Operating Instructions (22 page)

W
henever Sam does anything new or especially funny, my first thought is, Oh, Pammy will love this. Then she does. She does not laugh like a sick person, she laughs like she’s always laughed. She came over this afternoon and almost immediately started to fall asleep on the couch. Sam stood holding himself up by her pant leg, waving
goodnight to her. It may have been a coincidence. He can wave now, baby-style, hinging his fingers up and down over his palm. It’s really more than either Pammy or I can handle. What next? I asked her. Juggling? Calligraphy?

He eats almost anything now. He took a nice fat ripe plum today and plowed into it like a gorilla, with buckets of juice and saliva pouring forth everywhere. Then he let the red skin emerge slowly from his mouth, like a rejected dollar bill from a change machine.

He has a slow, sexy smile. It just makes you crazy.

P
ammy and her husband have gone away for a week, up the coast. Whenever we’re apart, I’m afraid I will never see her again. She and her husband want to be by the ocean for a while, away from the phone, to sleep and just be together alone. Part of me thinks, How can she bear to be away from me, even for a day? A small bad part of me is glad to get a week off, too.

Sam is finally getting a second tooth. He’s had that one huge snaggletooth way over on the side for so long. He’s still not
walking, but he holds onto couches and legs and dances to beat the band. He can entertain himself happily for twenty minutes at a stretch with coffee cans, paper bags, etc. I can see that he won’t need me much longer.

His kissing has definitely changed. In the old days, up until last week, he’d graze you with his lips and flutter his eyelids on your face. Pammy always said he was gracing you. Now he gets a real lip lock on your cheek or mouth, like an eel. It’s like kissing Elvis.

P
ammy is back, and some of her strength is returning. There is color in her face again. We spent most of the day playing in her garden, watching Sam careen around, seemingly stoned on acid, gaping at butterflies and each dead leaf as if they were bejeweled.

He can growl now. Pammy kept growling at him, and he would growl back at her in this sexy, throaty way. It’s not at all like a dog. Pammy compared it to Peter Boyle in
Young Frankenstein
, especially when he’s in bed with Madeline Kahn at the end, lying there reading the
Wall Street Journal
She lies beside him, saying in that amazing Madeline Kahn voice,
“Daddy this and Daddy that and I put two hampers in the bathroom, one for your regular clothes, and one for the poo-poo undies,” and the Peter Boyle monster responds with these low throaty growls without looking up from his paper. Pammy was right: that’s very close to what Sam sounds like.

I can’t remember her ever having been so entirely happy. For twenty-five years now we have been so black-humored and cynical. There wasn’t any of that today. It was so clean and bright, like all the dross had been scoured off. We sat on the grass in chaise longues, both of us in dark glasses and sun hats, Pammy growling at Sam, Sam growling back, me wiping my eyes. “Today I don’t really care what happens,” she said. “I’m just so glad to be here for this.”

I
t’s hard to keep up with this journal. It’s all I can do to keep the two of us together and to get enough writing done to make a living and to keep the house from looking like something out of
God’s Little Acre
. We’re
totally
nouveau white trash. There are actually broken appliances out on the porch now.

I don’t think I can climb up the steps here much longer.
There are about fifty of them, beautiful stone steps, but Sam is so big and heavy that trying to lug him and our groceries up them all the time is wearing me down. We need a bigger house on flatter ground.

My friend Ethan made me this wooden box about a foot high so I can do aerobic stepping—you get on and off it about two thousand times while listening to rock and roll, and you get sweaty and out of breath after about five minutes, but you make yourself do it for twenty. Everyone’s doing it. It’s the most now and happening form of exercise, although my personal belief is that thin smooth thighs do not necessarily speak of a rich inner life. So anyway, I had my step out on the porch with my broken appliances, and I was wearing a Walkman and listening to the Everly Brothers and sweating, when suddenly the Sears repair man appeared at the foot of the stairs. He was here to fix our upstairs neighbors’ refrigerator, and as he trudged, panting, up the steep stone steps, he watched me get on and off my wooden step, and finally when he was close enough, he said, “I would not think you would need to do that, living here.”

It was incredibly embarrassing.

S
am’s
still
not walking, but he’s finally getting lots of teeth all at once. When he bares his teeth at you in a smile, he looks a little like Martha Raye.

