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AUGUST 1. QUAVER
- University of Iowa Press
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105 chemo, and neither he nor his assistant apologized for the screwup. And then chemo was over. My mother says that at M. D. Anderson the nurses ring a little bell to signal someone’s end of chemo. Would it kill the people at Fancy to do something in commemoration? AUGUST 1. QUAVER I woke up today without a quaver in my voice or in my chest. Yesterday I could feel the quaver, the tears, as a liquid entity, filling ligaments or pipelines, or something, across my chest. Like they were there, an unending supply, and it wouldn’t do any good to cry them out because there would be more. I could talk but if it was about anything remotely personal (how do I feel, what am I thinking) I was weepy weepy weepy, weeping. Sylvienne from San Francisco and I went to Thousand Waves Spa yesterday to get massages. Mine was free as part of the spa’s lovely Stress Management Program for women with cancer . She paid retail for hers, and she paid for my massage therapist’s tip, as well. We were going to go to Gilda’s Club next for a new member orientation, but I felt I couldn’t deal with it. Meaning I couldn’t imagine sitting around and talking to people. I called to cancel. When I’d called to enroll earlier in the day, the intake person asked why I was interested, and I said I was desperate. When I canceled I was still desperate, even more so. We went to Dairy Queen then came home and watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was very different from the way both of us had remembered it. She’s less waif and more gold digger. Mickey Rooney is cast, disturbingly, as a Gnashing Oriental neighbor. The role is stereotypical and crass. When Linc came home we made a tray of whole grain bread, cheese, fruit, hummus, and olive tapenade and watched But I’m a Cheerleader , a very light movie about a high school cheerleader who’s not hetero enough for her Christian parents and her friends, so is sent away to rehab for straightening. Of course she emerges with a lover. Happily, parents accept her back. I was in the mood for light movies. 106 Still I was weepy. My sister called and I told her how weepy I was and she said I had been so strong before. Everyone has the impression that I’ve been Strong and Courageous. But I don’t know what that means. I just hadn’t been weepy much before. Audrey Hepburn was English-Dutch, born in Brussels. Her English father walked out on the family. Both parents were Nazi sympathizers , but after her mother moved the family to the Netherlands and saw her native land invaded, the mother soon supported the Resistance . According to some accounts, Hepburn saw the execution of her uncle for his Resistance work, and saw Jews killed in the street. She studied ballet and performed in concerts to raise money for the Resistance, and was also a courier. During the famine toward the end of the war, she suffered with the rest of the population, subsisting on tulip bulbs and grasses. This may have affected her metabolism. Except when she was pregnant, she kept herself down to 103 pounds. She was five-foot-seven. In 1987 she became the unicef goodwill ambassador, and died in 1993 at age 63 of colon cancer, by some accounts, but it may have been cancer of the appendix. Hepburn was allegedly offered the title role in the Diary of Anne Frank, but refused because she was afraid it would stir up too much internal trauma. AUGUST 7. THE NEVER-ENDING END This morning I was on my way to meet a creative-writing client at Emerald City when a young man on a bicycle asked me for directions. I told him how to get to where he was going, and then he asked me about the message on my head. You must feel really strongly, he said. I felt unmasked. My head as canvas was a side effect, not a deliberate political act. I told him that I lost my hair from chemo. I started to feel that if I were really committed, I would have shaved my head back when I had hair. But I guess a button will have to do when the hair sprouts back. I had to go today to Fancy...