Operating Instructions (19 page)

P
ammy, Sam, and I went to Marine World today. Pammy starts chemo tomorrow, and this just seemed the right thing to do. We had a ball. The best part is the dolphin and killer whale show; the two killer whales are unspeakably beautiful. Sam was blown away at the sight of them, just delirious, but then again he’s blown away by the kitty.

The three dolphins who open the show kept coming out before their cue, and their trainer kept sending them back and seemed genuinely annoyed. He explained to us that they were relatively new and that it would take a while for them to get it exactly right, and then they would come racing out again without having been summoned. They were sent back out of our sight (it was actually sort of tense), and Pammy whispered to me, “I’m afraid we’re going to hear three shots ring out any minute.…”

Pammy and I are both very scared and angry, but her spirits are fantastic. All sorts of people have given her copies of a tape by this healer named Louise Hay, who is very popular in the AIDS community. Hay’s position is that unresolved stuff from our past causes us to get—to give ourselves—cancer and that self-love will heal us, that it is our responsibility to cure ourselves. Every morning you stand in front of the mirror and say, “I
love
you.” Well, needless to say, it makes Pammy see red. It makes her see every color of the rainbow. It just makes her nuts. So every time I mention anyone who doesn’t seem to be doing well—like this guy we know who keeps getting these headaches—Pammy will say nonchalantly, “I think it’s brain tumors. I’d better go ahead and send him one of my Louise Hay tapes.”

It’s almost impossible to change Sam these days. You’d think I was trying to brand him.

M
om and Aunt Pat baby-sat Sam today so Pammy and I could go to a matinee. Pammy didn’t buy any chocolate, just popcorn and a mineral water, and she kept trying to make me give her another handful of M&Ms.

“Why didn’t you buy your own?” I whispered.

“I didn’t know I wanted them so much. Will you go buy me some?”

“No,” I said. “I’m trying to watch the movie.” There was a silence.

“I have
cancer,”
she said. So I clapped my hand over my eyes in the most exasperated way and poured a bunch of candy into her outstretched palm.

A few minutes later I felt her tugging on my sleeve. I looked over with great hostility.
“Now
what?”

“Can I have one more handful?” she asked. Every few minutes I’d feel her tug on my sleeve again, and I’d turn to find her holding out her palm, beaming at me, and if I shook my head she’d whisper terrible things to me about her cancer, about how weak she felt, until finally I ran out of M&Ms. Then she tried to get me to go buy us another box, and I told her she was in danger of becoming a parasite. She laughed for so long that people in front of us turned and glared.

P
ammy and I went next door to pay a visit on my neighbors this afternoon and got involved in a rather unpleasant ethical consultation. I’d never actually met them before. I am not much of a mingler. Both the husband and wife are strange, dour characters, and someone must have recently given them massive wind chimes, because I noticed them ringing last night when I was trying to sleep. By about 2:00
A.M.
, I felt I might have a complete nervous breakdown if they didn’t stop chiming, but then the wind died down. Halfway through my work this morning, as I was hurrying to get a book review written, the wind picked back up and the chiming began again. I know they are supposed to be very lovely and spiritual and soothing, but this is only the case when they are yours. Trying to work with them chiming away was like having Jimi Hendrix jamming over there on top of the roof. I felt very meek and apologetic and cringey about the whole thing, but I simply could not stand them. Luckily, Pammy came over in a bad mood, loaded for bear, angry and scared about everything and a little sick from the chemo. So we stormed over, and I let her do most of the talking. She was very adamant and kept mentioning that I am a writer and I need for things to be very quiet so that I can hear my characters speak. I felt like when you’re little and your parents are
Standing there talking sternly to someone who has hurt or betrayed you and you just want to climb into the backseat of the car and lie down on the floor with your car coat pulled over you. Needless to say, the neighbors were not happy about our request. They were actually appalled, like I had asked them not to wear shoes around the house because their footsteps were too loud. But they did take down the chimes. Now it is very peaceful again here under the redwoods.

I remember going to a party at Pammy’s house when I was six years old. I’ve known her since before Jesus left Chicago, and I don’t remember her ever even getting the flu.

