Cavewoman

I’m still sitting in this car going nowhere, staring at the side of our house with its mildew stains branching across the siding because we’re overdue for a power wash. The car was a splurge purchase several years ago. A Volvo with peanut butter leather interior which, every time I run my hand over, brings me all the way back to an elementary school friend, whose parents drove a similar car, had oriental rugs, and a dog too designer for our cocker spaniel neighborhood. A time when I thought it might be possible to live forever, or at least frozen in time like Harrison Ford in Star Wars, to be thawed out later. The hero never really dies. 

During that time of cocker spaniels off leashes and cars without seatbelts, the hero was certainly always a boy. Still, I saw myself, if not a whip hurling Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, at least his sidekick, his partner in action, that dark haired woman who drank too much but could hold her liquor better than the boys and even if held by Harrison when dropped in a snake-filled pit, came out swinging the torch, her arms, her eyes prepared to fight. The sidekick wasn’t supposed to die, either. 

In fifth grade, I had long straight hair and hazel eyes that seemed green, blue, or brown depending on the color shirt I wore or how hard you looked. My oldest sister called me Gingerbread Baby because I tanned up so crisp each Carolina summer while her freckles turned red. Dad pondered over my skin, which the adults all called olive, searching his foggy memory for a Native American woman smoking a corncob pipe on his childhood porch. Years later, a genetic spit test would disprove his memory.

That year I won the Biggest Flirt award for our class, which meant I had giggled the hardest when the boys pinched my butt. If I’m honest, I pinched a lot of butts, too. I crushed on boys with silly names like Phelps Sprinkle and Teddy Lemons. I cut babies out of magazines and made poster board collages. Depending on the boy you named, I could point out which babies would look the most like mine with him.

I want to be the hero of my own story, but my first mistake was trusting my body to hold its shape. My second was thinking it was my story in the first place. I’m alone in the car. My husband, Wen, went back in the house to get more tissues. My real kids are inside, out of earshot. 

In school they gave us some tests that identified the students they said qualified for the gifted program. It was nothing like today’s specialty centers or advanced classes. We simply got pulled out of our regular classroom once a week for an hour or so of puzzles and worksheets. One time, though, towards the end of the year, we got to watch the dissection of a small shark. The thrill of it made us push and pull each other, as we collected around the table set up in the parking lot. We touched the slippery rough of the faded gray and white skin, so different from our own. I don’t remember much, other than when the scalpel opened a certain organ, a slosh of embryos spilled out over the table, almost as if they were swimming over themselves to land between our shoes as we howled with delightful horror.

Mrs. Robinson was my first black teacher and my favorite teacher in elementary school. Not that either of those facts matter. She had promised us a skating rink party, but before she could plan it, she was gone. She took leave for a pregnancy or a death in the family, it’s hard to remember now, if I ever knew at all. She wrote us cards saying she was sorry. She was there and then not there, a blurry fill-in sitting behind her desk. 

Our youngest son was in fifth grade when our family life crashed into a brick wall going eighty, totally obliterating any sense of normalcy. Within a span of a few months, his older sister became inexplicably ill, trapped in a psychiatric center for fifty-nine days, then, I got diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. His middle school years have been marred by an ill mother who wore a wig to his sixth grade back-to-school night and almost passed out after standing up from helping him figure out his new locker. Still, throughout, he stood back-to-back with me to measure his growth against my stagnancy. So small at the start of this race. Now, three years later, he’s grown taller than me, something I am not sentimental about like the other mothers. Each inch is a step closer to self-reliance - a mother’s most practical finish line. 

 There’s a certain photo of Wen and me on our wedding day. We’re in the Bentley my dad rented to take us to the reception, parked in the grass in front of the church steps. We were so happy. I recall a mix of relief to have a barrier from the crowd and a bottle of champagne propped in an ice bucket next to us. The driver ceremoniously deprived it of its cork and poured us each a glass. I imagine we toasted to our future, but I hope we cheered for our past. 

I see the many drives ahead and behind that couple like the stutter-start-stop of a home movie turning on a reel of black tape, capturing my first ride. My mother holding baby me in the front seat coming home from the hospital, a painted smile darkening her tired lips. A single rose against the black of the seat when I opened his Bronco door on the night he proposed. A stoplight in a snowstorm. Two southern kids transplanted to Cleveland, with the culture shock that tea didn’t always come cold and sweet, and the white stuff didn’t pause all lives. A grocery store parking lot to buy beer on the way from his mother’s funeral. New Orleans for one night of Mardi Gras, before catching a cruise to celebrate our anniversary, trying to pack it all in. Rolling our suitcases through the streets sticky with the spilled booze of determined partying. 

We had already received my metastatic news, the end of last week, when the gastroenterologist woke me by saying he’d unearthed a nodule in my gut. Just a handful of weeks earlier, my body had been displayed like that gifted shark, while medical students oohed and aahed around a table when a top-ranked surgeon disentangled one of my diseased nodes from a blood vessel. It was a recurrence, so I was used to surgeries by then. We’ve been sitting in the driveway taking a virtual call with my oncologist, because it’s too far to drive back to Texas and a barrier is needed between this conversation and the children. You know it’s not good when you ask your doctor for a timeframe and he begins, How do I tell you this? I tried to help him with his start-stop answers like he was the one who needed encouragement. He said, It could be… I filled in, …a year? He said, …could…maybe…be a year if medications don’t work, to… I fill in the blank again with, …a couple years? He agrees that’s possible if they can find medications that work for a while to inhibit growth. Later, when I cry to my local oncologist that the last two times I’ve left her office I felt like I might be dead in three weeks, she shrugs as if to say, well that’s a definite possibility. Now, Wen and I are idling in the car, like teenagers lingering over a last kiss before curfew, before going back inside our home. Like my doctor, I am questioning, How do I tell you this? Only I am referring to our children. I've been too truthful along the way. This time I say to Wen that we tell the truth but stick to the more positive end of my prognosis spectrum deadline. Keep things rosy. 

I'd like to tell that beautiful grinning couple, paused on the way to the reception, to not freeze up in retail jobs and the suburbs. Find that chance overseas, renovate that turn-of-the-century fixer-upper in the middle of the country, take the kids out of school and do the sailboat island hopping or the cross-country Winnebago adventure - hell, do both. Live off the grid. Live on the grid. But don’t be afraid to thaw and live, live, live!

Our oldest son has the distance of college to cushion my decline. I birthed him in the middle of the country, in a town where you had to roll your car windows up and hold your breath on Wednesdays to deaden the stench from the meat processing plant wafting across the highway. Far away from family and childhood friends, Wen struggled to snap the new baby in the new car seat. In our first home full of hardwood and coconut husk woven rugs, which we tried to soften with blankets, we huddled over our new baby like cavemen over fire, full of protectiveness and fright.

I held him to my breast and asked questions. Is this right? Is he getting enough? What should I do? Is he starving?

-Kim Drew Wright

Kim has essays, fiction, and poetry published in various literary journals including The Pinch, The New Haven Review, and Phoebe. The Strangeness of Men, a debut collection of fiction and prose poetry, won USA Best Books and Independent Publisher awards. She founded a political justice organization. Kim advocates for awareness of PANS while living with triple negative metastatic breast cancer. Her journey has been covered in national and international media, such as, The Washington Post, BBC, CNN with Bill Weir, and news media as far away as Japan and Belgium. She has a background in advertising and a degree from the University of North Carolina in Journalism.