Operating Instructions (18 page)

O
ne thing about Sam, one thing about having a baby, is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of—and then you do, you love him even more.

He’s figuring out little concepts all the time these days, like that if something falls out of his hands, it is not instantly vaporized but just might be found somewhere on the floor. Even a week ago Sam was like some rich guy who drops some change and doesn’t even give it a second glance, but now when he drops something, he slowly cranes his neck and peers downward, as if the thing fell to the floor of a canyon.

T
oday is his seven-month birthday, and he crawled. He crawls. He’s a crawling guy now. He crawls in this lumbering, barrel-chested way, like a Komodo dragon. I saw glee and smugness and danger in his face today, as if he had just been handed the keys to the car.

H
e’s been sitting up by himself for a long time now, no longer needing to be surrounded by pillows, but I can see that he remains Fort Samuel, because as Donna keeps reminding me, Fort Samuel is simply a state of mind. Also, I finally set up the playpen the people from my church gave me. At first I thought we’d started it too late, because he’d only last a few minutes before he’d look completely bereft and forsaken and dying, like when the Bushman in
The Gods Must Be Crazy
was in that jail cell. If I didn’t pick him up right away, he’d start to cry. But we have had playpen practice for a little while twice a day, and today he sat in it for twenty minutes, playing with his toys and babbling.

U
ncle Steve came by just in time for playpen practice, which Steve immediately dubbed Office Hours. “Time for your office hours, honey,” he said, popping him into the playpen, and Sam entertained himself with his toys for quite a while, throwing things, banging toys together, putting smaller toys inside of bigger ones. I simply could not believe my eyes. Comparing this to even a month ago, let alone six, when he couldn’t do anything but nurse and poop, when he couldn’t hold his head up, focus, or chew, I felt like this was a miraculous apparition, one I would hold up against Bernadette seeing the Virgin in the grotto near Lourdes.

P
ammy is back, looking fantastic, missing Sam terribly and me just a little. Sam did not seem to remember her at first and then was all over her like a cheap suit. She held him for half an hour and let him do his periodontal work on her teeth and gums almost the whole time. “Oh, dear,” she said, “does he do my nose next?”

Here’s the difference in our personalities. Last night I put a brand-new bottle of maple syrup on the top shelf of the cupboard, and I laid it on its side because it was too tall to fit standing up, but because of brain waste I forgot to push the spout closed. So this morning the entire contents had dripped down all three shelves’ worth of cups and plates and packages of food. It took an hour to clean up (thank God for the playpen), and my head was filled with visions of ants, trillions of ants, ants everywhere, marching up the street in phalanxes, dropping by parachute, brought in on stretchers. But Pammy walked into the kitchen and said, like the little kid who finds his closet full of horse shit and thinks it means his parents bought him a pony, “Oh, it just smells so wonderful in here now—like the International House of Pancakes.”

I said, “I don’t know what I see in you sometimes.”

S
omething has happened that is not possible. Pammy found a lump in her breast today.

J
ust like that. Boom. Can you imagine? Just like that. I feel a dread like hearing sirens late at night, like I did with my dad. I know it’s bad. There’s no doubt in my mind.

T
oday is my dad’s birthday. He would have been sixty-seven. He’s been dead eleven years. I could smash out every window in my house. Pammy and I went to a matinee today and overate. My mother and Aunt Pat watched the baby. What are you going to do? Life has got to be bigger than death, and love has got to be bigger than fear or this is all a total bust and we are all just going tourist class.

B
ad mammogram. Bad news. She had a biopsy today. The doctor is worried. Pammy is okay but very sad. When I nurse Sam, my tears stream down over him.

I
t’s my birthday today. I’m thirty-six. I once wrote a book where a little boy named Joe woke up one morning on his birthday. I think he was eight or nine, and his parents weren’t getting along at all that day, and he went out into the garden, found his cat, and whispered to her, “It’s my birthday today.”

