Waiting To Exhale

Mom gets breast cancer while I am in New York with Stephen. She calls me, her voice breaking just a little, saying she has bad news, but that it is all going to be all right. Her reports are upbeat. I fly to Texas when she has her surgery. They say they got it all and we are relieved, pretending to be completely reassured of her good health. I can't contemplate her death for any length of time without going to pieces, particularly since as a child I endlessly obsessed about the possibility that she would die so often and so intensely that I sometimes made myself sick with asthma attacks and stomach pain. Year later I tell that to the psychic who now stays with our miniature dachshunds when we're out of town, and she says that from an early age I was psychically aware I would lose my mother too soon, and that this psychic knowledge was part of my possessive attachment to her. Now I live in California. I have taken our oldest dog for shiatsu where the practitioner smudged her to rid her of negative chi. It's easy for me to accept the word of our psychic pet sitter, if for no other reason than my mother's death was the thing I feared most in the world and it happened. Adam took her away from me. Then death did too.

In New York as it is happening I try not to think about it except sometimes at night, with Stephen's steady breathing in the background, and me sitting up, paralyzed. About eight months into it there is a recurrence. Mom and David still keep the reports upbeat. Then my uncle calls and says I don't understand: She is dying, I need to get back to Texas. I'm still grateful to him for that. I might not have had the sense to do it on my own.

This is not supposed to be happening now. I am in love with Stephen, in love for the first time, and I don't have A.I.D.S. And I am writing seriously. My nonexistent acting career (I'll write about that some other time) has finally morphed into what I should be doing.

I started writing a play about a dead mother and the ones she leaves behind.

But I began the script a year before my return to Texas; four months before my 48 year-old mother is diagnosed with anything. As far as I know she is perfectly healthy when I begin the dead mother play. Almost as soon as I finish the script a friend of an acquaintance reads it and options it. She was Delta Burke's manager though she is now suing over the "Designing Women" money. This was the big time. This rush of bliss crashes for no apparent reason before Mom has cancer. Everything is ostensibly coming up roses. But old feelings of failure press into me during my days alone when I am supposed to be writing, I think a lot about illness. And depression. And death.

I'm told that someone asked me when I was three or four if I knew what death was. I don't know the context. Maybe a dog died. Maybe I shot my father in his sleep. Apparently I answered the person that yes, I did know what death was, that it was knowing all the answers to all the questions you have without even asking. Spooky for a kid with no religious background.

Maybe writing the play is what gets me thinking about death so much around then. All the characters are dealing with it, with their guilt, their sorrow. Death starts to seem kind of nice to me, and comfortable, not in a suicidal sense. I just like contemplating the gorgeous quiet, the peace, and the release of it, the relief.

I have this tic that started when I was really young: Wherever I am, whoever I'm with, when they leave the room, the building, the house, or whatever, I listen for the door to close behind them. When I hear that click and know they're gone I can breathe easy. I'm no misanthrope. I might even go so far as to call myself one of the people who need people, though I would stop short of considering myself among the luckiest people in the world. Not surprising that the habit of waiting for doors to close started when I would wait to hear my dad leave the house, knowing it was safe to come out when he was gone. The habit continued though, through the years with my mom and step-dad, through my years in New York, with Stephen, and I still feel it now. I've come to believe it is a sigh of relief, the "Waiting to Exhale" moment of knowing the audience is gone. I can revert to being myself, whomever or whatever that is. I can be like a big blob with no one there to watch, no one there wondering why I'm not better than I actually am.

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Stretch Marks

With my mother's bessing and the acknowledgement of our shared belief in unseen powers, I move back to New York, register with a service called Brunch Buddies and find the first love of my life in three days. Magic.

Stephen is tall, handsome, has a real job, and drives a motorcycle. He thinks I am lively. After years of not knowing how to do it, I fall into our relationship with an absolute lack of muss and fuss, not much questioning the massive change in my life, the impossible suddenly emerging as not just possible but easy. The universe loves me. I start to believe that again. Maybe I'm regaining my powers.

My first date with Stephen lasts eighty hours. We are tender and careful with one another. I love that he is larger, taller, that he can envelope me in his arms and hold me warm against his chest. He doesn't talk as much as I do. That makes him seem strong to me, invulnerable, protective. I throw myself headlong into becoming what I consider to be a loving partner. By and large it works. I commit myself again to transformation and by choosing to become something I admire, something new, I make it real. I decide to love him and I do.