H
aving a baby is a terrible drain on the resources. I had no idea. I’m not suggesting that he’s a deadbeat, but I must say he’s not bringing in any money on his own. Lately he sits around in his underwear all day playing the harmonica, which is great, I approve of his choice of instruments. I mean, I don’t want him to turn out to be Donovan. I want him to be able to play the
blues
. But still, it’s
so expensive and time-consuming to have a baby, you might as well keep hothouse orchids. At least you can sell them.

Today I’ve felt all day like we are the Joads. Everything we own is so cruddy-looking and secondhand. Even the cat is secondhand. My brother Steve and I found her wrapped in a plastic garbage bag by the side of the road on Christmas Eve three years ago. Someone had just chucked her out the window of a car. We heard a kitty crying and then walked past a Hefty bag sealed with rubber bands from which the sound was clearly emanating. “I don’t hear anything,” I said at first, putting my fingers in my ears. I did not want a cat, did not in fact want any dependents. I had been sober six months, and it was all I could do to take care of myself. “You don’t hear the cat crying in that Hefty bag?” my brother asked. I shook my head and then sighed. But she’s a great cat.

All the other babies have beautiful little nurseries, and Sam just has the corner of my horrible hovel of a room. There are three feet of floor space between his crib and the platform where my mattress is, and that’s it. There’s a broken-down dresser with a thin foam pad on it that we use for the changing table. It’s too hideous for words. It’s Tobacco Road.

I’m sure someone else said that before me. I hate everything.

We sat and watched Bush on the news tonight, full of his usual bombastic suckitude. Sam was cheering him on and I was crying out, “No, no, darling, this is the enemy,” but Sam was totally wild in his enthusiasm and support, like we were watching the Lakers beat the Celtics. A mother worries.

My plans for molding him into the leader of the rebel forces do not seem to be going very well. I think of all those pacifists in the sixties and seventies whose children chewed their toast into the shape of guns. Sam will be one of those children. I can see it all now. He will probably be a Young Republican by the age of eight and want to spend his summers at camp with other little conservative boys and girls, singing patriotic songs in shorts and knee-high socks, holding his briefcase in his lap. He’ll pound the table jovially and cry out, “We’re table one and we want the salt!” and then help plot the forced internment of the left wing in America. Then he’ll come home from camp, and everywhere I go in our house, his eyes will seem to follow me, and when I notice this, he will give me thin smiles.

P
ammy got through her first round of chemo fine. We had a wonderful talk about it late last night. She said she’s just going to do what her doctor says—no New Age crystal Cosmica Rama stuff, no dietary changes. She said that if one more person tells her that she probably shouldn’t have wine at night and that she should be eating a lot of broccoli, she is going to stick a pencil through her throat. “I am not going to eat broccoli,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m just not. When they get their tumors,
they
can eat broccoli. I will go to their houses and steam it for them, but I will not be eating it.” She’s tiptoeing into the very beginning of some sort of relationship with God, or with a higher power, or something, but it is very hard for her to believe. “Look,” she said, “if you had parents like mine, if you grew up in a family as secretive and pathetic as mine, I don’t think you’d believe either.”

I said, “We
all
grew up in that family. I mean, this is America, honey.” I recommended that she think of all the women who have most adored her in her life and to come up with a sense of God based on that kind of love, on the sense of protectedness that it gives you to be loved by a really fine woman, a sense of some mysterious regenerative force at the center of things that is maybe just love. She said with great
surprise, “I didn’t know you could
do
that,” and I said, “Oh, yeah, you can do anything you want,” and by this morning she’d found a picture of a big cat licking a little cat. She’s a great cat lover, and it stuck. So at the hospital this morning, as she sat in the doctor’s office getting the chemo IV, and then as she sat around at home all day waiting to become Linda Blair, she said she’d picture this big cat licking her gently and carrying her in its mouth to safer places.

Well, the Joads had an okay day today, although now Sam screams loudly when he’s frustrated, like if he can’t open a certain drawer. I guess he’s developing will. I don’t think I like this in a baby. We drove up to see my therapist today, and I was listening to this sort of goopy Christian music on the radio, trying to check out because I’m just not feeling great these days. My stomach aches with anxiety about Pammy, and my self-esteem is about one notch lower than Kafka’s cockroach. We’re broke, and I’m fat and lonely. All of a sudden I tuned in to Sam, who was not paying any attention to me, chattering away in Serbo-Croatian, and I could hear suddenly that the song of life was playing and that Sam was singing it. So I turned off the radio and listened to Sam and got the spiritual hit I was starving for.

