The ride itself was not a long one, two hours at most. Such significance was attached to it in later years that it seemed to Billy as if a caravan journey from ancient Tyre to the land of Hind would have been more brief.

Searing August held the land in thrall. The man-mites coursed the burning pavements and the tar-pit streets in a weary plod, searching for oasis-like relief from the torpid, scorching day. The hospital orderlies grunted inarticulate curses at the sun, the heavy, awkward stretcher that grew heavier by the minute and their miserable fate at having to work, instead of being able to join the mass city exodus to the beach. They kept up a constant clamor about the delights they were missing at the fabled seashore.

The very word “beach,” to the unenlightened, conjures up an image of deep blue, tropical waters, rolling rhythmically upon a white-sandy shore. Coney Island was nothing like this serene image. Visited by the empty beer-can scattering tribe of man, Coney Island was an arena of delight for ten-thousand devils, fiendishly gloating over the tortures inflicted daily on all who were foolish enough to enter this arena of torment. First the bold adventurers ran the gambit of the boardwalk, bounded on one side by food stands selling all the viands that clog arteries; cotton-candy, hot-dogs, french-fries, soft-drinks, beer and ice-cream. On the other side, there was a rusting iron fence overlooking the beach, with an occasional pay telescope for the convenience of the optically challenged to peer at the bathing-suited maidens without having to venture into the fray.

Next, visitors descend a flight of stairs leading to the beach, pausing to shed their shoes before they became filled with coarse, grating sand. Then, they pursue a course designed to leave them as close as possible to the inviting water, followed by the indignant shrieks of outlying fragments of the dense mass, unappreciative of  possessions and persons being trod upon by sand-burned feet, echoing behind them. Finally, there was the spreading of the blanket, disrobing, racing across the hot sand and plunging into icy water, splashing around briefly, and then coming out to lie on a blanket atop gritty sand containing the discarded refuse of ten thousand fellow sufferers. The excursion culminates in broiling in the baking sun until it’s time to return to hot, uncomfortable homes. This was what our faithful bearers, unhappy with their princely burden, yearned for.

They had deposited the frightened boy on a traveling stretcher, in the hearse-like ambulance. Billy thought of the many times he had seen similar vehicles racing through the city streets, siren wailing, carrying someone to the hands of crisp, efficient doctors, who he imagined would coolly mend battered and broken frames. With the feeling that this shouldn’t be happening to him, and still finding it difficult to accept that he had the dreaded disease, he carefully watched the orderlies for any clue to his condition.

The ambulance drove along the waterfront section of the Belt Parkway, through the drab greyness of one of the many tenement neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Trapped on the uncomfortable traveling stretcher, Billy craned his neck so that he could see the ancient, rusty freighters loading their mysterious cargo that would go to strange, exotic ports of the earth. Then they raced through the tiled smoothness of the Battery Tunnel, with the faint pressure beneath the river pressing on his ears and the exhaust stench of the noxious engine fumes filling his nose and throat with a stinging touch that made his eyes water.

Finally, after feeling that sunlight was forever lost, they came out of the tunnel and Billy saw the large sign advertising gasoline greeting the jaded traveler entering Manhattan. They drove up the cobblestoned ramp, with Billy breathing a silent prayer to beat the automobile racing alongside his once ambulance, now racing car. Urging his heroic driver to go faster, despite the risk, then accepting defeat as the high-powered car of his opponent, Crash Kelly, roared past with a dangerous burst of speed.

Billy found consolation looking at the great, sleek ocean liners, snugly secured to vast wharfs jutting out on the dark flow of the Hudson River. On the far side of the river, the unknown land of New Jersey was gaudily bedecked with huge billboards and neon signs, blatantly attracting attention to the virtues of their products. Tall water, gasoline and oil towers stood awkwardly on craggy cliffs, surrounded by grim factories and warehouses. In the distance, there was the magical allure of an amusement park, whose wonders and delights had never been tasted.

On the New York side of the river, Billy watched with yearning eyes when he saw the fast-moving bodies of young boys playing ball in the parks that bordered the highway, each of them separated by ordered swatches of green. His mother spoke, breaking the reverie of remembered games. “The rehabilitation hospital is supposed to be very nice.” ‘How could a hospital be nice?’ he thought, nodding vaguely. His mother retreated into her own thoughts again. He tried to think of something to say indicating interest, but was distracted when he saw the George Washington Bridge connecting them to the unknown world growing larger, as the ambulance sped on.

They went through a series of sharp turns, then entered the access road leading across the vast, shiny structure. Billy looked down at the water and saw small boats chugging up and down river. Their remoteness, due to the height from which he was looking, made each boat seem like a tiny realm inhabited by sprite-like creatures. The ambulance paused as the driver paid the toll, then they continued on the road, with turnoffs leading to turnpikes, thruways and highways, each one preferable, but the driver, with malicious cunning, found the road that led to the hospital, where Billy would spend the next year of his stolen youth.

As they drove on, Billy stared with avid hunger at the boys seen momentarily in the small towns they passed, running and playing with abandon. This brought /images of himself and all the games and activities of his childhood, inexorably vanished with the coming of polio. He watched the trees bordering the road with their leaves turned yellow by the hot, pulsing sun. When the clouds occasionally parted, he could see the deep, flowing tides of the Hudson River, making his past life seem distant and strange. Higher and higher they climbed, as the road went into the Catskill Mountains and he looked upon the vastness of the unknown land and fear was born; the peculiar fear that comes when one first painfully learns that the carefree, unthinking time of youth is forever lost.

They passed a faceless small town and the driver, in venomous perversity, remarked: “We’re just about there.” Then the boy knew that this was no tortured nightmare, with salvation imminent by awakening. He began to accept the full significance of his condition for the first time; he was paralyzed.

The ambulance turned across the highway and went up a steep, narrow road bounded by slopes of seared grass. He saw a drab, grey and white columned building that looked like a shabby plantation in the movies. They passed a blur of low, red-bricked buildings that all looked the same. They stopped by the building which he knew would be his home. His stretcher was wheeled up a ramp, through a door to the ward nurse’s office, then into a temporary isolation room where he was placed on a bed.

