This Is Not About Us: Fiction Large type / Large print Edition

Apple Cake

Her sisters flinched because she was the youngest, but she looked so old. Jeanne was just seventy-four, and no one ever thought . . . ​They didn’t speak of it. They would not allow themselves, but Helen was eighty, Sylvia seventy-eight. They’d married first, been mothers first. They were older. They should have been frailer. How could Jeanne be first to go?

In the Brooklyn house, their baby lay propped up on pillows. Jeanne, who had celebrated her first birthday in eyelet lace, a slice of cake on the tray of her high chair, and her sisters on either side. Their living doll with her blond curls and round blue eyes. In the mountains, in Kaaterskill, they’d pulled her in their wagon over grass bumpy with apples from the apple tree. Later, when the family moved to Boston and the Brookline house, Helen and Sylvia had walked their little sister to school. Now it was dreadful to approach her—hair just wisps, voice nearly gone, her cough breaking every sentence. Horror, pity, shame. Jeanne’s older sisters felt all that at once, to see her now and to remember her as she had been. They were sorry and they were glad to feel so alive, steps firm in their low-heeled shoes. Their own bodies sound, rejoicing with each breath. What a terrible thing to say! They would never admit it. Their own strength, their good fortune, and their guilt—they could never put it into words. No one should!

“How are you, darling?” Helen asked.

Jeanne didn’t answer.

“Did you see the orchid Richard sent?” Sylvia turned a tall white orchid toward Jeanne’s chair.

Jeanne looked briefly at her nephew’s gift. There were so many flowers. Blossoms filled the first-floor music studio where Jeanne had to live because she couldn’t take the stairs. The orchid from Richard, the sunflowers from her daughter-in-law, Melanie, the roses from the Auerbachs next door. Wherever she looked, she saw arrangements. The piano tuner had sent a basket of mums, which were losing petals, shedding everywhere. The cards said, “All our love,” and “Thinking of you,” and even “Healing light.” This from her niece Wendy, the music therapist.

“Look how beautiful they are.” Sylvia meant, Do you see how much everybody cares for you?

Jeanne made a face. The flowers depressed her, especially those already wilting. When she looked at the mums, she felt she wasn’t dying fast enough.

Her sisters sat chattering about the heat, the traffic, and the rain. They were afraid to leave her alone—although she had lived by herself for years, a widow. She lived alone because she liked it. Her late husband had been difficult, to say the least.

According to her sons, Jeanne’s Tudor home was much too big. According to Phoebe, her twenty-year-old granddaughter, Jeanne’s house wasted energy. For years, everybody had been telling Jeanne to move. Now nobody mentioned it.

These were the privileges of hospice. You didn’t have to blow insulation into your walls. No one suggested assisted living, or criticized your carbon footprint, which would disappear entirely in weeks, or even days. On the other hand, everyone came to see you and confide in you. Jeanne didn’t believe in God or any kind of afterlife, but lung cancer made believers of her family, so that she, who despised superstition, became touchstone and talisman for the rest of them. Her sisters were always pressing her cold hands.

Helen told Jeanne, “Pam and Wendy are coming up this weekend.”

Jeanne nodded.

“Richard’s coming too,” said Sylvia. Her only child was having a terrible time, switching jobs, divorcing, and she felt he deserved credit for dropping everything to see his aunt. Pam was coming up from Providence, and Wendy lived in Brooklyn, but Richard was driving all the way from Philly.

Jeanne closed her eyes and listened to her sisters say she’s tired. She’s exhausted. She heard them echo and repeat each other. She has to rest. Yes, she has to rest. She was looking at the sun, red through her closed eyelids.

That autumn red felt good, but dark was better, because everybody left except for Shawn, the night nurse. Then Jeanne lay awake in her rented hospital bed and listened to symphonies and choral rhapsodies, quartets, concertos on WCRB, Boston’s Classical Radio. When she heard a solo violin, her fingers curled reflexively; her left hand knew.

Her sons had pushed away her music stands and moved the piano to make room for Shawn, now dozing in his straight-backed chair. Jeanne imagined he had another job during the day, and she saw that he was trying to study as well. He was always reading a textbook, but he never got far. Just before dawn, the book slipped off his lap onto the floor.

