Operating Instructions (6 page)

I think he believed that our job, the job of a writer, is not to get up and say, “Tomorrow, in battle, most of you will die.…” Instead, a writer must entertain the troops the night before. I think he believed that the best way to entertain the troops is to tell stories, and the ones that they seem to like the best are ones about themselves. You can tell sweet lies or bitter truths, and both seem to help, but it’s like Czeslaw Milosz said when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

T
he county is in the middle of a terrible heat wave. It is very hot everywhere but in this house. The baby and I both have acne. In all other ways he is unspeakably beautiful. He has the hugest, roundest eyes you can imagine, like those old Keane paintings. His hair is dark brown and thick, and he has what Pammy calls pouty baby porno lips. It’s a very beautiful mouth, but all you see when you look at him are his eyes. They’re not quite human; they’re more like those of a gentle extraterrestrial.

•   •   •

He tries to sit up and I try to help him, but he slips down like a collapsible tin camp cup.

The colic was very bad last night. Actually, it is bad almost every night now. Everyone is supportive and encouraging, but the colic still makes me feel like a shitty mother, not to mention impotent and lost and nuts. I can handle the crying for a long time, but then I feel like I’m going to fall over the precipice into total psychosis. Last night at midnight it occurred to me to leave him outside for the night, and if he survived, to bring him inside in the morning. Sort of an experiment in natural selection.

It feels like I’m baby-sitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and Diet Cokes. The same few people come over all the time—Pammy, my brother Steve, Emmy, Peg, my mom and Aunt Pat, and Gertrud and Rex, who are our oldest family friends. They’ve been like relatives for over thirty years and have been selected to be Sam’s paternal grandparents (because I don’t think Sam’s dad ever mentioned us to his parents). Otherwise I am saying no to almost everything and everyone. This has become my specialty. My therapist, Rita, has convinced me that every time I say yes when I mean no, I am abandoning myself, and I end up feeling used or resentful or frantic. But when I say no when I mean no, it’s so sane and
healthy that it creates a little glade around me in which I can get the nourishment I need. Then I help and serve people from a place of real abundance and health, instead of from this martyred mentally ill position, this open space in a forest about a mile north of Chernobyl.

My brother stayed over the night before last, walked and danced with my poor gassy baby all night while I lay in the tub. Steve seems to adore being an uncle, even though the baby cries so much and has such terrible acne. Steve calls him Pizza Face.

E
very night between 8:30 and 12:30 Sam cries and is miserable. I have tried everything that all the baby books suggest, and it is not getting better. I feel so badly for him—I keep thinking about how hard it is for him here, especially compared to how easy and warm and floaty it was where he used to live. It’s nuts. I’m so tired that I could easily go to sleep at 8:30 and sleep for twelve hours, but instead I walk the sobbing baby and think my evil thoughts—Lady Macbeth as a nanny.

B
ig day for Sam. He’s one month old. Pammy and Steve and I celebrated by giving him another real bath in his little plastic tub, which we set up in the living room, while listening to Toots and the Maytals on the boom box. He peed all over me and into his bathwater just as the kitty walked past. She began rubbernecking with the most shocked and horrified expression on her face, clearly thinking, “Oh, my God, now I’ve seen everything.” I think she had just begun to get over the trauma of witnessing the shit storm that poured out of Sam on his first day home, was just beginning to put her life back together. Steve watched Sam pee, then put his hands on his hips and said rather fiercely, “You should make him drink it.”

Sam does these fabulous nipple tricks now, lolling around at my nipple, pushing it in and out of his mouth with his tongue, sort of lackadaisically, like it’s a warm summer day and he doesn’t have much else to do but work over his wad of chewing tobacco. And Pammy noticed a new aspect of his bath personality. He doesn’t want us to think he’ll ever like it, but deep down, he may be starting to.

•   •   •

We were watching the news tonight while nursing, and I almost had to get up and leave the room when Bush came on. No one in the world hates George Bush as much as I do. (Who was it who said he looks like everybody’s first husband?) This is a true story: I was telling Sam how I feel about Bush and why someone once referred to him as “that preppy snot in the White House,” and I was saying that Sam really must grow up to be the leader of the rebel forces, and then I said to him, “Study that face for a second, listen to that whiny voice,” and Sam actually looked intently at the TV for a few moments, closed his eyes, and made the loudest, most horrible fart I’ve ever heard. I raised my fist in the air and said, “Yes! You
got
it.”

