Cures for Heartbreak (9 page)

“This is a lot of old ladies,” I said, scanning the room. It was old-lady summer camp, all bouffant hair and honey-thick perfume.

“What's this, hoomis?”

“
Hummus.
It's hummus, Dad.”

“Tastes like creamed sawdust.”

After a while a man moved to the front and asked us to take our seats. He introduced himself as Dr. Milken.

“Welcome. We're so glad you came to Green Springs.” He launched into a “health, happiness, and longevity” spiel, which suspiciously resembled the Healthy Heart brochure, and began to introduce about twenty different doctors and explain their specialties. As he droned on, my mind shifted to the cancer guy. I wanted to ask him if he ever thought about what might have caused his disease. Had he grown up near power lines? Was there something bad in their water? Pesticides?

Had he ever read
Health Now
?

I felt a sudden chill and knew for certain that I couldn't ask him. I knew the cancer guy had died. I
felt
it, the absence.
He was gone—somehow I was sure of this. In my mind I watched his body being wheeled away like my mother's, Gigi picking up his hand, kissing his nose, his forehead, leaving the hospital with the plastic bag emblazoned with Patients' Belongings in purple letters. A friend would pick her up and as she was waiting in the lobby she'd almost want to stay in this hospital where she'd spent so much time over the years, with its familiar rush of visitors, almost like a busy office building, except for all the hope and dread. And now when she walked out that door: only dread.

She'd sit in her friend's car and talk about how it was over finally—a relief. Relief? Not the right word. The friend would discuss the traffic on First Avenue, the weather, it was time for dinner, she must be hungry.

She wasn't hungry.

Had she eaten?

Not really. (An orange on Tuesday. A packet of saltines.)

She should eat. Did she feel like Chinese?

Chinese would be fine.

At the Chinese restaurant she'd think the whole time about the bag of belongings in her friend's car, that she shouldn't have left it there. She'd regret leaving it on the backseat throughout the entire dinner. What if someone broke in and took it? She'd never forgive herself if that happened.

I looked up—green folders were flipping open all around me. Dr. Milken asked us to take out a card inside that divided
us into groups called “families.”

“Are you okay?” my father asked. “You look lost.”

I tried to find my voice. “I'm fine.”

“We're in Family Three,” he said, and he led me toward the designated room.

There were seven members of Family Three plus two doctors, Dr. Marcy Fishbaum, a redheaded psychologist with a bowl cut, and Dr. Henry Jackson, a cardiologist in a blue sweater with a metallic sheen that had a certain Liberace-ness about it.
You'd think with their kind of money he could buy a nice-looking
sweater.

Dr. Fishbaum asked us to go around the circle, introduce ourselves, and say what brought us to Green Springs. She asked Nikki Glimcher to start.

Nikki and her husband, Tommy, resembled two giant human dumplings. “We're in our sixties now, and I kinda had to drag Tommy here—he didn't wanna come,” she said. Tommy examined the ceiling. “Six months ago, he had a heart attack.” Her voice cracked; she took a deep breath.

“But no way am I gonna eat rabbit food,” Tommy said.

Next was Cindy Curry from Florida; she'd come with her mother, Alva. “My husband died four years ago during a routine angioplasty,” Cindy said, her friendly, seahorsey face bobbing. “And my dad died of stomach cancer five years before that.”

“We have high cholesterol—runs in the family. We're on Questran,” Alva said.

My father took Questran also, that chalky powder he stirred into his orange juice every morning.

Shelly Petra shifted in her seat and tugged at her gingham headband. She was the youngest person in the group besides me. “I came here from Chapel Hill. I'm a professor of anthropology at UNC.” She pushed her purple-rimmed glasses back on her nose. She opened her mouth and paused for a long time. Dr. Fishbaum seemed unsure whether to move on to me, or wait for her to speak, but Shelly finally continued. “I came here by myself because Ron, my husband, passed away last year. He had a severe myocardial infarction and he was thirty-five.” Long pause.

“Do you have high cholesterol or other risk factors yourself?” Dr. Jackson asked.

