The Orchestra

She called us partners in crime. She the counselor and me the English instructor, working in this special program together at our college. She was unashamedly disorganized, professed her weaknesses to me as I sang out my fortes. We worked like a badly organized symphony orchestra, where the chimes come in at the wrong moment for their one clang, and the french horns fall flat, noticeable in the exposed section of the third movement.

The first semester, she called one morning.

“Laurel, I’m here—”

I had just gotten out of bed to the ring of the phone and picked it up as she was speaking the beginning of a thought.

“Where are you?” I asked.

She had arrived at school to set up the conference room on the fourth floor for the lunch event.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

I could kill her! I couldn’t believe it.

“The students are helping me set up,” she said.

I could picture the students bringing down bags of supplies from her office to the conference room, pushing tables and chairs around, unpacking the food.

“I thought we hadn’t confirmed it yet. We haven’t even matched the students with the mentors,” I said.

This wasn’t the only mess, as I thought of this event, back in bed that morning, where she would simply throw things together without proper planning. I wouldn’t rush in at the spur of the moment to do a haphazard job, as I imagined people pushed together randomly. I thought, too, of the letters I had the students write that first week in my class to a prospective mentor, and the notes I made at the bottom of each sheet with their interests. She had, somewhere in her office or at home, a stack of forms the mentors had filled out. Twice in our weekly meetings, she had not been ready to do the matching.

She was a real social person. An extrovert. Someone who felt buoyed up by a room-full of people, while the experience drained me. She embraced others literally, with her arms, and also with her open smile and the strong warm lift in her voice. While I felt crippled in a crowd, she was a flower whose center, exposed, enjoyed the light. So, for her, a disorganized occasion offered no problems. For me, the lack of structure made it impossible to function. I needed it to prop me up.

In these gatherings with students and their mentors from the community who were part of the program, the students would be put on display, either talking about a poster they had made in her class, or reading from something they had written in my class, both allowing them to talk about their hopes and aspirations. Sometimes the mentors would talk about their past experiences, not much different than the challenging road the students were up again, not only because of economics, but also because many of them were “undocumented” Latinos.

She would say, in front of the whole room, “See, you guys! These people aren’t different than you!”

The students recoiled to the I-told-you-so as little kids would respond to a mother chiding. I could only stare in horror.

My role in these events was limited, not only because of the organizational difference between us, but because I had to listen to her say such things. I could lead my own class more easily because I had full power, while this shared effort made me lean on her, as she would open the event and do most of the talking.

After three semesters of working in the program together, we attended a summer training for the program. She had attended it before, having done the program for a few years, and even though I had taught in it for a year and a half, I hadn’t done the training, partly not realizing the value, partly because I wasn’t entirely committed to teaching in it (I inherited the program from another teacher who went out on maternity leave.) After the training, I felt prepared to take more of a roll, confidence instilled from knowing better how to do all the program required.

Then, one morning near the end of the summer session, I entered the administration building before class. The Dean of Humanities, going in the other direction, stopped suddenly in her tracks, as if she had just changed her mind about something.

“Do you have a minute?” she asked, cocking her head.

I shook my head yes.

“Bad news, I’m afraid. The college is putting the program on a planning year.”

I was stunned.

“I’m sorry. I know you like it,” she said, her face sorrowful.

“The program is canceled?” I couldn’t comprehend.

She reached over put her arm on my shoulder.

I started crying uncontrollably.

“You’ve done a great job.” She hugged me.

She said that my partner would not be in the program when it restarted the following fall, after it had been revamped. Apparently, one of the VPs had frowned on a number of my partner’s practices, topped off by the fact that she didn’t get waivers signed by students or their parents before taking them to tour UCLA, a long drive in a few cars—hers and two students’—a two night stay in a motel, and meals out.

I thought of how the program had no support from the college in terms of money for the last couple of years—how my partner did her own fundraising, along with the students, including for this trip down south. I thought, too, of how she had no support from the counseling department: she had been in another program at school, and then got her masters in counseling; when she returned, she was not given the status of “faculty,” thus, being “staff” she had no rights, according to the counseling department, to an office on their floor. Later this would come back to haunt her as the very same people accused her of isolating herself up on the sixth floor, away from their department. Everyone, it seemed, turned against her. We did not work ideally together, but if she had been given her due, and if the program had monetary legs, we would have had a chance to make it work.

When the Dean told me of the dissolution of the program and how my partner would no longer be working in the new version of it, part of me was curious. What would it be like working with someone else? She had defined the roll of counselor and co-coordinator for me, yet I already knew from the summer training that there were plenty of areas that we hadn’t implemented properly, such as not providing a summer orientation for the students about to embark on the year’s worth of classes and commitment to the program. The Dean telling me a few weeks ahead of the fall semester was bad enough, but I was concerned that no one was telling her the program was on hold or that she wasn’t doing the program—whatever their story would be. I emailed my department chairs and they said her  own Dean needed to tell her. I emailed him. No response.

