Operating Instructions (17 page)

Maybe if I can learn to breathe and go slower, I can somehow help Sam be spared some of the craziness I had in my life, all that chasing down of these things that I thought would make me okay or would prove that I was okay. A lot of it, looking back, was metaphorically the serpent in the garden. I like that line of Kazantzakis’s in
The Last Temptation of Christ
when he says, “The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical; both green, both beautiful.”

Still, you know what the name Samuel means? It means “God has heard,” like God heard me, heard my heart, and gave me the one thing that’s ever worked in my entire life, someone to love.

I
’m just feeling stressed to the nu-nu’s today, very tired and unable to keep the house and our life together. It is clear to me that we need a breadwinner. Also, servants. I opened the fridge to make us some lunch and could instantly smell that something was suffering in there, but I did not have the psychic energy to deal with it. I don’t think I will tomorrow, either. I think the easiest thing would just be to move.

He moves so fast these days, like a lizard. He’s babbling with great incoherent animation. He gets on all fours and rocks, like he’s about to take off, like Edwin Moses in the starting block. His new thing is that he likes to stick his fingers in your mouth and examine your teeth. He does it every time we nurse. Maybe he wants to be a periodontist when he grows up. It’s a little disconcerting. He’ll stare at my mouth for a minute when he’s lying in my arms, and then reach in with these tiny monkey fingers and go tooth by tooth, checking each one for problems. Next he’s going to start picking cooties out of my hair. When Sam is doing my teeth, I sit there basking in our monkey lives.

I really felt like smoking today. It’s been almost four years. It would be the answer to a lot of my problems—weight control
and stress management, for instance. A friend of mine with a difficult baby Sam’s age—we call her “little Evita”—started smoking again a few months ago, and she’s become very thin and self-possessed. Of course, she smells like Nagasaki, but if you’re thin, who cares? I hear that practically all Michelle Pfeiffer does is smoke and go bowling. I rest my case.

Sam’s got this new maturity all of a sudden. Part of it is about being so terribly pleased with himself. He is so fast and physically adept that he can hardly contain himself. I’m cheering him on and blown away by each new skill, but at the same time the corners of my mouth turn down, like a mime’s.

I remember when he was always sort of placidly stoned and incompetent, like this puzzled little baby I saw in L.A. when I was pregnant. I could not take my eyes off her. We were staring at each other in a sidewalk café in the Palisades, in similar states of burnout, neither of us blinking very much, and all I could think of was a baby that Ram Dass described in a book I read years ago; he believed this baby to be a very old lama, someone who had been incarnated tens of thousands of times, a very old soul who was born this time as a baby in the Bronx, one of those very stoned-looking babies who are wondering what on earth they are doing here and who want to bless everybody but can’t get it to work.

That’s exactly how Sam seemed a lot of the time when he was an infant. Maybe all infants have that look. But now, he’s
happening
. Steve thinks he is finally beginning to enjoy his stay here, and not only that but he may want to be one of us when he grows up. There’s definitely a sense that he’s the new man at the company and is now ready to start working his way up the ladder.

H
e’s definitely got his daddy’s thick, straight hair, and, God, am I grateful for that. It means he won’t have to deal with hat hair as he goes through life. This morning as we were racing around, I was trying to get us both fed and ready for church, and I had
total
hat hair. When you have extremely curly hair, it is always getting mashed down into weird patterns, like grass that’s been flattened. You get it when you wear hats, and you get it when you sleep. In extreme cases, you wake up looking like a horse has been grazing on one side of your head all night. I know hat hair is not as bad as having, say, Lou Gehrig’s disease, but still I’m glad that Sam will be spared.

On the day I was born, I think God reached down and said, “Baby girl Annie, I am going to give you a good brain and some artistic talent and a sense of humor, but I’m also going
to give you low self-esteem and hat hair, because I want you to fight your way back to me.”

Bonnie, whose three daughters are half black, has a poster of Jesus with fluffy, nappy hair, just like her children’s, just like mine.

