Operating Instructions (11 page)

•   •   •

I’ve never been so up and down in my life, so erratic and wild. My body is slowly getting back to normal, except for my butt and thighs. I have to keep remembering the line about the little earth suits and that I am a feminist, because the thighs are just not doing all that well. I lay in the bathtub yesterday looking at them, thinking of entering that annual Hemingway write-alike contest with a piece called, “Thighs Like White Elephants.”

And then a part of me thinks, Hey, who fucking cares?

I
t’s been twenty-six years since John Kennedy was killed. I was in the fifth grade. I had a chopped-olive sandwich for lunch and two Hostess cupcakes. I can remember all that exactly, and yet a few days ago I got into the shower in my underpants. I feel so nostalgic for Kennedy today. We all know now that he had the moral life of a red-ass baboon, but, God almighty, compared to Bush, he’s like Desmond Tutu. I wish Sam didn’t have to grow up in such a violent scary world. There’s so much cancer, so much plague; there are so goddamn many child-snatchers, psychopaths,
Republicans. It’s all so nuts these days. When did that happen?

Obviously there’s a downward spiral going on, that much is clear, and all kinds of good, lovely people keep getting caught in it, while all these shitheads thrive. For instance, Sam and I saw this woman today at the market who is wealthy and obviously doing fabulously well, and everyone toadies up to her and pretends she’s just the most marvelous creation, but the truth is that she’s got this worm inside of her. She has to keep feeding it grim bits, like mean gossip and bad news about other people. I actually don’t even know her name, but I’ve been pretending to know who she is for so long that I can’t possibly ask her. She knows who I am, though, because she has read my books and the articles about me in the local papers. Right after Sam was born, she became only the second person in history to ask who the baby’s father was. We talked to her for a few minutes at the butcher counter today, and it was obvious that she had just had her face done again. The startled look was gone, so she looked like a million dollars, but she can make you feel so bad and low with just a look or a few well-chosen words that you end up wanting to cup your hands protectively over your genitals and skulk back home.

The madness is that I always do this little dance for her, wanting to make a good impression. This is the effect that beautiful rich people have on me. I become subservient, all but bowing and scraping and wanting to give them neck rubs. It’s
crazy. She’s just a mean snot. I believe that she’ll outlive us all, her family and portfolios will thrive, her pets will never be hit by cars. She’s in her late fifties, and her parents are still alive back East. She introduced me to them last year when they came out for a visit, and they look like aging movie stars. The father is as pleased and smarmy as can be, which is maybe the most galling thing of all, because my father, who was so kind, died so young in the world’s most terrible way. I don’t get it. What am I going to say to Sam when he first notices that things are so fucking unfair? I don’t know. Who was it who said that if something is fair, it’s probably just a coincidence? I don’t know. I think that way deep down I’m a little bit too much like this woman for comfort. My worm is not quite as big as hers, but maybe it will be with age. All I know is that I couldn’t wait to get home so I could call Pammy and we could gossip about the face-lift.

T
he kitty runs up and down Sam’s body all the time now, like she’s giving him a lomilomi massage. My older brother and I used to do them on our dad’s back when we were young. He’d seen them done in Tokyo
when he was a child. I’m not sure
how
he could have seen people get a massage, since his missionary parents were morally opposed to almost everything having to do with bodily pleasure, but when my brother and I were small, my father would stretch out on the living room carpet, and we’d take turns walking on his back. This morning the kitty walked up and down Sam’s back slowly for quite some time, seductively, reverently, peering around at his face from time to time as though she were hearing “What Child Is This?” playing on the soundtrack of her tiny kitty mind.

S
am slept through the night. I don’t want to jinx things by saying it too loudly, but it is true. He slept through the night, from 11:30 until 7:00 this morning. It was very confusing at first. My initial thought was that he had died. Then I actually let out a whoop and have been moving joyfully around the house like Julie Andrews on the mountainside in
The Sound of Music
ever since.

People say he’s the loveliest baby they’ve ever seen, even though his hair is falling out. Of course, they also say this to babies who look like water ouzels. Sam really is handsome,
with those huge moonbeam eyes and porno lips, but after bad nights I look at him with fear, as if when all his hair falls out, we might see sixes tattooed all over his head.

H
e is three months old today and has slept through the night for three nights in a row. He is definitely a keeper. He’s so big and talented compared to how he used to be, and I’d sort of like him to stay this size. On our daily walks, Pammy and I see all these toddlers tearing around. They look sort of unattractively huge and lunky, like loud screamy poopy variations on Diane Arbus’s “Jewish Giant.” Sam is so delicate.

We are almost completely broke. I don’t feel like writing, and I do not have anything to say. I’m trying to stay faithful, even though it makes me feel a little bit like a loser to be broke and fearful. I found myself having the nightmare vision again, where we end up living in the Tenderloin and I have to be a prostitute and walk the streets holding my stomach in, and the baby gets gnawed on by rats and we don’t even have a phone. What an incredible drug fear is. My friend Bettie, who goes to my church and is very black and very radical and about ten
years older than me, suggested I try to keep my eyes on Jesus. Sometimes I remember to. Other times I’m not sure I really believe in God. It would be best not to overthink it. Otherwise I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke—the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.

Movies played in my head today where I could see myself having a drink to wash away the fear of impending financial doom. I saw myself sipping a small and lovely glass of good Scotch. The problem is that I have never sipped a drink in my life. I’m more of a swiller. I did not sip beer at twelve years old, I did not sip drinks at twenty. I didn’t even sip the barium milkshake I had to take when I was thirty and getting an ulcer; I swilled it.

S
am’s father filed court papers today saying that we never fucked and that he therefore cannot be the father.