I keep wanting to do what Martin Luther King taught us—to walk in love, to love the racist and hate the racism—but I must say, it is not going very well these days. I am often beside myself with hate. I have a quote of his on the wall over my desk that says, “Let us not despair. Let us not lose faith in man and certainly not in God. We must believe that a prejudiced mind can be changed and that man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love.” But I sometimes despair. My hatred of American conservatives apparently sustains and defines me as much as my love of Jesus does, since I don’t think I’m willing to have it removed. Who would I be without it? I know I’m as much
a part of the problem as anyone else and that we’re all like the people in that old Dylan song who think God is on their side. Part of me does not want Sam to be like this at all, and part of me thinks that it’s right and important to scorn and revile the conservatives, because—well, because they’re bad, or at least they’re wrong.

T
he worst night yet. Sam was wild with colic until midnight, and nothing helped. Nothing. I have never felt so impotent and frustrated in my life. I tried everything. I put a tape of summer night sounds complete with crickets on the boom box, because white noise is supposed to help. I put a warm hot water bottle on his tummy, held his feet, and made him do bicycle pedaling because that is supposed to help him pass gas. I surrounded him with pillows in the baby swing someone lent us, rocked and nursed and rocked and nursed, which would help for ten minutes every so often. Then the sobbing would begin again. This went on for four straight hours. I can’t walk him for very long because my body is still all torn up. The wound feels like there’s a fishing weight suspended from its highest point; the weight swings like a
pendulum and drags the wound downward. The ache when I walk or stand up for too long is totally defeating. All I can do is try to breathe, deeply and slowly, and pray. We Christians like to go around thinking that God isn’t here to take away our pain and fear but to fill it with his or her presence, and I can feel Jesus’ sorrowful eyes on us as Sam and I walk and rock and nurse and listen to our white noise on the boom box, but still the frustration flushes through me again and again. If I had a baseball bat, I would smash holes in the wall.

I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats. But, God, it is so hard to feel that way today because I’m so riled up. I keep thinking of something the great black theologian Howard Thurman said, that we must try to look out at the world through quiet eyes. But I tell you, in the middle of the colic death marches, I end up looking at the baby with those hooded eyes that were in the old ads for
The Boston Strangler
.

Midnight

I felt very sorry for myself today until Peg called and reminded me of Renata Adler’s wonderful line about how self-pity is maybe just sorrow in the pejorative. I wrote it down on an
index card and carried it around in my pocket all day, like it was currency. The baby has fallen asleep after being just mildly colicky for a few hours, not psychotically so like last night, and the kitty is lying beside me asleep. Things are a lot better.

Steve took Sam for a while this afternoon, after dressing him in a little yellow duckling sunsuit and the Israeli cat hat that someone gave us. He looked so incredibly beautiful and tender that you almost had to look away. With a teddy bear next to the baby in the stroller, Steve figured, what woman could possibly resist? Steve is actually very handsome, six-foot-three, thin, with thick dark hair and a great nose, but he is still terribly shy and a little gangly. He trolled downtown with the baby for nearly an hour. One girl bit, but Steve didn’t get her phone number. He says he is going to try again tomorrow.

4:00
A.M.

After I nursed the baby a while ago and we had gone back to sleep on the futon on the living room floor, which is still our headquarters, I heard him begin to whimper, and I thought, “Go back to sleep, you little shit.” He kept whimpering, like a golden retriever whose feelings you’ve hurt, but he wasn’t really crying, so I didn’t wake up all the way. I kept shushing him and thinking, “You whiny little bugger.” Finally, at least ten minutes later, with total hostility and resentment, I roused
myself enough to reach over to rub his back, which sometimes helps him a little—and he wasn’t there! I turned on the light, and he wasn’t anywhere on the bed! I actually thought he’d been kidnapped; or
left
. It turns out he had somehow scooted off the bed and landed on the floor between the head of the futon and the wall and had just lain there whimpering. I don’t think I can capture in words how I felt at that moment.

