Deep End

Ellen Birrell

Cool water on a hot day is a gift: all earthbound life needs its solutions. Radical generosity starts with water. How can we be at odds when you and I have this much in common? 

Once I fancied myself an ocean—I too contain multitudes—but now I suspect I am just another ungainly and tender water balloon, sun bleached, wind scarred, storm buffeted. Bounded by billions of others very like me, sometimes we touch. Shit kicks up—yeah—ready or not. Pay attention. 

* * *

I am an artist, but I cannot “draw.” I have only the half remembered glyphs of my earliest attempts. In the upper corner I put the messy yellow sun, surrounded by a blue Crayola sky. Straight across the bottom of my lined paper canvas, scribble-green grass softened the flat horizon over which nothing ever loomed. A little dark “V” in the blue part conjured a quick bird. Another vee, big and upside down in between the sun and the grass, made no sense until I tethered it to the ground with two “Ls.” Two squares and a rectangle summoned windows and a door. Home has always been an complex abstraction drawn from need—the biggest one, that I am safe.

* * *

When I cannot sleep, I retrace my memories of the house I grew up in. It was worn old when I was young. I loved the intricately patterned 1940s cabbage-rose wallpaper in the dining room—deep burgundy blossoms highlighted in soft pinks, with fat green leaves all but veiling the cream colored ground. Outside French doors too old to open was my mother’s lavish peony patch, her only dirt obsession. My father mowed the lawn. 

We ate in the dining room on Sundays when my dad was not traveling, with proper place settings and stumbling table manners. He interrogated us about our week at school, about current events. By his side or summoned during the meal was his college graduation present—the single volume Columbia Encyclopedia, (ed.1943)—there to settle old facts and, I suspect, to chart his own changes. We children ate in the kitchen the rest of the week at a picnic table, all paper napkins and pandemonium. 

At my desk in a third floor dormer, I could see our neighbor’s young tree growing fat next to our chain link fence. 

The fence blatted:

 “Ours.” 

The tree kept expanding and stretching but the fence just repeated itself. I loved to explore the tree’s bark with my fingertips after they first met: a quilt of bothered wood constrained by the fence’s indifference, like flesh in a fishnet stocking. The fence blatted on, but was, to my mind, completely beside the point. I understood by then that like all technologies, the fence “knew” its job but never the context. 

* * *

I moved through many schools, official and not. Despite my contrarian attitude, I ended up back in schools for work—some sort of karmic life sentence I always supposed—and tried to hold open a few unexpected doors for the students who came my way. It was early September when the call came into the office. My father—mower of lawns, consultor of encyclopedias—was a man who had once studied Romantic poetry and taken up fencing before piloting a B17 in WWII. Retired from a care filled life, he was suddenly in the hospital, my mother told me over the office phone, the department secretary having summoned me from the classroom. I filed this news behind my class notes, finished my lecture on the vagaries of linguistic theories of sign functions, and fell apart in the car telling my ocean-going love, David, the bad news as I drove north. 

I was deep in the chaos of denial as I held my parents’ hands in a small conference room in the hospital, sitting on hard child-sized chairs and I recognized myself in that strange doctor, pacing and avoiding eye contact, as he lectured us like we were students: 

“These are cross-sections of your brain, Mr. Birrell. In these first two films, notice the characteristic appearance of healthy tissue. However, here in the third film, you can see this darker area, and when we look at the fourth and fifth scans, which are stacked below the first three like a layer cake, you can see the spot on the third film is the tip of a mass.” His lecture was the end of my family’s known world. 

My father had always relied on the power of fair words, but suddenly he could not find proper names. Then, all his nouns disappeared. For a while he had verbs and adjectives and could point, but his neat handwriting eventually devolved into Scrabble draws, tidy letters in a line, all gibberish. When he could neither speak nor write, we were told he could still hear and understand, so we talked to him as we always had, but he could reply with nothing except an endless, frustrated fidgeting. Each of us took breaks to stare, in other rooms or outside, over water or whiskey, alone in our dark. We lost him so incrementally and so distinctly: water was our common solution, tears, our common sign. 

