The pickings were slim. There was a short writer-type with a bad attitude, who later exchanged a lot of suggestive emails with me in spite of his actually having a girlfriend. There was a guy who looked almost exactly like Frankenberry from the specialty Halloween cereals I enjoyed as a child, which offered many delicious memories but not a lot of sexual excitement. Aaron was not on that tour, but he was in the cube of a young account guy who had played college lacrosse and was therefore, statistically speaking, a douchebag. Your dad introduced himself in spite of the fact that my mother considered him “kind of a goofball,” which I don’t remember at all, but he never forgot.
As much as I want to remember that story—especially the part where your father pined over me for years and followed me on Facebook and Twitter until we met again—I just don’t.
We got married just a few yards away from the spot where we met—the time I remember meeting him—in that same art gallery. I point it out to you every time we drive by it. I never get sick of this story.
Love,
Beautiful Mother
Chapter 12
Please Let Me Get What I Want
As far as first dates go, my expectations are pretty low. That will happen after a few solid years of disappointment, dating men who were made out of anything but boyfriend material.
I actually missed my first date with Aaron because of a funeral, so I’d already established myself as a hot commodity with a banging social life. And then he asked me out again. On Gchat. At the time, Snapchat didn’t yet exist, so this was basically the bottom rung of the communications hierarchy. I was not impressed.
NOVEMBER 2, 2010
aaronpurmort:
wait am i allowed to ask you to hang out over IM or are gentlemen supposed to call?
me:
i think you’re ALLOWED to but gentleman generally acknowledge that girls plan their lives in advance
aaronpurmort:
true.sorry. it’s new to me.
me:
that’s right, i forgot to wish you a happy 13th birthday
aaronpurmort:
exactly well if you’re not furniture shopping or making sad mix tapes, i’d enjoy listening to some mayer hawthorne with you. if you ARE busy, later in the week?
me:
what time is the show? i’m getting my hair cut
There’s nothing, and I mean nothing that tells a guy you are woman in demand like letting him know he is competing with your hairstylist for your time and attention.
“I’m not going to go,” I told my sister-in-law while she blow-dried my hair. Carly has been my hairstylist since she started dating my brother in about 2007. They’d been together a few months when I booked an appointment with her, which she found a little forward but I found completely appropriate because I lack boundaries. She is a really gifted stylist, and never outwardly judged me for the stripy blond “highlights” I got from the cheap Russian salon near my apartment in Brooklyn, where they charged per highlight and left me with a visual indication of just how cheap I was. If she has any flaws at all, it is that she rips through my hair with a brush like she’s hellbent on punishing me for the time I called my little brother “Fatrick” when he was going through puberty and had little boy boobs.
In between punishing strokes of her paddle brush, Carly paused to make emphatic eye contact with me in the mirror.
“You’re not canceling a date when your hair looks this good,” she said. I hate when other people are right, but she had a solid point, so I popped the collar on that cheap leather bomber and got into my sensible Honda Accord and drove to the University of Minnesota campus to meet him for dinner at an old pharmacy that had been converted into a restaurant. He was already there when I arrived exactly eight minutes late after sitting in my car for a few minutes so as not to be the first to arrive, and he stood up to give me a hug. He smelled like . . . Old Spice and Aveda and clean laundry. And also pasta? But that might just have been the atmosphere.
He was sitting at a table, not at the bar, which meant that we were going to eat a meal. On a date. Most recently, a “date” had come to mean “grabbing a few drinks before being pawed at by an underemployed, overserved idiot,” so frankly, I was a bit taken aback. I tried not to show my cards, sitting down like I was the kind of woman who routinely ate meals in restaurants and didn’t subsist on late-night bowls of cereal to “soak up” the couple of beers and cigarettes she’d had for dinner.
Aaron had already ordered a bottle of wine, and the warmth of a little buzz helped calm those butterflies in my stomach until they just drifted about lazily inside of me.
“I’m just going to say it right now,” he said after our entrées arrived, “when we get married, I’m going to be the stay-at-home dad.”
“All right, that’s fine with me,” I said, because I knew from years of babysitting and lifeguarding that a career spent with children was simply not for me. I can muster enough interest in playing pretend and coloring and someone else’s poop for a few hours at a time, just not as a full-time job.
Then, we just had to decide how many kids we wanted, which seemed a great topic to have over entrées. I said four, because that is how many my parents had and it really seems like the right balance. One is unacceptable. Two is just too lonely, especially if your only other sibling is a jackass. Three is all right, I guess. But four? Four is perfect. Four teaches you your place in the order of things. You learn to be gracious when you’re on the top of the hog pile (is that just a thing my family did?) and patient when you’re squished at the bottom. You learn to live with being farted on. You learn to be a part of a team.
Aaron wanted two, which, as I’ve outlined above, is just wrong, so we compromised at three and I made a mental note to pull the goalie and trick him into a fourth when our third hit kindergarten. That fourth child would be the light of our autumnal years, with nearly all the attention an only gets but none of the money because we’d have already spent it all on his older siblings.
