Operating Instructions (13 page)

Anyway, tonight Sam wore a red tuxedo sleeper with a black bow tie that Julie and John from upstairs gave us. Steve said he looked like a toreador. He always sleeps through the night now, and when he’s awake he lies around and makes raspberries and plays with his feet. He has even stuck them in his mouth twice now. Obviously he is an extremely gifted baby. He’s terribly drooly and may be teething. And also—this is almost too much to handle—when I hold him now, he puts an arm around my neck. It’s very casual. He just kind of slings his arm around me, like he’s Sam Shepard or something. It makes me woozy.

W
e had a perfect Christmas. Steve, Sam, and I went out to Stinson Beach for the whole day with Bill Turnbull, my publisher at North Point, and his wife, who is my other mother. We went for a long walk on the beach and then watched
The Godfather II
and ate hot-fudge sundaes.

I swear I have never felt so aware of God as I did walking on the beach with these people, who are atheists, with Sam on my back making raspberries. I know we all only talk about God in the most flat-footed way, but I suddenly had that Old Testament sense of God’s presence, a kind of weighty presence in the midst of all this tumultuous weather and surf. Even when the feeling was gone, I was left with the sense that something is here with us, something that is big and real and protective.

I do sometimes feel intensely aware of a presence and a voice so pure that they just couldn’t have come from this world.

H
e does this worried-hand thing now with his fingers and hands, the fingertips and nails of one hand clicking rapidly against those of the other, so he looks just like he’s knitting.

Also, when he’s on his stomach, he’ll suddenly sort of sag forward in a rolling motion because he wants to move but he can’t quite keep his head up. It’s some kind of precrawling
thing, and it makes him look exactly like a sow bug. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Dudu and Rex’s daughter Carmen and I sat around all morning eating Christmas chocolates and playing with the baby and laughing about our mothers. I was just in heaven. I’ve known Dudu since I was born, and Carmie has known my mother since she was three, so we feel it’s okay for us to laugh about them. We do impersonations of their sometimes fierce, sometimes passive-aggressive attempts to influence how we ought to live. I keep remembering a letter Simone Weil wrote to her mother in France, when the mother was panic-stricken because Simone was doing all this radical social-activist work with the poor, even though she (Simone) was very frail, very sick. Simone said to her mother something like “I love you, and if I had two lives, I would give you one. But I don’t.” The awful thing is that Sam will probably get hold of this line someday, too.

T
oday is Pammy’s thirty-fifth birthday. Sam and I don’t have any big New Year’s Eve plans. We’ll probably have another dance contest, and we’ll probably win it again. We’re that good. What I hope for the new year is that Sam has a great ride and that I learn to stay a little bit more in the now. I noticed the other day that not only do I spend a lot of the time in the future with imaginary triumphs and catastrophes and boyfriends, or in the past with my memories, but I’m so crazy that sometimes I even go into the past and rehash things that turned out
well
yet
might
have turned out disastrously. For instance, the car that almost hit us last month might not have managed to stop in time, and I’d be in a hospital with casts on all four limbs, IVs, cannulas up my nose, looking very thin and pale but sort of ethereally lovely, and I’d have to learn to walk all over again using computers and enormous force of character, and I’d be a really good sport about it all and get to be on “60 Minutes.” I used to have a lot of these fantasies, of being badly hurt but being loved back to health and being incredibly brave and spiritual about the whole thing, like Beth in
Little Women
. I think these fantasies were about trying to get people to see how hurt I was on the inside, even though my outsides looked okay. I don’t know. I do it only about half as much since Sam was born.
Maybe there just isn’t time. There’s also not much time anymore to look in the mirror, which I used to do quite a lot in a casual sort of way: I’d check myself out every time I used the bathroom, to make contact with myself a little, like “Hey, nice to see you, how you doing, babe, looking good,” or else I’d fixate on how old I am getting, how I’m beginning to look like Georgia O’Keeffe with an Afro. It’s that radio station KFKD, K-Fucked, which plays in stereo in my head: out of the right speaker, the endless self-aggrandizement, all the commentary regarding my specialness, uniqueness, all the imaginary TV talk-show interviews with Johnny and Joan and Dick Cavett, and then out of the left speaker, all the mind-fucking, every late-breaking bad bulletin on what a mess I’m making or am about to make of things, the fear of being uncovered, of impending doom. So I try to change channels, out of my head where the station plays and into my heart, and my wish for this year is that I remember to change channels more often.

