Flowers

“Don’t send flowers,” Will McGregor said into the phone. “They say it’s not good for the chemo or something. She won’t need flowers.”

From her bed, Trude only half-heard Will while her mind was elsewhere, resting. She didn’t need flowers, but really, she did enjoy them. Loved them, in fact. How they’d mess up the chemo she wasn’t sure. But she didn’t want anything to mess up the chemo. She wanted the best, strongest damn chemo that had ever been given to man or beast.

*  *  *  *  *

The stomach pain had started in August and she’d ignored it. By Labor Day it was a presence: a gnawing pernicious feeling that came and went at first, then came and stayed awhile, and now had taken up residence within her gut. From the first she’d known at some level it was cancer. She’d practically been waiting for it, wondering when it would come for her.

Trude was wilting in the kitchen the Monday before Thanksgiving when Sally, her oldest, had slipped through the kitchen door for the holiday, the way she always had, with an armful of yellow mums and a great gust of November air.  After a hug that had taken Trude’s breath away, Sally held her mother at arm’s length.

“You look like hell, Ma.” Sally was a nurse practitioner who got right down to business, whether doing a Pap smear or making an apple pie. She pushed her mother gently into a kitchen chair and rolled up her sleeves. Trude knew she looked awful. Heck, she felt awful. It wasn’t just the stomach pain. She’d been tired. A sort of bone-weariness that just made her want to pull something warm around her shoulders and lie right down in place. Sometimes she found herself stretched out on the couch and unable to move, with no idea how or when she’d landed there. She knew this was likely not a good sign.  Sally looked her mother in the eye and right away Trude’s worst fears were confirmed.

“It’s nothing sweetie, honest. Just a personal power outage.” Trude protested, drying wet hands on a tea towel. She didn’t know what else to do but lie in a situation like this. It was what her mother did and her mother’s mother did before her: a great family tradition of womanly lying to cover up pain.

“You can’t get away with that now,” Sally threatened, and Trude could see Thanksgiving going down the tubes right before their eyes, as they stood there in the middle of the kitchen, pots and pans all over the place, and a twenty-two pound fresh turkey all pink and naked in the sink.

“All this can wait. I’m calling Wetmore’s office.” Sally checked her watch. It was 3:30 on the Monday before a long holiday weekend. “If we can get you in now, let’s do it, ok?” She wasn’t asking permission.

So they’d called Will who was still at work.  Or Sally called Will, while Trude found her coat and handbag, and pulled an old woolen Burberry’s scarf around her neck, and wondered what to do about the half-frozen turkey in the sink, and in the end decided it was cold enough in the kitchen (she opened a window to be sure) and she wouldn’t be gone long enough for it to go bad. She threw a damp kitchen towel over the turkey’s bare behind, which seemed like the decent thing to do. And the two of them drove off in Sally’s Honda to the doctor’s office, Trude thinking, hoping really, that it would be a quick visit followed by a stop at the pharmacy for something, an antibiotic perhaps, or one of those new drugs that claim to “heal the damage” inside your guts. Perhaps that was the problem, Trude told herself: a case of heartburn run amok. 

But Dr. Wetmore seemed concerned as he probed her belly and counted Trude’s winces. Then Sally and he conferred, health care professionals privy to a secret language, discussing worries that meant something different to them because they knew the truth, the whole and dangerous truth, that ordinary people like Trude never even wanted to know. And the verdict was this: a battery of tests. Why a “battery” and not a “slew”? Trude recoiled from the word that implied assault.  These could actually be administered over the holiday week during a hospital stay. And so calls were made, and insurances were confirmed by secretaries who were eyeing the clock and would soon be preparing to take their own turkeys out of cold storage and put them in their kitchen sinks.

Still at the office, Will was summoned in the middle of an end-of-the-month real estate closing. And by seven that night, her energy depleted, Trude was already propped up in a hospital bed, draped in a Johnny coat with a tiny blue print faded from constant washing, having ordered a Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes from the hospital menu. Nobody told her not to. She worried it might be her last real meal for awhile. It came with overcooked string beans that tasted too salty, but she cleaned her plate from maternal force of habit. Will brought a foul-smelling micro-waved burrito from the hospital cafeteria, and that first night they watched the evening news dining together, just like any other.