I am trying to get him to sign a paternity stipulation, which just says that I am the mother and that he is the father and that I have custody. I want it partly because Sam is entitled to know
who he is and partly because if the guy dies before Sam is eighteen, Sam will be eligible for Social Security.

The thing is that I slept with Sam’s father three times a week for three months and with no one else. It’s so weird and dreamlike that he’s Sam father, but it is the truth. Certainly, though, in the police lineup of my ex-boyfriends, he’s probably one of the better donors, tall and brilliant, and Sam’s got his gorgeous hair.

As I was writing this, Sam, who is lying beside me on the futon in the living room, suddenly did this fantastic and joyful scream, exactly like James Brown. I don’t have any idea what I will tell Sam when he is old enough to ask about his father. I’ll say that everybody doesn’t have
something
and that he doesn’t have this one thing, but that we have each other and that is a lot. And that for a while his father was my friend.

Peg came over and took three huge loads of laundry to the Laundromat. She brought us this amazing breakfast that was left over from one of her catering gigs, a sandwich made of cream cheese and lots of blueberries, which you turned into French toast by dipping it into egg and frying it so that the cream cheese melted all over the warm blueberries, and then you put syrup on top. It was so good it brought tears to my eyes. I had to eat Sam’s portion, too, because he has no teeth. I asked her if she had any thoughts on how to help Sam deal
with not having a dad, and she repeated what her AA friends say, that more will be revealed, meaning that when the time comes, I will know what to do. She also pointed out that Sam wouldn’t be talking in real sentences for a couple of years and that maybe there were more immediate things that I could mind-fuck to death.

It’s so hard to keep my sticky little fingers off the controls of this spaceship, especially when I get scared, like now when God has not bothered to give me the specific details of his solution to our financial needs. I’m just a little edgy being in the dark about it. I don’t understand why he always has to be so goddamn weird about his plans. I would prefer that he be more like Jeeves, streaming into rooms like sunlight with all that I need to feel comfortable—God as cosmic butler. This other way is so hard. It always reminds me of the man who has fallen off a cliff but managed to grab onto a weak vine. Holding it, watching it begin to come loose, he looks up toward the top of the cliff and cries out for help. Suddenly, a deep booming voice from the sky says gently to him, “It is all right, my son. I am here and will never let harm befall you. Just let go of the vine, and fall into my arms. I will catch you.” The surprised man thinks about this for a moment, looks down at the ground thousands of feet below, then up to the ledge above him, clears his throat, and asks, “Is there anybody else up there?”

I have a deep belief that I know what is best for me and
now, by extension, what is best for Sam. The fact that I have spent my life proving that just the opposite is true does not keep me from acting like a schizophrenic traffic cop with a mission and a bullhorn. There’s something sort of poignantly ludicrous about it. I heard this old man speak when I was pregnant, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver’s seat.

S
am turned over from his stomach to his back yesterday, and then he forgot how. Later I saw him tugging at his chin like he was trying to remember. At any rate, he hasn’t done it again.

He is a very good but very needy baby. He coos and roars
his baby roar and tugs Hasidically at his chin. I know it’s too early for him to be teething, but he is as drooly as a Newfoundland. Everything goes into his mouth. Everything gets gummed to death. We give him bagels to gum, and he works them over with a kind of frantic joy—I think he’s doing his impersonation of Dan Quayle eating.

I
t has been a terrible day. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him go. He’s an awful baby. I hate him. He’s scum.

Midnight

I’m not even remotely well enough to be a mother. That’s what the problem is. Also, I don’t think I like babies.

Pammy came by late in the afternoon and saved the day. Emmy dropped by with groceries. I felt like I could hardly be nice to Sam because I was so tired and he was such a kvetchy little bundle of shitty diapers and bad attitude. And then while Pammy was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, he inched
his way off the futon and did a double gainer onto the floor. He just entirely lost his mind. So I was called in to comfort him, and of course I fell right back in love. I said to Pammy, “Well, there goes your standing in the community. You used to be number two for him, I think,” and she said, “Yeah, and now I’m number twenty-nine, right between George Bush and the nurse who gave him his DPTs.”

We sat outside, and it was so breathtakingly green under the redwoods. All the birds were singing, and Sam fell asleep in my arms. Pammy made us lemonade. It was like a glimpse of paradise. I was not exaggerating when I said earlier that when I was drinking and using I couldn’t take decent care of a cat, so all this feels like a small miracle—and not even such a small one, maybe a medium-sized one in plain brown paper.

I saw a “60 Minutes” show a few years ago about Lourdes, with Ed Bradley interviewing a family of three who came to the shrine every year—a devoutly religious mother of about thirty, a much much older father who could barely look at the camera and who couldn’t say one word because he was so terribly shy, and a little ten-year-old girl with spina bifada who was in a wheelchair. They came to Lourdes every single year, and Ed Bradley was kind of badgering the parents for being so gullible. He said to the little girl, who was so weak she had to be firmly strapped into the wheelchair, “What do you pray for when you come?” and she said, looking at her father really
lovingly, “I pray that my dad won’t always have to feel so shy. It makes him feel so lonely.” Which stopped old Ed in his tracks for about ten seconds. But then he looked back at the mother and said something to the effect that “year after year, you spend thousands and thousands of dollars to come here, hoping for a miracle,” and she just looked at her kid, shook her head, and said, “Oh, no, Ed, you don’t get it—we
got
our miracle.”

S
am was baptized today at Saint Andrew’s. It is almost too painful to talk about, so powerful, so outrageous and lovely. Just about every person I adore was there. They were the exact people I would invite to my wedding.