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6 DEBRA SPARK I haven’t saved the e-mail, but it must have said, “Would you be willing to contribute an essay. . . .” But, of course, I’m sure I thought, before I’d even finished the sentence. “. . . on the topic of risk?” The sticking point being that I’ve never taken a risk in my life. But that doesn’t stop me from assenting to the request. Saying “no” is its own risk: don’t want to appear ungenerous and don’t want to miss an opportunity. A friend once suggested that my general caution might have to do with my sister Cynthia and her death, at , of breast cancer. This loss might have made me inclined to think things would always turn out badly, for whenever there was a chance for something to go right with her illness and treatment, it didn’t. But this is far from the case. I was nervous long before Cyndy died. Indeed, my anxiety—about the evening news, about tragedies, near and far—so irritated my sister that she chastised me, more than once, during her illness. Not about my anxiety about her, since I knew enough not to burden her with my fears. It was my family’s way . . . a little whistling, everyone pretending that the cancer in the brain and the back of the mouth, not to mention her failure to eat more than half a bagel a day, didn’t signify. But Cyndy chafed at my worry about other things. Cyndy was the sort who took risks, from the minor (smoking cigarettes in high school, dressing outlandishly) to the more major (immersing herself in London’s theatre world; moving alone to California for graduate school, though still in the midst of her illness). Once, my twin sister, Laura, was out to lunch with Cynthia, seated in the smoking section of a little coffee shop in our hometown . Cynthia and Laura didn’t smoke, but they needed to eat and the only free seats were in the smoking section. Laura turned to a man in the booth behind her and asked if his current cigarette could be his last. “The smoke,” Laura said, “is kind of bothering me.” The man refused her request. And not politely. Scared  CH002.qxd 7/15/09 7:27 AM Page 6 SCARED 7 Of course, Laura was simply trying to protect Cynthia, whose lungs might have had cancer cells by then. Who knows? Every part of her had cancer in the end. But Cyndy needed no protection. She heard the man telling Laura off, and now she was the avenging sister. She walked over to him, pulled her wig off her head, and started yelling, assuming he’d be affected by a suddenly bald, -yearold cancer patient, a young woman who could take a lot—her body bloated by steroids, her mouth full of sores, her lungs exhausted—but couldn’t take him being mean to Laura. The man kept on smoking. He was in the smoking section, after all. He had his rights. As for me, as for risk: I’ve never done anything. Drugs? I don’t think so; my mind is a scary enough place without assistance. Extreme sports? Let’s consider the unextreme that I can’t handle: ice skating, skiing, or even driving in winter, which I consider a dangerous sport, given the latitude in which I live. Travel? I do it now, without much problem, but can remember my trembling collegeself confronted with the labyrinthine underworld of New York subways or eschewing an early trip abroad out of sheer nervousness about the unknown. I suppose I once expressed romantic interest in someone without them handing me a signed affidavit that they were interested in me first. That qualifies as a risk, doesn’t it? So I’m not a daredevil. What of it? I may have missed a chance to experience something by being cautious, but I don’t feel truly ashamed of my failure to take stupid risks. I’m glad I never was involved in drugs, less pleased by my middle-aged fondness for white wine, and I don’t feel my life has been hampered by the hours I haven’t spent whizzing down ski slopes. Sure, I feel embarrassed about the way I tremble at the edge of rooftops or falter when life places me on the end of a diving board (which it doesn’t, thank the Lord, anymore), but that...

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