Tuesday Morning
We are laughing too much for the chemotherapy infusion room, which is inappropriate, we know, obnoxious even, but we’ve lost control of the thing and are now heaving and crying and gasping for air and when you wipe your eyes, you accidentally wipe off part of an eyebrow and I point this out, which means we lose it all over again and it is exhausting and glorious, laughing like this, and also very, very on brand, because I can’t remember a time when we weren’t talking (I was an especially verbal child, you used to say proudly, my first words like a river between us that never ran dry: not when I was a teenager, not when you and Dad got divorced and you were reliving your twenties, going to strip clubs with your new boyfriend, telling me breathless details over the phone) and at the hospital this year the nurses often ask if we are sisters (which you love and I don’t because I am thirty-two and you are sixty-two) and you are one of their favorite patients because you are warm and a little bit weird and you remember everyone’s names, always, and you match your wig to your underwear, pulling up the waistband of your briefs to prove it, which is silly and endearing and one more way that you are the loveliest person I know—and today nurse Anne (who you greet by name) is putting in your IV and asking the usual questions about nausea and neuropathy and when you had your last blood draw, which makes you pause for a moment to think before replying that your last blow job was Tuesday morning, which makes us pause for a moment to think, the mistake hovering in the air, before Anne decides to ignore it and just enter the date into the computer, but I do not choose to ignore it and instead give you a look, which you respond to with another look—one that clearly means, did I just say blow job—which I answer with a raised eyebrow, well, Tuesday morning sounds like it was fun, and that’s when we lose it, that’s when the laughter takes over and we are nothing but heaving shoulders and gasping and tears and when, next year, you are gone and I’m the one in the chemotherapy chair, this memory will rush over me and flood my eyes and all I will want in the world is to tell you about it.
Shannon Cram is the author of Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and The Politics of Impossibility, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in River Teeth, Moss, Fugue, Public Culture, and elsewhere. She teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
