Operating Instructions (14 page)

Later I found this Polaroid I’d taken when I was about seven months pregnant and feeling psychotically alone and incomplete because my other four friends who were having babies were spending all this time getting the
nurseries
together, with their
husbands
, their doting, excited husbands. And I felt like the lonely hunchback innkeeper who had somehow gotten knocked up. But then two very old black women at my church—Alma, the one who wears the little ersatz Coco Chanel outfits, and Mary Williams, who calls me “sugar” and blesses me (“Bless you, sugar, bless you, bless you”)—had both stuffed a bunch of bills into the pocket of my coat. They each live on about $600 a month. It humbled me. It sort of kicked the shit out of my feeling sorry for myself. When I got home, I’d found the sonogram picture of Sam when he was a four-month-old fetus, and a picture of me at thirty-five holding the kitty, and a picture of me at seven years old, because I can still feel that girl inside my soul, and I taped them all under the arms of the crucifix in my kitchen. Then I took a Polaroid close-up of the whole scene and carried it in my wallet for the rest of my pregnancy, as my family portrait—me, Jesus, Sam, and the little seven-year-old girl. I’d say to myself, See? We are already a complete family unit. We don’t need some guy. We are whole.

I’d forgotten I had it. I had hidden it away so they couldn’t use it against me at my commitment hearings.

W
e are almost out of money. I have eight hundred dollars left in my savings account. The only money I am making is the thousand a month for the
California
food review. I have Megan for a few hours every day and cannot possibly give that up. It’s seven bucks an hour, but it is cheap at twice the price. It has given me a whole new lease on life. I can’t figure out any places where we can cut back. The friends who do the food reviews with me every month are already paying for their own dinners so that I can pocket the expense check. If worse comes to worst, Pammy and her husband could lend me some money until I am back in the saddle financially. I wrote a note to God this morning. I said that I did not have any solutions to my money problems, that I can and will scratch around and find some free-lance gigs if that is what his will for me is—that is, as opposed to settling down and trying to get an advance for a new book—but that in the meantime I need my next operating instructions. I folded it up and put it in the little box by my bed. Then I sat by the phone for about five minutes, primly, with my knees together and my hands folded in my lap, waiting, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Nothing happened, except that Megan arrived for work and
found me sitting like that. It was a little bit embarrassing. She cocked her head and after a moment said, “Are you expecting a call?” and I said, “Yes,” and she said, “From who?” and I said I really didn’t know. She nodded quite respectfully and went off to get the baby.

They spent the morning at the park, and I got to work on my food review. It was a great salve for the fear. The Smiths and Peg and Leroy and I had gone out a week ago to this happening place on the Embarcadero that everyone said was supposed to be a lot of fun. (“Oh, great,” said Leroy, bitterly, “a lot of
fun?
Shall I bring my little piece of the Berlin wall?”) And it
was
fun, partly because the food was so bad. It turned out to be a really funny review. I am grateful for the easy money, but I need $1,500 a month more to get by. Megan came back from the park with the baby at noon and asked, “Did your call come through?” and I shook my head, and she thought about this for a moment and said, “Well? Maybe tomorrow.”

She is really interested in a new man. I can hardly remember what that feels like. As I recall, half the time it’s fantastic and you feel larger than life and you have this marvelous cell membrane around the two of you and you dream your dreamy dreams of running in slow motion through the fields into the arms of your beloved, and the rest of the time you’re totally
fucked up the ass, breathing asthmatically if at all, psychically doubled over on the floor with little rivulets of barf trickling down from the corners of your mouth.

Megan, at twenty-two, seems so grounded. She’s taking it slow, although she admitted that sometimes there’s a certain temptation to do just the opposite, to throw caution to the wind and move in together and create all that delicious drama. I told her something my friend Deirdre said last year about the man I was seeing before I got involved with Sam’s father. She was urging me to go slow and not to make any commitment to the guy or to want one until we’d gone out for months and months. She said, Think of it as having come upon a beautiful canoe on the shore. Now, no matter how much you want to get in it and paddle way out into the water, maybe all the way across the Pacific, no matter how long you’ve had to wait to do so, you simply don’t do it. You’d paddle around the shore for a while, maybe for weeks, take little excursions, test it out. Maybe it would seem okay the first few times, but then it might turn out to be full of tiny holes and cracks and start to sink, and you would need to bail. It would have turned out that you had gotten the last good hours out of that beautiful shitty little boat. It was a good thing that you hadn’t gone out very far.

I
gave Sam a little rice cereal tonight strictly out of boredom. It used to be that
I
overate when I was bored, but now I get to overfeed the baby. He’s lovelier, funnier, smarter, and more alert every day. Everyone says so. He laughs out loud a lot, sucks on his feet, and makes these screams of joy and amazement that sometimes scare the kitty half to death. She’ll be walking up to him right when he lets out a banshee scream, and it’s exactly like in the cartoons, she leaps straight into the air and looks like she’s been electrocuted. Then a little later I’ll find her curled up next to him licking his ears.

I think she thinks that he is hers. I remember how I used to have these anxiety attacks about the kitty putting a pillow on top of the baby’s face while he slept or pinching his little nostrils and mouth shut. That’s why I like that line so much about my mind being a bad neighborhood I shouldn’t go into alone. It’s too often 4:00
A.M.
in one’s mind, the hour of the black dogs, and there are so many muggers and drive-by shootings and piles of dog shit you step in just when you’re starting to feel better about things. One’s heart is the only safe place to be. There’s light there, there’s company, and quiet.

That same bad-neighborhood guy said, smiling in this nice self-deprecating way, “Hey, I may not be much, but I’m all I think about.”

