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.
MARCH 28
One 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.
MARCH 29
Today 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.
MARCH 31
He’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.
APRIL 3
Uncle 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.
APRIL 4
Pammy 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.”
APRIL 5
Something has happened that is not possible. Pammy found a lump in her breast today.
APRIL 6
Just 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.
APRIL 8
Today 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.
APRIL 9
Bad 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.
APRIL 10
It’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.”
APRIL 17
Oh, 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.
APRIL 20
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.”
MAY 1
Sam 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 end
s 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.
MAY 2
All 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.
MAY 3
She 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.
MAY 4
Pammy, 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.
MAY 6
Mom 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.