O
h, God. Things are crappy here. Pammy had two malignant lumps removed from her right breast yesterday and will have her lymph nodes removed on Monday. One of the lumps is a more aggressive form of cancer, the other is not so bad. Life is full of unexploded land mines, and she seems to have stepped on one. I don’t know what to make of this.

Her husband was gone last weekend, so she came over and we watched
Wings of Desire
, that German movie where two angels, who look like a couple of homely middle-aged men, are hanging around Berlin. Only children can see them. They keep helping hopeless people who want to give up on life, by touching or laying their heads down compassionately on the sad person’s shoulders. Suddenly the sad person will look around and start to have the vaguest sense of hope. For instance, there’s a youngish man on the bus in one scene, and we hear his despairing thoughts, wondering what it’s all about because it hurts so much, and then we see—although he can’t—that one of the angels has sat down beside him. After listening to the man’s thoughts for a moment, the angel tenderly puts his head on the man’s shoulder, and we hear the man’s thoughts change, not to ebullience, but to the very beginnings of hope. And Pammy, who doesn’t really believe in
God, has called a few times since then to say she’s gone into deep despair and terror and then felt someone put his head near hers.

She comes over a lot to play with us, and she is still, as our old mutual friend Neshama puts it, incandescently beautiful.

I
need to try and focus on Sam for a few days. Otherwise I am growing too sad. Sam is scooting and crawling and saying Dada. That warms the very cockles of my heart. He is very loud, very assertive. He pulled himself into a standing position the other night. He’s so mobile now, and I am so tired. I feel like I’m breaking my motherly balls trying to keep him safe. Sometimes he’s the Dalai Lama, and sometimes he’s like a cross between a bad boyfriend and a high-strung puppy. And it never matters what my needs are. He never says, “Hey, babe, you’ve been working too hard—why don’t you take a couple of hours off? I’ll just lie here and read.”

S
am can now routinely pull himself up into a standing position. I feel that my life as I have known it is over. Nap time is now impossible because he ends up standing in his crib, grasping and shaking the slats like someone in an old James Cagney prison movie, shouting idle threats. Thank God for Megan. Now I can leave for a walk when this craziness starts up. I don’t know why I’m so surprised that things have become so loud. Did I think that babies would be entertained all the time just playing with themselves, going, “Wow, ten toes! One, two, three—wow! Four, five, six, seven …”?

Lots of the other babies Sam’s age have been crawling for months. Their moms say, “Oh, Joshua was one of those babies who couldn’t wait to crawl,” and their tone suggests that this is some positive reflection on his moral character. I always want to say, Yeah, but your kid’s a spoiled little no-neck monster and your husband is a
total dork
. But hey—congratulations on the crawling!

I’m still nursing full-time, day and night. Donna says to William, whenever she whips out a breast to nurse him, “Hungry, honey? Is that it? Because you
know
we never close here at Chez Mommy.…” I call myself Mama with Sam, as opposed
to Mommy, whenever I refer to myself in the third person. It’s so Elvis, so Jimmy Carter.

He’s so goddamn beautiful it breaks my heart. Maybe I could handle his beauty if Pammy weren’t sick. I still have a lot of anxieties about fucking him up with my selfishness or because I cling too tightly to him. In his first days here, I’d think, Well, he won’t ever be able to get into college because I don’t flash black-and-white images at him so he can develop his vision. Now I look at how clingy and selfish I am, and how much I cry since Pammy got sick, and I worry that it’s wrecking him, and he’ll end up killing people and burying them in his basement and getting his photograph taken with Rosalynn Carter, like all those whacked-out serial killers in the late seventies—John Gacy, Jim Jones, etc. I asked Donna if she worries that William will end up at the top of a tower shooting at people when he grows up, and she said, “Nah, Jews don’t shoot people. We just noodge them to death.”

