Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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The Truth About Cancer: In the Fictional Waiting Room of My Novel, Bring Back My Body to Me / Rita Ciresi
Keywords: Creative Writing; Literature; Disability
<1> Twenty years ago as an MFA student at Penn State, I submitted a six-line poem to be workshopped, about a character—also the speaker—undergoing an appendectomy . Unlike the rest of my bumbling, self-indulgent attempts at prosody, this lean machine of a poem was well-received by both my teacher and classmates. I felt elated until after class, in the Ladies Room, one of my fellow students lifted her T-shirt and invited me to compare my appendectomy scar to hers.
<2> I stared down at her belly, pale and doughy as a breakfast biscuit. My core muscles—I hoped, nay, prayed—were in better shape than hers. Still, I was not especially eager to flash my abs in front of her.
<3> And so I told her the truth: "I don't have a scar."
<4> She looked at me wide-eyed. Hopeful. Like I was about to reveal some secret Sicilian recipe that would rid her skin of its three-inch disfigurement. Such a remedy actually exists. Sicilians say that women who "make love to the onion"—by nightly massaging their scar with half of an onion slathered in extra-virgin oil—can undergo a Caesarean section in December and by June strut confidently down the shore in a string bikini.
<5> Some secrets are meant to be shared. And others, perhaps not. "I don't have a scar," I told my classmate, "because I never had an appendectomy." "But you just wrote about it," she protested.
<6> One part of me—the Catholic part of me—was thrilled: I had lied and gotten away with it! But another part of me—just as severely nun-ridden—was racked with shame: yes, I had lied. And now this appendix-less girl, who narrowed her eyes at me censoriously as Sister Saint John of the Cross, would be damned before she let me get away with it. I stood accused. Of telling falsehoods. And stealing material that rightfully belonged to she who actually had experienced it.
<7> I was used to taking such guff about my storytelling from my immigrant relatives, who were so deeply suspicious of the written word that they could find falsehood lurking in an innocuous grocery list. But I couldn't believe another would-be writer would get upset over the so-called "truthiness" of a poem. Didn't she understand it was the author's job to get her greedy little hands on whatever subject matter she chose to wring the most from it?
<8> A more mature artiste might have stood there in front of the dirty sinks and (over the incessant flush of the toilets) debated the power of the imagination versus experience. I, however, gave her a sheepish smile and bit back the urge to tell her, Nanny nanny boo boo, I wrote about it first!
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<9> The appendix incident, as I came to think of it, was the first of many incidents in which even educated readers mistakenly took the speaker of one of my fictions to be the author herself. It's always distressing when people assume the narrator of your novel is you, especially when they begin chastising you for your character’s bad behavior. Why did you get an abortion? they want to know. How could you tell your own mother to go to hell? What possessed you to sleep with your own cousin?
<10> Far more egregious than this unwarranted scolding is the assumption that the novelist embarking upon a new project simply sits down at her computer one morning and begins typing her life exactly as it was lived. Folks, I want to say, it should be so easy. Or My life should be so interesting. Or better still: Kindly mind your Henry James, who taught us "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life."
<11> Indeed who better described the tedious and sometimes torturous word-by-word travail of getting the "truth" down onto the page than James in "The Art of Fiction"?
". . . the air of reality. . . seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit on which all its other merits helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. . . . [The novelist] cannot possibly take too many notes, he cannot possibly take enough."
<12> As far as I was concerned, James wrote the definitive defense of "the very complicated business" of storytelling—stating it so forcefully and eloquently that I've been tempted to pass out copies of "The Art of Fiction" to friends and relatives with each new novel that I wrote just to ward off misguided comments about what was "real" and what wasn't. Read James first, I'd say, and Ciresi second! But fortunately for me (who needs all the audience she can get) I did not put the ponderous prose of The Master in between me and my readership. Instead, for twenty years I simply smiled and let off-base comments about the reality of my fiction roll off my back.
<13> Then halfway through writing my third novel, an idea for my fourth came to me as if in a dream. I saw a young woman with long brown hair walking out of a parking garage in downtown New Haven, where I had grown up, into a spitting April wind. Where was she heading? I followed her down the narrow side street. Through a set of automatic glass doors. Into the hushed, carpeted hallways of the Yale University Cancer Center.
<14> Only then did I remember the infamous fictional appendix, which all these years had been floating in the corner of my consciousness, like some odd and troublesome island country—Madagascar or Bahrain—whose primary language and principal agricultural products I was at a loss to name. Why had my imagination latched onto cancer? It was not my story to tell.
