Free One True Thing by Anna Quindlen Page B

guided me to the right sort of wax for the cherry bow-front chest or sent me out to buy cheese or berries, I felt as though I was sinking beneath the weight of a life I had always viewed with something even more dismissive than contempt, a life I had viewed as though it were a feature in
National Geographic
, the anachronistic traditions of a distant tribe.
    It was a world without men, too, with my brothers gone away and my father scarcely there, letting my mother take care of her own disintegration as she’d taken care of her house, her children, the life which she had devoted to him.
    “I know what you’re saying,” I told Jules. “I know someday I’ll be able to walk away from this. But what if I just get back into it again? What if I marry Jon and it turns out that what he really expects is a suburban matron who knits sweaters for his children?”
    “What Jon will want in his first wife is the kind of woman who runs charity luncheons and hires good staff. His second wife will be the trophy wife, the one who designs jewelry or something and wears leather pants.”
    “You’ve just reduced three lives to a set of clichés,” I said. “And one of them is mine.”
    “True clichés, El. And I’m betting that one of them won’t beyours. I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on Jon, but how often has he called you? How often has he written? When will he come to visit? Your mother needs you and you need him and he’s nowhere to be found.”
    Jules was right; Jon had called only twice since I had come home. But I did not care much. The Ellen Jon knew was the other Ellen, the one who always shone with the luster of success. The Ellen who sat in the hospital corridor with Kate Gulden was inevitably a loser; after all her triumphs, this endeavor was doomed to failure.
    One afternoon in early October we went to the big mall outside of town and across the racks at one store my mother saw a woman who had once been part of the group that decorated the village green for holidays—the Minnies, they called themselves, after the childless Mrs. Langhorne.
    “Oh, Ellen, do you remember Sheila Fenner? She was in the Minnies when you were in high school.”
    “And I miss it,” said Mrs. Fenner. “But I’m a working woman now, and there’s no time for anything but the grandkids and Bill’s dinner, and even that comes out of the microwave. But look at you, Kate, you’re a shadow. When did you lose so much weight? You’re a bone.”
    “Oh, you know,” said my mother shrugging. “Running around. Keeping up with Ellen.”
    “Weight Watchers?” said Mrs. Fenner archly.
    My mother looked at me sideways. She knew what I would say if left to my own devices: “No, Mrs. Fenner, it’s the chemotherapy plan. A delicious shake for breakfast, one for lunch, an IV in your chest at teatime, and before you know it you weigh ninety pounds.”
    “No,” said my mother, “I hate those plans. The food is just awful.”
    “Well, it’s nice to see you,” Mrs. Fenner said. “And Ellen. Jill said she saw your byline in a magazine a while ago. That must be terribly exciting.” I smiled. “Jill’s husband is at Cornell MedicalSchool. I wish he’d finish up so they could get out of the city. I just worry terribly. Where do you live?”
    “Greenwich Village,” said my mother.
    “Lovely. And how are the Minnies?” added Mrs. Fenner, in the slightly condescending way we speak of the lives whose usefulness we have outlived.
    “I’m having them over for lunch next week,” my mother said.

 
     
    H ow I remember that lunch for the Minnies. Years later, when I was on call at the hospital, when my scalp began to feel rank and gritty and my face slack after a night of screaming and suffering and pleas for painkillers on the medical wards, I would try to gauge my fatigue and always I would come back to the same basis for comparison: I was as sweaty and drained as I had been at the end of the day I cooked for those women, the day