Tuesdays with Julie
More, October 2006

For the past twelve years, through one divorce (mine), two boyfriends (hers), the raising of our sons (two apiece), several cancer scares (a lump in my breast; her unexplained bleeding, my suspicious moles) and myriad other life passages, the single most stable thing in my life, and in the life of my racquetball partner, Julie, has been our twice-weekly racquetball game. Doing this one thing we do together requires detailed, up-to-date knowledge of each other’s schedules: how early and how late it’s okay to call; when either of us is going away, and whether she’ll be exercising while she’s there, and if so, how; the blackout dates when our other obligations–tutoring kids (her), deadlines (me), therapy (sometimes her, sometimes me, sometimes both of us in various combinations of offspring and significant others)–make one or both of us unavailable to play.

Julie is often my first call of the day. So I wasn’t surprised, one Tuesday last August, when she called at seven-thirty AM. What did surprise me was what she had to say. Not her usual breezy, "I booked Court Four for five o’clock. See you then," but, "I’ve been on a treadmill for the past few days."

My heart sank. Julie, on a treadmill? How could that be? Since I was forty-two and Julie was fifty-one, we’ve depended on each other’s devotion to racquetball, and racquetball only, with the symbiotic desperation of the truly addicted. "I gain five pounds every time you go on vacation," we grumble at each other. "When you’re too sick to play, I get sick too."

I reminded myself that thanks to a winning combination of whining ("I’ll die if we don’t play this week") and bribery ("I’ll make the reservations, I’ll pay for your parking, I’ll have your racquet re-strung–just don’t stop playing with me"), Julie and I had weathered threats to our commitment before. In 1997, I believe it was, when my chiropractor advised me to take up swimming instead. In ’99, when Julie’s doctor told her to swear off racquetball until her migraines went away. My loyalty was tested by a brief dalliance with Funk-Aerobics (inspired, admittedly, by the oh-so-buff, not-at-all-funky hunk who taught the class). Julie’s loyalty seemed iffy just last year when she strapped a pedometer to her wrist and joined the tens of thousands of other fanatics who’d started walking ten thousand steps a day, and I worried that she’d walk away from me.

"A treadmill?" I repeated incredulously. For years, Julie and I have been shaking our heads at the iPod people getting nowhere fast on their high-tech, no-fun treadmills and Stairmasters and stationary bikes. The two of us shared a satisfying hit of healthier-than-thou self-righteousness every time we wove between the rows of whirring dervishes that line the big hall outside the racquetball court. Was Julie abandoning me, racquetball, our years together, for a machine?

"A treadmill of medical tests," Julie explained. And that’s when I knew that what I was about to hear wasn’t going to be about exercise, and it wasn’t going to be good, and that no amount of whining or bribery would make it go away. "I have breast cancer," Julie said. Quickly she added, in a confident voice that defied grief or pity, "They caught it early. I’m going to be fine."

I swallowed a sob. Not Julie, I thought. My mother had a mastectomy thirty years ago. My best friend had one ten years after that. Both of them, and most of the women with breast cancer I’ve known, are alive and well today. But Julie is someone whose well-being I count on for my own. Someone I care about. Someone, I realized in that throat-clutching moment, I love.

Since we met at a Racquetball Challenge Night at our gym and started playing together–first sporadically, then in three-ways and doubles, eventually monogamously–Julie and I have had our issues. I don’t like her sneaking up behind me when I serve. She doesn’t like me hogging center court. There’s a harshness between us when we play, a competitive streak that carries over to our breathless, ruthlessly honest between-game talks. I’ve never liked her bugging me about staying out of the sun. She never liked me telling her to dump her not-good-enough-for-her man.

Although Julie and I have a lot in common–I’ve written books and articles about what’s wrong with the public schools; she’s spent her life teaching in them, trying to make them right–Julie and I rarely spend time together outside the gym. Still, we share a strange sort of intimacy. I went to the party at her middle school when she retired from thirty years of teaching at one of the Bay area’s toughest schools. She came to my wedding, and just about every local book reading I’ve done. I can’t remember a time when we’ve called each other for emotional support, but we see each other more often than either of us sees any of our friends. The advice Julie gives me while we’re stretching or toweling off or trading gulps from her water bottle (I always forget mine; she always remembers hers) is some of the best I get. She seems to have a PhD in Letting Grown-Up Sons Grow Up. Whether they know it or not, my sons have benefited greatly from Julie’s expertise.

