Man speaks for woman

O O O this should not bother me, but after all I'm the Bitch, and so many things can bother me that wouldn't bother a non-bitchy person. There's a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer at Sloan-Kettering, just one of 200,000 women who will hear that the test was positive this year, and the noteworthy thing about her is that she's the Wife of a Doctor. A Doctor at Sloan-Kettering, and ain't that ironic or crazy or what-have-you, and since this is the age of irony, her husband gets to write about the experience in the New York Times. Am I jealous? Yes. Is that what's fueling my ire? Yes. No. Am I annoyed that he writes in an ungainly fashion and strains when he makes comparisons and isn't very interesting? Yes. Am I jealous? O, we covered that. Sort of. It's in the New York Times blog, not print, and since cyberspace is everywhere and nowhere, in a way you could say that it is not in the New York Times, or you could say it is there and everyplace else in the known world. But even at the blog, aren't there editors? Must not be, otherwise we wouldn't have such sentences as: The late nights along the Seine were as dark and dreary as the sunshine was bright that Wednesday morning on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The author is a doctor at Sloan-Kettering. What kind of cancer doctor? No one says. He admits that the white coat has been his protection against involvement and emotion. But anyone who's ever visited a hospital could tell you that. He also has pull, not surprisingly. He tells us that they got an appointment with a friend who's a breast surgeon: When I told him Ruth had felt a lump, he had made room to see us right away.

Which is nice. And I'm sure they have insurance, which is good because I doubt that professional courtesy would pay for all her subsequent treatments. Which is good for them, especially since they seem pretty young and it appears from this first installment that the cancer has spread to her lymph nodes. (Though you've read here that removing cancerous lymph nodes may not be required, after all.)

Of course, a more erudite decision on the part of the Times would have been to tap (virtually) the shoulder of the Cancer Bitch and offer her the blog spot. She could write: When the Cancer Bitch has Blood Cancer, a comedy of manners that has not yet ended. But the tap was not received, no messages were left. And a more relevant and important and serious decision would have been to get an uninsured woman to write about her breast cancer. Or, second best, the husband of said woman. Or daughter. Finding such a person would be easy--it is said in these parts that a scoffing full professor (the kind who hires adjuncts) once said he could spit outside the window of his office downtown and spray any number of PhDs, the point being that those with doctorates in English should be grateful, o so grateful, hat in hand and bowing and scraping, if and when they were offered a couple thousand dollars for teaching a course as an adjunct. So too, unapocryphally, you could walk to to the county hospital here, named for a politician, John Stroger, who spent his last days, comatose, in a private hospital (Fancy Hospital, in fact), and find hosts and hosts of people without health insurance. Interestingly, ABC News told us: Stroger lost a brother who was turned away from a segregated hospital in the South, and the availability of quality healthcare became his pet issue. He struggled for decades -- sometimes alone -- to make sure the Cook County Hospital remained open. There was a libertarian Republican named Tony Peraica who ran against Todd Stroger, son of John, for Cook County Board president, and I didn't like Peraica's politics at all, but I had to appreciate one commercial in which he said he would improve Cook County Hospital so that it would be good enough for John Stroger to go to. Peraica lost and Stroger died and Ariel Sharon remains cocooned in his own coma, and I think no one in Israel has the chutzpah to pull the plug on him. The photo above right is of a sculpture of Sharon by artist Noam Berlavsky.

The transformation implied in the blog, I think, is that a doctor regains his vulnerability and dare we say humanity, not to mention humility, when he is the spouse of a patient, and not a Doctor draped in sanitary whites. This is a tricky concept, because we writers would tell him that the story is his--but if he makes the story too much his own, he will seem like a cad because it's his wife who was stricken. The best thing for him, in order to remain a sympathetic narrator, is to contract a serious disease himself. But such things take time.

Taking, Losing, Making

There are two empty houses on our block and one of them has been abandoned for 39 years, according to neighborhood lore. We want to dig out some of the plants and transfer them to our little front yard. I think it would be permissible to take from the very abandoned house. We think those plants with long thin leaves are some kind of lily but we have to wait to make sure. The other house has a boarded-up door, permanent scaffolding and a few nice white irises. We saw a woman working in the yard there last summer. She wasn't friendly. She refuses to sell, a neighbor told us, and this was before the market collapsed.


When I worked at AstroWorld amusement park, some of the time I helped the silhouette cutters. We all wore old-fashioned costumes because we were houses in the Old Towne Main Street or whatever (since razed). One silhouette cutter had panache and style and beauty but her silhouettes didn't look much like the kid (which the model usually was). She would make all kinds of bows and flourishes to gussy-up the profiles. She was such a dynamo that she could convince the parents that yes, this looked exactly like her child, don't you see? Kinda like the Emperor's New Clothes. The paper was folded so that each cutter made two silhouettes at once. If the people didn't buy the second one, we threw it away. (Which frustrated the parents, because they'd argue, Why isn't it free if you're just going to throw it away?) I would sweep up all the paper and occasionally I would take the extra silhouettes home and store them in my high school yearbook for use at a later time, which has not yet arrived.

