Operating Instructions (16 page)

P
ammy has gone to Morocco for a month. I am completely distraught. I find I’ve been sort of scared since she left, like she was somehow keeping us safe. I’m watching Sam sleep a lot, to make sure he’s okay. It’s hard to believe how shallowly babies breathe when they’re sleeping. They’re like plants.

I
was a mess all morning. Maybe my hormones are raging, maybe that’s what the craziness was all about. Something is really off. Part of me wants my body back, wants to stop being a moo-cow, and part of me thinks about nursing him through kindergarten. I know a
woman who nursed her daughter until the girl was almost four, and of course we all went around thinking that it was a bit much, too
Last Emperor
for
our
blood. But now when Sam and I are nursing, it crosses my mind that I will never ever be willing to give this up. It’ll be okay, I think to myself, we can get it to work, I’ll follow him to college but I’ll stay
totally
out of the way.…

This the easiest, purest communication I’ve ever known.

H
e’s six months old now, the most gorgeous, alert baby you ever saw in your life. Everyone says so. Maybe they just say so because I’m so goddamn tired and mentally ill so often. I had two days of bad depression this week. Peg came to cook for us and baby-sat so I could go hang out with a bunch of other recovering alkies. They were funny; it helped to be with them. But still I would love,
love
to check out sometimes, especially when I feel like I did yesterday and the day before. The weather sucked, gray and heavy and damp and dark. I felt like I was really hurt somehow, in a deep way. I can’t explain it. And there was nothing to do but feel it and maybe talk about it a little with friends. Pictures of glasses of
wine kept crossing my mind, and I thought about how great a few hundred lines of cocaine would feel. I kept remembering that old joke about how when a normal person’s car breaks down, she calls a tow truck; when an addict’s car breaks down, she calls her dealer.

It finally occurred to me the next morning to call my therapist, and we talked for five minutes. That helped a little, maybe even more than a little. I was really aware when I called her that I wanted a fix, that I couldn’t stand the feelings of exhaustion and loneliness and fear and anger. When I mentioned this to her, she reminded me of a story that I had once told
her
. It was something that M. F. K. Fisher wrote about in one of her books, of having a friend over for tea one day. The friend noticed out the kitchen window that Mary Frances’s cat was lying in a big mud puddle. Mary Frances said that it was hurt and trying to take care of itself, but the friend asked, Then shouldn’t we take it to the vet? Mary Frances said no, absolutely not, that if she did, the cat would die, that the cat knew exactly and intuitively what to do, knew that only time and lying in the mud would heal her. A few days later the cat was okay again.

That’s how I felt after my dad died. I had to shut down almost entirely and just lie in the mud for months. I felt that the world was no longer safe if my young handsome lively father could be so suddenly dead. It felt like it was a shooting
gallery out there. And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore. And then over time I became more or less okay: I did feel joy again, and I feel it now sometimes bigger than I ever thought possible. It’s so big inside me now with Sam that it’s like a secret that might make me burst, like when you’re in love.

S
am now sleeps in our little tiny bedroom at the far end of the apartment in a beautiful crib that someone has lent us. God, he’s so grown up. It goes so crazily fast that it’s no wonder we’re all just a little bit edgy. One day you’re six months old and learning to crawl backwards, and then about ten hours later you look like Alan Cranston. Have you seen him lately? He was a great senator, a great man, and I’m sorry bad things are happening to him,
but still I’ve got to say that he looks absolutely cadaverous. He can’t weigh more than about 105. I’ve got
pantyhose
that weigh more than he does.

Sam’s a good sleeper for the most part. I put him facedown in his crib, and he does a few baby push-ups. It’s this very manly little ritual he has. He turns to look joyfully at me, like it’s great that we’ve simply moved the party from the living room to the bedroom, but then he understands that I am going to turn off the light and leave him, and this look of terror and total betrayal crosses his face.
Total
betrayal; basset hound death. His lips tremble, and he weeps for a moment in this pitiful little-guy way. Then he goes to sleep, just like that.

I start to think about the millions of things I could do around the house or at my desk, and I decide on just one thing that could really make a difference in the quality of our life, and then I usually end up thinking, Gee, that sounds like a lot of work for a woman who hasn’t brushed her teeth in three days.

S
am’s got this fabulous little fake cough now. The advice nurse at Kaiser said lots of babies get little coughs from all the teething drool, but I would swear he’s just doing it because he can, like that Eddie Murphy routine where he says, “You know why male dogs lie around all day licking their balls? Because they
can
. If I could do that, I’d never leave the house.…” Sam will look at me suddenly with great concern and go, Cough cough cough, quiet and tragic, and then look at me expectantly, and I’ll say, “Oh, Sam, honey, that’s an
awful
cough,” and he looks terribly pleased. Then his eyes grow wide again, and he goes, Cough cough cough.

His eyes are very dark and huge. Most of his body is taken up with these eyes.

My friends and I did a food review again after all these months. I loved being out with my gang again—Peg, Leroy, Bill, and Emmy—and for the first couple of hours I loved being away from Sam. I felt once again like Zorba the Greek, with my arms stretched out to the sky, dancing to balalaika music. Everyone was very funny. Then all of a sudden I felt this psychotic need to be with Sam again—the jungle drums started beating, and I could hardly take in what anyone was
saying. I couldn’t get home fast enough—my breasts were absolutely bursting with milk—and I rushed to the crib and woke Sam up, and he gave me this bewildered, derisive look, like “Don’t you have
any friends?”

Maybe he’s not really capable of loving me per se. I think maybe I can only love or understand God in that same baby way. I don’t know. Donna says that when our babies see us, they say, Oh, good, the chuck wagon’s here again.

