The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

MAY 19. FREE DINNERS AND FREE DINNERS

85 are you working for? I forget how I was supposed to respond. I assume that I was supposed to be as vague as possible and never confess. In fifth and sixth grades, we also conducted surveys. You would get a friend of yours from another school to call a boy you were interested in. She would say, I’m doing a survey. Please rate these girls as potential girlfriends, A, B, or C. Your name would be buried somewhere in the middle. She’d ask him to rate cuteness and personality , too. You’d know the results the minute your friend hung up the phone. And the boy knew that his answers would be made public. How did we come upon this sophisticated marketing technique at age 10 and 11? I still remember that a certain person rated me high in personality. He hadn’t been surveyed on my account, but I was pleased to have the information. Now we all have web sites and can count our visitors and can look up the status of our books on Amazon and read our students’ evaluations of us. And we can help orchestrate the opinions; I knew a feature writer at a newspaper who wanted to become a critic. Every time she wrote a review, random readers (really , her friends) wrote letters to the editor praising her review. And it worked. Or maybe the letters had nothing to do with her promotion. Then she got breast cancer and it came back and in 2002 she died. MAY 19. FREE DINNERS AND FREE DINNERS I had a lovely free dinner last night with professors, all writers. The menu was prix fixe so you felt the obligation to order dessert. I did. We all did. I could have ordered more lightly, but there was much butter butter everywhere. My appetizer was two crab cakes with avocado chunks and skinny potato strings. Then I had acorn squash stuffed with risotto. Then sorbet. For some restaurants, butter is the new butter. After I went to bed, I got up and threw up. I’m lucky that the chemo hasn’t made me nauseated, but it has mangled my digestive system. I was so afraid of nausea, because it’s constant. So this is better than nausea. But I have to watch myself. The soup of the day was cream of fennel. It was served with 86 a tall pat of butter in the middle of a bare bowl. Then the soup was poured over it. This defiantly lavish use of butter—I know it’s defiant because we all know about animal fats and cholesterol and good fats and bad fats—is a reaction to the self-satisfied substitution of olive oil. Back to butter. Retro-smug. Retro-rebellious. My subsidized dinner was with Smart U Day School folks and a lovely, lyrical visiting writer. I am with the Night School. The difference between Day and Night is the difference between . . . night and day. You saw that one coming. The Day School people, mostly, have full-time contracts. The Night School people are all part-time. As I told a prospective student yesterday who wanted to meet me during office hours, I don’t have an office. I wrote this to him on e-mail. He wrote back: That sure cuts down on office hours. Though this isn’t to say that the Day School people never teach at night. They do. Then they are Day people moonlighting. The Day people can be tenured. The Night people are always hanging. Tenured, from the verb to hold. We are slippery, we Night people. We slither, frictionless, through the groves of academe. We can break bread with the Day people, we can partake of their largesse, and then we slink our way to another institution and then back, as if we know where we’re going. MAY 21. THE EROTIC LIFE OF PROPERTY I went to a funeral today, my third in the past year. In Jewish law, one of the best things you can do for someone is help with the burial, because that person can never repay you. I knew that that’s why the assembled people lined up to put earth on the grave, for that very reason. I didn’t know that you were supposed to stick the shovel back in the pile of dirt and not hand it to the next person. The reason, the...