COFFEE AND POP

Grubby tables and fetid air once seemed to attract me. During high school summers, friends would flock to the striped umbrellas and concrete chess tables of Au Bon Pain, the invariable meeting place for a night out. I drank numerous oily cups of Peet's Coffee, pretending that I was a tortured poet in a proverbial coffee house. I even developed a taste for their tuna croissant-wiches. I have good memories of ABP; it wasn't until college that it started to make me cringe.

My mother and father had lunch with me under the dirty old tree in front of ABP on the very first day of Harvard. As the fall went on, I'd meet them there periodically because ABP was close to the T and out of the Yard. So, it came as no surprise when my mother suggested coffee one October afternoon so that she could drop off my winter coat. I was a little late and caught a glance of her scrutinizing the dry oatmeal cookies, the rust-colored, checked blazer my father had picked out six sizes too big last Christmas dwarfing her tiny frame.

A kiss and a clutching hug as always--confounding me as usual, for it seems so obvious that they only live three T stops away and across the river. "How is school?"..."How are your classes?"..."How are your friends?" Normal questions, the some old routine. Then, "There's something I need to tell you." Her hands stretched out across the table as I fiddled with soggy Sweet and Low wrappers. "Pop's score went up. They had to do a bone scan to see if the cancer had spread."

All of a sudden, it was senior year all over again. His trip down to Baltimore to get surgery, my pretend excuse of going there too--"Really, I'm visiting Hopkins and Georgetown." My father lying in bed, looking pretty good for someone being invaded by tubes and catheters, my nervous mother, all the shrimp and barbecue we ate down by the waterfront when my father was hungry again. I had thought that it was all over. The doctor had worked his magic on my surgeon-father so unaccustomed to playing the victim on the operating table rather than the needle-and-knife bearer.

But in ABP, my mother's lips tautening, she told me that it was back. Reality had struck again, abruptly invading my college utopia. And Pop couldn't even bring himself to tell me in person--he had thought I was so happy at Harvard. "And we've known this for a few months," she was continuing. "We just wanted you to start school happy." I felt disgusting. I was the selfish daughter who hadn't even contemplated a return to this sickness--I was just reveling in the petty glories of being a careless freshman girl. I was worried about boys and chem and parties and sleep, not giving a second thought to my father who was struggling to maintain "normalcy" at the hospital and in his research lab. In familiar ABP, I felt sick. My parents couldn't even tell me about the bone scans and CAT scans because the wanted me to be happy.

So for a while, I freaked out. I couldn't do my chem problem sets. The tiniest thing completely frustrated me. Everything with my mother was a fight. I couldn't be nice. I couldn't stop my overwhelming selfishness--everything was affecting me. How I felt. How I reacted. It was a feeling of dread--there was no way out of my self-obsession. What would I do if he died? Where would my mom and I go? I could not escape the constant image of my mother weeping. And her voice: "I hope he lives to see you graduate."

And now, I don't even make time for them. I argue with them. I complain more. I get annoyed when they call and "disrupt " my schedule, and I can't stop myself. I was, and am, totally self-absorbed. I couldn't stop thinking how this would change my life--destroy my life. He started radiation one morning and I had tried to explain to two friends how this made me feel, but I couldn't, and the subject faded. I told a few people haphazardly. What did I expect them to say?

In a perverse way, I probably wanted attention or sympathy. I probably just wanted someone to feel badly for me. Look at you--you think your Expos paper is hard. Well, my father is in a hospital right now, getting gamma rays sprayed through him every day with a last hope that they will kill his cancer. All I could think about is what I would miss if he died. I lay in bed the other night thinking what would happen to his rows of Docksiders in the closet. He has a system. Fancy clean Docksiders for dinner parties, medium-flavored Docksiders for walking around the island, and dirty, hole-filled Docksiders floppy soles and a distinct smell of dead crabs for the muddy sand in our backyard. My mother is always trying to throw them out, but they magically reappear every time to stink up the closet.

There was another forced meeting at ABP a few months later, this one following weeks of fighting about my bad management of money and my rapidly growing credit debt. I had to meet Pop at ABP, and I started to drip tears and turn red and crouch in the iron chair, complaining about my life, all the while knowing that across from me, my father was just trying to stay alive. I cried and complained and told him this boy, my boyfriend, was mad at me and I couldn't do chem and wasn't having fun and couldn't get good grades and couldn't get along with Mom--everything, except how much I wanted him to stay alive. What is wrong with me, I kept thinking, that I can't tell my father how scared I am that he'll disappear? How his strong rower's body will shrivel up and his mind will lose all the things he knows about science and Churchill and art and boats. And how my mother will be alone. Me too. I still can't look him straight in the eyes, through his little tortoise-shell John Lennon glasses and try and say that I am not selfish and that I really do think about how he feels and not about my own petty problems. I guess that dealing with things is just easier if you deny it all.

Pop looks great, a little more tired, but still the same cackling laugh and dry wit. He's just waiting now. He is just waiting to see how those rays work. In a few months they will run some more tests and give him a verdict. Until then he just has to wait. And I wait too. Sometimes still pondering what might happen, sometimes just trying to get my own things done. Sometimes the overwhelming feeling of selfishness sickens me, and more than often, I think about other stuff, like when ABP was just a meeting place for a night out with friends.

I just hope that my next meeting there is simply for a cheap, oily cup of coffee. Frances G. Tilney is a first-year living in Thayer. She plans to concentrate in History and Literature.