His mother, with affectionate and tender words, said farewell, promising to visit as soon as possible. The boy saw the anguish and unspeakable torment in his mother’s eyes, but was too young to understand that affliction is a searing pain to those who love the afflicted one. So he watched her go, unaware of her isolated anguish during the long, silent ride back to the city, unaware of her impotent and frustrating vigils to come in the stillness of long, sleepless nights, and unaware of the agony brought about by the crippling of the child of her flesh. And the boy felt the first dagger-thrust of aloneness that would bind him adamantly for the rest of his life.

The New York State Adaption Institute is located north of New York City, upon a hill that overlooks the Hudson River. It sits on the ancient site of one of the many battles George Washington lost in the Revolutionary War. The institute consists of red-bricked buildings with green-tiled roofs that had a factory-like efficient appearance, shaped roughly in a quadrangle, with outcroppings of buildings including a laundry, resident personnel dormitories, and others whose mystery was never penetrated. The buildings were surrounded by neat but scraggly grass patches, giving the entire area the appearance of a sterile, small town college, where the local progressive citizenry might send their barely functional offspring to incubate and not embarrass the family.

The buildings in the quadrangle comprised the working area of the institute that the patients had contact with. They included two main ward buildings; one for male patients, with one floor for those over sixteen years of age, called the ‘men’s ward’, and the other floor for those below sixteen, called the ‘boy’s ward’. The building for female patients was similarly arranged.

Once he was left alone, he lay there on the bed petrified and silent. His mouth was dry in an agony of fright. The doctors had said that he would never walk again. The words burned through his brain in hot, unbelievable flames that consumed all his courage, all his strength. It was just a few days ago, running down the street with his friend Tommy, never knowing that it would be the last wild use of his limbs. He didn’t want to recognize that he was the immobile body concealed under the covers, already taking on the look of the imprisoned. He stared from captive wounded eyes, asking the same question over and over; ‘Why me?’

Darkness fell, bringing the first hospital night for the boy. Lights suddenly flared, throwing grotesque, hovering shadows on the bile-green walls. The scuffing footsteps of nurses in the hallway brought him memories of recent summer nights and the distant whispers of unknown strangers, passing in the darkness. Nurse Wheeler, the night ward nurse who he would get to know well and who had grown dismal from the sufferings that each night brought, stopped at the door of the isolation room. “And how do we feel tonight?” she mumbled, then hurried on without waiting for an answer. And the night slowly passed and he lay alone with his new unmoving body as the hours crept by, and he struggled to endure the fearful, sleepless watch. And when no sleep came no dreams came and he was trapped in his inert flesh with no hope of escape.

He remembered the terrible events of the last two weeks that brought him here. He had been working as a junior counselor in a day camp in Brooklyn. He was fifteen years old and it was the first job that gave him responsibility over others; he was thriving on it. He had worked as a bicycle delivery boy at the age of eleven, getting up each morning at 5:00 A.M. to deliver the Brooklyn Eagle to its enlightened readership. He had been the youngest and smallest delivery boy, suddenly introduced to the carnivorous world of work, bullied and harassed, until he learned how to deal with his peers. Two years later the demise of the Eagle ended his ride. When he was fourteen, a neighbor got him a job in the mail room of Warwick and Legler, a politically connected law firm, that included John Foster Dulles as a senior partner, a powerful player in Republican circles. Billy was politically ignorant and didn’t grasp the stature of the firm and no one bothered to educate him. So the summer passed in mechanical chores performed by rote, although he learned how to interact with sophisticated adults.

In the summer of ’53 he was strong, fit and full of juices. He had joined the high school gym team the year before as a sophomore and had blossomed physically. He was a shade under six feet, with curly brown hair and intense brown eyes that hungrily probed everything around him. He had a striking rather than a handsome face, a persona that instantly attracted friends and enemies, and a growing confidence in his abilities. By the second day of camp he had established himself by the assured way he did whatever was asked of him. He was treated the same way as the older counselors, the college boys, and despite their difference in years, felt equal to some and superior to most. By the end of the first week he was flirting with three girls, the youngest of whom was seventeen, and he had a short, but exciting sexual encounter with a girl of twenty-two.

For the first time in his life Billy was happy. He came from a poor family, with a harsh father who took out his failures and frustrations on his son. Only recently had he become strong enough to put an end to the oppressive beatings that had gone on since early childhood. Now his father still cursed and yelled at him, but it was a minor annoyance compared to regular violent attacks. His father never struck his mother, but she had been worn down by his endless verbal assaults. He had hated his mother for not protecting him when he was a child, but he finally recognized her inability to deal with the ugliness of confrontation and now felt sorry for her. He was doing well in school, getting good marks and he had actually made some friends. He had a series of girlfriends, several of whom significantly added to his sexual education. He started to believe that there might be a tomorrow for him, up to the day he got sick.

He hadn’t noticed anything physically significant in the second week of July. He went to work, tended the kids, flirted with the girl counselors and was really enjoying himself. He came home one day and his mother remarked that his face seemed flushed. She felt his forehead and told him he was burning up. He felt alright and started to go out for the evening, but she insisted he see the doctor. She phoned the family physician, Doctor Pearlman, who had taken care of their family for years. He urged her to bring Billy to his office immediately. The country was in the midst of a polio epidemic that was terrifying people everywhere, particularly in the big cities. When Dr. Pearlman made a preliminary diagnosis of polio, Billy thought he was joking. “Are you trying to scare me?” he asked scornfully. “I feel fine.” But it was no joke. The doctor sent for an ambulance that took Billy to Kingston Hospital and an isolation room.

Despite the doctor’s assertion and the contagious warnings on the doors, Billy still felt fine. After lying on his bed for two hours with nothing to do, he got restless and went for a walk. When he got back, the nurses, doctors and administrators were frantic and screamed at him to get back into bed. He began to understand how lepers felt. They put him in restraints and gave him a spinal tap, an agonizing experience, confirming the diagnosis. When he woke up in the morning, he was completely paralyzed from neck to feet. He didn’t believe it at first. It was only when he tried to move and couldn’t that the horrifying reality begin to sink in. He had no idea what to do or think, so he retreated to that inner place that let him endure his father’s beatings. The doctors were pleased to tell him that morning that he would never walk again. He couldn’t believe that they could say something like that and his “Fuck you. I will,” was not received cordially. But he didn’t care and vowed that he would walk again, no matter how long it took. The doctors spitefully told him that as soon as he was no longer contagious he would be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital, somewhere in upstate New York.

