My Peeps

A few weeks ago the Nectarine called and left me a message that said, “Call me. Call anytime. Call now.”

It wasn’t the words that said it so much as the tone of her voice. It was different than the tone of voice Dusty had used when she left the message, “Just checking in y’all. Call me when you get a chance.” That tone told me something bad had already happened but it probably wasn’t getting worse. Dusty would be soldiering on and when I caught up with her in an hour, or a week, I would need to help.

It was a different tone than BirthPie’s email SOS one Friday morning. The fact that BirthPie was emailing and not calling said in itself, “I am hanging on to sanity by my fingernails. Every hard thing about motherhood is pressing on me this very moment. If I begin to speak of it I might start screaming and never be able to stop.”

***

I heard from BirthPie in the brief window between Small coming down with the stomach flu and her passing it to me. I came home from teaching self defense at 10 pm on a Wednesday night and Sweetie said, by way of greeting, “Small is puking.”

We were in the midst of the first summer heat-wave. I climbed into a wall of dense, unmoving heat to check on my girl. Small’s forehead burned dry under a damp cloth. Dead tired from teaching I ran to the basement for the fans, set them up all over the second floor, cooled Small’s washcloth with fresh water. I climbed into her bed to be there when she woke. An hour later the power went out, stopping the breeze mid-spin. Small continued to burn and puke. I wracked my boiled brain for the signs of dehydration but could remember none of them. I slept for brief, searing moments between bouts of her retching before heading out to my 7:00 am clients.

On Friday—power restored, girl no longer puking, the diagnostic has she peed? returned to my brain—I had little in reserve for BirthPie, my stalwart, my other wife. I delivered soup and bread from the Co-op, got take-out for my own family. Saturday the crud struck me down. When Sweetie called to check on the BirthPie family—holding steady, everyone safe—I wailed from my own sick-bed, “We can’t both be in crisis at the same time! Who will feed us?”

***

The Nectarine closed her office door before she said what she had to say. “My brother has breast cancer.” The words came out in a whoosh of air and left a vacuum all around us.

***

I have known the Nectarine since I was fifteen years old. She is not my other wife. She does not bring me soup or fold my laundry or pick my kid up from school. She is not woven into my life of every day. She is woven into my life of forever. 

I helped her by hearing her news, by telling her to tell her boss, her friends at The School of Come-the-Revolution. I recommended a meditation book for her manic sister-in-law, I sent love to her parents, I watched for her email updates and sent words of encouragement. I called more often than usual, which is pretty much never.

But it was weeks later—after the tests and the great prognosis and the treatment plan and things looking as good as they could possibly get for someone with breast cancer—that I sat at a stop sign and suddenly thought, “Oh my god, he’s got cancer. It’s the brother. It’s that boy.”

The boy on the front page of the school newspaper, Staples High School, 1984. The boy I had a crush on, and his friend the Communist too. The boy she plays catch with, flies to spring training with, lived with through college. The brother. That boy.

I wept.

The last time we talked, I told the Nectarine about my favorite quote from Anne Lamott. Facing metastasized lung cancer her friend Rich Fields said of his doctor, “He thinks he knows when I’m going to die, but he doesn’t even know when he’s going to die.”

Small has cottoned on to this recently. One night I found myself explaining that, yes, any one of us could die at any moment. She still misses her friend Dave and she knows that it’s strange and awful and unusual but not impossible for someone to be with us one moment and gone the next.

To the Nectarine I said, “How do we live with this? Why aren’t we all running screaming through the streets?”

“Maybe we are,” she said.

***

Dusty’s call was to say that her sainted mother, Mme. Lasagna, fell and broke her hip. Mme. tripped on a threshold. As she fell, Dusty caught her.

In my mind I see Dusty diving head-first like a base runner sliding safe. Her arms stretch in front of her and her mother’s tiny, heavy body lands in them. I feel the oomph of impact, the cushion of their bodies smashing together.

I see us cradling each other the same way: Sweetie, BirthPie, Dusty, Small, the Nectarine, the School of Love, Our House of WarShip. My world. My heart. It’s how we fall: a whoosh of air and a cushion of impact. We’re never unscathed, screaming and flailing through this life. We break all the time.  But we’re so much less hurt than we might have been.