The fucking astrologer, who so long ago told me love had to be at the center of my life, has turned out to be so accurate that it is embarrassing. Loving and being loved sets off an explosive chain reaction in me, almost instantaneously demolishing huge chunks of the emotional walls that once seemed so impregnable. Mom and I start talking constantly on the phone. We talk about our sex lives, about what it feels like to be in love, about the past. I begin to let her know about the way I fetishized her as a child, about how desperate I was all the time. We both cry when she tells me she never knew. She feels guilty that I was in such pain and she couldn't tell. I cry some more. There is almost always an edge of tears to our calls. Mostly happy ones, but still… I love her so much. Finally. Not the idea of her. Her.

I am working at home, doing freelance work for the promotions company in Los Angeles, trying to drum up business for them in New York. Mom has been right about how much they value me. They keep paying me for over six months, even as their own fortunes head south, leading to bankruptcy a year later. I use my free time to write and to become a housewife, getting dinner on the table every night when Stephen comes home, and throwing myself into becoming the ideal in-law with his brother and sister in-law who live across the park and are about to have a baby.

There is one horrible fear nagging in the back of my mind though. I have never had an H.I.V. test. I am too scared. The sheer volume of encounters I've had, most of them completely unprotected, a majority involving practices that put me at greater risk that the other guy, make the outcome too certain. Stephen is negative. We are reckless with one another. Testing positive could not only mean losing my life, it could destroy my newfound happiness in finding out how successful I am at loving and being loved. Then one day I notice red welts on my stomach, low, going down to my crotch. I don't know if they are new, or if they are birth marks, or just something I've never noticed before. I don't tell Stephen about the welts because I am absolutely positive (positive, get it?) that I have Kaposi's Sarcoma. The year before my gums were bleeding and I thought I had A.I.D.S. then too. It turned out that not having my teeth cleaned for seven years was the problem. The hygienist, while communicating her amazement that my teeth and gums were still healthy under all that plaque, asked why I hadn't been to the dentist for so long. I said no one told me I was supposed to get them cleaned at all, let alone every year. That was true, but what I didn't tell her was how the bleeding had been scaring me for a few years already, but that I was too terrified to go to the dentist and ask about it since I believed I must be positive and the bleeding was symptomatic of my first opportunistic infection.

I hold out about the welts for a few weeks before breaking down in our bedroom, sinking from the bed to the floor as I show Stephen my lower abdomen and start sobbing. He hasn't noticed them before either since they are covered with the trail of body hair leading down to my pubic area, and he doesn't know if they are old or new. As I sit on the bedroom floor, pointing to my welts, trying to stop crying, Stephen is very gentle with me, understanding my terror, but reassuring me that he believes it is nothing, that it can't be A.I.D.S., and that he believes I am negative anyway. Wouldn't I like to finally get tested and not have to be afraid of anything?

He really thinks I'll test negative. I know he is wrong. We go to an alternative testing center at the women's health clinic, because they get the results back sooner than the gay community center. They give me this incredibly long speech about T-Cells, AZT, and DDI, what infection means, what it doesn't mean, while I'm screaming inside, "Take the goddamned blood!" I am scared of the needle but more scared of what it will show. My arms are rigid, my fists clenched, and Stephen puts his arm around me. Finally they take the blood samples and tell me to come back on Monday. It is Friday. I sit there thinking, it's now seventy-two hours before the rest of my life is gone (this is before cocktails and new inhalers) and then it washes over me, the strangeness of it. I am either positive or I am not, and my not knowing had nothing to do with what the results would be. It is a viral reality that exists independently of my fears or any new bargain I can offer God - though I do make the offer of giving up ice cream for the rest of my life for a negative result. I would not possibly be able to abstain from eating ice cream for a lifetime but I swear anyway.

Stephen just tries to keep me laughing, drunk, trying not to think all weekend. We have sex lovingly, carefully. He is prepared to take off work on Monday but I say no. I don't want to make any more of a fuss than I already have. I promise to call from the center if the news is bad so he can come get me. I walk into the lady's office and am again overwhelmed by the idea that a piece of paper has a result on it already, that I can't alter that in any way. She rummages through a file and doesn't even look at me. "Okay, that one is negative."

As shocked and overjoyed as I am, I think about her, about how hard it must be for her when the news is the opposite, and wondering why she doesn't take more pleasure in being able to tell someone good news. I expect a parade. Then I think, what if it's a false negative. I've heard of that happening. The next week I get another test just to be sure. Negative. I go to a dermatologist to find out what the welts on my stomach are.

They're stretch marks, like women get after giving birth. He says sometimes they can be caused by stress. Have I been under any particular stress? "Yes!" I say, "The stress of worrying that I might have A.I.D.S.!"

I don't have A.I.D.S. -- I am a housewife with stretch marks.

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