So here he was at 5:30 A.M., trapped in his bed, when Nurse Harmon, the ward nurse who he would later come to detest for her callous, frigid indifference to the patients, brought in the juice cart. There was a limited choice; concentrated orange, tomato, or grapefruit, in tiny cans dripping with early morning sweat. “Do you always bring juice this early?” he asked. Nurse Harmon stared at him coldly and ignored his question. “Orange, tomato, or grapefruit?” she asked implacably. “Orange, please.” Their eyes locked and the roots of conflict were born. “You didn’t answer me. Why do we have to get up so early?” She glared at him, hands on hips. “It’s ward policy. Are you going to give me trouble?” He managed to bite back a smartass retort. “No. What happens after juice?” “We wait until breakfast.” “When is that?” “7:30,” she answered, looking at him challengingly. He didn’t respond, beginning to realize that he was trapped in an alien world, with unknown rules.

The wait until breakfast felt interminable. He started to doze off several times, but each time Nurse Harmon appeared, as if by remote control, and stridently said: “No sleeping before breakfast.” “Is there something I have to do?” he asked reasonably. “No.” “Then why can’t I sleep?” “Ward policy. Do you have a problem with that?” He decided not to argue with her until he knew more about the place. “What happens after breakfast?” She stared at him for a moment, then answered in a monotone: “Toilet and personal hygiene at 8:00. School from 8:30 to 12:00. Lunch at 12:30. Physical therapy from 1:30 to 2:30. Hydro therapy from 3:00 to 4:00. Occupational therapy from 4:30 to 5:15. Dinner at 5:30. Ward lights out at 9:00 on the boy’s ward, where you’ll be moved after dinner. Questions?” “I can’t move. How can I do those things?” “This is a rehabilitation hospital,” she explained scornfully. “We’ll help you.” “Oh.”

The only palatable part of breakfast was the ward attendant who fed him. She was a local girl, who in another section of the country would have been a hillbilly. She had stringy brown hair, a pale face, washed out blue eyes, but a ripe body that swelled in the appropriate places. The corn flakes were pasty, the milk watery, the breakfast roll stale, the butter tasteless, but her hand that casually stroked him as she fed him with her other hand, made him forget what passed for a meal. “What’s your name?” she asked nasally. “Billy. What’s yours?” “Lizzie Jo. But you can call me Liz.” And while they talked her hand kept wandering his body and he didn’t know what to do or say. “This your first day?” she asked, while her hand asked something else. “Yeah. What kind of place is this?” “It’s a hospital for paralyzed people.” “I know. I mean what’s it like?” “You’ll find out,” she answered with a giggle. “I’ve got other patients to feed. See ya.” And off she went, leaving him trying to figure out what she was up to.

The rest of his first day at the hospital was as strange as breakfast and passed in a blur. The school teachers treated their physically dysfunctional students as if they were mentally challenged. The level of classroom work was designed for the retarded and that’s how it was presented. He didn’t say anything as he tried to understand what was going on. His unmoving body was shuttled from therapy to therapy. At physical therapy, Stan, a short, stocky, extremely hairy man, seemed to take pleasure in stretching Billy’s limbs until he screamed in pain. Then he explained how it was for his own good. By the end of the day Billy was so exhausted that he had no objections when the lights went out for the night. He lay there in the darkness feeling the shame of being processed like a piece of meat, with as much consideration for his sensibilities. Just before he fell asleep, he vowed to himself that he would deal with this nightmare and someday walk again.

Sleep was an intermittent torment of terrifying dreams of pursuit that he couldn’t escape. A band of ravenous wolves chased him across a snow-covered mountain. He ran faster and faster, but so did the wolves. They caught up, surrounded him and were about to pounce, when he woke up in a cold sweat that he was helpless to wipe off. He lay there quietly trying to calm down, until he drifted off. A group of brutal-looking men threatened him on a surreal city street. He turned and ran and they followed. The street got narrower and narrower and they got closer and closer, cornering him in a dead end. They reached out to grab him and he woke up again in a cold sweat.

He didn’t dare go back to sleep after that and lay awake, a prisoner in his immobile body. He couldn’t move, so all he could do was ask himself why this happened to him. He didn’t know what would come next, so for the first time in his life he tried to pray. He didn’t know how to do it, so he just asked for help. There was no reassuring sign, or soothing voice and he tried not to feel sorry for himself. Suddenly the harsh fluorescent ward lights flashed on, blinding him momentarily. The cold, grating voice of the ward nurse snapped: “It’s 5:00 a.m. Time for juice.” When the cart reached his cubicle, he asked: “Why do we have juice now? It’s still dark out.” She glared at him implacably. “Hospital routine. You’ll get used to it. You can go back to sleep until 7:00.” Instant antipathy flared between them, but they said nothing more. A moment later she put the lights out and he began to understand that he was in a battle and would have to find some way to survive this alien world.

Author Unknown. If you are the author of this essay or know who is, please let us know at r.kv.r.y.editor(at)gmail(dot)com. We lost records when the old website imploded, and would like to fully credit all authors who have generously shared their work with us. Thank you.

Five years after my younger sister Barbara  died of a malignant brain tumor, I moved from Minnesota to California. I loved the soft tilt of the large round hills, the unfiltered California light, the green Irish spring and golden Italian summer.  Being alone, without Barbara, wasn’t what I had thought would happen. When she died, both of us were in our forties and neither of us had married.I had presumed that the two of us would age, visiting each other’s homes where we would both wash dishes with a sponge, not a rag, use SOS for burned pans, and, like Mother, wrap everything in plastic. Eventually we would end up in a nursing home, eccentric old maids rocking side by side; I imagined her tormenting me with her singing.

