Operating Instructions (20 page)

Sam can climb stairs now. I don’t think this is good news.

Today at church he played with the kids in the back room for the first time. He was in his walker, and these little kids are possibly the most stunningly gorgeous people on earth. They adore him, and they push him hard in his walker from one person to the next, all the way across the room—it’s like a cross between curling and dwarf-tossing. All the little kids including Sam roar with laughter, like they’re all in love.

S
am was nine months old the other day. Steve brought him his first gun, all nicely wrapped up, but it turned out that he had just borrowed it from a friend’s kid in order to get a rise out of me. Steve is hypervigilant about not being made into a father figure. Every so often he calls me on this, on my secretly wishing he could be Sam’s surrogate father. I always lie at first and insinuate that this is all in his mind, but then I go into another room and all but
snap my fingers, like “Rats! Foiled again.” Finally I end up confessing to Steve that maybe I do try to manipulate things along these lines, and I always end up crying because it makes me feel so vulnerable to be so pathetic and transparent. Steve pats me a lot, tenderly, and then he gives the baby a bath or in some other way pours on the avuncular love.

I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child. Sam’s been teaching me how to play again, at my ripe old age. His favorite thing right now is for me to hide a Cheerio in my mouth and then to let it peek out a tiny bit, and he goes in after it with this great frantic concentration, like it’s a diamond.

W
e’re sick, for the second time in two weeks. I can’t believe it. I never used to get sick. These babies are all carriers. And then Pammy, who was all better from the cold she caught from us last week, came by with groceries, determined not to pick Sam up, just to drop off some supplies. But it was impossible for her not to hold him
for a second, and of course he slimed her a few times, sucking on her nose. So she’s sick again, too, and needs more antibiotics. I feel completely responsible. But she said it was good that we figured out in her first month of chemo instead of, say, her fifth that we have to be
extremely
careful and to err on the side of caution. She also said that she liked sitting around with an illness with which she was familiar. It was like wearing an old worn, soft shirt, just to have a sore throat and head cold. She said she was sitting around almost savoring it, sitting in the rocking chair a lot, holding her imaginary piece of fishing line.

W
e’re doing more or less okay. There are days when it feels like
The Seventh Seal
with diaper rash and milky bras, but right now we’re sort of lurching along. I am having to spend so much time trying to keep the faith. Otherwise I spin off into tremendous anxiety.

Sam is growing so fast that it almost makes me lightheaded. It’s time-lapse photography speeded up. Maybe I shouldn’t feed him so much. I feel like he’s not even a baby anymore. He’s becoming a young adult.

They get so smart so fast. For instance, there’s been another
new development that I’m not sure I like. He seems to have picked up a memory somewhere. In the old days—in his youth—you could hide something you didn’t want him to have behind your back and that would be the end of it. He’d maybe look around for a split second with this benevolent look on his face, like “Well, for Chrissakes, that’s funny, it’s gone; oh, well, now I can’t even remember what it is that’s gone, but who cares.” Now he looks at me blankly when I first take something away, and then he lunges at me, like he’ll kick my teeth in to get it back.

He has a frantic craving to be vertical. Every second he pulls himself up to a standing position again. You’d think he’d just spent six months in a body cast. He is so full of energy and muscle, teething, ranting, crazed, but he’s the best baby you could ever hope for. Still a baby, though, which is to say, still periodically a pain in the neck. Donna was saying the other day that she knows this two-year-old who’s really very together and wonderful a lot of the time, really the world’s best two-year-old, but then she added, “Of course, that’s like saying Albert Speer was the nicest Nazi. He was still a Nazi.”

When Sam’s having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it’s like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of
algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there’s a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float.

This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so I put him in bed with me, nursed him for a long time, and then fell back asleep in the dark with him nestled up against me. The only light came from this dimmer switch on the wall by my side of the bed. There is a foot of carpeted space between my mattress and the wall, and the dimmer switch is on the wall about two feet off the floor. It is lit so you can find it in the dark, but it’s underneath a beautiful piece of cloth I’ve hung there, white with the prettiest parrots on it, so the dimmer glows golden beneath the cloth like Tinkerbell’s light. Anyway, I kept hearing Sam scooting around next to me in the dark, and I kept saying, “Shh, shh, go back to sleep,” half-dozing. Then it became totally silent and I almost fell asleep, but I opened my eyes a crack and looked up to see Sam standing between the bed and the wall, with one hand on either side of the dimmer,
his face a few inches away from it so that he was lit by its light. He looked like he was in joyful supplication, or an ecstatic trance, like the little boy in
Close Encounters
.

T
his memory thing is really interesting. Before, every time Sam went into a room—the bathroom, for instance—he would be almost beside himself with wonder and amazement, like it was his first trip to FAO Schwarz. Now he recognizes it. It’s not quite old-hat yet, but he sees the bathtub and he remembers that he loves it and he tries to thrust and squirm his way over to it. It’s funny that he loves the bathtub so much. He didn’t always. But mostly he loves to toss stuff into the tub when it’s empty, and then he loves to gaze endlessly down into it, with wonder, like it’s a garden in full bloom.

He’s heavily into flinging things. He dismantles everything he can get his hands on, pulling every possible book and chotchke off every possible table and shelf and flinging them over his shoulder. It’s like living with a Hun, or Sonny Barger, the old leader of the Hell’s Angels. You can almost hear
“RIDE HARD!” ringing through the chambers of his mind: “RIDE HARD! DIE FREE!”

