Cures for Heartbreak (4 page)

I stared down at the glossy white of Gina Petrollo's shoes until Alex answered for me.

“Mia's upset,” Alex said. “She's failing her history class—”

“No, I'm not.” How had she found out? I thought I'd successfully hidden my midterm report card.

She rolled her eyes. “She's not taking care of herself—she leaves late for school every morning and eats the most disgusting things.” She poked me. “I mean, you don't even have breakfast, do you?” She turned back to Gina. “I think she has, like, Twinkies on the subway.”

“That's not true,” I said, wondering how she knew.

“Erratic eating is a common symptom of anxiety,” Gina said, pleased with her diagnosis. “What you can do”—she reached into her handbag and pulled out another blue pamphlet,
Convalescence and Your Family
—“is read this through so you'll feel prepared to help your father recover. I think he's going to do wonderfully. He has a great attitude. He is so
strong.
And in the meantime, what you need to do to take care of him is to take care of yourself.” She slid the new pamphlet toward me on the coffee table.

“I keep telling her he's going to be okay,” Alex said, “but she doesn't believe me.”

“For God's sake, they're sawing through his
chest,
” I said. “They're rearranging his
heart.
” I paused and stared at the pamphlet on the table.
Convalescence.
It sounded like the name of a perfume. “Everyone said Mommy was going to be fine at first,” I added quietly.

My sister glared at me. I watched her fist come at me in slow motion, like they do in boxing movies. She punched me on the shoulder—not hard, but I toppled off my chair and gripped the table. A year ago, when Alex was studying behavior modification techniques in a psychology class and briefly decided to stop cursing, she'd taken to hitting me whenever I swore. I never hit her back, since she was bigger and stronger than me, but I screamed enough to make up for it.

“Fuck you!” I screeched. “You
goddamn
bitch!”

Gina's eyes widened like those of a farmer wandering upon fertile land.

Alex started crying. “That isn't the only thing,” she told Gina, her voice quavering. “I see her every day—she's wearing Mommy's
clothes
.” Her mouth twisted and widened as she sobbed, and she stormed off toward our father's room.

I gazed down at the floor guiltily. “Well,” I said. Gina stared at me, as if awaiting some explanation. “You know, I should probably get back to my dad,” I said.

She smiled gently. “We can continue our discussion later.”

“That's okay. We don't have to.”

Gina thoughtfully raised her plucked brows, as if struck
by a sudden insight. “I know what you need.” She rummaged through her pocketbook. I thought she was going to pull out another pamphlet—I hoped for
Romancing Doctors and Your Family
—but instead she handed me a tiny street map. “Macy's is right down Thirty-fourth Street. You walk fifteen minutes, you buy yourself some nice thing, you come back, and you'll feel so much better. You just need to get out of here. No one should be in the hospital this much.”

I gawked at her. Where had she gotten her social work degree—Wilfred Beauty Academy? She patted my shoulder, said good-bye, and clicked off toward the elevator. In the solarium, the man still snored; the woman still wordlessly gaped out the window.

I didn't go to Macy's or return to my father's room right off; I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, the cancer floor, and walked down to the public ladies' room, tucked away at the far end of the corridor. It was empty, as it had always been in January. It was the only place in the hospital where you could be alone.

I stared at myself in the mirror. I washed my hands with the disinfectant soap and dried them. They smelled like Lysol. I took out my mother's blusher and reapplied it. This bathroom was virtually the only place I'd cried while my mother was dying. I never did it in front of her, with the doctors and nurses coming in and out. Crying felt like failure, like
admitting we'd lost; it was breaking the hospital's unwritten code, the hopeful façade that we were supposed to maintain.

The doctors had never sat us down and explained to us exactly what was going on with my mother; we were told of the dwindling prognosis only during quick exchanges in the hall. The day of the diagnosis, a Monday, she'd been given a good chance of remission; the next day she was given five years. Day by day the outlook worsened: on Saturday they said she might live two years, on Sunday one year, on Monday months, and then weeks. On Wednesday the gastroenterologist said to me in the hall in passing, throwing his hands up in the air, “Your mother comes in with a stomachache and finds out she's a dying woman!” He sounded exasperated with her, as if she'd somehow been deceptive, thoughtless, and unfair to hide such a grave state with so forgettable a symptom.

