Michael Kardos
Training
All the Ashkenazi women were cutting off their breasts. I knew this was the proper word, though Andy Meltzer called them boobs and Ian Marcus called them tits and Ronnie Goldman called them cartons for a reason lost to me until he puckered up and mooed. A year earlier, on a sunny, cold fall day, I had stood in the Mount Sinai cemetery to watch my grandmother get buried. I remembered looking around at the nearby tombstones. My relatives going back two generations had paid in advance for a number of plots—for those now deceased as well as for those who hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Looking at the dates, I was unsettled by all the people in my family who had died young. My grandmother’s sister had been thirty-two. My mother’s cousin had been forty-nine. Lifespans were shorter back then, I told myself, but this seemed excessive.
Less than a year later, my father was sitting me and my sister, Michelle, down, my mother beside him, and together they told us about genes and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, and Michelle said, “Jesus fuck,” and I didn’t know what to say, and anyway my mouth had gone dry, and all the chambers of my heart had collided. Finally, I squawked out a question: “What stage is it?” I had watched enough TV to know that cancer had stages. The higher the number, the worse it was. My father glanced over at my mother and said, “They don’t really go by that anymore,” which maybe was true, maybe not, or maybe it was true under some circumstances—but I knew damn well that if my mother’s cancer were stage one, Dad would have said so.
That fall, my parents tried to keep me busy with scheduled activities: recreational sports and school jazz band and chess club. They encouraged me to go to the movies with my friends. I was in the eighth grade with increased independence but no wheels. Michelle, who had gotten her driver’s license over the summer, carted me from place to place, the radio so loud that the speakers crackled in time with the bass drum. She had just tested positive for BRCA1 and BRCA2, which meant, she told me, that she’d won the cancer lottery with genes almost certain one day to turn her cells against her. “It’s the only thing I ever won before.”
Michelle, I should mention, was always the funniest one in my family, no contest. She had timing and wit on her side, not to mention a younger brother who was hopeless in the face of her attention. As a kid, she’d get me laughing so hard I’d have to leave the table so I wouldn’t choke on my food. And if she started laughing first, forget it. But that was then. These days, her current repertoire was mainly gallows humor.
We were on our way to rec basketball training. They called it training rather than tryouts because everyone made a team. But the coaches needed to see everyone on the floor in order to divide the kids in a way that ensured league parity, or else the parents went nuts.
“So what are you gonna do?” I asked.
“Are you joking? The girls are as good as gone.” I looked away. “But the ovaries go first,” she said. I assumed she was talking about years in the future, decades, until she added, “So you’re going to need a new chauffeur for a while.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The ovaries are next month,” she said. “Breasts over Christmas break.” “Chanukah,” I said automatically.
She raised an eyebrow. “You think we get off from school for Chanukah break?”
I didn’t like thinking about my sister’s breasts. I had never thought about them at all until the day when Tony Andrews mentioned how big they were, and another kid was like, “Right. Duh,” and it was the first time I really understood that people had conversations when I wasn’t around to hear them.
As we pulled into the Sportsplex parking lot, Michelle told me about our cousin, Sarah, who had also gotten tested and decided to have the procedures. And the woman from the pool, Mrs. Bloomberg, who had done it a couple of years back, and Jen, who sat at the front desk at Dad’s law office. But all these women were older than Michelle. Jen didn’t look much older than Michelle, but I knew she had a husband and a kid because I’d met them. I wondered when I was Michelle’s age if I’d ever be as definite about anything. I couldn’t even choose a sandwich.
“Don’t you want kids someday?”
“I want a lot of things,” she said. “What’s your point?”
I felt stupid asking. “Don’t you need ovaries to have kids?” “Again,” she said, “what’s your point?”
We were rolling slowly past parked cars. She seemed to be looking for a spot even though all she had to do was drive up to the rec center and drop me off and then kill two hours before picking me up again.
“Can’t you wait a few more years before going under the knife?” I had no idea where I’d heard that phrase, but I felt mature saying it.
My seat belt tightened as we lurched to a stop. The car behind us blared its horn. Michelle’s dark green eyes locked on mine.
