The Prize for Consolation

The Prize For Consolation

         I hadn’t called because I was too busy, our phone was out, the kids just started school, because we had to run over to Home Depot again for that forgotten box of finishing nails needed to hammer in a transition piece between our newly installed laminate floor and Berber carpeting.
         “It’s the house,” my husband, Gene, and I explained as we tried to slip past the pastor in our church. “Every spare Sunday has to be donated to working on the new addition.”
         The day before she left, I noticed her jeep parked across the street. My kids were strapped and buckled in our minivan, and I was tossing the last batch of towels and lotion in to the backseat. I can’t say goodbye like this, I told myself, yanking a dangling thread from the faded black strap of my suit and retying the wrinkled wraparound that covered my unshaven thighs. We’ll just dash over to my parents’ pool for a quick dip, and I’ll drop in when we get back. It might rain later, I squinted up at a grayish cloud that crept across the sun. And I promised the kids… But when we returned, with beads of chlorine dappling our shoulders, and sun-produced sweat nesting in our armpits and the underside of our knees, her jeep was gone. I’ll call after we take a shower. Then my hands got preoccupied with rubber ducks and tuna casserole and mascara before shouting good-byes through the screened door on the way to my evening job.
         “Sheila stopped by,” Gene said in a phone call to my office at the university that night. “How busy are you? Why don’t you take the night off and go see her before she leaves tomorrow? Have one of the professors lock up.”
         “I can’t. Things are crazy here. Students are registering for classes, and I have to mail out a bunch of brochures. Besides, I don’t want to bother her. She’ll be packing. You know how she is.” A week before one of Sheila’s excursions one would normally stumble on bubble-wrapped gifts lined up along her bed, or t-shirts and jeans, waiting to be pressed and cradled in plastic, would threaten to slip off door tops and collapse on one’s head. This latest trip, however, was hectic and unplanned.
         “I’ll call her when she gets there,” I assured my husband over the phone. After all, Sheila wasn’t traveling abroad this time to her hometown in Kent, Great Britain.
         A month slithered by. When I finally thought about reaching for the receiver, my hand wavered. I’m not ready. My arm jerked back. I need to think first. I need coffee. I rubbed my eyes. I have to make other phone calls first. I have to pay bills. I need to meditate. I need to pray. I don’t know what to say.
         What could I possibly say to someone who’s battling through the final stage of breast cancer?
         “The woman could die,” Sheila’s stepdaughter said, angrily referring to the fact that none of her friends have called. All right. I picked up the phone and punched in the numbers.
         “Hullo?” Sheila answered in her quiet British chirrup.
         “Hi! I’m so glad I got a hold of you! How are you?”
         “Oh, you know,” Sheila replied. “It hasn’t been easy.” My friend recounted her experiences since she left her home in the Philadelphia suburbs to immediately begin radiation and chemotherapy treatments with a trusted doctor in Los Angeles. She was “grateful, of course,” to be able to stay with friends in West Hollywood for the year or two it might take to fight her illness. But their apartment was a $120 cab fare from the medical center. And Sheila had to defer to the Jewish Orthodox practices of her hosts. Fridays and Saturdays were confined to dark, silent gatherings around a table smothered with fried food that Sheila could barely stomach. “At least I can compare wig shops,” she joked. “I was able to gloat about a hairpiece I found that matched my color perfectly and cost one tenth of what their daughter paid once she got married.”
         Sheila asked about her husband. At fifty years old, my friend had married for the first time. Now, three years later, Sheila and her new husband, Barry, were only able to communicate during brief phone conversations. Barry had to remain on the East Coast and continue working at his new job to sustain their medical insurance.
         “He’s okay,” I lied. I knew he ate spaghetti every night and smoked as often as he wished now that Sheila wasn't there to nag. I also knew how desperately he wanted to be able to hold his wife during those moments when she coiled into a fetal position from the pain.
         My body slumped with relief after I hung up the phone. That wasn’t too awful. I faked a positive attitude as well as I could. I didn’t blurt out any comforting cliches. Maybe my friend won’t even feel the urge to report me to Ann Landers.
         Things happen for a reason. God only gives you as much as you can handle. I’d heard them all after my daughter died. The tired phrases didn’t seem to bother me much. “Right. Yes. I know,” I had probably responded, in a daze. I certainly didn’t have the energy to complain to an advice columnist. What stirred me most during one of the most difficult times in my life were the perfect words, spoken or unsaid.
         “I hope you don’t mind me saying that you’ve inspired me,” a young nurse told me as she wheeled me back from the NICU. “You and your husband were so beautiful when you held her. Thank you so much for letting me be there with you.”
