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show I was doing a lot of physical comedy, and for a time I blamed it on that, but after a while the bruises were so big and ugly they couldn’t be considered normal. I remembered that movie Marvin’s Room, where Diane Keaton went to the doctor for something unrelated and he noticed these massive black-and-blue marks all over her thighs. So he ran some blood tests and eventually diagnosed her with leukemia!
    I just couldn’t get that movie out of my head, and as if that weren’t enough, I was also beginning to notice a change in my stool.
    And I ain’t talking bar stools, either!
    Now I was starting to connect the dots and wondered if all these changes weren’t symptomatic of the same thing. So I decided to call my internist, Doctor #3. I’d already seen two gyne-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 24
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    cologists, who’d found nothing from my Pap test, pelvic exam, ultrasound, and mammogram. Based on the tests, it didn’t seem like my problems were gynecological.
    Meanwhile every attempt Peter and I made to connect outside the studio failed miserably. Everything we’d once had together seemed to have deteriorated, and all that was left was the show.
    We tried marriage counseling, but that didn’t work. I don’t think we were able to be completely honest with the counselor or each other, and after a few visits we abandoned that route. We tried to take a vacation together. I booked us in separate rooms, which was weird, but we were already living in separate homes, so what was weirder than that?
    But I just wasn’t strong enough as my own person to get back together with him. I was still feeling a profound regret that I’d wasted my youth being the good daughter and the good wife, but never truly knowing what I needed. What I wanted.
    Then Peter invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at his new apartment. He included all the couples who were our dear friends.
    He catered it from a favorite restaurant, which we’d used for special occasions back in the ol’ days when we were together. He even ordered my favorite wine. I arrived with candy, flowers, and music, attempting to be joyous and gay.
    It couldn’t have been easy for our friends who attended that night. To them, Peter and I were like an institution. Nobody but nobody would have ever imagined that of all the couples, we’d be the ones to split. Yet there we all were, trying to make the best of a very awkward situation. All the dinner guests were the same friends we worked with on the show, so there wasn’t a lot of catching up to do, and the conversation bordered on the mundane.
    “So how’s everything?”
    “Good, good. How ’bout you?”

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    “Fine, fine.”
    And that was the riveting stuff. Everyone was being so damned polite. Minding their p’s and q’s. It didn’t seem like Thanksgiving at all. Growing up, it just wasn’t Thanksgiving unless my mother got nervous and yelled, my sister got high-strung and slammed a few doors, and my dad overate to the point of indigestion and acute gastritis. Ah, the good ol’ days.
    I remember in my early married years with Peter, we’d sometimes spend the holiday gorging on Chinese food. Nothing like spareribs at Genghis Cohen when you’re giving thanks. Another Thanksgiving we cooked for our friends but didn’t want the leftovers because it was all so fattening, so we made plates of food for the homeless and eight of us piled into the old Buick and drove around L.A. looking for the needy. Believe it or not, it was a hard sell. No one wanted my home cooking!
    But that was then and this Thanksgiving, unfortunately, had a whole different feel. For me it was a colossal push. It felt like a shoe that didn’t fit. It was too much all at once: being in Peter’s place, with all the friends I really hadn’t been spending much social time with recently, and then simply Peter and I. We weren’t who we used to be, and we had