New Year’s Eve meant I had been home for almost as long as I had been in rehab. I thought that ushering in 2013 meant flushing away the troubles that had riddled me through almost all of 2012. In anticipation of feeling great about what lay ahead, I invited my sister’s whole family over to celebrate. At four that afternoon, shortly before they arrived, I called my mother.
“You’re not in the mood for having them,” she said.
“Why would you even say that?”
“Because I can tell.”
“That is not true at all. I’m just concerned that I won’t be able to stay up until midnight, at least not in a sitting position. Or a standing position.”
“Okay.”
“I’m perfectly fine with them coming over.”
“Okay.”
“God!”
I made garlic bread. I didn’t smell it burning because I was mixing the margaritas and the blender was so loud it seemed to block out my sense of smell, but the kids noticed and then I saw smoke and the smoke detector went off and the room filled with fog. I slid over to the oven and took out the burned toast.
“Fuck.”
“Mom!” said Henry.
“Sorry, but fuck.”
I opened the fridge to get the guacamole and saw Rumy with her latex gloves sitting on the shelf next to the orange juice. I saw myself turn over on the bed. She firmly shoved the magic bullet up my bum. I slammed the fridge shut, but the image remained. I remembered a rumor I heard that Elvis didn’t die of a drug addiction but of constipation so intense it brought on a heart attack. My obsession with my bladder and bowel continued, every visit to the bathroom torturous.
By eleven thirty, all the food eaten, the drinks drunk, and the dishes put away, my sister’s family went home and our family went upstairs to get ready for bed.
Henry called out. “Where are you, Mom?”
I put on a happy voice. “In the bathroom, honey! Where are you?”
“In your bed!”
I heard him turn on the TV and rustle himself under the covers.
“Oh God oh God oh God,” I muttered under my breath. I was sweating.
Eventually, I got up and went to wash my face. I had to sit down to do it. I couldn’t stand over the sink with my eyes closed—I lost track of where my body was in space. It was also why I had the shower chair. I couldn’t risk closing my eyes while standing up, not even for a second.
I came out of the bathroom. Rich was now in bed with Henry, watching the throngs of people in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop.
“Where’s Joey?” I asked.
“Hope he has better luck than me.”
“Nice.”
A bunch of actors were discussing past New Year’s Eves and with whom they had shared kisses. I watched for a couple of minutes. Rich looked at me and smiled and then I went downstairs in the dark. I sat on the top step of the basement stairs. It was fifteen minutes to midnight. I called my mother.
“Mom?”
“What is it, darling?”
I pressed my eyes shut.
“Ruthie?”
I took off my glasses and put them beside me.
“Are you crying?”
I didn’t want the kids to hear me.
“Ruthie,” my mom said. “You are doing amazing. Just think of how far you’ve come and how far you’re going to go still. I have no doubt whatsoever that you’re going to be perfect again—even your bum. I watched you walking down the hall when you were here last week and I was amazed, amazed at how well you did. You can’t even tell. Honestly. Can you feel me hugging you from here?”
“Yes.”
“Actually, I’m surprised you haven’t broken down before this.”
Rich appeared. He was standing over me, frowning. “It’s almost midnight,” he said.
I shushed him away, then gave him the thumbs up, then gestured for him to go upstairs to the kids, then shushed him away again. He shook his head, then brought me a Kleenex box. I blew my nose, then gave him the thumbs up twice more.
“Come on!” Joey called from our bedroom. “It’s almost midnight!”
“Go. Just go,” I said to Rich.
He didn’t move, and then he did. I heard him slam the wall before heading upstairs.
“I’ve heard your mother,” my father said, picking up the extension. “And I agree with everything she said. Oh—there goes the ball. Ten, nine, eight . . .”
I was still sobbing.
“Go kiss your wonderful hubby,” my mom said.
I said my good-byes and then sat there for a few more minutes before going upstairs. Almost every light was off. Rich and the boys were still awake in our bed. Rich didn’t look at me as I came in. I put my hand on his arm and then leaned over him to kiss Henry, then Joey.
“Happy New Year, boys.”
And then I kissed Rich, but it was too late.
The kids went to bed and I crawled in beside him and leaned my head on his shoulder. Rich left to go to the bathroom and I followed him. He was standing at the sink and I hugged his back until he turned around and hugged me proper.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I do. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
We went to bed and lay there with our eyes open.
“You slammed the wall,” I said. “Did you hurt your hand?”
“Since 1995, we haven’t missed a kiss on New Year’s,” he said.
