An Enlarged Heart (8 page)

By now, she has had Kawasaki disease for seven days, during which she's been feverish for all but three hours. At night, she and I sleep in the same bed. In the middle of the third night she sits bolt upright in the bed and screams, “Where's my mommy?” The immunoglobulin drips into her arm through the clear tube. Wires cover her chest. Despite the tube, she tries to get out of bed. “I'm looking for my mommy!” she screams. Her body is covered with wires, the fluids leach from the IV into her bandaged hand.

“Don't look at the monitor,” the nurses say. “It doesn't mean anything.” When it flashes, they run in to check. Four aspirins a day keep her blood from clotting, and I grind them up and put them in her blueberry yogurt. “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” sings Julie Andrews, on the video screen. Everyone passing by looks in and says, “I love
Mary Poppins.
”

She has two echocardiograms. Her heart is like a pulsing flower. She lies on her side while I tell her the story of “The Nutcracker Prince.” She is coated like a jujube with the blue jelly. We go further and further into the forest. We learn the first findings. The function of her left ventricle is slightly depressed; there is a small pericardial effusion, which means she has fluid around her heart; her aortic root is at the upper limits of what's considered normal, as is her left coronary artery. This is what they would expect to find with acute Kawasaki disease. When I was a little girl, I played every summer on the same beach where my children play now, with the children of my parents' friends. When the phone next rings, it is one of those friends. Now he is a pediatric cardiologist. Listen to me, he says. He sets up appointments—here, there, for when we return to New York. I call Dr. Lazarus in New York. Good, he says. Good. These are the people to see.

The second treatment works. She eats a dish of rice and peas. The nurse comes in every hour and checks her temperature. I become more superstitious than ever. I cross my fingers. Her fever stays down.

We have not been outside the hospital for five days. The night before we leave, another child, a little boy, is admitted with Kawasaki disease. His mother is a nurse. “I called my friend on the way here,” she says, “and I said, ‘Look it up.' My friend called me right back, and started reading.” The mother pauses. She is in tears. “I thought, How can he have something I've never heard of? I had to pull off the road.”

I decide to make the homecoming festive, and take the ferry across Cape Cod Bay to Provincetown. Her grandmother accompanies us. The day is warm and windy, and the bay glistens. If her fever goes up even half of one degree, we are to return to the hospital immediately. Over the next days, I will put my hand on her forehead so often she swats me away. Back in New York, she'll see four doctors in three weeks, and the one they all lead to, a large, kind man, the wizard at the very center of the maze, who listens to her heart intently for a full five minutes while she sits absolutely still, as she has learned to do, will say to me, in early October, She's fine. Her left aortic root may be slightly enlarged, but she's fine. Two weeks later, she'll cough while she's eating breakfast and I'll start to shake and have to leave the room.

When the ferry pulls in, the wind stops. Her father brings the other children to meet us at the dock. She has slept on my lap during the ride, and the button on my jacket has made a red mark on her face. The children are horrified: all their anxiety is centered on that one splotch. What did they do to her face? they cry.

There is news right away. The waves are good, the waves are bad. They ate marshmallows. The biggest news is the mouse. They have found an infant mouse, in the grass at Lev and Joseph's house, and Daddy said they could keep it.

“No mice,” I say.

I am instantly a pariah.

“You can't tell them they can't have this mouse,” their father says.

“What?” I say. We have been down this route before. We have two turtles, two cats, a fish, and four children, and we are not going to have a mouse.

“Wait,” he says.

When we arrive on the top of the hill, the door to the cottage is plastered with homemade welcome-home signs. The mouse is in a matchbox. Hairless, pink, it is only a little bigger than a fingernail. They found it the night we went to the hospital, and they have kept it alive by loading a grass stalk with milk and waiting while he sucks it. They have taken it in turn to do this.

