Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (21 page)

For the second annual ride, the newspaper needed a new staff recruit for the assignment. The editor who approached me knew that I was a regular runner. Was I also, by chance, a biker? I wasn’t, my emulation of Jennifer Beals having been brief and long ago. But I was in my late twenties and in decent cardiovascular health, and the ride was still three weeks away. I’d get a bicycle and I’d train. No problem.

Right away I got the bicycle, a clunky-looking one suited for off-road biking, because much of the ride entailed that. As for the training, well, I got sidetracked. I went out for a ride around Belle Isle, but found that I didn’t enjoy biking as much as running, so the next day I went back to what I liked. I reasoned that as long as I was exercising and staying in shape, the method didn’t matter. Besides, while the cross-state ride averaged about forty-five miles a day, I would have most of the day to do it. I could take my time.

As it happened I had to be slightly more attentive to speed than other riders did, because while they simply had to make it to a given night’s base camp by dinnertime, I had to be there by three thirty p.m. so that I could write and file a story by six p.m. But that would still give me a good six hours to cover the requisite distance if I started out by nine a.m.

On the first day of the ride, it took me less than five hours to do the fifty miles or so, some of it across dirt and grass rather than pavement. On the second day, it took me only slightly longer, because I stopped more frequently for breaks. At various points along the route, the organizers set up refueling stations stocked with drinks and cookies, and I found I could eat seven or eight cookies without feeling at all stuffed. My body just burned them up. This was heaven.

On the third day, I woke up, began to get out of my bed in the school dormitory that riders were using, and shrieked. I couldn’t straighten my legs. When I tried, my knees felt like they were being stabbed. I sat on the bed and breathed deeply, hoping this was just some postsleep stiffness. How could it be from the biking, which hadn’t felt difficult at all?

I tried a second time to straighten my legs. This time I whimpered instead of shrieking, not because the agony was any less intense but because some pride had kicked in.

With halting movements I finally managed to get out of bed, get dressed and make my way outside, where I found one of the ride’s organizers. He wondered how much bicycling I’d done in advance of the ride. When I told him I’d stuck to running, he remarked that the bicycling was stressing and straining a different set of muscles and joints, which were now voicing their complaint.

He reminded me of a truck that followed us from stop to stop and said I could ride in it, with my bicycle in the back. This would have been an excellent solution, but for one small problem: I’d already charted my journey and my thoughts in the newspaper for two days running, establishing a ritual of daily chronicles. If I stopped riding now, I’d have to own up to my failure to hundreds of thousands of readers.

One of my fellow riders had some ibuprofen. I took four of them for starters, and another two every two hours thereafter. And I biked. At first I biked as slowly as a human being could without tumbling sideways or going backward. Each time I pressed a pedal down, it seemed to me that shards of broken glass were scraping the inside of my knee, and I had to clench my jaw to get through it. On any incline of more than about three degrees, I got off the bike and pushed it forward. I started composing paragraphs for that day’s story in my head and tried to memorize them. At the pace I was riding, I wasn’t going to get to the next base camp by three thirty, so I was going to have to type like the wind.

By the end of that day I was doing much better, my agony eased by some combination of ibuprofen, vanquished stiffness and pure will. By the end of the next day I was, miraculously, close to fine. I completed the ride, all 250 miles of it, going so fast on the last day of it that I glided across the finish line well before the vast majority of other riders. I felt lighter than usual, but was actually less focused on that than on how much prouder than usual I felt. Sometimes I could grit things out. Sometimes I surprised myself.

The thrill of unusual adventures like my captivity in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or my stupidity in biking across Michigan had a lot to do with sharing them with Mom. It felt like a proper return on the investment she’d made in us.

 

 

“I would have just held it in,” she said when I told her how I’d had to go to the bathroom in the Iraq desert during the truncated ground war, at least the one time I couldn’t avoid it. “I would have. For days if necessary!”

