Repetitions

Count All This — Chapter 12: genetics or a black magic family curse?

Just when Jo Kasten’s adult son encounters schizophrenia, she discovers she has breast cancer. Meanwhile, her marriage faces a test. Count All This is a story about love and loyalty, addiction and madness. This is the twelfth chapter. Find the first chapter here.

The night before I was scheduled to meet my surgeon (“Oh, you have a surgeon now!” Karen exclaimed, as if I had purchased an expensive hat), I woke at 4 in the morning and wondered what she would want to do with my left breast. Would she want to “remove” it (take it somewhere else, perhaps)? Or could she make, merely, a “large area excision” as suggested by Dr. Brand?

As Larry snored softly beside me, I tried to reassure myself with the things I had heard: the doctor said the cancer hadn’t traveled: if you have to have breast cancer, ductile carcinoma in situ is the best kind to have; my sister Jean looked it up and found it wasn’t life threatening; some doctors don’t call it cancer; they call it pre-cancer. These details calmed me for a moment, but then the fear came back. I remembered my mother, who was close to my age when she developed breast cancer. She’d had a mastectomy when she was 53. (Seventeen and self absorbed, I barely noticed.) Two years later, the cancer spread throughout her whole body. I was 19 when she died, the same age my daughter Rose is now.

I remembered the warm, summer afternoon that my mother told me she was dying. I had come back home to live after having an LSD-fueled nervous breakdown during my first semester away at college. What was the meaning of these repetitions? Was I reliving my mother’s life? Was Eddy reliving mine — or my bipolar father’s? Was this genetics, or some kind of black magic? And if it was a mysterious family curse, passed down through the generations, how could I make it stop?

She was folding laundry at the foot of her bed. I sat at the head, cheerfully listing my plans for entertainment over Christmas vacation.

“I won’t be here for Christmas,” Mom said. She held a shirt to her chest with her left hand, the sleeves extended to the side with her right, as if she were dancing. The laundry basket brimmed beside her on the mattress.

“What do you mean, you’re not going to be here?” I laughed from my place on the pillows. “Where are you going to go?”

“The cancer has come back. I’m dying.”

Her words fell onto the clean bedspread like greasy, black, metal car parts. Time stopped, but she continued to fold the sleeves over her belly, jackknife the shirt, lay it carefully beside her on the bed, reach into the basket for another. I stared at her, stunned.

“That’s not true!” I finally shouted.

She nodded grimly, once, not looking at me. “Yes it is.” She was looking down into her basket of laundry. She leaned over and held onto the rim to steady herself. Her face was immobile.

“Who says so?” I whimpered.

“The doctors.”

“Can’t they do anything?”

She shook her head.

“But when is it…when do they…when do they think it’s going to happen?” I couldn’t comprehend the horror of what I was asking. Bile rose into my throat. The bedroom was receding down a dark tunnel.

“I’m going into the hospital next week,” I heard her voice fade into the background. “There’s no telling how long it will take. It could be a month, maybe two.”

My head filled with gasoline. Hot oil splashed inside my chest. I tried to hold down, to hold on, to hold in, to hold off. I tried not to detonate. Tension filled the bedroom to the bursting point. The walls bowed.

“I don’t believe you!” I shouted before I ran out of the room and stumbled to my car, sped toward the safety of a friend’s house through a thick film of tears.

Three blocks before I got there, a small gray car suddenly appeared on my left — too close. There was one long, extended moment when I knew that it would hit me. Then my car was balanced on its hood on someone’s front lawn, my back against a broad tree, blood spilling down my nose.

I don’t remember the ride in the ambulance. But I remember that my mother came to the hospital to collect me, held my plump pink hand in her bony mottled one while they stitched up my forehead, staring past me with that same, blank, implacable face.

That afternoon was the beginning of my 10-year dance of self destruction, which ended only after I married Larry and gave birth to Rose. It wasn’t my mother’s death that demanded retribution, though, it was my behavior on the night she died, when I left her alone in the hospital, just as I’d left her the day when she told me the news.

