My dad had a box of fishing tackle he kept in the garage, a great silver box that accordioned into eight levels when you opened the lid.  That’s how I remember it anyway.  The glints on little hooks.  The feathers.  The spools of iridescent fishing line.  Later he’d carve his own out of bass wood and hang them on handmade racks to paint and epoxy them to a high shine, writing names on the tails he’d picked out of an English to Spanish dictionary: Pescado, Nadar, Niño Malo.  But these in the box were store bought, some still in their clear plastic containers that snapped shut.  Lying stretched straight in a tray — a rubber worm twice the length of my finger and the purple color of an old bruise.  I was six or seven, living in Arkansas.  One month before my breast cancer diagnosis, D. R. (Duke) Haney and I were working on a piece about Frankenstein and Duke told me that growing up in Virginia he was able to tune into a D. C. station to watch Detroit-based Sir Graves Ghastly present films like Whale’s Frankenstein in the middle of the night.

I told him that there was nothing cool in the seventies in Arkansas for 600 miles (unless you count that someone spray painted “Nugent” on the Dairy Queen wall) and that when I looked up the possible horror hosts out of curiosity I found this notice:  Sadly, the scariest thing that has come out of Arkansas is Roger Clinton’s music. To our knowledge there have been no horror hosts in Arkansas. So that’s where I lived once, carefully carrying a rubber worm into the kitchen on two palms so I could saw a mouth onto its small face with a butter knife, a mouth that I could pinch open by squeezing the sides so we could sing songs together.  We sang we are Siamese if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please while I dangled my legs off the balcony at the back of the house, both of us staring off into the dogwoods that lined the barbed-wire farm fence of the pasture behind us.

I did have two human friends, one named Christy who lived down the street and, I suspected, was part of an arranged friendship forged by my mom with Christy’s mom.  I got stuck in Christy’s locked bathroom once, and, after what seemed like hours, the adults had to squeeze me out the bathroom window and into the boxwoods below.  The other was an only child on the other end of the street, older than me, and bigger, oafish, two large turned-in teeth always showing in a snarl.  She had a lace-covered double bed with twenty pillows in frilly cases, a white Victorian dollhouse precisely her height, and a blistering left hook.  If she would have seen my pet rubber worm, she would have smacked me in the shoulder so hard the worm flew out of my hand.  Once, she chucked a volcanic landscaping rock at my eye, and along the socket it turned the color of the rubber worm.  My whole family gathered around me as I stretched out on the sofa with my arms sloppily crossed over my striped tank top while mom patted at the bruise with an ice cube wrapped in the dishtowel.  After that, I drew black rings under my eyes with crayon so maybe this could happen again.  It never did.  But that’s the same sofa I sat on one October night, the rubber worm coiled in my fist, to watch Whale’s Frankenstein.

The monster walks into the room backwards and pivots into the light for a closeup.  He stands, shifting his weight, his arms lock-jointed straight by his sides.  He drags his boots when he steps to Henry Frankenstein.  He’s talked to like a child.  Sit down.  Sit down! He tries to hold a light beam.  Sit down.  Go and sit down. His hands, palms up, tremble, empty.

74 Days after diagnosis, two days after the oncologist switched my chemotherapy treatment to Taxol for the home stretch, my hands and feet swell up sunburn red, painful to the touch, and I’m shuffling around the kitchen, the “V” of my loose robe showing the mechanics of the mediport just under my skin, a thin cap slouched on my bald head, trying to figure out how to open a water bottle with Boris Karloff creature claws.  Like holding sunshine, it can’t be done.

So I sit on the sofa with the bottle and quiet cry until everyone else wakes up.

“Why didn’t you come get me to open it?” Joe wants to know.

Because it’s been awhile since I drew black around my eyes for pity and maybe even longer since I admitted there was something I absolutely couldn’t do on my own. It turns out I’m in the slim margin of people who experience what’s called hand and foot syndrome from chemo, and I start to think of all the other slim margins I belong to.  I’m in the slim margin of breast cancer patients diagnosed as “triple negative,” for example.  I’m in the slim margin who are under a certain age or weight when diagnosed.  I’m in the slim margin without a family history and on and on.  So after Joe sets the opened water bottle down on the side table my dad built for me and turns on the television to find that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died, I fumble to open my laptop with my thumbs and slip into the internet vortex of doom.  My fingers can bend just enough to tap at the keys in search of Hoffman news, then “hand and foot syndrome and chemo,” then “triple negative breast cancer,” then “statistics of breast cancer survival.”  Within a few clicks, I’ve bought a book with a chapter called “Preparing for the End.”

Later in the evening, as the Superbowl unfolds on the front-room television, I direct my melancholic shuffle toward Hannah in the hallway and ask if I can borrow one of her make-up removal wipes.  She brings it to me, her eyes almost level with mine, her hair swept up in a topknot to show her bare, thin neck stretching in earnestness.

“How should I wash my face now?” she asks, blinking.

“Like you usually do?”

“But this is the last one.”  Her eyes well up.  “But you can have it because you have cancer and I can’t take away a face wipe from someone with cancer and I’ll just cry if you don’t use it just because now you know it’s my last one.”  She blinks again, brown eyes the size of moon pies, fat curls of lashes glistening.  Really, those lashes.  She was born with them.