Instead I sat in my dusty studio in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Pacific Ocean and just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  It was a 170 square foot garret in an old army quarterhouse with rutted floor boards that caught my chair as I rolled from one part of the room to another, and in the inflated real estate market, I was lucky to have it. In summer my room was often cold and smelled of the spit of the swallows that nested in the eaves. If I opened the skylight, the resident cat jumped out on the roof and attacked the swallows.

In this room for the next five years, I tried to resurrect my sister. At times, Barb’s spirit had given me a friendly wave, and at other times, chastised me as it emanated from one vertical file cabinet, then another, from Minneapolis to San Francisco and places in-between. Now, a yellow folder sat at the front of the file cabinet, luminous against the royal blue hanging file. When I unpacked the files, I felt I was removing a body wrapped in fragile papyrus.

I had Barb’s dresser and desk, I wore her chartreuse harem pants and her red and black striped socks. I had a soft leather purse with her pink plastic comb, boxes of letters, and wads of photographs in rubber bands. I had her sheet music and her scribblings about the voice lessons she took. I drove her 86 Camry across the country and back. I had her eulogy and three-inch thick binders filled with notes and flip chart pages on which I had written “What is the meaning?”

Perhaps our meaning was in singing, maybe even our faith, certainly our hope was. The women in our family had been as one with the Metropolitan Opera as Texaco, which sponsored the Met’s Saturday afternoon broadcasts from 1940 to 2003. My grandmother in Massachusetts sang to those broadcasts and so did my mother in Duluth, Minnesota, turning the volume so high that the basses and sopranos rocked through the oak doors of our house, from the den to the kitchen where, apron tied around her middle, Mother sponged dishes and sang along with Leontyne Price, even though a high school chorus teacher had told her to mouth the words in chorus. Unless the opera were extraordinarily long, broadcasts started unfailingly at 1:00 and my mother refused any invitations for Saturday afternoon.

When each of the three sisters in the family reached fifth grade, our parents took us to the Metropolitan Opera, which toured every year in Minneapolis. Riding in the back seat of the old Buick into downtown Minneapolis, I saw the Pillsbury and General Mills factories stationed like sentries over the Mississippi River. To me they meant, not farming and food processing, but opera and food. In the Curtis Hotel, I walked importantly through the green and red train style lobby, ate in the hotel coffee shop, walked through Dayton’s Department Store with my mother, saw the sunset glow a deeper gold than in Duluth and sniffed grainer, less piney smells. All of this was going to the opera. After I left Minnesota and returned to Minneapolis for graduate school,  by which time the Curtis Hotel had been demolished, my feelings remained the same about the opera and so did Barb’s, who had entered law school in Minneapolis.

That year, the May of opera week was humid and hot and the auditorium wasn’t air-conditioned. Three times that week, Barb and I  joined the opera mavens, their long silk gowns rustling in the soft night breeze, high heels clicking on the stone plaza of Northrup Auditorium. The first night we dressed in black and white and pretended to be ushers. The second night we wore our dress-up hippie clothes, long, pink and black flowered skirts with peasant blouses. The skirts would blend colorfully with the gowns the wealthier patrons wore – we would fit right in, we were sure of it. At the end of the first act, imitating the privileged patrons, we strode to empty seats in the first row. Jittery, we eased into the maroon velvet. A well-dressed matron stopped us and said, “These are not your seats!” We stood up, smiled and walked with injured dignity to the side of the auditorium, where we remained until we found a seat for the next act.

The last night of the opera there were no empty seats in the front rows. We stood at the side and as soon as the curtain went up, Barb beckoned me, then walked across the first row of seats, crossed the few yards separating the audience from the orchestra, and casually walked towards the seven steps on the far left that led to the stage. Praying that I was invisible I followed. There we sat, on the fourth and fifth steps, nearly on the stage, twenty feet away from the silver streaked hair of Cesare Siepi, who was singing Mephistopheles in Faust, his tall lanky body packed into a red jacket threaded with gold and silver. The dimension and timbre of his bass voice slid into every cavity of our bodies in the same way a morning jump into Lake Superior cuts to your vital organs and makes your body tingle until nightfall. My ears reverberated and my heart beat – in part I was afraid we would be asked to leave but Barbara wasn’t perturbed – she hummed along with the music. I  heard the music note by note, the melody almost fragmented, each note becoming both more and less than it was alone as it joined up with the others and strolled or marched or leapt toward the end of the aria.

It was certainly possible that we would be kicked off the stage steps and tossed out of the auditorium, but I went with Barb year after year because to hear Violetta die in La Traviata and Lucia go mad in Lucia di Lammermoor from six yards away thrilled me. Concentrated in one night were all the bliss and fear I had yet imagined. I felt proud going to the opera with Barbara in the same way I had felt special when my parents took me in fifth grade. I was going with  someone who cared. It was my good luck to be with her.

After Barbara passed the bar exam and joined my dad’s Duluth law practice, she took voice lessons in Duluth and kept written vocal instructions in a booklet lined with bass and treble clefs, as she practiced arias from the operas we had seen as children. She did breathing exercises every day and learned how to support the voice and how to locate the place where the sound comes from, behind the bridge of the nose, deep in the sinus cavities.