T
here’s been a miracle here, the sort of thing that you could not get away with in fiction. Your editor would say, “Look, I’m sorry, but no one would believe it. Things just don’t happen like that in real life.” What happened is, a woman named Liz Logan, who used to be an editor at 7
Days
magazine, called me this morning. We have corresponded once or twice because she is a fan of my books and restaurant reviews. She just got hired as the articles editor at
Mademoiselle
, and she offered me the book column this morning, for two thousand dollars a month. Two thousand dollars a month! God Almighty.

I can’t contain myself. It makes me want to have a whole bunch of cigarettes or something. Pammy is on her way over with the makings for hot-fudge sundaes. Gonna get
down
.

“Oh, Sam,” I said to him when I hung up from talking to Pammy, “honey?” But I couldn’t put how I felt into words, so I ran into our funny little bedroom, buried my head in a pillow, and cried.

S
am eats rice cereal and carrots every day and makes bright orange poops. Feeding him is like filling a hole with putty—you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and gob it back in, like you’re spackling.

E
veryone is ecstatic because of
Mademoiselle
. Everyone called everyone else to discuss the big news, and then everyone called me. It has been a great couple of days, with much jubilation. It feels like the worst is over. I wish I could tell my dad. It makes me remember the only lines from the Bible that I know for sure he loved, from Song of Solomon, chapter two, “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” My father would raise a fist, and beam.

A
nother birthday. He’s five months old. He can do all sorts of brilliant things now besides squealing and sucking his feet. His new thing is that he scratches absolutely everything with all the fingers of one hand at once—the material of the couch, my chest, the sheet of his bassinet, which, against the plastic-covered foam pad, sounds like “scritch scritch scritch.” It’s sort of spasmodic and eerie, because in the silence those tiny little fingers are the only things moving. It sounds like someone who has been buried alive and is scratching the top of a coffin. “Stop doing that,” I say, “it’s wearing on my nerves,” and he just looks at me placidly and goes scritch scritch scritch.

I
t’s great to have so many friends who had babies right around the time I did—even if it did make me bitter and resentful that they also got to have husbands and nurseries—because they all have extremely bad
attitudes and sick senses of humor like me. It would be intolerable to call a friend, a new mother, when you were really feeling down and for her to say some weird aggressive shit like “Little Phil slept through the night yesterday, isn’t that marvelous since he’s only eight weeks old, and guess what, I’m already fitting back into my prepregnancy clothes.” You’d really have no choice but to hope for disaster to rain down on such a person.

Yesterday Sam was horrible, whiny and wired and just in general the most worthless and irritating little person. By the late afternoon I was no longer stoned on the good news from
Mademoiselle
. In fact, I was quite depressed. On top of everything, I have developed a horrible new body odor. Maybe it’s because sometimes there isn’t enough time to give both me and the baby a bath, but when we went to the market I thought someone in line must have some terrible endocrine imbalance, and it turned out to be me. Pammy was busy all day and couldn’t come over, and I just hated everything. So I called Donna, my novelist friend, whose son is five days younger than Sam. She’d been completely wasted and mental a few days earlier, and I’d managed to cheer her up: the more I think about it, the only reason various societies work is because we’re not all depressed at the same time.

I said, “What are you doing?”

She said, “I’m just sitting here in my colic clothes, my spitty
little nightgown, even though it’s 4:00 in the afternoon, and I’m nursing little Elliott Abrams and eating my fourth doughnut.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“I think I’ve been better,” she said. We both started to laugh somewhat maniacally.

“I called for a reason,” I said. “I need to know one thing. Are there any actual benefits to having an infant?”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

I asked, “Do you think having a husband makes it a lot easier?”

She said, “Oh, no, just the opposite. The only real advantage is that you get to have tantrums
and
someone to attack, which, actually, the more I think about it, does seem to relieve some of the pressure. You get to say things like ‘I hate my life, I hate you, you’re gone all day, this was your idea, my figure is ruined, you’re a bad person, I hate you, and I hate listening to you floss every night. It makes me want to hang myself.’ ”

It doesn’t look that funny on paper, but I laughed so hard that I could breathe again.

After I got off the phone with Donna, I called Pammy and asked her if I could yell all this stuff at her since she’s the closest thing I have to a husband, and she said very nicely, “Oh, sure.” So I did, I actually repeated everything Donna had
said, even that I hated listening to her floss every night. She just listened silently; she was probably sorting laundry or giving her cat a flea dip while I ranted, and when I was done she asked if Sam and I wanted her to come up and watch the evening news with us, which, needless to say, we did.

Midnight

We’re better, Sam is sleeping again. There were periods earlier when I got so stuck in the feelings of darkness that it felt like there were no safe places. I used to feel this a lot when I was a kid and a teenager. All those years I just wanted a family that was okay (except for those times when I thought maybe I’d settle for a police dog instead). And now I have one, a family that is okay, a family of me, a baby boy, and a cat, and the people I love most, who love me and are helping me to raise Sam. For instance, Peg brought over a whole bunch of meals today, one for tonight and some to freeze, and she took all of our laundry to the Laundromat and returned with it an hour and a half later, all of it clean and neatly folded. It felt like a small miracle to have enough clean clothes for four or five days. She said something so funny just before she left that I’ve repeated it four or five times over the phone and laughed all over again each time. She’s such an entirely right-brain person—totally loving and intuitive, not in the least cerebral—
and she’d just read an article somewhere involving new revelations about Hitler’s private life. She told me all about it while she was putting away our laundry, then shook her head angrily and said, “I’ve
had
it with Hitler.”

I
did a really dumb horrible thing late last night. I reread Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing.” I don’t know why. It’s like that old joke about the mighty lion who is holding a mouse upside down by its tail, dangling it back and forth in front of his eyes, telling it, “You are the weakest, most pitiful creature I’ve ever seen,” and the mouse says, “I’ve been sick.” That’s me.