It’s gratuitous looting. He almost never actually
takes
anything and crawls away with it, but he’ll get to the coffee table and systematically, often without any expression, lift and then drop or fling every single magazine, book, cup, or whatever to the ground. His grim expression suggests he’s got a lot to do and just really doesn’t want to be bothered until he’s done.

Pammy is pretty sick from the chemo. It’s so bizarre to write those words. It’s like saying, “Sam is having trouble with the metal plate in his head.” It’s something that simply can’t be happening. So it isn’t quite so scary and painful as it might be, since it doesn’t feel like it’s really happening a lot of the time. It makes me feel totally in the dark and about eight years old. I’m trying to keep my faith high, but I feel sort of disgusted and puzzled by God right now. It makes me think of Sam’s gratuitous looting; God standing there bored at his table, dropping, or letting people’s lives drop, to the floor. It’s like he doesn’t even care, isn’t even paying attention. It’s like James Joyce said: he’s doing his nails.

I have a friend named Anne, this woman I’ve known my entire life, who took her two-year-old up to Tahoe during the summer. They were staying in a rented condominium by the lake. And of course, it’s such a hotbed of gambling that all the
rooms are equipped with these curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning. One afternoon she put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of these rooms, in the pitch-dark, and went to do some work. A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on the door from inside the room, and she got up, knowing he’d crawled out of his playpen. She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he’d locked it. He had somehow managed to push in the little button on the doorknob. So he was calling to her, “Mommy, Mommy,” and she was saying to him, “Jiggle the doorknob, darling,” and of course he didn’t speak much English—mostly he seemed to speak Urdu. After a moment, it became clear to him that his mother
couldn’t
open the door, and the panic set in. He began sobbing. So my friend ran around like crazy trying everything possible, like trying to get the front door key to work, calling the rental agency where she left a message on the machine, calling the manager of the condominium where she left another message, and running back to check in with her son every minute or so. And there he was in the dark, this terrified little child. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped
crying. She kept wanting to go call the fire department or something, but she felt that contact was the most important thing. She started saying, “Why don’t you lie down, darling, and take a little nap on the floor?” and he was obviously like “Yeah,
right
, Mom, that’s a great idea, I’m feeling so nice and relaxed.” So she kept saying, “Open the door now,” and every so often he’d jiggle the knob, and eventually, after maybe half an hour, it popped open.

I keep thinking of that story, how much it feels like I’m the two-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don’t speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead, via my friends and my church and my shabby faith, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn’t enough, and it is.

P
eg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is
weaving. God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture. We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the thick lumpy patches, the tangles. But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are. The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life. You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit. I hope Sam’s is a very long piece of thread. Please God let it be longer than mine.

Pammy’s looks like it’s going to be too short. I wanted it to be longer than mine, too. But maybe hers is being used to do an exquisite bit of detailing—a tiny furled bud, requiring lots and lots of quick little stitches because you can’t convey the bud without all that convolution, can’t show how much life there is inside: a tiny leaf, the blossom.

I
swear Sam is a week away from walking. He crawls everywhere and climbs everything. Yesterday I was in the bathroom, and Megan was with him in the kitchen, letting him crawl around. She went to the front door to let the kitty out, and when she got back, Sam had climbed the four steps of the ladder to the loft and, as Megan reports, was sitting on the mattress like the Buddha, very pleased with himself in the most casual possible way, like “Hey, baby, just hanging out here on my mom’s bed. Come on up and have a beer!”

Tonight at Rex and Dudu’s when I came to pick him up, he was playing catch with them, pushing a tennis ball across the coffee table to them, catching it when they would push it back, concentrating as hard as Nolan Ryan pitching another no-hitter.

Earlier today he pulled a TV dinner table down on himself when I was doing something in the kitchen. He fell down on the carpet and lay there with this two-pound table on top of him, wild-eyed with the drama of it all, like he was Joe Ben in
Sometimes a Great Notion
who gets pinned under the log. He looked up at me, not crying but tortured, like “You ignorant incompetent slut—
you
did this to me; you’re supposed to be watching me, but nooooooo …”

T
his boy can dance, Mama; he still can’t walk, but he pulls himself into a standing position, holds on to the couch or chair or leg or whatever is nearby, and begins to bounce and gyrate. This boy can rock and roll. It’s such a miracle. It seems that only yesterday he was so pupal, and now he’s Michael Jackson.

The guy who loves George Bush and doesn’t give head called yesterday and also today. There’s a part of me that wants to go ahead and give him a whirl because he’s so smart and funny. But I know that he’s got a mean streak, that his girlfriends all end up feeling ripped off and shut out. Then when they break up with him, he loses his mind completely and throws himself at them and says all the right things and takes them for the romantic weekend sail on the delta. As my agent once said of another man, he has the soul of a trapped rat. The girlfriends always end up going back for a few more rounds, and the exact same pattern plays out. Who needs it? Peggy once gave me the best definition of insanity, something they apparently say in AA, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different result. So I’m trying to resist—he asked me out on an actual date today and I made up an excuse—but I find myself craving the excitement, the danger.
My life has become so mundane. The biggest thrill left for me, the only time I really feel I’m courting danger, is when I’m washing my hair and I step directly under the shower spray and let the water begin to stream down my forehead, but I wait a split second to close my eyes so that the shampoo gets dangerously close to blinding me. Whoa! What a rush!