Later in the Afternoon

Pammy’s cancer is bad; she just called. It’s in six of her lymph nodes but not in her bones. We are crazy and bewildered. It’s a nightmare. She seems sort of all right with it, but maybe she’s in shock. I told her what my friend Elizabeth once told her
friend Rae, “I’ll give you one of anything I have two of—kidneys, lungs, you name it.” Pammy said thank you, because she knows I mean it. The jungle drums are beating loudly tonight.

A
ll day Pammy has been asking me to do favors for her—to please tie a scarf in my hair, “because I like how you look that way,” or to cook her a quesadilla. Then she says that I
have
to do whatever she asks because it’s her last wish. This is all that gallows humor, all that hard laughter, just like when my dad was sick. I said, “If you die, can I have all your shoes?” And she said sure, but she wears a size seven, and I wear a seven and a half, but then she added, really nicely, “I’ll start buying bigger shoes.”

She can’t handle holding Sam right now, although at the same time it’s just about her greatest solace. It’s the one thing that makes her cry. She and I are both afraid she won’t get to watch him grow up. But she is reading books on people who have beaten really dreadful prognoses. She says their cancers make hers look like poison oak.

I’m just trying to stay faithful. I heard this amazing East
Indian doctor talking about autistic kids back East who were so severely withdrawn that if you stood them up, they’d just fall over. They’d make no effort to stand or even to shield their faces when they fell. Then these people working with them discovered that if they ran a rope from one end of the room to the other and stood the kids up so that they were holding on to the rope, the kids would walk across the room. So over the months they kept putting up thinner and thinner pieces of rope, until they were using something practically invisible, like fishing line, and the kids would
still
walk across the room if they could hold on to it. And then—and this really seems like a brainstorm—the adults cut the fishing line into pieces, into twelve-inch lengths or something, and handed one to each kid. The kids would still walk. What an amazing statement of faith. I told this to Pammy, but she didn’t really respond right away. She went over to where Sam was playing and sat down next to him and said, “Mommy’s a religious fanatic.” She held him in her lap while he played with his toys, and she made him laugh, and then she started to cry.

“We need to get some,” she said sometime later.

“Some what?” I asked.

“Some fishing line.”

I haven’t been to the store yet, but I feel like every time the phone rings and it’s Pammy and she needs to talk about this horrible thing that’s happening now, or, come to think of it, every night when I don’t get any sleep and then the baby is crying
to be fed at 6:00
A.M.
, or every day when I sit down and try to get a little bit of writing done, that I am clutching my little piece of fishing line as I go to the phone or the crib or my desk.

S
he calls me in the mornings to check in, and we go over her stuff, any new information or thoughts she might have, and then she always says to please, please tell her every single new thing Sam is doing.

He pulls himself up on the little fence we erected around the floor heater to keep him from crawling on it. It is very secure, screwed into the wall. But he shakes it for ten minutes at a time like he’s trying to tear it down, like there’s not a jail in the land that can hold him. All he wants to do is to stand up; he falls down a lot, bumps his head, cries, and then wants to get right back up.

He thinks I’m hilarious. We have a game where I ever so slowly scan the ceiling, like I’m watching for enemy planes, and he watches intently, getting increasingly more anxious as I lower my gaze, and then when I suddenly look right at him, he screams with joy and surprise like I just doused him with water. Then I do it again, slowly scanning the ceiling, and he
gets very somber, and turns his eyes upward, and his mouth opens a little.…

He also likes to put the cat’s little toy ball in his mouth. It’s slightly bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, and I know it’s too big for him to swallow. It pulls his top lip and his lower jaw so far down that he looks exactly like a little transvestite Eleanor Roosevelt. I can’t take my eyes off him. And then I remember Pammy and am hit with terror. My mind whirs with awful fantasies of the future, a rehashing of what happened to Dad. I do everything possible to find my faith and to get back into the now. I try to tell myself really gently, Okay, okay, enough mind-fucking already—now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast.