tulips perhaps; golden trees; and God's arms enfolding them
all. God has very long arms. They reach all the way from there
to here. When I go home I will paint some of these visions. Just
a few weeks ago, I was up half the night rocketed by one vision
after the other and finally had to take a sleeping pill. Later,
I wrote a long letter to my friend Richard Brickner, a novelist,
telling him that at times I felt that I loved my own creativity
more than I loved my own children, and that surely this was a
sin. Richard called the day he got my letter and said: "You know,
of course, that you're setting up a false conflict." I confessed
that I knew. Now Richard calls again, from New York, worried about
me. Richard himself is the survivor of a car accident he suffered
when he was 20, leaving him to a life in a wheelchair and only
partial recovery of his upper limbs. "Frankly," I tell him, "I'd
rather have what I have than what you have. That is, if the cancer
doesn't kill me." "Well, yes, I agree," Richard answers.
I make a list for living (I have always been very organized):
Pray
See my friends
Love my family
Work with faith
Meet with the breast cancer ladies for lunch every month
or so
Enjoy God's gifts (food, drink, etc.)
Animals (Bumby and Elephant)
Go back to Saint Anthony's
"Why," I ask all three of my roommates on our next-to-last night
together, "would God give me these gifts if he doesn't want me
to use them?" I begin to cry; Liz pads over to give me Kleenex,
and the others -- all of them, no doubt, thinking of their own
torn flesh, their own vivid hopes -- murmur words of encouragement.
I would like to sit there crying all night long -- I love being
the center of attention -- but just then one of the night nurses
comes in with the tea trolley. "Any of you girls wanting a lovely
cup of tea?"
The Christmas Carolers
On the fourth night in hospital, a group of Christmas carolers
come through the ward, singing "The First Noel," "Silent Night,"
and other old faithfuls in chirpy, chipper voices, forced smiles
plastered on their faces. Who invited them? I don't know whether
to laugh or cry. I tell my roommates: "My theory is that they're
all drug addicts, and this is part of their rehab." I also say:
"If they sing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' I'm going to scream."
Mary, one of the nurses, says: "It's medieval torture."
The Wrong Side of the Bed
When my husband comes to visit, with his big, doleful eyes, I
tell him that I am on the wrong side of the bed. I'm not supposed
to be here, I say. I'm supposed to be there, in the chair,
holding someone else's hand. I'm the one who consoles, who sits
by the dying, who makes vague murmuring sounds meant to convey
solace. I'm the one who reads Psalms, hears prayers, goes to funerals,
remembers to write letters of condolence to the bereaved. I'm
not supposed to be here, I repeat. "So get up and take a walk,"
my husband says. Together, we do laps around the 10th floor ward.
Anxiety
The doctor said that the lump was small, but then again, the
lump never should have been there anyway. What if the lump, though
small, was filled with an unusually aggressive and deadly form
of cancer? What if, despite the movie playing in my head featuring
me, myself and I as funny, feisty heroine, the cancer spreads
and spreads until all that's left of me is a pair of eyes that
open and close, until at last they no longer open? In the melodrama
version of my life, wouldn't it be fitting if, just as I am coming
into myself -- just as I'm working with ease, as if God himself
supplied both prose and imagery, and just as the children have
reached that sweet age where they still adore us but are old enough
to be quite independent -- I get zapped? Particularly as, as I
will later explain to my husband, I feel blessed with extraordinarily
clear vision, an almost instinctive ability to see into the souls
of others? As if she's prepared to go. In my own warped
version of events, it is just as I'm rising to such heights that
I will be stricken, punished, ground to dust. Oh! The chutzpah!
Fiona says: "Don't even go there. Don't let yourself go there."
Jean says: "We go to the peaks and the valleys, you see." Liz
says: "Do you know the story of the two sets of footprints in
the sand? And then one set disappears? God is carrying you, and
he will not let you down."
