March 2003
My mother sat on the crunchy white paper of the examining table and the doctor sat on a stool. We were on the chemo floor of the NYU hospital, far from the wing that housed the doctor’s more reassuringly furnished office. Danielle and I had been called in to discuss the future course of our mom’s chemotherapy.
For a year, she’d been on both Carboplatin and Doxil. In January she’d reached the maximum dose of carbo a human being can tolerate, so it had been removed from her regimen. Now it looked as if the Doxil had also run its course. A side effect of Doxil was skin toxicity, and my mother’s symptoms had grown severe: sores in her mouth and in her rectum, chapped hands and feet that had cracked open in wounds. The doctor told us he wanted to change tracks and put her on a new drug called Gemzar. This broached a delicate issue. Though Gemzar did not cause total hair loss, it did cause hair thinning.
My mom’s eyes clouded with tears. Her voice was childlike.
“No. I won’t lose my hair, I won’t do it.”
The doctor tried to gently assuage her. “Gemzar will not cause you to lose all your hair, Stephanie.”
“I told all of you from the beginning that I won’t do this, so don’t pressure me. I love my hair. It’s thick and gorgeous. What am I going to have, bald patches?”
“Usually the hair thins quite evenly. It will be thinner, that’s all. And in some cases the side effect never occurs.”
The tears spilled over.
“Oh, it’ll occur for me. With my luck. Will it be so thin you can see through to the scalp?”
“In some cases.”
“No. I won’t do it.”
Danielle and I jumped all over her. “Mommy, if this is the right drug, you have to do it. Thin hair isn’t the end of the world. We’ll buy you new wigs if you don’t feel comfortable.”
My mother’s expression turned grim, her face streaked with tears. Her voice was bitter, but she wanted to live. “Back to the wigs.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, on one of the first warm spring afternoons of the year, my mother and I walked across Christopher Street toward Seventh Avenue south. The day was sparkling, the trees newly green. My mother carried a wig head covered by long, swinging brunette hair. We ambled slowly, my arm linked through hers as a gesture of endearment, but also to support her. My mom was smiling and chatty. She’d spent about ten days mourning her possible hair loss and then put it behind her. Always forward-thinking, she was now on to the project of creating a new “fabulous wig,” and we were en route to the hair stylist.
“Do you think I should keep the wig long or cut it shoulder-length? One good thing about wearing a wig is that I can have my brown hair back without those toxic dyes. I tore out a picture from a magazine of Goldie Hawn’s haircut to show Amir. I’ll be the only bald woman in a wig to still look like a movie star!”
She was animated and giggly, flushed with the happiness of being alive. The salon was an unassuming little place my sister had discovered. Danielle and I frequently dropped in to have our hair blown dry by a sweet gay Israeli man named Amir. (Once I’d started working professionally as a writer, I wanted a more adult, polished look. The first shift in my appearance was taming my abundant, unruly hair.) After hearing our raves, our mom started going to Amir, too. The place was owned by a robust Italian named Vito, and the stylists ran the gamut of local color. It had the familiarity of a small-town beauty parlor—everybody knew us there. My mother and I and the wig head made our entrance. We were greeted warmly from all sides.
“Stephanie, Jessica, how are you? Stephanie, you look beautiful! Where’s Danielle? What is that wig?”
My mother planted the wig head in the center of Amir’s station and the three of us stood around it. My mother pulled visual aids out of her purse: the photo of Goldie and several snapshots of herself, precancer, when her hair had been in its full glory.
“I’m on this new chemo and they say my hair is going to thin, how much God only knows, so I want a smashing wig just in case. I tried on the wigs from my last cancer and they just seem too wiggy. You know I only like long hair—I never let my girls cut their hair short—so I only want to trim it, but I don’t want the cut to feel heavy. You see how Goldie has the length while it’s still bouncy in front?”
Amir had his own wig stand at the shop, so we left the hair and exited, my mom carrying her wig head under her arm like a football.
