CHAPTER ELEVEN

Screw Nature

Rebecca was treating herself with Vaseline, her all-purpose miracle ointment. It softened skin, shielded wounds from water, greased the works. She stuck it up her nose with a Q-tip to get the dried “boogies” out—and recommended I do the same—she rubbed it into her withered hands each night and slept with them encased in white, cotton gloves. Vazeline, she called it, as if it had a z in it instead of an s. But in the months since the pigeon drop, she had been putting it somewhere else.

Vaseline was not an unfamiliar substance to me either, of course. Every night, my mother reached her fingertip into the large glass jar that sat on our bathroom counter so she could dab a clot of it on the rectal tip of my enema tube before inserting that tip into me.

My grandmother told herself that she just had an irritation; it wasn’t as if she could look. And if she couldn’t see that place herself, she certainly didn’t want anyone else looking. It was that locus of torture, where scheisse, that toxic, dirtiest of all the world’s impure substances, struggled to get out. Now the blood was one more shameful effluent confirming the body’s corruption. So she put globs of Vaseline in her rectum every time she saw red in the toilet, every time she felt a stab of pain. Bigger and bigger globs of it to try to stanch the bleeding.

When my father told me the story afterward, his mouth pressed a little too close to my ear, the details accounted a little too viscerally, I felt as if I were trapped there in Rebecca’s bathroom with the both of them, my grandmother’s remedy going not into her, but injected straight from my father’s voice into me.

This time, the Vaseline failed to perform its miracles. When Rebecca finally allowed the doctor to put his clean, shiny scope up her, her rectum was blooming with cancer. “She’ll need to see a surgeon,” he told my father, who had been pacing the waiting room, sighing and pulling at his thick black curls, “but it may be too late.”

My first cousin Joey and I sat on the covered lawn swing on the grounds of Temple Hospital, where we had been consigned for “some fresh air.” Joey was six months older than me; at the end of the summer he would turn thirteen. Inside, the surgeons worked on my grandmother. Though I only got to see Joey on the weekends, we talked on the phone for hours nearly every night, whispering, giggling, sharing secrets.

If my father had had his way, I would not have been on the swing, I would have been at his side, taking it all in—the anguish in the atmosphere, the surgeon’s pronouncement that my grandmother’s condition was hopeless, the refusal to accept, the sobbing that ensued. For once my mother and Aunt Sonia had prevailed, and I was outside on the lawn with Joey, being buffered like a child.

The grounds of the hospital were well manicured with roped-off gardens of roses; the swing we sat on, ancient, its floral chambray faded from the sun and covered with leaves and tree pollen. Joey was using his pent-up energy to keep us in motion, one foot—shod in its usual high-topped black Ked—pushing us off from the ground every time our momentum flagged. The swing’s rusty chains squeaked as we swung over a big rolling lawn; birds sang and a sprinkler twisted somewhere in the distance.

A strand of hair in the side of my mouth, my shoulders hunched, I held my arms in defensively so they stayed out of contact with the bird droppings splattered on the swing’s splintered armrests. I could only bite my hair, rather than the preferred fingernails, because I suspected my hands might have come into contact with those droppings. The shedding wood also posed risks: if a splinter punctured my flesh, even if the splinter was tiny, and the wound it created nearly invisible, even though my father had already subjected me to a near overdose of booster shots, I could get tetanus and die. Our proximity to the hospital and my anxiety over what was happening to Rebecca made the prospects of a fatal disease feel especially imminent. Remembering my father’s warning, I opened and closed my jaw repeatedly to reassure myself of my lockjaw-free state.

Joey chattered without breaks from one sentence to the next, the tone of his voice getting higher and higher as he grew more excited. He was always trying to persuade me of something, of the way things were, which was the way that Joey saw them. And I usually agreed; with early adolescence had come a growing conviction that we were the only ones in our family who understood what was really going on in the world. Joey scarcely paused to see if I agreed; as long as he kept talking, periodically poking my upper arm for emphasis, he assumed he was getting somewhere.

My anxiety competed with the inherently calming properties of the environment, the comfort of being with Joey. He was busy making up rules for the games we would play later, elaborate tournaments of Chinese checkers and Monopoly. When Joey stayed over at our house, these marathons could span several days, a board of Monopoly not to be disturbed on the living room floor, another of the Game of Life on the dining room table. Now Joey was saying that if I lost the games, I would have to pull down my pants and show him my woo-woo.

Joey and I had played variants of these diversions on and off for years—kissing-touching-showing games. Joey might have been the initiator, but I was a willing participant even though I nearly always lost, and it never occurred to me until years later that maybe these games were rigged.