*  *  *  *  *

Trude had spent most of a lifetime as a smoker; half a lifetime as a drinker. She’d gotten the nasty habits from her father’s side and the talent for covering them up from her mother’s side: a perfect legacy. She was on the wagon now, but for what? Maybe it was time to get back off unless that wasn’t good for the chemo either. She had a friend on Lipitor who said “they” made her stop drinking grapefruit juice. Trude had a feeling “they” were about to enter her life now, as well.

With her late menopause had come melancholy; a true melancholy, with symptoms that ran the gamut from pensive thoughtfulness to habitual depression. A randomly remembered lesson from her college Western Civ: the Greeks attributed this to an overabundance of black bile. The single cause of both her illness and sadness must be black bile, perniciously coursing through her belly, she concluded. Not a pretty picture.

Trude had always nurtured a strong belief that cancer would be her final sentence; she just didn’t know when the sentence would be imposed. Everyone from Will to the paperboy ragged on her for smoking, threatening the direst of consequences. Now everybody was busy denying it.

“Don’t worry, the tests will come out just fine,” Sally said taking her hand.

“You’ll be home in time to eat the other drumstick,” her son Greg assured her, always in competition for the Thanksgiving bird’s extremities.

“You’re in too much pain for it to be cancer.” Betty, her best friend, smiled the smile of the utterly uninformed. Where did she get these ideas, anyhow?

But while the pain in her gut had been ameliorated by an IV drip, it had been replaced by a piercingly cold knot in her chest.

“I’m scared,” she whispered under her breath to Will but mostly to herself. She wanted to actually say out loud the words that nobody else seemed ready to hear.

 Now Will was somewhere out in the hallway, she knew, under fluorescent lights. She couldn’t seem to get his attention. His shadow was in the room though, bending across the green and white checkerboard linoleum floor, and moving slightly every so often. She could make out his crossed arms by the points of his elbows. It was a comfort: at least a part of him was nearby.

“Will honey? How come no flowers? I don’t get it.” This question took much of her strength but she wanted it answered, dammit.  

“Be right there, sweetie.” He called, talking to one of the doctors. One of a dozen or maybe it was a hundred interchangeable young residents who’d consulted with Trude in the past few days, in light green wash-and-wear scrubs, photo name badge clipped to a pocket, stethoscope around the neck. Hard to distinguish nowadays from orderlies or even housekeeping staff, they were girls and boys of all ethnicities, or at least they looked like children. How strange to be putting your fate in the hands of someone younger than your youngest adult child, Trude thought. On the other hand, medicine was a little like computer tech support…something you wanted done by the youngest possible person. Someone who knew all the latest quirks in the software. That’s what you were paying for these days, not bedside manner or a long, meaningful relationship with the family. When it came to cancer, you wanted cutting edge.

“Sorry, I just got talking out there.” Will was inside the room now, shifting from one foot to another. He was a tall man who was used to being in charge, needed elbow room and seldom sat down. He was visibly uncomfortable.

Truthfully, Trude knew, she was lucky to have even gotten a private room, a practicality Will would not have understood. He always assumed exceptional things were coming to him, and they usually did. Like great parking spaces. Now he came closer to the bed, awkwardly pushed the IV pole aside, and laid his hand on her head, stroking her hair.

“Tell me about the flowers, honey. Why can’t I have any flowers?” Trude reached for Will’s jacket. It was the one she’d given him from Abercrombie’s twenty years before they got trendy. She rubbed the old brown suede softly between her thumb and forefinger.

“I’m honestly not sure, but I’ll investigate.” Suddenly taking on this mission, Will bent down to kiss his wife of more than three decades in a gesture that was both familiar to them and foreign, taking place in this alien, asexual environment. Any place either one of them had ever stayed overnight had featured a bed ample enough for two: a place where sex was at least a possibility. Here, Trude was on her own, adrift in a bed for one, a bed with iron sides, like a lifeboat, that kept her from falling onto the linoleum and drifting down the hallway, in her johnny coat. Or drowning.

“I do like flowers, you know,” she insisted calmly as Will made his exit.

“Yep. Don’t worry, I’ll find out.” He blew a backward kiss in her direction.

Trude stretched tentatively to distract herself and pointed her toes till her feet started to cramp, then flexed them backward to stop it. Cramping was another annoyance that had come with mid-life, as though her calf muscles and feet were warring with each other for control of her legs.  Other women celebrated the change of life and the freedom from pregnancy, but for Trude, it had signaled the realization of many losses: the “to do” list of things she thought she’d have plenty of time for had become the list of things she’d better try while she still could.