Yet for all of my years of hard drinking and sleeping with losers, I didn’t know why I was punishing myself. The memory of the night my mother died was so toxic to me, so difficult to bear, that it was immediately lost, buried deep in my psyche, where it lay in secret and worked its dark magic until years later, when, during a therapy session, it popped suddenly into my conscious memory like a beach ball bursting from the bottom of a pool.

As I lay beside Larry’s warm, sleeping body and tried to understand what my diagnosis meant, I let the memory of the night my mother died resurface — the memory I’d spent a drunken decade suppressing, and years more arduously reliving in therapy until I could prise free of its grip. I entered with trepidation.

It is already dark the last night when I go to the hospital. I am wearing a new party dress, hurrying to pay a duty call before leaving with a group of friends for a big night in San Francisco. We are going to see a new play at the Geary Theater. Our tickets were purchased weeks before. My boyfriend waits impatiently in my living room at home.

The hospital is quiet, almost empty. The click of my high heels echoes hollowly down the wide corridor — too fast. A fat Mexican man in a ball cap dozes in a waiting room. A nurse stands at her station with a clipboard, making notes, the harsh scratch of her pen competing with the clatter of my heels.

I control the familiar fear as I approach my mother’s doorway. One, two, three, four, counting the sick people’s rooms as I pass; hurrying away from a dangling arm, a protuberant foot, a siphoned nose; wondering what manifestation of my mother I will find this time. Pensive? Bravely cheerful? Obviously drugged? Asleep?

I draw up outside her room cautiously. When I poke my head around the doorway, I am stunned by what I see. She is staring straight at me — as if she knew I was coming! Her eyes, all black pupils, are emanating fear.

“Mama?” I use the old appellation, the one she’d directed me, as a toddler, to discard for the more civilized “Mommy.” Instant tears burn my eyeballs, drown the back of my throat.

“Mama, what’s the matter?”

But the question is meaningless, ludicrous, almost funny. No matter how long I stand acting stupid in the hallway, I can’t escape the knowledge. It is imprinted on every cell.

My mother is dying.

Death is here, in her room.

Death swells behind her curtains, sifts under the door to the toilet, gathers in the corners of the closet, oozes in every drawer. His shape changes with each inhalation: now a shadow, now the hairs rising on my forearm, now a yellow skeleton in long black robes — just like the movies — his bony jaw open in a hideous grin.

I enter my mother’s room haltingly. It is dark. My mother is alone here. Where are the nurses? Death is crawling between her blankets! My mother is afraid.

During all the long weeks of her illness, my mother has never shown me this face. She sat regally in the hospital bed and asked of my progress at school, the activities of my friends, the state of the weather. We weren’t to discuss it: her dying. She’d rather not. We were to look out the windows and remark the sky.

Sometimes, I wondered if it was really happening. Sometimes, I wondered at the absence of fear or rage. Sometimes, I thought that she was welcoming Him beneath her blankets — a long-awaited lover, a killer, an escaped convict — taking comfort in the silvery glint of his sharp blade.

She was tired, her five children almost grown, her bipolar husband increasingly cruel. Her body used up by pregnancies and age. Her legs, slightly bowed, laced with thick blue veins. Her hips, wide with menopause. Her mottled thighs.

Her breast, the breast that suckled me, was sliced off at the root, stored in the hospital basement in a sealed bin of foreskins, diseased organs, amputated limbs and other human garbage, leaving nothing on her chest wall but an angry red scrape.

But tonight, she doesn’t divert my attention; tonight, she doesn’t remark the sky. She looks straight through me — to Him. Her face is filled with fear.

“Mama!”

I move quickly to the bed and gather her body up my arms. She weighs nothing. She has no responsive muscles, no resilient fat, no warmth. Already, she is bones.

I press my wet face against her blue and white hospital gown, her shoulder, her neck, her chin. I don’t look at her. I smell her. I breathe her up — into me. I smell the hot chicken noodle soup she brought me when I was in bed with the mumps. I smell her bitter anger when my boyfriend brought me home late from a date. I smell the Chanel №5 she dabbed on the inside of her wrists before going out on a date with Daddy, the Jergen’s lotion on her hands when she stroked my chubby, tear- stained cheeks the day my school friends wouldn’t let me play two-square at recess. “Don’t cry for yourself. Cry for them,” she tutored. “Their hearts must be so small.”