He’s psychotically active, lovely, and social. Also, terribly willful. He makes a sharp cry when crossed, a string of sharp, vaguely Japanese sounds. Pammy calls it baby Tourette’s.

He really loves music. Dudu and Rex are convinced he is a musical prodigy because he does his Michael Jackson dance routines to the operas they are always watching on PBS. I tell them that he is way behind schedule, that Mozart had already written symphonies by this age, but the three of them look at me with wounded defiance, like I am a cultural Philistine.

He does love music, though. He climbs in and out of the living room closet where I have a guitar on the floor, and he picks and strums it endlessly while babbling away. I call out requests to him—I say, “Hey, babe, do you know anything by Bob Dylan? Trini Lopez? Bobby Vee?” and sometimes he stops and appears to think about it for a minute. Then he’ll launch into a heavy-metal version of “Lemon Tree,” or sometimes “Jamaica Farewell.”

•   •   •

In the morning, when he first wakes up and looks at me, it’s with such joy and amazement that it’s like someone had told him, before he went to sleep, that I had died.

S
am is learning to drink from a cup, but it is not going very well. Mostly he plunges his hand into glasses of water or juice, as if he has just had a sudden bout of Infant Hot Hand, as if steam will rise. He sloshes his hand around in the cup until the pain passes, and then every so often takes a tiny sip before plunging his hand back in. Then he hands the cup to you, and you are expected to take a sip, and it is clear by the look in his eyes that it will be a major emotional setback for him if you don’t.

Sam and I took Pammy to the doctor in the afternoon. We are always expecting the doctor to say that mistakes were made and that Pammy is actually just fine, but what she said is that they are trying to control the cancer, that she doesn’t think it can be cured per se, because it is too aggressive a strain and there were too many lymph nodes involved. Pammy didn’t cry, and of course, in the car, I did. “Look,” she said, “we’ve pretty
much known that all along,” and I hung my head and said, “I know,” but when I got home I felt like I might go crazy with frustration. I cannot remember having such a huge rage inside me. I called Steve and cried, and he came up with a pizza for dinner. He did all these wonderful little errands around the house, fixing things, cleaning important windows. I felt like I could breathe again; I thought about how great it would be for Pammy—and how happy it would make me—if I went to her house and did the same sorts of things for her that Steve was doing for me. I ended up feeling just fine, against all odds. I thought, Boy, was that nutty old Mother Teresa right when she said that none of us can do great things, but that we can do small things with great love.

L
ast night was Peg’s birthday, and Emmy and Bill had us to dinner. There was corn on the cob, which Sam loves because it’s such a good teething product. So all of us were sitting around the table in the dining room eating dessert, having dumped all the chicken bones and corncobs into a garbage bag in the kitchen. Sam was scooting around the kitchen in his walker and got into the garbage and
was playing with it, but Emmy said, “Let it go—whatever makes the little darling happy,” because he’d been sort of fussy throughout dinner. The door of the dishwasher was open, and it turned out later that Sam had rather neatly stacked all the chicken bones and corncobs inside it. I said to Megan today, “He’s so brilliant—he’s trying to get the garbage clean,” and she said, “Well, he
is
a Virgo.”

Pammy and I still try on a daily basis to turn him against the Republicans. Pammy told him the other day while we were watching the news that Bush is a right-wing spider sack of lies and meanness, that he’s the same kind of nightmare person as the dummy that comes to life in “The Twilight Zone.” All that’s missing, she said, is a little bit too much rouge on his cheeks and glycerin madness in his eyes. Then I told Sam that I fear Bush is secretly beginning to decompensate and one of these days will appear on the White House lawn covered with fingerpaints and breakfast foods, carrying an AK-47 and quoting from Mary Baker Eddy. They’ll have to haul him off and pop him into the bin for a few years.

One thing that drives me crazy is when strangers ask, “How old is he?” and then, because they’re stupid, go ahead and guess nine months, although he’s very tall for his age. I tell them that he’s almost a year old, and they can never admit that they were so far off, so they say, “Oh, he’s small then, isn’t he?” like he’s
a little peanut, like he’s going to be Hervé Villechaize when he grows up, out on the lawn staring at the sky, crying, “Da plane, Boss, da plane!”

