Operating Instructions (12 page)

Everyone cried, or at any rate, lots of people did—all those old faces of the people at my church, and all the younger people, too, and my family and best friends, everyone clapping and singing along with the choir. All these old left-wing atheist friends singing gospel music. The singing was extraordinary, the choir of these beautiful black women and one white man, singing to Sam and me. A friend of nearly twenty years,
Neshama, from Bolinas, described the two of us as looking very tremulous and white and cherished. Out of this broken-down old church, out of the linoleum floors and the crummy plastic stained-glass windows, came the most wonderful sounds anyone had ever heard, because of the spirit that moved the day.

Sam was just great, although I must say I took the liberty of dosing him with perhaps the merest hint of Tylenol beforehand so he wouldn’t weep or whine too much during the service. He wore the baptism gown that my cousin Samuel had worn fifty years ago, very Bonnie Prince Charlie, very lacy and high Episcopalian, with a plain little white cap.

For the huge party at Pammy’s afterward, he changed into his one-piece cow outfit. It was a wonderful party. Everybody mingled like mad, except me, and everyone got to hang out in the garden because it was such a beautiful day. I kept feeling that God was really showing off. The party felt like the secular portion of the show.

I’ve always kept the various parts of my life compartmentalized, but today all the important people from all aspects of my life were finally brought together: my sweet nutty family, in droves; my reading group; people I have worked with at magazines over the years; old lovers; and the women I have loved most in my life. It was my tribe. It felt like Brownian motion, all of these friends who had been strangers to one another bumping off each other in the garden.

Inside Pammy’s house, the sun streamed through the windows, and there were vases of flowers everywhere, dozens of vases, hundreds of flowers of every possible color and shade, some arranged as if by pros, some like crazy hairdos. It was like a Haight-Ashbury wedding. Emmy and Bill brought a whole roast turkey, and everyone else brought the most beautiful dish he or she knew how to make. Mom and Dudu had been in charge of recruiting the food, and there were beautiful bowls and plates of food on every inch of tabletop and counter. My brilliant old friend Leroy from Petaluma, who has been a permanent member of my food review squad for years, told my mother that the food was so exquisite that after eating, one heard the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s
Aida
, had visions of elephants, camels, cannons. My mother was so proud, so high from the whole thing that she could have chased down an airplane.

The kid made a haul, fantastic toys and clothes and books for the little emir. Dudu and Rex started a savings account for him; my reading group gave us a check for a small fortune. Except for the fact that there was folk music on the stereo, it was like the wedding scene in
The Godfather
.

A bunch of other babies were there, all of them about Sam’s age, and they were all so much more robust than Sam. He is a skinny little guy. When I mentioned this to Neshama, she said very kindly that the other babies looked like babies on
Steroids while Sam was a baby on spirit. I had to hide in a back room with him practically the whole time because I was too overwhelmed, amazed, and profoundly grateful at how loved Sam is and how loved I am. It made my stomach ache.

Now I am sitting here on the futon in the living room, Sam asleep beside me, the kitty sniffing at him with enormous interest as if I had accidentally brought a perfectly broiled Rock Cornish game hen to bed with me. I have spent so much of my life with secret Swiss-cheese insides, but I tell you—right now, Mama, my soul is full.

P
ammy showed me a picture that someone took at the baptism of her holding Sam out toward the camera. He definitely looks like he was blown away by the proceedings, too, somehow sort of blank and surprised at the same time, like he had just that moment been plucked from a huge pie.

All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but
I feel inside like when you’re first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can
do
it, but it doesn’t look all that great around the cuticles. And I think that because I’m so tired all the time, people feel like I’m sort of saintly. But the shadow knows. The other night I was nursing the baby outside, underneath the redwoods, and you could see the full moon in the clearing of the treetops. Everything smelled so clean and green, and the night birds were singing, and then I started feeling a little edgy about money or the lack thereof. I started feeling sorry for myself because I’m tired and broke, kept thinking that what this family needs is a breadwinner. And pretty soon my self-esteem wasn’t very good, and I felt that maybe secretly I’m sort of a loser. So when my friend John called a few minutes later from L.A. and mentioned that a mutual friend of ours, whose first book was out (for which he had been grossly overpaid, if you ask me), had gotten a not-very-good review in
Newsweek
recently, all of a sudden, talking on the cordless phone and nursing my baby in the moonlight, I had a wicked, dazzling bout of schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is that wicked and shameful tickle of pleasure one feels at someone else’s misfortune. It felt like I’d gotten a little hit of something. It made me feel better about myself. “Do you have it?” I asked innocently, and he said that he didn’t think so because it was a week or so old. I then found myself clearing my throat and saying in a flat, innocently curious voice, “Why
don’t you go look?” So he did, and returned to the phone with it, and I said, nice as pie, “Now read it.” And when he was done, I said, “Man, that was like
Christmas
for me.” Then we laughed, and it was okay for a minute.