Shawn started up and saw Jeanne staring at him from her bed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, ma’am.” He bent down for the book.

She said, “You rest.”

“No, I’m here if you need something.”

“Sleep.”

His eyes widened. There was no way he was going back to sleep. He’d lose his job.

“I’ll let you know if anything happens,” Jeanne said.

Her sons and their wives came to see her every afternoon. First Steve and Andrea would sit by her side. Andrea showed videos on her phone of their huge boys, born just eighteen months apart, lion cubs who played high school soccer. They were coming to see Jeanne right after practice. Andrea was going to drive them straight from the field, cleats and all.

Next came Dan and Melanie. They had just the one daughter, Phoebe. Melanie had gained fifty pounds when she was pregnant. She never had another child, and she never lost the weight. “Phoebe sends her love,” said Melanie.

Dan explained, “She wants to be here, but she won’t fly.”

Jeanne tried to picture her ecological granddaughter biking from Ann Arbor. She couldn’t help laughing as she imagined Phoebe’s long blond hair streaming out from under her helmet. Jeanne’s breath came short and quick. For a few moments she couldn’t breathe at all, and then she couldn’t see. With help from her nurse, Lorraine, Jeanne sat up, and wiped tears from her eyes.

“What’s so funny?” asked Dan.

Melanie said, “She wants to study eco-poetry.”

“Stop!” said Jeanne because she was laughing again, and her lungs couldn’t take it.

Dan and Melanie looked crushed, and Jeanne felt sorry for them—but why did everyone expect her to be so concerned?

Illness did not bring out the angel in her. At first she had appreciated visitors, but as she lingered on, they didn’t leave. Her sisters kept bringing in their middle-aged children—for what? Goodbyes? Advice? Some final blessing? Sylvia begged, “Tell Richard to stop smoking!”

Oh really, Jeanne thought. That’s what I am. Exhibit A. She studied her ruddy nephew. His wife had just won custody of the children and the dog. “I enjoyed smoking,” said Jeanne. “Your mother did too.”

Sylvia shrank back as though Jeanne had struck her, but she said nothing. It was too late, apparently, to retaliate.

Jeanne’s sons returned, and they looked terrible, both of them. Dan wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was thick in the middle, and he had hardly any hair. It amused and saddened Jeanne to see him look so much like his late father. As for Steve, he had a bad back, so he had to walk around the room. He made Jeanne dizzy, pacing up and down.

Her daughters-in-law got emotional—especially Melanie, herself a doctor. Please, thought Jeanne. I lost both my parents by the time I was your age.

She pretended to sleep, and then she really did drop off. When she woke, her sisters hovered over her. Some of us have overstayed our welcome, Jeanne thought—and then, with sudden shock—no—I’m the one. That would be me.

Sardonic as she was, husk that she’d become, she shuddered to disappear, to lose consciousness and irony, her music, her unrenovated house, her sun. Cancer had consumed her body; drugs clouded her mind. Even so, Jeanne held on. Barely eating, scarcely speaking, Jeanne endured. Her nieces and her nephew sat with her. Wendy came to sing and strum her battered guitar. Jeanne’s soccer-playing grandsons arrived. Zach cracked his knuckles. Nate jiggled his right leg. The boys were all ears and feet.

The hospice nurses said that Jeanne would drift away in just a day or two, but four days passed, and then a fifth. It was awkward, because her sons had to take off work, and her grandchildren could only miss so many days of school. Should they stay, or should they go? Did it make sense to return home and then come right back for the funeral?

Helen said, “We need a plan.” Oldest and bossiest, she told Jeanne, “We need to know your wishes.”

“To get well,” Jeanne said immediately.

Later in the hall, Sylvia turned on Helen. “How could you speak to her like that?”

Helen drew herself up. “Well, we can’t ask her what she wants when she is gone!”

Sylvia began to cry.

“Don’t get hysterical,” snapped Helen.

“I’m not hysterical. I have feelings. Be considerate.”