Operating Instructions (21 page)

I got out the Polaroid I took when I was pregnant, of the photographs of me pregnant and at seven years old and the sonogram photo of Sam, all under the arms of the cross, and I can still get that sense that we are a complete family unit, but sometimes I’m so hungry for a partner, a lover. One thing I know for sure, though, is that when you are hungry, it is an act of wisdom each time you turn down a spoonful if you know that the food is poisoned.

S
am got a tooth. I saw a little flash of white in his mouth way over to the right and didn’t think much of it because I was expecting his first teeth to be either the two top front ones or two bottom front ones. This one is way over to the east. I decided the whiteness was a sore, baby herpes or something even worse, because I couldn’t feel
a sharp little point, but Pammy insisted it was a tooth. Then the two of us took him in to see the doctor for his regular checkup, and I mentioned it. I said he seemed to have a sore in his mouth. Pammy said it was a tooth, and Dr. James felt it for a nanosecond, looked up at Pammy, and they smiled conspiratorially at each other. Then they both looked at me and shook their heads. I’m so glad I didn’t share with James what I actually thought, which was that it was infant melanoma.

The drool is immense. There are rivers of drool all day now, almost biblical, like the waters of Babylon, He has a drool rash on his chin. It made me think of his old baby-acne days when Steve used to call him Pizza Face. A friend of ours watched him drooling away like a Saint Bernard puppy and finally said to him, “Hey, kid? Get a lip.”

I hope he gets his daddy’s teeth. Actually I have no idea what his daddy’s teeth look like, since he had almost all crowns, the result of a bad car accident a few years ago. For all I know, before the accident he used to look like an alligator gar or a moray eel. I also don’t know if his original teeth were strong or not, but they’ve got to be better than mine. Mine are like chalk. Little bits are breaking off all the time, and I’ve had more cavities in my life than anyone I know. I have so many crowns that I actually can’t fit them all in my mouth—I have to keep a bunch of them in the drawer by my bedside table. Of course, Sam’s growing up with fluoridated water. I taught
a writing course at UC Davis one semester, and one afternoon we had some time to kill, so I asked my students to take out a piece of paper and write about some really horrible humiliating frightening thing they have to do periodically, like going to the dentist. They all looked at me like I had just started taking off my clothes, because it turned out that a good two-thirds of them had never even
had
a cavity. I mean, it was awful, and then they were all sort of laughing at me as I stood there with bits of my teeth breaking off, and pretty soon they all looked like hallucinated troglodyte versions of Mary Tyler Moore.

I
t seems cavalier to go out and have fun when Pammy is home with her husband being so sick from the chemo, but for one thing I need to make a living. I ended up going out with the gang to do a food review the other night. I was feeling very low, in quicksand, and like I wasn’t well enough to be out in public trying to be interesting. All I wanted to do was to stay home and sit on the couch necking with my fear and depression. But I made myself show up, and it got me unstuck. Like they say, take the action and
the insight will follow. There’s still real life going on out there, and it was such a nice break to take my extension cord and plug into it for a while.

Bill was all edgy because the restaurant we went to smelled so strongly of garlic and he’s badly allergic to it, so as usual we tried to order as many dishes as possible without it. We always order family-style. But I was whining about wanting to try this roast Dungeness crab with billions of cloves of garlic. I said in this conciliatory way to Bill, “Look, honey, if you’ll just let us order this one thing, you can order something fabulous that J can’t eat,” and he looked at me bitterly and said, “And what would that be, Annie? Thorns?” I laughed so hard that it broke up the thin candy shell of fear that was covering my heart, and I could breathe again. I think that’s what they mean by grace—the divine assistance for regeneration.