God, it was painful though, too, and the hangover was debilitating. I was deeply aware of the worm inside of
me
and of the grim bits that I feed it. The secret envy inside me is maybe the worst thing about my life. I am the Saddam Hussein of jealousy. But the grace is that there are a couple of people I can tell it to without them staring at me as if I have fruit bats flying out of my nose, who just nod, and maybe laugh, and say, Yep, yep, I get it, I’m the same.
Still
, I feel like it must drive Jesus just out of his mind sometimes, that instead of loving everyone like he or she is my sibling, with a heart full of goodwill and tenderness and forgiveness, I’m secretly scheming and thinking my dark greedy thoughts. I say to him, Bear with me, dude. He does give me every single thing I need, but then I still want more, and I picture him stamping around like Danny DeVito, holding up these gnarled beseeching hands of frustration, saying, “Oy fucking
veh.”

W
e had a great time today. He slept a lot, laughed a lot, played, roared. Later we had a Hoagy Carmichael dance contest, and we won—we won big. It was just Sam, the kitty, and me, but still, we felt good about it.

It takes Sam a long time to fall asleep at night, and when he does, I can’t tiptoe around cleaning up because (I think) he subconsciously hears me sneaking around and finds it unbecoming and he wakes up crying. So often I just sit by him and watch him sleep. I tell him while he sleeps that it’s a jungle out there, and you have to be really, really careful or else the eagles will get you, like they got Johnny G. My friend Mary had six cats at one point, until her cat Johnny G. disappeared, and eagles had been seen in the sky that very same day, so of course you could only draw one conclusion. After that she used always to warn the other cats to be really careful so that the eagles didn’t get them, too. The odds seemed so stacked. Have you ever seen that awful PBS nature movie on baby turtles, where they show you the beach where twenty million turtle eggs are laid and then hatch? Then they show you those twenty million baby turtles trying to race across the sand before the seagulls swoop down and gobble them up. About forty-five baby turtles make it to the water. It makes you shake
your head. You double over and have to hold onto your stomach. I say, Please, please, please, God, let Sam make it to the water.

He can roll over to one side and no longer just says, Ah-goo. He does all these fabulous babbles and bellowings now. He’s so pretty that it’s sort of nuts. I’m sure he will be as gay as an Easter bonnet. My friend Larry gave him a naked Ken doll that Sam took a shine to one evening when my reading group met at Larry’s, and it’s totally Fire Island around here now. Sam licks and chews the naked Ken doll at every opportunity. I called Larry and said, “You’re trying to recruit my son,” and he said, “Look at it this way—in twenty years you won’t be losing a son; you’ll be gaining a son.” Larry has AIDS, or at any rate has HIV and no T-cell count these days. Boy, talk about the baby turtles. I worry that he won’t be here when Sam is four or five. Of course, I don’t know if I’ll be here, either. Larry called one night at the end of my pregnancy when I was just devastated by the thought of the hole in Sam’s life because he wouldn’t have a dad, how much that was probably going to hurt and how I wasn’t going to be able to do much about it. He said that I was just an opening for Sam to come into the world, that I wasn’t supposed to be a drug for him. I was just supposed to be his mother. Sam was meant to be born into the world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even
if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets who would die and acne and seventh-grade dances and AIDS. He simply wasn’t meant to be born in the paradise behind the mountains.

