I took it home for $7.99, scrubbed it with coarse salt and oil, then set to season it with the help of Google because I had no idea what to do with cast iron. That night, I made a frittata that was mostly edible. The skillet’s name became Agnes, named for romance novelist Jennifer Crusie’s heroine in Agnes and the Hitman, a cook who tends to defend herself with her nonstick skillet as hijinks ensue.
Halloween came a week after my mother was diagnosed, two days before she was scheduled for surgery because nobody wanted to wait, before the Halloween pumpkin language turned into Thanksgiving pies that would herald the beginning of chemotherapy, before I lost myself in the food metaphors of cancer, before I started hunting all that bright, expensive cookware in my local thrift stores, before the quest for cast iron became an obsession to keep me grounded, before my orange Le Creuset skillet became an explosion of color and delight that gave me a dedicated purpose, before I began cooking for my mother against the feeling that food had become something to be feared.
Agnes is the color of orange not found in nature, not citrus or pumpkin or persimmon. She is cheap boxed macaroni and cheese. She is the color of warning, of flame and blaze orange, that keeps our hunter friends safe in the woods on these chilly days. She is the artificial-looking color of the gerbera daisies delivered to my mother’s hospital room the day a three-pound, sixteen-centimeter embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma tumor is excavated with my mother’s uterus. It is a cancer so rare in adults that I contact a high school friend who is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic for advice and he connects us with a sarcoma specialist there. My mother could have chosen to do her treatment at Mayo, but she decided on the University of Minnesota, since it is so much closer to home, and we begin a collaboration with their sarcoma specialist. We learn that if my mother were my niece’s age, the doctors would know what to do, but she is sixty-five, and they must extrapolate a treatment plan from what they would give a child. A three-week cycle of chemotherapy, they decide—three drugs given on Day 1, one on Day 8, one on Day 15. Even then, they are still guessing that this is the right path. We learn that she is given a lower dose of this cocktail, because children can tolerate stronger chemotherapy, which seems counterintuitive.
What they do say is this: my mother is cancer free after this surgery, but they are prescribing aggressive chemotherapy because if she does not do chemo, there is a 70 percent chance the cancer will come back, and if it does, she has a 40 percent chance of survival. With chemo, she has a 90 percent chance of survival if it returns. She chooses chemo. Nobody argues.
4
WHEN OCTOBER DAYS GROW short and opaque and the dense of sky presses down like the palm of a hand, I crave cabbage, the resistance of green steamed just enough to bite, Brussels sprouts cut in half and sautéed in butter and olive oil. In the celadon spring, I always want colcannon. In these early days of cancer, my family—my parents, two sisters, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew—institute a weekly family dinner to alleviate the fear in our bellies over what is happening to our mother. We are a family that crowds three adult daughters into the consultation room with our parents and our mother’s doctors, prompting one doctor to look from me to my youngest sister and back again and ask if we are twins, and we laugh and say there are four years between us. Our family is very close, both geographically and emotionally, and this colors our reactions to the world around us. Because we live within a ten-mile radius, it is common for us to toss out impromptu invitations, so when we think about making each moment count, we realize that we have not changed much about the way we are with each other. Cancer simply requires that we articulate ourselves differently, reorienting our language as we become intimately aware of the words we use. We come to understand the idea of “cancer-adjusted normal,” that what might have constituted a bad day a year ago is actually a truly good day today. We don’t ask how are you doing? anymore—we ask how is today?
On one of these nights full of family and color and sound, I pull out Estelle, my vintage Le Creuset cast-iron Dutch oven, rescued from a thrift store about the time my mother was diagnosed, and I realize that Estelle is Week 14 Lemon Yellow and I’m seeing pregnancy and cancer and food everywhere. Tonight, I want the bright of braised red cabbage against that pale-yellow enamel, the bite of vinegar and sharp apples, because today is a day that stings the inside of my skin like balsamic breathed too deeply. I sauté the sharpness of two thinly sliced onions down to sweetness, then add fennel seeds until they warm the room. Three Granny Smith apples, cut into chunks, are stirred gently into the onion, and then I turn to the red cabbage, which will be chopped and added to the pot with enough balsamic vinegar to braise over the course of an hour. I refuse to think of pathology as I slice harder than necessary through dark purple and white, the hidden patterns and swirls in the packed leaves too beautiful to be accidental.
5
MY MOTHER’S SURGEON SAYS that the margins and lymph nodes are clear, but skepticism lingers between my ribs, a slight and constant pressure. Later, the poet Heid E. Erdrich introduces me to the concept of fetal microchimerism, the phenomenon of fetal cells being found in the mother decades after birth—“blood river once between you / went two ways / what makes us / own sole and sovereign selves / is only partially us,” Erdrich writes in “Microchimerism”—and I wonder what alternate selves mothers carry in wombs that betrayed them, what muscle memories remain in the phantom space left behind when children have been delivered, when the wombs themselves are gone, or what we carry in wombs that, by choice or circumstance, never bear children. Scientific American tells me, “We all consider our bodies to be our own unique being, so the notion that we may harbor cells from other people in our bodies seems strange. Even stranger is the thought that, although we certainly consider our actions and decisions as originating in the activity of our own individual brains, cells from other individuals are living and functioning in that complex structure”—and I cup my palms together to imagine what my mother’s three-pound cabbage-sized tumor would feel like, but the heft of my imagining disintegrates into the feel of my mother’s hand in mine while the doctor attempts a second biopsy, necrotic tissue floating darkly in clear tubes, learning later that the cells simply fell apart when pathology tried to look at them. But I don’t understand, not really. Are we our own unique beings or not? Science would suggest we are not. We exist within systems, networks, the matrix of family and friends, patterns. We are not alone. We are all connected, even on a cellular level, across time, space, and logic. Perhaps it is individuality that is the myth.
6
AGNES IS THE COLOR of fear, of orange cones and emergency vests, a color to startle, to wonder at the point where cancer has become the rule, not the exception. Every new diagnosis surprises me a little less. It’s cancer. It’s always cancer. It is fall in Minnesota and our days are getting shorter. I feel time as physical oppression. I am so angry in these days, my world a flare of bright orange. Anger is a secondary emotion, they say, a reaction to fear or vulnerability or frustration or injustice, an active reaction, rather than passive, and I walk the halls of the house, my belly simmering with something less than rage. The heft of cast iron in my hands feels right in a way my mother’s light Club aluminum does not.
I am angry at the urgency they feel in giving my mother six months of destructive chemotherapy but not being worried when her blood counts are too low to receive treatment. For what feels like her oncologist forgetting she’s a human being with a brain, with feelings, and this is something I will not ever forgive him for. We brush aside his poor bedside manner, as that’s just the way he is, and my fingers tingle with resentment. For the subtext of You have cancer and you’re getting chemo—what do you expect? For the nursing staff telling her, again, in voices that sound incredibly patronizing to my ear, If your temperature gets to 100.4, you have two hours to get to the ER; make sure you wash your hands; make sure you avoid sick people—or on her last visit, where her platelets were too low and her white blood cells were so scarce they could be individually counted, the nurse told her to be extra careful with shaving—and made motions with her hands like she was shaving her legs—and I could feel my brain seize. Look around you, nobody here has hair, my mother also clearly has no hair, and you’re telling her to be careful shaving her legs?
My mother’s friend A., recently