P
eg and Pammy both came over for lunch, and then we all took Sam for a walk in the park. He swung in the baby swing for over half an hour. His Big Brother Brian has been bringing him here since he was a few months
old, putting him in these swings ever since he could hold his neck up. We have come here a lot together, too, Sam and Pammy and I, especially in the last couple of months. Sam is our anchor. Without him as our counterbalance to Pammy’s cancer, we would float off into outer space on fear. It crossed my mind recently that maybe we were using him like a drug, to avoid the terrible feelings we are having. But drugs take you away from what is in front of you, whereas Sam
is
what’s in front of us. He’s not the drug, he’s the reality, I think this is why Pammy asks every day for the specific details of what he’s up to.

When we first brought him to this park, he was an aging infant. In one of the swings, he looked like a fragile little egg with the face of Tweety Bird, swinging back and forth with a slightly perplexed expression. Then he went through a stage where Pammy said he looked just like one of those Al Capp characters called shmoos. Now he is cool and intense, like the child of James Dean and one of those aliens you see in the tabloids who resemble giant babies with saucer eyes. He is going to follow in my footsteps as a swing junkie, though. Anyone looking at me as a child on swings should have known that I would grow up to be an addict. Swings were one of my favorite things about life. When it was your turn, you’d sit on the piece of wood or the tire or the knot at the bottom of the rope, and your friends would wind you up in one direction until you and the rope couldn’t be twisted any tighter and then
they’d let you go, and you’d unwind faster and faster, out of control until it felt like your head was going to spin off your neck. You’d just lose your mind joyously in the whirling wheel of green foliage you’d see every time you opened your eyes.

Everyone but me would eventually want to go home. Red-faced, exhausted, my nerves jumping, I’d be pleading to spin one more time, just one more time. Peg said today in the park that she was also this way—Peg who, like me, ended up snorting coke like a truffle pig. Along these lines (no pun intended), Sam’s expressions were somewhat alarming today: he completely gets it, was totally into it. Everything in his face was saying, “Swing;
swing.”

Peg pushed Sam while Pammy and I sat beside them in the swings for bigger kids. Peg had treated herself to a manicure the day before, and she told me that the manicurist had her soak her fingertips in a bowl of warm soapy water and
marbles
, of all things. “What were the marbles for?” I asked. “So that your fingers don’t get bored,” she replied. “So they have something friendly to do while they’re soaking. It was lovely. They clicked softly between your fingers, and the water was like velvet.” I’ve never had a manicure, but I could picture and hear it perfectly. It made me think of how Sam is in my mind when we are apart. In the old days, before Sam, my mind would be filled with fantasies and ambitious thoughts and terrible worry about every aspect of my life, including global starvation and the environment and nuclear power and weapons
and friends dying, and now that all still goes on, but there are a lot of times in a very real sense when images of him give my mind something friendly to play with, something lovely for a change to click between its fingers.

The three of us women sat for long periods without talking, while Sam played in the sand. We would talk with great animation for a while and then be quiet again. My father and I could do this, too. It is so profoundly, comforting and beautiful, the minuet of old friendships.

E
very so often Sam will be standing up, holding on to something, like the coffee table, for instance, and he will have finished his work there—that is, he will have already flung everything to the floor—and all of a sudden he’ll let go with both hands and stand there for a few seconds. It’s totally charged time, like the moments right before lightning. Then you can see concern cross his face, and on the inside he’s going, “Yo! Holy
shit!”
When he starts to wobble, he reaches for the table again to steady himself.

I
do my food review every month for
California
, and my book review for
Mademoiselle
, and a pretty flabby job of trying to keep this journal up to date. I take notes and dick around with possible scenes for a novel, but I don’t feel like writing much else. Certainly not a long sustained piece of fiction. I can’t really remember how you do it. But I just remembered the other day a weekend I spent with my family at our cabin in Bolinas when I was seven or eight and my older brother was nine or ten. He had this huge report on birds due in school and hadn’t even started it, but he had tons of bird books around and binder paper and everything. He was just too overwhelmed, though. And I remember my dad sitting down with him at the dining table and putting his hands sternly on my brother’s shoulders and saying quietly, patiently, “Bird by bird, buddy; just take it bird by bird.” That is maybe the best writing advice I have ever heard.