We had a lot of other great things in common. Important things, like an unironic love for Mandy Moore and a good grasp of key jokes in the Arrested Development series. He loved his family the way I love mine: like they are the world’s best-kept secret.
When dinner ended, he followed me out of the restaurant, and my stomach flipped over as he placed his hand on the small of my back the way men do to their wives of thirty or forty or fifty years. The concert had already started by the time we crossed the street and walked into the venue, and I wanted immediately to be back at that table, leaning in on my elbows to hear everything this near-stranger had to say. Even today, I can still see how his face illuminated with the flash of the strobe lights that searched through the crowd in time with every song.
Most first dates only last five hours if there is sex involved, but by the time the show was over and the night was on the cusp of becoming the next day, we just weren’t ready to call it quits. November in Minnesota is no place to be lingering at night, but we grabbed two cups of coffee just before the coffee shop closed and sat down on the curb anyway.
“See that?” Aaron would say three years later to our infant son as we drove through campus, pointing at the sidewalk. “That’s where I fell in love with your mother. Before I smelled her armpits.”
He walked me back to my car that night, where I was ready for him to throw me down on the hood. Instead, he gave me the kind of hug that men tend to give each other, the kind where a handshake sort of blends into a hug, but your clasped hands still stay between you. It is the least sexual kind of hug you can give someone, if a hug is ever really sexual, and I wondered if everything I’d felt this evening had been one-way, if I’d somehow misread the night’s events to be something they weren’t. Maybe this was just a friend date?
On the drive home, I intentionally missed my freeway exit just for the chance to hold my breath in a tunnel and wish along with the Smiths song I’d been playing endlessly all autumn: “Please Please Please Let Me Get Wha
t I Want.”
(And let it be him.)
Chapter 13
What to Do When the Person You Love Gets Brain Cancer
(or Any Cancer)
Cry.
Punch a pillow.
Punch a wall. Gently. You don’t need a cancer patient and a person with a broken hand; that’s just foolish
Break something (not your hand; please see above). From my experience, bottles are satisfying, but I’ve heard fantastic things about lightbulbs as well.
Fantasize about breaking something bigger. Something that you can take a hammer to. Something you can hack apart with an ax.
Love them hard.
Love them the way they need to be loved, however that is. It is sometimes gentler than what you want to give them, because your natural inclination will be to want to squeeze them so hard their bones crack, to crawl inside them like a pod person so you never have to be apart. They may not be super into that.
Leave a note on the counter before you leave for work in the morning. Hide another in their wallet. Actually, shit, you should be doing this even if they don’t have cancer. This is just good relationship advice overall. Start doing this now.
Be there.
Go away.
Treat them real special, real nice. Send a jet for them tonight because they can have whatever they liiiiiiiiike. They can have whatever they liiiiiike. If you don’t believe that T.I. is a poet after listening to that song, I cannot be of further assistance to you.
Treat them like a normal person. Because cancer isn’t an excuse to leave your clothes right next to the hamper when there is a perfectly good basket just waiting to be filled with dirty clothing, and the garbage still needs to be taken out. It smells. It’s garbage.
There’s not a right thing to do or a wrong thing to do, and sometimes there is nothing to do at all.
Okay, there is one wrong thing to do and that is Googling it. Don’t Google it, okay? The Internet is good at so many things, but reassuring someone that their cancer-stricken wife/husband/son/brother/best friend is gonna be a-okay just isn’t one of them.
The Internet should recognize that and just focus on its strengths (Twitter, photos of baby giraffes, online shopping) but no, it insists on housing tons and tons of “information” that will fill you with anxiety dreams where the stairs fall out from beneath you as you’re climbing to the top of a tall building.
Life will unfold as it will no matter what you type into that search bar, so just give yourself a break and Google something more useful, like photos of nineties supermodels.
There aren’t any right words to say or wrong words to say. Except for “God has his reasons.” For the love of Pete, never say that unless you want to get kicked in the throat because no, my God is, like, “Oh, man, this sucks” while holding her hands up and shrugging. She doesn’t have a reason.
You can be sad.
You will be sad. This is fucking sad; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
You can be strong.
You will be strong. You are fucking strong; don’t let your dumb brain tell you otherwise.
You will be whatever they need you to be, but more important, you will let them continue to be themselves. You will let them be sad. Or angry.
You will let them punch something (gently) or get a neck tattoo or run a marathon or just continue living their lives like average people because that is what they are.
They’re not just statistics and pity cases and yellow rubber bracelets and Facebook statuses that you better share for just one hour to show your support, otherwise you’re a cancer-loving sonofabitch.
They’re people. Our people.
What do you do when the person you love gets cancer?
Your very best.
And you also cry.