* * * * *

It was late and, sleeping fitfully, Trude hadn’t quite figured out how to work the overhead television. At home she wasn’t much of a television watcher. Like most men, Will was the one with his finger on the controls. Groggily, she wondered if she should ring the front desk for help or not? Did they call it a front desk or something else? Ah, yes, the nurses’ station. That’s right, it’s a hospital not a hotel. Funny, they both start with h-o. Ho ho ho. Christmas is right around the corner.  Trude almost giggled before being jolted by the recollection that she’d left her house with a turkey modestly draped in the sink and not a single holiday gift purchased. She’d miss shopping on Black Friday, but would surely be home in time to put in her time at the mall. Then again, the shut-ins she visited with her church group swore by catalog shopping. Was she heading for life as a shut-in? Trude had often puzzled over that term, and what was being shut out. Now as a patient, she realized it was literally everything…the rest of her family, town… world.

*  *  *  *  *

Thanksgiving was Trude’s favorite holiday in the calendar. The family would visit the hospital that afternoon, then probably return home without her, to eat the meal that, ever before, had been her own personal measure of devotion to kith and kin. Thanksgiving was The Day that reinforced for Trude what mothers did: they carried on the traditions, cooked the seasonal feasts, and initiated the newcomers (babies, roommates, fiancés, out of towners) into the family fold.

“Trude? Mrs. McGregor?” It was Janice, the first shift nurse, shaking her awake. “You’re due over in radiology, dear.”

Trude was suddenly bolt upright. Maybe she’d just had a night’s sleep. She couldn’t tell. “Is it night or day?” she groaned.

“It’s still afternoon. But those blinds’ll make it feel like midnight.” Janice walked over to the window and pushed them aside. She was that rare breed of nurse who still insisted on a white uniform, but over it she was wearing a red sweater with snowflake trim. “You’ve got a real nice view of the Christmas lights across the park.”

Trude could not say that she’d noticed. Christmas lights were not something she remarked upon though she knew plenty of people who made quite a fuss about them every year. It was fine if you had nothing better to talk about.

“Well, there’s another house or two every day,” Janice announced with satisfaction, as though that was the natural order of things…a gradual increase of Christmas lights each day until the actual holiday. Then a gradual decrease. Something that could be graphed if only Trude had some graph paper. Janice twisted the rod that opened the blinds. “You can come over here and sit on the chair and look out any time you want. It’ll cheer you up.”

Trude liked Janice but wondered where she got her cheery notions working with sick people all day. If she lived to see another holiday season, this one would likely color it forever. The pit of her stomach told her she might not be around to worry about next Thanksgiving.

A young orderly named Tyrone pushed a wheelchair through the door adding to the clutter.

“Hop on, Mis McGregor.” He offered her a hand. “Next stop, X-ray.”

Trude hadn’t heard the word “X-ray” in a long time. Here in the hospital atmosphere, where all words were separated from the context in which she knew them, it suddenly felt weird, a science fiction word. Maybe X-rays are science fiction, she thought. Maybe none of them really see through the skin like Superman, to where the damage is, to where the dynamite is about to go off, so that someone can meticulously detonate it. Maybe all the new cures are bogus, too, Trude thought as she eased her bones into the wheelchair and allowed herself to be backed out of the room, then whisked forward down the green and white checkerboard hallway, pushed from behind.

“You off for Thanksgiving, Tyrone?” Trude called behind herself as best she could.

“Not this year. But I got Christmas off, so that’s somethin’.” Tyrone bent down close to her, to avoid shouting himself.

“Guess you gotta take your pick,” Trude said.  It seemed like a shame though.

“Not really. They do the pickin for you. It’s easier that way,” Tyrone sounded resigned to both the hospital regimen and the party line. “And my mama’ll save a plate for me, that’s for sure.”

She would have done the same thing if she were Tyrone’s mama. She could see his plate, piled high with turkey and cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes, sealed up under a nice tight sheet of plastic wrap, waiting in the fridge. Maybe it was just easier for Tyrone to go with the flow. Trude was starting to feel the same way, but she was also craving a smoke. She still had a crush on the Marlboro man she couldn’t quite get over.

“On the bright side, there’s a real nice turkey dinner here for the patients,” Tyrone informed her as he put the chair’s brake on in the hallway outside radiology.

Trude imagined the hospital staff and patients gathered around a giant dinner table in the hospital lobby, white-coated-staffers alternating with patients in wheelchairs all around the table, like pilgrims and Indians, with the Chief of Surgery at the head, carving the bird. 

