The dog seemed old from the time we got him, as if he was acting the part of an elderly man. At the shelter, they said probably two. The vet said likely four. This makes him, now, either sixteen or eighteen. He’s nearly blind and mostly deaf. Also, he’s got arthritis in his back legs, as well as a cough that’s due partially to an enlarged heart and partially to a collapsing trachea—a grotesque sound, somewhere between a honking goose and wet choking. He’s had epilepsy since we adopted him, which is controlled by a bucketful of daily medications. There’s a growth on his right hip, which he worries with his tongue and teeth. It looks like a wad of bubble gum that someone chewed and stuck on him: gruesome but benign. I tape a large bandage over it that ends up being even more of an invitation for him to rip it off, eat it, then lick the growth until it bleeds.
Ha ha, I imagine the dog saying in the voice that Jack and I pretend for him. Not dead yet.
It’s wet outside this morning when he needs to be let out. From the back deck to the ground are three stairs. Stepping onto the first, he slips, rolls over, tumbles down the other two and rights himself before I can move. Afterward, he seems unhurt though disoriented. I guide him toward the section that we leave to him, underneath the plum tree, then back to the house when he’s done. Not wanting a repeat of his fall, I carry him up the stairs, despite what it will cost me.
Every day, we say that it’s a wonder he’s alive.
* * *
I wore, during my teenage years, a white, plastic back brace—like a corset—for scoliosis. My crooked spine was discovered at age ten. In recent years, the curvature has suddenly doubled. One side of my back has become tightly compressed. My pelvis now rotates to the right as if lagging behind the rest of my body. From the outside, hardly noticeable, but at my annual wellness exam the nurse measured me two inches shorter from one year to the next. This was one of the first signs that it was getting worse. Also: the pain.
The way I can understand how much pain I’m in now is to remember that I once was not at all. I did things that caused temporary aches, but they had nothing on this current, unrelenting level of torment. (Is torment too strong of a word? Would agony be better?) If it does recede, it’s only to the edges, where it returns with any misstep. Doctors ask me when it’s most intense. Walking, I tell them. Sitting. Standing. Sleeping. I hear how it sounds.
* * *
When Jack and I first moved into this house, a huge avocado tree towered above the balcony off our bedroom. I’d lean over the railing to pluck the fruit. Green and watery. Fresh. Ours. But only a few years later, the tree became barren. We called arborists who recommended this or that (none of which had any effect), until, finally, one told us that the tree was, in fact, dying. The roots of an avocado tree want to stretch out quite far in all directions, and when they’re thwarted—in this case, by the house, the cement path—the tree eventually gives up.
We mourned the loss. Its fruit. Its shade. But out it went because a dead tree is no use to anyone.
* * *
I’ve been going through boxes of old correspondence and diaries. Hundreds, maybe thousands of programs from plays I’ve attended since I was a child. Dozens of shows I’ve performed in or directed. It’s difficult for me to let go of anything. I worry that I won’t remember who I was.
In my early twenties, I was cast in a production that ran first in San Francisco, then in Paris. The auteur was an art historian rather than either playwright or director, but I was young and eager, and he was paying my way to France. The piece was autobiographical: years earlier, the auteur and his wife had been in a terrible car accident. Only he had survived. This, at first, made him worthy of sympathy. Before rehearsals began, he went to Mexico for a long weekend and contracted hepatitis, both A and B. He began rehearsals wearing a mask, his skin beneath it yellow.
In the cast of four, there was a woman, a pianist, who was attached to her instrument by way of a giant skirt that we laced her into each night. She played Chopin, Rachmaninoff, etc., while a man recited the only spoken words of the evening. My friend Tracy and I played characters called “The Widows,” performing acts such as dancing a tango together or playing catch with a large ball that had been hung from the lighting grid. When we had to move from one place to another, we rolled on the floor. We were not to walk, only to roll. Or dance. Mutely.
An acrobat was brought in to instruct me in aerial work. In one segment, I climbed a rope and swung my body upside down, entwining my right leg so the rest of my limbs could be free, my hands above my head—meaning, pointed towards the ground—then I circled, slowly, slowly, all the way down. For the run in California, our stage had some spring to it, but in Paris, it was a hard floor, maybe even cement. I didn’t think about asking for any kind of protection or cushioning, so confident was I in my body to perform this trick, which was, once I learned it, relatively easy.
