Habit (5 page)

I'll skip over magnets, full spectrum lights, Reiki, Blue Green Algae, and Twelve-Step programs, the last of which I'm truly grateful for—my father rejoined humanity with the help of AA. In the mid-1980s, The Answer To Everything turned out to be macrobiotics. Ma got herself a real Japanese mentor and proceeded to lose all her excess body weight, which was surprising because it seemed like all she did was cook and eat. Daddy began to get take-out a lot and used to call in desperation, asking how to prepare things like steak. When David and I came for a visit, we'd drop our bags and head for the grocery store first thing, because Ma's kitchen had become scary and witchlike; you'd sort of brace yourself before opening the fridge. Whatever was in there (thirty different varieties of seaweed, glass specimen jars with odd-looking sticks in them covered with bright orange fungus) would easily take away your appetite. Maybe she couldn't keep any weight on because the food was so slimy it wouldn't stick.

A lot of her friends at the club in Penllyn thought Ma had cancer in the 1980s because she looked so awful. Why else would you put yourself through such a restrictive diet? Ma didn't have cancer, but it's not inconceivable she might have been trying to set an example for friends and family who were foolishly trusting Western medicine to cure theirs. Either that or she had a full-blown eating disorder and thought it needed a legitimate focus.

She still claims she is macrobiotic, but she cheats. She doesn't eat meat, but she LOVES a good dessert. She has that compulsive tendency, if left alone with a platter of cookies, to eat until they're gone rather than till she is satisfied. I greatly enjoy pointing this out to her when she starts to lecture me about my own unhealthy eating habits.

Through it all to this day, Ma has maintained only middling respect for the medical profession (
doctors are ALL idiots!
). So it is impressive to see her obediently enduring test after test, not even batting an eyelash when they talk about chemo and radiation and surgery followed by bags. I appreciate her compliance, but I'm wary. Like her sudden willingness to let someone named Weissman poke around her nether regions, it's just not in character.

It seems that the latest and possible final Answer To Everything is Orthodox Christianity. She's been trying her darnedest to convert me, and I've told her I'm a little too old for this—I got off the train when we went back to the Episcopal Church in the late 1970s. The icons she's made me are beautiful, but I've got a whole trunk full of tracts and miraculous medals and paraphernalia she sent me when she joined a bunch of Catholics who liked to pray outside Planned Parenthood clinics and collect tin cans in the basement for the End Times. That really turned me off, and now I'm fine, thanks. Boy oh boy did that get her goat, she couldn't stand that I had finally had enough and wouldn't even give her the courtesy of listening, most especially because this time she really thought she finally HAD reached the last stop on the line, and all that other stuff was just a series of experiments.

I know Ma's been talking to her monks and priests, but I'm not clear where they fit into the decision-making process. A few years after she joined her first Orthodox church, which was Russian-oriented somehow, Ma had a difference of opinion with the priest (
he said I was a very difficult woman!
). Her friend Photini wasn't satisfied, either, and she eventually found the one they're with now: Saint Mark of Ephesus. It's Orthodox as well, but apparently without the corrupting KGB taint. Unfortunately, it's also two hours upstate, in a small town called Carlisle. Photini has actually moved up there, and Ma has trouble finding rides. When she had the Camry, she managed to visit several of the church's affiliated monasteries and convents around the country; now she mostly sustains herself through avid phone discourses with various members of the clergy she's met on her travels. I recently asked Ma to let me talk to one of them so I could get a feel for what's up on that front.

Ring. Ring
.

—Hello?

—Susie?

It was Father Nicholas from the monastery in Seattle. He sounded cute as a button and told me all about his son who is an actor. Small world: my mother's monk's son is on TV, too.

Of course, it's all up to Ma, but if it were Father Nicholas, he said, he'd just give his Abbot Superior a copy of his living will, move up to the attic of the monastery, and let nature take its course. And there's always tonsure.

