At this point Danny and I had passed the ten-week mark, which Angie and I agreed was the big time. During our Friday-night home-by-nine-thirty movie dates, Danny and I would start by sharing an armrest during the opening credits, then let our hands wander as we pretended to watch the movie; but after ten weeks of that, I was bored. Enter the Friday I got home from Bohack’s and Lillian wasn’t there. Looking back, I should have known that my mother took camera detours only in spring, when the light lasted longer, and not on the way home from work in winter, when the light was gone by four. Rather than worry, I got inspired. After putting away the groceries, I changed into my skirt and wrote a note that I was sleeping over at Angie’s. I met Danny for a movie and didn’t show up at Angie’s until after midnight, just as The Dick Cavett Show was marking its halfway point with “Glitter and Be Gay.” Arriving home the next morning to no Lillian, I figured she was out taking pictures. When the phone rang, I was so sure it would be Danny or Angie that for a second I didn’t recognize my mother crying at the other end.

JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1970: After the embarrassment of fainting and being brought to the emergency room like a nineteenth-century woman with the vapors, worrying about you distracted me from the blood draws, and the thick needle at the bottom of my spine, and the odd repeated questions: Had I ever inhaled a lot of benzene? Or swallowed a lot of aspirin? Or taken something called Chloromycetin? I asked if that was the same as Dexies. No, the doctors said as they inserted another, much thinner needle into my arm. My daughter doesn’t know where I am, I told them. I called and called, but you didn’t answer, and my worry reversed itself. I don’t know where my daughter is, I told them. Was there someone I could send to the house, they asked, or a friend of my daughter’s I could telephone? I didn’t know Angie’s telephone number. I even tried calling Grete, though it’s been at least a year since we’ve spoken, but there was no answer there, either. I spent the rest of that night lying awake, dialing our number, and listening to it ring. At one point I dreamed I was gripping your skeleton and awoke to the phone in my hand—so that when I did reach you the next morning and learned you’d been with Angie after all, my relief overshadowed the doctor’s diagnosis by the end of the following day. You are safe, and I have leukemia. Between that and its opposite, this is the option I would choose.

99. Untitled [Sleeping hospital patient], New York, 1970