Coats

W
hen my friend Joan came to see me I coveted her coat. It was violet, and the snowflakes that had attached themselves to her as she walked through the park were small spangled stars. I coveted Joan's coat because my first reaction, always when I see I coat I admire, is to wish I owned it. When I see a dress, or boots, or a bag, or hat—I may think, I would like to have something like that, and I may even set out to find one, not that thing but somethingclose— but that is because my relationship to dresses and boots and handbags and hats is not tinged with remorse and loss.

It is not only because I am always cold, although that is true. In winter my children need to be convinced to put on overcoats, and once they are outside, they take them off, holding their coats under their arms and sometimes letting a sleeve trail on the ground. In the summer when they were small they begged to eat supper without their shirts on. At night, they sleep naked and in the morning there are mounds of their bedclothes on the floor. Implicit in this is that to be hot is to be a person of vitality. When, long ago, we huddled by the fire on the steppes, a person who allowed cold to seep into her bones was a fool. People who feel the cold are always complaining of old-fashioned ailments: they feel drafts under the door, they suffer from rheumatism and neuralgia. When my grandmother was very old, she always wore a knitted white cap, to avoid a cold in her head. Now when I go out, I always wear a hat; and on the bus, I choose my seat carefully to avoid the air that pierces the weather stripping. My books are sodden from where they have fallen into hot steaming tubs; sometimes I have to buy another copy, so that I can find out what happens. My husband, who is almost always too hot—the only time he is cold is when we are at the sea in the summer and he stays in the Atlantic for hours, and then when he comes out blue and shivering, he is surprised and takes short, noisy showers. My eldest daughter, although she goes out without a coat—because it is a sign of weakness to admit to cold when you are young, and she wears a thin shirt in every kind of weather—without fail takes a hot bath when she gets home to warm her bones, but the youngest comes home from school with her anorak bunched up in her backpack, sweat on her brow. Now that she is older she is cold at night in our drafty house: once when I called when I was away she told me that she had worn gloves to bed, and I thought, not for the first time, What kind of mother am I? Like mine, her hands and feet are always cold. Sometimes, even when it is not very cold out but damp, my fingers turn a yellow-green in the cold, from the first knuckle to the tip—when I was a little girl my father would warm my fingers but cupping them in his hands and blowing into them, as if blowing out a candle.

T
he first coat I remember was made for me by my mother. When I was very small she made almost all of my clothes. The clothes I wore as a child, and that were worn by my playmates and my cousins, were uniform. We wore smocked cotton dresses in the summer and in the winter we wore what we called jumpers, but were really pinafores, made of wool or corduroy, over blouses with Peter Pan collars, or sometimes turtlenecks. On our legs we wore black or white or sometimes navy heavy tights, and we wore lace-up shoes or Mary Janes, with buttons that were impossible to do up by yourself. There was a little steel stick, button hook, too hard to manage. During my mother's period of most intense homemaking she stitched the smocking herself; the coat I recall—and which I still have, and was worn by two of my daughters—was a red corduroy double-breasted coat with a round red velvet collar. The quality is such that the coat can stand by itself. They were “good cloth coats.” Now my children wear coats stuffed with goose down in bright colors, or old leather jackets they have found at Goodwill. When they were little they wore snow pants that matched the bright jackets; even in New York City we were ready at a moment's notice to ski down slopes and survive in arctic conditions, but when I was a girl and it was very cold our snow pants were made out of some kind of intractable black serge that turned to iron the moment it was wet, and winter was inseparable from the smell of wet wool steaming on the radiators, and the knocking of those radiators, which had to be “bled” and which interrupted our dreams, as if heat was pounding on the door, damp and bloody, to be let in.

Lately, a friend whom I have known all my life as been reminiscing about a certain kind of coat that girls he knew wore in the seventies: these coats were made of Mongolian sheepskin and were brown or the color of milky coffee. They were trimmed with pile on the collars, which were worn open (then, we never closed our coats but wore them open, nonchalantly, in the coldest weather) and the leather was embroidered all over with flowers and leafy stems. I never had such a coat. As a student I was too shy. Now I do have a sheepskin coat. I bought it on the Internet, during a time when I was unhappy and had both too much and too little time. It looked a little like one of those coats my friend recalls so fondly, but it was not like those coats: it had a notched collar of dark sheepskin pile, and a band of dark pile around the hem, and a line of horn buttons. When I received the coat in the mail, in a brown-paper package tied with string and fixed, haphazardly, with stamps, it looked like a package that had arrived from the past. When I put it on in front of the mirror on the top floor of our house, the only mirror that does not distort, but because we put it there years ago for the children is set low on the door, so that you have to bend, slightly, to fit your reflection in the glass, I went downstairs and found scissors in a kitchen drawer, and cut off the hem. It was exactly like shearing a sheep. The scissors cut through the skin with a hiss.

I have had that coat now for three years, it is the second sheepskin coat I've owned, and it is the warmest coat I have. When I bought it, it was stiff and old and like the corduroy coat I had as a child. It could almost stand up on its own, a straw man, a Guy Fawkes coat; like the coats my friend recalls so fondly it has a slightly madcap air: when my husband, to whom I was married when the coat arrived in its time capsule and I put it on, saw it, he said— My mind stops. What did he say? If I think, I will remember it, at the risk of remembering other things. Although when we were married my husband often chastised me mildly about my habit of running up bills, on the subject of new coats, of which I have acquired many, he was silent: on the roster of checks and balances that at that time made up our marriage, I was still a few coats short, for a decade ago when we moved into the house where I still live now, it happened that he threw all my coats away.

This house has five floors and huge drafty rooms, and in summer a honeysuckle climbs into the living room through the iron railings, which are shaped like sunbursts, but before we moved into this house, we lived in an apartment that looked down on this house and across to a church that looked, to me, like a church in Prague. For six people there was one proper closet: the apartment had been built at a time when people used wardrobes, great heavy armoires that were packed like trunks for great voyages, with clothes and shoes and overcoats, although often the people who owned them went nowhere. The closet in the hall was long, and part of it was for all purposes inaccessible: the door opened on the “front end” but six feet of the closet stretched beyond the door—it was possible to retrieve anything from the back of the closet only by crawling on all fours, with a flashlight. For many years, before we abandoned the apartment, we discussed opening up the closet wall, but as my husband had a particular aversion bordering on mania against sliding doors of any kind—an aversion that has been borne out in this house, as the sliding louvered doors of my closet, painted very pale green, a color called Abingdon Putty, are perpetually coming off their tracks and jamming. But when we lived there we did nothing to the apartment. It fell apart around us. In the summer I moved all the winter coats to the closet's tight back alley, and switched our summer wardrobe of slickers and ancient linen jackets to the front end. In between, often for a day or two, the winter clothes would be strewn around the bedroom, as if a party were going on in the next room, and the guests had left their coats in a mound on the coverlet and chairs; a room full of coats where a couple quarreling or not could sit in a burrow of pelts as if retreating, for those ten minutes, into a dream of intimacy, and in the morning I would find little piles of ashes on the windowsill, from where someone had smoked a cigarette out the window, their breath freezing in the cold and leaving a smudge of smoke on the sash.

