Last night, we smelled something odd in Dad’s and Darla’s house and panic ensued. By “we” I mean that Dad noticed a strange smell and informed Darla that the oil tank might be empty. By “panic” I mean what followed was an absolutely cinematic exercise resembling nothing so much as water ballet. Cue the swimmers!

Oompah pah oompah pah! Oompah pah oompah pah!

My son-in-law Mr. Sasha and Dad’s second wife Summer’s third husband Clay waltzed through the kitchen. One of my sisters retrieved a flashlight. A kitchen full of women sipped white wine. Daria and Summer paged through the phone book. Where, oh where was the tank, the tank?

Oompah pah oompah pah! Oompah pah oompah pah!

The tank, the tank, the tank has seven inches. The charge, the charge, the charge for emergency delivery. We don’t know what to do, and Daddy’s asleep!

This morning, I realized that, dazzled by the glare off the tiaras, no one resolved the oil situation. Daria wanted to discuss our options with Daddy before we did anything. I had a sneaking suspicion that if he were healthy, every last one of his assembled relatives would have had Dad’s boot print on her ass. So this morning, he and I conferred.

Tata: Clay determined the tank had seven inches of oil. The oil company felt we probably wouldn’t need more oil before a scheduled delivery on Tuesday. We don’t know your tank, though, or the house’s normal oil consumption.
Dad: You didn’t take care of this last night?
Tata: Daria wanted to ask you what you wanted to do.

Yes, I completely threw her under the bus.

Dad: When the oil runs out, the house is going to go stone cold. What’s going to happen then?
Tata: It won’t happen, Dad. We’ll take care of it.
Dad: Do me a goddamn favor and go take care of this right now.

At the doorway, I pointed to my sister-in-law Bette and said, “Why don’t you go in and say hello? He’s in a great mood,” which might’ve been a shitty thing to do if she’d just spent a full day on airplanes with two children under three, but I’m not a nice person and – damn it – nobody’d thrown her under the bus yet today. As she disappeared into the sick chamber, I turned on my heel and sent Mr. Sasha off to find the fast-moving and focused Daria, who stared at me briefly, swished her mane of spiral curly hair and marched off to find the oil company’s phone number. I almost felt sorry for whoever told her no, she couldn’t have whatever her heart desired – almost, but I’m not a nice person and you should’ve seen that coming.

It was about this time Dad got to see my brother Todd for the first time since Todd, Bette and the two children under three arrived late last night from Los Angeles. Earlier in the week, I worried Dad wouldn’t live this long, but illness has not changed Dad’s iron will and sense of badass decorum: there was no real way Dad was going to kick off before he talked with each of his children and saw the seven-month-old grandson who’d carry on the family name. Todd, who had not seen the parade of his sisters, aunt, cousins, and stepmothers burst into tears all day, every day, seemed to keep cool, and when he wasn’t upset, gradually Todd’s relatives drifted into the living room until the room was full and Dad seemed to be holding an audience. I didn’t really notice what was happening at first, because I was sitting at the end of his bed, with my hand on Dad’s leg. Daria was sitting on the other side of Dad’s legs. Dara was sitting behind us on an adjacent couch. Todd’s wife sat holding the baby on Dad’s portable commode. Todd stood right behind her. Summer sat on the couch behind me. Miss Sasha sat at Dad’s right hand, and Mr. Sasha sat next to Summer, whose new husband stood in the doorway. Auntie InExcelsisDeo sat on a recliner behind Daria. A friend of Daria’s named Zippy sat behind Miss Sasha, who said, “Grandpa, please tell us the story of the Crisco and cornflakes.”

This is the story of the morning Todd was born, and it is our favorite. Miss Sasha held a digital recorder. Todd set up a video recorder. If I’m especially lucky, I’ll be able to post this video so you can see it, but until that time, here’s what you must visualize: Dad tells us the story and it is somehow different from what I’ve ever heard because it is always different each time from what I’ve ever heard. We let the differences go and no one argues. The story is hilarious: on April 1, 1966, Todd was born at Stupid O’Clock in the morning and Dad came home from St. Peter’s Hospital. When he woke up in the morning and sat up, he knew something was wrong when he put his feet down on his bedroom floor and felt a CRUNCH. I was three years and two months old. Daria was less than two. We’d decided to make Daddy breakfast and poured out every spice, powder and goo in the kitchen. I was the intrepid planner and climber, and no cabinet was left unopened and emptied. As two little Italian girls, Daria and I had long, dark hair, which stood up in cornflake-filled mohawks. Neighbors heard the screaming and rescued us. There was concerted cleaning and scouring and Grandma – the hairdresser – washed our hair with Spic-N-Span. Aren’t you glad you stayed tuned to this channel?

