Charles Bock: Alice & Oliver

That afternoon, the sky was heavy-handed in its grayness, the wind blowing the hail sideways in unending sheets. By the time Oliver found the weathered woodcut pole that the nurses had told him to watch out for, his clothes had long gone damp, his face and hands turned numb. None of the old men turned from their shaving chairs. Oliver picked through the newspaper’s meager sections, not daring to interrupt banter about the weather.

The wind’s bluster had eased into a mild, overcast evening. The baby dozing, Grandma as well. Visitors to the room were supposed to wear surgical mask and gloves. But in the recliner, Grandma’s head was unadorned, tilted back, her mouth open wide enough to reveal gold fillings. Alice responded to the door’s creak but appeared groggy, confused. Then her eyes went wide, her swollen jaw dropped as if unhinged.

“I wanted you to see it’s just hair,” Oliver said.

Her hands went over her heart. It seemed she would bawl.

“It’ll grow out or it won’t,” Oliver continued. “Who gives a fuck.”

“The most wonderful thing anybody’s done in the history of time,” Alice said. She threw both arms outward, set the IV machine jiggling. “Get over here, silly man. Let me feel, already.”

That night he would borrow the electric shears kept at the nurses’ station. Alice’s hair was more than ready, releasing easily, some clumps falling from vibrations alone. His wife had a long-standing fondness for brightly colored streaks, exotic highlights, any tweak that might lend a bit of glamour. For important gallery openings, industry parties, or runway shows, it was assumed that a chunk of her afternoon would be devoted to some complexly pinned arrangement, be it chopsticks, feathery wisps, or exotic braiding, whatever the most stylish magazines would be cooing over in six months. Less than three minutes it took now to shave her skull.

Afterward they perched the baby between them in the crowded bed, her head its own pink planet, practically the size of the rest of her body. What few hairs she had were still short and translucent, their swirling growth pattern forming an almost imperceptible crop circle on the top of her head. Alice’s mom fetched an overpriced disposable camera from the gift shop. Oliver pulled his little surgical mask down around his neck. He and Alice leaned their shoulders into one another. Doe gurgled, cooed, kicked out chubby legs.

“There they are.” The nurse counted backward toward the flash. “The perfect, bald family.”

—

Some things, however, were Alice’s alone: the way those tiny lips attached themselves to her areola; how the ridge of those gums wrapped around her nipple; holding the baby’s head to her and listening to the soft gurgles, feeling the sensation of her pull and suckle. Through the first five months of her life, Doe had known only her mother’s milk. But the cells in Alice’s bloodstream changed that. The chemo made her milk toxic.

Obstetrics sent a machine that looked like something out of fifties sci-fi, and when Alice’s breasts got too full, she applied the ancient vacuum’s suction attachment and performed a distorted version of her normal routine. A nurse in a blue mask, gloves, and lead-lined radiation gown carried away the results for hermetic disposal.

Without much fuss, Alice’s mother went out and purchased formula from the Olde Town Apothecary. A tenth-grade English teacher for more than thirty years, Alice’s mother was a pragmatic, thoughtful woman. Her daughter insisted, so she had to venture out a second time, scouring the few health food stores for something more natural. It took four days until Alice was sure Doe smelled different. Chemical-y. This new smell made Alice weep, and her body was weak enough that these jags became their own sources of pain. She couldn’t help herself. She wept because Doe hadn’t ever had a diaper rash before and would now. She wept because her baby still reached for Mommy’s chest, and began her own bawling when she wasn’t allowed to attach. She wept remembering how raw her nipples used to get, and she wept because, with every passing minute, they were getting less raw. At three in the morning, when a nurse came around to take her vital signs, Alice wept with the memory of the body weight of her girl by her side — rustling, half-awakening — the memory of plopping a breast into the little one’s mouth. Whipping out the feeding curtain at Dean & DeLuca. Leakage spreading through silk-screened maternity blouses. Those nursing bras that she knew her husband so despised.

—

The visiting doctor from Eastern Europe had a habit of snacking on junk food in the hallways, and this was humanizing to Oliver, especially seeing that the man consistently seemed gracious toward other hospital staffers, so catching up with him outside the nurses’ station, using words and mannerisms that included everything short of falling onto his knees and pulling down the guy’s pants, Oliver pretty much begged for a promising survival rate, some crack of light, a taste that would help them get through this. “I mean, she’s stabilizing, and we started the chemo, so…”

With the same flat tone that his esteemed colleague had used to tell Alice that her hair was going to fall out, the attending told Oliver these words: “Cancer is hell of disease.”

—

Teen years: lonely Bakersfield afternoons, his dad pounding dents out of cars all day in a glorified salvage yard, Mom making copies for an accountant, the stink of fertilizer constant, industrial farmland as far as the eye could see. His escape was a home computer store in a strip mall, Oliver learning code from his cousin’s dad, who needed to distract himself from the paucity of people who were shelling out money for Commodore PETs and Atari home systems. Even before partial scholarships had gotten Oliver out of that cow town and across the country, allowing him to bust his ass through college and graduate school, his intellectual life — even his understanding of himself — had begun maturing, in no small part, because of his relationship with complexity. Those tedious hours he spent with infinitesimal units, information strings of code, copying the program for another adventure game, whose line progressions were listed in the back pages of Byte magazine. This, Oliver learned, was how massive, elegant structures were constructed. And, gradually, he became accustomed to converting the theoretical into something practical and sturdy and cleanly perfect.

It was gut-churning to hear that man say, Cancer is hell of disease. What felt worse, however — wrong in a way that betrayed everything Oliver believed about the cosmos — was the recognition. A doctor involved with his wife’s treatment was openly admiring the elegant complexity eating at her bones and blood.

Comrade Doctor put his hands up. “I try again—” he said.

Damaged English followed. “As personal, I try avoid telling person news he cannot take.” The doctor continued, sharing his belief that honest assessment represent measure of respect, as well as importance give loving ones information so to be prepare selves .

“You’re telling me…” Oliver began, petered out.

“First hundred days,” the man answered.

“What?”

“We see how she doing. Get sense how things going. Know more.” He patted Oliver’s shoulder. “Hundred days.”

Whitman Memorial, 1220 York Ave., 4th floor, Hematology/Oncology (follow-up appointment: patient background/personal history)

He couldn’t afford one of the office supply company’s high-end jobbers, so he’d sprung for your solid, middle-of-the-road, basic ergonomic desk chair. This was what he sat in. As for his diet, he tried, he really did, loading up on greens and boiled chicken, although he still snuck in red meats and fried calamari, more than he’d care to admit. Ever since kids had come into the picture, he’d been lucky to get to the gym once a fortnight. Admittedly he could have dropped fifteen pounds. Twenty pounds. So, basically he was a middle-aged somewhat-overweight white-collar dad going through the rite of manly passage known as chronic back pain. Maybe not a human interest feature in the local paper. But his spasms sure felt newsworthy. Had to pile throw cushions on that desk chair just to sit; pop Advils like they were candies just to get through the day. And rolling around on the carpet with Timothy and Suzy Jo? Please. Then his wife had heard about this acupuncturist from another mom at playgroup. And he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, but he let them put those pins into both sides of his neck, his shoulders, his elbows, his kidneys, his sacrum, the bottom of each foot, the space between each pair of toes. Afterward, he defecated for the first time in four days. Went home and slept like a stone at the bottom of the ocean.