         “Two pink rosebuds for two little granddaughters,” my father smiled, proudly setting down the vase he brought into the labor room. After only one twin survived, struggling for her life in the incubator, I stared at the rosebuds. The petals of one had already begun to turn brown and frail. The other stood above it, straight and tall.
         Seventy days later, after we brought our daughter home from the hospital, I cringed at the sight of a package on our doorstep. It was from Sheila, who was then still caring for her mother in England. Please don’t let it be something about twins, I fretted as I opened the gift. Inside was a 1904 edition of Tennyson’s poems, presented to a pupil at a London school in 1905 for “good conduct.” It was a birthday present. I had forgotten my birthday. Whether she knew it or not from all those miles away, Sheila had given me the perfect consolation prize. I was a mother, now a mother of a child who would have many special needs; but I still wanted to be a writer. How ironic that I couldn’t find the perfect words to give her years later. “This really sucks,” I said when Sheila informed me she was diagnosed with breast cancer for the third time. I tried to focus on my friend’s face with sympathetic but dry eyes – she told me she was quite irritated when her sister cried at the news.
         Sheila and I met when we were both living in Los Angeles and working together in the entertainment business. She was celebrating a seventh year of remission from her first bout of cancer. We attended film premieres and luncheons at Le Dome. We shopped at the Santa Monica Promenade and the West Side Pavilion and teased each other about our breast sizes in the dressing rooms. Sheila looked terrific in a t-shirt. I feigned belief in the power of the “layered look.”
         My husband and I used to joke about how proud my friend was of her breasts. “I swear she kept pressing her chest into my arm while I was talking to her,” he told me.
         “Oh well,” I shrugged. “If you got ‘em you should flaunt ‘em.”
         “I don’t care about losing the breast,” Sheila said during our phone conversation. “I just don’t want to die.”
         Suddenly, all of the fun, silly moments we'd shared dissolved into a puddle of senseless "Laverne and Shirley" episodes.
         Remember when I called in at work because I was having a bad hair day?
         Oh, you don't have hair now.
         Remember trying to assemble thirty-five baby shower gifts after drinking a batch of chocolate martinis?
         Oh, you can't drink now.
         Remember all the funny birthday cards we've sent to each other about sagging breasts, memory loss and senior discounts?
         The birthday card I'd bought for Sheila a year ago remains in my desk drawer. On it a grim reaper stares in a rear-view mirror, while the words, "objects in mirror are closer than they appear," glare underneath.
         "She felt so thin and frail when I hugged her," my husband said after Sheila left for LA. “I’ve got the horrible feeling she might never come back.”
         “She’ll come back,” I said.
         My friend moved to a different country on her own when she was in her early twenties. She took care of a mother suffering from dementia. She quit cold turkey after years of smoking at least one pack of cigarettes a day. She beat cancer twice already. She can beat it again. She’ll come back.
         But suddenly, all of Sheila's "quirky" investigations through the years - the visits to fortune tellers and astrologers, the studying of Reiki and crystals and spirit guides, and the healing powers of fingers moving in a circular motion across the foot - have convulsed into serious fusillades to her soul. The feisty spirit of the "Curious Aquarian" sobered into a rollercoaster gallop between high confusion and low depression. "Is she saved?" my religion asks. Again, I don't know what to say. This is another battle my friend will have to fight on her own.
          “I could make it through this if the doctors would just tell me it will be all right in the end,” Sheila says.
         If the doctors can’t tell Sheila that everything is going to be okay, then I certainly can’t. I can pray for her, but I don’t have the power to make her better. I can agonize over sending “light-hearted” e-mail meant to sum up the depths of our relationship, but I can’t harness Sheila’s perception of how much I care.
         As Eleanor Roosevelt stated, “the giving of love is an education in itself.” If I’ve learned anything, it’s that friendship and pride mix as well as, yes, oil and water.
         So, for you, my friend, I’ll give up the notion that writers should always be able to choose the perfect words, or that those who have lived through hard times should be able to understand another’s difficulties. And the next time I’m at a grocery store I’ll grab an amusing knick-knack - a “worry” stone for you to rub, a healing crystal, or book-on-tape to stash in a care package, and I’ll pick up a couple of cheery greeting cards. And inside these cards I’ll write things like “the sun will come up tomorrow,” and “keep your chin up.”
         And I’ll cling to the hope that someday you’ll be strong enough to bitch to Ann Landers about my pathetic attempts to console you during the worst time of your life.