“I don’t feel like having breast reconstruction and chemo at the same time, thank you very much,” she said. “So no. It can’t fucking wait.”
This is the part that ought to flash ahead another year and return us to the cemetery: same rabbi (now trying out a goatee), same family in attendance, many more friends—my mother made friends everywhere she went. It’s another clear, blustery fall afternoon, the sky and trees an embarrassment of supersaturation. The Mourner’s Kaddish ends, and people line up to shovel dirt onto the simple casket. Michelle is beside me—healthy, rebuilt, the ordeal of her own body now safely in the rearview. It isn’t lost on her, will never be lost on her, that her brighter future, statistically speaking, is what has been salvaged from the wreckage of my mother’s illness. In this moment in the cemetery, unable yet to begin processing the loss, I am no more than a receptacle for sensory stimulus. The sound of the dirt from my shovel as it lands on my mother’s casket. The murmuring of the people waiting to return to their cars. The smell of pine needles. The sound of cars starting up. The sound of cars pulling away. My father, my sister, and I together. Somewhere far off, a leaf blower. A last look at the gravesite before we walk to the limousine provided by the funeral home. My limp, the result of an injury sustained almost exactly a year earlier, is almost gone. I’m standing between my father and my sister. They each place a hand on one of my shoulders.
Symmetry. The story is bookended. Or a chapter has ended. Or a new one has begun. Something about a book. I should have mentioned my mother was a reader.
The car blared its horn again in the rec center parking lot, longer this time. “So rude,” Michelle muttered.
We went nowhere, Michelle having decided to test the limits of the other driver’s patience. When the horn sounded again, she spun around in her seat and gave the other driver the finger. I turned my head and saw there was a boy in the front passenger seat of the car behind us, though I couldn’t quite make out who it was. A second car came to a stop behind the car behind us.
Then a third car.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“People should be decent to each other,” she said. “It’s literally the only thing that should be required of people.”
Maybe so. Yet in the weeks since Mom’s diagnosis, Michelle had been testing the bounds of decency and paying the price, with two in-school suspensions and a brush with the law. It was a small brush, but given the general law-abidingness of my family, Michelle seemed to me like a desperado. Braydon Kirkpatrick had been spreading rumors about her friend, Allie (I never did learn the specifics), and in retaliation, Michelle decided to toilet-paper the big oak outside his house. And not just with one roll, but dozens of them. The Kirkpatricks’ house was set back from the road, and his family was out for the evening. Michelle had all the time she needed. She worked alone, without an accomplice or even telling Allie ahead of time. When she was done, the tree looked like a giant mummy had sprung free from its coffin. It would have been the perfect crime except for the surveillance camera that recorded the whole thing, making it the world’s easiest bust.
Michelle sounded genuinely apologetic to the officer, to Dad and Mom, and, in the letter she penned and shoved in front of my face while I was trying to decode scientific notation, to Braydon’s parents.
“Check out how sincere I can be,” she said. I set aside my exponents. “I’m not legally required to write this,” she explained as I read.
I handed her back her handwritten letter that was somehow both syrupy and confusing. I have failed this test of my maturity and understand that in life there is no grade inflation.
“I only apologized because Mom made me,” she told me. “TP-ing a house isn’t even vandalism in Delaware.”
“You’re lucky,” I said.
“No, dummy.” She tapped her head. “I do my research.”
If so, then her research fell short. A few days after sliding her letter of apology into the Kirkpatricks’ mailbox, Michelle got into trouble again at school (a day of in-school suspension) for barging into Allie’s homeroom and calling her a fucking bitch in front of the whole class, then slamming the door and storming out. It turned out Allie had lied about Braydon spreading rumors about her. She was just mad because he’d asked another girl to homecoming.
I wondered now if we were about to be the victims of a road-rage incident in the parking lot of the rec center. I was fourteen and oblivious in some ways but not all of them. I knew we could get gunned down at any moment for any reason or for no reason at all. It seemed best not to make waves or pick fights with people we didn’t already know well. I hoped Michelle wasn’t expecting me to defend her. In gym class, I could barely bench-press the bar.