Chapter 14
And Also with You
My father’s dying wish was for “generations of Catholic McInernys.” To be clear about the dying process, nobody asks you if you have a dying wish, but it’s generally understood that anything you say when you are making your exit from this world to the next should be taken as explicit instructions for your children. So when the priest, wrapping up the last rites, asked my father if there was anything else he wanted to pray for, that was his answer. And while my three siblings looked at one another nervously, I felt as smug and superior as one can feel while standing at her father’s deathbed, because Ralph was the only grandchild out of five who had been baptized.
We were standing in the room that had been my father’s office until he went to the hospital with more chest pain than usual and ended up in the ICU. While he was lying in a hospital bed, my siblings and I had dutifully packed up the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with his beautifully bound copies of everything from diet books to Faulkner. We dismantled the desk where he sat every day, writing the infomercials that would sell millions of dollars’ worth of vacuum cleaners and weight loss solutions. We sanded and painted and made his dim little office a good room to die in. The paint was barely dry when the ambulance brought him home for hospice this evening and now our father is lying in a loaner hospital bed where his bookcases ought to be.
Father Gillespie, the closest thing the Archdiocese of Minneapolis–Saint Paul has to a beloved celebrity, has led us through last rites. It is the second time my father has received the sacrament, though he didn’t count the first one earlier today. That priest was a free agent, some sort of hippie who floats from hospital to hospital anointing the sick. He was wearing a knit beanie when he’d parted the dark curtains of my father’s room in the ICU, and I don’t think my father believed a man who was dressed like he just came from an REI sale could possibly be a priest.
At any rate, Father Gillespie is here to do it right.
Steve tries to sit up and pray with us, but the effort is too much. Father Gillespie soothes him like a child, commending his effort with a quiet shhhhh, a firm hand on his shoulder. On Sunday mornings I would stand next to my father in church, embarrassed at how loud he sang, how loud he prayed. I kept my voice quiet—it was hard to remember all of the words. I could never sing along with the cantor’s faux-opera register, even as my father tapped his finger along the lyrics in the hymnal.
Now, Steve is moving his lips quietly beneath his breathing mask and my siblings and I are left to pick up the slack. We are awkward and self-conscious through the Hail Mary, not wanting to go too fast or too slow, not wanting to be the one to say the wrong words out loud. This is probably a residual fear from the fact that the Church recently changed the responses, a move that I believe was only done so they could see who was paying attention and who had only been to mass once since last Christmas. I’ve been caught every time confidently saying “AND ALSO WITH YOU!” while everyone around me is saying “AND WITH YOUR SPIRIT” and judging me for not keeping up with the hot news coming out of the Vatican. Last year I’d been ambushed outside of mass while heading to a funeral. The local news wanted to interview Catholics about how they felt about the pope retiring. I was described as a “local Catholic,” because they didn’t really have enough space on screen to add “goes to mass for holidays and funerals, still considers herself somewhat Catholic but has problems with patriarchy, child sex abuse, and discrimination.”
When he’s led us through a series of Hail Marys so long it becomes a meditative chant, Father Gillespie turns to me and my siblings and asks if there are any prayers we’d like to say ourselves. In moments like this, it’s vitally important to say the right thing. Your father will only die once, after all. Which is why I say, after several beats of what feels to me like unbearable silence, “We’re not good at that. We don’t know how to do that.”
What I mean is that Catholic school did not prepare me for this moment. What I mean is that decades of going to mass, where a guy in front tells you what to say and when to say it, while standing on an altar that clearly tells you who is in charge and who’s zoning out and thinking about the doughnuts in the basement, we literally
don’t know what to say. We just said all the prayers we knew, like, a hundred times. We are not cut out for freestyling. That’s your job, Father!
My awkward comment hangs in the air, right over our dad’s body. We are for sure, one hundred percent, letting this guy down. And if he could talk right now, that’s what he’d be telling us.
Up until just a few months ago our family dinners were characterized by my father shouting, “For God’s sake, we’re all in the same room, can you keep your goddamn voices down?” But now that our father has collapsed back onto the bed after struggling to sit up and pray the Our Father with us, Father Gillespie gently anointing his forehead and hands with oil, we are speechless.
Father Gillespie assures me that there is not a wrong way to do it, and though my father is unable to speak, I know in his heart he is thinking, How the hell did you get through twelve years of Catholic school without knowing how to PRAY, GODDAMMIT?!
So I go for it. And I tell my dad everything I’ve already told him before, on Sunday afternoons as he rocked my baby to sleep, on teary phone calls from my college dorm room, on long car rides to and from college or the golf course or the grocery store. That I love him. I love him I love him I love him. That he is a good father and the best gift he has even given us is how much he loves my mother, that their happy and stable marriage has set the standard for what a loving partnership means for their four children. I am not crying. My head is clear and my voice steady. I feel like I am delivering a very important message. I am, I think, finally learning what a prayer is. It is just a thank-you.
“I love you,” I tell him again and again, stroking his forehead the way he would touch my fevered head as a child. “You were such a good father to us.”