Sam’s Big Brother Brian, who still takes him every Tuesday for a few hours, is married to a very funny Southern woman named Diane, who’s bleached fabulously blonde, sober fifteen years, very Eve Ardenish. She says that we’re all so nuts amid so much beauty that it’s like we’re at the circus. In one ring is an amazing array of clowns and bears doing all this great stuff, and in the middle ring is a woman who does breathtaking tricks on horseback, and in the far ring are elephants or seals
and maybe more clowns, and above us are trapeze artists, doing these death-defying precision feats, and we’re sitting in our seats looking around crabbily, going, “Where’s that damn peanut vendor? I want my goddamn peanuts!”—even when we’re not particularly hungry.

But, oh, God, all I really care about is that the eagles don’t get Sam like they got Johnny G. He’s lying on his stomach beside me on a bright-blue comforter, doing the sow-bug rolling-forward motion, flailing his arms, roaring and hollering. He appears to be bodysurfing in the tropics. You can almost hear the Beach Boys singing “Help Me, Rhonda” in the background.

T
here are huge changes every day now. Maybe there always were, but I was too tired to notice. His main activities currently are nursing, foot sucking, making raspberries and bubbles, and chewing on his Odie doll’s ear. We were sitting out beneath the moon again, nursing, and it occurred to me that someday he will stare at the full moon and know the word for it.

Things are getting better now. They’ve been easier for a month. People kept telling me that I just had to hold on until the end of the third month and everything would get easier. I always thought they were patronizing me or trying to keep me from scrounging up cab fare to the bridge. But I remember a month ago, when he turned three months and one or two days—it was like the baby looked at his little watch calendar and said with a bit of surprise, “Oh, for Chrissakes, it’s been three months already—time to chill out a little.” He sleeps every night, and doesn’t cry or gritch very often, and just in general seems to be enjoying his stay a little bit more. It’s much better. I’m much better. This guy I know who is really nuts and really spiritual said the other day, “My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.” That pretty much says it for me in the first three months.

My friend Michelle calls the first three months the fourth trimester.

Another thing I notice is that I’m much less worried all the time—a lot of things are no big deal now, whereas in the beginning everything was. For instance, now Sam can go for a few days without pooping, or can poop ten times in one day, without my automatically thinking he has some terrible intestinal blockage or deformity that will require a colostomy, and that will make trying to get him into day care a living hell.

He’s becoming so grown-up before my very eyes. It’s so painful. I want him to stay this age forever.

I look at him all the time and think, “Where’d you come from?” as if out of the blue, some Bouvier puppy came to live here with me and the kitty. I don’t really know how it happened. It seems like I was just sitting around reading a book, and what book it was I can’t remember, and then all of a sudden, here he is, sucking on his foot and his Odie doll’s ear.

He has this beautiful hand gesture where, when he’s nursing, he reaches back with his free hand to touch and lightly pat the crown of his head, and it looks exactly like he’s checking to see if his bald spot is exposed.

I
’m mental and defeated and fat and loathsome and I am crazily, brain-wastedly tired. I couldn’t sleep. This is maybe the loneliest I have ever felt. It’s lonelier than Dad’s last few months, when his brain was all gone. At least he used to sleep through the night.

