When I told Jane I had leukemia, she asked if I was going to die. I told her that in rare instances leukemia went away, that sometimes it could be staved off; and other times chemotherapy brought remission that lasted years. Deb, I’ve always prided myself on being honest, but I didn’t see the point in giving Jane the numbers. That the majority of leukemics die from infections or pneumonia. That ninety-five percent who undergo chemotherapy die in two years. For the first time in my life, I understand the value of a partial truth.

I can’t bring myself to inform my parents yet, but I telephoned Mr. Wythe straight away. Despite my not having been in touch for two years, he immediately wanted to know if there was anything he could do. “Is this how you treat all the girls?” I asked him. “Only the ones I represent,” he told me.

100. Untitled [Leukemic woman putting on lipstick], New York, 1970

Because she’s awake and her head’s in three-quarter view instead of in profile, it takes some looking to realize this is the same hospital patient Lillian caught sleeping, but it makes sense, given the circumstances. I can’t help thinking the parallels with Makeup artist on the uptown train and Getting ready are deliberate, but maybe applying lipstick requires the same absorption no matter whose mouth it is. Lillian never introduced me when I visited, so I don’t think they were friends. That means either Lillian took this picture on the sly, or her hospital roommate was too sick to object.

When someone becomes ill in the movies, it’s dramatic, but in real life it is incredibly boring. Even the guilt and the fear and the sadness become things you live with, such constant weights that, after a while, you stop feeling anything. I guess because of the way my mother and I lived together and apart, it was easier to forget that she was sick, or maybe I just didn’t want to remember. Sometimes I didn’t think of it until the afternoon. Sometimes I didn’t think of it at all, and I’d jerk awake the next morning with the breath knocked out of me. When I called the hospital, it seemed like Lillian was asleep or getting treatment half the time, and the other half she’d ask about school and I’d ask about her blood cells, and then we’d both dumbly sit there holding the phone. Visiting the hospital after work was out because that meant riding the subway at night, so I’d wait for Saturday to take the train up to Sixty-third in Manhattan, then walk toward the river. It was weirdly clean and quiet up there. Old ladies in fur coats and pinched faces held small dogs and fancy-looking shopping bags as they teetered in and out of stupid-looking stores. I knew I didn’t belong, and the old ladies knew that I knew it. I kept hoping one of them would ask what I was doing there so I could yell back that I was going to the hospital to visit my mother who had leukemia, and would they like me better if I was shopping for jeweled hairpins and miniature fruit? Except that none of them ever said anything to me, so each time I had to walk to the hospital without yelling at anyone.