Eight years later, Barbara was diagnosed with a brain tumor that started in her visual cortex. “If I hadn’t identified so strongly with Violetta when I was a little girl,” she cried as I sat with her in the hospital, “do you think this would have happened?” Violetta, a young courtesan, is Alfredo’s lover in Verdi’s opera La Traviata. Alfredo’s father begs Violetta to leave Alfredo so that Alfredo’s sister can make a good marriage. Violetta, sick with tuberculosis, is reluctant to leave the man she loves, and during the duet, you’re not sure what will happen, she could go either way. Finally, generously, she  forsakes Alfredo and moves to the country to die of tuberculosis. Believing himself abandoned, Alfredo rages. When at last he learns of  Violetta’s sacrifice, he rushes to her bedroom and they are reunited. Minutes later she dies. Barb and I grew up listening to La Traviata as my mother played it on the old mahogany record player in the front hall. We both thought it could be the most beautiful opera ever written. Verdi’s combination of tragedy and score – the troubled relationship of father and son, the family pride, the illness-crossed love of Alfredo and Violetta, the courtesan who sacrifices so another woman can marry in an almost feminist gesture – all of this thrilled us. Oh, to be so grand, to love so well, to sacrifice so nobly. To die so beautifully. Barbara had always identified with Violetta, I think because she felt things wouldn’t work out in her own life, and because Verdi’s flowing melodies express a bittersweet longing for all that is unattainable.The story would be melodrama without the music. The despairing “Addio” is filled with longing and the melody searches. Why do we enjoy wallowing in sad music? Because the song’s end promises, not joy, but the knowledge that others have felt what we feel. If you know an aria, you silently join in that place at the top of your soft palette where music soars. You feel it in your chest and throat and lift your rib cage, involuntarily breathing as though you were singing, and climb over and under, up and down, your pleasure in the melody and the search propelling the aria forward. The music of “Addio del passato,” which Violetta sings at the end of La Traviata, melds a sublime musical line with an earthly story, guiding you from loss, to rage against that loss, until, eventually, over the course of the aria, you are able to reflect on what happened. After she got the tumor, Barb couldn’t see well but she could still sing while I played. She sat scrunched against me on the piano bench, so close that my arm couldn’t move. Then she stood. “It’s better to sing standing and better to see too,” she added.

“I can’t see either, Barb,” I said.

“You act like you don’t believe I can’t see.  You don’t want to admit what is happening to me because it makes you unhappy.  You’re trying to make me feel better, but it doesn’t.” I was lucky we continued. I stilled my back and shoulders so they didn’t betray contradiction. Only my fingers moved. She was so close I could smell her if we hadn’t smelled so much alike that I smelled nothing. Would she sulk? I couldn’t see very well but who could say how well I saw compared to her or what made it dark – the light or the angle or the blindness caused by the tumor? We had really believed, Barb and I,  we could burrow inside each other’s skin or behind each other’s eyes, that we knew what the other was feeling. Now I couldn’t make the leaps of understanding that came so easily before. I couldn’t be inside her head. I was careful not to look at her in case that made her angrier. I couldn’t see what she saw. I could only see how to find the keys in her purse and open the door to the porch, how to put bright lights in her lamps, and when to shut the windows because it might rain. I could only see that she wanted to sing and I waned to play. A match. Rejoice!

“Shhh,” I whispered, meaning, “Sing softer.”

“Were you telling me to be quieter?  I haven’t sung in over six months. I am lucky to get out anything at all much less the variances necessary to do it At the piano I kept silent, breathed slowly, acted calm. I loved playing and hearing her sing the arias from La Traviata, Un di felice – A happy day, Sempre libera – Forever free, and Addio del passato.

Ten years after Barbara died, I walked down a sandy hill to the Pacific and felt the familiar tears welling up as I thought about Barbara’s lengthy and violent dying. I had cried almost every day, sometimes several times, from loss, guilt, anger, all the usual emotions of grief. Startling myself, I thought, “I don’t have to cry.” I felt some guilt, as though I were choosing to ignore Barb. I smiled anyway. It was a windy afternoon softened by warm moisture from the sea. The hills were blossoming with bushes of lavender lupine and on the sand were unruly spreads of fuchsia iceplant. I heard the brown pelicans’ wings tapping softly against the water in Rodeo Lagoon when they landed. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, for which I imagine these brown pelicans, nearly wiped out by DDT then, flap their wings in gratitude. Carson herself died of breast cancer in 1964, but not before visiting Rodeo Lagoon in a wheelchair to witness fifty brown pelicans gliding to the ocean on their huge floppy wings and splash-landing in the water. Before that day, I hadn’t known that one could choose not to be sad, not to cry, that one could move around in the mind like a chessboard, taking a pawn and sliding it to a safe place instead of placing it directly in the path of  the queen. At the turnoff on Coastal Trail, I started singing. I had begun singing lessons nine years after Barb died and I breathed through my diaphragm and tried to flare my nostrils and smile, as my singing teacher had instructed me. In classical singing, you pull your chin down, push out your diaphragm, let your stomach flop, flare your nostrils, flatten your tongue, make fish lips and smile. When I neared the east end of the lagoon, nostrils flaring and stomach flopping, I thought I was singing well.Addio, dorati sogni, cari fantasmi, addio. . . .  (Farewell, golden dreams, dear spirits, farewell. There is no room for you in my heart anymore.) My teacher picked this song for me, along with Come Away Death by Sibelius, Dido’s Lament by Purcell, and several other death-oriented arias. It troubled me that she thought I was suited only for death. The music of Addio has an agitated marching rhythm and an acrobatic melody but the lyrics are angry and depressed: “Woe is me, in the strife of the world sorrow cannot be forgotten. Death is the only true farewell and that pleases me.” It pleased me to sing the song, but I didn’t understand its emotions until I remembered Barb saying she needed distance from me. By the time she said that, I had thought things would be peaceful but they weren’t. I saw that it was wrenching for her to pull away from the living and when Barb pulled away, I felt like she’d socked me in the stomach.

Suddenly, in front of me in Rodeo Lagoon, a Great Blue Heron lifted its terrific wing spread and flew to the next cove. My body on the shore seemed utterly unimpressive and finite. I walked to the bridge over the lagoon and she did it again, flying back to where my singing had disturbed her. She landed on the grey rocks and was still. After a few seconds, I couldn’t make her out. Perfectly camouflaged. I began to sing again.

Mardith Louisell has published essays, profiles, and book reviews in Italy, A Love Story, The House on Via Gombito Street, The Best American Erotica, and in journals and magazines. She writes about music, color, obsession, the WWII Holocaust, feminism, food and relationships. She lives in San Francisco where she works in child welfare and just finished singing the Mozart Requiem.

After I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I couldn’t help but notice circumstances that, when they arose, seemed to strike me as blatantly unfair.  To each I would respond with a dramatic sigh and state emphatically to anyone who would listen, “There ought to be a rule against that!”

Now as the self-proclaimed Menopausal Warrior Queen, I decree that the rules that follow are hereby effective immediately and across the universe.
Okay, so I don’t really have that kind of power.  But if I did, here are the ones I would implement with the snap of my noble fingers.