I couldn’t stop thinking of a day at the end of my father’s life when the brain cancer had progressed to the point where he was barely functioning. He was sometimes like an eager-to-please three-year-old, sometimes like the Rainman. He was in his early fifties. On this one day, I took him over the hill to do errands with me, and he just sat in the car totally spaced out while I ran into various stores. Everything was going okay except that it was so sad to see him in that kind of shape. Still, he was actually sort of cheerful and very very sweet. I remember we were listening to a live Pete Seeger tape. On the way home, I had to stop at the bank in Mill Valley, so I gave him a big candy bar and left him belted into the passenger seat and ran in. Of course there was a huge line, so every so often I’d run to the back of the bank and look through the window to make sure he was still there (as if someone were going to kidnap him). The last time I looked, he wasn’t there—the car was empty! I felt like adrenaline had been injected directly into my heart, and I turned to stare out the windows behind the tellers, just to collect my thoughts, and through them I saw
this crazy old man pass by, his face smeared with chocolate, his blue jeans hanging down in back so you could see at least two inches of his butt, like a little boy’s. He was just walking on by, holding his candy bar, staring at the sky as if maybe his next operating instructions were up there.

M
y mom and my Aunt Pat, my mom’s twin sister, came over this morning. They are short and slightly round, originally from Liverpool, ever so slightly Monty-Pythonish, and desperately in love with the baby. Both of them work, but they come over every chance they get, and they never stay too long. This is a greatly underrated quality. I think they see Sam as royalty and me as his governess. Pat’s grandchildren live in Canada and she doesn’t get to see them nearly enough, so she now officially considers Sam
hers
because she can get her mitts on him whenever she wants. Her husband, my Uncle Millard, is one godfather. (The other is Manning, who told me it would be a great blessing for me to have the baby and who took me in for the amnio.) Millard is tall and skinny and hilarious and Jewish and says that my people do not know anything about educating children, so he
will handle things every step of the way. Millard makes it sound like Sam and I have only a few more weeks together before he begins his study of Hebrew at some yeshiva in Los Angeles. Millard will be a great godfather. He calls the baby Third Samuel.

Mom and Pat take turns holding the baby for ten and fifteen minutes at a stretch, gazing and cooing, clucking about how much he seems to adore whichever one is holding him: “Oh, you love your Nana, don’t you, you love your Nana so much.” “No, no, no, come here to me, darling; oh, you love your Auntie Pat so much, don’t you, honey, hmm?” I lie on the futon with my eyes closed, letting their cooing and murmurs wash over me like a cool breeze.

My mother lives about twenty minutes up the highway; Pat and Millard live on the other side of the mountain. I was raised around their four kids and the kids of my father’s sister, who
also
still lives in the county. We’re all still pretty much around, except for my older brother, who lives with his wife in Sacramento. I was afraid when I told Mom that I was going to have a baby that she would think, Oh God, my sluttina daughter’s knocked up, what will people say? But I think it was the happiest day of her life so far. That night she called every single person she has ever known to tell them the news. Some of those people say she called with tears of joy, and I think I have only seen her cry three or four times in my whole life. She
even called a lot of people I have never heard of. She all but called the papers. I don’t know why I was afraid: she has been a screaming liberal her entire life. She and I have sometimes not known quite what to do with each other since she and Dad split up when I was twenty-one, but we’re doing okay these days. Of course, now I have a major bargaining chip in Sam: “Do this,” I say, “or you’ll never see the kid again.” So she makes me homemade soup. Sometimes we can’t communicate well, for no particular reason except that we’re mother and daughter and so different: I’m so flamboyant and confessional and eccentric; and she’s so essentially English, concerned with how things look to others. But she makes me these big pots of soup, and when she leaves sometimes I cry. I remember in
Franny and Zooey
, how Franny is lying around having a breakdown, starving herself, saying the Jesus prayer ten thousand times a day, trying to find something holy in the world, and Zooey finally explodes in complete exasperation, crying out to her that she should simply drink her mother’s soup—that her mother’s love for them consecrates it, makes it holy soup.