The following Saturday she'd fallen into a coma, and in the late afternoon, while my father, my sister, and I were in her hospital room, my mother stopped breathing. I had been watching her mouth opening and closing, and suddenly it stopped.

There'd been no chance to say good-bye like there is in the movies, no tearful resolutions and shared confessions. My sister moaned and screamed and hollered. I stood frozen, completely stunned; I didn't cry. The nurses came in, and then an orderly arrived; they asked us to take her jewelry off. I slid her rings onto my fingers, held her hand, which was already cold. I kissed her forehead. They wheeled her out.
That was the last time I saw my mother.

And now I was wearing her maroon sweater, her print scarf. I couldn't keep away from her closets, the mysterious treasure trove of my mother. Each time I creaked open the huge wooden doors my stomach still clenched, as it had when we'd picked out a dress to bury her in. The closet had loomed before us, overflowing, shelves sagging, dress racks packed tight. Beautiful, expensive dresses towered out; twenty unopened packages of panty hose, stacks of belts, scarves, pants with the tags still on. We'd flinched in surprise—we'd known she'd bought lots of things, but it had never seemed this much, and we stood mesmerized by these clothes without their owner, like shed skins, discarded cocoons. The sheer amount even overwhelmed the usual criticisms parading from my father's and sister's mouths about our mother's spending habits.
Why?
Alex would ask when mail-order packages clogged the doorway, or our mother came home from work loaded down with shopping bags.
Why does she buy so much stuff?
My father would shrug and say,
Your mother had hardly any clothes as a child,
or some similar mystifying statement. Were our grandparents nudists? Could they not stand the fashions?
Omi and Opa came here with one suitcase
was my father's explanation. I thought of the unfamiliar names of the dead relatives on my sister's family tree—Friedl, Julius, Lotte, Gadi—and the question marks.

A tear slid from my eye. It was strange to watch it, as though
it was somebody else's face, the eyes reddening, squinting. I had done it so often now I was a quiet-crying pro; I could do it without sobbing, without noises or heaving, just the tears flowing as if they were apart from the rest of me.

“I just spoke with Miss Petrollo,” Richard told me at the salad bar that night. “She said she enjoyed your talk. She really likes you and your sister.”

“I bet she does.”

We set our trays down at the same table we'd eaten at before. Though I'd gazed longingly at the sundae station, I hadn't indulged; it seemed too childish beside him.

I stared down at my carrot shavings. I'd read magazine articles about how to tell if a guy liked you.
His pupils will dilate. He'll smile a lot and may even stutter. He'll stare at his feet. He might pinch or tickle you. He may act like a jerk.

“She had a suggestion. She thinks it would be good if you could see your father after the surgery, on the sixth floor. He'll still be under the anesthetic then, but you'll be able to see he's fine.”

The sixth floor: in the elevator, a little white cube with red lettering encircled that number, warning No Visitors Allowed. I doubted that any suggestion of Gina Petrollo's could possibly bring any good, and was about to tell Richard that we could just wait to see my father when he was awake, but Richard kept talking.

“I know it isn't much of a help, but I'm glad I've had this chance to at least try to make things easier in some way. You've only spoken to Miss Petrollo once and already you seem relieved.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, slicing my lettuce into bite-size pieces. I didn't tell him that the relief was because of him.

