What We Have by Amy Boesky

Author:Amy Boesky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Published: 2010-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

Two Calendars

CALENDARS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIES. Ours, for instance, got completely overhauled in the 1580s. Pope Gregory dropped eleven days in order to realign man time and star time, resetting the year to start in January instead of March. One by one, most European countries went along with the changes, but England (and a few other Protestant countries) held out. For the next century and a half, England kept the old calendar, cut off from the rest of Europe by eleven days. If you traveled, like lots of merchants did, you needed to keep two calendars in your head at once. A little like flying to Tokyo from Boston, except that instead of moving forward fourteen hours, you had to move back eleven days. And then forward again.

Pope Gregory’s calendar was on my mind that summer, because once we learned my mother was sick, we lived in two calendars at once. In Calendar One, life went on. It was June. Realtors came over with prospective buyers; Sandi came, we looked at houses; I went over to my new department to fill out paperwork; I got names of child-care agencies from Annie’s sister. Summer settled in, hot and dull. In the late afternoons, the sky turned the color of a bruise, thunder rattled the house, and Sacha, six months now, scuttled across the shag like a beetle, tried to pull herself up on things, and fell back down again with a surprised grunt.

Sara, Julie, and I strategized, trying to map out visits home. Sara was reorganizing summer plans so she could come out and stay for several weeks, from late June to mid-July. Living so far away, one longer stay made sense for her. Julie and I were already scheduled to fly in for the Fourth of July. But when we heard the news, we decided to go in that next weekend as well. We knew there wasn’t anything we could really do, but we thought we could cheer them up. Lend moral support.

Our plans were made in the old calendar, Calendar One, but they took place in Calendar Two, Cancer Calendar, which had no fixed beginning or end, no set months or days. This was the calendar that governed now. Here, things happened at the same time as other things, preceded other events, superseded or even erased them. It was like trying to keep track of time on an Etch A Sketch. Dr. Brenner and Megace and the call my father got back from Mayo from the oncologists who reviewed her scans and the multiple phone calls to multiple experts that friends of friends knew at Sloan-Kettering or at the Farber—all these took place in Cancer Calendar, which, though none of us would admit it, was not only unstable but somehow inverted, a counting away from what we all knew as real.

Sometimes, the two calendars overlapped: Northwest Airlines, Boston to Detroit, Terminal D, Friday, June 12, 11:00 AM.

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