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The Cure for Cancer
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The (ure lor (an~er BEFORE SHE WAS DIAGNOSED-before the disease-my sister drove up from Lawrence to help me move into my new apartment in Kansas City, to "keep tabs on her little brother," she said. It had always been her joke, that I was younger than her, seemingly since she came out ofthe womb thirteen months before me. I had just moved back to the area after two aborted attempts at law school in Iowa City. In an effort to erase some ofmy college debt I applied for and, still to my mild surprise , accepted a teaching assignment at an underfunded inner-city junior high school in Kansas City, Kansas. The other Kansas City. A rough neighborhood, I knew, not like the suburb where Carol and I grew up, but it was only for two years and I'd be close to my sister. We would both teach. She came to stay for four days during the last week before the start ofclasses, helping me unpack boxes and furnish the apartment. It was the heat of summer, and I'd awkwardly hefted up my window unit to find it was too big for the small windows ofmy new apartment. Carol laughed it off, in typical fashion, and we spent ensuing afternoons in chilly movie theaters, watching comedic matinees, wrists drooped over the rims ofgigantic tubs ofpopcorn. Carol lived with her husband Dan in Lawrence, where he worked in H.R. at a growing insurance company. They had a six-year-old son, Sam, my nephew. Carol had made a career as a permanent adjunct of - 90 - The Curefor Coneer introductory English classes, bouncing around from college to college for shitty pay. But she loved it. "Where else but the adjunct circuit can your students mistakenly refer to you as 'Doctor So-and-so' when you only have a masters?" she said. "Besides no bullshit committee work. No departmental meetings. I have freedom." The best part was that she was able to design her own classes, so she always taught Shakespeare , her first love, showing the kids how to wrestle with the language , pointing out all the bawdy puns. She only taught the tragedies, she said, because at the very least the kids needed those. On our final night together, I was unpacking a box, the last I would for a number of months, and found something I'd forgotten about: a slide projector. It had been our parents', loaded with pictures from when they were first married, before Carol and I had been born. Our parents had us late, not until Mom was forty-one. My father had an almost perverse affinity for documentation, part ofthe reason he'd been such a good lawyer. More often than not, mental images I conjure of him include some kind of camera at his side or to his eye, eclipsing half his face. I looked down at the projector, so old and oversized, and showed Carol. Her eyes got big, and she clapped her hands together- "Pictures!"-speeding to the kitchen, where she filled two glasses with white wine from the box in my fridge. I set the projector on a card table and propped it up with a dictionary. When it clicked on, a beam oflight shot through the motes ofdust drifting singly like flakes ofsnow; the stuffyou never realize, I thought. We spent the rest ofthe night getting toasty on cheap wine and watching pictures of our parents slide over my blank, white wall, pictures from when they had fallen in love-not the unhappiness, obesity and disease of middle age and retirement, but a time when they were younger, before life had imploded. In the dark silence ofmy new apartment I saw my parents come back to life, image by image for only a second, to a time before Carol and I had been alive. "Howald are tlley here?" I asked. "Early-mid thirties, I think," Carol answered. She was sitting on the floor, the beam hovering a few feet above her head. Her back was to - 91 - [3.14.70.203] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:46 GMT) The Curefor Cancer me and periodically when an image struck her she'd reach behind and grab my foot, momentarily latching onto it and shaking excitedly. We, too, were nearly halfWay through that decade. It's a strange thing to see your parents at the same age as you, all oftheir authority and distance shrinks away and...