My ex-boyfriend Jonathan the playwright was getting married in a few weeks, and my mother had recently helped me choose an outfit for the wedding. She’d sat in a chair in the Calvin Klein store on Madison Avenue as I’d modeled an array of dresses. When I was young, she’d drag me shopping and dress me up in clothes that had nothing to do with my personality. She’d ambush me with her taste, and I’d leave the store weighted down with shopping bags and feeling emotionally drained. Our recent Calvin Klein shopping excursion had a very different tenor. My mom was sick, and I felt lucky to have her with me; I found comfort in the familiarity of the scene. As a child, going shopping with my mom had felt like an arduous chore; now it felt nurturing. Many other factors were also converging. As my mother’s illness progressed, my need to rebel against her and her material-girl persona waned. As my mother’s humanity shone through, her love of fine clothes became merely an endearing detail of her personality. I was also now a thirty-three-year-old career woman—my tastes were changing and inching closer to hers. The bohemian thrift-store look felt juvenile to me and had lost its appeal.
I had chosen a pair of dangling earrings to wear with the dress, so after leaving Amir’s, the next task of the day was to get my left ear pierced. I rarely wore jewelry and when I tried to put the earrings in, I discovered one ear had closed. As we crossed the street, I told my mom I was heading to one of those tattoo parlors on Eighth Street and she insisted on coming with me. This never would have happened before my mother got sick; she would have been much too busy to keep me company on this sort of mundane errand.
My elegant, bejeweled mother sat in a chair in the tattoo parlor, the wig head on her lap, while a squat, bald man with bulging muscles so cartoonish he could have been the strong man in a circus led me to the piercing stool. He was covered in tattoos, and though he looked like someone who would part the sea of bodies in the yard at Rikers, his manner was gentle. Two young girls with piercings in their eyebrows, noses, belly buttons, and along the lengths of their ears waited in line for their turn on the stool. One girl was there to get her tongue pierced and the other was debating whether she should do it, too. The Strong Man swabbed my ear with alcohol and my mother asked if I wanted to grab a bite to eat after. “Sure,” I said. “Where would you like to go?”
“I don’t care. I just want to be with you.”
As the Strong Man shot a metal stud through my ear, I looked at my mom, unfazed by her surroundings, eyes focused on me like a bear guarding her cub. Cancer and chemo were aging her and she seemed frail, but more to the point, I was struck by the shift in her energy toward me. Gradually and without my noticing, she had grown genuinely maternal.
A WEEK LATER, Danielle, my mother, and I were back on the chemo floor for round two of Gemzar. Edgy and upset, my mother clutched a notepad on which she’d written down all of her symptoms and complaints. She told Andrea the nurse that her hair had begun to shed, leaving a wispy trail on the floor behind her. But even worse, she’d started having trouble eating. Small bites of food sometimes caused her to double over in pain, and often she would vomit her food right back up. Even water could be hard to get down. Usually, she was nauseous for only one or two days directly after receiving the drugs, but this sickness came on two weeks after she’d gotten chemo. Andrea listened carefully and asked if this had become a consistent reaction to food or only sometimes. “Only sometimes,” my mother replied. “Other times I can eat and I’m fine.” Andrea said it seemed as though my mom’s bowel was inflamed (from tumor, she meant, though she did not say it). As long as the problem was intermittent, it suggested she probably would not have to undergo surgery to remove a blockage.
The word surgery sent chills through my mother. Andrea asked about her sores and skin chafing, a topic that further depressed her. Although she had stopped taking Doxil, there had been no improvement. “I rinse my mouth out with saltwater a hundred times a day—it does nothing. I go through bottles of lotion on my hands and feet—it seems to make them worse.”
Out of the blue, my mother’s eyes lit up a bit. She asked Andrea if she was allowed to travel. As long as it didn’t interfere with her treatment, Andrea said, sure. My mother turned to me and Danielle and told us she’d been thinking about the things she’d always wanted to do and realized she’d better do them now. In fact, she’d already chosen the first one:
“It’s a dream of mine to see Céline Dion perform live—I read that she has a new show. Girls, we’re going to Vegas.”