Rule 1: Bad behavior on the breast cancer patient’s part should not be held against her by others, at least not permanently.  Actually, this rule was in effect for me although I wasn’t badly behaved all the time.  I was at my worst when I was recovering from my mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery and my husband was my primary caregiver.  After a week in the hospital, he drove me home and bundled me off to bed,   then set to the design and execution of a well-documented system of round-the-clock checks, meds, and drain line cleanings that would have impressed Florence Nightingale.  He made sure I ate on schedule.  He arose every hour on the hour, night after night, to lead me to the bathroom since I couldn’t walk without wandering because of the pain medication.  He was the model of loving efficiency.   Since I was unable do much by myself, I really did need his help.  But his unlimited cheerfulness made me want to smack him, so I soon dubbed him the “Nurse Nazi.”  

Luckily, he remained steadfast through my emotional outbursts and did not hold them against me.  His explanation was that my temporary lack of gratitude was the result of exhaustion, pain, medications and fear which sounded plausible enough to me.  Therefore, I dictate that this rule is now in effect for all, henceforth.

Rule 2: Anyone who accompanies you to a diagnostic test should be prepared to dress you once the test is complete.  I took a doctor-prescribed Xanax prior to my MRI biopsy and it did the job because I don’t remember any pain or discomfort.  The tricky part came when the procedure was finished.  I was so out of it that I couldn’t dress myself, so the nurse called my husband from the waiting room to help me.  The jeans I wore had slipped off quite easily when I undressed to change into a gown.  But getting those same jeans back on proved to be about as difficult as stuffing sausage meat into a casing, only without the spiffy machine.  Ed was able to place my feet into the leg openings while I sat on the bench, but when he tried to stand me up my rag doll posture made it difficult for him to pull them up around my waist.  His military training served him well as he draped me over his shoulders in a modified fireman’s carry, propping me up so he could slide the jeans over my hips.  My giggles over Ed’s groans coming from behind the dressing room curtain caused the nurse to check to see if everything was okay.   In retrospect, I was grateful that I hadn’t asked one of our male neighbors to drive me to the test.  That would have made the rounds of our neighborhood at lightning speed!

Rule 3: You should not be held responsible for breaking basic fashion rules when coming home from the hospital or at anytime
during treatment.

This rule can keep you off the fashion hook for four or five months, at a minimum.  For example, although it was not a combination I would normally wear, drawstring sweat pants, a blouse that buttoned up the front, and pink Crocs on my feet were all I could manage when I left the hospital.  Since it was chilly that day, I layered my white terry cloth robe over it all for an attractive finish to the outfit.  The good news is, no one cared because everyone leaves the hospital looking like hell anyway.  And I didn’t care because… I was on pain meds.  Thank God my oldest daughter, ever ready with her camera, was not there or I would certainly have shown up on the back page of Fashion Don’ts in a future Glamour magazine with a black rectangle over my eyes.

Then there are the days during treatment when concocting any outfit, much less a fashionable one, is just too overwhelming.  One afternoon after a chemo treatment I answered the doorbell looking a bit green while wearing my trusty terrycloth robe over pink knit pajamas, slippers, and a pink terry turban on my head.  A Victoria’s Secret ad gone terribly wrong.  The FedEx man, polite but wide-eyed, had me sign for the package, then literally sprinted back to the safety of his truck.  Note the common theme of the robe in both anti-fashion examples.  Maybe I should decree that runway designers need to elevate the style status of fluffy terrycloth robes in next year’s collections!

Rule 4: As a cancer patient, you should not be embarrassed to admit to the use of unorthodox methods to solve unexpected annoyances. I submit the example of what to do with your head after you shave it, that is, if you choose to shave off your hair prior to it falling out during chemotherapy.  A week or so after you shave, some hairs will not fall out readily, won’t come out when rubbing your head in the shower, and are also not growing.  They feel like little needles and can be pretty uncomfortable under a hat, scarf, wig or crown.  

I presented this dilemma to my husband, ever the willing problem solver.  He suggested the typical male answer to most all of life’s problems – duct tape.  My first instinct was to snap back at him: “Are you crazy?  It isn’t enough that I am bald?  Now you want me to rip the skin off my head??”  (This was a holdover from the bad behavior highlighted in Rule #1.)  But I managed to hold my tongue and, after conceding that this stuff was used in wartime to patch bullet holes in helicopter blades until repairs could be made, decided that I didn’t have much to lose if I was careful.  And I had to face the cold reality that none of my ideas had worked.

Per his instructions I cut a 9” length of tape, wrapped it around my palm and the top of my hand, sticky side out, then slowly and gently rolled my covered palm across my head where the needle hairs were.  Sure enough, many of them came out without any pain while my skin remained intact.  As I performed this exercise Ed sat in the bedroom anxiously awaiting the results.  I walked out and stated ruefully, “As much as I hate to admit it, this actually works.”   After a few more duct tape treatments, I progressed to my Sheltie’s pet roller for the less stubborn hairs.  These two techniques got me to the point where I had no more needles and no more hairs falling out and sticking to my pillow or turban.  Therefore, I order that we will no longer be embarrassed to share our unusual (okay, weird) solutions with others who might benefit.

Rule 5: Staying with the hair theme, wigs need to be cooler. I don’t mean better styling, although President’s wives must be popular /images for some wig designers because one made me look like Mamie Eisenhower while another channeled Pat Nixon. The wig I finally selected was a stunner and was comfortable enough when I bought it in mid-October.  That is, until my first serious hot flashes began after I started chemotherapy.  Then, all I wanted to do was strip off everything – my clothes, the wig – and do it fast.  Since that kind of behavior can get you arrested out in public, I sucked it up until the flash was over.  But over a period of four months I went through several packages of batteries for my personal hand fan.  That sweet little device saved me from becoming bald jail bait.  So forthwith, wigs will help us look terrific while containing a cool gel lining in the net cap so we can survive climate change, both personal and global, while staying on the right side of the law.  