She shook her head. “No. But I eat a nearly fat-free diet. I'm very careful. I saw an ad for this retreat in
Health Now,
and I decided to take the plunge.”

“We're glad you're here,” Dr. Fishbaum said, and nodded at me.

“Um, I read
Health Now
too,” I said. “I'm here with my dad. My triglyceride count is borderline high—one forty-five. I have a genetic predisposition for heart disease. And melanoma. I mean a predisposition for melanoma—I don't have it of course, ha ha ha. My mom did—she died. But my father
and I are eating well. We're doing really good.” I sounded awful; I should've rehearsed what I'd say while the others were speaking.

Alva clucked her tongue, and Shelly and Cindy nodded sympathetically. I couldn't believe all these people had lost someone as well. What a sorry lot we were. But people died every day, didn't they? Every minute. While we'd been sitting here hundreds of people had died. Hundreds of families were getting their hearts torn out. I couldn't fathom it. I wasn't sure how it was possible, really, all these people all over the world quietly grieving. You'd think that if everyone was going through this, you'd see them all on the street in a communal howl. There'd be grief riots, Healthy Grief Week, and grief spas. Grief mud masques. Grief nail polish.

My father was saying, “I've had two heart attacks in my life now, and triple bypass. Well, as my daughter said, my wife died in January. My health is good! I'm in good shape. My daughter's watching my diet. We had a Wendy's grilled chicken on the way down—no fries—and the chicken wasn't half bad.”

“I'm glad you brought up the subject of healthy eating,” Dr. Fishbaum said. “We're going to start with a simple exercise tonight, to begin the process of examining our lifestyles closely, to make room for change.”

We were supposed to recall everything we'd eaten in the last three days, to the best of our memory. I felt virtuous,
writing it. No Twixes, fries, or burgers for me of late. Even at the Queens Burger I'd been eating simple pastas and the vegetable plate after my shift.

Nikki Glimcher whispered to her husband, “Don't lie! You had three Big Macs!”

“What's in the past is in the past. We're making room for change in the future,” Dr. Fishbaum said.

“Thing is, I'll eat the rabbit food and make myself miserable and then I'll probably get sideswiped the next day by an eighteen-wheeler on I-78 like my uncle Jarvis,” Tommy said. Nikki glared at him.

But I thought he had a point. In the end my father's death would probably not come from a heart attack, and I wouldn't get melanoma—no, that would be too expected. It would be something else—a staph infection, an aneurysm, pneumonia. I'd read of people who'd died unexpectedly from all these things, how their families were shocked by the cruel twist.

Dr. Jackson had an answer: “Wear a seatbelt and drive cautiously.”

That night, while my father was in his initial stress evaluation consultation, I unpacked my things in our room. Then I picked up the phone and dialed information.

“What city?” the operator asked.

“New York.”

“What listing?”

“A residence—Gigi Backus.”

“There's a Gigi Backus on Degraw Street in Brooklyn.”

“I'll try that.” I could picture her house with plastic-covered couches and embroidered wall hangings and a hairy white cat.

I wrote down the number. What did I want to say? That I was sorry about her son? That I was sorry I hadn't said bye to him? That I just wanted to make sure she was okay? Maybe I'd tell her that I'd liked him.

I was still deciding what to say when the answering machine clicked on.

“This is Gigi! Not here right now 'cause I'm out on the town! Please leave a message—don't just hang up! I hate it when people just hang up.”
Beep.

I hung up.

I glanced at my bare legs: no spots. It was crazy to worry so much; I knew that. But the loss of control galled me. You simply got picked to die. It seemed no different than in Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery,” which we'd read in English class—a public stoning.

Worry was something to do, an occupation at least. A part of me actually felt it might help. If only I had worried before, maybe we could've prevented some things. Maybe now we'd be on the lookout for staph infections, aneurysms, eighteen-wheelers.

Maybe worry could save your life. And if it didn't—if you didn't catch the disease early enough, or avoid the oncoming
truck—if you could prepare for the worst, maybe it might make it a little easier. Maybe worrying, thinking about these diseases, would make you feel more ready. You'd expect it. You wouldn't feel so sideswiped, so surprised. You'd have control—even if only a tiny, tiny bit.