Regarding my Biker’s Knees, she said, “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad. You’ve always been a big baby about pain.” She wasn’t one of those mothers who rushed a child to the doctor at the sound of the slightest sneeze or kept him home from school if his temperature was just 99.8. She stuck a few aspirin in him, told him to buck up, sent him on his way and went back to the grocery store. She was always going back to the grocery store.

I reminded her of her unwarranted skepticism in the past. “Remember when I broke my back,” I said, “and you didn’t believe me?”

“I knew you’d bring that up,” she said. “You always bring that up! You think I’m just the most terrible mother. Fine: I’m a terrible mother!”

I hadn’t technically broken my back, but during my years at Loomis, after jumping from a classmate’s tree house rather than climbing down, I’d experienced twinges and stiffness a few inches above my tailbone. When I informed Mom, she was convinced I was making it up to get out of an upcoming swim meet that I’d already said I didn’t want to go to. Weeks later, when the twinges got markedly worse and I found myself walking in herky-jerky steps, Mom at last decided we should consult an orthopedist, who did a special kind of X-ray called a bone scan. It turned out that I had fractured two vertebrae. I spent the next three months in a canvas and steel brace that went from my pelvis nearly to my underarms and kept my lower back from bending.

From college forward, my phone calls to Mom had been frequent, but while living in Detroit I called her just about every day, the two of us having our morning coffee together over the phone, the calls lasting up to an hour. I never cut them short. If she seemed to be enjoying them, I didn’t want to disrupt that, and if she was filling me in on the latest news from her doctors, I wanted to hear it—wanted her to know that I was paying attention and not oblivious to what she was going through.

You see, I’ve skipped over something, as reluctant to dwell on it now as I was to accept it then. Just before I moved to Detroit, Mom was diagnosed with cancer.

None of us in the family knew quite what to make of it, because the hard facts of the diagnosis contradicted how healthy she seemed. She had uterine cancer, but of a rare kind that acted more like ovarian cancer, which was bad. We knew that even without having to educate ourselves: there had been extensive news coverage of Gilda Radner’s struggle with ovarian cancer and of her death in 1989, the very year of Mom’s diagnosis. Pressed to make a prediction, Mom’s doctors told her she might survive for two years.

Almost immediately there was surgery, and then she started what would become round after round of different chemotherapies. She soldiered through them without suffering the worst of the fatigue and nausea chemo can cause. She soldiered through them without complaint. She was the same as ever: chatty, silly, impulsive, excitable and of course ornery, but not about the cancer, never about that. Occasionally she got a panicked, haunted look in her eyes, and her hair went from straight to curly, the chemo acting as an unflattering perm. But she made jokes about that.

And she had distractions. Harry was engaged to be married, beating Mark and Adelle to the altar, giving Mom her first opportunity to fuss over a child’s wedding and giving her a daughter-in-law, Sylvia, whom she adored. Sylvia was thin, fine-boned, long-necked, tall. She looked nothing like a Bruni, and my favorite part of the wedding ceremony and reception was seeing her pose for pictures next to Grandma, who barely cleared her navel, even in her high heels and even with her high, stiff wedding-day hairdo. My second favorite part was watching Uncle Jim and Uncle Mario help Grandma out of the reception hall and across the parking lot at the end. She had danced so much that her feet were blistered and swollen, and she’d had to ditch those heels.

Soon after the wedding Mom was consumed by all the pesky domestic details surrounding Dad’s latest transfer, from San Diego to New York City. Although rounding up new doctors and making sure her medical treatment didn’t suffer in the transition gave her plenty to worry about, she still found time to sweat the usual stuff: whether the houses lined up by her real estate agent had kitchens that would pass muster; whether she should stick with Corian or switch her countertop allegiance to granite, which was then in vogue; whether Dad would survive the separation from Remington’s.

The house they ended up buying was in Scarsdale, which was adjacent to White Plains but more exclusive, a way of simultaneously returning to a patch of turf they knew well and feeling they’d moved up in the world.

