Talk Before Sleep (7 page)

W
e are finished eating. Laid out on Ruth’s floor are the remains of our meal. There are broccoli stalks, courtesy of L.D., who went out and got that as well as the makings for hollandaise sauce. There are ravaged orange-red lobster shells lying in a steep pile, and gigantic bowls with sticky pools of leftover ice cream at the bottom. L.D. ate an amount that could most kindly be called inspirational and now, satisfied, leans against the wall picking her teeth with a matchbook cover. Sarah, long legs silkily crossed, is sitting in a chair by Ruth’s bed, idly flipping through a magazine. I am stretched out on the bed beside Ruth, my jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, even my bra unhooked. “I’m sick,” I groan.

L.D. snorts. “What a wimp.”

“I’m not a wimp!”

“Yes, you are,” Ruth says.

Sarah puts down the magazine, looks at her watch, stands up and stretches. “I’ve got to go,” she sighs. She leans over to kiss Ruth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She nods to L.D.; then, as she is pulling on her coat, asks, “What does L.D. stand for, anyway? I never heard you say.”

L.D. pushes herself up off the floor, heads for the bathroom. “You never will, either.” She slams the door shut.

Ruth smiles. “Loosely translated: Good-bye, Sarah. Great seeing you.”

“Do you know what it stands for?” Sarah asks quietly. At the same time Ruth shakes her head, we hear L.D.’s muffled voice. “No, she doesn’t. Nobody does.”

“Oh. Well. Good night then, Lucinda Diane,” Sarah calls.

Nothing.

“Laura Dee Dee?”

The toilet flushes, the door bangs open, and L.D. reappears. “Fuck you, Sarah.”

“Oh, no, that can’t be it,” Sarah says. “That would be F.Y.” She smiles, embraces all of us, and is gone.

“Does that woman even have to use deodorant?” L.D. asks.

“Oh, come on, she’s great,” Ruth says. “You should see her apartment. It’s so … comfortable. She’s really learned how to enjoy living alone. I wish I’d learned how to do that.”

“You’re learning now,” L.D. says. “Look at this: every night, a fucking party.”

“Well,” Ruth sighs, “not a
fucking
party. Unfortunately.” She takes her Red Sox hat off the bedpost and puts it on her head. Then she gets out of bed to start gathering up the dirty dishes.

“We’ll do that,” L.D. says. “You … meditate.”

I wash the dishes, L.D. dries. We don’t have to guess anymore where things go; the place is beginning to feel like ours, too. The kitchen radio is turned on low to a country-and-western station. The stupidity of the lyrics is comforting.

When we are done, L.D. hangs the dishtowel
evenly over the rack. “Are you staying with her tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Call me if … you need to.”

“I will.”

We go back to the bedroom and L.D. sits down beside Ruth. “Tonight, before you go to sleep,” she says, “I want you to think of all the things you want to do tomorrow.”

“L.D.”

“What?”

“What
does
L.D. stand for?”

I stand back respectfully, but stay in the room. I want to hear.

“Someday,” L.D. says, “I’ll get drunk and tell you.”

“Oh, you’re such a tease.”

“No, I’m not,” L.D. says, and there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.

A
fter L.D. leaves, Ruth and I look for something on television that might entertain us. This turns out to be too much of a challenge. “Want me to go get a movie?” I ask.

“No.” She sighs, looks around her room. “You
know, I never thought dying would be boring. Did you? I mean, I find myself getting to this place of readiness. It’s a kind of deep peace, that I never felt before. And so I lie there thinking, okay, I guess this is it, this is a good time, go ahead; and then the phone rings and it’s somebody wanting to steam clean my wall-to-wall carpeting, which of course I don’t even have. And I want to say, Oh, stop with this carpet nonsense. Listen to me. You’ve got to be careful. Say all you need to say, right away. You have no idea how fragile this all is!’ But of course all I say is ‘No thank you.’” She smiles. “Who would have thought it would be like this?”

I am quiet for a moment, then say, “Know what I’m really glad about, though?”

“What?”

“That you get to be peaceful, sometimes.”

“Oh, yeah, when I’m not terrified, I’m real peaceful. And you know what else? It’s such a rich thing. It’s so … good. And sometimes I think, God, my life has taken these awful turns, but they’re also sort of wonderful. I mean, the constant presence of you all—my friends …” Her eyes fill and I put my hand on her arm. She is talking too much. She’s too short of breath.

“Rest a minute,” I say. “Stop talking.”

“No,” she says. “Let me.” She turns to face me earnestly. “Sometimes I feel as if I want to stay sick so I can keep all this.”

“Oh, God, don’t say that!”

“I don’t want to die, but sometimes I wonder … Wouldn’t it be terribly anticlimactic if I went back to normal? I mean, for all of us?”

I
am lying on Ruth’s sofa in one of those states where your body seems asleep but your mind has other ideas. I turn on the little lamp on the table, look at my watch. Three forty-seven. I sit up, look around, wish that I were home. Then I could go into Meggie’s room and watch her sleep, set myself right. I worried, when I was pregnant, that it would be so hard to be a mother, that it would drive me crazy to be needed so much. I never suspected that it would be I who needed Meggie more.