I had rung in the New Year with my parents. I was thinking how hard the year had been for them because there is nothing worse than seeing your child in pain. Somewhere in the countdown, I had heard my father say that he wanted to go kiss my mother. I ended up spending the last moment of 2012 alone. I felt sick. My husband, who had done everything for me, while also going to work every day, looking after the kids, updating our family and friends with emails about my progress, keeping on top of what the doctors said, and taking my teary calls at all hours of the day, was denied a kiss at the end of this terrible year because I thought everything was still all about me.
We were back to back. I tried to make it so that our bums touched. They might have been, but I couldn’t tell. I pushed my feet toward his. Knowing they rarely hit their target, Rich made sure his feet found mine first. I rubbed them against his, until I had to ask, “Are you wearing socks?”
“Mmmm,” he said. He was dozing off.
I started to doze off then, too. I was happy to lie touching him, maybe bum to bum, maybe feet to feet, relieved to know that all was forgiven.
•
“I got the number of this girl you might want to call,” Rich told me, shortly after New Year’s. “One of my poker friend’s friends. Apparently, she had something very similar to what you had.”
“That makes me nervous.”
“Just take her number. You don’t have to call her if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
He gave me her number and I carried it around in my purse for a long time. After my faith-shaking conversation with Carmen back at Lyndhurst, I had decided never again to compare my surgery and progress to others. But my history shows that making a mistake just once isn’t enough for me to get the message.
I decided to call this woman, Erin, only after creeping her online first. Her Facebook page showed that she had three children (almost like me!) and was in the arts (just like me!) and loved to climb mountains (not like me!) and go on great family adventures (sort of, almost, just like me!). Still, I proceeded with caution. There remained one red flag that could just as easily have been interpreted as a positive sign: Erin described herself as fully recovered. I was skeptical of this “fully recovered” business. I also presented as “fully recovered.” I wasn’t. I didn’t know if I ever would be. In Erin, I was looking for someone to answer my current, most burning question. I felt confident she could do that.
Erin seemed excited to hear from me, ready to help in whatever way I needed.
“You had a spinal meningioma, right?”
“Yes. Did you?”
“I had an ependymoma.”
“What’s that?”
“A tumor that developed from cells in the lower back part of my brain.”
“How did you know you had that?”
“Excruciating headaches.”
“I’m so sorry. That sounds awful.”
“I learned some pretty cool stuff about it, though.”
I heard some of the words: cells, structures, cavities, canals, something called a lumen. Erin was clearly a card-carrying member of the knowledge-is-power party.
“Do you know I have a website for tumor sufferers?” she asked.
I had looked at it only moments before I called her but immediately regretted it. The stories were heartbreaking; too many issues dovetailed with my own. Even the uplifting posts made me anxious.
“Really? I’ll have to take a look at that,” I lied. “Listen, did you have numb bum after your surgery?” I blurted.
“Oh God, yes.”
“Me, too!” I laughed. “Just tell me when it will go away.”
“It will never go away.”
“It won’t.”
“But you had your surgery eleven years ago! It must go away eventually.”
“But it won’t. It never will. And anyway, so what?”
I was miles, months, maybe years, away from “so what.”
I thanked her for her time and for sharing her story with me. After, I vowed—again—to never discuss my issues with anyone who appeared to have anything like what I had, and this time I meant it.
I looked at my feet. They were size-7 metaphors, never quite touching the ground, elevating me just slightly to a perfectly functional but wobbly place. I could learn to walk there, to balance there, to sit there, to live there forever if I had to. Time would have to take care of what I couldn’t. I needed a new area of focus, something to take my mind off my feet and my numb bum.
My sex life.
There are two mysterious events in my life that I have never been able to solve. The first occurred when I was moving out of the apartment I shared with my friend Fli to move in with my then boyfriend, Rich. While making a quick sweep under my bed to ensure I wasn’t leaving anything behind, I discovered a pair of bejeweled slippers with upturned toes. They looked like they belonged to a genie or an Indian princess, or a gay elf.
“Fli!” I called.
She ran up the narrow staircase to my room. “What’s the matter?”
I pointed to the twinkling shoes.
“What are those?” she asked.
“You didn’t put these under my bed?”
“Huh?”
Later that night, Rich came over and saw the slippers.
“Where did those come from?” Rich asked.
“No idea.”
The mystery remained unsolved.
I thought about those slippers when I opened my Kindle one night. I scrolled through all my e-books, which all looked familiar except one, a book called Taking Instructions. It came with a warning—something about “Extreme” and “BDSM.”
I had a bondage book on my Kindle.
I didn’t put it there. I asked Rich. He didn’t put it there. Joey and Henry—God help me—certainly hadn’t put it there, either. It appeared that the same fairy who had placed the jeweled slippers under my bed had returned for some more tomfoolery.
I started reading.