Not long after she and Dad settled into the Scarsdale house, she called Grandma several times one day and didn’t get an answer.

This was strange: she’d talked to Grandma just the day before, and Grandma hadn’t said anything about any plans to run errands, shop or do anything else that might take and keep her out of the house for hours. So Mom drove over to Fifth Street.

She found Grandma unconscious on the floor outside her bedroom. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered a major stroke.

While she was still in the hospital, I flew from Detroit to see her: perhaps the only visit with Grandma during which she wasn’t hurling food at me and I wasn’t idly protesting that she stop
.
She barely had the strength to kiss me and mumble the few words she said.

There was a good chance she wouldn’t be able to live alone anymore, so Mom began sizing up the Scarsdale house, figuring out if it could be made suitable for someone with limited mobility. It had an odd layout, with many half flights of stairs between clusters of rooms, all these steps and more steps. But Mom determined that ramps could be installed, and she concluded that it made more sense for Grandma to live with her and Dad than with Uncle Jim and Aunt Vicki or with Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn, because she and Dad were the only ones whose kids were grown and gone. Mark, Harry and I had graduated from college and begun working; Adelle was finishing up at Princeton.

Those ramps never had to be installed. Grandma died soon after her stroke. She was eighty-one.

Toward the end of the visitations at the funeral parlor, Uncle Jim took out a camera and snapped several pictures of her in her casket, which was open, in accordance with family and southern Italian traditions. The pictures were for her relatives back in Puglia, to whom Grandma had sporadically sent documentary evidence of her good fortune, visual support for her written assertions that life in America was going well. More than a half century earlier she had photographed my father as a newborn, wanting to present her distant sisters with proof that she had been the first among them to produce a son. In the picture she had sent them he was naked.

In the picture that Uncle Jim took of Grandma at the funeral home she was wearing an elegant dress, and her hair and makeup were flawless. The point was that she looked regal and affluent in death, like a woman who had talked on a gold phone. What would
the people
think? That she had lived a good, gilded life. Her relatives back in Italy needed to be assured of that.

Back at Carolina I’d taken a psychology class with a professor whose mantra, only tangentially connected to what we were studying, was that life was ultimately about adjusting to loss, about letting go. He meant life after a certain point in time—after a certain age—and I wondered, with Grandma’s death, if I was already there. Yes, new people would come along, but none who might loom anywhere near as large on the landscape of my life, of my whole identity, as she had. With luck a few of these people would love me, but none with the fierceness and pride that she had.

My world had just become irrevocably smaller and colder, and it threatened to become smaller and colder still. But I pushed that thought away.

Mom looked fine. Mom
was
fine. It was Mom who had been poised to care for Grandma.

A truly sick person didn’t step up to play nurse.

 

 

 

 

I
felt lonely in a way that I hadn’t before. Back in Detroit I toted up the men I’d dated over the past few years and started worrying that I’d called it quits with some of them for dubious reasons and had maybe missed out on something. I realized, too, that I’d almost always called it quits precisely at the one-month mark. I had a pattern.

Then Greg came along.

Robin, my fashion writer friend, fixed us up.

“Solid job,” she said in describing him, because he made decent money as a marketing executive for a chain of hardware stores.

“Handsome,” she added, because he stood more than six feet tall and had a striking combination of strong Greek features with soft, non-Greek coloring.

“And I really think he’ll like you,” she concluded, because she knew something that she kept from me but that Greg later confessed. For him it wasn’t a blind date. He’d seen me give a speech about my work at the
Free Press.

Maybe that had somehow made me seem important. Maybe on our first date I wore something with astonishing thinning powers. For one reason or another, Greg decided right away that I was the guy he wanted, and he constantly made that clear—so clear that I could shelve some of my physical insecurity around him. I felt safe, and that feeling, coupled with my determination to break the pattern I’d only just identified, carried me into a second month with him, then a third.