After we finished eating and placed our salad bowls on the conveyor belt, I returned to my father's room. The heart monitor still broadcast every rhythm, and my sister hardly looked up from her
Quantum Mechanics III,
but the thought of Richard made it all affect me less, somehow. Part of me knew that it was unrealistic to hope for something, to transform our brief meeting into some whirlwind of eternal devotion. A tiny memory of Jay Kasper's pity date also poked through—but I still couldn't help hoping. I wasn't sure what I'd do if I didn't have Richard to think about. Even if it was unrealistic for us to be together now, what was to stop us from connecting in the future, like the characters in a romance novel, meeting on page two and again on page two hundred? I could see Richard and myself at more appropriate ages . . . me, having graduated from college, in a job (anything but social worker), until some minor incident—a friend's baby, a sprained wrist—took me to the hospital. Years would have passed—no matter. He'd have been through girlfriends, many of them, but never married. In hours, it would happen as we'd always known it would: we'd kiss outside the hospital, a deep, shocking kiss, and the
other doctors, the passengers in traffic, the visitors, the social workers—the whole world—would stop and stare in surprise.

Alex still wasn't speaking to me the day of the surgery; she sat curled up in her square orange seat in the hospital lobby, with her calculator and protractor and textbook. I wandered in and out of the gift shop, carrying my books from school yet not opening one of them. I bought a new romance novel,
Rosamunde's Revelation,
and skipped to the sex scenes. I was hyper-awake from exhaustion; all night I'd been unable to sleep. At three o'clock I'd gotten out of bed and started watching television, flipping between reruns of
Twilight Zone
and
Love Boat,
and periodically visiting the kitchen to rummage through the freezer. I opened a yellow Tupperware container and found the frozen three-month-old carcass of Jay Kasper's Cocoa Krispies treats. Whenever I saw him in the halls at school now, he smiled at me faintly, as if he barely remembered who I was, and walked on. I threw his creation out and settled on a more recently purchased Sara Lee chocolate cake; I ate it frozen from the box while my imagination leaped and bounded off, alternating between scenes of my father on the operating table and visions of the wedding dress I'd marry Richard in, ivory sleeveless with long silk gloves.

At six that morning I'd started getting dressed. I didn't wear my mother's clothes, to try to keep peace with Alex for at least one day, but I used every kind of makeup my mother
owned: eyebrow pencil and cheekbone highlighter, even a set of false eyelashes she'd bought for a Cleopatra costume one Halloween. I wore my own small wool hat and matching dress; in a moment of inspiration I stuffed my bra with cotton.

Late in the afternoon, I plopped down in the chair beside my sister, who was scribbling away in her notebook. For the first time that day she really looked at me.

“What's on your face?”

“Nothing.”

She squinted. “Your eyes. They look weird.”

“They're fake,” I said, and blinked at her. “The eyelashes. They make my eyes look big.”

She shook her head and went back to her work, and I read until I fell asleep. At five o'clock she nudged me awake—Richard stood before us in the lobby.

He looked tired but relieved. “It was a success,” he said. “Everything went well. He's still unconscious—he will be for a while—but he looks good. I can take you up to see him.”

We packed up our books and followed Richard to the staff elevator. We didn't speak. The tension of the past days and weeks trailed us into the elevator and up to the sixth floor.

No paintings hung on the walls of that floor; there were no couches, no solariums. Just random medical machinery I'd never seen before, parked throughout the corridors; the hulking machines looked like creatures from the future, as if they
could scuttle away on their own. Nurses and doctors flurried by, their gazes gliding over our heads. Richard led us into the brightly lit recovery room. The beds were lined up like in an orphanage. He pointed out my father's body.

His bed was at my chest level. Alex and I stood stunned before it, hypnotized. The transparent blue of the oxygen mask, the clicking and whirring of pumps and electronics, the breathing machine, the closed eyes, the random spots of dried blood, brown on the blank bedsheet. My father's blood. It ran in tubes, transported to and from another machine. His whole body seemed like a technological, digital thing, as if where the machines started and stopped couldn't be defined.

It wasn't our father. It was some replacement, a wax model, a plaster shell. Our real father was upstairs with his
Times
and Sanka. The body in front of us was a mistake, and we stood there blinking at it, and at the other sheet-covered shapes with their mechanical breaths and computerized heartbeats, until finally Richard tapped our shoulders and led us out.

None of us spoke in the elevator, but Richard seemed proud and eager, as if seeing our father had actually pacified us somehow, instead of making me feel like I'd just seen him dead.