Parentheses
I first see them on the bathroom floor — fine strands of curved silver hair scattered across the dark grey slate, like a gang of parentheses gone wild. I grab a wipe and swipe it across the floor, then another, until there is no sign of them. I walk softly out of the bedroom, hoping my husband stays asleep. I need window-seat time.
His hair is falling out, I text to my friend Susie.
Oh damn…. that’s when it gets real, she answers.
I’m scared, I peck back, and then, even though I know the answer, I ask how long she thinks it’ll take.
She says that for her husband, it took a few days, which is what the doctor had told us. Still, I can’t believe it. Balding for over-achievers, I write back. When men lose their hair in real life, it happens so gradually, that unless they go to their high school reunions, no one is surprised. But chemo-balding allows no time for combovers. Even leaves on fall trees get more time.
Philip emerges from the bedroom touching the top of his head. “My scalp hurts,” he says. “It’s like, tender.” I’m relieved to see that his silver hair looks pretty much the same, parted on the left, full and straight, just as it’s been since he was 40 and it went from salt and pepper to salt. “You have good hair,” his mother used to tell him, to which he’d nod in matter-of-fact agreement. She had the same good hair. Strong. Rich. The opposite of mine, which is fine and wavy and can sense humidity a few states away.
He sits at his computer table, sipping coffee and I notice a couple of stripes of pink scalp, peeking through, near his part. As I walk past him, I suppress a gasp. The back and shoulders of his navy t-shirt are covered in the same parentheses that had littered the bathroom floor.
It seems fitting that they look like parentheses. Philip’s cancer has put parentheses around our lives, our marriage, our kids’ lives and most immediately, our summer. I write a note to the woman whose beach house we normally rent. “We hope to rent (if all goes well with Philip’s treatment) toward the end of the summer. Then another saying, “If you can give us a bit more time (of course I understand if you can’t) we’d really appreciate it. And finally, a third saying, “I can’t ask you to hold it for us any longer so please feel free to rent during those weeks (but if no one takes it, let me know!) My parenthetical hope won’t quit.
Throughout the next couple of days, I grab wipes, swiping more frantically than a desperate online dater, but my goal isn’t love or sex, it’s protection. Somehow, I feel that if Philip doesn’t see the strands on the floor, he won’t realize it’s happening. And maybe, ridiculously, I logic, if he doesn’t know, it won’t be real.
By the third day, I need a mop, because the parentheses have multiplied, spooning each other, in orgy-like clumps. I think of the way Philip used to curve his body around mine as we fell asleep when we were first together.
One morning, during those early days, he whispered, “Do you feel safe?” I sleepily replied that I did. A few seconds later, he hoarsely said, “You are,” and I teared up, stunned by the realization that I’d never felt that way before. I mop furiously, not wanting to look at the grey strands that coat the Swiffer pad.
As I sit in the window seat, I don’t text Susie with what we call the cancer updates. I stare. And wait for his footsteps. Which I don’t want to hear. So I dress quietly, telling myself I’ll pick up some milk.
The streets of Greenwich Village are sweet and charming at 7AM, so I walk mindlessly, heading east. I hesitate as I get close to our old apartment. I stand across the street, looking up at the Juliet balcony, noticing that whoever lives there now has a nicer chair than we did, but no morning glories cascade the railing. Philip used to come home from the farmer’s market, arms filled with bags of fresh corn and tomatoes and flowers. He showed me how to pop tiny pansies out of their square plastic holders and transfer them to clay pots, adding soil with a little metal shovel. Same with basil, which I’d later snip and cut into ribbons that I added to the fresh pasta sauce he’d taught me to make.
I loved and didn’t recognize this version of myself, who played Ella and Louis while setting the table for Saturday night dinner parties and scoured Julia Childs and Marcella Hazan, learning words like roux and ragout. Philip took me to the opera and to Knicks games, where we sat two rows behind Woody Allen, back when he was just a brilliant filmmaker.
It was wonderful, but, in quiet moments, I knew, that like the pansies that popped out of their containers, my roots weren’t completely ready for their new soil. I loved Louis Armstrong and the Knicks, but I was playacting at a lot of it.
As time went on, I stopped pretending and started complaining. About jazz that sounded like traffic jams. And the Brahms and Beethoven that made me yearn for Mick and Keith. Philip’s procrastination went from being amusing to infuriating. His fiscal responsibility stopped making me feel secure and started turning me off. But we were married. And marriage was complicated.
When our twins were babies, I used to joke that I would have left him if I hadn’t been so exhausted, but I wasn’t kidding. He “helped” when asked, but most nights, I sat alone, feeding one baby in my lap and rocking the other with my foot. As I calmed tears with a pacifier, I wished I had one for myself. I knew he was pretending to be asleep, and that I could roust him and make him help but doing it alone was easier than seeing the resentment in his eyes.
And yet, as the kids developed and grew, so did Philip. He made them juicy, roasted chicken and taught them to husk corn and cook shrimp to the perfect shade of pale pink, while I worked late, often because I had to, but sometimes because I found it easier to start the night an hour later. He patiently watched Ben navigate the monkey bars and gave Ava tips for getting from one rung to the next in a way I couldn’t.
I head back home, wondering if he’ll be awake when I get there. Chemo hasn’t made him nauseous the way it does in movies. His symptoms are less dramatic and more depressing. He’s weak and exhausted and seems to have two states — sleeping and sighing. Sometimes he sighs in his sleep.
I walk through the streets we used to saunter, late night, in boozy, flirtatious glory, when we were dating. I pass shops whose narrow doors I struggled to jam a double stroller through so many years ago. I look wistfully at restaurants that have long since changed hands, some where we lingered and chatted with people at nearby tables, feeling witty and charming and lucky. Others, that we stamped out of, angry over a comment gone awry. We’d march home silently, yell, sleep, wake, bicker, fester, then finally, make up and laugh. If we could have skipped from bad comment to laughter, we’d have saved so much time. But we couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Like determined children, we clung to every rung so we could get to the next.
The Juliet balcony version of us — the couple who had gardened and felt safe — was long gone. Just as, eventually, the monkey-bar stage ended and all the other versions of us expired, leading us to become the people we are now. A pair of almost-empty-nesters; one sick, the other scared.
It occurs to me, as I near home, that this stage is more than a parenthetical break from our old lives. It’s the end of it. I believe the doctors when they say he’ll get better. And I believe myself when I tell the kids we aren’t allowed to think the word “cancer” without also thinking the word “treatable.” Chemo will be over by summer’s end and our lives will start to become normal again. But they’ll never be the same. Lung cancer has put a period at the end of the old-us-sentence.
We won’t get to be people who think the worst problem they have is that they annoy the crap out of each other. From now on, our worst problem will be a pending cat scan. The ultimate pass or fail test. Maybe, with this knowledge, the stamping-out-of-rooms-us will finally cease to exist.
I get to our building and into the elevator, wishing we lived on a higher floor because limbo is my favorite place these days. As I crack the door open, I smell coffee and take it as a good sign. I hear the clicks of his keyboard and step into the room where he sits at his computer. All I can see is the top of his head, now officially a scalp. I breathe in, but not out. He swivels to face me, and his eyes look shy, almost embarrassed.
“It happened,” he says.
I force a smile. “You know what? You look good this way.”
We both know I’m lying, but right now, we need lies. We look into each other’s eyes with forced acceptance. The new us has begun. He looks like a child who’s been hurt. And like a mother who feels nothing but love, I hold him close. And kiss his head, which is completely bare, save for a few odd strands that hold on for dear life.
