Free Habit by Susan Morse Page B

morning comes and Ma and I get the cage all to ourselves again.
    I think it would be good to skip the details of how two or three weeks’ accumulations of digested matter are safely and painlessly moved past a largish tumor when you are old and unable to get out of bed unassisted. Ma says the aides at Huntingdon are saints.
    What strikes me right away is how much more there is to this place than I saw at first. There’s the cozy area where they get you to sign up, and then there are the treatment areas: the dreaded infusion room with its rows of dentist chairs and individual TVs to watch while you get your chemo. There’s the radiation area in the basement with its thick concrete walls. Now, we seem to have hopscotched over everything to the place with the beds, where the struggle is so much more immediate and real. In an ordinary hospital, our paranoia could be eased by happy sights: mothers being wheeled outside with newborns; flowers and bobbing balloons; orthopedic patients with casts on their legs. But this hospital is exclusively for cancer and now Ma has moved, hopefully temporarily, to the place you go when you might be dying. The hallways and rooms are very quiet and sacred, like a tomb, and they seem to go on for miles and miles and miles.
    There’s a very sick old woman in the next bed who is not up to socializing with her own revolving flow of visitors: saucer-eyed grandchildren and anxious adult offspring, optimistically approving procedures on her behalf. When they all step outside, the woman moans and protests to the aides that she has had enough. This has made Ma think serious thoughts, and she’s asked Father Basil to come down from Carlisle. She wants me to meet him, so I work another quick trip to Huntingdon into my tight round of interviews at assisted-living places in anticipation of her release and the beginning of radiation.
    I had been instructing myself all day to be on good behavior, and not to overreact if Father Basil turns out to be all pompous and patronizing. Not just because I’m not Orthodox and who knows what Ma’s been telling him about my heathen ways, but because I am a woman and I don’t like what I hear about the role of women in this church.
    My first contact with Orthodoxy was in L.A. I was filming Deadly Intentions, a TV miniseries based on the true story of a Sweet Young Greek Orthodox Girl (Madolyn Smith, the Other Woman in Urban Cowboy ) who marries a Charming Young Doctor (Michael Biehn, from the first Terminator ) with a Mysteriously Creepy Mother (Cloris Leachman—my favorite in Young Frankenstein ). Things go downhill quickly when the Doctor turns out to be a Raving Lunatic trying to poison Madolyn and stuff, and she has to escape with the Baby in the nick of time.
    I was playing the Spunky But Loyal Best Friend Who Suspects Before Anyone Else That Something Is Amiss. We filmed the wedding scene in a gorgeous Greek Orthodox church somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. When I got into my pink chiffon bridesmaid’s gown a little too early for hair and makeup (Cloris’s character wore white to her son’s wedding, which should have been a tip-off), I slipped in to check out the church. The priest who would be performing the filmed ceremony offered a tour. This was long before Ma became Orthodox and I didn’t know much of anything, but I was really impressed by the gold leaf all over the place, the wide Byzantine arches and the beautiful, vivid colors on the walls, with fantastically detailed old icons everywhere. What sort of turned me off, though, was when I asked if I could see behind the altar.
    The priest said no. No women were allowed back there. I know from Ma that the women and men are separated during church services; they stand on opposite sides. Since I am most emphatically in accord with the team in the Episcopal Church that approves not just women but openly gay and lesbian priests and bishops, I’ve got a pretty