February brought historic rains. One storm in particular caused devastating flooding, cutting off water and power, destroying roads and bridges, grounding planes. The storm deafened me with ejaculations of the apocalypse. It was clear that it would take my father.  

Despite cancelled flights and white-knuckle delays, my dad somehow waited until we were all back in his room, knowing—I believe—we would do better if all we were all together after he left. My mother and I held his cool, stiffening hands as we all settled in to share what time we had. His hand gave a reassuring twitch in mine as he passed. For a split second, I was sure he was returning.

Within the month, my mother and I were both diagnosed with breast cancer.

* * *

My mother had been down this rabbit hole once before. She chose the simplest treatment, saying, at 72:

“I’ll take my chances.” She knew the risks: breast cancer had stalked the women in our family for four generations.

But I was only 43. I denied and bargained: 

“Not me….” 

“Not now!”

“I am too young.” 

“I don’t feel sick, damn it.” 

“Excuse me, Mr. X-Ray Tech, what you are calling ‘calcifications’ on my mammograms are just dust and crap on the film. I have an MFA in Photography. I know all about this shit….” 

“I will give up anything. I promise.” 

“Is this a short trip, maybe a lot shorter than I thought?” 

“Wake up.” 

 “I am dead—I will be soon…. Wake up anyway. Daily joy may be all I can savor; kindness may be all I have to give. Pay attention.”

“It’s not dangerous,” my doc promised, but added a lingering “yet.” He consoled me with his statistics and his judicious scalpel that carved off suspicious bits that I told myself I could spare. I remember the sour drip of chemo. 

* * *

From that old dormer where I had studied the tree and the fence, I could see all the way to the end of the block. It was not a great distance, but still the borders of my barefoot world. One misty summer darkness, I saw that familiar ground stretching—an immortal leviathan—under the banal street-lit, kamikaze-bug-studded stratosphere, so utterly indifferent both to tech and ticky-tacky houses, it took my breath away. That glimpse forced the world for me like a bulb, and I was sure I would hunt for and steward that force—somehow—when I grew into the superpowers of an adult.

* * *

Four or five years into my first tangle with cancer, along about the time I was beginning to suspect that at least one mastectomy was inevitable, I was sure I couldn’t wait any longer for daily joy. We had a serious discussion of our bucket lists, and committed to them. Mine was a young filly to ride and train and some land to pitch a tent on somewhere. David’s was the fully outfitted blue-water fishing boat of his dreams. I dreamt of eating the sweet tangerines I had planted, while dawdling around sitting on my sweet night-colored mare. But David actually fed us.

In the sixth year even my doctor gave up, and I, judiciously, exhaustedly, agreed to a mastectomy. One. I had sucked hard on the Life Saver of his promised “never again.” Supposedly, I had bought that with my chemo. 

* * *

I was fifty when we moved out of Los Angeles to an old farm in the country. My life calendar was marked Before Breast Cancer and After Breast Cancer, and I jumped off the deep end, hoping to live happily ever after. I longed for the ancient alchemy of rot and growth. I wanted to drown my incessant interior natter in the evening frog chorus. I needed intimacy with seasonal change, and ached to hear to the mountain lion’s soft heavy foot pad, hunting under the backyard pear tree at dawn. I knew the foursquare frankness of horses would save me. 