This was all very funny, but somehow we got on the subject of baby brothers as science projects and Daria told a story Dad had never heard before about Daria and I replacing Todd’s Halloween Chiklets with FeenAMints. As Daria told this story, a man I’d never seen before dragged a giant hose across Dad’s lawn and disappeared behind Dad’s forest of bonsai trees. And just as Daria remembered weighing FeenA Mints as Chiklets vs. trying to pass off chocolate stamped ExLax as Hershey’s, the man dragged the hose back to a truck I couldn’t see. So the heating problem was solved, and as Dad’s father used to say: “Everybody out of the pool!”

Atticus is the new cat in the house. He stays mostly in Dad’s office when he is not eating or wandering around outside. Earlier today, Atticus decided the power cord on my laptop looked especially delicious and I realized suddenly: the people of the four resident cats are busy with the drama of life and death; these cats are bored, lonely and confused by the presence of an allergic family. Even people who sneeze can twirl string, and if the cats are happier, Darla will be happier, and if Darla is happier, Dad will be happier. So we’re going to play with these cats if it costs us a whole county’s ration of Zyrtec.

I bet you’re wondering how I came to be here.

On Monday, I got home from work and spent an hour arguing with a trucking company about the sofa I ordered. The trucking company said it was good news/bad news regarding my sofa. The good news was my couch was coming on Wednesday. Believe it or not, the bad news was they’d bring the sofa to the foyer of my building but not the additional 25 feet to my living room. I told them they should be ashamed of themselves. There were many phone calls back and forth and someplace, during a moment I wasn’t cursing someone’s ancestors, Daria called and told me Dad had been sent home from the hospital to die and we were going to Virginia, all of us. I burst into tears and told her I should go with someone who’d gone before, since I didn’t know my way around Staunton and Swoope, Virginia. After a flurry of phone calls, it was decided I’d leave Monday night with Auntie InExcelsisDeo and my cousin Sandy. We’d drive down to Sandy’s sister Monday’s house and leave the next morning for the Shenandoah Valley. Once that was decided, there were a lot more calls to make. My dentist and orthodontist would notice my absence, for instance. The family store would look a little empty without me. And my job. I think they’d notice if I didn’t turn up Tuesday morning to do my daily half hour of scathing pre-coffee stand up comedy. What about the damn couch?

Siobhan promised to take care of the whole sofa delivery thing for me. Monday afternoon, she sat on my filthy living room couch and issued directives while I walked around in circles, sobbing and bumping into things. This is called “packing”.

Siobhan: You’re laying out your clothes, right?
Tata: Waaaaaaaaaaah!
Siobhan: Bras. Take some bras.
Tata: Waaaaaaaaaah! Check!
Siobhan: Socks?
Tata: Waaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yup.
Siobhan: Sweaters? Sweat shirts? T-shirts?
Tata: Sniff! Sniff! Got ’em.
Siobhan: Pants to sleep in. Pants to look like a normal person in. Pants for the feed store.
Tata: Waaaaaaaaaaaah! If you say so.
Siobhan: Products? Because even though they have drug stores out there, you like to smell like you.
Tata: It reassures me. I don’t have to keep checking my underwear labels to see who I am.
Siobhan: That may prove important. Especially since I know you didn’t pack any.