I had, by then, a catalogue of coats. When I was a student, and for sometime afterward, I did not have a proper coat, or a coat that recalled in one iota the coats I had worn as a child, made of corduroy or worsted wool. In the spring and fall I wore an olive-green suede jacket I had bought at a second-hand store, which was missing the top button. The lining was acetate, peach-colored; in some places the lining was rent and torn under the arms and had separated from the hem in the back. The suede had rubbed off around the buttons and the button holes, and at the cuffs. These places were a sad, rusty brown, as if the jacket had been scorched and then doused with water. When it was very cold I exchanged the jacket for an equally old black nylon jacket I'd found left after a party at the apartment of friends who lived off campus: I'd worn it home when it started snowing. Although I'd dutifully inquired, no one had claimed it: it was the kind of apartment in which a stray jacket could have resided for months. Along the seams the black had weathered to pearl, and tufts of feathers, like cotton wool, interlaced the baffled stitches. The linings of the pockets were torn, so that for years in the winter I would find that my keys or spare change had migrated to the back of the coat, and I would have to take it off and shake it in order to pay for a coffee or unlock a door. To me these coats proclaimed that I was uninterested in clothes: I was a vagabond or, better, a tramp, my mind set on other things
: Hold on tight,
I would say to myself, and,
they called me
the Hyacinth girl,
and
Come in from under the shadow of the red rock.
The impression was entirely false. I cared in my own way desperately about clothes, and it did not occur to me that there were others, too, going around in tattered clothes reciting; the friends I admired and coveted seemed to wear their clothes like ceremonial armor, as tatting made from the cigarette smoke, cocoons from which some had already emerged as butterflies. About my purdah in tatters I was like a novitiate who has given up the world out of fear.

The first coat I coveted as a child was blue. I was five when my parents bought the white house outside the city in which I would grow up with my sister and brother. The house had iron windows with catches that opened with the turn of a crank. My room had a window seat and a closet with a window: it was a house to look out from. For many weeks my mother had looked at houses; this house, she told me, had belonged for thirty years to a man called Mr. MacGregor. The MacGregors had fixed the window cranks, the MacGregors had bought a new boiler! There was a screened porch with a door whose catch stuck. The screen door to the kitchen locked. Mr. MacGregor showed my mother how the radiators needed to be bled.

When we are children our fears are uncontainable, there is no yesterday in which something did not happen. As a little girl, I knew by heart the story of Peter Rabbit who is nearly killed by a farmer because he has disobeyed his mother. I repeated in my mind the story of his mad escape from the assassin who, before the story begins, killed his father and put him in a pie. Running from Mr. MacGregor, Peter is caught in a gooseberry net and is snared by the large buttons on his jacket. I was a child who had been brought up in the city. I had no idea what a gooseberry net might be—it was confusing to think of a net to catch berries. But next came a sentence that seemed to me then of great beauty:
It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.
I immediately wanted such a coat. My mother no longer made my coats; instead, they were handed down to me by an older cousin. Nothing in the bags my mother unpacked remotely resembled a blue coat with brass buttons that had been made for a rabbit. The space inhabited by my mother and me included even then my utter inability to describe to her what it was I wanted. But had the coat saved Peter? By abandoning his coat, by sacrificing it to Mr. McGregor, he had escaped as surely as if he had traded the coat for his life. A fair exchange, it seemed to me, a coat for a rabbit. For after all, in the end Mr. McGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scarecrow to frighten the blackbirds. From our new house, my father took the train into the city very early in the morning and returned late at night. When I looked out the window from my window seat, my mother was in the garden that had been Mr. MacGregor's, setting out bulbs.

The second coat I coveted had belonged to my father. It was a covert cloth stadium coat, lined with brown plush. He had worn this coat when he was in college in New Hampshire, and the belt, which had a leather buckle, was frayed. It hung in the attic closet next to my mother's silk shantung dance dresses. These dresses had watercolor patterns in pinks and blues, and the waists were small. The closet was lined with cedar. Next to the dresses my father's coat was a behemoth, pocked with tiny moth holes. In the left pocket, which was lined with chamois, was an old half-finished tube of lipstick. The case was black Bakelite and the color was Splendor Red. It had been made by Elizabeth Arden. After I finished school and returned to New York I hardly ever stayed again with my mother and father for more than one or two nights, but one of those nights I came down from the attic with a paper bag into which I had folded the coat and asked my father whether I could have it. My father is a tall, broad-shouldered man. He is a person who takes up space in a room. When I put it on, the frayed belt went twice around my waist and the hem skimmed the floor.