propped on his desk, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. I imagine that man might have frequented a place like this, perhaps with my grandmother in a calf-length skirt holding my toddler mother by the hand. It is a satisfying image. The staff in their white aprons are energetic and knowledgeable enough that when I say, “I want bones for stock,” they tell me I have choices. As a vegetarian in a butcher shop I trust their expertise, because until today, I didn’t know the difference between stock and broth. I walk out with seventeen dollars’ worth of soup bones and marrowbones. Bones are not cheap. Maybe they shouldn’t be.
After we learned that embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma is a soft tissue cancer, one whose cells appear like the skeletal muscles of developing embryos, which is ironic considering the tumor developed inside her uterus, after the hysterectomy, after her first chemo treatment, after the failure of her antinausea medications under the doctor’s terse orders Don’t let her throw up, after several days passed before she could be convinced to eat anything, we wondered: Starve a fever, feed a cold, but what do we do for cancer? There is a desperation involved in feeding someone undergoing such treatments, not only because of the horror of it, not only because those chemicals change taste perceptions, but the failure to care for the most basic needs of someone you love so deeply is unacceptable. My mother’s palliative doctor tells her that dysgeusia is the technical term for food tastes like shit, but this information does not help, so he prescribes Ritalin to stimulate her appetite. We laugh, knowing how many of her fourth grade students were also on Ritalin. We learn that our friend M. survived chemo on mashed potatoes and ice cream; F. couldn’t tolerate sugar. My mother has trouble swallowing, complicated by a feeling she calls dead belly, like her entire midsection has filled with concrete, exacerbated by incessant belching, so my days are spent in her kitchen with the press of chicken under my fingers, the heft of beef bones, the slice and chop of carrots, onion, and celery, in pursuit of bone broth and a miracle.
14
THE YELLOW OF MY vintage four-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven named Estelle is the faded sunshine of summer lemonade, as viewed through a screen door from the distance of November. She is the first Dutch oven I found, the second of my cast iron collection, vintage Le Creuset like Agnes I could never afford in real life, sunny on a thrift store shelf for $4.99. I don’t know why I felt like she needed a name or why I thought she had a Count Basie vibe, a blues personality with a sassy grin, the weight of her so spectacularly solid and comforting, but she was perfect to attempt bone broth for my mother at a point in my culinary experience where I knew nothing about such things. I hadn’t made a soup from scratch, ever. The idea of a bone broth is to simmer a stock long enough—even up to twenty-four hours—to pull all the nutrients from the bones, the gelatin and collagen that can be drawn out only by time. Some consider bone broth the cure for everything and I was willing to try.
In these early days of chemotherapy where my mother’s bones malfunction, where we come to terms with how many children are afflicted with this particular cancer, my elfin nephew shows me that his shoes light up when he runs, when he stomps, double-footed, around the kitchen to make them pulse. He is three years old. His shoes contain tiny blue orthotics the same color as the glasses he wears that turn dark in the sun. He has finally been diagnosed with a growth hormone deficiency that has kept him in the single-digit percentiles of growth and he begins daily injections he will need until he turns eighteen. The growth hormones will catch him up to his genetics, to help his bones grow to the height he was always destined to be. There will come a point where this is normal, that H. will not need both of his parents to hold him still while the plunger pierces his tiny leg, but we have not yet reached that stage. At some point, we expect that adult bodies will break down; there is something specifically awful about the malfunctioning of a child’s body, which should be perfect in its newness.
The majority of research on my mother’s cancer is on children, not adults. I have found only five studies of adults with embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma in the last thirty years, which estimate the number of adults with this cancer at four hundred, total. I look at my nephew, still small enough that I can perch him on the red stool on the kitchen counter so he can watch the earthmovers tear up the street in front of our house while my father takes my mother to chemo, and I just watch H. and wonder. The shots are working; he is growing. But he is still so small.
15
WE CONSIDER THE BETRAYAL of bone the worst kind, a fracture of things we cannot fully accept. The week before my middle sister moved to college, my father took my sisters Rollerblading on the Heartland State Trail near our home, the oldest Rails-to-Trails path in the state. He fell and broke his hip. He was fifty years old, six foot five, two hundred and twenty-five pounds: when he falls, something will give. In his parents’ generation, the statistics of death within a year of hip fractures are truly astounding. We work ourselves to the bone, we know things in our bones, we consider the perfection of bone structure, and sticks and stones may break our bones, but have we never lost the ancient philosophical idea that there are things we know intuitively, below the level of consciousness? Is it that we attribute a certain kind of knowing to our bones, a kind of discernment and wisdom that cannot be gained otherwise, medieval ideas of where wisdom and understanding are physically located in the body? I know that the animals in the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska are unique in that they were fossilized in three dimensions. Most fossils collapse once the flesh has decomposed, and if they collapse into a way that keeps the order of bones intact, we say that the skeleton is articulated, as if the order of bones allows us to speak of them. What is missing when we cannot articulate the bones, when they are telling us something other than what we expect them to say? What does it do to us when our bones betray us, when children do not grow, when mothers develop childhood cancers, when the bones we trust do not hold us? How do we articulate our lives, then?
16
THE STORIES OF CONSUMING the thing we want to become are ancient, old as folktales of Hansel and Gretel, the Christian Eucharist, warriors consuming defeated enemies. My pursuit of bone broth became the literal one-to-one equivalency of If my mother eats bones, her bones will be strong, because her chemotherapy makes her neutropenic, which means that without those white blood cells born in her bone marrow, she cannot fight infection. And yet, consumption is code for the scourge of tuberculosis. Consumption spun metaphors of weakness as virtue, as Susan Sontag famously questioned the war metaphors of cancer as ones of strength—“The bromides of the American cancer establishment, tirelessly hailing the imminent victory over cancer; the professional pessimism of a large number of cancer specialists, talking like battle-weary officers mired down in an interminable colonial war—these are twin distortions in this military rhetoric about cancer”—but in the first six weeks of my mother’s chemotherapy, the food metaphors became my own reality: the recipe for her three-week regimens, the drug cocktail they pumped through her port every week. What is the purpose of metaphor except to understand what we absolutely cannot, to compare something we do not know to something we do? It tastes like chicken, after all. In those first six weeks, when my mother was hospitalized with those 100.4 fevers, she compared the bone pain of treatment to natural childbirth, something we could understand, even if we had not experienced it ourselves.
17
I REMEMBER THE FOOD shelf in the back of the hundred-year-old parish hall at the church, my father answering knocks on our parsonage door and giving food to whoever needed it. Looking back, even gatherings like Wednesday evening soup suppers during Lent—each one prepared by a different group in the church—were a way to make sure the larger community didn’t go hungry in a rural world where church and school were the primary community gathering places. American relationships with food are often an expression of class and poverty and this is not new, from debates about free and reduced lunch for children to concerns about food deserts, both rural and urban. Politicians find it expedient to shame those who use SNAP to feed their children, stoking outrage