I want to say all the right things — all the things I’ve heard on television. How we’ll always remember her. How she’ll live forever in our hearts, in every action we take, in every word we speak, in every thought we think or dream. I want to tell her we all love her, and not to be afraid.

I imagine that she was waiting for me — I am the center of the universe. That she only needs to hear my words before she can let go. I am the chosen child. I am the favorite. I am the ferryman who can pole her wooden boat across the River Styx into the underworld. She has shown me her face! But when I open my mouth to help her cross the chasm of fear, my throat closes tight and only spit strings out. I can barely whisper, “Mama, please! Mama please don’t die!”

Perhaps she knows.

Perhaps she knows everything I want to tell her. Perhaps she hears more than those six stingy words. Perhaps she reads my thoughts through her bony forehead, feels the tribute in my spit, and will grasp some peace. Perhaps my love will help her make the crossing. But when I lower her body back down to the bed, her face is unchanged — a frozen mask of fear. I’ve said nothing. I’ve given no relief. And when I lift my head to look around the room I see the curtain shifting, a drawer sliding open, the bathroom door swinging ajar. He is coming! He is coming for her! He is here in this room! And He might take me too! I feel a drop of pee trickling down my thigh.

So I run.

I put her broken body back down on the bed and run. Her eyes follow me out the doorway, past the nurse with her clipboard, the sleeping Mexican, the indifferent sick. Her eyes follow me as I crash and clatter down the cavernous stairway, too scared to wait for the elevator. Her eyes follow me as I race across the asphalt parking lot, kicking up tiny pebbles in my tumultuous wake.

Her eyes burn two black, smoking circles in my stinking, yellow back.

I don’t look back for her, the woman who held my hand through every real or imagined crisis in my whole life. I don’t comfort her. I don’t help her. I don’t stay with her to face Him.

I run! I run! I run!

I leave my mother to die alone. I go to San Francisco with my friends as we had planned. Everyone admires my new dress.

We saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that night, a play about inmates in a mental institution. I sat amid my friends and watched it in my own psychotic state. No one noticed that I wasn’t myself, that all my attention was focused on the big, black bowling ball of a moment that was steadily rolling toward me in slow motion all night: the moment I reentered my house in Stockton, starkly terrified, to find out what had happened to Mom.

“Maybe I was imagining it,” I tried to reassure myself before I got there. “Maybe Death wasn’t really present in that room.”

I knew that was a lie even before I turned the front doorknob and heard the locking mechanism click. I could feel the misery through the thick wood. The living room was washed in tears.

Jean sat on the couch, red-eyed and whimpering. She opened her red mouth slowly and repeatedly, like a fish suffocating on a dock. Daddy sat blanch-faced and vacant-eyed on the blue-flecked easy chair. Claire stepped toward me protectively, reached out her hand, opened her mouth to speak.

“Don’t tell me!” I cried as I almost fainted in the doorway. “Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I already know!”

I ran up to my teenage girl’s bedroom, where a wind-up ballerina balanced on a spring in a pink and white jewelry box, tiny trolls with orange hair huddled together on the cement block and board bookshelf, and a curly-haired little girl spread her arms wide across a blue-tinted poster with the suddenly ominous message: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Nothing had changed. Everything was different.

Thirty years later, lying in bed next to my sleeping husband, I felt the same disconnection from the everyday objects in my bedroom, reminders of the life I led before I had breast cancer.

I wondered what was ahead, how I would fare the tumult, whether the cancer was divine retribution. Would I finally be able to pay for my sins?

I feared that I would prove pathetic — a coward. I felt stronger now, anyway, than I had at 19. I felt better prepared for a mortal fight. I saw an image of a small face, about the size of an umbrella handle, being carved out of hard white wood. It was hideous, scary, unnaturally white, like the incessantly screaming infant in Eraserhead. Yet it was also powerful, touched by the divine. All the human hair was peeled off, all the soft flesh, all the distinct features — leaving nothing but an inviolable center, pure and constant as stone.

That was the twelfth chapter of my novel, Count All This. To continue, follow the free chapter links below or buy a digital copy of the whole book on Amazon, where leaving a rating or review will help others find my story.

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