TESTIMONY

In the fall of my senior year of college, I was living in Somerville, in an off-campus apartment with a roommate who was, from what I gathered, about twelve years older than me. I’d just as soon have come out and asked her, but by then, too much time had passed, and I didn’t want her to think I’d been inordinately concerned about the age gap between us. She did once mention that she’d been a regular on a 1970s children’s program that I was too young for but that my older siblings had watched with devotion.

Her name was Dawn, and we’d met on campus during the spring of my junior year. She seemed like a refreshing alternative to my friends from the dorms. My best friend was a first-generation Indian American girl from Sacramento with a penchant for alcohol and theatrics. I loved her, but when I was being very honest with myself, I had to admit that I found her exhausting. And while she was my main confidante—we spent whole days and nights talking to one another about what we did and thought and felt—she had once made it explicitly clear to me that she had limited patience for hearing me talk about my romantic exploits. “You sound almost stupid when you’re talking about your boyfriend,” she’d once said. And ever since, I’d tried very hard to keep most of that kind of business to myself.

Dawn was black, which was one thing that had drawn me to her. I had plenty of black friends, but not so many that I had ceased feeling excited about cultivating new ones. At first, I thought she was a student, but it turned out that she was on an extended leave from the university, having taken time off during her second or third year. Though older than me, she was sweet and innocent in a way I felt I’d only just left behind myself. As far as I was concerned, I’d grown up a lot in two years, a side effect of heartbreak, and as a result of having, at some point in the preceding years, learned to look at myself through more objective eyes, commanding, Straighten up, or Grow up, or Wise up, at times when the old me might have stood mute in shock or crumpled into despair. This is life, I learned to tell myself. These are the fleeting glories and their accompanying devastations: love and betrayal, unabashed pride and humiliation so poignant it requires you to lift your chin and stride out the door like a goddess.

When I met Dawn, I was dating a slightly older black guy I’d met at the campus film archive, where he worked. He wasn’t a student, but he was a campus personality. I wanted the relationship to succeed, but I suspected that he was being somewhat cavalier with his affections. There seemed to be more than a few young black women with whom he was exceptionally familiar. Dawn didn’t appear to know terribly much about him, and I took that to mean that they’d never dated or that he’d never flirted (successfully) with her and that striking up a friendship with her wouldn’t later open me up to the mortification of discovering we had far too much in common.

In the spring of the previous year, after we had already looked at a few apartments together and my eagerness to leave the dorms had been mightily piqued, Dawn and I went for a coffee in Harvard Square. “Are we sure we should be moving in together?” she had asked, as if we were contemplating a far more serious commitment. I shot her a confused, half-betrayed look, and she attempted to clarify by saying that she was a Christian and that her values might seem unusual to me.

Her concern hit me like a rebuke from my own conscience. For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? Instead of telling her that, like her, I was a Christian, I’d snarked back, “Well, if you’re worried that we won’t be ‘equally yoked,’ you can relax.” Why was I trying to punish her for being transparent in her faith? And what was clouding my ability to be transparent in mine?

“Maybe I’m worried about living with someone who makes cheesy jokes about my religion,” she’d replied, ruffled. But we went ahead with things anyway. It would have been far harder to find affordable one-bedroom apartments on our own. Like it or not, we had come to need one another.

Dawn and I were alike in certain ways. She seemed to come from a fairly sheltered middle-class black family with a handful of kids. But when she was my age, both of her parents were killed in a car crash. That was why she’d taken a leave of absence from school. Again, it was something I’d gathered, pieced together from our many day’s-end conversations. The closest I’d come to asking Dawn to tell me her whole story from start to finish was simply listening to the bits and pieces that came tumbling out when we were relaxing together at home.

After we’d first moved in, we drove a U-Haul out to Roxbury to pick up some of her belongings from her brother’s basement. The two of them had the same wide, spoon-shaped face and exquisite almond eyes. I could imagine the whole family was beautiful, in a gentle, almost surprising way. They’d been quiet together that afternoon, talking but not talking, not bothering with the kind of cheerful chatter we’d have made in my family: smiling our big smiles, volleying around jokes, and lobbing a slew of questions over to the outsider.