Trude wondered if she’d be able to eat it. Would she be on chemo and did it make you lose your appetite that quickly? She knew her waning eating habits would soon become the source of great consternation. Trude’s father had died from lung cancer when she was twenty seven, and the daily report of his appetite, intake and corresponding appearance (as though consuming a few spoons full of mashed carrots would save him) had been endlessly discussed in the family. The stark reality of his approaching end was hardly even mentioned.

Still parked outside radiology, Trude remembered being a young mother, and taking Sally and later, her son Greg around their neighborhood in a stroller, walking briskly, kicking up leaves, petting friendly dogs.  How good she’d felt then: how free to leave the house behind, and to breathe in the cold pine air with a new baby, all bundled up. How careful she was never to take her eyes off the child while she chatted idly with a storekeeper or had a smoke with a friend. Now, she was the dependent one, out for a change of scenery in a push cart.

By the time she’d been scanned, Tyrone was already off duty, and another orderly did the honors, transporting her back to her room, and helping her into the tall-backed vinyl easy chair, next to the window.  A get well card from Betty was already standing open on her window sill like a new recruit in the Army to Cheer Up Trude. With time, more would probably enlist. Trude could already tell that a battle was in the air and that she wasn’t going to get discharge papers any time soon.

Janice had been right: across the park, another house now sported white icicle lights along a pitched roof line, and a wicker reindeer in the front yard to match. The homeowner was still outside hammering, and his pounding echoed metallically across the duck pond and bounced off Trude’s window. Maybe if she could just make sure her get-well cards outnumber those decorated houses, that could be an omen that she’d recover. Any old sign’ll do, she thought, as long as it’s positive. Maybe she’d start calling her friends asking them to send cards.

Trude looked up at the IV bag that, nearly empty of a fluid that was clear and seemed benevolent, hovered ominously on its pole. Last night it had warded off pain and relaxed Trude, leaving her in this current vague state that was really rather pleasant. Was this the way chemo might be administered, or was it taken by mouth? Or by hypodermic needle? Trude hadn’t thought to ask. She both dreaded knowing, and yearned to.

Janice returned, washed her hands at the tiny sink next to the door, and replaced the old IV bag with a fresh one.

“How’re you doin, Trude?” She put the probe of a thermometer into her ear, got an instant reading, hopefully no earwax, then recorded it on a clipboard.

“Ok as long as I don’t need any more needles.” Trude had tiny veins that rolled around, then collapsed just when the technician was about to snag one of them. Janice looked at Trude, eyebrows raised. She pushed her Christmas sweater sleeves up to the elbows.

“Listen, Trude, I hate to tell you but there’s gonna be a whole lot more needles down the road. That’s a good thing. It’s when the needles stop that you gotta worry. So, how’re you really doin?” 

“You gotta say good.” It was something Trude had heard not long ago from an old gent at the Veterans Home, after she’d plopped her then-healthy self down on his bed for a friendly volunteer chat.

 “Nobody wants to hear ya bellyache, no matter what they say,” the man had confided morosely.

Now Janice shot Trude the look of a disapproving mother.

“No, you don’t gotta say good if you don’t feel good. Tell me the truth.” She picked up Trude’s wrist to get a pulse.

“Honestly, I’m fine.” She wasn’t really lying. But, at Thanksgiving, you just gotta say good.

* * * * *

Trude’d already gotten into the swing of dining from an over-the-bed tray. Under any other circumstances, she would have considered dining in bed luxurious. She shuffled across the room trailing her IV pole behind her, and looked behind the curtain that served as her closet. She couldn’t remember what she’d been wearing when she left home expecting a prescription and a quick drive back home. Suddenly it seemed like ages ago and that this was her rightful home, the caregivers her new family.  Funny how your brain does that to you. Trude peered at the clothes she’d been wearing when Sally’d walked into the kitchen and the world had changed. They weren’t exactly what she’d have wanted to wear for Thanksgiving dinner, but they were better than a johnny coat---and she still had her pride.

* * * * *

Thanksgiving dinner was a modest institutional affair, squeezed into the hospital schedule at lunchtime. The lounge at the end of the hall had been arranged with folding chairs around a clothed table, candles watched-over by a nurses’ aide fearful of setting off the smoke alarm. Previously-plated turkey dinners sat covered on trays in the usual rack on wheels. As patients wandered in, Bob from Food Service seated them, gallantly accommodating wheelchairs, walkers, IV poles. It was a lovely gesture, really it was. But nobody looked very hungry. Trude wondered if everyone else was longing for the little delicacies they loved at home: that special cranberry orange relish. The cheese straws. The poached pear salad with balsamic vinaigrette that was her specialty.