When we’d been younger, the kissing, touching, and showing were incorporated into frequently reenacted storylines. I was the seductive hypnotist who, with my swinging crystal, controlled Joey, my unsuspecting victim, and forced him to do my bidding. Only he just pretended to be hypnotized as a ploy so that when I leaned over him, he could pull me down and kiss me. I dropped my crystal and submitted.

In another scenario, I was an independent cowgirl who’d inherited her father’s ranch, and he the traveling cowboy who fell off his horse and broke his arm. Delirious for days with an infected wound, he lay tossing on my bed while I nursed him back to health, largely by wiping his forehead with a damp towel. I only realized he had regained full consciousness when, as I leaned over to give him a sip of water, he pulled me down and kissed me. The unanticipated kiss—which the heroine first tries to fend off, then submits to, and finally relishes—had made its way from the movies into our stories.

Sometimes we dropped the dramatic underpinnings and simply practiced kissing as a technical form. Always a perfectionist, when Joey attempted a new roller skating maneuver outfitted in his official black Roller Derby skates, he’d practice it over and over again, imploring, “Don’t take your eyes off me. Did my ankle turn too soon? No, you didn’t watch close enough. Watch me again.”

He was the same way with kissing. On a Sunday afternoon, in Rebecca’s antiseptic bedroom, when Joey and I were seven, while the rest of the family congregated in the living room, Joey employed this same persistence in duplicating a kiss he’d seen Tony Curtis deliver in a movie. Again and again, he put me in his arms, bent us halfway over, and planted his chapped lips on my closed mouth.

“Let’s try once more, my mouth was too tight,” he said, wiping his lips on his madras sport shirt’s short sleeve, and starting over. As fond as I was of Joey, I never liked the taste of his mouth. His sinuses chronically plugged from allergies, his mouth possessed that yeasty, closed-in odor of someone with a cold.

By the time of Rebecca’s diagnosis, Joey and I had stopped kissing. The showing had endured and become more baroque. If I lost one of our games, he proposed, I’d have to dance in a circle naked; I’d have to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair; I’d have to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair singing tra la la; I’d have to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair and do the Hokey Pokey while I sang tra la la.

I didn’t mind the games. I liked to think of myself as sexy. I’d pull my T-shirt down off my shoulder and swing my hips as I walked. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to grow up to be exactly the kind of girl my father liked, as I was becoming more and more aware of the contempt for women that seemed to go hand in hand with his appreciation. Still I felt powerful and free exhibiting my body, and Joey had always been duly appreciative. But we were getting older now, approaching the age where sex was no longer a game. This conversation was adding to my unease; should we be talking about this while Grandma was in surgery? If my grandmother was suspicious of all bodily pleasures, she held out a special level of disdain for sex. She’d caught me once on her front porch with a scarf wrapped over my waist covering my Bermuda shorts, pretending to be a circus performer and doing a strut down to the ring for a boy from the neighborhood. She yanked me back inside, shrieking, “You little hussy!” as if I’d been caught soliciting.

“I’m so worried about Grandma,” I said to Joey, changing the subject. “I’m scared of what’s going to happen.” Now I was so nervous that, despite the risks, I had to get my finger into my mouth. I wiped it on my skirt, examined it for obvious signs of contamination, and then made room for it alongside the strand of hair. Joey had inherited my Uncle Nathan’s devil-may-care fatalism.

“Oh, cousin,” he said (he had taken to calling me cousin, an affectation he’d borrowed from a French movie), “Que Sera Sera.” He had heard Doris Day sing that song in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

I still felt uneasy. Not only should we not be talking about sex, we should be saying something especially nice about Rebecca. We should be behaving like good little Jewish grandchildren who had never seen each other naked. That way, God, who might be guiding the surgeon’s hands at this very moment, would know how much we loved her, and reward us by not taking her away.

I prodded Joey. “I hope Grandma will be okay,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” he said. He picked up the cue and began to reminisce about the giant bags of M&M’s and chocolate-covered orange sticks that Grandma bought for us when we came to visit. His voice trailed off wistfully at the end, as if we had eaten that candy eons before, as if Rebecca were already dead.

Bringing sweets into the house constituted a major concession on my grandmother’s part; she not only kept strictly kosher but renounced any interest in food. She sustained her ninety pounds on canned peaches, the medically obligatory prunes, cream of wheat, and a sludgy grain drink called Postum. The mainstay of her diet consisted of cold boiled chicken that she made every Friday afternoon—after traveling three hours to the kosher meat market on Vermont Avenue to obtain it—and ate all week, down to the last stringy, slimy shred. The candy, and occasional cans of Franco-American spaghetti and tuna fish bought for us, constituted the only foods in my grandmother’s house that Joey and I considered edible.