Dawn prayed before meals and woke up for church on Sundays (not Memorial Church but another in Cambridge). Sometimes, she brought people home from her church group, students who were my age mostly, from Harvard and the other nearby campuses. I always wondered if I’d bump into the Bible-study kids I’d met and embarrassed myself in front of that evening during my freshman fall, and for all intents and purposes, I did, over and over: the types were exactly the same, as was the feeling they incited in me, which was equal parts annoyance and shame, as if they were the flock and I the single sheep that succeeded in getting away.

Our apartment was large and sunny, but in winter it felt like a walk-in refrigerator. The number of tenants who had lived there before us seemed to bear a direct relationship to the layers of linoleum curling up from the kitchen and bathroom floors. If you stood on the corner of Dane Street, where we lived, and Washington, which led to campus, you could see the factory chimneys off in the distance. On cold days, their smoke hung motionless in the white sky. A block up, there was the bakery where I bought the (half-priced) day-old scone and cup of black currant tea that together helped take my mind off the wind rifling through the wool of my army surplus jacket (I had warmer coats, but that was the coolest one). As I set out from home each morning for campus, the cadence of my footfalls seemed to invite a new thought to take shape, and the twenty minutes it took for me to reach campus gave that thought the time to really get somewhere. Sometimes, it felt more like dreamtime, and I found that I’d worked my way through an idea or a memory it should have taken far longer to navigate. The same held true on my treks back home at night, though the dark added an element of mystery and a sense of largeness to things that I never quite noticed when the sun was out.

I’m not sure how true it is to say that I thought a lot in those days about my mother. Sometimes I avoided thinking about her as a way of staving off worry. If we just left things as they were and didn’t meddle with them, I’d tell myself, everything would be fine. When she and I spoke, she answered my questions with affirmations: I’m feeling well. Everything here is just fine. Dad and I are keeping busy. I couldn’t ask the hard questions, the ones that would have pried into the space where certainty gave way. I couldn’t even say a thing like, But, Mom, how do you really feel? What are you thinking? Are you worried? Because I couldn’t bear to hear her peel away the strength and the assurance and show me where she was vulnerable or afraid. I was the youngest, after all, the kitten of the family, the baby, and in that role, I’d never had to learn to be strong for anyone else or to provide anyone else with necessary support.

For my part, I scrambled to show my mother how well I was doing, how pleased she should be with me, to rattle off the proof of how much I was in the process of achieving, because it had become impossible to tell her what was inside my heart. If I upset her, in her condition, what else might happen? There’s a version of cancer, in the imagination, that is a monster we unleash upon ourselves and the people we love, something animated and augmented by stress and by anger. Wouldn’t it tempt my mother’s cancer to let her know how much a part of the world I had become—the world she’d warned me was fleeting, snared with moral pitfalls, a mere way station on our way to the hereafter?

My silence did nothing to mitigate my own worry. After I’d hang up from one of our calls, I’d imagine her sitting on the side of her bed near the phone, asking God for strength, for health, for more life. Underneath the prayers, I feared that she was afraid, no matter that she’d all my life told me the Lord took away fear, that she was serene in His promises. But what if the cancer wasn’t content to stay gone? What if it decided to come back? Would she know? Would it speak to her in aches or a dull burn or a searing thunderbolt that flashed on and off through the day and night? I lay awake sometimes, worrying it might surprise her with the kind of pain that would cause her to say, “Oh,” and have to lie back down on the bed in her clothes and her shoes and shut her eyes.

I’d started taking the late-night bus to Providence once a week so I could spend the night with my boyfriend, the one I suspected I shouldn’t completely trust, who was by then enrolled in graduate school at Brown. I hadn’t wanted to bring him home with me because Dawn would have disapproved, but she stopped me one morning as I was coming back into the apartment to collect my things for class.

“It’s okay if you want to have your boyfriend stay here sometimes,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t mind going to him. I wouldn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

“As a Christian, my choices are right for me,” she said. “But they might not be right for you.”

It was impossible for me to imagine the same words crossing back and forth between my mother and me. Did I think that by presenting a false or partial version of myself I could convince her she had been wrong, a few years back, when she’d wanted to pray for me with the ladies from church? Did it seem likely that hiding the facts of my day-to-day life would make her think her prayers, about me—and everything else—had been answered?

