“Hmm. That’s not really my emotional philosophy,” I say. “I like being cracked open.”
“It’s not a bad mantra for the medical journey, though,” says John. “Especially considering it came from a man in a fox suit.”
“Good point,” I say. All the warfare jargon around cancer—the battling, the surviving, the winning/losing, the kicking its ass—hasn’t been ringing true for me. But I’m good with not letting it crack me.
“I will be the densest little nut in the world,” I say to John. “Green and unyielding. A squirrel’s effing nightmare.”
“One small spot,” says John, squeezing my hand.
13. Dasein
John and I met in a graveyard. It was during college at a summer job in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where we were both teaching assistants at a camp for gifted kids. I taught a writing class and he taught a course on existentialism. Our classes would sometimes cross paths on field trips to the historic, treeless cemetery down the street from the campus where the camp was held. Overlapping interests, you could say.
“How’s your class going?” John asks as we both wander around the graveyard distributing handouts. He’s got these crazy blue eyes and a backward ball cap and a sexy smile, and he’s wearing a Bad Religion T-shirt and carrying a dog-eared copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness—in French. I mean: Forget it.
“Not bad,” I say. “I’ll be relieved when the session is over though. Sounding like I know what I’m talking about all day is kind of beyond me. These kids are really smart.”
“Yeah. Try adding Kant to that,” he says.
“I kant,” I manage.
I tell him I’m so tired I keep saying “kill-dren” by mistake when I mean to say children.
“You’ll make a fantastic mother someday,” he says.
Journal prompts for the graveyard: Steal a name and dates off a headstone and write a character sketch. Describe something you see here without revealing the setting. Imagine and describe your own death. Write the first paragraph of a love story that begins in this cemetery.
John’s students read Kierkegaard and stare off into hand mirrors they’ve brought as props near my students. The grass in the graveyard is so sharp and dry and full of anthills you can hardly sit down, and there is never a single bit of wind to rile the rows of veteran flags. If there is any sound at all other than the occasional muscle car revving through the stoplight at the corner, it is the sound of bees. Big loud desperate bees and the quieter, tiny, metallic-looking bees that cluster at your ankles. Sweat bees, those little ones are called.
One day, three girls from my class come find me at the oversize cement skirts and raised ramrod of the Molly Pitcher monument near the entrance gate and tell me that a man had just appeared near where they were sitting and loaded a trap with a groundhog inside into his pickup. They say the groundhog was jumping all around in the trap and the man whacked it over the head with a shovel until it stopped moving. One of the girls is crying.
“Yikes,” I say. “But I guess now you have an amazing plot twist for your story.” They shrug and walk away. I decide it’s probably time to head back to the classroom.
“See you at the dining hall,” I say to John with a meaningful stare, “if in fact you exist.” He rolls his eyes and goes back to explaining Heidegger’s Dasein to a thirteen-year-old with purple hair and wool hand-knit shorts.
*
I’ve always loved Molly Pitcher, that Revolutionary War supermom who traipsed into battle fearlessly stirring pots, tending wounds, scrubbing bloodstains, in all the fourth-grade history books.
She’s the one who found a hidden spring during a one-hundred-degree day of gun fighting at Monmouth and brought cold, fresh water to the soldiers. And then later that afternoon it is said that she picked up her husband’s rammer after he dropped from exhaustion at his cannon and set to work swabbing and loading and blasting the British back to Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Also: There was the time when the skirt was ripped from her frock by a British musket ball that passed between her legs, and Molly supposedly exclaimed, “Well, that could have been worse!”
I think about Molly Pitcher all the time these days—whenever I feel like I’m standing in a battlefield with my heart pounding and a gaping hole burned out of my dress.
When my pubic hair all falls out at once in the shower and shows up like a drowned baby muskrat in the drain. When I’m summoned to the elementary school to discuss some unfortunate behavior on the part of my elder son, and a kindergartener in the hall sees me and starts to cry. When I try to dye Easter eggs with the kids and end up gagging over the smell of sulfur and vinegar in the bathroom. When I wake one morning covered in hives, my lips and eyes swollen like I was nearly punched to death.
My friend Melissa, who is the closest real-life person I know to Molly Pitcher, picks my kids up from school, keeps them for hours while simultaneously running her own business, and organizes a parade of friends who show up on our stoop with dinner night after night: soups and roast chickens and eggplant parmesans. At first I try to look human when people stop by, but eventually I stop. Cancer removes whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others. A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother suggests. All the oh-yes-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste.
*
One morning with my class in the Carlisle graveyard, I found a headstone near Molly Pitcher for someone named Molly McCauley. I looked it up in the local library later and it turned out she was the actual woman: a well-liked servant for hire—known for cursing like a soldier—who lived and died in Carlisle. And that Molly Pitcher is made-up—probably a legend from centuries of lore or maybe some tall tale the author of all fourth-grade textbooks made up when his wife asked him to help fold the laundry.
I ended up feeling kind of annoyed at the myth on behalf of Real Molly—and became increasingly fond of her lesser-known story of hard work and quiet survival with the help of a few curse words.
And I got fonder of the sweat bees, too—even though they stung me a couple times. They like sweaty, sweet, humans for goodness sake. Don’t we all: John and I got married exactly two years later.
I love the gutsy cement hero woman and I also love the real potty-mouthed housemaid with a ruffled bonnet who is buried somewhere below that crooked, faceless grave. I love the musket ball not hitting me, and I also love the musket ball. I love goddammit motherfucker, and I really love Well, that could have been worse.
14. The Transparent Eyeball