"Of course you’ll be fine," I reassured Julie, and myself. As she filled me in on the details of her new schedule–more tests this week, a lumpectomy next week, months of chemotherapy and radiation after that–I remembered the year it took my mother to get back on the tennis court after six months of chemo; the five years it took my best friend’s lungs to recover from an overdose of radiation. Selfishly I thought, But what will I do without you until you are?

"Before the surgery," Julie said, "I want to play as much as we can." As much as you can, I knew she meant. As much as you will.

"B.C." (Before Cancer), Julie and I played on Tuesdays and Thursdays at five PM. I held us to that schedule with the non-negotiable rigidity of the raging control freak I am. I needed the structure that our unvarying racquetball schedule lent to an otherwise unpredictable freelance life; the productivity of an uninterrupted workday took priority over Julie’s requests for the occasional mid-day game. "A.D." (After Diagnosis), relieved of my delusions of control and predictability, my priorities were instantly reordered. "We’ll play whenever you want to," I said.

Julie didn’t know what the doctors would predict or prescribe after they removed her tumor. So neither of us knew, when we played our last game before her surgery, how long it would be till we whacked that little blue ball around that glass-walled court again. I envisioned Julie and me in our post-surgical exercise regime: taking slow, short, shuffling walks around her neighborhood, Julie’s back bent with nausea and fatigue, her shaking elbow cupped in my firm hand. I figured that would be the extent of our workout, if we were lucky, for the next six months or more.

How could I have been so wrong about Julie? She landed on the cancer treadmill fully upright and running strong. If she’s done any shuffling or shaking, I haven’t seen it yet.

"Let’s try a gentle game today," Julie said, a week after her lumpectomy.

"Are you sure?" I said, terrified that I’d hit her with the ball, that she’d take a swing and open her incision, that she’d waste what little energy the surgeon had left her.

"Positive," she said. So what could I do but show up there with her?

B.C., Julie used to win two games out of three. The first game–"when you’re still paying attention," Julie had accurately asserted–was almost always mine. A.D., I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that the best thing I could do for Julie was to let her win. She needed the self-esteem boost, I thought. It would help her heal to feel that she could conquer all–or at least, me. The first time we played after her surgery, it took Julie exactly five points to figure out what was going on, and exactly five seconds to extract a promise from me that I’d never pull that again.

"Until I let you know otherwise," she said, waving her racquet at me impatiently, "I’m fine. Now let’s play. And don’t you dare hold back."

"You’re incredible," I told Julie after our third game that day, as we stuffed our glasses and gloves and rackets back into our bags. I’d beaten her twice. She’d beaten me, fair and square, once.

Julie looked at me quizzically. For a moment I wondered if she was fishing for a much-deserved compliment. But no. She was genuinely puzzled.

How could I explain Julie’s courage to Julie? Eleven months after her annual mammogram had shown no signs of disease, during her annual physical Julie’s GP had found a lump in her left breast. The lumpectomy revealed that she had "Stage 1.5" breast cancer, a Stage One-sized tumor that had spread to one of her lymph nodes. Now she was facing the rest of the "slash, burn, and poison" regimen that constitutes modern cancer treatment. A friend had loaned Julie a tape of Melissa Etheridge in concert, on which the fireball performer described that regimen in terrifying detail as having made her too sick to eat, read, or move. And Julie was still tutoring kids, still helping her elderly neighbor to write a book, still volunteer-ushering at the local theater. She was still playing racquetball, still asking me what was new with me; still listening attentively when I answered. Even in the throes of a life-changing disease, Julie was able to step outside of herself, to be bigger and better than her diagnosis, to be in on the radiation table when she was on the radiation table and on the racquetball court when she was playing racquetball. Even with breast cancer, Julie was still winning.

"Remember when I had my breast lump?" I said. "Remember how freaked out I was until I found out it wasn’t cancer? I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. It was all I could think about until they took it out."

"But it wasn’t cancer," Julie said.

"Are you saying I would have handled it better if it had been?"

"I’m saying that you would have found it within yourself to deal with whatever you had to deal with. Same thing I’m doing." Julie bent her head to zip her sweatshirt, then looked up at me with a gleam in her eye. "There is one difference between us, though," she said. "I never would have let you win."