Rule 6:  Steroids and adjuvant hormone therapy should not result in weight gain. Here’s another one where the drug universe really sticks it
to us.  Although I didn’t have a weight problem before, once I started my second round of chemo accompanied by steroids, I packed on 13 pounds before I could bat my skimpy-eyelashed lids.  It didn’t help that I was moving less because of bone pain, fatigue, and winter weather, and my steroid-induced appetite evaporated any attempts at portion control.  But the appearance of my ballooning alter ego was definitely unwelcome.  And, for the record, I was still bald.

As the effects of the chemo drugs faded, and the weather started to turn warmer, I began an exercise regimen to strengthen my body, doing a little bit at a time, and progressing as I felt stronger.  Just about the time I started to feel like I was hitting my stride, my oncologist initiated a one pill per day hormone therapy which will continue for five years or more.  One of the most common side effects is – yes, you guessed it – weight gain.  You have to love the irony here.  It’s not like we need help gaining weight as we mature and our metabolisms downshift after menopause.  I am dutifully exercising and watching what I eat, as well as how much, and am feeling 100% better and looking fitter and firmer but really, this rule needs to happen – NOW – before I gain another ounce!

Rule 7: When you ask for the curly hair chemo, then you should get curly hair on the regrowth. I spent my entire life begrudging my two brothers their curls, while my hair was stick straight.  That’s another rule that I should have taken care of long ago.  (Did I mention I am the oldest, and had to put up with them both, so they owe me?)

But I digress.  When I heard that many survivors’ hair grows back curly, I saw my chance.  I explicitly requested the curly hair chemo mix from my oncologist, who appraised me with a puzzled look, nodded, and said vaguely, “Aha.”  Now as I examine the current quarter inch regrowth that nominally qualifies as my crowning glory, there is not one curl to be seen.  The hairs are baby soft and delicate, and there are many more silver representatives than before.  What is that all about?  But not a damn one is curly.  So let’s revise this evolving rule: Curly hair chemo, if requested, means you get curly, non-gray, luxuriant tresses as your regrowth, and this goes double if you have two ungrateful brothers who have curly hair and the gall to complain about it in your presence.  Now that’s a kickin’ rule!

In summary, I don’t mean to be a complainer.  But if these rules were effective today, coping with breast cancer surgery and treatment could be rendered significantly more straightforward and certainly less maddening.  Alas, until that time comes, we just have to hunker down and fight our way through it, day by day.  To those untouched by breast cancer I say, good luck, annual mammograms all around, and keep ‘em coming!  And to my brave, survivor sisters: Fight on, Warrior Queens!  We can’t back down now and we can’t let the Evil Breast Cancer win!

Tana Suter is a recent cancer survivor who, fed up with illness memoirs crammed with drama and pathos, used her idle time throughout treatment to document how a serious illness muscled its way into her previously well-organized life.  She is finalizing a book entitled The Menopausal Warrior Queen Slays the Evil Breast Cancer where she collects her non-medical frustrations and observations into a funny, sad and often cranky call-to-arms for warrior queens and those who love them.  Her website, menopausalwarriorqueen.org will go live in May 2009. Suter lives with her husband, Ed, in the picturesque foothills of northern Virginia.

This is, of course, the name of one of his stories. In it, a man who has escaped his  farm town past, a rustic with urban vanities, nonetheless returns there to visit a trusted dentist. He sees the things that have changed since his childhood visits, the most telling being a digit-based (though not digital) clock, its minutes dropping away, as he watches, “into the brimming void.

What has not changed is his passion for a childhood flame who happens to drop
by the office, chat him up a bit, blush under his revived attentions, and eventually,
almost silently, alludes to the anomies her marriage there has doomed her to. Though
his themes are as abundant as Adam’s names, persistence is Updike’s perpetual
character-driver, the life force that animates each form of his characters’ transcendence:

[Janet] arose and came against his chest, and Clyde,
included in the close aroma her hair and skin gave off,
felt weak and broad and grand, like a declining rose.
Janet tucked a folded note into the pocket of his shirt and
said conversationally, “He’s waiting outside in the car.”
The neutral, ominous “he” opened wide a conspi-
racy Clyde instantly entered. He stayed behind a minute,
to give her time to get away. Ringed by judging eyes of the
young and old, he felt like an actor snug behind the blinding
protection of the footlights; he squinted prolongedly at the
speedometer-clock, which, like a letter delivered on the stage,
was blank.

And who wrote better about abiding religiosity, the search for faith that Updike saw as essential and unexplainable by reference to historical or social forces? In the story “The Man Who Loved Extinct Animals,” the protagonist sees in the joints and hinges of the fossils he assembles the delicate bridges that the mind builds over the abyss. The brimming void may blind us, he seems to say, but as long as we rivet the beams together, keep busy with the reality or the illusion of building and don’t look down, we will be fine for the time being.

Persistence also abides, though less than in other writers, in those characters who shore up some art, or artifact, against their ruin. One of the most powerful of “The Olinger Stories” (Collected in 2004’s Collected Early Stories), is “The Alligators.” An elementary school boy fashions his first illustrations not out of any transcendent wish, but to satirize a classmate whose ostracism is a requirement for popularity. He feels guilt  at creating for such a mean and limited purpose, but then, as he shares other, maturing drawings with friends, sees that he has inherited a transfiguring power, and one conferring the consolations of infinity.

What often persists the most could be the most unattractive but necessary of qualities—market ambition, social climbing, the Sinclair Lewis hucksterism that tells us the historical echoes of the “Rabbit” nickname. In the story “The City,” a man falls ill while traveling on business, and as he recovers through hallucinations and incisional pain, we think that maybe he will reassess, prioritize, hunger for the stasis of a family and fixed life. But the desire to impress and dazzle is as basic to the organism as eating or breathing, and the brush with death seems to have taught him nothing but the need for reserves of energy stored up by rest. It was always Updike’s exploration of ambition that made him that most American of writers. Roth and Bellow approached it brilliantly through urbanized machers of immigrant merchant classes, but Updike filtered it through our Rotary Club speakers, the Toyota salesman (Rabbit Is Rich) quoting gas mileage stats to us from Consumer Reports.