The other cutters were a couple of art teachers from a small Texas town. They had no panache, just more precision in cutting profiles with special scissors. At dusk they would walk through the park making cuttings (guess it was in their blood) of plants that they liked. I thought it was stealing but you could argue otherwise. I suppose. Their silhouettes were more accurate and without the Little Lord Fauntleroy collars.

Last autumn our friends' son died and the mother is not wearing white or pastels, probably until the anniversary of his death. She writes letters to him. The father is thin and strained. She said to me, Do you have hope? and I said yes, and then I thought of Pandora's box, how after all the evil escaped, she managed to shut the cover before hopelessness was able to escape. Let us ignore for now the misogynist portrayal of Pandora, the first mortal woman, in this myth (curious, willful, girlish). Or maybe she shouldn't. One teller of the story suggests that she may have been a goddess originally, her immortality taken from her with the frequent retelling.

Sunday at Trader Joe's I saw two beautiful shopping lists, both held by women who were in the midst of referring to them. The writing was even and well-shaped, and both lists were the essence of lists, items printed in a column, one object pers line. I collect grocery lists but it is part of my ethic or personality (which is sneaky) not to ask for them. Enough with this Davy Rothbart, who founded FOUND, a magazine of found notes. I started collecting in the early 1990s or before. (And I have proof!! See my essay in Crain's Chicago Business, Sept. 28, 1992, about moving. I wonder if I should throw away or keep files such as the notes from the 1988 interview with Rich Melman; my collection of other people's discarded shopping and to-do lists, found on the streets over the last several years....) My idea was to hand them out in creative writing classes and have students create characters based on them. I've never done that. And someone else bested me: Hillary Carlip, a list collector since the age of 15, dressed up as the the characters she imagined behind each list, and got a book out of it all, A La Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers.

And FOUND is a book and a play off-Broadway and Rothbart brings his finds to This American Life, and Cancer Bitch has three books, but they are published by university presses, and she has no play off- or on Broadway and she used to hang out with Ira Glass (the first person she knew to put tomatoes in a stir fry) but that was many many years ago. Cancer Bitch has not started a national movement. One could say she is too inward, does not spread the wealth, as Rothbart does, with his "operatives" all over the US finding papers and sending them to him to publish. Cancer Bitch learned to use sesame oil from Gish Jen in graduate school, and you've heard of Gish, not to mention Ethan Canin and Dan Woodrell (no links to these people; you can find them yourself), with whom she also went to grad school, and she is feeling tres peevish (and doesn't know how to insert accents over letters) and keeps thinking of the essay Roy Blount, Jr. wrote the year that the MacArthur Foundation started designating (and paying) geniuses. I want a goddamned genius grant, he wrote. MacArthur fellow Robert Penn Warren is a great writer, but after all, what does he need to be designated a genius for? He's got a poem in every goddamned magazine you pick up.

There is some kind of lost web site where people write about objects they've lost. It is somewhere, way out in cyberspace, beyond sites about the TV show, and maybe by writing about the thing and posting a photograph, you can feel a little thump of satisfaction or compensation, the way you do when you wake up from a dream in which you've found that item you lost in the real world, and haven't yet realized that the dream was a dream.

And Cancer Bitch forgot that last week she started making art with her lists, sewing them onto satin, and while she was thus occupied she felt engaged and intense and satisfied, ye olde feeling that's been called many things over the centuries by people we've forgotten, and is now known in our century by the term that Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls flow.

How Not to Be Intimidated

I don't know how. I am reading submissions for our little literary magazine and I am cowed by a cover letter from someone with several books who sent us a travel piece and informs me (not really me; the letter should be addressed to me but it is not) that two similar pieces of hers have been published in fancy places. Prestigious magazines. Unknown to most people but well-regarded among us in the MFA set. I like the piece but I can't tell how much I like it because I should like it, how much I like it because I want to snap it up before a fancy magazine snaps it up. I don't love it. I don't feel like calling friends up to say, You must read this. But her essay made me want to visit the country she was writing about. I learned from it. But it didn't tell enough about her heart. Do all pieces of personal nonfiction need to do this? It's also written in present tense, which is annoying. But who am I to tell her that? I am the editor (more or less) she sent the piece to. After all. That's who. She doesn't even know I exist, didn't care enough to look up my goddamned name on the masthead.

I keep thinking about the writer who sent an account to me (addressed to me) a few years ago at this very magazine, and I thought it was boring and I rejected it and lo and behold later it turned up in the Missouri Review and then Best American Essays. I still think it's boring. Should I have accepted it because it had the whiff of Prize-Winner on it? The idea it explored was interesting but it was hard to get into, the writing at the beginning was working against the piece. The beginning was slow. The rest of it wasn't so great, either. But it was about medicine, so that made it interesting. In theory. Jeez, and now this person has two books of essays, is an M.D. and Ph.D. And I am just ol' Cancer Bitch with two books and one breast and one-and-a-half eyebrows. Neither of my books was praised, as hers were, in the New York Times and Washington Post. Not only that, she's probably at least, at least, 10 years younger than I am.

The ol' Desiderata, which we memorized and tacked up on our walls in the '70s, back when that Medical Bitch was only knee-high to a stethoscope: If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter.

Well, guess what? It was already too late then.