It was raunchy stuff with only the barest bones of a reality-based setup: a studly male teacher, a buxom, naughty female student, and . . . go! I was open to its potential sexual magic almost immediately. Although things down there still felt largely frozen, I refused to simply pack it in and live out the rest of my life orgasm-free. I was in possession of eight thousand sensory nerve endings; I would be happy if even half of them worked again.
(“I’d be happy with just two,” Rich said.)
Like any horny teen, I needed to discuss things with a girlfriend but didn’t want to be the one to start the conversation.
Luckily, my friend Beth and I met for breakfast one day. “How’s your sex life?” she asked.
“It’s good, it’s good,” I said. “I just can’t, you know . . .”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Not even with a vibrator?”
I put my coffee down. “No. But only because I’ve never used a vibrator.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Do I have one?” She sighed. “We’re going to the drugstore.”
“The drugstore?”
She knew just what aisle to go to and didn’t care who was looking. She grabbed two off the shelf.
“So you can compare and contrast,” she explained.
They sat in my bedside table for weeks before I told Rich about them, before I even tried them. I’m not a prude, but somehow, using these (two) vibrators without Rich’s knowledge—even though I had been counseled by my friend to take them for a test drive on my own before bringing Rich on board—felt like a betrayal. I needed time to think. Since coming home, I had spent a fair bit of time in our hot tub. The water continued to be a source of soothing and healing. And then one day I remembered to turn the jets on.
A few hundred nerve endings were officially reactivated.
•
Henry and I went for a walk after dinner one night. Since scaling down to one stick from two, I had been advised to switch over and start using the walking stick in my left hand instead of my more dominant right hand to even out my gait. I hated it. Every part of me hated it, especially my left hand and my left leg. My right hand was bereft since its job had been downsized. In an act of pure petulance, it refused to swing when I walked, remaining stiffly by my side, barely budging from my thigh. So I had an idea: I would carry my left stick under my arm like a purse, tapping it on the ground only if I fell into my drunken side-steppy walk. Otherwise, I was pretty much walking without props.
Henry did tricks on his scooter just ahead of me.
“You better be careful, Hen,” I warned. “You almost hit yourself with that thing.”
“Mom, that’s the point! You never know when I’m doing the trick or not!”
I stopped for a couple of minutes to watch him, but even then I didn’t lean on my pole. I had been studying how other people walked, taking mental measurements, amazed at how they could put one foot in front of the other so quickly and with such consistency. If there was enough distance between a particularly compelling biped and me, I would try to fall in step with his or her gait, test out his or her walking rhythm against my own to see how it fit. I thought that syncing my steps with the steps of strangers would not only force me to move at a different pace—often one that was faster than my own—but also help me relearn the significance of body language. I was sure that how one walked told the world something interesting about oneself. I was also sure that if Henry didn’t stop swinging his scooter around his body like that he was going to slice his ankles off.
“Do me a solid, Hank, and get behind me. Tell me how I look.”
I started walking, back ramrod straight. I felt like John Gielgud in every part he ever played.
“You’re too stiff,” Henry said. “Loosen up a little.”
I slackened my knees, rounded out my posture, let my hips do the talking.
“That better?”
“Too much swag.”
Swag?
“You mean my hips are moving too much?”
“Way too much.”
I split the difference. I felt like I might be approaching something natural.
“There. You look great, Mom.”
Not too long after that, I asked Joey to take a walk with me. I told him how excited I was that I had finally regained the art of walking and talking while his dad and I were out on our Sunday morning stroll through the neighborhood ravine.
“What I mean is that I didn’t have to choose to either do one or the other. I could actually look at him while I was walking. This was a real revelation because, as you know, I haven’t been able to do both for the longest time.”
“ALL RIGHT ALREADY. I GET IT. THAT’S ALL YOU TALK ABOUT! YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANNOUNCE EVERY SINGLE THING. IT’S ALL YOU TALK ABOUT ALL THE TIME! I GET IT, ALL RIGHT? I GET IT!”
We got home. I opened the door and Joey went straight to the TV. I went straight to the kitchen.
“Did you want some pasta?” I asked him after several minutes of silence.
“Sure.”
He came into the kitchen.
“I want a plate,” he said. “I mean a bowl. I desire a bowl. I’m desire-a-bowl!”
He sat at the kitchen island and I watched him eat the way he does, with his head bent so far down over the bowl he practically touches it. I didn’t see his face again until he was finished.
“You’re right,” I finally said. “I do talk too much about my recovery.”
“It’s okay.” He wouldn’t look at me.
“I guess it’s what I think about a lot of the time.”
“Of course. I understand that.”
“Anyhow, it’s really boring and I’m going to try not to do that anymore.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“I’m really sorry, Joey.”