To her eleven-year-old daughter: “If a guy ever grabs the back of your head and tries to pull/put your face in his crotch, that is a deal breaker. (Unless he has just gone down on you . . . and even then I think it is probably time to leave.).”
I say a silent hallelujah. I have always wanted a girl, and I’ve always been jealous of moms with daughters. But the idea of parenting a teenage daughter from the grave sounds worse than terminal cancer.
Ginny texts me another one: “Kids: if you ever get freaked when you are making out with someone and you suddenly think oh shit my mom can see this, please know that if heaven exists, and if I am there, and if I can watch what you are doing, I will politely draw the curtains and give you your privacy. At least, I think that’s what I’ll try to do. No, maybe I will watch to make sure you don’t do something disgusting.”
I love that one; oddly, it’s something I’ve thought about in terms of my own mom since she died, as though dying makes us more powerful parents than the living version of ourselves. Does she somehow magically now know how seldom I clean the downstairs shower? How bad I am at balancing my checkbook? That I’ve worn this pair of jeans three days in a row?
When our kids were littler, John and I convinced them that the word supervision meant a superhero-like all-seeing power possessed by some people—particularly grown-ups: Adult Supervision, Parental Supervision. And that we had it. For example, a sign on a hot tub that read Parental Supervision Required indicated that your parent must possess Supervision in order for you to go in that hot tub, so that they would know how you were behaving, whether they were watching you or not.
A run of good luck and intuitive guesses on our part have kept the ruse half-alive, but maybe when I die it will be strengthened just in time for tweenhood. I don’t want to make them paranoid, but I don’t mind fibbing to keep them honest. It’s not anywhere as diabolical as the stunt that Ginny’s friend Lee and her husband pulled with their kids by telling them that when the ice cream truck’s music is playing that means the truck is out of ice cream.
“What if we keep our email accounts open and give your sister and John our passwords?” I reply. “That way they can get a direct ‘mother is watching’ email whenever necessary.”
“Perfect,” says Ginny. “We can have them all ready to go and my sister and John can just press send: ‘Freddy, it has come to my attention that you have been looking at porn on the laptop. Not cool. Not cool at all. Disrespectful to women, and it can cause blindness. Please use your time more wisely. Love you, Mom.’?”
Finally Ginny gets the go-ahead for the clinical trial. As long as she doesn’t get too sick in the meantime and as long as she’s not in the placebo group, she now has a one in five chance of the immunotherapy working its magic.
Twenty percent. Ginny’s oncologist tells her that when it works it’s a miracle, but when it doesn’t it’s a total dud.
“At least there’s no stress at all there,” Ginny says. “No giant pressure to wake up under each day.”
*
The day before one of Ginny’s lung biopsies for the clinical trial, we meet up at a fancy hotel in town for the night. Ginny brings her best friend Lee with her, and I bring Tita, and we all four sit on the patio in the fall evening, drinking cocktails at the hotel’s restaurant—just like ladies out on the town. The waiter comes over and lights the gas fire pit.
“Good to see you girls out early having fun,” he says. “Nice night for it.”
We are, in fact, out early—since Ginny can’t have anything to eat or drink after midnight. At one point in the evening, she leans toward me from her luxurious oversize patio lounger, and I lean toward her from mine and she says: “Is it fucked up that I keep buying clothes for the kids for when they’re much older? Yesterday I went to the Gap outlet near the cancer center and spent a fortune on twelves and fourteens in boys’ pants. And I’ve been browsing prom dresses.”
“Totally fucked up,” I say.
Meaning: My friend, that’s one of the sanest things I’ve ever heard. Meaning: I never stop being amazed by how simultaneously cruel and beautiful this world can be.
19. Lyla
One afternoon on the way home from Duke, I catch a glimpse of someone who can only be Lyla in the parking lot of the Embers. The two scooters are in place and the door to the room is open and she’s wearing too-tight jeans and holding a cigarette, talking to someone in a beat-up sports car. She’s much fleshier than I imagined, bright peach skin and blond hair stringing down her back.
“It’s Lyla!” I’m yelling, and John’s yelling, “Jesus, stop yelling! You’re going to make me crash!” and I’m yelling, “Lyla! Put down that cigarette!” and then John is saying, “Of course Lyla smokes, what are you even talking about?” and I’m saying, “I really don’t like the looks of the guy in that car she was talking to.”
“Well we should probably stop and go back and you should tell her that right now, along with your smoking PSA,” says John. He usually rubs the back of my neck on the drive home from Duke, but now he’s stopped because I startled him. I’m wishing he would start again.
*
Lyla can’t stop making bad decisions. She spends a quarter of her paycheck on a pair of knee-high boots at the outlet mall. She oversleeps and misses her screening appointment for the Certified Nurse Aide program she’s trying to get into. She’s nicest to all the wrong customers at the Waffle House: the guy who is trying to make his way toward the casinos in Cherokee, the guy who suggests how she might look if she was only wearing her boots, the guy who has nowhere to stay and lost all custody of his daughter because some three-year-old kid at his mama’s daycare in the apartments where they’ve been living spilled juice on his Xbox controller and he told the little fucker to suck his dick and now there are child sexual assault charges pending.
She does make one or two good decisions: Sometimes at night when the a/c unit conks out and the guy with the custody situation is snoring and farting and the room gets so hot her thighs stick together, she climbs onto the scooter and rides south on Route 54, out into the county, where she takes off her helmet and wastes a couple bucks of gas at top speed—which isn’t very fast but enough to unstick her hair from her neck, to feel a breeze where there is none.