Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“Life’s a big problem,” agrees the Mother. Part of her welcomes and invites all their tales. In the few long days since this nightmare began, part of her has become addicted to disaster and war stories. She wants only to hear about the sadness and emergencies of others. They are the only situations that can join hands with her own; everything else bounces off her shiny shield of resentment and unsympathy. Nothing else can even stay in her brain. From this, no doubt, the philistine world is made, or should one say recruited? Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge — no need to watch Oprah . They leave Oprah in the dust. Oprah has nothing on them. They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars , in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them.

Some of their friends visit with stuffed animals and soft greetings of “Looking good” for the dozing baby, though the room is way past the stuffed-animal limit. The Mother arranges, once more, a plateful of Mint Milano cookies and cups of take-out coffee for guests. All her nutso pals stop by — the two on Prozac, the one obsessed with the word penis in the word happiness , the one who recently had her hair foiled green. “Your friends put the de in fin de siècle ,” says the Husband. Overheard, or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, though usually no one is.

She loves her friends, especially loves them for coming, since there are times they all fight and don’t speak for weeks. Is this friendship? For now and here, it must do and is, and is, she swears it is. For one, they never offer impromptu spiritual lectures about death, how it is part of life, its natural ebb and flow, how we all must accept that, or other such utterances that make her want to scratch out some eyes. Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter “Jesus Christ!” and shake their heads. Plus, they are the only people who not only will laugh at her stupid jokes but offer up stupid ones of their own. What do you get when you cross Tiny Tim with a pit bull? A child’s illness is a strain on the mind. They know how to laugh in a fluty, desperate way — unlike the people who are more her husband’s friends and who seem just to deepen their sorrowful gazes, nodding their heads with Sympathy. How exiling and estranging are everybody’s Sympathetic Expressions! When anyone laughs, she thinks, Okay! Hooray: a buddy. In disaster as in show business.

Nurses come and go; their chirpy voices both startle and soothe. Some of the other Peed Onk parents stick their heads in to see how the Baby is and offer encouragement.

Green Hair scratches her head. “Everyone’s so friendly here. Is there someone in this place who isn’t doing all this airy, scripted optimism — or are people like that the only people here?”

“It’s Modern Middle Medicine meets the Modern Middle Family,” says the Husband. “In the Modern Middle West.”

Someone has brought in take-out lo mein, and they all eat it out in the hall by the elevators.

Parents are allowed use of the Courtesy Line.

“You’ve got to have a second child,” says a different friend on the phone, a friend from out of town. “An heir and a spare. That’s what: we did. We had another child to ensure we wouldn’t off ourselves if we lost our first.”

“Really?”

“I’m serious.”

“A formal suicide? Wouldn’t you just drink yourself into a lifelong stupor and let it go at that?”

“Nope. I knew how I would do it even. For a while, until our second came along, I had it all planned.”

“What did you plan?”

“I can’t go into too much detail, because — Hi, honey! — the kids are here now in the room. But I’ll spell out the general idea: R-O-P-E.”

Sunday evening, she goes and sinks down on the sofa in the Tiny Tim Lounge next to Frank, Joey’s father. He is a short, stocky man with the currentless, flatlined look behind the eyes that all the parents eventually get here. He has shaved his head bald in solidarity with his son. His little boy has been battling cancer for five years. It is now in the liver, and the rumor around the corridor is that Joey has three weeks to live. She knows that Joey’s mother, Heather, left Frank years ago, two years into the cancer, and has remarried and had another child, a girl named Brittany. The Mother sees Heather here sometimes with her new life — the cute little girl and the new, young, full-haired husband who will never be so maniacally and debilitatingly obsessed with Joey’s illness the way Frank, her first husband, was. Heather comes to visit Joey, to say hello and now good-bye, but she is not Joey’s main man. Frank is.

Frank is full of stories — about the doctors, about the food, about the nurses, about Joey. Joey, affectless from his meds, sometimes leaves his room and comes out to watch TV in his bathrobe. He is jaundiced and bald, and though he is nine, he looks no older than six. Frank has devoted the last four and a half years to saving Joey’s life. When the cancer was first diagnosed, the doctors gave Joey a 20 percent chance of living six more months. Now here it is, almost five years later, and Joey’s still here. It is all due to Frank, who, early on, quit his job as vice president of a consulting firm in order to commit himself totally to his son. He is proud of everything he’s given up and done, but he is tired. Part of him now really believes things are coming to a close, that this is the end. He says this without tears. There are no more tears.

“You have probably been through more than anyone else on this corridor,” says the Mother.

“I could tell you stories,” he says. There is a sour odor between them, and she realizes that neither of them has bathed for days.

“Tell me one. Tell me the worst one.” She knows he hates his ex-wife and hates her new husband even more.

“The worst? They’re all the worst. Here’s one: one morning, I went out for breakfast with my buddy — it was the only time I’d left Joey alone ever; left him for two hours is all — and when I came back, his N-G tube was full of blood. They had the suction on too high, and it was sucking the guts right out of him.”

“Oh my God. That just happened to us,” said the Mother.

“It did?”

“Friday night.”

“You’re kidding. They let that happen again? I gave them such a chewing-out about that!”

“I guess our luck is not so good. We get your very worst story on the second night we’re here.”

“It’s not: a bad place, though.”

“It’s not?”

“Naw. I’ve seen worse. I’ve taken Joey everywhere.”

“He seems very strong.” Truth is, at this point, Joey seems like a zombie and frightens her.

“Joey’s a fucking genius. A biological genius. They’d given him six months, remember.”

The Mother nods.

“Six months is not very long,” says Frank. “Six months is nothing. He was four and a half years old.”

All the words are like blows. She feels flooded with affection and mourning for this man. She looks away, out the window, out past the hospital parking lot, up toward the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon. “And now he’s nine,” she says. “You’re his hero.”

“And he’s mine,” says Frank, though the fatigue in his voice seems to overwhelm him. “He’ll be that forever. Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve got to go check. His breathing hasn’t been good. Excuse me.”

“Good news and bad,” says the Oncologist on Monday. He has knocked, entered the room, and now stands there. Their cots are unmade. One wastebasket is overflowing with coffee cups. “We’ve got the pathologist’s report. The bad news is that the kidney they removed had certain lesions, called ‘rests,’ which are associated with a higher risk for disease in the other kidney. The good news is that the tumor is stage one, regular cell structure, and under five hundred grams, which qualifies you for a national experiment in which chemotherapy isn’t done but your boy is monitored with ultrasound instead. It’s not all that risky, given that the patient’s watched closely, but here is the literature on it. There are forms to sign, if you decide to do that. Read all this and we can discuss it further. You have to decide within four days.”