The car behind us decided to start emitting a single, sustained blast from its horn. Michelle sighed once, deeply. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
I didn’t need to ask what she meant. She was already stepping out of the idling car. I obeyed her command—an automatic, younger-brother response having nothing to do with wanting to be her accomplice or saving her from herself or taking a risk on her behalf. I knew Michelle was full of rage about Mom and about her own DNA, but I was full of terror. In the last couple of weeks, I had quietly quit jazz band and chess club. This was to no one’s loss. I was a second-chair clarinetist who consistently failed to protect his queen. I came home and did my homework and played computer games and read books I’d already read a dozen times and stayed within proximity of my mother, who spent the afternoons working remotely from the guest bedroom—she was a freelance graphic designer—but really napping (wig on; the wig stayed on when there was even the remotest possibility Michelle or I might glimpse her) because the chemo and radiation wore her out. I knew it wasn’t a treatment, either. Michelle had told me. It was an “experimental study,” which, she ex- plained, meant that someone someday might benefit, but it wouldn’t be Mom.
When Mom woke up from her naps, she’d be groggy awhile and then she’d be awake awhile, puttering around the kitchen or maybe sitting on the sofa in the late-afternoon sun reading one of the books for one of her book clubs, and I knew there was literally nothing less important in the universe than jazz band or chess club—or rec basketball, but my parents had paid the league fee and the games were only once a week. I figured I’d start playing. I could always quit.
The man behind us in the parking lot, the man who could step out of his own car with a loaded gun if he wanted, he wasn’t a man. He was just another high school kid a year older than my sister. Steve Collins. Steve’s passenger was his younger brother, Milo, a sophomore.
“The fuck are you honking like that for?” my sister asked, but already her tone had shifted. She was playing it tough but wasn’t angry anymore. We knew these guys. They lived in our neighborhood. There had been a couple of years, when we were all younger, that we’d gone to their house for Christmas dinner. Or maybe it was Christmas Eve. It was a long time ago. But there’d been a group of families from the neighborhood with kids of all different ages, and we’d sat around playing video games while the parents did parent things and the fire crackled in the fireplace.
“Aren’t you too old for rec basketball?” my sister asked the younger brother, Milo.
“We’re coaching,” Steve said. “Why?” Michelle asked. “Volunteer points,” Milo said.
I didn’t like that answer. Points for what? If you volunteered for something, I thought, there shouldn’t be points. Points made it not volunteering anymore because of the points.
But Michelle didn’t seem put off. “Too bad for you,” she said, giving Steve a look I hadn’t seen on her face before, and it occurred to me that Steve’s thick hair and stubble and height probably made him a good-looking guy. He grinned.
And straight white teeth. “Yeah?” he said. “Why’s that?”
“Because you should blow it off,” she said, as if the answer were as obvious as air or death or the first star of the night not being a star at all but rather Venus.
“What about me?” Milo asked. I figured he meant he didn’t want his older brother to leave him to coach alone. But Michelle misunderstood, or maybe I did.
“It’s not a date or anything,” she said. “Come along if you want. Steve,
park your stupid car. We’ll hop in mine.”
The line of vehicles by this point was backed up almost to the road. But Michelle didn’t seem to be in any rush, and neither did Steve.
“Give us two minutes,” he said.
“Sorry I gave you the finger,” Michelle said. “It’s okay.” He shrugged. “I get that a lot.”
Fifteen minutes of riding silently beside Milo, while Michelle and Steve shouted to each other over roaring guitars, and the four of us were sitting on a small floating dock beside the kayak launch in Shadow Lake Park. The day was mild with sunlight shimmering off the water and brightening the leaves on the trees. Still, the sun this time of year never got high enough in the sky to convince you that daylight really meant it.
The lake was actually a shallow, brackish overflow of the bay. It had been years since I came here, yet after we arrived and threw a few pebbles into the water and settled on the floating dock, I began to feel the looming presence of the nearby train trestle and understood the reason we’d come here of all places. I couldn’t have explained how I knew. It wasn’t one thing, but a composite of all things: the last-gasp-of-fall weather; the line of cars; Michelle’s new career as a delinquent; our chance encounter with two brothers who knew us from way back but not too well; Steve now being good-looking; the knowledge that death was approaching with the steady cruelty of a slow-moving freight train. The trestle rose at least twenty feet above the lake. I knew kids who told rumors about other kids who’d crossed the trestle or jumped into the water, and I knew they were all lying. The lake couldn’t have been more than three or four feet at its deepest, and only an idiot would traverse a trestle on an active rail line that was probably two hundred feet between ends. I knew all this, just as I knew, the way Michelle was glancing over at the trestle, that she was going to try.