I pull a magazine from the pile in the handwoven basket Ruth keeps under her coffee table. The cover advertises a story about preventing breast cancer. I wonder if she has seen it. I put the magazine at the bottom of the pile, go out into the kitchen and turn on the light. I want some tea, but I don’t want to wake Ruth up by running water.

Assuming she is alive.

I stand up, then sit back down. Then I stand up again, tiptoe into her bedroom. She is turned away from me, but I can hear her breathing. I see moonlight lying against the back of her bald head, pooled in the small valley at the top of her neck. They are so graceful and beautiful, necks, so full of a kind of combined strength and vulnerability. I wish we could get over our horror of baldness and appreciate instead the tender revelations it provides.

When Ruth first heard about how the chemo
would probably make her lose her hair, she asked me if I would go with her to get a wig when the time came. I said I would, but I also asked her if she were sure that’s what she wanted to do.

“What else would I do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If it were me, I think I’d be more of a scarf type. Or just walk around bald. I mean, it’s kind of a badge of honor, isn’t it?”

“You didn’t think I should get fake boobs, either,” Ruth said.

“I know. Same reason. Except what you did is just as good.” What Ruth did was to get prostheses three times the size she was—she went from a 34 A to a 38 C.

She waited until her hair was quite thin before she decided it was time for a wig. And even then, on the way to get it, she asked me, “Do you think I have to get one now? Does it look really bad?”

She was driving, and I looked over at her and the sun was coming through her hair, making it look like an aura. I thought it was beautiful. “It just looks as if you have real thin hair,” I said.

“That’s what I think, too,” she said. “But I’d better get one now in case it gets worse.”

I was carrying a magazine I thought would give us ideas for wig styles. Ruth had said she wanted something really short for a change.

“Look at this woman on the cover,” I told her, holding up the magazine. “Her hair is pretty short, and she looks great.”

Ruth snuck a glance, then looked back at the road.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I’ll do.” Then she sighed and I was careful not to look at her. I turned on the radio, and we rode the rest of the way there without talking.

T
he place was located in a suburban medical building. When we got into the lobby, we looked at the roster of names to see what office we were supposed to go to. A man in a uniform seated behind a small desk asked, “May I direct you ladies?” We didn’t even look at him, even when he asked again. We were full enough of what we had to do.

The sign on the door said
PATRICIA LOOMIS
, which Ruth and I agreed was highly unimaginative. “It should say
BALD BUSTERS
or something,” Ruth said. “Or
HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW.”

She took in a breath, opened the door, and announced herself to the blank-faced receptionist wearing a show-off ponytail. Then we sat on an overstuffed sofa with a coffee table in front of it that held a book called
Cancer and Beauty
.

“Oh, man, look at this,” Ruth said, picking the book up and flipping through it. Mostly it was tricks for tying scarves.
Don’t be afraid to get creative!
the book said. She rolled her eyes and put it down. There was a basket of fake geraniums on the table, too, and Ruth fingered one of the thick green leaves in disgust. “In keeping with the fake-o theme, I suppose,” she said. She crossed
her legs, swung her foot. “I’m a nervous fucking wreck,” she said quietly, not looking at me.

“Me, too.” I looked down into my lap, saw my fingers squeezing a knuckle.

Finally, a woman came out and called Ruth’s name. As we followed her down the hall, she turned around and looked critically at Ruth. “Have you been walking around like that?” she asked.

I thought, oh, God, don’t cry, Ruth, and she didn’t. She said, “Well, of course I’ve been walking around like this. Jesus Christ. What else? If I had a wig, I wouldn’t be here now, would I?”

Yeah, I thought. Yeah! And then I thought, what is someone like that doing working in a place like this, where women with broken hearts come?

After she’d brought us to the fitting room, the woman left to get some sample wigs. Ruth was seated in a swivel chair before a huge mirror, a setup like those they have in beauty salons. There was a hand mirror there, too, so she’d be able to inspect the back of her head.

“I think that woman is premenstrual,” I said.

“I think she’s prehistoric. Did you see the wrinkles in her neck?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t.

When the woman returned, she handed Ruth a hairnet. Ruth pulled it on, then turned her head this way and that, looking at herself in the mirror. “I look great,” she said. “Like a cafeteria worker.”

“Give me some of that, uh, American chop suey,” I said.

Ruth smiled. I smiled. The woman frowned and I wanted to drive something wide and sharp into her softest part. On the way out of the place, I asked her, “Why do you have to be such a bitch? Why do you have to make a hard thing harder?”

“I beg your pardon?” she asked coldly.

“You should,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ruth said, paying for the wig she’d ordered—a short, dark-brown one—with her MasterCard. “Rush this order, okay?” she said. “Put it on the next rocket. I just found out I’m not supposed to be walking around like this.”