Siobhan drove me down to Auntie’s house, where Sandy poured me three fingers of gin because my job in the car was to sit in the back seat and NOT throw up. We drove like Jehu to Monday’s house in Somewherethehell, Maryland. Sandy poured me some more gin because my job was to go to sleep, in which effort I was briefly successful. When I woke up at 3:30, I was freezing in a strange bedroom filled with wedding pictures. It gave me the heebie jeebies. We set out for the valley by 9:30: four of us in a Honda hybrid with indefinite travel plans and wide-eyes terror. The night before, a block away from Monday’s house, Sandy saw an upended vehicle next to the car and said, “Mom, is that real?” Auntie said, “That’s real. Those people are going to help them and we are leaving.” Tuesday morning, as we drove to Virginia, I was so frightened I could barely speak in between episodes where I couldn’t shut up. But reality is seldom what I think it is, and when we arrived at Dad’s and Darla’s house, we found Dad looking and sounding – and we were deeply shocked – like Dad: witty, charming, abrasive, foul-mouthed. How could he be so sick that all bets were off? A few hours later, Daria and Tyler arrived, then Miss and Mr. Sasha. We each spent a little time alone with him until he was tired and needed sleep. My sister Dara is fifteen, and kind of numb. Her mother took Dara out of school temporarily, but it’s hard to know how to help Dara. I’m not sure I know how to help myself.

Wednesday, Siobhan told me my brother-in-law Dan was sitting in my apartment, with his two small children, waiting for that sofa. It was snowing in New Jersey. By that time, I couldn’t have cared less if Dan had given that sofa a Raritan River Viking funeral. Thursday, Sharkey, Dom and Siobhan dragged the old sofa to the dumpster. The new sofa, described by Dan as “bordello red” and by Sharkey and Dom as “fire, walk with me red” waits for me in my empty apartment. I don’t know when I’ll see it, but I’m grateful it’s there.

My brother will arrive here at Dad’s and Darla’s soon. We’ve taken to buying huge bottles of wine and leaving them outside in the shade because otherwise there’d be no room in the fridge for more than a few eggs. The other night, we made a toast, all of us, including Dad: to us, to life, to love!

I’m sitting on the floor of Dad’s office with a fuzzy orange cat named Atticus. We are surrounded by cookbooks. If I haven’t mentioned it, food and food writing are Dad’s thing. Friends Dad made on food and wine lists are calling and writing, and Darla’s reading letters and blog comments to him. The two of them are deeply touched by what people are saying. Dad, who has always enjoyed the idea that he is loved and reviled equally, is surprised by the outpouring of affection. I keep asking if that’s Stage One of his Eeeeeeeevil Plan.

No one knows how long we’ll be here. Today, Dad’s second wife’s mother sent us rotisserie chickens and cole slaw. Time has slowed down to a crawl. It took me almost half an hour this morning to put milk and coffee into a cup. Seeing Kelly Ripa on a TV in the Staunton, Virginia Howard Johnson’s was oddly comforting.

The house is filled with bottles of wine Dad’s had for ages. They’re like a travelogue of his life I can’t read except to say I can see that the journey was far from ordinary. We are making lists now of the things we want, and my heart is in my throat. The posterboards he brought back from living in Europe have always signalled for me We are at Dad’s house and I love them. Other than those posters, I can’t say what thing will remind me of some important moment until I see it, and this house is full of things to see.

Dad is sleeping. In some corner of the house, documents were drawn up and signed. My two sisters drove off to find and pay the garbage haulers to haul off yesterday’s frozen condiments. Miss Sasha, the only one of us intent on making a career in food service, is looking through the cookbooks for treasures. Atticus naps at my feet, but he is not convinced that all is well. We have shared a glass of water.

The best idea I’ve had all week involved less thinking.

Tata: Darla, can I get you a glass of wine?

I have to guess for a minute: it’s Wednesday? It’s Wednesday. Dad relocated from the couch to a rented hospital bed in the living room, which is good because he’s more comfortable. His liver is failing and it’s terminal. I have no idea how long something like that takes to kill a person but he looks pretty damn good. I said so.

Tata: Dad, you look pretty damn good.
Dad: Don’t believe it.

He’s always been a good actor. Most of my family is here at Dad’s and Darla’s house. We are kind of climbing all over one another and anxious to help. This morning, Auntie InExcelsisDeo, who is taking this very hard, needed to get out of the house for a bit so she and I walked to the end of the driveway. It’s about a mile and a half. We returned to find my sister Daria and her husband Tyler directing the assembled cousins, siblings and spouses in a hive-like effort to clean up Dad’s half-finished oils and vinegars for the spring market season.