For each performance, the auteur sat at the lightboard, which he’d placed in the audience. He sometimes referred to himself as the improvositeur des lumières. At any moment onstage, I would find myself in complete darkness, or suddenly in light where I’d previously been hidden. At one point in the spectacle, I stood downstage left and slowly, slowly, moved from standing to sitting and then lying down without—ostensibly—the audience seeing me in motion. The whole of it took around five minutes. I had excellent thighs.
One night, the auteur brought the lights down in accord with my movement, leaving only a tight spotlight around the face of the pianist, stage right, so that by the time I was on the ground, the area around me was completely dark. My blocking was to roll offstage, which sounds easier than it is. The body is encumbered by arms, which, even when accounted for, make the journey of a bodily roll bumpy enough to throw one off course, particularly if one can’t see where she’s going. I rolled in the darkness, hoping I was navigating correctly, that my muscle memory would retain the route. After several rotations, my head thwacked into the back leg of the piano. Echoing. Resounding. I reoriented myself with this new information and rolled offstage.
During the process, the auteur had countless tantrums. “I’m not your father, little girls,” he yelled at us once, to which Tracy and I responded (later, in private), “Thank god.” He’d pound his fists like a little boy, striking the light board. “Je suis malade!” he’d cry. “Je suis malade!” In the end, we hated him. His jaundiced grief. He was not, by then, sympathetic. But I remember each night twirling, twirling, secretly amazed that my body had been taught to defy gravity.
* * *
A spring day in Los Angeles. We’d returned from a trip with our children the day before, a tour of Civil War sites—Gettysburg, Antietam, and others, less famous. I’d barely passed my history classes in high school, where facts and dates were expected to take precedence over narrative. History was memorization: here is the name of the man who lived from this date to that one. He invented, or triggered, or decided. Etc. Etc. Tidy and dry in textbooks. But walking the grounds in Pennsylvania with my sons, aged thirteen and fifteen—on the verge of being the same ages as the men and boys whose blood turned those fields red—it became real to me for the first time. The loss of limbs. The loss of life.
Two years earlier, I’d survived cancer, though survive always struck me as the wrong word. I knew people who’d survived. The chemo. The radiation. That was survival. I also knew people who hadn’t survived. I knew people who, in years to come, wouldn’t survive. But I’d gone to sleep one afternoon, with the assistance of strong anesthesia, and woken up cancer-free. Technically survival, though my role had been entirely passive.
This lovely spring day in Los Angeles, nearly two years after my surgery, I don’t recall what we were talking about—me, Jack, the boys—only that we were close and happy. And then, for some reason that I still can’t articulate, I pressed a finger into the shin of my right leg, and what appeared was an indentation. Had my skin always reacted this way and I’d only just recognized it?
I pressed my thumb into my left leg to test it: nothing.
Again, on my right: there it was.
It seemed inconsequential, if odd. I Googled the symptom. Then the associated condition. Lymphedema. The images that came up were horrific. Elephantine limbs, angry flesh, skin folds, cellulite, disfigurement. A horror movie. My only thought: Get it off me!
Then disbelief.
Then anger.
Then sobbing, sobbing, at the kitchen counter.
* * *
The dog’s coughing gets worse, yet every morning he’s up, his tail wagging. He eats his meal, chews his bone. How much time is left? In my mind, I say goodbye to him several times a day. But he’s still here. Still waking. Still toddling into the kitchen for breakfast.
The vet checks his ears. Despite the arthritis in his hind legs, the growth scabbing on his hip, the cough (both cardiac and tracheal), the occasional disorientation, his inability to hear, to see, the ongoing management of his seizures, she tells me he “looks great.”
* * *
Eight years ago, at a routine appointment, my doctor asked if I’d known my uterus was enlarged. “Probably fibroids,” he’d said. At my age, the advice was to let them shrink on their own. I was headed toward menopause within the next few years; the body would take care of things naturally. “Though, be sure to tell me if you’re in pain,” Dr. S had said.
On my way home, I was reminded of the sharp jolt in my hip, a creak of my body that I’d been living with, hoping it would go away on its own. I wrote Dr. S an email the next morning: Could this be related?
It wasn’t an emergency, he told me, but he scheduled an ultrasound. The tech spread jelly over my abdomen, moved her wand along my skin, inside my enlarged uterus, not speaking, just the shhh, shhh of the machine, retracing her motions over and over until I finally asked—as if a kind of joke—“How many fibroids are there?” After a long moment she said, “You don’t have any fibroids.” Not an ounce of humor in her delivery.