Affecting nostalgia, Joey said, “Remember those old-fashioned sayings Grandma told us? Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot. I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. Let’s not and say we did.” He laughed and nudged my arm. These sayings were as close to jokes as anything my grandmother ever imparted. She tended to be sourly prescriptive where Joey and I were concerned, always advising us to calm down and “Shah still before somebody gets hurt.”

“I remember,” I said.

The surgeons removed my grandmother’s colon and rectum and found that the cancer had invaded her liver. They weren’t sure about her brain. When my father learned she had only months to live, he became frantic. We were sitting at the table over lunch one day soon afterward, when my father got up from his place at its head and began to prowl.

“Her doctor should have found the cancer sooner; why didn’t he do a sigmoidoscopy?”

“She didn’t tell him anything was wrong,” my mother said. “She was too embarrassed.”

“She was alone too much,” he said. He stopped and stood in front of Paul’s chair. “If you’d only gone to see her more often, she would have told you what was going on.”

“I’m the one who did go to see her. We had lunch together all the time. Where were you? You were the one who always wanted to go to a movie instead of visiting her.”

My father screamed, cursed, lamented, his voice booming, black eyes boring into Paul, and then my mother. “Couldn’t you see how much weight she was losing? You took her to the ladies’ room; couldn’t you tell that something was wrong?”

Then he settled on a new target—the pigeon drop. Yes, that was it, the pigeon drop to which she’d fallen prey the year before had given my grandmother cancer.

“It was the shock,” he said. “A bad shock can cause cancer.” And after a beat, “I shouldn’t have yelled at her when it happened. Why did I yell at her?”

My father yanked out his chair and collapsed back in his place at the table.

“I should have called her every day. I should have taken her to the doctor when I saw she was getting oyver-botl, we should have taken the money out of her account and doled it out to her ourselves.”

He hung his head low and ran his hands through his hair. Then he jumped up again, back in motion, twirling his curls with his pincer hand, dripping with sweat. Finally, he looked up to the ceiling and, in his most stentorian tones, found a target large enough to encompass his accusations: “God, what did my mama ever do to deserve this? All that observance, traveling miles to the kosher meat market, depriving herself, divorcing Sam because he wasn’t frum enough, and you still let her get cancer? Gotteniu! What kind of God are You?”

Then came scheming and planning.

“Those Glendale hick doctors don’t know anything. We’ll take Mama to the Mayo brothers,” the Mayo brothers being my father’s equivalent of Mecca.

“Ira,” my mother said, shaking her head and enunciating each syllable, “there’s nothing anyone can do. We’ll just have to see how it goes, keep her comfortable.”

“Don’t be a patsy. Movie stars and rich people get all those experimental treatments—”

“You’ll only prolong her agony.”

“Ira,” Uncle Nate had said, when my father got him on the phone at midnight, “you keep trying to fight Nature. Sometimes you just have to let go.”

“Nobody loves Mama the way I do,” he said. “Screw Nature.”

The surgery left my grandmother with a colostomy bag. “The doctors removed her rectum,” my mother told me. I could not fathom it. How did you remove a hole? I pictured the crack of her buttocks stitched up tight with a band of stitches like my mother used to close the Thanksgiving turkey. What did my grandmother feel inside when she bore down—a gutted vacancy?

My grandmother could not fathom it either.

“It’s been days since I’ve had a BM,” she fretted to my mother.

“Ma, it’s okay,” my mother said. “Remember I told you every thing comes out higher up, everything comes into the bag. That’s what the nurses come to irrigate the bag for.”

“What bag?” she said.

Every other day two home health aides arrived at her door to flush the stoma. I tried to picture the procedure, but it felt too close to what was happening to me on a nightly basis. What if I ended up the same way, with a stump in the place of my colon, and strange women interrogating that hole in my flesh? I imagined my grandmother having to take a bath in a tub full of her own feces, surrounded by the bad stuff she had worked so hard for so long to rid herself of.

One day she called, hysterical. Two unfamiliar women had come to her door and demanded entrance. “Get away from me,” she had cried from behind her door. She thought they were the bunco artists returned to finish the job.

“We’re from the home health agency,” they said. “You need to let us in.”

“Didn’t you get enough from me the first time?” she screamed. “Didn’t you humiliate me enough? I don’t have a penny left! Leave me alone!”

The strangers finally in retreat, Rebecca called my mother.

“Oh, Becky, you should have let them in,” my mother said. “They were the nurses who came to irrigate your bag.”

“What bag?” my grandmother said.