I keep hearing Ma mention tonsure as something that somehow factors into the equation, but she's vague about it. I know she and the holy guys have been contemplating this for her, and it is a big change of some sort. What I got from Father Nicholas is that tonsure is a ceremony where you become a monastic. Younger nuns and monks live in communities together, share the household duties, and pray. That's their job. In Ma's case, being female and elderly, she'd be a House Nun. Her job would be to stay in her home and pray there, which is pretty much what she does already.

Ma's favorite Orthodox prayer is familiar to me, but I'd always thought J. D. Salinger made it up. She has a slightly wordier version of this prayer Salinger's character Franny obsessively mutters while having a nervous breakdown in
Franny and Zooey
:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

I like Salinger. I'm pretty sure he was born half Jewish/half Catholic, and later practiced Buddhism and Hinduism as an adult. I feel it's best not to point this out to Ma.

According to Father Nicholas, there's a bonus with tonsure. The Church has noticed that when Orthodox people with dire illnesses receive it, Things have been known to Happen, and they've happened often enough to get everyone's attention. The tonsured person is sometimes miraculously cured, or else dies suddenly without any painful messy ordeals.

So that's what she's up to.

Weissman tells us he also wants to operate but, contrary to surgeon number one, he recommends the full course of chemo and radiation first. We realize we're going to need a third opinion, and things are getting complex. Ma's been sort of quiet, and after I walk her up to her apartment, I figure it's time to let her know where I stand. At the door, I tell her I'm with her no matter what she wants to do. Treatment, partial treatment, no treatment at all, I'll see if I can figure out a way to support her.

—Thank you, she says.

—I can imagine this is pretty scary, I say, and I don't want you to worry about me.

We look at each other.

—But, I say, I know what I would do. It's pretty clear that if you don't do something medical, and things progress, you might not like what you'll be going through.

—Yes, Ma says, I'm praying about it.

—And, I say, this might not be a good time to hold out for a miracle.

—I'm praying, she says.

—Right, I say. I really hope your priests and monks and things aren't getting your hopes up too much because—

—I'm aware of the situation, she says, and I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm gathering all the information and I know God will take care of me.

This, I think, is really hard. I don't want to beat her up about it, but this is really a big thing. It's one thing to say that with prayer someday your checkbook will balance itself or your illegally parked car won't get impounded. When those kinds of prayers aren't answered, you can still carry on somehow and Susie will get over it after she's had a minor conniption and recovered from cleaning up the mess. Now the stakes are raised.

—I hear you, I say. I'm with you if you decide to go the prayer route. I'm against it, but I'm with you. And if you do manage to be cured or even if you simply have a comfortable peaceful death without doing anything medical about this cancer, you just might convert me after all.

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I am profoundly uneasy. There is an unmistakable gleam in Ma's eye, and her absolute composure both appalls me and rips my heart from its root. I burst into tears. The gauntlet is thrown.

W
E ARE DOING THIS
lying-on-the-foam thing today. The radiation department needs about two hours to get a mold of Ma, facedown in position. This mold will become her bed during treatment, to keep her perfectly still. They will also do a CT scan, and make tiny tattoos on her backside so they can point the beam as accurately as possible.

We have settled on an outfit called the Huntingdon Cancer Center. We like Huntingdon because it's not in Center City, and it has its own parking lot, which takes you right to the door. Also because Pete Johnson is a hotshot surgical oncologist there, and he used to be married to my cousin. When we sent Pete all the test results, he took charge in a very reassuring way, and we found ourselves saying yes to the full protocol: six weeks of chemo and radiation, followed by surgery.

At least, I think that's what we'll be doing. Ma has required a little coaxing, but she admits she has a thing or two to accomplish before she exits this world. So the plan is to try the treatment one day at a time with the option to quit immediately if she doesn't take to it.

The radiation subsection we're dealing with this morning is made up of a bunch of nurse types with shrill voices who are awfully wrapped up in the pleasures of their workday, hanging out in the halls and gossiping with one another. The patients seem to be expected to hop to it when they're told, and otherwise not to call too much attention to themselves.