“Don’t,” I said.
She looked at me. “Don’t what?” “Nothing,” I said. “Just don’t.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, standing up. She eyed the trestle again. “Do you know what, though? I feel like taking a walk.”
“No!” I said. And then I added: “I have to take a leak.” My bladder was fine. But if I reached the bridge first and started walking across, then she would see the idea for what it was, risky and stupid and selfish. And while I might have been three-and-a-half years younger, I was the faster runner.
Later, Michelle would insist she never meant to try to cross the trestle. She was only hoping Steve might take a walk with her so she could see what mak- ing out with him was like. That’s what she would tell me, and her allegiance to her own story hasn’t wavered. But I know what I knew.
I planned to step onto the trestle and go exactly as long as it took for Michelle to order me to turn around. She would see how dumb it was, and maybe she would see how dumb lots of things were that she was doing. Her behavior wasn’t acceptable. I needed her. And I would continue to need her in increasing amounts because it was going to get awful. I knew that. But there was no telling her. I wouldn’t find the right words, and even if I did, I knew she wouldn’t hear them.
I also knew that my sister would never let me step onto that trestle. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was Steve’s distracting charm. Since when had Steve Collins become charming? Nor had I counted on Milo sensing that without my presence he was a third wheel and wandering off to the water’s edge to spot killies.
Which was how I made it well over a third of the way across the trestle, one slow step at a time, before anyone saw me, and how the set of eyes didn’t belong to Michelle or Steve or Milo but rather to the conductor of the slow-moving engine coming toward the trestle from the other side of the water. A full sprint and I could have made it back easily. But nothing was easy—because seeing the train, the enormous certainty of it, I found that my feet and legs had frozen.
The train blared its horn, and that’s when I heard my sister. I didn’t see her, couldn’t look away from the train, but she didn’t sound so far away.
“Jesus, Ben—fucking run!” “I hate everything!”
My reply made no sense, yet Michelle seemed to understand. “I know. But turn around and run. Now!”
“Fuck this.”
“Yes, Ben. Yes. Fuck this. Now run!” “Fuck this!”
“Run!”
“Run, Ben!” Steve’s voice. “Just turn around and do it!”
The train, though—it had me hypnotized. The steady chug-chug-chug over the tracks, the smell of oil, the engine’s dark metal, the rust and dirt, the win- dows like a set of eyes. It looked like a grinning face. “I can’t!”
“Then jump!” Michelle shouted. “Jump off the—” Her words were cut off by a long blast of the train’s horn.
The trestle was too high. I knew that. “I can’t!” “Do it for me!” she shouted.
I would have. I would have done anything for her. But my feet might as well have been cemented to the tracks. I was rooted there, unable to do any- thing but watch the train come nearer until my world went painful and black. I saw that reserved plot of the cemetery, saw my own tombstone with that small span of years for some future kid to see and wonder about. Or no kid—because whose would it be?
The train blared its horn again, loud and scolding. I could already feel the impact. I was resigned to being next—me, not Mom—and it was as if Michelle heard my thoughts because she shouted, “Jump for Mom, Ben!”
Oh, how I wanted to. But I couldn’t.
“Do it for all the Ashkenazi women!” she shouted.
Was she trying to be funny? Later, I would ask Michelle why she said it, and she would swear she had no idea—that she had simply barfed it out in desperation. But her absurd plea was what caused me to peel my eyes away from the train for a split second, long enough to break the spell, long enough for me to leap away and down into the shallow muck, and then, later—in the safety of her car, having dropped off the gone-silent Collins boys on the way to the emergency room to deal with my busted leg—for us to laugh until we cried, and to cry until we were somehow laughing again, and it went on like that, on and on, and even now, it’s still going on.