* * *

Each winter, I dream of summer tomatoes—sun warm and slippery with juice that runs down my impatient chin. My lucky unlooked for two decades at Deep End Ranch has taught me that I am ambivalent about plants. The small lemon orchard that came with Deep End was supposed to run like a machine: a system of inputs and products that would abstract tidily to ledger pages and money in the bank. The perfect farm is always a fantasy, really, and it took me years to understand that a farm is not just another dumb fence. Nevertheless, Lady Bountiful tomato fever strikes me every winter, and I spend the dark months gazing at seed catalogs, resolving to fix the catastrophes of the year before—which is, by the way, exactly how farming works, only on a much larger scale. Each winter, when the sun is low and pleasant, and the seasonal rains have begun to upholster Sugar Mountain in new-green velvet, I plan and build work-arounds: raised beds, squirrel netting, better compost systems and more efficient irrigation. I added a chair last year because the ground is so much further down there than it used to be. But every summer, I find my actual garden wilty, weedy, buggy and needy. If my attention wanders, all the tomatoes have been pecked, nibbled or beset with blossom end rot. Or the plants have pulled a full-on Victorian faint and I have to go all Florence Nightingale on them. The drama-queen zucchini, the size of baseball bats and just as wooden, they were tiny tender squash blossoms the other day—I should have heard them growing from my kitchen window.

* * *

Last winter, imagining this summer’s garden, I found myself at the bottom of the stairs sitting on my very painfully crumpled left foot. My right leg was stretched out in front of me and my calf pulsed a dull pain. The right foot didn’t look quite right—it did not line up with my leg the same way it had. The morning news still whispered from the phone in my hand, but I had missed the most important part of the story. Pay attention. I dissolved into deep bone-rattling shakes and began to yell for help.

My broken leg and I stayed in the downstairs bedroom off the kitchen, next to the bath for months. David and I named the room “the wheelhouse” for its panoramic windows to the north and east. It reminded us of his many fishing boats, long sunk under the farm. On opioids, I would randomly surface to confirm, yet again, that the sun rose each day. I peed in a bottle. I tried to sleep through as much of the healing as I could. I dreamt of piloting us toward a future where we wouldn’t fall, fall apart, drown or die of thirst. 

I rolled through leg surgery and months of no weight bearing. Using crutches was a death wish, so I traveled in a wheelchair and settled for a geezer walker at home, the kind with tennis balls on the front feet to make it easier to slide. I grew adept at the incremental mapping of each objective three steps out, and came to appreciate the impossibility of stairs. 

I was flooded by memories of my mother’s elderly body. Yeya moved to the farm when, at 84, she could no longer live independently. She always dressed her struggles in deflective cheerfulness for my benefit, but now I understood her worry about falling: the conscious tedium of doing the simplest things—the safe calculus of sitting on the toilet lid because I was unable to stand long enough to brush my teeth, or wearing only skirts with elastic waistbands because they were easy to pull on. The long list of our shared genetic vulnerabilities, including our breast cancers and our particular patterns of aging loomed in my overactive imagination. The reveal was terrifying. 

Sure enough, immobilized in the wheelhouse, something stormy loomed on my horizon: another crappy mammogram. Oh shit. Doctor Logan offered me his wan smile, like the friend that hangs around while you are gambling, making both the wins and the losses seem equally unsurprising, and all of it somehow normal and bearable. He detailed the possibilities in Chutes and Ladders commentary: if, then, if, then and so forth, but still comforting for offering a sketch map through the many unknowns looming. 

My breast and I wheeled into a clinic in a sunny suburb of Los Angeles, one of those that sport aspirational names and gated developments. I got my temperature checked and rolled alone into the examining room. Covid had stripped me of David’s comforting hand. Knowing the business of the day and anxious to be done with it, I steered toward the strange chair in the middle of the room, planning each incremental move in order to get into it without pratfalls. Someone grabbed my wheelchair from behind, pushed me into the far corner, deftly popped on the brakes, and announced: 

“Oh no you don’t. I drive here, and you’re not my first wheelchair.”

Nurse Drive locked me so I could only face into the corner like a dunce. I shut down. My attention became a stubborn cocklebur, clutching at any mindless pattern I could grab in the officially inoffensive room. The muted nonsense of pink waves and beige flowers, each offered laybys of detail to follow elsewhere, the busy work of circular tracery, like drains. Alas all those drains emptied into the dead overhead light of the examination room, like so many others I had been in, as I took up, once again, my all too familiar role as symptom bearer.

 I turned to Nurse Drive and fell into more enervating drains: tangerine curls above Day-Glo solar systems spread across the black, menopausal Milky-Way of her no-iron nurse’s coverall, no girly pastels for her.