<15> Or was it?
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<16> It was supposed to be a routine mammogram. The technician was overweight—by a good fifty pounds or more—and I felt her own ample breasts press against my bony back as she positioned me against the mammoth machine and tilted me into position.
<17> "Have a seat out in the waiting area," she said.
<18> She was gone a long time. When she returned—at the moment when she was supposed to say, "You're good to go!"—her gold crucifix glinted beneath the fluorescent lights, making me blink.
<19> "The radiologist wants another look," she said.
<20> And so it went. A second look became a third. A third, an ultrasound. An ultrasound led to a sweat-inducing slide through a claustrophobic, clanging MRI, which then won me a trip to the oncologist.
<21> The H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa offers complimentary valet parking, an on-site beauty salon, and copious signs reminding patrons THIS IS A SMOKE-FREE FACILITY. The waiting area of the Comprehensive Breast Program reminded me of a spa. There we all sat—blond hair, brown hair, gray hair, no hair—in our snowflake-printed robes, patiently awaiting our appointments. Too bad none of us were there for Brazilian blow-outs. As I sat there with my by-now huge imaging file on my lap, valiantly trying not to stare at the woman in the pink turban opposite me, I thought, If I do have cancer, I can write about this. But if I don't, I won't, because I won't get the story right.
<22> But what was right, when every woman sitting there had a different story? Maybe sitting right next to me was a woman whose faith in God was so unshakeable that she instantly was able to take her diagnosis in stride. Across from her was one who mourned every morning the scar that no onion slathered in olive oil could fix. Kitty-corner to her was another woman who was terrified to die before her own daughter was old enough to safely turn on the stove. Behind her sat the middle-aged woman who feared her husband—upon learning both breasts would have to go—would leave her.
<23> And so, over the next few years, as I made my annual pilgrimages back to the oncologist, who continued to shake his head at how the fluid-filled cysts in my breasts swelled and receded and came back on one side and then migrated to the other, each time thankfully benign—I began to ponder not, how could I write about this, but how could I not? And the narrator of my novel—the young woman with the brown hair walking down the street in the spitting rain—was not me and yet me, as well as any other woman who had sat on the exam table in a paper gown, waiting for that fateful knock on the door, when the doctor would enter to deliver one of two scenarios: "See you next year!" or "I'm sorry to tell you that. . . ."
<24> For me, writing fiction about this dreaded that was a way of saying nanny nanny boo boo to the time bomb sitting inside my own body, and like every other one of my stories I hoped would survive once I was in the grave, a fuck-you to death itself.
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<25> My novel Bring Back My Body to Me had a lot of false starts (including the title, which kept boomeranging back and forth from Mating to Life to How Long Do You Have to Live?). I first began the action by following my twenty-seven-year-old heroine by then I knew her name was Francie—as she disrobed and donned her snowflake-printed robe to receive her first radiation treatment at Yale Cancer Center. I knew Francie was scared—who wouldn't be?—and so I upped the ante on her fear by making her all alone in the world. No parents, no siblings, no husband accompanied her to her first appointment.
<26> But why? Why was she all by herself? This puzzled me, until I began thinking about why some women are more prone to breast cancer than others. Of course! Francie—like my own daughter—was half-Jewish. Her ne'er-do-well half-Italian, half-Irish father had left her mother, who like many other women of Ashkenazic descent, carried the breast-cancer gene. Francie's mom had wasted away from the disease when Francie was a mere fourteen, leaving Francie alone with. . . . who?
<27> Ah! Francie then had been raised by her great-aunt Syl and great-uncle Sol, a Holocaust survivor. But now only Great-Uncle Sol remained alive, stubborn as ever, in a nearby assisted-living facility. So Francie wasn't really alone. But as Uncle Sol kept reminding her, he was eighty-seven-years old, so soon she would be left to fend for herself on Cruel Planet Earth. Thus Sol was pressuring her to get married to. . . who? Why, of course: a nice Jewish doctor named Arnie or Lennie.
<28> Not—God forbid—a fellow cancer patient.
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<29> Bring Back My Body to Me is a love story about the courtship and marriage of Francie Malarkey—a kind and quiet young woman who works for a branding company named Image Is Everything—and Joel Goldman, the futures analyst she meets the first day of her radiation treatment. Francie thinks she has it bad—undergoing a mastectomy at the age when most young women are planning their wedding—until she accidentally wanders out of the "women's waiting room" and encounters Joel, whose surprise diagnosis of cancer of the thymus has led him through a year of grueling chemo and radiation. Joel is thin as a hockey stick, with hair that promises to grow back Andy Warhol-white instead of blond. His prognosis is much bleaker than hers. But to Francie's surprise, she is instantly drawn to Joel.