He sounded like a bevy of drunken doves.

H
e continues to love the kitty more than life itself. He crawls or rushes over to her in his walker and then pulls at her face and ears passionately, while screaming in almost anguished love, like a Beatles fan at Candlestick Park.

I’m very lonely. Neshama was talking today about her marriage with John, who is kind of a loner, very bright and eccentric. They’re both in their fifties, married twenty-five years, and she said, “We’re Rilke’s ‘Solitudes’ in motion. Maybe less and less in motion.…” That’s what I want so much.

Pammy came by with strawberry sorbet and the new
People
magazine. I felt like God had reached down and touched me. She’s so incredibly kind to us. It would be much easier to think of losing her if she weren’t so goddamn kind. Maybe I will talk to her about this tomorrow.

I remember how much her crazy drunken mother used to smoke when we were young, and I wonder if that has anything to do with Pammy’s cancer. Her mother would blow smoke into your face, even when you were a little kid. She had this elaborate inhaling technique—I think it was French—where she’d take a hit and it would pour out over her top lip like a
reverse waterfall. It was really quite beautiful. And then she’d blow it into our faces.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, Pammy forgave her parents. I heard someone say once that forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past. And this is why Pammy is so powerful.

S
am is recovering from a burn on his hand that he got at my friend Alice’s on Sunday night. Alice had been cooking a roast all afternoon and opened the oven door to take it out. Sam was in his walker, and in a flash, like a speed skater, he darted over and put his palms down flat on the opened door. Our friend Dennis rushed him to the sink and put his hands under cold water for the longest time, but there were blisters. Still, Sam seemed okay. He was sort of unattached to the pain. I was reminded of the time the kitty jumped onto a spike near the houseboat where we lived and had a huge hole in her chest, so big you could see her lungs, and how, after getting it stitched up, she was completely done with it.

Now, me, if I’d had burnt palms, I’d milk them for all they
were worth. I’d go about for weeks holding out my little paws as though they had been run over by a truck.

Megan puts some New Age hippie aloe juice on Sam’s burns every day, but she really only does it for herself. I, the old addict, keep thinking he needs some heavy pharmaceuticals, when actually he seems to be just fine.

Pammy came by today and feels so nauseated from the chemo that she can’t even drink tea anymore, only water. And it has to be room temperature. She said she wants me to help her write a chemo cookbook, that we could make a fortune off it, and I said, What would be in it? And she said, Smoothies, toast, and room temperature tap water. That’s all.

S
am and I sat out on the steps last night for a long time, and he fell asleep in my arms. It’s so easy to have religious awe when you’re outside at night. It’s even easier when you’re in the mountains, especially during a thunderstorm. Boy, do you feel like an aphid, and boy, are you glad there are other aphids around.

P
ammy had her first, and maybe last, THC experience last night. Pot is supposed to help chemo-related nausea. I remember my dad using it a number of times during his chemo and not liking it at all, because it made him so aware of every single thing he was feeling, and he was feeling so bad. But yesterday Pammy took a capsule of Marinol, pharmaceutical marijuana, even though she hates being stoned. I called her around 5:00 because I was feeling sort of lost and sad, and she told me she had taken the Marinol and was just waiting for her husband to come home, somewhat high but really glad to listen. So I talked for a while, poured out all my sorrows and this quiet philosophical stream of consciousness, and she listened attentively and every so often at just the right moment said, “Mm-hmm.” It made me feel all choked up with wonder and gratitude for the intimacy and tenderness of our relationship. Then I’d say something that was a thinly veiled plea for some advice or a pep talk, and she’d just say, “Hmmmm,” like she knew I was going to be able to answer my own question in a moment. It seemed such a spiritually enlightened position to take. This went on for quite some time. It was so comforting. She was so present and so supportive, in a nonverbal way, and then I apologized for going on so long and said, “God, you’re such an incredible
listener, Pammy. Were you able to follow all that?” and she didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said dreamily, “No, not really; I was just sort of vegging out on your voice tones.”