A willowy brown girl slipped into my corner. Not 25 yet, with wide, earnest eyes in still acne prone skin and street clothes, she tried a smile on me. Nurse Drive introduced her as DeeDee, like a Hollywood extra shed from a Gidget set. DeeDee seemed to be there to soften Nurse Drive, to pass tools and hold hands, kind of like a helpful, beautiful child visiting for the holidays.

I kept sensing the loom of the chair behind me. It resembled a chair, but only sort of—it was too tall, too upright. The chromed footrest betrayed its utilitarian purpose. Half draped in freshly laundered hospital linen, the vinyl upholstery underneath was a chemical minty blue, like mouthwash. Like drain cleaner. 

I had been through this kind of biopsy during my first dance with cancer, when the technique must still have been pretty new, given the level of ham-fisted administration I experienced that first go round. Then, the male radiologist laid me down on my stomach with my breasts dripping down through holes in the gurney, like a cow to milking. I vividly remember he had assured me it would not hurt more than a shot of Novocain. I should have asked him how many times he had personally experienced it. 

Back in my corner, while Nurse Drive delivered her blunt descriptions of the procedure, DeeDee offered me her hand and a friendly personal share: 

“Oh! My grandmother lives in Santa Paula, too…. My mother made me go visit her last weekend. She lives alone, you know?”

And:

“Do you have children?” I untangled my hand.

“No.” I answered flatly, in the same way that—at DeeDee’s age—I remembered trying on to radiate discouragement at strangers in public, particularly leering ones. One of my proudest moments happened when I was sixteen, walking on a beach with my sister. A whole gaggle of boys surrounded and heckled us. Some god of female righteousness inspired me to turn to Amanda and loudly cluck like a chicken, calmly and determinedly, as if we had never been interrupted. She replied in the same, and the gaggle scattered. I used more refined methods on DeeDee, but I might as well have clucked.

“Do you have pets?” DeeDee continued, reaching for my hand again.

As Nurse Drive droned on about the procedure, as pages of contracts and exclusions and rights and mediations were presented for my signature, I raged. How the fuck had I fallen into the parallel universe of “patient” again?

Thus, the highly scripted theatre of breast cancer treatments returned for me. In the intervening years, the script had gotten a bit more upholstered and in this instance, the cast was all female, but my part remained unchanged: a patient presenting the requisite body part for analysis, if at all possible, cheerfully, pliably and without complaint. Finally, Nurse Drive wheeled me to the chair at the center of the stage. She instructed me minutely and in detail exactly how to move onto it, but I ignored her and performed my planned one foot pivot, my fancied pirouette, my small but necessary triumph. Even with a broken leg, I would be the ballerina in this play, if only for a walk-on. 

Nurse Drive rotated the chair and I faced a refrigerator shaped machine, plumbed with USB cables and multi-pin plugs that snaked up and across the acoustic tile ceiling and down into a shielded alcove by the door, the kind X-Ray techs shelter behind while blasting a nearby body part with radiation. A small platform protruded from the machine’s belly, fitted with plastic plates and a compression vice. Yeya always called it “the mangle iron.” Nurse Drive adjusted the chair back so far forward that if I had not had the compression plate right up against my ribcage, I would have fallen on my face.

“Are you comfortable?” asked DeeDee.

“Put your chin this way and your arm up there.” Nurse Drive instructed, grabbing my left breast and positioning it on the flat plate at the machine’s belly. The vice closed down as the pain rose up. She left me to check on the screen and called 

“Doctor” down the hall outside. 

“It needs to be moved and twisted to the left a bit more,” Doctor said from the alcove, her penetrating gaze judging my breast through the live x-ray screen. Nurse Drive released the vice slightly and rolled my breast before starting to ratchet it down again, not stopping until Doctor said: 

“That’s perfect!” 

The pressure was all but blinding. 