No chemo yet and Trude was already losing her appetite. She picked at the food awhile in gratitude to the eager Bob. He must be new, she figured. Then she pushed her IV pole, like a tall, thin companion, back to her room. Just as Trude eased into a nap, an almost-forgotten Sally poked her head in the door, shushing Jeffrey and Simon, Trude’s young grandsons, who were hanging back shyly behind their mother. The three tiptoed in, and arranged themselves around Trude’s bed, the boys awkwardly surveying the hills and hollows of their grandmother’s body as though she was some kind of relief map. Trude pulled the sheet up to her chin.

“Did you eat yet?” Sally inquired nursily. It was starting already, Trude thought.  Sally squinted up at the IV bag, then back at Trude. “You need to keep your strength up, mom. Here, we brought you some pie.”

Trude was determined to resist this role-reversal for as long as she could. Once reversed, in her experience, it was permanent. “Don’t worry, Sal. They’ve thought of everything here, including the turkey. Like that bird I left back home in the sink, I am officially stuffed.” Jeff and Simon had located the remote control and were flipping TV stations.

  Trude asked about dinner plans at the house, and Sally described her morning’s work, that the bird was in the oven, and where, by the way, did Trude keep the gravy boat? They’d go back home, eat around five, then Will would come spend the evening shift with Trude. Her father was having trouble, Sally explained, accepting the fact that Trude was incarcerated.

“Hey, kiddo, show me how to use that thing,” Trude demanded of Simon, who sat up on the pillow close enough to his grandmother for her to inhale his sweet boyishness. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Together, they pressed buttons until they landed on the Garden Channel, and soon Trude slept soundly with peonies.

Later that evening, Will sitting guard nearby, Trude was visited by Dr. Wetmore and a coven of colleagues, a surgeon and an oncologist who interrupted a replay of the Macy’s parade with a verdict: spots on one lung and a biopsy set for tomorrow. They tried to sound upbeat. If necessary, a mega-dose of the latest chemo, commencing as soon as they had results and continuing on an inpatient basis for about a week straight, followed by blood work, and another scan down the road, would give them a better sense of things. The emotional transition from uncertainty to near-diagnosis was easier than she’d feared. Uncertainty itself was cancerous. Trude surveyed her room and the Christmas lights across the park, realizing now that this would be her home, and Janice, Tyrone and Bob her family, for the near future: the holiday weekend, a week---who could tell? She told herself she’d just make out her usual Christmas list but that Sally would need to do the shopping. This shocked her by coming as a relief.  

“So if I survive all this, I get to fight another day?” Trude was feeling oddly feisty. Dr. Wetmore shook Trude’s hand rather lightly, she thought. She’d been hoping for the confident handshake that might have indicated a pact between them, patient and doctor: we will make you well, worry not. Instead, the lightness of his grasp was, while not limp, noncommittal. It came with no promises. The specialists smiled, mumbled evasively and said their goodbyes.

Will had taken a stroll down the hall and returned looking like he needed medication himself.

“Did you get any sleep at all last night?” Trude asked, picturing Will in bed alone. Like an exiled ruler she reflected back on the customs of her beloved home and homeland.

“Not much.” Will perched on the edge of her hospital bed. Perhaps a certain reality was setting in.

 “It’s not the same without you. Those boys were up way too late last night. Sally lets them get away with murder, you know.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss, and she did her best to hug him around the waist, taking in Will’s familiar warmth. Trude wondered when, if ever, they might have sex again. It was unthinkable that a lifelong loving relationship would be cut short, without warning.

“About the flowers,” Will looked down at the floor as though personally ashamed. “They don’t allow them around chemo patients.” He’d gotten confirmation from the doctor in the hallway. “The chemo will lower your resistance, and then any bacteria in the water or the vase could be dangerous. That’s what they said, anyway.”

Trude wasn’t surprised, but she took it as a sign, and rolled over as best she could amidst the IV tubing.

“Bad enough you have to take chemo, but they deprive you of flowers, too.” Trude sighed and she heard Will sigh, too. She looked out the window. Incredibly, it was still Thanksgiving. A house in the distance had turned its Christmas lights on and they blinked red and green in the evening fog like distress signals. Trude blinked back at them, and they blurred a little.