What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (15 page)

I’d expected breastfeeding to be a great bonding experience, but there were all those dopey tubes and the daily comedy of errors of tape coming off nipples and formula spilling on Eliana’s head. Instead, I bonded with Eliana when she napped on my belly, her cheek on my chest, where I imagined her listening to my heartbeat, our bodies completing each other like they had been for nine months. For the duration of the nap, I loved her. It was very simple. If only I could extend that love. That simple, peaceful, unfettered love.

In mid-January, Michael’s mother arrived from New Orleans, to help take care of the girls and give me time to work while Michael was in Brussels for a week. He’d canceled all his touring in Eliana’s first month, but he was committed to this international conference for Arthur Andersen LLP, the gigantic global accounting firm, which in the last year had become his most consistent freelance client.

We’d visited Daisy several times in her modest home in New Orleans East where Michael grew up, most recently in May when Michael, Julia, and I went to the New Orleans Jazz Fest and I nearly fainted in the heat, unaware that I was pregnant. I was very fond of Daisy, and we were generally tolerant of each other’s different worldviews. Michael and I had a running joke that she would surreptitiously try to baptize Julia by sprinkling water on her head when we weren’t looking.

I loved Daisy’s accent, a blend of her rural Mississippi childhood and five decades in New Orleans. Michael, who had intentionally dropped his New Orleans accent in college to avoid being branded with the stereotypes associated with the Deep South, made fun of my attempts to imitate Daisy’s voice.

“My mother doesn’t sound like Blanche Dubois.”

“To me she does.”

 

 

Daisy took care of Eliana and Julia while I edited
Play by Play
, which needed a lot of attention for me to get the next issue out on time. I was in a lot of physical pain and sad most of the time—grateful that Daisy let me be quiet and sad for as many hours a day as I needed. She blessed every meal and thanked Jesus for everything, above all for our “miracle baby,” but she didn’t expect me or Julia to pray with her. I knew that she was aware of some of the tumultuous decisions made and unmade during the pregnancy, and I expected her to judge me. But she didn’t—or if she did, she kept it to herself. And as far as I could tell, she didn’t try to baptize the girls.

Daisy loved to take care of people. She was exceptionally good with babies. I was feeling clueless in this arena, and I watched her carefully. She knew how to rock Eliana to sleep, just how close to hold Eliana’s face when she talked to her, how to wipe away baby shit without irritating her skin. She knew how to play with an infant, a skill I’d forgotten. She sang Eliana lullabies and folk songs I’d never heard. She sat on the floor and entertained Eliana on her lap while playing board games with Julia.

“How’s it working out with Mom?” asked Michael, calling from Belgium.

“She’s great. We’re all fine. Freezing. How’s Belgium?”

“It’s a beautiful resort, the food is amazing—I’ll bring home some Belgian chocolate. It’s surreal how much they spend at these conferences. I used to feel guilty about how much I charged, till I saw a planning budget and realized they spend more on balloons than on my weekly fee. But this is a really hard conference.”

Michael was essentially a corporate court jester. I teasingly told him he was like the trickster in traditional rituals, who made fun of the king while simultaneously reinforcing the status quo. His job at these training conferences was to teach Arthur Andersen culture and to lampoon it at the same time, with these absurdly funny, faux-corporate characters he invented. Through his comic monologues and audience participation bits, he illuminated Arthur Andersen culture—from the tax code to the dress code and everything in-between—while skewering the very precepts he instructed his audience to follow. The firm used these training conferences to acculturate new hires and seasoned employees into Arthur Andersen’s particular worldview. They appreciated Michael’s ability to transform dry information into crowd-pleasing entertainment. His corporate audiences always thought he was hilarious. He was accustomed to being a huge hit.

“It’s our first European conference, and we’re just figuring out this audience. The first two days totally bombed. All the bits that worked so well in Chicago—the Europeans think it’s dumb and American. So we’ve been adjusting, and we’re finally getting it.

“And here’s an interesting and unexpected development—one of the partners talked to me last night about possibly joining the firm.”

“Is that good?”

“I—think so? Maybe. Yeah, I think so. Wouldn’t happen for a while. Not for a year probably. But if it works out, I’d be working out of the New York office. So I’d be home more. I could walk to work.”

“Wow. That sounds really . . . complicated. Really good! But complicated. Will you still be Michael if you work for Andersen full time, or will you be like
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
?”

“Who knows? The last two Januarys I was working in El Paso, creating theater with children of Mexican American migrant farmworkers. How did I end up here?”

“Maybe you could still work in El Paso some of the time.”

“Yeah, not likely. But this will be good, working in the New York office. I won’t be touring so much. You want me to be home more, right?”

I don’t know the answer. Yes, of course I want Michael to be home more. I miss him. I need his help with the girls. I asked him to find work that allowed him to be home more, and he’s being incredibly responsive and responsible. But will
real
Michael—funny, cynical, ethical, penniless-by-choice, loner, edgy Michael—survive, or will he be selling his soul to the company, replaying the life of his dad who worked at an office job he hated for forty years and then died, a scenario Michael has dreaded? I don’t know the answer.

