MARY HANNAH TERZINO
Cancer Buffet
1. Fish
I’m thirty-three years old, perched on a sofa in a navy-blue Laura Ashley dress, overly browned from hours in a tanning booth at the YWCA. My hair is big and fabulous. My mother sits in a chair to my left, laughing. It’s her sixty-first birthday. My cousin sits to my right, saying something witty, holding my hand. She’s a pretty blonde, five years older than I am, my dear friend. This photograph from 1988 is the only one of the three of us in which we’re all adults.
My youngest brother is graduating that day from Indiana University, and he and my dad are at commencement. My mother is too tired to attend, and my cousin and I keep her company at our hotel. My mother doesn’t look tired in the picture. But the photo doesn’t show her surgical scar, a carving made four months earlier to excise from her colon a tumor the size of an orange. Invisible cancer cells remain, lurking in the crinkled folds of her digestive system, dividing and devouring, the only things they know how to do. Their virulence exhausts her.
Swimming inside us is the delicious broiled snapper my mother and I both ordered at a restaurant the night before, a meal so good she almost finished it, now coursing through her remaining intestinal folds with difficulty. My intestines, in contrast, are pale, smooth-walled organs forming a transept trail; the bites of snapper navigate the switchbacks easily. I take digestion completely for granted.
In the photograph my father took at the restaurant, my mother’s fork is poised above her plate, but it doesn’t contain any food.
My mother dies in a hospital bed in her living room three months after the hotel photo. A purple lump the size of a baby eggplant protrudes from the side of her neck. At the moment she dies, I’m in her kitchen making salmon loaf for the family. We’ve closed the doors between rooms because she’s terribly sensitive to smells, and although I’m trying to listen for her, I don’t hear her final breaths. Amidst the sadness and planning that consume the rest of the evening, the salmon loaf is forgotten, a pinkish lump shoved into the refrigerator that I throw out two days later.
I have no photographs of my mother’s wake or her funeral to remind me of those events. I have almost no memories of either day. Thirty-three years on, I still retch at the odor of salmon croquettes.
2. Appetizer
Shortly after my mother dies, I dream that everyone in our family attends a party featuring champagne and lavish silver trays of hors d’oeuvres, including one displaying a hill of toothpicked shrimp. My mother isn’t there, and I ignore her absence as I nibble rumaki, one of her favorites because of the bacon. Relatives mill around the shrimp hill, grabbing at toothpicks. My cousin is also missing, and I keep looking for her. In this dream, no relative I ask, including her own brothers and sisters, knows my cousin. I panic in the dream at the prospect that she has disappeared.
3. Coffee
My cousin dies of brain cancer twenty-seven years after my brother’s graduation, her tumor the size of a peach pit. I visit her several days before she dies. She isn’t speaking much, but the smell of my coffee appeals to her, so I pour her a cup and offer her a straw. She manages one sip. I remind her that I’ve never forgiven her for the dried-blood-colored bridesmaid’s dress I had to wear at her wedding, and she smiles at this familiar ribbing. As I say goodbye, I hold her face in my hands and wipe tears from her cheeks, afraid to assume they are for me, afraid to assume they aren’t.
In the last photo of the two of us together, taken the summer before she dies, we pose at a farmers’ market. My cousin’s sleek, gray wig frames her cheeks, our heads touching in front of a tumble of green, red, and orange bell peppers.
4. Wine
I am reading aloud at my cousin’s graveside. I wear her necklace, one we shopped for together; her daughters gave it to me before her funeral. I touch its colorful, smooth stones as I recite the Maya Angelou poem I’ve selected. I don’t read the title; it’s become the name of a sentimental TV show. It’s a poem about love, not death, and I choose its message for my cousin’s daughters. Angelou writes that love comes with both happiness and pain, but if we’re open to it, love can remove our fears. Love, of course, cannot remove our cancers. Love is more limited than we like to think, more vaporous than the soft pulp of our terminal fears, but I don’t say that. I drink my lunch after the graveside service, hurried gulps of bad white wine.
In a photograph of me with my brothers at the lunch, they’ve raised their glasses to toast my cousin. I’m holding an empty glass.
5. Meat
Four years after my cousin’s death, I develop a cancerous tumor under my left eye, next to the tear duct. It’s the size of a small pea. The night before the surgery, I dine on grilled lamb chops in an Ann Arbor restaurant with my husband. I cannot finish the chops. It takes all of my concentration not to rub my fingertip repeatedly over the bump under my eye.
The tumor removal is easy. The plastic surgery to repair the lower eyelid is more complex. For three weeks I resemble a prizefighter, cut, swollen, and bruised, dozens of infinitesimal stitches trussing my skin to my cheekbone. I take selfies of my face, of the butchery designed to make me look normal when I heal.
I show these photographs to no one.
6. Fruits and Vegetables
My relationship with food exists both inside and outside of my body, in both life and memory, literally and metaphorically, from earliest consciousness, tainting how I imagine tumors, those ugly knots of killer cells.
I picture my mother’s surgeon removing an orange globe from her abdomen, peeling and sectioning it, juice running down his glove. I see the purple lump on her neck grow shiny like eggplant skin. Under my cousin’s wig, a peach pit protrudes from the side of her head, bits of coral-colored fruit stuck in its creases, the creases in the pit mimicking the ridges in the brain itself. The night before my surgery, I gaze in the mirror at my pea-sized tumor as it turns bright green.
I have the easy tumor in the family cancer buffet. The surgery is successful. I’m told I’ve completely recovered. But now the photograph of my mother, my cousin, and me has begun to brittle, edge curled, faces blurring. I make copies on my printer, hoping to prolong its life.
Mary Hannah Terzino writes overlooking the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck, Michigan. Her work has been published in The Forge Literary Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Blue River Review, among others. She was a 2018 finalist for a fellowship for emerging writers over 50 from The Forge, and was awarded first prize in 2021 for her flash fiction story “Blank Slate” from the UK’s Fiction Factory. She is an occasional contributor to Brevity blog, an online publication about writing.