Body Language
As our father’s leukemia spread, my brother, sister, and I returned to the rooms where we’d first learned fear.
Welcome to The Slush Pile—a new series of old, rejected stories that have been collecting dust in my Google Drive for years.
Thanksgiving, 1998. Hours before the meal starts, my brother, 15, and I sneak out to Potbelly’s to get a sub sandwich. The goal is to get back home as soon as possible before our dad notices and gets mad. Our dad gets mad at us all the time, and when he gets mad he yells and when he yells he screams and his whole face bulges with veins and turns bright red. Sometimes he screams Goddamnit so loud it will make you cry, even though you don’t want to.
And today is Thanksgiving, so he’s been cooking all day with my mom, brining turkey in tamari, roasting the rutabaga with olive oil, mashing the squash. We hate rutabaga and we hate our parents’ hippie food and honestly, we hate Thanksgiving, hate having to put on a happy face for my parents’ extended family and friends.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, I say, shoving my Potbellies into mouth. laughing. Shredded lettuce and cheese fall onto my sweater.
My brother and I run back the two blocks, hearts racing, but by the time we put the key in the door he’s standing on the top of the stairs in his apron. Face flushed. Hands clenched.
Where were you kids? he roars.
Potbelly’s. I can feel my brother’s fear like it’s my own.
The table isn’t set.
Sorry, sorry, I say. My fault.
But the table is perfect by the time the guests arrive. It is a huge old table, dinged and scratchy with candle wax, a table where we’ve sung hundreds of happy birthdays, drank tea from the Russian samovar my great-grandmother carried across the Baltic. This was the table where my brother, at eight days old, had his bris, while my Grandma Malke and I clutched hands and cried in the hallway.
My parents, third-generation Chicago Jews who read the Tribune regularly, have a dense network here in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park, where they bought a hundred-year-old house in 1977. Aldermen, teachers, poets, writers, analysts, grandparents, aunts, cousins, and uncles take their seats. My siblings and I know the deal: we smile, work the room, fill everyone in on our lives. My sister, three years into her music PR career in Manhattan, is currently on tour with the Rolling Stones. I’m a junior at Brown, majoring in English and film. My brother, a high school sophomore, is running track and writing for the school paper. We eat, we smile, we clear plates, we keep smiling.
Hours later, after the house is emptied out, my dad calls the three of us into his den, where he sits in his easy chair, wearing boxers and socks, the dog by his side. His stomach looks swollen. Years later, when there is nothing about my father’s body I do not know — its rhythms or organs or fluids or functions — I will learn that it is his spleen that is swollen, not his stomach, that it’s enlarged as a result of having to flush out toxins from his bloodstream.
I have cancer, he announces.
He does not attempt to deliver this news softly. My father is not a soft man. He has taught us how to clean dust cracks in the back stairs with a Q-tip, to melt anchovies into a hot pan with tomato and garlic, to dig for fossils in the Indiana Dunes. But he did not teach us tenderness.
He speaks quickly and with little effect. His cancer is rare. It’s called polycythemia vera. It can be treated with regular doses of aspirin and a routine procedure called a phlebotomy. With luck, he will live symptom-free for the rest of his life. My siblings and I say nothing. We know what to say on job interviews and in thank-you notes, but no one has schooled us in the silent language of sickness, of hopelessness and help.
After he tells us he has cancer, we all disperse. My big sister heads to a bar. My brother puts on pajamas and watches Pop Up Video. In my bedroom, I return to my paper on the Semiotic Analysis of the Hero’s Journey. I am in over my head at my college, my father’s alma mater, trying to climb out of academic probation, trying to fit in with my friends who’ve been preparing for the Ivy League their whole lives. I applied to Brown to impress my father, to prove I can follow in his footsteps, his shadow daughter, trudging behind the shadow of his accomplishments.
After a while I get bored and read Vogue. Smile! says the coverline, featuring a blonde model in a white fur coat. In boiling water downstairs, turkey meat tears from the carcass and floats to the top of the pot. Soon the whole house will smell of bones.
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