I make a new list, this time of what I have to tell my husband
to do if, God forbid, my future is one of absence:
Get a dog
Stay in Baton Rouge
Spend summer vacations surrounded by family, even if you
don't like them
I've also found a second wife for him: my friend Debra. Debra
is true, loyal, funny, smart, well-read. She loves kids, but doesn't
have any of her own. She isn't Jewish, but that's okay, as she's
philo-Semitic. The only problem is, Debra is already married,
and I would have to kill off Debra's husband, Matt, in order to
make this particular match.
When Debra comes to visit, she brings a small soiled pouch and
hands it to me, saying: "I know this isn't much of a gift, but
I thought you might be able to use it." Inside are three tiny,
discolored plastic birds -- one is red, one is the blue-turquoise
of bathroom tiles and the third is the color of dirty teeth --
with furrowed, cranky expressions on their beaky faces. "They're
Worry Birds," Debra explains. When she was a little girl, she
got them out of a vending machine in Nashville and has kept them
by her side ever since. "They got me this far," she says. "Now
you should have them."
I have been anxious my entire life -- so anxious that at times
it's all I can do to put one foot in front of the other, or tolerate
my three children's childish moods, their enthusiasm, their schoolyard
stories, their desire to share their lives with me. But now the
anxiety abates, abates. I sleep with Debra's Worry Birds under
my pillow. I do not think about Friday.
The Question of Hair
If it's only radiation, I will simply get my hair cut a couple
of inches, as I do every few months anyway. If I have to undergo
chemotherapy, too, I will have my hair cut very short, like a
boy's, which is something I kind of want to try anyway but am
afraid to, as it might look stupid and would take a long time
to grow out. I have already e-mailed to my sister Binky in New
York, explaining that if I'm going to lose all my hair, I want
an authentic Yankees baseball cap to wear and not one of the cheap
knock-offs that they make in Britain.
Cancer Is a Gift
On the phone I tell my Baton Rouge rabbi, Stan Zamek, that somewhere
-- perhaps in one of those alternative-medicine books by Andrew
Weil that I started reading after my mother got sick -- I'd read
that cancer was a gift. Or maybe not. Maybe I've made that one
up. "Have you heard of this?" I ask him. "Can't say that I have,"
he says. He is awkward on the phone -- his long-distance bedside
manner a little stiff. "The idea," I tell him, "is that cancer
lets you let go of all your crap. That is, if it doesn't kill
you first."
"Baruch ha Shem, you'll be fine," he says.
What The Other Women in the Room Say
Fiona says: See you on Friday, girls! Jean says: You'll
be fine. We'll all be fine. Liz says: God doesn't give us anything
that we can't handle. I'm going to miss you, dear, when you go
home.
What's Next
Perversely, I don't really want to go home. I like it here in
the hospital, here with the other women, chatting. I like the
nurses, the doctors, the residents. I like being served tea in
bed, the smell of the flowers that are filling up the room, and
the sense of being in a spaceship, cozened and protected from
the world. Most of all I like the routine that allows me to blot
out thoughts of Friday. What I'll learn on Friday. What my doctors
will tell me on Friday about what they found under the microscope.
And then: I'll light the Sabbath candles, welcoming Shabbat.
But I have to go home, home to our little, cozy, furnished house
in Glasgow. My incisions are clear. My family needs me.
I'm always worried about running out of material, about my well
running dry, even though my Baton Rouge psychotherapist has told
me time and time again that the well will always be there, that
it will not run dry, that it is my soul. Now I know that this
is true. When my brother-in-law, David, calls from his home in
Jerusalem, he says: "So I guess you've got all kinds of new things
to write about." He is an editor at an English-language bimonthly
and understands something of inspiration, deadlines, the way ideas
can enter your mind, like birds, squawking, and just as quickly
fly off. "Are you taking notes?" he asks.
Yes, I tell him. Yes I am.
* * *
Jennifer Moses is a writer who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
where she is at work on a book about being Jewish in the Deep
South.
(April 2004)