Luna moth-like in their velocity when they bat.  They used to attract strangers in grocery stores and restaurants.

“My god those lashes!”

“I know.”

“That one will always get her way.”

“I know.”

So I tell Hannah she can have the last wipe if she can help me wash my face with a warm rag.  She takes the wipe back and follows me to the bathroom where we stand toe to toe on the gray rug as the sink faucet runs.  “Is this warm enough?” she asks me, touching my chin with the edge of a wet, pink washrag.

“Yep.”

Eyes closed, I shimmy my hat back just enough to reveal my forehead but not the sparse stubble at the edge.  Hannah’s not fond of the bald head, unlike the Firecracker who’ll sometimes pop my hat off and call me Caillou or rub the top to see if it still feels like the shorn belly of our Shih-Tzu.

“This is like being at the salon,” I say as Hannah dabs the rag at my cheeks.

But it’s not like that at all, I’m thinking.  I’m thinking this is that essay she’s going to write one day in tenth grade about the saddest thing she’s ever had to do in life, the essay that begins with something like, “my mom with her eyes closed looking all dead and stuff while I wiped her face clean.”

But after she’s done and I say “thank you,” she replies in a sing-song voice “you’re welcome” before pivoting on her tiptoes to walk away and I realize that’s probably not what she was thinking at all.  Maybe she was thinking how grown-up it felt to be able to help.  Maybe she was thinking how glad she was I didn’t use her last make-up wipe.  Who knows, but I decide then that maybe I’m not Frankenstein’s creature to anyone else but me at my worst.  And I decide there are different sorts of slim margins I also fit – the slim margin whose cancer responds so quickly to treatment, for one.  Mine, after all, is one place, one small mass that’s at least halfway gone already.  Then the swollen hands and feet I thought were in the slim margins of those that stay this way forever begin to ease back to their usual proportions again.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

Day 72

+Read more

When I spoke to Jody on the phone she encouraged my confidence in her acupuncture services because she used the word “evil” when I mentioned “cancer” and “chemo.”  Last week, I had … a vision?  I don’t want to say the word “vision” because it makes me think of Dirty Steve in Young Guns warbling out at half-speed, “Did you see the size of that chicken?”  I was dozing off at any rate, and I imagined without trying (okay, call it a vision if you want) that chemo was a lanky woman in a cheap feather boa leaning on an elbow, flicking the nails on one raised hand together, looking back at me with her brows aslant in mock pity.  I’ve worried that my animosity toward the chemo might manifest itself more deeply, might make my body resist the work of the chemo every two weeks.  So I’ve been trying not to see chemo as evil at all, but when Jody made the connection I thought, this is the acupuncturist for me.

“How about January second?” I asked her.   “Do you have anything then?”

“Oh no no no no no.  Too busy.  Everyone wants to come have acupuncture for the New Year.”

“Oh,” I sank with the phone on the sofa.  The “oh” might have even registered as a sigh, a static burst in Jody’s ear on the other end of the line.  “I’ll call another time then.”  I really wanted January 2 because that’s the day before chemo treatment number three, which I’ve heard was an optimum time for acupuncture.

Then Jody blurted out before I could disconnect, “What about nine in the morning?”

“On the second?”

“Yes yes yes.”

When I hustled across the parking lot this morning in my pea coat and scarf and knee-high red boots, I expected to fling back Jody’s office door to a full room.  There wasn’t anyone except Jody, poised to answer her own office phone that never rang, her hands folded expectantly over the receiver in its cradle.  I told her I had an appointment, that I was a little early.  I thought she might need to look me up on the computer that didn’t seem to exist on the sparse desk, so I gave her my name.  She nodded.

“Remind me why you’re here,” she said, sitting straight in her swivel seat, her hands on the phone, her shoulders taut under a white lab coat.

“Uh.  Acupuncture?”

“For why?”

“Oh!  Yeah.  I’m currently undergoing chemo for breast cancer.  That’s why.”

“Why are you so smiley and happy?” she asked, sitting back in the chair, her fingertips leaving the phone.  “You have cancer!”

My open, silent mouth framed a circle, and somewhere in this circle, skirting the void, was that old joke of Mel Brooks’: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”  The “I” and “you” in that quote seems immaterial to me.  I come from a long line of morbid vaudevillian would-bes, anyway,  a grandpa, for instance, who liked to say, “I don’t buy green bananas these days,” with a poke of an elbow in the nearest set of ribs.  Maybe that’s why I was smiling, because this was so unfunny it was funny, because in my mind chemo is played by Carol Burnett from Annie.





Jody didn’t look like she had a sense of humor, though.  Her brows were in a permanent knit as if everything in the world – from the plastic areca palm to the acupuncture pamphlet rack to the phone – was on the verge of exploding.  She proceeded to tell me about some lady upstairs with breast cancer oof.  Then she wanted to know my entire story, from annual visit to mammogram to biopsy to oncologist and how long they gave me to live because she was sure it was three or five years, and I was thinking, shouldn’t we get a move on before your onslaught of post-New Year patients get here?  But Jody came around the desk to sit with me in the waiting room and listen.