I
just got off the phone with Pammy. It is almost 11:00 at night. As usual she wanted to hear every detail of our day, even though it was so late and she was tired. She’s so nauseated that it’s like a sweet form of chemo—a benevolent drug—for her to hear about Sam, in the flush and fullness of his babyhood, growing up. I had so much to tell her tonight, Sam had such a busy day, and Pammy understands as well as anyone alive what a miracle it is that life keeps making itself anew and flourishing and that we can all tap into it.

He had his first informal communion today, his first cheeseburger, and his first black eye. To begin backwards, tonight at the Smiths he had climbed up the wooden steps that go from their kitchen to the bedrooms. He and Big Sam were playing at the top of them, and all of a sudden he tumbled and fell all the way down, bouncing like a rubber baby. All of us were moving in slow motion, like we were underwater, to catch him, but couldn’t, and he ended up at the bottom of the stairs having hit his eye on a corner. He cried, I cried, Big Sam cried. I absolutely knew in those first few seconds that he had a spinal cord injury and that his head was going to swell up with fluids like a medicine ball. It turned out that he was just fine. He was a little shaken up for a few minutes, and he started to
get a shiner right away, but then of course he was ready to bolt right back up the stairs.

After church we stopped for lunch at a hamburger joint and split a cheeseburger. I tore his half into little pieces, and he ate almost the whole thing. There were some grilled onions stuck to his pieces, and mustard, and he ended up with this meaty, oniony, primordial manly breath. It was startling, like cigarettes on a nun’s breath.

Earlier, during the service at church, when the bread and the tiny glasses of grape juice were passed to me, I gave Sam a bit of both. “Honey,” I whispered to him, “this is the bread of heaven, and this is the blood,” and he gobbled them both down and then burped, all but patting his big beer belly afterward.

I
t’s been a hard day to get through, and we wouldn’t have made it without Megan. She actually ministers to us, cooking me little treats, arranging for Sam to hand me a small bouquet of wildflowers when they come in from their walk. I was depressed all day, though. The good thing is that I have been sober four years today. I told
Sam this while he was nursing tonight and described what it used to be like. He hung on my every word. I have such a terribly checkered past. I am certainly not Donna Reed. I shouldn’t even be alive. It’s a small miracle. I sang him a talking-blues version of the Beatles’ song “The Long and Winding Road.” I sang to him about the long and winding road that had led to his door. I opened it and there he was, looking at me with those huge brown headlights of his.

Pammy is tired but otherwise doing okay with the chemo. She is so calm and spirited and optimistic, and I am such a mess. She told me a story a long time ago of being in Paris with her husband, driving around and around the Left Bank trying to hook up with a new friend, but she and her husband kept getting completely turned around. They were hot and frustrated and hopeless. So finally Pammy got out of the car and went into a café. She was so burnt she couldn’t even try to speak French, so in English she said to the maître d’, “We’re lost,” and he said in barely understandable English, “You are not lost; you are
right here.”
I try to remind myself of that every few days.

Sam has this one pose Pammy just adores, where he gets up on one knee and balances there, thoughtfully but with some confusion, like someone has just pulled a fast one and it is just beginning to dawn on him. She says it’s very pre-Rodin;
The Sucker
.

She wants to get well so she and her husband can adopt. Sam has been her training baby. She hasn’t cried very often since the diagnosis. I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don’t feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.

Sam works so hard. He’s so physical and alert and patient. His concentration is great, and he’s got this fabulous sly and flirty look that renders you helpless, turns you to total mush. But sometimes he’s also very willful. Other times he can’t stop whining and clinging to me like some horrible horny Pekingese. It’s hard. He’s teething and uncomfortable and needy and looks like the inside of my soul when I first found out that Pammy was sick.