My mother. No matter how I’d willed my thoughts of her to behave, no matter how much I’d begged them not to conjure an image of her as sick or even vulnerable to sickness, as my senior year was just picking up momentum, her cancer came out of remission. At first, it was only Conrad’s fiancée, Janet, a resident in emergency medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, in whom she confided. Janet came from an even more sprawling family than ours, and she fit in instantly with our heat and commotion. I suppose my mother felt more comfortable asking Janet for help with the dilemma of whether to seek treatment or whether, in place of fighting back against the disease, she should surrender the outcome to God. Asking Conrad would have been dumping her burden upon her son, though she must have known the news would reach him through his fiancée, anyway. Perhaps there was a part of her that wanted it so.

But by the time I was studying for my midterm exams, Mom had broken her silence. In any case, the cancer was no longer something she could hide. There were malignant growths on her liver, and her abdomen was swollen with a tumor so large it could be seen beneath her clothes—something that on a younger woman would have been mistaken for a pregnancy. She underwent the rounds of chemotherapy she’d initially resisted, which left her emphatically tired. She couldn’t walk without help; she needed a wheelchair to get around most of the time. And there were new words used to describe the state of her condition, words terrifying in their intransigence. Inoperable. Terminal. Words that threw up their hands and said: Go no further. End of the line.

Some evenings, shivering under a blanket in my drafty apartment, I’d phone home. I missed Mom, feared for her, longed to hear her tell me she’d had a good day. “How are you feeling?” I’d say into the telephone receiver, and the voice that reached me was smaller, as if there were a distance greater than the breadth of the continent standing between us. “I’m okay, honey, just tired,” she’d answer, sensing how much I wanted such a thing to be true, for it to be as simple as needing some rest, a bit of time off her feet. But everything I didn’t ask—like what her doctors were saying or whether the tumors were shrinking or what God offered in answer to her prayers—was there listening in on our conversation, saying nothing but audible somehow in its silence.

Whenever Conrad, my physician-brother, the one person in our family with clinical, scientific understanding of cancer and what it meant, broached the topic of our mother’s health, it was always gently, as if testing the waters of my knowledge. He could have sat me down and schooled me, shown me the textbook pictures the way he had years before when I was learning where babies came from. But instead his method was subtle, Socratic. “When was the last time you spoke to Mom?” he’d ask. Or, “How did she sound to you?” And always, I’d repeat back the same misinformation. That she sounded tired but otherwise the same. That she was hopeful about the chemo. That it would be great once we got past all of it and she was herself again. Conrad the cardiologist, whose head must have been filled with the painful truth of what my mother was actually going through and heading toward, listened, not pushing back, allowing me to take my own gradual steps into understanding. But by Thanksgiving, he told me that he and Janet had moved up the date of their wedding. “If we wait until spring, Mom may not be able to manage the trip.” Shortly before the two of us flew out to California together for Christmas, he said, “You know, we might not have many more holidays like this with Mom.” Just above his eyebrows, I could see the furrows that formed when he was serious. His eyes implored me to get it, to comprehend that this was real, that our mother was dying. Finally, the knowledge I’d been trying to evade closed in on me. It took no time at all. It had been there keeping pace with me all along.

I petitioned the dean to let me drop a literary theory class that I’d more or less stopped attending anyway, and when he asked for written explanation of my exceptional circumstances, I produced a short letter that included the statement “My mother is dying.” It was as if I were entering into a contract with myself, signing my name to something I had finally come around to believing.

When we were at last all at home for the holidays, I housed a quiet fear. Mom was thinner. When I hugged her close, I could detect a faint chemical scent on her skin. Her hair was thinner, too; at night, she rested a small hairpiece on her dresser among the perfume bottles and brooches. When friends called to ask how she was feeling, sometimes she’d say, “I’m just waiting on my miracle!” And how faithless, how wicked I felt at those times for having surrendered to that terrible knowledge, the knowledge that had forced me to admit she was dying, that the odds of her surviving stage 4 colon cancer—which was how I had just recently begun to describe her condition, how Conrad and our mother (by way of her doctors) had finally explained it—were at best only about 15 percent.

