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A kind man with white hair who resembled a doctor in a children’s book came into the room with a folder and sat down across from my parents and me. The scans, he said, showed many tumors, in both lungs and all through the body. The kind of cancer was “squamous cell lung cancer.” The doctor said, “We can’t cure this cancer, but we have treatments.” The doctor said we only had to make one decision that day, “the first decision of a hundred more,” and that was what treatment plan to start with. He said the options were: chemotherapy, immunotherapy, both, or neither.
We all sat there, stunned.
“What’s your reaction when I mention chemotherapy?” the doctor asked.
“I’m a writer,” my father said. “I’m still employed. I want to do whatever will help me keep writing as long as possible. I think chemo might make me too tired.”
The room was quiet. Across from me, my mother’s eyes were filled with tears. She looked scared.
“You’re saying writing is what gets you out of bed in the morning,” said the doctor, clarifying.
“The idea of not being able to write fills me with dread.”
“You aren’t just a writer!” I said. “You’re also a husband and a father and a grandfather and a friend.”
Sounding exasperated, my father said, “What am I supposed to do? Just sit around like a potted plant? I don’t make any sense to myself if I’m not writing.”
My mother hadn’t said a word.
“If I do nothing, how long have I got?” my father asked the doctor.
“Well, with your kind of cancer and how far it’s progressed, we say the median length of time after diagnosis would be six months,” the doctor said. “That means half live longer than that.”
And, he did not say, half live shorter.
Six months. Once those words were spoken it felt like the weather in the room changed.
“I don’t want to do chemo,” my father said at last. He opted for immunotherapy. Probably no side effects. A 35 percent chance of improving his quality of life and possibly extending it. It would just mean an infusion every three weeks starting on Tuesday.
“I can’t Tuesday,” he said. “I have a deadline.”
After the appointment, I bought my parents food at a restaurant where I’d once eaten salads and discussed story ideas with a magazine editor. It felt like a long time ago. As my parents and I half-heartedly ate, I asked my father if he wanted to go on a trip or something. He said, “Maybe a ball game.”
A half hour later, we left the restaurant and found that it had begun raining. I was the only one who’d brought an umbrella. My father said he wanted to walk to Chelsea to look at art. I gave my father my umbrella and called a car for my mother. As I stood alone in the rain, I watched my father walk away. Before he rounded the corner, he lit a cigarette.
My childhood bedroom looked out over the East Village punk thoroughfare St. Marks Place, where drunks yelled curses and the M13 bus rattled down the street, shaking the windows. Without close extended family, my parents and I were a tribe unto ourselves. Together we watched the seasons change through the skylights in the tar roof and beneath the translucent cover of the Entenmann’s cupcake boxes on the kitchen counter: pink for Valentine’s Day, green for
St. Patrick’s, egg charms for Easter.
My father never bought me presents. He did not know my teachers, my friends, or my shoe size. To reach him in his ash-blanketed office at the back of the apartment, I passed through our living room, then a dining room and kitchen. I would listen to check if he was on the phone. If all was quiet, I would knock. At 5 p.m. sharp, ice cubes plink-plinked into a glass, followed by Jack Daniel’s. Peter Jennings on TV, 60 Minutes, Jeopardy!. My mother, home after auditioning and running errands, would drink screwdrivers. There was always Rose’s lime juice in the fridge, for the occasional gimlet.
“You were sick all the time,” my father says when my childhood comes up. It’s true. I had ear infections, bronchitis, strep throat. I missed weeks of school and drank bottle after bottle of gooey pink antibiotics, swirled into my Dannon yogurt or chased with Tropicana orange juice. Looking back, I wonder if my ailments may have had something to do with the fact that my parents smoked several packs a day between them.
I was anxious. Music class, where we were expected to sing solos, gave me a stomachache. Upon learning what the middle finger meant, I became fearful that I would accidentally raise it at someone, so I sat on my hands. I declined to sit down on the bus or subway from fear that I would not notice a pregnant or handicapped person. My parents joked about how I should be given “bad lessons.” Starting in first grade, I traveled to and from school alone, watched several hours a day of TV, and read books well above my age level.
As a teenager in the 1990s, on my walls, I wrote quotes—everything from Colette to La Rochefoucauld—in acrylic paint. I taped up postcards from my pen pals and posters of Ed Ruscha paintings. My father praised my self-sufficiency, and I became ever more independent, working jobs starting at 13, passing the summer I was 14 living on St. Marks with no adult supervision. (My parents spent the summer upstate.) I smoked cigarettes, sat with friends on Manhattan rooftops drinking vodka concealed in Snapple bottles, and had a thousand boyfriends. My father didn’t notice. Wearing thrift-store slips as dresses and charms on embroidery-thread necklaces—pentacles, ankhs, subway tokens, coins from the Chinatown Fair arcade—my witchy friends and I dripped wax onto my broken record player in order to build a scale model of the town of Twin Peaks. My father didn’t notice that either.
He didn’t shut himself off from people in general. He dazzled at dinner parties. He loved the Fourth of July potluck he and my mother threw each year at their place in the Catskills. I was a gal Friday for the party—running to the store for groceries, teaching children how to twist bottle rocket fuses together, setting out trash cans, serving on the fireworks line crew. I wanted to help my father achieve his vision. He spoke of the sublime, the cultivation in the audience of “terror and delight.” We joked that his motto was “Safety Third.” He duct-taped fireworks to trees, set up Roman candles to cross-fire in a field, giving the effect of clashing armies. It was amazing, and only sometimes genuinely scary.