It’s not lost on me, now, the waving of the wand, as if she cast a spell that turned me into stone. Or a toad. Or banished me deep under water until something magical could release me into myself again. (Meaning: forever?)
A month later, in the recovery room, despite assurances that the surgery was only exploratory, that my numbers weren’t high enough to think it was cancer, the nurse at the head of my bed shouted to someone across the room: “I’ve got a radical hysterectomy waking up!” (For a while after that, many things were said with exclamation points.) Then she turned toward me. “You’ve got the most beautiful eyelashes.”
The next morning Dr. S visited me with a photo of a white blob, “the size of a tennis ball.” I tried to imagine the space it had taken up in my body. How could I not have known? He told me there had been another tumor, smaller, inside this big one. Like a secret. That had been the real danger. That little one. Like some kind of stealth cancer. He recounted how he removed the tumors, the ovaries, my uterus and cervix, fallopian tubes, and—to be cautious—“several lymph nodes.” He showed me forty-two staples running up my abdomen, lifting my gown to inspect his work. After he left, a nurse held my hand. “You’re going to beat this,” she said with tears in her eyes. I was still trying to work out how I’d carried a tennis ball inside my body without knowing.
Radical hysterectomy is a medical term. It’s differentiated from a simple hysterectomy or a subtotal hysterectomy or a supracervical hysterectomy by the removal of—in addition to the uterus and ovaries—the upper portion of the vagina, fallopian tubes, and “surrounding supportive structures.” It also implies the dissection of lymph nodes. It can take up to two months to recover when the surgery is performed abdominally, and the woman should not lift anything heavy, like grocery bags, for example. Or dogs.
There are no instructions for dealing with the psychological loss of this anatomy. Many people told me I was lucky I’d already had children. That I no longer had any need for my reproductive organs.
Whenever I say it aloud, I can’t help thinking, Wow. Dude. Like, radical. A silent joke to myself.
* * *
We have hundreds of lymph nodes throughout the body. The lymphatics work in tandem with the cardiovascular system, though on somewhat of a different track. (Word is, in medical school, a total of forty minutes is dedicated to the study of the lymphatic system.)
Lymph nodes are the great unsung heroes of the body. They do the work of cleaning out impurities, toxins, sending it all toward the kidneys to perform the final flush. When we’re ill, the lymph nodes go into high gear. This is why, sometimes, they’ll be enlarged when you have a cold, for example. Or cancer. When cancer gets into the nodes, they become overly effective at spreading it to other parts of the body. During a surgery to remove tumors, the nearest node or cluster of nodes is often removed as well, then tested to see if disease is present. When Jack had prostate cancer, his surgeon took out half of one lymph node; when I had surgery for ovarian cancer, they removed thirty.
It’s protocol to dissect lymph nodes, and now that more people are surviving cancer, there’s more evidence of lymphedema. It’s become, to some extent, an expected outcome. The problem lies in the proximity between nodes. This can make the difference between a working lymphatic system and an ineffective one. The most helpful explanation I’ve heard is a comparison to a series of stations for an electric train. Each one has only enough power to get the train to the next station in line. Remove some of those stations and suddenly there’s not enough juice. The train can go downhill (because: gravity) but it can’t get back up. It stops moving, and everything it was carrying (the detritus of your body) gets stuck.
This is what happens in my leg now. All the trains are backed up, swollen with angry passengers. None of them with a sense of humor.
* * *
Years after the avocado tree came down, we planted two plum trees. The Santa Rosa can, in the right conditions, self-pollinate, but its chances for bearing fruit are higher with some help from the Satsuma. Both trees bloom each spring with fragrant white flowers, but only the Satsuma has given us plums, juicy and sweet, which we try to harvest before the squirrels get to them. The bees and butterflies do their work, and Jack, too, spends hours with Q-tips, transferring pollen to the Santa Rosa, but no luck. She won’t perform on command.
And isn’t she enough as she is? Home to finches and bulbuls. An arbor for the dog on a hot day. What more should we expect of her?
* * *
An ongoing joke between us: Jack and I speak as if we’re the dog, giving voice to what we imagine he might say. It’s an intentionally stupid sounding voice, but not without a cynical awareness. Ha ha, one of us will say, giving ourselves a slightly stuffed-up quality, like a kid with allergies (which I was). Ha ha. Still alive.