“Hold still. You must hold still for 20 minutes,” Doctor told me as Nurse Drive injected my pinned, twisted tit with Novocain. When Doctor finally touched me, it was only to flick a scalpel at my numbed breast and insert a steel probe. 

Back in her alcove, Doctor manipulated the machine so that tiny hollow coring needles darted out from the probe collecting tissue samples. When Doctor had enough, Nurse Drive removed the probe, released the vice and wiped blood off the plate. She swabbed my breast and bandaged the spot. Only then did she unfold the chair to full recline and step aside for DeeDee. With neither invitation from me nor instruction from Nurse Drive, DeeDee began vigorously massaging my breast: 

“To prevent some of the bruising,” Nurse Drive said, as she went about putting the room back to its benign order. DeeDee’s big brown eyes swam into mine as she rhythmically pumped my feeling, offended breast. 

“I think that referring to a person in need of medical attention as a ‘patient’ is one of cruelest ironies of modern medical care,” I opined imperially, and, no doubt, insufferably. DeeDee’s eyes got really big.

“What?” asked Nurse Drive.

* * *

I waited for my future in the wheelhouse, David feeding me yet again. I thought a lot about my great grandmother, Ellen Griswold Birrell, for whom I am named. She had been a homesteader in Ohio in the 1870s. I never met her, but some time in the early 1990s, my dad and I visited the home she had built with my great grandfather. The house was a relic; the farmland long gone for Depression era WPA projects. I had visited as a child but the house was always empty except for the stuff past relatives had left there for “safe keeping,” including the family-famous taxidermy two-headed calf in the bat infested attic. 

I found Ellen’s diaries in a box in a bedroom closet. I had always been curious about her, especially after my uncle showed me her brown taffeta wedding gown from 1880. She was tiny. How could my near six foot frame have come down the ages through the body that fit that dress? 

I arbitrarily decided the faded golden oak roll top desk by the large window was where she must have sat to write each day, so I took her seat and gazed, imagining her dairy cows and her vegetable patch basking in hazy Ohio sunshine. After a bit of that, I began my examination of her diaries, hoping to recover something of her interiority. In that increasingly frantic hour, I skimmed through all of them and was bereft. She had told me nothing about herself, what she felt or thought, who she saw or loved.  In her schooled and awkward hand, the diary entries simply described each day’s weather. 

* * *

My leg was a machine like the farm that was supposed to work, but, unlike the farm, always had. But, in an act of defiant closure to my months of immobility, I stood on my own two feet to plant my damn tomatoes. Only then did I follow my scary biopsy results down yet another medical chute. 

I began writing myself, not long after moving to Deep End, and I find that, like my great-grandmother, I often start by describing the weather. I think understand now what she knew looking out at her dairy cows; weather of all kinds simply is the most insistent fact of living, even if describing it is challenging.

This cancer is all mine, made from my genetic rag bag, a product of the collision of my weathered ocean balloon with the triggers of the world, the effluent of my very act of living. As I wait for more surgeries and final opinions, I wonder, can my mutating cells be eliminated, beaten back or bargained with? 

In the wheelhouse, I return to the now digital version of my dad’s old comfort hobby—house hunting. Every Sunday, a few of us would pile into the family station wagon—a Ford, always a Ford—and visit all of the realtors’ open houses up for rent or sale, within an hour’s drive. We explored them all, studio apartments, subsidized housing, grand mansions and everything in between. My dad talked with us about how we would live, wherever we landed. I am grateful for his lessons. And now bedbound again, I can steer by browser toward as many hypothetical futures as are pictured on my smartphone’s real-estate apps—a plea, an assertion that, yet again, there will be an after. After my mutinous cells. After Deep End. 

* * *

Today the hot, dry winds out of the desert own this farm. The doors have shrunk in their frames. The windows rattle. My skin crawls under blankets of moisturizer as I watch the horizon. A few hours into this blow and I am scenting for the least hint of smoke in the air. I am waiting for that first nacreous, sullied light of wildfire. 

“Hold a hand,” my dad always said. I promise to hold on as long as I can. 

Send rain.