Later in the Day

We’re a little better. Emmy came by with groceries and took care of Sam while I took a bath. Then we both slept for a while this afternoon, and when I woke up, I lay nursing him with lots of covers on us, thinking about the Special Olympics. I’m not sure why. I’ve gone to them for five or six years in a row now. They’re held in the spring at the College of Marin, and as I lay nursing Sam, I saw movies in my head of all the times over the years during the track-and-field events when runners have stopped halfway down the track, out of confusion or exhaustion or pain or whatever, and just sat down in the dirt. Sometimes they sit there completely frozen, staring at the sky, and sometimes they start to take their shoes or clothes off just because, I think, they don’t know what else to do. Every single one of them has been assigned a volunteer, though, and that person steps out from the sidelines and goes to the runner, and gets down on the ground with him or her and helps him or her put the shoes and clothes back on, and then takes the person by the hand and they start off again toward the finish line. In all the years I’ve been going, I’ve never once seen someone not get over the finish line. Right now, I feel very aware of all the volunteers God’s given to me, because I tell you, I’ve ended up on my butt in the dirt a
lot
these last few months. I ended up there again this morning. Now I’m back on my feet, more or less.

I
bet that life must be like a dream for Sam. It must be such a surprise for him to wake up every morning and for the whole thing to still be going on, the same way it must have been a joy and a surprise every morning for the primitives when the sun came up again.

A
big day here at home. Sam rolled over five or six times from his stomach to his back, followed each time by lovely squeals and the James Brown shrieks. Also, he can now hold his little plastic book up so that it looks like he’s reading thoughtfully. Sometimes he looks up toward the ceiling, with a pondering frown, exactly like William F. Buckley.

He is lying beside me now, reading his plastic Beatrix Potter bath book, very absorbed. I try to get his attention, but I can see that I am just annoying the shit out of him.

•   •   •

Tonight we went to Bolinas to visit Sylvie, my ninety-year-old Swiss novelist friend who had knit, with her ancient gnarled hands, a beautiful little yellow coat for Sam, with a collar and little knit buttons. So I went out to take her some dinner and to show off the baby in his yellow knit coat. It’s a little like something Liberace might have worn at three months old, but Sam is such a manly guy that he can pull it off. So we were driving over the mountain, and on our side it was blue and sunny, but as soon as we crested, I could see the thickest blanket of fog I’ve ever seen, so thick it was quilted with the setting sun shining upward from underneath it, and it shimmered with reds and roses, and above were radiant golden peach colors. I am not exaggerating this. I haven’t seen a sky so stunning and bejeweled and shimmering with sunset colors and white lights since the last time I took LSD, ten years ago. But do you want to know my very first thought upon seeing this? I thought, Oh, shit, the fog’s coming in—the ride home will be a pain in the neck. And then, right that second, I got it. I started laughing at myself, and pulled the car over and got out, and got the baby out of his car seat, and we stood looking for a while till it got too cold.

Sylvie was absolutely blown away by how beautiful and good Sam is.

Now he’s on his stomach in his bassinet. It’s 10:00 at night and he’s sort of lurching around but not crying, and he keeps raising his head to look around, like a turtle.

L
ast night we were driving to the grocery store, and he was falling asleep in his car seat. When we got to the parking lot of the store, I said his name loudly to wake him up. He was halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and suddenly his eyes rolled all the way back in his head, and he shuddered, and I decided in a split second that he was having a massive seizure. I couldn’t breathe, and when, two seconds later, he wouldn’t rouse, I slapped his face! And he startled awake and looked at me like my nasal hairs were on fire. He burst into tears. I took him out of his seat and comforted him, and then we went into the store.

Back at home, he fell right to sleep. I was starving to death and felt like my body was cannibalizing itself, and I desperately wanted to cook while he slept. But I kept dropping things—a mug, a huge slotted metal spoon—right next to his bassinet. Each time he’d startle and almost wake up, while I’d stand there holding my breath, and then I’d try to be more careful. I felt like I was underwater. I was trying to do everything while wearing oven mitts on both hands. Then I actually dropped a
pan
on the floor, and it reverberated like a huge gong you might use to summon the Dalai Lama to dinner, and I just turned on myself viciously and said, “Why don’t you just fucking
slap
him again?” I ended up so mad at myself, so
impatient, and that sent me into this terrible feeling of aloneness. Sam kept sleeping.