Tag, You're It

            Tag – you’re it… squealed the little girl from the other room. 

I wasn’t ready! my son David complained.

            The adults were all in the kitchen.  My husband Alex was busy chasing Noah in the backyard so that he didn’t step into puddles.

“Liya, this is Dan and this is his mother-in-law, Shira,” my friend introduced. “Good to meet you,” I said in my shy awkwardness.

Dan was an outgoing guy, throwing out a joke a minute. I like people like that; they always have a way of filling the silence.  I never had that gift. It takes me ages to get acclimated to my surroundings and the people in them. By the time I’m comfortable enough to engage in small talk, the evening is forgivingly over.  The only time, surprisingly, I’m able to make jokes is when someone finds out about me, about what I have, and the familiar awkward what-do-I-say-now look overtakes them.  I suddenly turn into Ellen.

            Say something, be casual! I bid myself. What a terrible habit of always hearing my subconscious. It makes me, well, self-conscious. 

            “So where’s your wife?” I asked, as casually as I could with a half smile.

            It took only half a second for me to process the kicked-in-the-gut expression on Dan’s face. The abrupt shift in his features, from smiling to agonized, was utterly shocking. He couldn’t talk and left the room. I don’t know what was worse: Dan’s leaving or the mother-in-law staying, frozen in place, her features as dead as her deceased daughter.  Three seconds had passed – the longest three seconds in history – and she was as still as a statue, not even breathing.

            “I’m so sorry.” I muttered, mortified and nauseated at the notion that I had just intensified the pain that they’ve been living with for I-didn’t-know-how-long. 

            “Oh no, no, no,” said Dan as he re-entered the room. “No.”  He tried to be nice about it, but couldn’t utter anything but no.  Shira couldn’t say a word.

            “Stuck my foot in my mouth again,” I murmured.

            My friend Viola shook her head at me as if to say, You didn’t know, don’t worry about it. She could’ve warned me earlier in the day that her friend was coming over to her home with his mother-in-law and five year old daughter, and by the way don’t ask about his wife’s whereabouts because she’s in the ground.  But I guess she didn’t think anything of it.

             “They’re used to it,” Viola said later that evening. “His entire medical office knows.”

            Dan must have been my age, around thirty, thirty one.

            “Did she have what I have?” I asked timidly.

            “Same ballpark. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. They didn’t think anything of it.  It wasn’t caught in time, what could have been a very treatable cancer…”

            I understood only too well, though it made it just as difficult to listen to.  Dismissing something as nothing, then the doctors also dismissing something as nothing, only to be told too late in the game that the nothing is actually a big, incurable Something…

            “Do they know about me?” I asked in a whisper.  No, they didn’t.  “Tell them.  I don’t…I’m not very helpful, with this thing I have. It can’t make them feel better but perhaps if they see that someone her age…they won’t feel so alone in their…”

            My friend shrugged.  Wrong, I thought to myself.

            The rest of the evening went smoothly.  Our kids played together.  My four-year-old son Noah loved Dan’s pretty daughter Sarah, trying to kiss her hands and hug her interminably.

            Eventually it grew late. Sarah fell asleep in her grandmother’s lap, Dan by their side.

            I stared at my tea from across the table, not daring to look up unless I had to make further conversation – which I was not about to do. It wasn’t difficult to imagine my husband sitting across from some uncomfortable stranger, Noah asleep on his lap, David by his side, older with a more knowing expression. My mom would not have been able to help, being physically compromised by a massive stroke years back. In my mind Alex sat alone, grief lining his tired features, humor spat out to make everyone around him more comfortable…

            That can easily be him. 

            Surely he was thinking of this as well, as he and Dan sat exchanging funny Family Guy lines and Dan was cracking OBGYN and GI doctor jokes.

            “Everyone knows GIs are full of shit,” he said.   I laughed.

            “Imagine if doctors were serious all the time!” Dan remarked light-heartedly. “People use humor to make light of serious situations.”

            We all knew that.

Copyright 2011 Liya Khenkin