The thing was, my father just never seemed to find me interesting—not when I got perfect grades nor when I dropped out of college, not when I worked on a farm nor when I worked at a newspaper, not when I was single and wild nor when I acquired a stepson and son and became a godmother to eight. (At which point I learned that the pain of not being interesting to him was nothing compared to the pain of having my children—my objectively incredible children—not be interesting to him.)
He was, as he told the doctor, “a writer.” And to him, being a writer meant that was the only thing you really cared about. In an autobiographical essay he published after his diagnosis, he wrote: “I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.”
For many years, I believed that as long as I worked at the PTA bake sale and took the kids shopping for clothes and planned our meals and cleaned the house, even if I became a best-selling author (which I did), I would never be a real writer. Even as my books outsold his, I considered him the actual writer. I was a hard worker, sure, but he was a genius.
My mother has always been his helpmeet. Even while making most of the family’s money as a successful commercial and TV actress in the 1980s, she cooked three meals a day, paid all the bills, and kept the house clean. A gifted painter, she confined her creative activity to the living room, where she would paint trays or lampshades with intricate floral patterns, cleaning it up before it could get in anyone else’s way.
In 1974, my parents spent their honeymoon at their artist friend Robert Dash’s home in Sagaponack, a lushly landscaped paradise he called Madoo. (It’s since become a garden conservancy.) I went there once as a child, and loved the hollyhocks he grew with seeds from Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny. But Dash mostly stopped hanging out with my mother when she had me because, she gathered from things he said when drunk, he thought becoming a mother made her boring. That scene of poets and Abstract Expressionist painters—what’s called the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s—had to reach escape velocity from ’50s conformity, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some of its members could be hostile to any show of domesticity. When the artist Jane Freilicher got married and had a daughter, her friends accused her of caring more about her new refrigerator than her painting. How often one person’s liberation is another’s subjugation. The poet Alice Notley wrote: “There is no place in America for heterosexual poets with children...except for / in your house.”
Trying to embody both my parents at the same time, I routinely filed magazine stories while watching my young son. Once I had to build a pillow fort on the couch to protect myself and my laptop from being shot with Nerf bullets to get my work done. I finished the piece. Then I set out snacks.
I wrote a parenting book while working full-time as an editor in chief and taking care of a toddler. It was entirely composed on a laptop in my bed between the hours of 9 p.m. and midnight, after working a full day and putting my son to bed—and it was written in such a fugue state that I would be surprised if any two sentences are in the same language; I pretend it doesn’t exist.
Because my father was right about this: If you lock yourself away, your work goes deeper. I’ve been distracted for most of my life, certainly since I became a mother. It’s possible that the best work I’ve done was several years ago at an artists colony, where for two weeks I did exactly what my father always did—shut everyone else out. When I told my parents I was going, my father rolled his eyes. He said he wouldn’t be caught dead at a writers colony. My mother snapped at him: “Your whole life is a writers colony.”
Many women author friends of mine struggle to carve out time exclusively for their work. One with two kids told me that she writes in her bedroom so her husband can have the office in the apartment. When I mentioned that the New York Public Library had scholars rooms she could apply for, she got a sultry, faraway look in her eyes, as if I’d just described a nude beach. My friend Abbott says that all women who want to create need to train themselves to be 10 percent more narcissistic, whether or not they have children. If your whole life you’re told by the world to be quiet, to be small, to be pleasing, how do you go a different way? I read male memoirists with thousands of pages of stories, and I don’t know how they do it. I wonder if I want to be like them or if I’m just intoxicated by how free they seem to feel. Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz—a poet of my generation and fellow graduate of Manhattan’s P.S. 41—once told me that the age requirement for drinking on St. Marks Place was “confidence.” Maybe that’s the age requirement for everything.
I sometimes ask myself if I would be as great a writer as my father if I’d stayed single, childless, cloistered. To be a great writer or artist, how ruthless do you need to be? How single-minded? Do you have to be the kind of ruthless where in front of your only child and your wife of 47 years you tell your doctor that you only care about writing?
“Should I have closed a door on my family?” I asked my shrink. “Would I be a better writer?”
“Your son will be out of the house in five years,” she said. “Then you can work all day every day if you want. Personally, I’d rather read something by someone who had a full life before locking out the world.” I find what she says—you can have everything, maybe just not all at once—comforting, though I fear she’s humoring me.
The immunotherapy treatments worked. My father, around his work schedule, got infusions. Soon scans showed that the tumors had stopped growing; some had even shrunk. The doctor said that he hadn’t been cured, but that he could be looking at “a long horizon” in terms of life span.
My father is still alive two and a half years after that initial appointment. He’s still shutting himself in his office all day to write and smoke. My mother still makes him three meals a day, pays the bills, cleans around him. He sees me and his grandchildren when he sees us.
My husband and I and our kids are close. We take vacations and eat dinner together. We have inside jokes, talk through problems, and help one another do the things we want to do in the world. I know the boys’ shoe sizes, what books they’re reading, and who their best friends are. I find them infinitely interesting, and they know it. My next book comes out soon. Would it be a better book if I’d put everything into my work like my father did? Maybe. But I know for a fact that my life would be worse.
Adapted from Also a Poet © 2022 by Ada Calhoun; reprinted with the permission of the publisher Grove Press.