This is sort of not really the way Ma likes to operate. I can tell they are pushing all her buttons; she's tired as it is. I wonder gloomily if we will be seeing a lot of these ladies over the next six weeks.

She emerges from the last segment of business, the CT scan, while I'm in the hall talking schedules with dreamy radiation resident Doctor Morris. She has two or three of the ladies in tow, and they're squawking cheery, patronizing last-minute salutations in high nasal voices.

Ma has a familiar demonic grin on her face, which calls to mind the famous Night of the Fork, around 1969 or so, when she decided she didn't like our dinner conversation.

—You're all done now!! says a nurse.

I wince. Ma hates it when people say they are
done
because technically it means they are dead. You are supposed to say
I have finished
.

—Oh, you're all DONE NOW!!!!! says Ma, mimicking the nurse in this really high voice with an exaggerated South Philly accent.

—You can get changed!! says the nurse.

Get changed
is also bad grammar of some sort—I forget what. I brace myself.

—OH, GOODY!!!! You can get CHANGED, squeals Ma and she sniggers evilly at me and Doctor Morris, whose jaw has dropped. He looks to me for a cue.

When we were little, my siblings and I used to joke about the Men in the White Coats. These were the guys who had to come and cart you away from home if you were locked-up-type crazy. We thought it was a funny image, but under the surface was the possibility we didn't really talk about: that the White Coats might really have to come and collect our mother some day. Ma was mostly functional, but there were these outbursts when her frustrations got the better of her and she would lose it publicly in ways that were hard to overlook. Colette remembers a particularly turbulent summer when she was only nine or ten. More than a couple of people yanked her aside at the Penllyn Club to vent: Our mother
must
see a psychiatrist. This was the 1960s, when nobody said things like that unless the situation appeared to be desperate.

A few years before the Night of the Fork, when I was five, Daddy had his first heart attack. Quitting drinking was not discussed with the doctor, but apparently leaving his unsatisfying job as a corporate lawyer was. There was a modest income from a small family trust, and Daddy decided to look for a new country to live where the dollar could really be stretched. The criteria: golf for Daddy. There had to be Montessori, ponies, and dogs for us three girls, and Ma needed Catholics, a garden, and a decent social life. All of this boiled down to Ireland. There was added enticement: something about a baron Ma was related to, who was friends with racy people like the Guinnesses.

Felix had just graduated from college and was left behind to fend for himself. We girls spent a week on a Dutch ocean liner and landed in two worlds at once, the first being Old Fort: a farmhouse near the sea, named after the ruined sixteenth-century fortified castle that was crumbling picturesquely in the adjoining field, nestled in the lowland area of the magical, mystical Wicklow Hills. There were lambs frolicking, a few ponies and barn cats, a devoted yellow lab who produced baskets of puppies hand over fist, and new friends with names like Seamus and Grainne who had lyrical accents we quickly assumed as our own.

The second world was our parents' rapidly deteriorating marriage. Ma soon copped to the reality that her talented young Philadelphia lawyer had no intention of supporting the family in the conventional way, and instead had plunked her down in the middle of a dirty damp nowhere with three small children and untrained help. That's when she began to squawk. Plus she hadn't really thought out the whole social thing: We were serious Catholics then, and the Anglo-Irish crowd was allergic to Catholics—this was Ireland, duh.

Daddy could have made do indefinitely between the golf and the pubs and his weekly columns for newspapers back home and in Dublin (Mike O'Shisker amid the charming natives of the Emerald Isle—fables for our times). But Ma wasn't cooperating, and our household became a place where parents screamed at each other and slammed doors in the night.

As for us girls, we had to do a lot of coping on our own. We learned quickly not to make life more complicated by objecting when Things Happened. Like when Colette, the eldest, was ordered to put some excess newborn puppies in a burlap bag and drown them in a barrel because
that's what you did on a farm
, and I, at age seven, went into the ancient, cavernous kitchen for a snack and was fiddled with by the toothless old gardener.