“I’d love it if you were home more. I miss you.”

“I miss you and the girls a lot.”

Daisy walked Julia to school each morning and forged instant friendships with moms in the school yard and with every shop-keeper in a three-block radius, which was as far as she traveled in New York City. She would have enjoyed being a more adventurous tourist, but she was ill-equipped by wardrobe and by constitution for the cold. By midweek, there were five inches of snow on the ground and the windchill was below zero. Daisy walked through an icy wind to the department store three blocks away and came home with the first wool coat and flannel nightgown she had ever owned.

At the end of the frigid week, Daisy came down with a terrible cold. I gave her hot tea and chicken soup and Advil, and helped her get a cab back to the airport. She had to take care of her ailing sister in Mississippi and her grandbabies in St. Louis.

“I’ll see y’all in June!” she said.

“I have a gift for you,” said my friend Sue Schulman. “I’ve arranged for my yoga teacher to give you private yoga classes at home.”

Parvati was her Sanskrit name. She was small, slim, and muscular, about thirty years old, with close-cropped black hair, black lashes, pale skin, and velvety lips—incredibly sexy. It took me by surprise, not that I was attracted to a woman, but that I had any sexual feelings at all. I watched her take off her puffy down jacket and several layers of oversized sweaters, revealing her lithe body in a tank top and sweatpants. There was a lot of touching in my yoga sessions. In my postpregnancy, post-three months of bed rest, post-forty-seven-hours-of-labor, still anemic state, my body was a foreign thing. Before the pregnancy, I’d been strong and flexible. Now my muscles were atrophied and stiff. My body still hurt.

Parvati was gentle but forceful, pressing her body on mine while I was standing, sitting, lying down, using her weight to stretch my legs, my back, my shoulders. I told Parvati, Sue, and Michael that the yoga was restoring my sense of physical well-being. I didn’t mention that it was reawakening my libido. I loved her smell, the feel of her hair on my skin when she stood behind me and positioned my pelvis, my shoulders, my neck. The yoga positions were quite painful, but she was intent upon activating my dormant body.

For one hour a week, I practiced yoga poses, which I allowed myself to think of as Parvati embraces. Between her visits, I practiced on my own. Each time I saw her she pressed me into deeper bends, opened my legs in wider stretches.

Eliana was also promised home visits from personal trainers, compliments of New York State’s Early Intervention Program.

On a blustery January day, Michael and I took Eliana to be evaluated for services, at the Upper East Side office of Stepping Stone Day School, our Early Intervention administrator. She lay on a gym mat strewn with baby toys, surrounded by a team of five therapists and social workers who carefully observed her and took copious notes. So much attention focused on such a tiny baby! The disparity in cubic space occupied by the observers and the observed was remarkable.

Eliana did what babies do: Reach. Grasp. Look. Make sounds. Then, one by one, the therapists did what Early Intervention evaluators do: Move a toy from side to side, three inches from her face; make eye contact; put a finger in her palm; put a finger in her mouth.

Michael and I held our breath when the cognition specialist spoke. “Eliana presents as an adorable and alert baby girl. . . . No cognitive delays. . . . Educational services are not needed.”

Michael and I exhaled.

The other therapists had more complicated diagnoses and goals. They reminded me of the good fairies surrounding newborn Sleeping Beauty’s bed, trying to counteract the damage caused by the Evil Fairy, who wished for Baby to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. Eliana’s evaluators waved their wands and made wishes that would offset the less-than-perfect hand Eliana had been dealt.

“I wish you a straight spine!” said the physical therapy evaluator. (Anyway, that was how I understood her Latin-infused, anatomy-textbook shop-talk about correcting Eliana’s scoliosis and minimizing skeletal damage resulting from her asymmetry.)

“I wish you a better suck and a stronger tongue!” (my rough translation), said the speech, language, oral motor, and feeding therapy evaluator, after withdrawing her rubber-gloved finger from Eliana’s mouth.

They sent us home with written reports: “Eliana presents as an adorable baby girl with a C-curve from her longer (left) to her shorter (right) side, and severe scoliosis,” wrote the physical therapist. “Eliana presents as an adorable baby girl with evidence of palsy on the right side of her face, which interferes with oral motor functioning, nursing of most immediate concern,” wrote the speech, language, oral motor, and feeding therapist. Three therapists would be assigned to her case. Home visits from the physical therapist and oral motor therapist would begin in a month.

The ubiquitous “Eliana presents as an adorable baby girl” appeared on every doctor’s and therapist’s report Michael and I read, often followed by “failure to thrive.” I thought Eliana was adorable, but I doubted that adorableness was an objectively observable quality. Did “adorable” carry any useful medical information? I suspected it was the scrap thrown to anxious parents, hungry for good news, any good news, about their special needs child. “Adorable” was comfort food for a starving parental ego.