‘We can’t go in? Then what the hell did we come up here for?’
‘Moral support.’ Rose hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and about-faced toward the seating area.
‘I could have been moral support at home,’ Bean grumbled quietly, but she followed along, procuring coffee on the way. ‘How long does this take?’ she asked, settling into the seat beside Rose.
Rose glanced at her watch. ‘We’ll be out of here by noon, I’d say. They have to check her blood first, and then the pharmacy has to put together the treatment, and then the chemo itself takes a few hours.’ She produced a book from her bag and opened it pointedly.
‘What are they going to do?’
‘He reads to her, usually. You did bring a book, didn’t you?’
Bean reached into her purse and pulled out a thick paperback, the covers hanging by the barest edges. Rose nodded and turned to read her own book. Inside, our mother would sit in one of the forgivingly vinyl hospital recliners while a tube dripped benevolent poison into her veins, and our father perched his reading glasses on his nose and read to her.
How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages? Even at Coop, the tiny professor-run cooperative school we’d attended, a refuge of overly intellectual families, we were different. ‘What do you mean you don’t watch television?’ one girl had asked Bean. She was new, her parents visiting professors who passed in and out in one calendar year, their sojourn so brief Bean cannot even remember the girl’s name. She remembers only the strange furrow to her brow, signifying the complete and utter incomprehension at the idea of a life without.
Except to us, it wasn’t a life without. It was a life with. For Rose, a life where, after our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week’s reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air. One of her friends, a little girl with sunken blue eyes and parchment skin, laid her costume jewelry out in the same way, and even then, Rose had recognized the metaphor, standing in her friend’s white wicker bedroom, looking at the sparkle of paste, to her, dull by comparison. For Bean, a life where the glamour and individuality she sought was only the gentle flick of a page away. For Cordy, always slightly detached no matter how many people surrounded her, clucking for her attention, a life where she could retreat and be alone and yet transported.
In college, when it became clear people might think there were more interesting things to do than read, when it was apparent the only books appropriate for decorating one’s room were textbooks, weighty and costly, worth only their end-of-the-semester resale value, we were faced with a choice. Rose, who had never paid attention to the requirements of cool, carried on reading, her one concession choosing a single room after her first year, though this was probably more due to her penchant for cleanliness than for fear of being unmasked as a reader. Bean spent afternoons in the library, having discovered the classics room, filled with huge leather armchairs and ottomans, and walls lined with books into which she could escape. Cordy, as mindless of convention as Rose, but never bearing its stigma in the same way, read everywhere: walking to class, during class, on the quad while Frisbees spun above her head, in bed at night while her roommate and her friends played cards on the floor, and once by a basement window at a keg party, where just enough light from the streetlamps spilled in to allow her to turn the pages. The difference between Rose and Cordy in this respect was that Rose, upon interruption, would fix the interrupter with a baleful glare, keep the book open, and reply curtly until a break in conversation allowed her reentry into the world in which she had been basking. Cordy would close the book, or slapjack it down on its open pages, and join the fun.
In New York, Bean chose the subway because of the reading time it afforded, free of questions but not of distractions – the frotteurs, the over-the-shoulder-readers, the panhandlers, the nosy parkers with opinions going spare – though Bean rapidly learned to dispatch each one of these with ease while keeping one eye moving down the page. She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. ‘A few hundred,’ she said.
‘How do you have time?’ he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading!
‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging.
This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.
It hadn’t really sunk in to Bean what our mother’s illness meant until the third day after the chemotherapy treatment. Everything hurt our mother. She was cold, but the blankets felt heavy and hard against her skin. The barest sliver of light coming through the curtains made her turn her head away, slicing through the delicate skin of her eyelids with scalpel-like precision. She was bored, but our reading to her made her head ache until she begged us to stop. Lonely, she would call to us to be with her, and then beg us to leave, as if our presence made it harder to breathe. She vomited and then asked for food, and then vomited again. Bean hovered uncertainly in the hallway outside our parents’ room, stepping in and then out again with each changing request.
‘Is it always like this?’ she asked Rose, who was standing at the sink doing dishes, handing them to Bean, who dried them ineffectively with a wet cloth and then put them vaguely where they belonged.
Rose shook her head, put her lips in a thin line. A soap bubble floated up from the sink and she jabbed it with a finger, watching it pop in the sunlight. ‘This is bad. I read that it gets worse throughout the treatment, but I didn’t expect this.’
‘I hate not being able to do anything for her. How long will it last?’
‘Usually it’s only a couple of days – maybe longer this time, since it’s so bad. I’ll have to call the doctor and ask. And then she’ll be tired for a few days longer than that. She’s got an appointment to get the size of the tumor rechecked, and then they’ll schedule the surgery.’
We washed and dried in uneasy silence for a few minutes. Outside, the sounds of summer continued – the buzz of bees, shouts of children free from school, a sprinkler whisking in circles. It seemed wrong and harsh for there to be such happiness in the world at that moment.
‘Is she going to die?’ Bean asked uncertainly. Her voice shook a little, and she stared hard at the plate in her hand, watching the streaks of damp disappear into the air.
Rose snapped off the faucet. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even say it. She’s going to be fine.’
‘But . . .’
‘Don’t.’ Rose held up her hand, her fingers wrinkled and white from the water. She wouldn’t meet Bean’s eyes. ‘We can’t even think about it. It’s bad luck.’
Bean said nothing. She finished drying and put the last dishes away and then disappeared into the living room.
Rose went upstairs and peeked in the door to our parents’ room, looking at the dim shape of our mother lying on the bed. She was sleeping; Rose could hear the steady whisper of breath. When we were little and had nightmares, we would slip into our parents’ room and beg to sleep in their bed. Our mother rarely agreed to this, usually walking us back to our own beds and giving us a kiss as protection against the darkness. Now she only shifted slightly, her mouth falling open as she slept.