She hated growing up in her grandparents’ house as if she and her mother were siblings. (To be honest, said my friend, I left a lot of the child rearing to my mother, which was how Mom wanted it too, and I really did feel more like an older sister than like a mother myself.) The daughter could not tolerate seeing how well mother and grandparents got along. She was an alien among them, her father’s daughter, not like any of her mother’s people, with whom she could not get along at all.
I will never forgive that woman for coming between us.
That woman of course being me, my friend said.
Love letters was what they were.
She had managed to turn him into a great passion, my friend said. She would’ve sold the rest of us into bondage to spend one hour with him.
And that’s what bothers me most, she said. Okay, hate me. I’m the one who got knocked up and said no to a shotgun marriage, I’m the terrible mother. But what about my parents? All they ever did was love and take care of her, and she made what should have been their golden years miserable. That’s what I’ll never forgive.
If she’d known how things would turn out, she’d have tried to give them another grandchild.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
In middle school, she wrote a poem about her father that included the lines “I was the one in the burning house / I was the one you heard screaming.”
All about what a tragedy her whole life was, her mother described it. This much-loved, much-wanted child who grew up with every conceivable privilege in a world full of suffering, and here she is, acting like she’s an orphan, a refugee, a goddamn boat person. She even had the nerve to call herself that.
“I am an emotional boat person” was another line from the poem.
Her grandparents had also been upset by the poem, in which they were accused of being unfeeling rich snobs, more enemies than loving family.
It was the last fucking straw, my friend said. And then the school went and gave it a prize!
Might as well disclose it here: I never had much sympathy for the daughter. I never liked her. She was, it must be said, an extraordinarily unlikable little girl. I recall how guilty my aversion to her used to make me feel: she was just a child, after all. But I had never before met a child so disagreeable. She lied with the skill of a con artist. She broke her toys on purpose. She stole things that she could have had just by asking for them. She bullied smaller children. When her grandmother gave her a kitten she teased it so relentlessly that it became almost feral.
When it came time for college, she applied only to schools in distant states (She wants to get as far away from me as possible, her mother said, accurately), and later, for postgraduate work, she went farther still and lived for a few years abroad. She had always shown both a gift and a passion for writing, but rather than pursue a literary career (Follow in my footsteps? said my friend. Never happen), she went into business, specifically the business of advising others how to manage their businesses, eventually specializing in hospitality and entertainment. At this she turned out to be something of a whiz, and because it was work that involved a lot of travel, and travel was the one thing she loved more than work itself, and because, thanks to her job, travel usually meant complimentary luxury travel, she had turned out to be happier than we who’d known her as a girl would ever have predicted.
Once she’d established her complete independence from them, her hostility toward her family diminished. Her grandparents’ deaths, which fell one right after the other, triggered feelings of remorse of which her mother had come to fear she was incapable. It would be an exaggeration to say that mother and daughter reconciled—there would never be true peace between them—but there was less tension, and for a few years, at least, they managed to be in each other’s lives in a manner resembling a normal family relationship.
But it was too late. There was too much history, too much bad blood between them. (With typical dysfunctional-family logic, my friend easily forgave her parents for voting Republican but not her daughter, ever.) In the end, it was simply easier to let go, to do without each other. Just as my friend had yet to meet the man her daughter was living with, her daughter had no idea that her mother also had been seeing someone (a man whose interest cooled, however, once it was clear that she might be seriously ill).
This is where things stood at the time of my friend’s diagnosis.
It’s your choice. What a thing to say, my friend said. It’s your choice. Period. Like it was a small thing. Like it had nothing to do with her.
I held her hand, I tried to soothe her. I said, People say the wrong things—
You were smart not to have children, she said.
It was not, by any means, the first time she’d said this to me, but this time it was said with unusual force. Then, as if realizing that maybe she ought not to have spoken so to me: You know, I specifically told other people not to come see me this afternoon because I wanted it to be just us.
I did not have any real news to share so I talked about other things, the usual things, books I’d been reading, movies I’d seen, and how everyone who lived in my building was freaking out because one apartment was reported to have bedbugs. My friend and I had met in our early twenties when we worked at the same literary journal. The editor in chief, our old boss, had died earlier that year, and we talked about him, about our old days at the journal and what its future might be, now that its founder and editor in chief was gone, and I told her about the memorial service, which I’d attended, and which she said that she, too, would have attended had she not been ill.
We talked about other people we knew in common, others we’d first met at the journal, the ones with whom we were still friends, the ones with whom we’d lost touch. The dead. I worried about all this talk about death, some of it about people (like our old boss) who’d succumbed to the same disease now threatening my friend’s life, but it was she who directed the conversation, as she pretty much always did when we were together: it was her way.
Though she was somewhat groggy from medication (and, though she denied it, I believe also in pain), she carried on in the emphatic manner she was known for, unmistakably someone who’d spent a good part of her life behind a lectern. I was reminded that she had always been known for her vigor. She was the kind of person whom others describe as a fighter, a survivor, and it was because of this that we who knew her were surprised when she announced that she intended to forgo treatment. And unsurprised when she changed her mind. She had not been wrong, however, to dread treatment. At first I hardly recognized her. White as an egg and skinny as a chopstick was how she’d tried to prepare me. And minus every strand of what had once been a thundercloud of hair.
About an hour into my visit we were interrupted by her oncologist, a youthful and classically handsome brown man, like a movie star cast as the hero doctor, and I was touched to see how she flirted with him (and how he, subtly, good-naturedly, flirted back) before I was asked to step out of the room. A private room. (You won’t believe what this is costing, she told me, but I couldn’t bear the idea of lying here all day with some roommate watching TV or gabbing on the phone. I can’t stand it even for a few minutes in the lounge. And I, in turn, told her about being in the hospital overnight for minor surgery the year before, and how I’d had to listen for hours to the woman in the next bed phoning updates on her condition to an endless series of people, including her hairdresser, and, weirdly enough, one apparently bewildered person to whom she had to explain how it was that they even knew each other.)