* * *
For a long time, early in my adult life, I was not kind to my body. I ingested. I inhaled. I mistook sex for love, repeating the error to a dizzying degree. It wasn’t unique, my behavior, in the crowd I ran with, though I knew plenty of other people who didn’t risk their anatomies, who seemed to have some sense of their right to exist without the aid of a drug or a drink or a body. I did not. I was a splattering of uncontained emotions and desires. The driving force was (I can now name) a need to feel worthy (of what? by whom?)—an amorphous concept, more felt than known. For far too long, I held tight to the idea that to be desired was something other than hormones and availability.
Later, I tried to make up for it, this punishment I’d inflicted on my body (my soul?). I climbed mountains, took up running, tennis, swimming. I eschewed all drugs except for Advil. And when, amidst my transformation, a man showed up whose hunger was tempered with stability, I paid attention. I returned his attention.
What I can’t help but wonder now, though, is whether there’s a connection. Did I cause my current bodily woes, or would they have occurred in any case? An inevitability of my genetic map.
* * *
My father loves to tell the story of my pneumonia when I was two years old, how I had to be placed in an oxygen tent. I don’t remember, but he recounts that I said the mist reminded me of his cigarette smoke (Dorals, two packs a day). I was scared to go inside, but he comforted me until I allowed someone to lift me in.
My older son developed pneumonia at age seven. I remember the horror of his screams as nurses tried to place the IV in his tiny veins, the agony (this is the appropriate word) of the decision—after three weeks of worsening symptoms—to have surgery to drain his lung, the near-fainting (both Jack and me) in the hallway after they wheeled him to the OR.
I’d brought his pillow from home in its Superman pillowcase. His small head, hair so blond it looked white, rested against the blues and reds of Superman’s cape, which unfurled beneath my son’s pale face. I remember this, too: the shadow that he was upon release, having lost a tenth of his body weight.
There’s no hidden message in anything, no fairy tale ending. There is just disease. And when we’re lucky, a cure.
* * *
Jack and I found each other across the country. I moved to New York for him, then he moved to Los Angeles for me. Every time the odds seem against us, we outlast them, mostly because Jack is so steady. I flail against every dimming possibility, worrying, questioning, looking backward, as if the past will reveal anything about the future.
The other night, he made a soup from roasted broccoli. He served it with a squiggle of olive oil, a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese, a touch of salt and pepper ground over the top. What does it mean to be lucky in love? If you’d asked me before I met Jack, I’d have given you the wrong answer.
* * *
In the dark, the dog wanders all over the yard in confusion. Even when I guide him back to the stairs that lead to the deck, he backs away, disoriented. And yet, once I’ve finally coaxed him inside, he goes straight to the dishwasher to lick the dirty silverware. “That’s a dog who’s very much alive,” my friend says.
The coughing is painful. At least, it sounds painful, as if the dog is wheezing out his internal organs. We dutifully give him his medications, the hydrocodone, sildenafil—generic for Viagra. Originally prescribed for the heart, it was discovered to have properties that were otherwise beneficial to men with sexual dysfunction. The dog doesn’t seem to be aroused in this way, but I sometimes wonder if that’s what’s keeping him alive. Not just encouraging the beating of his heart, but a zest, a rush. The thrill of possibility?
* * *
I miss shoes. Open toes, mules, ankle straps, heels. Boots stretching to my knees. Shoes that highlighted my pedicure. This is vain and ridiculous, though while I’m at it, I also miss jeans that were meant to be tight yet hung loosely. Skirts that showed off my calves. I thought I could count on my legs, long and shapely as they once were, to carry me through to old age.
Being in public is to be reminded of ankles. I hadn’t appreciated how delicate they were until I lost mine. (Just the one.) Swollen in perpetuity. From behind, I look like a model for one of Picasso’s bathers. Not the beauties from 1918 with their long torsos and luscious hair, but a decade later, his series of bodies with triangular arms and legs nearly unrecognizable as limbs. No hint of the curves and concavities that delineate the leg’s connection to the foot.
I stare at all the ankles. Women in their leggings, or loafers and capris. Ankles are everywhere. Even baggy pants have hems that leave just enough room for a hint of skin. A whisper of bone. I understand why the Victorians swooned. It’s a sublime piece of the body. Complex. Elegant. Tapering.
* * *
Have I mentioned the hip dysplasia? On the left. Congenital, apparently. The pain set in ten years ago. (If I were a fictional character, it would be too much. And yet, to omit it here would be the lie.) Without the pain from that deformity—undiagnosed until only recently—Dr. S wouldn’t have ordered the ultrasound, the tech wouldn’t have waved her wand, and deep within my body, unnoticed, the stealth cancer would have grown and grown. So, I’m grateful for the knobby ball of my hip, the not-fully-formed socket.