I
was reading something the other day and came upon the word
bastard
, as in illegitimate, and it actually crossed my mind for the first time that Sam is illegitimate. Maybe I’ve lost too much ground over the last year and a half, but I swear it hadn’t occurred to me before. I mulled it over for a few moments, saw that in a legal sense the word maybe did apply, but then I thought, Nah.

We have a new comedy routine we do to amuse our friends. It’s called Crane Operator. I am the crane operator, and he is the crane—I carry him suspended about a foot off the floor,
motoring over toward, say, an orange, making engine sounds the whole time, and then when we’re directly over the orange, I lower him until he can slide his hands under it and somehow get a grip on it. Then I raise him, holding the orange, and our friends clap.

They are a simple people.

H
e splashes in the sink now while taking his bath, slaps the water and squeals, like some yahoo from
Deliverance
.

When he thinks I’ve left, he cries. When he thinks Megan’s left, he cries. When he sees that we are still here, relief pours over his face and his entire body, like one of those old nudie pens where you turn it upside down to get the swimsuit to pour back over the woman.

Everything feels funny and not real. It’s that old familiar feeling of having a dental X-ray apron on my chest. I keep thinking of these lines I have taped to my wall that someone once sent in a letter; they’re from Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus:

Sam seems like a really happy baby. I don’t know why I’m so sad.

I
wish I felt more like writing. I don’t particularly feel like I have anything to say these days. I feel like the propulsion is missing. All that emptiness and desire and craving and feeling and need to achieve used to keep me at the typewriter. Now there’s me and Sam, and it feels like there’s not any steam in my pressure cooker. Whenever I teach, I tell my students about that line of Doctorow’s, that when you’re writing a novel, it’s like driving in a tulle fog: you can only see about as far as the headlights, but that’s enough; it’s as far as you have to see. And I tell them that this probably applies to real life, too. But right now I feel like I’m just sitting in the car with Sam, not really going anywhere, just getting to know each other, both of us looking out through the window at what passes by, and then at each other again.

The slow pace and all this rumination wear me down and bore me and make me desperately want a hit of something, of anything. Adrenaline, say, or a man to fantasize about or have drama with, or some big professional pressure, like a deadline I’m just barely going to be able to make. I want to check out. I do not want to be in the here and now with God and myself and all that shit. I know that this is where all the real blessings and payoffs are, that there is a good reason they call the now “the present.” I want to learn to live in the now, I want to learn to breathe my way into it and hang out there more and more and experience life in all its richness and realness. But I want to do it later, like maybe sometime early next week. Right now I want a rush.

Last year when I was obsessing over this married man whom I adore and who adores me and with whom I was trying to avoid having an affair, I talked about it with this older lesbian, a recovering alcoholic and addict. I was talking about how often I wanted to call him, and how, when we saw each other, I wanted to drop these erotically charged bombs into the conversation, and how high I’d get off all the adrenaline, and how it felt like it validated my parking ticket because he was so luscious and powerful. And the lesbian said, really nicely, “Yeah, yeah, I get it, I’ve done it. But I think each step of the way you gotta ask yourself, Do I want the
hit
or do I want the serenity?”

It seemed one of the most profound things I’d ever heard,
and it’s helped me a hundred times since—with food, men, etc.—but at the time, to the lesbian, and right now, to myself, I said, Honey, I want the
hit
.

Sam can get up on all fours now, but he can’t actually move that way. He drags himself from place to place, though. It’s a little like
My Left Foot
around here these days.

He often makes a beautiful pealing shriek of pleasure and surprise.

At church, during the “prayers of the people,” members of the congregation share these incredibly sad stories of their own lives and the lives of friends who need help. They ask that we pray for their families, and for kinder leaders, and for the homeless, and people with AIDS, and people in other countries in crises of starvation or war. The whole time, Sam sits there making joyful loud farting noises with his mouth. He sounds like a human whoopee cushion. I clap my hand over his mouth, but he just makes the loud farting noises directly into my hand. And they still call him their baby. “Oh, that’s
our
baby, sugar, huh? That’s
our
baby.”

All of his sounds bring him such joy. He’s learning the range of his voice, learning to play it like a musical instrument.

H
e’ll be seven months old in nine days. He’s really scooting around like mad now, doing some real distances but still not crawling on his hands and knees. Sometimes he stops and lifts his arms and legs and appears to be swimming in a thrashing kind of way. Megan and I were watching him do this today, and Megan said to him, with a real mixture of sympathy and encouragement, “Gee, honey, if you were in the water, you’d be there by now.”

I am really trying to trust God, to believe in the tenderness of a God who cares even about a bruised reed, or a hurt bird, and certainly about this happy little baby. I feel the presence of that tenderness in the people who love Sam and me, who bring us groceries and help us keep our spirits up. But I’m still fucked up and feeling off my feed so much of the time. I know the solution is to slow down, and breathe, and learn to pay attention. My friend Bonnie’s kids went to a kindergarten with a sign over the front door that said, “Start out slow, and taper off.” It’s so easy and natural to race around too much, letting days pass in a whirl of being busy and mildly irritated, getting fixed on solutions to things that turn out to have been just farts in the windstorm. Our culture encourages this kind of behavior. That’s why we call it the rat race. Some days I get
stoned on the pace, but today it is making me incredibly sad. That’s probably a healthy sign. Maybe I’ll learn to slow down and breathe in time for it to help Sam. Peg’s friends over in AA say that the willingness comes from the pain, by which they mean the willingness to change; in other words, people don’t get sober when they are still having fun drinking. Today I feel like one old rat who wants to get off the exercise wheel.