Church was especially sweet this morning. Of course, it goes without saying that the more quiet and sacred any occasion, the more you can count on Sam having terrible flatulence. Today, during the period of silent confession, it was like machine-gun fire. I think it may be another guy thing. I don’t think girl babies do this. Plus he continues to make loud farting noises with his mouth, so it’s like bringing a wiseacre drunk or a jackhammer to church. It’s hard to express how loud this sixteen-pound baby can be. I stood up during the “prayers of the people” to say how happy and relieved I felt to be there. Sam started farting again, not with his mouth, and I just stood there holding him, crying, and trying to talk about God and about how crazy my past was and how mostly beautiful my life is now. Through my tears, every time he farted I’d start to laugh, and I thought later that it must be music to God’s ears—someone trying to voice her gratitude while she laughs and cries and her big-eyed baby farts.

There was this East Indian Jesuit named Tony de Mello who used to tell this story about disciples gathered around their master, asking him endless questions about God. And the
master said that anything we say about God is just words, because God is unknowable. One disciple asked, “Then why do you speak of him at all?” and the master replied, “Why does the bird sing?” She sings not because she has a statement but because she has a song.

T
oday he rode in a shopping cart for the first time. He was blissed out, stoned, bug-eyed. He looked like Buckwheat. He passed out almost immediately after we got back into the car. The excitement must have been too much for him. His eyes rolled back in his head as he fell asleep, but this time I didn’t slap him or try to wake him. I finally remembered what our Lamaze teacher had told Pammy and me—that you never
ever
wake up your secondborn, so try to remember that when you are about to wake up your first.

It will be interesting to see if he remembers Pammy. She will be home in a few days. I’m sure he will. She was one of the first two people to hold him after his arrival here on the outside. She’s been his second mother. He might feel shy at first, though, because he’s a little shy at first with everyone but me. When I come home to him, he just goes ape-shit, like he’d
given me up for dead. It’s like George Carlin’s impersonation of a dog—frantic and breathless with relief that his human has come back, going, “Oh, Jesus God, I’m so glad you’re back, I was going out of my mind, I was beside myself, I didn’t think I could last another fifteen minutes,” and his human says, “I just came back to get my
hat
, for Chrissakes.” That’s exactly how Sam is.

He scoots joyfully all over but still doesn’t move with his stomach off the floor; i.e., he does not officially crawl. He’s like a salamander moving through the mud.

Today a friend with a little baby Sam’s age called, and in the beginning of the conversation, her baby was cooing and peeping quietly. All of a sudden I heard the baby begin to babble animatedly, and then she burst into tears. My friend comforted her for a moment, and the baby was quiet again. “What on earth was that all about?” I asked. My friend said, “Oh, the great god Dad just came into the room and then left, and now she’s frustrated.” I felt a flush of many feelings all at once—longing, jealousy, sorrow beyond words that Sam doesn’t have a daddy. He will grieve over the years, and there is nothing I can do or say that will change the fact that his father chooses not to be his father. I can’t give him a dad, I can’t give him a nuclear family. All I can do is to give him what I have, some absolutely wonderful men in our lives who loved him before
he was born, who over the years will play with him, read and fish and walk with him, make him laugh and throw him up in the air until he is too big, men who will be his uncles and brothers and friends, and I have to believe that this will be a great consolation.