A trifecta of maladies. Each of their own origin but exacerbating the others. The left hip tries to compensate for the heavy right leg. The weight of the leg compresses the curve on the right side of my spine. My hip and spine compete for the pelvis, twisting it under and back, pulling, causing the many muscles connected to it to tighten into spasms. My walk is Frankensteinish. I try to remember to shift my weight forward, lift the right leg instead of dragging it, release the tailbone so that my hips can swing (if not exactly side to side, then as close as I can get), engage my core muscles, breathe.
Breathe.
A body rolling in the dark.
* * *
A chronic condition comes to define you. Even if you resist it, that only makes it more so. A daily reminder of loss. You become acutely aware of what you can’t do. Sometimes you do it anyway and cause further pain, further injury. You wear the wrong shoes. You walk for too long (or at all). You stand at a party, sit in the theater, sleep on the wrong side. Maybe you have a good day, you feel almost normal, so you do more than you should and pain engulfs you. Do everything right and it will engulf you all the same. It shapes you despite your best efforts: your gait, your posture, the way you dress. You change what you do, who you see, how you live. You leave the house less often. You’re no longer comfortable in your skin, your skeleton. (Maybe you never really were?) Sanity occasionally becomes questionable. You inhabit a body that is yours and not yours, and so, who are you? Or rather, where have you gone?
When you’re inside pain, that’s all there is. The aperture shrinks. There’s no other possibility, no hope, save for (in my case) an atheist’s prayer that it dissipates. Your entire being, your place in the world, is only to be in pain.
From the outside, it’s both boring and invisible.
Technically, I can do almost anything. I can sit. I can stand. I can walk. It’s the pain that limits it. And the inevitable swelling. I sometimes wonder whether it’s too much to bear for anyone in my situation or if I buckle easily. I look to others with disabilities for guidance, but most of us are in hiding.
* * *
There are a few people who see me, who recognize the me that’s surrounded by my condition. Jen, with her soft strokes of lymphatic massage; Diane, who patiently adjusts my imbalanced walk; Chi, guiding me through bridges and planks, “Up. Lifting,” Chi says. “Up. Lifting.” These women who comfort, restore, retrain my body with gentle-firm hands. Gentle-firm words. Lean to your left. Elevate. Elongate. They hover above me, around me. The way some people see angels.
* * *
Several years ago, Jack and I planted a sapling between the two palms on our parking strip and staked it well, or so we thought. A Sumac, it grew crooked. Despite the bracing post, her trunk bent one way, then another. After a time, she found a kind of equilibrium. Her trunk curved, but she reached toward the sun. Her leaves now provide shelter for robins, sparrows, mourning doves. Squirrels jump from limb to limb.
The palms on either side tower above her, a haven for rats, and too tall to give any kind of shade. I wonder how our tree would regard them. With envy? With sorrow? Her arms reach out to touch them, as if in reassurance. They stand straight, but she’s the one to offer her canopy, leafing up and out.
Encouragement comes wherever it’s found.
* * *
I take the dog out for his evening walk. He goes up the length of two houses and back down again, just enough to smell the outside world, to feel like he’s a part of things. Dusk is settling. A clear night. Through the window, as we near the house, I can see lights on in the kitchen. Jack is chopping vegetables for salad, putting a flame under a pot of water, stirring onions, caramelizing them—one of his specialties. The crisp air is tinged with a savory, smoky scent.
Release your tailbone, I think, adding an inch of height when I do. Shift forward.
Mercury is visible to my right, Jupiter on my left. Breathe, I remind myself. The dog pays no attention to me. He stops to sniff as something catches his interest, then trots ahead when he remembers that it’s dinner time. There must be enough light—just enough—for him to be able to make out the familiar shape of our house, the steps, where he waits impatiently for me to open the door, to catch up to him. Come on, Lady, he says in my made-up voice. Life is short.
Emilie Pascale Beck won the Levis Prize for Fiction in 2022 for her novel, The Torch Bearer. Her writing has been published in Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing, Howlround, and LA Stage. In addition to writing prose, she’s a theatre director, dramaturg, and playwright. Her play, Sovereign Body, was a finalist for the 2011 Smith Prize. For many years she served as the Literary Manager/Director of New Play Development at Boston Court Theatre, where she directed and dramaturged award-winning world premieres. She received her MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson.