Forward

I enjoy lying.

Everybody does to some extent I think. Lies are entertaining for one (I mean, all a lie is, is a story, and everyone loves getting their mind off reality for a bit). And two, lies hide the truth, which is usually one of two things: boring, or disturbing (not “horror film disturbing” where there is a reason why the “bad guy” is killing, haunting, or in general, terrorizing people; but the kind of disturbing that has no cathartic remedy).

Imagine, for instance, you go to lunch with an old friend from high school. Even though she had high hopes of becoming an anesthesiologist, or…a registered nurse (one of those people who wears those white hats with the little red cross in the middle), she accidentally turned into a housewife and mother of five kids (who are all currently pre-adolescent). Her hubby works nine to five plus overtime.

They live in Hampton Hills – a construction-in-process suburban community (it’s surrounded by a dense (construction-in-process) forest; Neighborhood Watch is always executed; gardeners maintain the landscape; it’s a “lovely place to raise a family”) just outside of Buffalo.

They have a basketball hoop in their blacktop driveway. Every house does.

Ok, so it is summer vacation. Since none of the children are older than, let’s say 11, they need to “stay in the yard so mommy can hear and see” them. If she leaves the house, then she’s got to drag the gaggle with her.

Ergo, it is probably safe to say that she hardly has time to pee with the door closed let alone read a good book, go for a long drive, or masturbate even – anything to get away for a moment.

So when you go out to lunch with her because she finally found a babysitter willing to deal with five children/wants to “catch up,” there is a point during lunch (most probably right at the beginning) where the question comes up: “What have you been up to lately,” or “Anything new and exciting going on?”

If you were sitting across from the 24/7 housewife/mommy, would you want to know the real answer to either question? Probably not because you already do:

“The same old,” which is code for: “absolutely nothing,” or “my life sucks” or “I wish I were dead.”

What a relief it is when she bypasses the kid and marriage rhetoric and starts gossiping about a neighbor’s husband who she thinks is having an affair with the 16-year-old, “blonde bombshell” babysitter.

“It doesn’t take an hour to drive into the city and back,” she says. She cuts her salad into bite-size pieces and lightly dips the end of her fork into a saucer filled with fat free raspberry vinaigrette. “Just a taste is all you need.” She chews slowly (it burns more calories she will probably explain) and swallows. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s throwing in a little extra tip. 16-year-old blonde bombshells don’t naturally go for forty-something balding bank tellers.”

You know that she knows, most likely, it’s all a lie. Pure gossip. Jealousy, maybe. But you smile and agree completely with the analysis of her story. This is her moment to get away.

Let’s consider a different, yet similar, scenario. We’ll stick with the same mommy/wifey figure.

So she – let’s give her a name…”Rachel.” Seems like it has a “wife and mother” sort of ring to it – is head of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), goes to church every Sunday and even holds weekly Bible study sessions on Wednesday evenings at her home (she makes cookies in the shape of crosses and sometimes other fun little treats for these meetings), makes sure that she only eats between 1,200 and 1,500 calories per day so that she stays trim for her husband (who is the vice president of some prominent accounting firm in the city), and re-colors her ass-length hair (to cover up those “irksome greys”) at least twice a month with a warm chestnut hue.

If Barbra Welter wrote a contemporary sequel, Rachel would be the embodiment of a “True Woman.”

One morning in the shower – which is always before sunrise so that she looks presentable when she wakes the kids and cooks breakfast for her family – while lathering with a vanilla-scented body scrub (her husband’s favorite) that leaves her skin “smooth” and “refreshed,” she notices something that feels like a soft marble lodged deep inside her left breast.

An aggressive series of chemotherapy is the “best bet” to help someone with stage four breast cancer, their family doctor, Dr. Ken O’Brian, tells her a week later. “We need to start immediately.”

It doesn’t take long for the warm chestnut and grey to loosen. She’s been kicked into early menopause.