As the weeks went by and Julie’s course of chemo began, I realized that what was changing between us wasn’t just who won. Now, instead of Julie calling me to set our next racquetball date (she marked her calendar, thought ahead to our games; I lost days to my wrestling matches with words), I was calling Julie to ask how she was feeling, what fresh hell the drugs were wreaking, what I could do that would make her feel even the tiniest bit better. When her hair fell out I scoured the stores and brought her an assortment of soft, cotton hats. When her appetite came back I brought her a pot of homemade sausage soup. Instead of sitting on the gritty court floor in our sweats, talking about boyfriends and girlfriends and sons and jobs, Julie and I sat on her couch and turned the pages of her family photo albums, and talked about oncologists and radiologists and support groups and positive visualization. For twelve years competitiveness had pushed Julie and me apart. Now, tenderness connected us. Julie wasn’t my opponent anymore. She’d become my hero, and my friend.

"I really need to get on the court," Julie told me two weeks after a round of chemo had knocked her flat. "Don’t let me win," she warned me as we volleyed for the serve. I beat her three times while she stood stock-still in center court, her bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights, swaying on her swollen feet, beaming triumphantly. "Even when you whip my butt," she said. "It sure feels good to play."

"I’d better beat you," I said, nodding at the iPod people on their rowing machines and Precors, staring at us curiously through the court’s glass walls. "How embarrassing would that be: getting beaten by a bald cancer patient in front of all those fitness freaks?"

Our one-year gym memberships expired just as Julie was beginning radiation. The doctors had warned Julie that as her seven weeks of treatment progressed, she’d become increasingly exhausted and prone to infection. The skin on her chest and back, they said, would blister and burn. We both knew that if Julie wasn’t going to be playing racquetball, there was no reason for either of us to pay the hundreds of dollars it cost to re-join the gym. Neither of us had money to waste on a membership we might not use. I worried that even having that conversation could blunt Julie’s secret anti-cancer weapon–her indomitable spirit, the best defense she had.

"They gave us a free month, so we can see how you’re doing before we re-join," I told Julie the day before our memberships expired. She stared at me, half-horrified, half-delighted, Midwestern Protestant to New York Jew.

"What have you done now?" she asked. I told her I’d explained the situation to the gym’s director, who’d noticed Julie bald and playing racquetball, and said how great that was, and immediately offered us both a one-month ‘medical extension.’

"She told me I’m a good friend to you," I reported. "As if I’m playing with you to be nice. As if you’re not still beating me half the time."

"One-third of the time," Julie corrected me. "But she was right. You are a good friend."

I ruffled the top of Julie’s head, darkened now by a soft, silvery fuzz of new growth. "You’ve already gone from Melissa Etheridge to Sinead O’Connor," I teased her. "If you want us to keep getting freebies, you’re going to have to get a bald wig."

"I can always shave my head," Julie said.

"I think it’s my turn," I said. "If we can’t afford the membership next time, I’ll shave mine."

The first and second weeks of Julie’s daily radiation treatments went by. The third. Still Julie was playing with me twice a week. Between games she turned her back to the iPod people, lifted her shirt, and showed me the markers the radiologist had tattooed on her chest.

"I’m going to go nuts if I don’t see the sun," I said, one Tuesday in March, after nine relentless, non-stop, record-breaking weeks of rain. "The weather is depressing," Julie mused. "But I have to say, having cancer makes me glad I’m here to be depressed by the rain."

During Julie’s fourth week of radiation, her legs became heavy, she told me between games, as though they’d suddenly been rooted to the ground. The next week Julie was winded before we’d quite finished our first game. We sank to the floor to rest. "Let’s just play five more points," she begged. Wheezing asthmatically, she hauled herself onto her feet and kept playing, and won. I packed Julie’s gym bag for her, positioned her beret carefully on her head. When I left her at her car, she was still having trouble catching her breath. I was having trouble breathing myself.

"Maybe we should take a break next week," I said. Julie shook her head. And then I realized that racquetball had become Julie’s touchstone: her way to prove the odds and the doctors and every pessimistic prediction wrong.

"I’m not doing so great today," she said when we met the next Tuesday–the closest she’d come in months of cancer treatment to a complaint. "Turns out they’ve been radiating my lung by accident," she said. "They had to re-mark my chest." She pulled her cotton hat off her fuzzy head, lifted her shirt, and showed me a bright blue "X" drawn over her heart. Just above it, the radiation burns had turned her chest fiery red.

Near tears, I said, "I wish I could wave a magic wand and make this whole thing go away."

Julie pointed to the racquet in my hand. "Every time you play with me," she said, "that’s exactly what you do."