“He doesn’t want you to know,” my mother says. Then she pauses. She’s calling from Florida.
I sit in my sunroom in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It’s a Friday afternoon in early summer, and she’s been telling me about my brother Dennis’s colon cancer.
My brother and I stopped talking about a decade ago, after I’d discovered he’d forged checks and had stolen thousands from our mom’s bank account.
I had threatened to tell our mother if he didn’t confess, something he refused to do.
“Screw you,” he’d replied—and these were his last words to me.
Now, street traffic intrudes through the phone line, and I imagine my mother standing on the narrow balcony of the apartment where she lives with my brother and his family.
“Dennis never forgave you for telling me about the checks,” she says. “He wants nothing to do with you.”
“I get it,” I say to her.
Late afternoon sunlight floods the sunroom, and the heat is intense. My husband and I have agreed that next year when we upgrade the HVAC system, we’ll install air conditioning in this room.
“He’s going for chemo and radiation,” my mother says. “Next week.”
“What about surgery?”
“Only if they can shrink the cancer. The prognosis isn’t good.”
I rise from the couch, notice a squirrel eating at our backyard bird-feeder.
“I don’t know, Rae,” my mother says. “He’s got an appointment with a new surgeon on Monday. We’ll see what he says.”
“Keep me posted,” I say. The squirrel is gone; the bird-feeder shakes. “Got to go, Mom. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
I walk back into the air-conditioned house, chilly but pleasant. I pet Jake, our old golden retriever, who thumps his tail, and go into the kitchen to begin a salad. For five years, my mother and I didn’t speak—having had a falling-out over money—so talking to her now, telling her I love you, still doesn’t feel right. I turn on our kitchen radio, NPR, and pull salad ingredients from the fridge.
I’m chopping a tomato, watching the sharp knife slice through the skin. The tomato is ripe, and my fingers are wet with juice as I listen to an All Things Considered segment about Jimi Hendricks. I don’t hear the beginning, but I’m carried back to late April 1969, when I’d come down with mononucleosis right after my fifteenth birthday, at the end of a turbulent year. I stop for a moment, remembering how I’d recovered just in time to finish up the last two weeks of school, to take my state Regents exams before summer break.
The previous fall I’d had an intellectual awakening. I’d read Walden, Eros and Civilization, and The Second Sex, and I’d met a new group of older, more intellectual kids who became my friends. I finish chopping the tomato, pick up half an onion, and begin to chop that. I turn off the radio so I can concentrate; I want to give this memory attention.
1969—the year I’d also decided to quit modeling, quit shaving my legs, using makeup. I’d stopped accompanying my family on Sunday visits to my grandparents in Brooklyn, joined a student protest movement, and dated “Strike,” a college guy I’d met on the Long Island Railroad during my ride home from a Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden.
In October, I’d co-led the Lawrence Junior High walkout with Eugene, friend and Black Power leader. We’d planned our walk-out to coincide with other student protests in the New York area, as five-hundred seventh, eighth, and ninth graders had left their classrooms in the middle of fourth period in an anti-war protest held on the school’s football field. Somehow, I’d secured a megaphone, and standing on a table in the cafeteria, I directed my fellow students to leave the building—not out the back door but rather out the front so that they could parade past the principal’s office, out the Greco-Roman entryway, down the wide front steps.
That summer—after my year of political protest and illness—would be the wildest of my life. Stuff happened. Stuff that changed, defined me.
The kitchen is full of late afternoon shadows. On the counter, I see that I’ve chopped tomato, onion, green pepper, walnuts, apple, and have tossed them over our home-grown arugula leaves in a hand-blown glass bowl—a gift from our glass artist son, Will, from when he was still in college. It has deep blue swirls and is, as Will calls it, a “low bowl,” a shape more challenging to blow.
Tonight, we’ll have warmed-over homemade pizza and fresh salad. Tomorrow, my husband, Nick, leaves for his month-long writing retreat in upstate New York, where he has a fellowship that will allow him to spend a month at Blue Mountain, a retreat center in the Adirondacks for writers and artists. All year he has looked forward to this time. He hasn’t been able to write much during the academic year, and although I have written a surprising amount, it’s all rough drafts, unfinished stuff that no longer calls to me. But I need the publications, so at some point, I’ll have to revise, edit, send this work out.
I’ve also plotted a new novel—a literary romance set in Fayetteville, NC, my adopted home, where Nick and I, both English professors, have lived for over twenty years. My first novel was a historical novel, based on a woman who had been a slave in Fayetteville. It took me years to research and write, so I’m ready to write something fun, light, and breezy.
The idea makes complete sense. When Nick is on retreat, I’ll have the time and the solitude to write. I’ve already mapped all the major plot points.
Nick and I eat in the sunroom, still hot but now bearable. We have dinner plates on our laps, with extra pizza slices and salad bowl on the coffee table. Jake is with us, begging food, a bad habit, but he’s an old dog, easy to forgive.
Packed and serviced, Nick’s old Ford pick-up truck waits in the driveway. Nick plans to leave in the early morning, around 5:30. He’ll be driving north to upstate New York, but the plan is for him to go west to Asheville first, where he and Will plan to go hiking and camping overnight.
“I’ll set the alarm,” I tell him.
“You don’t have to get up with me. You can go back to sleep.”
“I’ll get up,” I say.
“A month,” Nick says, his voice soft, regretful.
“I’ll be okay,” I assure him as we finish the pizza.
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Later, Nick calls out, “Come to bed.” I’m on my laptop in my study.
After looking over the notes for my novel, I hit save. “Yes,” I call back to Nick, turning off the computer. Nick is waiting for me, and the lights are out. We embrace, but too tired for romance, turn over and go to sleep.
Saturday morning—and at 8:42 a.m., it’s already hot outside. By now, I think, Nick is halfway to Asheville. In darkness, I’d watched Nick back his old Ranger from our driveway to begin his trip.
Already I miss him. The light in my study is still on, as I’ve been trying to work. But instead of fiddling with my novel, I’m thinking of yesterday’s conversation with my mom about my brother’s cancer. I sip tepid coffee and decide to free-write about Dennis, about my half-formed memories of him—my only and difficult sibling.
I take another sip, and as I remember my conversation with my mother, I hear her tentative voice telling me about Dennis’s cancer and how he doesn’t want me to know. Secrets have defined our family. It was only last summer, after my dad died from Parkinson’s—an incomplete diagnosis, for his death was complicated by dementia and other medical issues—that my mother and I reconnected. Not reconciled exactly but got back in touch.
I begin typing, but instead of writing sentences, I find myself typing the words secret and regret over and over until they almost fill the entire screen. Something inside me wants out. But even after years of therapy and healing, I’m not sure I can find the words to write about my family, especially about my brother and how his actions affected our lives.
I want to discuss this with Nick. On a normal summer morning, he’d be downstairs sipping coffee, working on his laptop in the kitchen. I have a strong urge to see if he’s there. But he’s not. And I’ve learned that it’s better simply to sit with, not act on, my discomforts. I take a few deep breaths and delete the words on the screen. I close my eyes, breathe, then open them. Haltingly, I write.