Dad was home full-time with her by then. He’d retired after my sophomore year. They’d been traveling together, enjoying their leisure to the extent possible, though now their comings and goings were determined by the chemo schedule and by her checkups with her oncologist. Dad spent a lot of his free time working on the kinds of projects he’d undertaken when we were much younger, building bookcases and end tables, stirring up sawdust in his garage, sketching out the kinds of plans that had made him seem like a da Vinci when I was a little girl. Jean, who’d taken a leave from her job when Mom’s cancer had returned, was living at home to help with all the things our father wasn’t good at: fixing our mother’s hair and makeup, getting her dressed and showered, and surprising her with colorful silk blouses and the little curios that made her happy. Jean, whose easy rapport with our mother sometimes unnerved me, if only because of the way it stood in contrast to all my own self-censoring. Jean, who over the years had been not just a daughter to our mother but also a confidante, a friend.

But more than to our father or Jean, Mom had given herself over to the care of her Lord, the one who any day now, if He saw fit, could still reward her with the miraculous healing she urged us to believe in and pray for.

When my mother talked about her miracle, I pushed myself to believe in it, too, but I found that wanting a thing to happen was not the same as believing it likely. Those times, I felt stricken with guilt. How could I be so pessimistic and hard-hearted? What if my belief in the harrowing statistics was all that stood in the way of her making it through everything alive?

How different would the process have been if I had remembered that we—my entire family and I—were going through it together, if I could have brought myself to say something simple and true to Jean or Michael or our father? But for some reason, I carried it around like a secret. Perhaps it was guilt at my own ability to have said a thing like “my mother is dying,” to have put it in writing and signed my name to it and made it true. Shouldn’t I have been telling people about the brave battle she was waging? Shouldn’t I have been enlisting their support, making it clear how much I believed she had it in her to survive, to win?

Sometimes, I did try to imagine what it would be like if she made it, coming up with versions of the woman she’d have become by then. About a year after her first surgery, she and my father had taken a long road trip across the United States and into Canada. In North Carolina, they’d visited friends, and one evening at church, my mother had given her testimony to the congregation. Giving testimony happens a lot among Southern Baptists, who, as a whole, are eager to bear witness to the evidence of God in their lives. Most of the religious testimonies I’ve ever heard have followed a formula similar to the stories recovering addicts or alcoholics tell: of struggling with negative ways, hitting rock bottom, and then climbing back to a place of stability or prosperity with the help of a higher power. When my father told me with pride in his voice about how my mother had shared her salvation story at that North Carolina revival meeting, bragging that a video had been shot during the event, I’d said “That’s great!” hoping I’d never be forced to view it. She’d probably told the crowd how, long ago, she’d been searching. Maybe she’d even found words to describe whatever it was she had once sought and how God had come to meet that need. But watching her tell that story to a roomful of strangers was something I instinctively shrank from. The Jesus-happy crowd, the naked faith that would have traveled along my mother’s voice, the hand holding and head bowing—I couldn’t fathom indulging the embarrassment, even before myself, of such raw, untempered, hardheaded believing.

But it wasn’t just that. It also had to do with my own fear of claiming the faith I was born into, of owning it without concern for what it conjured in anybody else’s imagination, without the anxiety of being likened to the Christians whose worlds were, by my estimation, too tiny, circumscribed by a few arcane commandments and deliberately impenetrable mysteries. The ones who voted against progress, who feared science, the ones who got married and lived tucked inside their houses. The ones for whom my distaste made me nothing better than a snob. It was because of them, or rather my fear of them, that I had refused to profess to the realness of God in my life. Wouldn’t my mother’s testimony implicate me in that reality as she understood it? Wasn’t her voice still drifting out in every direction from that pulpit where she’d stood testifying, touching every inch of air on its way toward only it knew where? And when it found me, as one day it must, would it force me to choose between her world and mine? Would it mark me or claim me or simply slow for a moment, staring incredulously?

If only I could have sat beside her for a few hours and said, “This is my testimony,” telling her every step I had taken on the path to that day, trusting that there was nothing I could say that she did not already know. If only I had known how to trust her with who I was. If only I had known how to ask her a thing like, Where will we all be after everything that is happening has happened?