Sweaty clumps, which resemble something like hairballs hacked up on the rug by a cat, begin to litter her pillow when she wakes in the morning. And it’s even worse in the shower. The plumber was called twice last month to unclog the system.

The poison running through her veins – medicine that is killing her to kill the thing inside her – diminishes her hunger. So not only does she lose her breasts and hair, but 50 pounds as well. “She’s just skin and bones, I swear.” She is bedridden. No more PTA meetings. No more church and no more cross cookies.

“Her white cells are extremely low,” Dr. O’Brian tells vice president hubby, who diplomatically explains the situation to the gaggle.

Even if Rachel wanted to allow herself to care that she has to wear a white mask over her mouth and nose at all times, that her children can no longer hug or kiss her, or that it takes longer and longer for her husband to drop off the babysitter every night when he comes home from work, the physical pain from the medicine is too agonizing.

It consumes her. “It’s very sad.”

When you hear this information being passed around at the gym, or grocery store, or over lunch with a mutual friend, you go over to see how Rachel is doing. Again, when you ask…do you really want to know? And in this case, does she really want to tell you?

In my experience of both boring and non-horror-movie disturbing kinds of instances, most people don’t want to know the truth. They need to look away so that they can keep functioning. White lies, is all. White stories to help them look away.

“It’s worse than it looks,” Rachel tells visitors. “In a couple of months, I’ll be back to normal.”

She asks you to remove the mask “just for a moment” and feed her water through a straw. She swallows big and asks if you’ve heard “the latest” about the blonde bombshell.

I think she smiles but her lips are the same shade as her skin – sallow. They’re the same consistency too. She’s far too skinny to have lips anymore. There is only a line where a mouth once was. Only a rasp where a voice once was. Only a wrinkled bed sheet where a woman once was.

We all create stories to protect ourselves from the truth about each other, about ourselves. Most people don’t realize that the latter is more prevalent. They don’t want to believe that the cliché really is the closest thing to truth: you are your own worst enemy.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Rachel convinced herself that things were going to be all right, right up to her last exhale.

Like I said earlier, I enjoy lying. Most people don’t accept that they like it too. It is more of an unacknowledged, a nameless, necessity to them. But once you enjoy the lie, you take control of it. You are writing the story. The chips don’t need to fall where they lay.

You can lie them anywhere.

Honestly, parts of this story are not a story. They really happened.

But, Rachel is really a laid-off/stay-at-home daddy named “Thomas,” and the vice president hubby is really a five-to-nine psychiatrist named “Elizabeth.”

To make it simple, just take everything I told you about the two and reverse it (gender-wise). For example, if Rachel counts calories, Thomas runs six miles per day. Or, if she gossips about some blond bombshell babysitter who is diddling the next-door neighbor over lunch, then he and his friend Mike laugh about the fact that Mike really did accidentally kiss the 16-year-old babysitter.

If Barbra Welter had a sex change, he would be a True Man.

The cancer stuff is not a lie. Only it isn’t breast, it is skin; skin that turns into blood. Blood that goes septic everywhere pretty quickly – liver, colon, stomach and lung.

The church stuff is all the same too. Thomas found God a while ago. They were “acquaintance-friends”: the kind you call when your spirits are low and you need a shot of something strong to put the pep back in your step. They’re a great pick-me-up, but sometimes their name can “slip your mind,” especially when you’re introducing them to someone on the spot. It’s never an issue though. You both just shrug it off.

God and him were like that.

Towards the end though, they became pretty close. Maybe God missed the cross cookies on Wednesdays.

And what of VP hubby and Elizabeth? Well they’re never really in the picture. They work lot. “Have to put food on the table,” of course. That explains all the late nights in the office. You’re just letting your imagination run away with you if you think otherwise.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

So, think whatever you like about these people. Make up their backgrounds. It’s probably pretty close. And if not, then it’s probably more exciting than the truth anyways.

By the way, they don’t have five kids. They only have one.

That one is me.