“MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.
There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!
I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, as square and tame as I am:
Caitlin would never call a boy unless he had called her first. She would never change into or out of a bathing suit in a communal dressing room. She would never watch Star Wars or any of its sequels, cut a dinner roll with a knife, become an alcoholic.
And, for the past 20 years, the list would include one extremely important never: Caitlin would never write in detail about the painful, unacceptable things that she has had to endure in two decades of cancer treatment.
At the time of my diagnosis, I was just beginning my career as a writer, and for some reason I thought no one would ever hire me if they knew I was sick. I was also superstitious, and felt that writing about the disease during a period of remission was tempting the gods. Plus there was the problem of sadists: Letting personal information like that out into the world gives cruel people a loaded gun.
Lately, though, I’ve begun to see that no matter how much I have tried to pretend that cancer is an aberration in my life, an interruption after which life will return to normal, it never has and it never will. When I turned 60 last month, I had a sorrowful realization, one that might have come sooner if I’d spent more time plowing the cold fields of “side, angle, side” and its attendant concerns. I realized that I’d had cancer for a third of my life. It never went away, it’s never going away, and I will be on chemotherapy for as long as I live.
It’s bracing to face those truths, but I rarely spend much time dwelling on them, because I’ve known—and known of—so many women who have died of breast cancer. I had the strange good luck of getting diagnosed with what was once a particularly dangerous strain of the disease at the moment that scientists were beginning to break its code. So long as I keep my mind on that fact, I’m okay.
But a few weeks ago something happened that finally broke my spirit. For the first time in this endless war, I felt like deserting.
What happened is I lost some teeth.
It was a shocking event, one that had nothing to do with a cancer recurrence or with my overall health; it was just far downstream from some of the endless treatments I’ve had over 20 years, a side effect I’d never considered. I was finally ready to give up.
Game, set, match: cancer.
This is the horrible part of the essay where I have to give you some dental information. Believe me, I tried to keep it out, but the story doesn’t add up without it.
Decades ago, when the world and I were young, I had to get a dental bridge. Basically that’s what they give you if you have a missing or—in my case—funky tooth. It’s sort of a fake tooth anchored to the two teeth on either side of it. Let’s skip why I needed it. (No, full disclosure! Exposure dream! The reason I needed the bridge was that the middle tooth was a baby tooth. There was a time when I thought that was an adorable little fact about me, although now I realize it’s just more evidence that I have lived my life in a Ford Pinto of a body. Nothing has ever worked right.)
Back to our story, already in progress. Over the summer, I had a pain underneath my bridge. That can’t be good, I thought. It wasn’t just that it suggested some nasty procedure; it was also that for many years I’ve been on a powerful drug called Zometa, which has a rare but ghastly side effect: It can lead to a hideous thing called osteonecrosis of the jaw—so you have to take excellent care of your teeth. Thankfully, it turned out I did not have osteonecrosis of the jaw, or anything like it. I had a cavity. The dentist took an X-ray and said she would just need to remove the bridge, fill the cavity, and then make a new bridge.
This sounded straightforward enough, but I delayed doing it for a couple of months because my husband and I immediately set to work creating some new material on the subject of “on-plan dentists” versus “off-plan dentists.” He wanted an on-plan dentist to curb the cost, and I wanted a dentist who had nitrous oxide so that I could open the doors of perception. In the end we compromised, and I went to an off-plan dentist without nitrous oxide.