Tata: What are you doing?
Daria: Dad said, “Lazy people! Get off your saggy butts and go clean frozen shit out of the garage!”
Tata: Good thing freakish upper body strength is apparently genetic.

We dragged milk crates and boxes out of the garage and into the driveway, which is an absolutely great idea because the house is in the Shenandoah Valley. The backyard, if you can call it a backyard, is a cow path. A little while ago I was talking on the phone to a friend and made eye contact with a passing cow, which seldom happens in New Brunswick – I mean it, almost never. Last night, on our way up the lengthy driveway, nine, ten, maybe a dozen deer crossed our path, staring at us. They were not afraid. Darla said the deer live here because Dad doesn’t shoot them, so it’s personal. Up here, in this section of the valley near Staunton, Virginia, wildlife is right outside the door, munching on something. Fortunately, we’ve left it frost-damaged condiments.

Tonight, we sat with Dad in the living room, all of us: his wife, his second wife, three of this daughters, his sister, his two nieces, his son-in-law, his granddaughter, his grandson-in-law. My brother and his family will arrive Friday morning. Tonight, I sat on the end of his bed, with my hand on his leg. My baby sister Dara, all of fifteen, sat on the other side, touching his other leg. My other sister Daria was holding his hand. Daria directed the conversation for about an hour, and it was so funny we were all crying from laughter, even Dad. This is what he has always liked best about the family: we are a riot, an utter riot. In an unguarded moment, we were all telling on each other, which I had never imagined happening, not even with a special prosecutor.

Tata: We’ve all got GOODYEAR stamped on our asses from being thrown under the bus.

We agreed that one of our finest moments as a group was Miss Sasha’s bridal shower, which Dad catered, and it really was. Dad could hardly breathe, he was laughing so hard. We all held our collective breath for a second, though he was smiling broadly.

Dad: Spaghettios!
Tata: What?

Everyone remembered at once. Dad and Daria are catering professionals. They’d built a banquet table of considerable Italian charm and elegance. Rustic touches lay everywhere, like artisan loaves of bread and decorative grasses. Because Dad is a prankster of the first order: a bain marie tray of Spaghettios.

Everyone: Spaghtettios!

A few minutes later, Darla closed the doors to the living room to let Dad sleep. Everyone’s in the kitchen, laughing and crying. I don’t have to see it to know. I know. And my heart aches.

I’m leaving tonight and I don’t know when I’ll be back.

Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.
– Samuel Beckett.

For me, the answers have always been in the body. My solution to emotional distress has always been lifting weights or dancing or calisthenics or cycling or athletic sex. When I am acting like myself, if I am miserable and in motion, I’m working through it. One of the lessons of depression was that my body, which had turned on me before, could betray me completely in the form of bad brain chemistry. Subsequently, I discovered I could also fatten up alarmingly. When I look at myself now and think I should lose 25 pounds, I feel betrayed, but wonder by whom?

The human body is a leaky vessel.
– Ta

This morning, Mom emailed the family an NPR journal by Larry Sievers called My Cancer, pointing in particular to paragraphs 2-4. I was unfamiliar with Mr. Sievers or the journal. Let’s see:

I’ve been a journalist virtually my entire adult life. I’ve also been a baker, a short-order cook, a chicken delivery boy. I’ve taught. I dabbled in the human rights world briefly. I tried and failed to write a book. All that seems dwarfed by the cancer.

Now I find myself about to embark on another part of this strange journey. I have been undergoing a relatively new procedure called Radio Frequency Ablation. They stick a needle into your lung, your liver, wherever the tumor is. The needle actually pierces the tumor. Then they burn it out from the inside. Kill it. Something that people undergoing chemo can only dream of. I’ve seen the scans, seen the black holes where my tumors were.

At first, I thought we were talking about Mom’s identity as a cancer survivor. This interested me because it would never occur to me now to identify myself by my disease or malady since my seeking treatment for depression was an abject failure. So I wondered if Mom, who wears a Live Strong bracelet, was referring to Mr. Sievers’ thoughts two paragraphs later:

And when that’s done, when the last tumor has been turned into ash, what am I then? Will I be somebody who used to have cancer? I think most cancer patients don’t ever think it’s really gone. It’s just hiding, waiting to jump out and scare us when we least expect it. Will I be able to resume my old life? To rebuild my battered body into what it was before? I don’t know. But I know this disease has changed me dramatically in so many ways. I am a different person. Hopefully a better person. You cannot go through an ordeal like this and not be profoundly affected.