“I’m going to live old enough to hold my friend Andrea’s teeth in a jar in the old lady home for artists.  We’ve made a pact,” I explained.

And when I told her how chemo will shrink the tumor so it can be, as my surgeon says, swiftly and elegantly removed – like Sean Young from the Oscar red carpet or something – Jody reaches into my sweater to assess the lump for herself.  There we sit in the waiting room.  My boob in Jody’s hand.  Now do you see why cancer is funny?

“Oh yes,” she says.  “Good size, the lump.”

She tells me about her years practicing gynecology in China, and I learn more than I need to know about her sister’s vagina which she shapes with forefinger pressed to thumb, exactly the way that I shape a deer with antlers while playing shadow puppets with the Firecracker.  All this time, they were really vaginas.

Then a half hour later Jody puts hands to knees to rise.

“Well?” she looks back at me.  “Are you just here to look pretty or you want acupuncture?”

So into the apparent acupuncture room we went.  No special robes.  No tinkly music.  A table.  Something that looked like a microwave.  That was it.

“Pants off.  Socks off,” she said with a flip of her hand.

When I was stretched bare-legged on the table, Jody told me how I needed a second opinion.  Maybe a third.  Because she was convinced I needed to dispense with this whole chemo nonsense and have a full mastectomy because I was going to die in three to five years.  Somehow her sister’s vagina was the reason.  There was a long story, anyway, about IUDs and cancer and radiation and loose stools.  “When she has to make pooh, she has to make pooh, you know?”  And then, “These long legs!  Your husband must love you.  But get a second opinion.  And a third.”

She opened a package of acupuncture needles like fumbling with a box of Mike and Ikes at the movies, an audible rip finally issuing forth.  I made a point not to look at the size of them, being somewhat needle-phobic.  And when she began, pushing my sweater hem up and out of the way, tapping a needle into my stomach and then turning it three times, I’m thinking, Good God, I thought this wasn’t supposed to hurt. Everything I’d read said it wasn’t.  But it did when Jody drove one in.  Each and every one.  When she hit a nerve around my ankle, I winced and said, “That one really hurts.”

“Oh,” she said.  “That’s just the bad chi wanting out.”

And when she twisted it three times, it felt like all of my insides were winding tightly around it and I feared I might run out howling into the cold parking lot, half-naked and bristling with needles.  She held my feet in her hands for second and asked, “Are they always so cold?”  And before I could answer, she screwed a needle into the bottom of each one.  “There,” she said.  “Better.”  She gingerly patted the tops of my curled toes and moved around to scoot something closer to the edge of her cart, some kind of box from which she unwound tiny jumper cable pinchers.

I’d researched electroacupuncture, and that wasn’t at all what I signed up for, but before I could protest, my legs were dancing by themselves on the tabletop.

“Oh, oh too much!” she said, adjusting the dials.

Then my legs danced only a little.  The bottoms of my feet throbbed with tingly pops I swear I could hear.

“Good for your energy,” Jody said, bending the neck of an ultraviolet lamp to hover inches from my stomach.  “Good for your digestion.”

And then she left me to answer the phone that finally rang.

Okay, I thought, this is going to be great for my energy, which is why I’m here.

And I tried not to think of the digestion part and Jody shaping her sister’s slack colon with both of her hands about twenty minutes before.  Instead, as electricity sizzled down my limbs from pin to pin, I thought of Frankenstein’s monsters zapping to life in the James Whale films my friend Duke and I had just critiqued for Halloween only one month before my diagnosis, when monsters were just monsters on screen.





Thirty minutes later, Jodi returned to remove the needles and tell me again how and why I needed a second and third opinion.  She made me promise her I’d do it.  She made me promise I’d come back.  She seemed so lonely, Jody, in her empty acupuncture office.  I felt badly for making promises I was going to break.

“Get dressed,” she said, with another flip of her hand as if she knew this too, the door falling shut after her.

And when I leaned to reach for my jeans I noticed that my stomach had a sunburn splotch and she’d left two pins in — the ones in the bottoms of my feet.  I’ve had two recurring panic dreams in my life.  In one, I’m holding all of my own teeth and not in a jar but in bloody fistfuls.  In another, I’m pulling shards out of my foot soles.  At least these are slender needles, slender at their points.  At least I could imagine, as I cringed to pluck one needle free, that something dark slipped loose too, loose into the room, Chemo Carol slumping over the armrest of a chair, or maybe, maybe even cancer.  

I left the two needles, thick on the ends as bolts, rolling across the cart top.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

+Read more

Last Halloween, I’d asked a few Nervous Breakdown contributors to share their favorite terrifying movie scenes, and D. R. Haney was among them with his contribution from Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I, on the other hand, had picked the tunnel scene from Willy Wonka, which I explain so you understand why I like collaborating with Duke. My brain grows three sizes bigger by association. He’s like a cinematic moral compass for which true north is James Dean. And this year for Halloween, Duke and I decided to discuss the classic tale that produced another old-school Hollywood icon.

Read the rest here.