We quickly fell into the routine of Green Springs: whole-grain breakfasts; the morning Family Meeting, during which we discussed the obstacles we faced in lifestyle change; exercise classes (my father swam, I did step aerobics); then afternoon and evening health lectures.

My father was a gung-ho student, taking pages of notes in all classes on everything from gingko biloba to the benefits of craniosacral massage. He used to hate that kind of stuff. When my mother's friends had called with tips from alternative-medicine books and New-Age newsletters, suggesting everything from watching sitcoms to sprinkling cornmeal in our yard to make my mother better, he'd scoffed. He'd called it their woo-woo advice. (Woo-woo said with a wave of the hand, a fruity expression.)

Now my father leaned over to me during the Alternative Supplements Workshop and said, “Maybe Mommy should've tried the shark cartilage.”

At meals we were encouraged to sit with our Families, though my father and I quickly discovered we preferred to eat by ourselves, without the others' incessant complaining. They all kvetched about the lack of butter and alcohol, the strange
foods and fibrousness. Discussions frequently centered on everyone's “daily eliminations”—as in “Due to increased fiber intake, your eliminations may be substantially larger than you're used to,” which was what Dr. Milken announced in a lecture our second day. “My elimination was
way, way
larger than I'm used to!” Tommy said at dinner that night.

My father and I preferred not to discuss the quality and quantity of our eliminations. Plus, I liked the food. I was in
Health Now
menu heaven. I liked the tofu, tempeh, seitan, texturized vegetable protein, and ground flaxseeds, and best of all, every meal was included in the price, so I could have whatever I wanted off the menu without guilt. The spa made money off this, my father maintained, since most everyone there was dieting. But not me. Blessed with a good metabolism, I ordered two appetizers, two entrees, and two desserts at each meal, plus I made endless salad bar voyages. My father grinned. “Thank God we're getting our money's worth.”

I was on my second dessert—a chocolate chip oatmeal flax cookie—on our third night when my father said, “Uh-oh. Golden Girls alert.” Alva and Cindy were walking toward our table, clucking their tongues.

“I just love watching you eat! Where does it go? Oh, I used to eat like that when I was fifteen, just like you, and not gain a pound,” Cindy said.

Alva shook her head. “At fifteen you were bigger than a sixty-nine Caddy.”

Cindy ignored her. “Just don't get too used to that appetite
or you'll have a hineybumper the size of Alaska in ten years!”

“You bet your bippy I won't,” I said. I'd collected these words,
hineybumper
and
bippy,
from Alva and Cindy, and I was determined to use them whenever I could.

Cindy laughed and they left the dining room. I glanced around the tables. I'd begun to actually like being around all the old people. There was something comforting about their makeup and pastel leggings, flower-printed tote bags and big hair. They gave me an odd sort of hope. You could live a long time, you could endure; not everyone had to die young.

I woke up early on our fourth morning and took a bath. In the tub, I noticed a mole at the edge of my armpit had turned black. It was bigger, too. Was I imagining it? My blood pounded. I got out of the bath, put on a towel, and studied the mole in the mirror. I was definitely
not
imagining it. It looked reddish black and bulbous and different from every other mole. I hadn't brought my mole notes, but I was certain it had changed. My stomach sank as I fished out the measuring tape from the complimentary sewing kit and measured it—seven millimeters.

Holy fucking shit.

Asymmetry, borders, color, diameter—those were the melanoma ABCD's. This was asymmetrical, its color was freakish, and it was fucking
huge.

Shit.
Shit.

My father was already at breakfast; I sat down and showed it to him. “Don't worry yet,” he said. “Let's talk to Dr. Fishbaum.” My father didn't seem too nervous—just quietly concerned. He was probably used to disease now, after his two heart attacks and our mother. It was old hat.

“I've been really tired lately too,” I said, breathing deeply. “Fatigued.”

“Eat some breakfast.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Try some oatmeal.” He pushed his bowl toward me, and I took a few bites. It tasted like soggy cardboard. Then I convinced him to leave breakfast early and look for Dr. Fishbaum.