Forgiving the Governor of South Carolina

The waiting room of the Rosenfeld Cancer Center in Abington, Pennsylvania, is my new home away from home, and I'm eager to prove it. When I step on the ridged black-rubber welcome mat and the sliding glass doors swoosh open, letting escape the smell of static electricity, an odor not unlike the vacuumed and vacuous stale spaces of PHL and LAX and SFO, I will not (as I did on Day One) acknowledge my desire to turn back, to hightail it away from anything that says Cancer and run straight into the oak-lined, neatly mowed yards of the suburban homes across the street. Instead, I breeze through the first and then second set of sliding glass doors with a confident swagger, my mother moseying just behind me. Hello, puce- and azure-flecked carpet, and hello, gargantuan bean-shaped fish tank with the silver loaches and the swaying plastic green fronds. Hello, 24-hour news channel with its unrelenting ticket of urgent headlines scrolling at the bottom of the flat screen TV. Hello, receptionist with the frosted highlights in her hair and the raspy voice that sounds, ironically, like a smoker's. I am the cheerleader of a cancer patient. In front of the receptionist's desk, I hug my mother and feel her ribs through the thin skin on her back. I watch her hip-swaddling walk as she heads through the forbidden sliding doors, the ones I can never pass through. Just beyond them, I see three black trapezoids that point inward. The two trapezoids on top are like the eyes of a stenciled skull. The single trapezoid on the bottom is like the gaping mouth of that same skull. Caution: Radioactive, the sign says.

I've been here before, and I know what I'm doing. I'm not, for instance (as I did on Day One) going to read the magazine that Lance Armstrong's leathery, grinning mug graces, the one called Caring 4 Cancer, which tells me all the side eff ects my mother might feel during her 28 days of radiation and chemo. (Heavy arms and legs, mouth ulcers, metallic taste in mouth, thinning hair, severe burns, diarrhea . . .) Despite its boast that it's my "complimentary copy," I'm not even going to touch what happens to be the only reading material in the waiting room, a fact I well know because (have I said this already?) I've been here before. Instead, I've brought a novel. A Jewish teenage boy, a lover of escape artists and a studier of Houdini, has escaped from Nazi Prague and is now in the Big Apple, where he's in full pursuit of the American Dream. I will read this book because I have no need to do what I did on Day One, which was to examine every single image on the wall—a photo of a horse's arch-shaped butt under a barn, a photo of a tractor plowing through a golden field, a photo of a weathered turquoise door in what appeared to be a Latin American town. Back then, I wondered how any of these images might comfort someone who waited here. But now the door and the butt and the plow are the good-natured accompaniments, the happy, ironic companions of my task, which I perform dutifully and without sentimentality, which is: waiting.

I wait. As an off-white, spaceship-like machine makes a ten-minute rotation around my mother's abdomen, sending radiation through her hips, her bladder, her uterus, her spine, and ultimately (or hopefully) a patch of flesh in her bowels, I am here to wait. And I'm getting really good at it.

So are, apparently, the citizens of South Carolina. They've been waiting for their governor to reappear for several days now. It's been the talk of the summer news. Like my Jewish protagonist who escaped Prague, and like David Copperfield, who once made the Statue of Liberty vanish right before New Yorkers' eyes, the governor of South Carolina has disappeared. Headlines have marveled for days—Governor Gone Missing...