She was always the one who knew things, having worked at the college for decades—who performed which duties, who to go to for advice on a particular issue, which people got a long and which did not. She was an expert on the politics of the college, and knew the community around it as well—where to go to recruit students. She would go to students homes if they were having trouble, and talk to their parents.

Then, right before school was supposed to start, I got a call from her. 

 

 "I have ovarian cancer," she said.

“What stage is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Laurel, and I’m afraid to ask. I guess I just don’t want to know.” Her voice sounded quiet, the “know” curling in on itself at the end of the sentence.

When I visited her after surgery she was lively. As I approached her room, I could see there were three other people in the room, two sitting, one standing. An altar with figurines and pictures had been erected on a shelf. Next to that, vases of flowers made it look like a flower shop, and the myriad cards sat in layers, while others were taped to the wall. One of the friends told me to sit and we all exchanged a few words before they left. They had been there a while already, they said. Then, appearing from the hallway, her mother-figure friend, Ana, stepped out of the room to allow us time alone together. I knew  about Ana—Ana who she had traveled with, arm in arm around the world.

She couldn’t tell me the prognosis, because again, she didn’t want the information. But she was eager to talk about the students.

“Did you hear about Alma? She called the police on Jose, and now they won’t let him on campus. She’s making too much of things, as usual. Will you call him? And talk to Alma. Tell her—”

I promised to get things straightened out, but I knew, really, that only she could do that. She knew the students better than I, having been their counselor, and could talk to them in a way I couldn’t—a way that reached more deeply.

One afternoon in November, I visited her in the hospital after my classes. I had asked her for the chemo schedule.

She had her own room, her bed situated diagonally with a chair to the foot of it. Her eyes were shut and she snored loudly. I moved the chair to the side of the bed, though it scarcely fit. The hospital setting was familiar to me, as my husband Dan and I had attended a cancer support group for over a year at UCSF because of his cancer. However, he had no chemo with his early stage cancer, so this set up was new for me, the bag containing the toxic mixture hung where the subcutaneous fluids should hang, and its tube went into a port in her chest. I knew she also had a port in her abdomen, because she had shown it to me, but the tube didn’t go there today.

A nurse came in and nodded. She whispered to me, “She’s asleep.”

This seemed strange, because wasn’t it obvious that she was sleeping? But her words allowed us to talk, and she asked me if I would like some juice. She went out and brought a small box.

I had come for my friend, my partner at work, yet there was no sign of her waking. I sat for twenty minutes, as a witness to her treatment. Finally, she shorted abruptly and opened her eyes.

“Oh hi, Laurel.” Her voice was muffled, different from its normal clamorous ring.

“How are you?” she asked, a layer of fog clouding the rhythm of her speech. The patient asking the visitor how they are.

“Fine,” I said, and started telling her what was going on at school, not so much to entertain her, as really needing some advice on students.

Then her eyes closed again.

She was the only one who would understand, and she wasn’t awake to hear it. In the year and a half we had worked in the program together, I had the benefit of her counseling expertise on how to handle students’ needs. I was without her at school, my support, her absence showing how valuable our weekly meetings had been, even when she went off on tangents, telling me stories where she always learned something. As I sat there watching her sleep, I remembered one story which involved how she was in a colleague’s office on campus. A former student of hers who had done work study for her was now doing work study for this person. Without thinking, she asked the student to get her a cup of coffee. Her colleague reprimanded her. “I learned something new,” she had told me, her voice a ringing bell, speaking to overstepping her bounds, navigating situations.

Now she was taken to and from the hospital by different people because her friend Ana was away, unavailable. Ana had stayed with her at home for over a month of the beginning of the treatment, while her husband did nothing for her.

Months later, after her final chemo, after celebrating with a vacation to New Orleans with Ana, and taking a few Southern California trips to visit her son and others, she left three phone messages.

I knew. It had returned.

When I called her back, she was in bed, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. It was not like her to be in bed during the day, ever.

“They found cancer cells in my blood test. They need to do a CT scan,” she said, slurring her words.

“I need to put my affairs in order. I’m getting rid of papers in the garage, so when I die, others don’t have to worry about it,” she said.

The words bristled. How could she talk this way? She was looking at the gallows, yet it was hard to hear.

In the wake of her treatment, when we thought it was over and done with, our lunch get togethers in the past few months had been easy social events. Partly talk of school, partly getting to know each other more, we existed together. And now, with the new diagnosis, she was getting ready to die, making her belongings less.

She also did not want to put anything off, including her new plans for work and other interesting endeavors, including working at a college or high school. How could she both live and die? I wondered. She is one of the most energetic people I know, regardless of the cancer.

There are two truths. The external truth: she drove me crazy working with her. The emotional truth: I have grown to appreciate her strengths. She hasn’t changed at all—it’s me who has changed. I don’t want to let go of her. She has taught me how to love and forgive. I want to hold her and keep her here.