T
oday Sam and I went to the convalescent home, where my congregation conducts a worship service once a month. There was this new woman there, about eighty years old, and I went up to her wheelchair to say hi and to introduce her to Sam. The people at the home usually gape at Sam as if I’ve brought Jesus into the room with me. But this woman looked at him angrily and said, “Is that a
dog?”
And I said, “No, it’s a baby.” And she said meanly, “What
kind
of baby?” I tried to be Mother Teresa and to see Jesus in the distressing guise of the poor and incontinent, but I secretly wanted to push her wheelchair over and then kick her in the head.

P
ammy’s very sick from the latest round of chemo. My heart is broken.

I got a little bit interested in another man this week and sort of wanted to pursue it, to have someone to hold me and to be in love with, someone to do the big oompus-boompus with every few hours, but how can you go dancing under the fruit trees when someone like Pammy is so sick?

I feel sometimes that I let up and relaxed too much and that’s why Pammy got sick. I got too tired and wasn’t vigilant enough, so the flies got in through the window. This is infantile, but it keeps crossing my mind. It’s like when Dylan Thomas came to America on an ancient propeller plane from London, and he said something like “I’m exhausted from trying to hold the plane up in the air.”

I feel that the exhaustion and constant fear about Pammy make me like some little animal who lives on the ocean floor, who has an ink sack in its body, like a squid, that it’s supposed to use for self-protection. But in my case, left to my own devices, I panic, and end up ink-jetting myself.

S
top the presses. This just in: Sam walked last night at his Big Brother Brian and Diane’s. They’d been taking care of him while I was at Cirque du Soleil, and they took him to a park for a picnic dinner. Diane pointed out a little girl who was smaller and younger than Sam but who was already walking and who had more teeth, and Diane said she really rubbed it in. An hour later, after I had arrived, Sam was leaning against the coffee table and let go, like he’s done before, but then he walked three or four steps to me. We all went crazy. We just lost our minds. He looked mildly pleased. Then he did it a few more times. All the Smiths stopped by this morning, and he did it a few times again for them—four, five, six steps, looking absolutely wild in the eyes and triumphant the whole time.

By the afternoon he had forgotten how, and I went back to thinking that he would need leg braces and be one of Jerry’s kids. At Rex and Dudu’s tonight, though, he did it again, and again, and again. I can’t really put my feelings about it into words. It’s like breathing in cold clean mountain air and holding it for a little too long.

I
t’s Sam’s birthday today. He is one year old, my little walking dude. We had a little birthday dinner at Dudu and Rex’s. Uncle Steve stopped by. There is a big party planned for the weekend at my Uncle Millard and Aunt Pat’s. Absolutely everybody who is anybody will be there. I may hire the Blue Angels—the Air Force Precision Flyers—to buzz the house a couple of times.

He says “heeeee” for kitty—for our kitty and for all cats everywhere. He’s very bright; he gets that from me. He can climb anything, and it is obvious that he is having huge testosterone surges. I still look at him and think, Where did you
come
from, little boy? How did you find your way?

I’ve been thinking about his birth all day, of walking to the drive-in with Pammy, of the male doctor at Kaiser who said the baby was flat. I remember walking down the corridor at Kaiser on the way out to Pammy’s car, totally pissed off that there was not a room for me, and how really awful I felt and how much the contractions hurt. Pammy asked a nurse if I could get a Valium or something, and they looked at her like she was Jim Morrison. I thought about the ride over to Mount Zion in her car, which is this twenty-year-old Mercedes of her late mother’s that we used to drive around in high school. I was bellowing “Fuuuuuuuuuck” at the top of my lungs. I kept
remembering today the blood Pammy said looked like just a little crankcase oil down the back of my dress, of Carol, the angelic but no-nonsense resident who delivered Sam, and the nurses who’d read my books, and how deeply and quickly Pammy and Steve and I bonded with all of them. Pammy said later she felt like she’d even bonded with the equipment in that room; part of her wanted to take home the little stainless steel tray with the delivery intruments on it. I was remembering the magic of the epidural—the anesthesiologist’s name was Merlin—and the long day on the monitor, with Pammy and Steve on either side of me, and then all the troubles. I can remember the feel of the sheets, warm from the dryer, on my body, and how hard I was shivering, and what despair I was feeling, and then Sam was born, purple as an eggplant, with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, but alive.