A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [21]
It was Bill who stayed home from work on the days Bridget received the chemotherapy, who sat with her while the medicine was fed through the IV. Bridget could not think of it as poison, which many patients did and which she supposed it was. Rather, she preferred to think of the three chemicals that dripped into her body as beneficent potions. And it was Bill who was in the house during the afternoons and evenings when Bridget could not raise her head from the pillow. On treatment days, Bill brought her ricotta cheese and fruit, oddly the only food that appealed to her. He left her alone when she wanted, or stood in the bedroom, hands on his hips, while she threw up in the bathroom. She did not like him to see, though she knew he could hear. Occasionally, when she was nauseated, a terrible sensation of panic would overtake her, and she would call out to him, and he would come. His presence, just outside the bathroom door, would be enough to calm her. He would remind her that the ordeal would be over soon and that the medicine was doing its job, platitudes she just as easily could have told herself.
She glanced at Bill behind the wheel—at his steely hair, at his round face, sculpting itself with age; at the other sculpture of his torso, coming undone with the years, like ice slowly melting. Bridget loved Bill. Not fiercely, as she loved her son. Not all-consumingly, as she had once loved Bill as a teenager. But, rather, solidly and knowingly, a deep undercurrent of passion and memory running below a grateful surface.
Aware of her attention, he turned his head and reached out with his hand, giving her something between a pat and a poke, the touch both automatic and reassuring. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, knowing Bill would accept her answer, even as she knew he knew she might be lying.
Bridget wasn’t fine. Since the chemo, long drives made her carsick. She ached to get out and to stretch her legs, to breathe fresh air. She was hungry, too, another consequence of the chemo, the constant need to put food in her stomach as well as a perfectly justifiable desire to indulge herself from time to time causing a weight gain of twelve pounds in six weeks. The weight gain struck Bridget as egregiously insulting. She particularly minded now on her way to her own wedding. Bridget thought of the pink bouclé wool suit she would wear to the ceremony, of the way the waistband of the skirt pinched and caused the skirt to rise up higher than it should. And that thought led to a dispirited one of the ironlike underwear she would need to put on under the suit to smooth out the new swells and rolls: the one-piece, the panty hose, the skirt girdle. Too much architecture, and yet Bridget was unwilling to let herself go entirely.
She didn’t want to reveal, for example, her nearly bald head. She’d told herself that the wig was for her son’s sake, that if she didn’t look sick he wouldn’t worry about her as much. And it was better, too, for the sake of her colleagues at the school department. But of course the wig was for herself. In the middle week of the three-week treatments, when she had recovered some of her energy, she could almost believe that she was well. Her skin tone had changed (she was paler, and she’d been told that might be permanent), but with the wig and a sweep of blush, she thought she could pass for normal. Fear was counterproductive, Bridget had learned. One couldn’t spend every minute thinking about death.
She fingered the wig now, the stiff netting that lifted slightly off the back of her neck. It was made of real European hair, colored light brown, thicker than hers had ever been. But Bridget could not get used to the strange otherness