If I’m cancer free, does that mean I’m not part of cancer world, the community in which I have found so much comfort and strength? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I just know that once again I will be a stranger in a strange land. But I will still be someone whose life was changed in every way by the monster we call cancer.

But Mom wasn’t thinking of herself. Maybe the experimental treatment might help Dad, she thought, which is remarkable. At times, Mom and Dad have had the most acrimonious divorce I’ve ever seen. Then again, Dad’s heart attack caused Mom a lot of sorrow. Who knows what the failure of another’s body may mean to us?

I spent hours yesterday afternoon dancing, which is to say stepping inside music to get out of my brain. After the hysterectomy years ago, I woke up to find my doctor sleeping in a chair at the foot of my bed. My surgery had not gone as planned, and he was worried. I wanted to go home, so I sat up in bed without using my hands. He said should have been impossible – except I just didn’t believe my body was weak, so it wasn’t. And though I am in pain nearly all the time to some degree, as arthritic people may be, I cannot see myself as anything but temporarily inconvenienced. Pain is not important. Dancing is everything, is life.

What am I to do, then, with the frailties of other bodies in the quiet of time?

I made the mistake of waking up happy this morning. The sun was shining, NBC-TV promised 55 degrees, and I felt pretty good, so I was completely pissed that I had nothing to complain about. Damn it. I expect a certain level of flavorful misery, and if things are looking up, I’m waiting for pigeon poop. Perplexed, I left the apartment at noon, walked to town, to the library, where I retrieved something I’d left at work yesterday, then I walked to the health food store. By then, my hair was floating above my head like a fuzzy bronze cloud and my eyes were so irritated by something in the air I was trying to walk up Route 27 with my eyes closed. Fortunately, I spent my childhood pretending I was Helen Keller, so even that was nothing to complain about, but I arrived at the health food store determined to discuss homeopathic medicines for wanting to kill your sister and found the Chinese medicine practitioners missing. Only a teenage boy was evident, and he wastes his youth pretending not to follow me through the store. I like him. He’s very sweet. But I’m not having a conversation with him like –

Tata: Do you have a homeopathic remedy for when my sister is a complete bitch?
Boy: Only if she’s imaginary, and we’d need third party confirmation of that, ma’am.

– so I walked across the street in the glorious sunlight to the Extortion Mart and couldn’t find baking pans. At last, something to complain about, and not even finding foil pans stopped me. I’ll be baking every week. I might need pans – and no one should forget it!

Two and a half hours after I left the house, I arrived home and checked messages. Daria and I had talked on the phone twice before noon, but she’s nothing if not thorough.

Daria: Darla updated the blog, they’re getting ready to leave the hospital and Fifi needs a nap. Peace out, dog.

Though I was desperate to talk with Dad again, I took my cue from the toddler and lay down for a nap. Dad and Darla would need some time to settle in, I thought. Some time passed –

…feelings! nothing more than feelings! trying to forget my…

– and after the musical interlude, I called Dad’s house.

Tata: I’m relieved that you’re home from the hospital.
Dad: So you are crazed with worry?
Tata: I’m keeping my cards close to my vest. Speaking of my vest, there’s a man resisting my otherworldly appeal. If you will.
Dad: Is he exceptionally stupid?
Tata: Thanks, Daddy! I’ll call you tomorrow.

I’ve got no complaints at all.

We’re having an office cleaning day! I’m wearing sweats because I anticipate climbing on top of and under things. The comfy clothes proved less comfy than usual when I got to work this morning completely soaked because cotton jersey absorbs water like you wouldn’t believe, especially when you crouch down and make yourself a nice, round target. This morning, another of my tires was flat, though I can’t remember if that makes Flat No.5 or 6. I’m having a pretty good day so I’m telling you: you haven’t lived until you’ve inflated a tire in a forty degree driving rain.