I
woke him last night at 12:30 to nurse him, and he looked at me like “Are you out of your fucking
mind?”
But then he nursed for a long time. He woke up at 4:00, but I gave him his pacifier, patted him, and told him what a good kitty-cat he was, and he fell right back to sleep until 9:00. So I feel like a million dollars, like I am on the road to a complete recovery. Steve came by with take-out Mexican food tonight and after dinner sat talking to Sam about life while I took a bath. I eavesdropped: Steve said that meeting Sam was one of the best things that had ever happened to him but that another was having finally learned to swim at the age of thirty. “Life is really great sometimes,” he said. The fact that he couldn’t swim was always this deep secret that Steve went to great lengths to hide, like the men and women who can’t read or write but who have all these fabulous tricks and games they play to keep their illiteracy a secret.
Then this summer Steve did one of the bravest things I’ve ever heard of. He took swimming lessons where all these kids could watch him. He said it was like learning to ride a bike when you’re thirty years old and six-foot-three, with a bunch of kids on skateboards looking on.

But he did it. He learned to swim. He was telling Sam tonight that he went around for all these years dreading that somehow he would be found out, someone would have a foolproof way to get him into the ocean or into a pool, and he’d have to admit he couldn’t swim. And now he can.

Now there’s only this one other little secret that he has. He can’t start barbecues, which of course everyone in California is expected to be able to do. Stacking the briquettes, sprinkling in the charcoal lighter, letting the coals get red hot and then white—you know, the whole Gestalt. So now he’s afraid that he’ll be at some pool party, finally splashing around happily in the pool, maybe doing a few nonchalant laps, and someone will holler, “Hey, Steve! Why don’t you come do me a favor and get the charcoals started?”

S
am’s getting a lot of hand control. He can grasp the rattle if you touch the backs of his fingers with it. Before, you had to spread his fingers open and wedge the rattle in. It always made me think of those movies where the dead person is clutching a coin or a clue in their rigor-mortised hand and the detective has to pry the fingers open. But this morning I took this weird black elastic-Lego-bell contraption that looks like a molecular model and put it on Sam’s stomach. The next thing I knew he was banging himself euphorically in the face.

It’s also National Sam Lamott Neck Control Day. We’re talking major, hard-core neck control. I changed our answering machine to say, “We’re apparently out celebrating National Sam Lamott Improved Neck Control Week, but operators are standing by to take your call …” People left the most supportive messages, as if Sam had triumphed over muscular dystrophy, like “All
right
, babe—
go
for it.” Larry’s message said, “Oh, it’s all too much for me. Please give the little savant a
huge
hug from all of us.”

I
did a terrible thing yesterday. Someone had invited us to a birthday party that I totally did not want to go to. I just hate parties so much. I’m always reminded of that wonderful Virginia Woolf line where she says she and her sister Vanessa would go to parties and end up sitting there like deaf-mutes waiting for the funeral to begin. I really couldn’t think of a way out of this party because it was for someone I really love. But then Sam started crying hysterically because he was so tired and strung out, and a light bulb went on over my head, and I rushed to the phone with him in my arms, wailing, and called the friend. I said Sam and I were both exhausted and just couldn’t possibly come, and the woman said, “Oh, well, of course we’re terribly disappointed,” but I could tell she was desperately relieved. She probably got off the phone going, “Oh, thank you Jesus,
thank
you,
thank
you.”

W
e all had Christmas Eve with Dudu and Rex, as we have for about thirty years now, although this, of course, was Sam’s first year. They are so desperately in love with him. I worry that they have come to think of me as his driver. I felt such a deep sadness that my father didn’t get to know Sam. The last Christmas my dad was alive, he was fifty-four and had been sick for a year and half, he looked very handsome in his best L. L. Bean clothes, but his brain didn’t work so well anymore. The awareness of how much ground he had lost made him unbearably sad and worried. It was the hardest thing for me, definitely harder even than knowing that he would be dead pretty soon. Luckily, we three Lamott kids were all still drinking heavily at the time, so we ended up having a tipsy, if not happy, night. I wish now I could have been more present for my dad’s sickness. I was drunk and high every night. That last Christmas I kept praying for God to pull a rabbit out of his hat and come up with some sort of solution, and about two weeks later Dad was definitely much more senile, beyond even noticing that his brain was shot, so it wasn’t a great solution, if you ask me. Still, it was better than nothing. I guess that’s about all you get sometimes. I remember at one point on that last Christmas Eve he had a
bright quilted tea cozy on his head, like a crown, and he really looked great, like he was having a good time.