<30> I now had a triangle on my hands: Francie, Joel, and Great-Uncle Sol. But I had no idea what to do with them. I wrote and re-wrote the opening scene, in which Francie and Joel squat in the waiting room, waiting to be called back for therapy. I described the supposedly soothing mauve furniture, the bad artwork, the incessant blast of CNN on the wall-mounted TVs. I had my hero and heroine banter about the foolish medical-history forms they had to fill out that inquired do you wheeze? drink more than three units of alcohol a week? wear a seatbelt?
<31> But all the while I kept thinking, okay, what's the conflict? What happens when you're twenty-seven-years old, have been subjected to a unilateral mastectomy, and yet are under tremendous pressure from your only remaining relative to find a guy who can take care of you for the rest of your life?
<32> After countless false starts, I realized I needed to begin not with my heroine and her love interest, but my heroine and her antagonist. And so I backed up from the waiting room and opened up the novel with these words:
My story has a sunny ending. Yet it begins on a dim, drizzly April morning when my dearly-beloved Great-Uncle Sol called at seven a.m. and insisted I meet him for “a nice distracting bowl of raisin bran” before I drove myself into downtown New Haven for my first radiation treatment. I had no idea why my great-uncle thought that eating a bowlful of stale bran flakes at Warden House—the assisted-living facility where he had been a reluctant resident for the past five years—would take my mind off my own health problems. But stepping through the automatic doors of the Warden House entrance certainly gave me cause to wonder why I (and every other cancer patient I knew) so desperately wanted to live a long life.
<33> And here fact and fiction truly mingled in a way that made my story ring so much more "true" to me. I might not actually have had cancer. I might never have entered a lead-lined room to receive radiation. But over the years I had reluctantly gone into nursing homes to visit first my grandmother, then my father, and ultimately, my mother. I knew those places like the back of my hand. And so the following practically rolled off my pen:
The north wing of Warden was dubbed “God’s Waiting Room” because it was populated by the bed-ridden, the comatose, and the senile who asked their own children, “Have I met you before?” My eighty-seven-year-old great-uncle lived in a cramped kitchenette on the south wing. Uncle Sol was one of only four men among a hundred mostly Irish and Italian women still sharp enough to play bingo and bridge, and spry enough to take the house van on its daily rounds of the Catholic church, the Stop & Shop, and the Sears Roebuck.Uncle Sol claimed he got a lot of unwanted attention from these Christian widows whom he referred to as “the Marys and the Marias.” Although I too considered the M&Ms a most fearsome bunch (who farted when they coughed and coughed when they farted), I could safely vouch that they were far more interested in canasta and pokeno than my five-foot-two kvetching uncle (who had to buy his ill-fitting clothes in the boys’ department and who often gave off the unsavory odor of one who did not thoroughly wipe his ass).
<34> From there I went on to describe Uncle Sol's cataracts. His trembling, age-spotted hands. His pilly gray wool cardigan. The fistful of sweaty, wax-paper-wrapped Tootsie Rolls he swiped from the Easter Bunny on his last visit to the Sears Roebuck. His attempts to break the stale candy with his wobbly, yellowed teeth. His attempts to find Francie a husband by hailing three separate posses of Marys and Marias in the hallway:
“This is my greatest-niece,” he kept announcing, as if to say, Got any grandsons—a neurologist, a gastroenterologist—she might date? “You remember my niece, Francie, who visits me every Saturday?”Most of the M&Ms peered blankly at me through their glasses, which seemed to confirm what Sol whispered as we walked away: “Those ladies can’t remember their own shit from one movement to the next.”
<35> I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed describing the old-age home and its residents. Such places are beyond depressing, with their bad smells, peevish residents, and falsely-cheerful holiday decorations. But I felt it important to place Francie here, at the start of her story, as if to have her pose the following question to the reader: Why do we all—in spite of illness, war, misfortune, and the looming specter of old age—want to live long lives?
<36> Bring Back My Body to Me is fiction, yes, but hopefully it gets at the truth of what matters as we each sit in our own waiting room: finding love, establishing a family, and trying to make as sunny as possible the inevitable end of our own story.
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