Perhaps the greatest persistence he portrayed was longing itself; yearning, the desire to rise higher and keep hope borne up in one’s bearing as the very badge of existence. Like Francis Bacon, Updike believed the world is laid out for us, kindly disposed to our discovery and enjoyment: “Full of Joye and Wondrous Goode.” That transporting, almost erotic elixir of exploration runs through the age-sequenced life snapshots of the narrator of “Museums and Women.” It first visits him like a spell as he traverses a county reliquary with his mother:

Who she was was a mystery so deep it never formed itself
into a question. She had descended to me from thin clouds of
preexistent time, enveloped me, and set me moving toward an
unseen goal with a vague expectation that in the beginning was
more hers than mine. She was not content. I felt that the motion
that brought us again and again to the museum was an agitated
one, that she was pointing me through these corridors toward a
radiant place that she had despaired of reaching . . .I was her
son and the center of her expectations. I dutifully absorbed the
light-struck terror of the hushed high ceilings and went through
each doorway with a kind of timid rapacity.

What is sought here—though great—is not as important as the sensation, the very texture of seeking: she was pointing me. . . toward a radiant place she had despaired of reaching. Updike owns the luxuriance of The Search more than anyone (perhaps excepting Walker Percy) in modern letters: he invented the theme out of whole cloth and then perfected it in more than fifty books, through hundreds of characters. His perspective on it was tactile, limber, instinctual, breezy, and at the same time solemn, like one of his epistolary clergymen. William Pritchard said of him, reviewing the collection with the above story as its title: “He is a religious writer, he is a comic realist; he knows what everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together a body of work which, in substantial intelligent creation, will eventually be seen as second to none in our time.” Eventually seen? For those in the know, the fathomless depth, and the dexterity, was staggeringly obvious from the start. Chip McGrath, in his tribute in The Times, posed the question: “If you could write that well by taking a pill, who wouldn’t swallow whole fistfuls of them?”

Though we had no way of knowing it, my colleague Victoria Pynchon  and I saw him in his very last public appearance, at UCLA’s Royce Hall in December. He read a quick passage from The Widows of Eastwick, where Alexandra, the aging Rhode Island witch of the Seventies, is now an old woman on a Nile cruise, telepathically electrocuting bats that are flying across her steamer bow and mussing her hair. Everything you could want in establishing a scene is there: the colors of the foul but suddenly clearing river, the Monet hues of the Egyptian twilight, the precisely rendered sound of something we’ll never hear but know could sound only that way were we to witness it—a bat’s fur and rubbery extremities flaming up and then dousing themselves to death in the water.Wrapped up in this sensuous music—much as with his beloved Proust and Bellow—is the effortless, sudden ranging between third person and first, the immediately recognizable hinges of his free indirect style. It is what hit American readers of Rabbit, Run like a thunderbolt in 1959, or like the welcome sun Harry sees on the first page, sliding open the door of his dark, Satanic Linotype shop and blinking at the kindly-disposed world, the bright, haphazard gravel under the soles of his basketball hi-tops. It was the same shifts in register and perspective that made you always know but never care which thought was Rabbit’s or which was his creator’s. He dove like a . . . what?

Like a bat—down into everyone’s head and hovered there meticulously. He got out of them just what was needed for reality to create their observations and then, with a pirouette Sam Tannenhaus called “pure magic,” let his characters’ minds in turn press out upon the world their seeing had reconstituted.

He honed this to perfection in the opening scenes of Rabbit At Rest, where the narrator jumps inside Rabbit (he’s waiting for his wife to get out of the bathroom at the Ft. Myers airport) long enough for us to feel the man’s gluttonous elation, then leaps back to look at his character like a Babbitesque, portly clodhopper, chewing and dribbling a candy bar, gazing at his own strange sunstruck extinction:

While she’s in the ladies he cannot resist going into the shop and buying
something to nibble, a Planter’s Original Peanut Bar, the wrapper says. It was
broken in two somewhere in transit and thinks one half to offer his two
grandchildren when they’re all in the car heading home. It would make a small hit.
But the first half is so good he eats the second and even dumps the sweet
crumbs out of the wrapper into his palm and with his tongue eats them all up like
an anteater . . . . . As he tries with his tongue to clean the sticky brittle stuff, the
caramelized sugar and corn syrup, from between his teeth—all his still, thank God,
and the front ones not even crowned—Rabbit stares out at the big square of
sunny afternoon. As the candy settles in his stomach a sense of doom regrows its
claws around his heart: little prongs like those that hold a diamond solitaire.

We come finally to the little shadow under the intensity of appetite: its forbiddeness and its premonition of oblivion. You stuff yourself, but with something of your own negation.

Later, even closer to death, Rabbit looks up from his heart bypass operating table and sees on a video screen his own horrific viscera, “the pulsing wet tubes we inherited from the squid.” Harry is reassured that his doctor is Jewish, having a

Gentile prejudice that Jews do everything a little better
than other people, something about all those generations
crouched over the Talmud and watch-repair tables, they
aren’t as distracted as other persuasions, they don’t expect
to have as much fun. They stay off the booze and dope and
have a weakness only . . .for broads.

We get Harry’s immediate assessment of his surgeon’s vices, but only after we’ve sailed around the room a little, flitting omnisciently within the purely authorial, purely sociological adumbration of the character.

At the reading, Updike finally laid down the copper-jacketed book and talked awhile with a writer from the L.A. Times Book Review. All his observations were witty, generous, self-deprecating, and in the words of his own epitaph for his beloved editor William Maxwell, “funny and wise and kind and true.” He finished with a gush of enthusiasm about the newly-elected Obama, clasping his hands together, appearing to rise up out of his chair like one of his early cartoon whiffenpoofs. Then he took a series of mostly inept audience questions, steering each gracefully toward a cognizable answer. The inevitable what-are-you-working-on eventually arrived, and for once he really didn’t have a thought-through response. He shrugged his shoulders, slapped his palms on his knees, and said “I’ll only say I intend to stay in this writing business until I drop over dead.” And lucky for us, by God, he did.

Richard Wirick lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife and three children, where he practices law and writes. He is the co-founder of the journal Transformation and the author of the hauntingly lyrical collection of prose poems 100 Siberian Post Cards.