I
was secretly infatuated with a man for a few days this week, and it was just awful, like bad drugs. His packaging was nearly perfect. He’s tall, nice-looking, with lots of money and a degree from Stanford, but most of all he’s very funny, definitely a snappy piece of cheese. He called last night, and when I heard his voice, I felt on the verge of hyperventilating. I had to force myself to calm down so that I wouldn’t start wheezing. My back lit up, and there was a burning sensation in my neck. I was hanging on everything he said so I could micromanage each word and inflection, looking for a hidden meaning. On the inside I felt like the George Carlin dog, but I played it cool and was as funny as I’ve been in a long time. We talked for half an hour and didn’t make a date. We said we would talk again soon. I got off the phone and fantasized for a while about having this tender romantic
sex with him. Then I called a woman who went out with him a few years ago and discovered the two most damaging things I can know about a man: one, he voted for both Bush and Reagan, and two, he was very very reluctant to give head. Now maybe on a really bad night I would let one of these things go by, but I tell you, if his head wouldn’t go south of my waist and he was up there talking with passion about the thousand points of light, I’d crack. It would be like “Hey, thanks for stopping by, pal, but the thousand points of light are in my pussy.” I don’t want to feel like I have to negotiate the SALT talks just to get a little oral sex. The right guy will love nothing more.

Maybe I’m not well enough to have sex at all right now. I thought I was, but it all sounds sort of disgusting the more I think about it. Right now I secretly want everyone to be pristine and beautiful, like a summer lake, instead of being real, with all those little pimples and weird vein activity. Plus, with this latest crush, the last thing I’d want is to have to worry about a boyfriend sidling up to Sam in the middle of the night and whispering right-wing propaganda into his baby ears, stuff about supply-side economics and welfare cheats. So I’ve been restored to sanity.

It would be one thing if I could leap into a disastrous romance and it would be just me who would suffer, but I can’t afford to get lost because Sam doesn’t have anyone else to fall back on. And
I
don’t have anyone else to fall back on, come
to think of it. I can afford to wait for a good one, not get derailed by some total fixer-upper. Once my agent Abby said that if we’re not careful, we’ll spend our whole lives blowing on sparks and trying to turn them into embers, when all along they were sparks that should never have been ignited. In that capacity, I’ve looked like Neptune, cheeks filled with wind, blowing on the sea.

It gives me the chill to think about beginning a new relationship, even though of course I would love to find a man to love and grow old with. You see these seemingly perfect couples and feel like the kid with her nose pressed against the window of the candy store, but then you get to know them and learn all the ratty underbelly stuff about them, that they are cold to one another, or sarcastic, or unfaithful. I have loved men so much and am so afraid of what they will do to me. On bad days, I think straight white men are so poorly wired, so emotionally unenlightened and unconscious that you must approach each one as if he were some weird cross between a white supremacist and an incredibly depressing T. S. Eliot poem. I know they were very badly hurt and misled, but so was I, and I chose and am choosing to get well. I am sorry for how they were raised and for all the fears about their thinning hair and little penises, but I mean, bore me fucking later, try having been raised female in this culture. Most men shut down like sea anemones or bank vaults the moment things get too intimate or too dicey. I lived with a man who when he had hurt
me enough—not that he meant to, but he always did—he would cry with fear that he would end up old and alone, never having really lived. And then I’d have to comfort him and nurse him back to health because he was so sad and I loved him so much, and I’d help him be able to reconnect with me again, but then two or three weeks later I’d look up and see that cold flat reptilian look in his eyes again. I am too old and tired and too well to do this anymore. Maybe.

I heard this friend of mine named James, who is really a great guy in a lot of ways, smart and reasonably sensitive, telling another friend of ours the other day about this woman he has fallen deeply in love with. He was describing how totally cool she is, intelligent and sensitive and caring, and then he says quite earnestly—and I am not making this up—that she could suck a bowling ball through a garden hose. I tried to explain to James that if you really love someone, you don’t go around telling people that she can suck a bowling ball through a rubber hose. You just don’t. But he didn’t get it at all. We had a small fight, and my impression is that he came away thinking that it was still okay to say it, just not if there were a bunch of hostile feminists around. God, we are an interesting species.

I miss Pammy so much today. It was horrible of her to go away, and I’ll never forgive her. I will find someone new. There are plenty of other fish in the sea, women who would rejoice
in being my best friend. I will tell people terrible things about her, make up stories about her past, tell everyone I know that she can suck a bowling ball through a garden hose.