NOVEMBER 30
Sam’s father filed court papers today saying that we never fucked and that he therefore cannot be the father.
I am trying to get him to sign a paternity stipulation, which just says that I am the mother and that he is the father and that I have custody. I want it partly because Sam is entitled to know who he is and partly because if the guy dies before Sam is eighteen, Sam will be eligible for Social Security.
The thing is that I slept with Sam’s father three times a week for three months and with no one else. It’s so weird and dreamlike that he’s Sam father, but it is the truth. Certainly, though, in the police lineup of my ex-boyfriends, he’s probably one of the better donors, tall and brilliant, and Sam’s got his gorgeous hair.
As I was writing this, Sam, who is lying beside me on the futon in the living room, suddenly did this fantastic and joyful scream, exactly like James Brown. I don’t have any idea what I will tell Sam when he is old enough to ask about his father. I’ll say that everybody doesn’t have something and that he doesn’t have this one thing, but that we have each other and that is a lot. And that for a while his father was my friend.
Peg came over and took three huge loads of laundry to the Laundromat. She brought us this amazing breakfast that was left over from one of her catering gigs, a sandwich made of cream cheese and lots of blueberries, which you turned into French toast by dipping it into egg and frying it so that the cream cheese melted all over the warm blueberries, and then you put syrup on top. It was so good it brought tears to my eyes. I had to eat Sam’s portion, too, because he has no teeth. I asked her if she had any thoughts on how to help Sam deal with not having a dad, and she repeated what her AA friends say, that more will be revealed, meaning that when the time comes, I will know what to do. She also pointed out that Sam wouldn’t be talking in real sentences for a couple of years and that maybe there were more immediate things that I could mind-fuck to death.
It’s so hard to keep my sticky little fingers off the controls of this spaceship, especially when I get scared, like now when God has not bothered to give me the specific details of his solution to our financial needs. I’m just a little edgy being in the dark about it. I don’t understand why he always has to be so goddamn weird about his plans. I would prefer that he be more like Jeeves, streaming into rooms like sunlight with all that I need to feel comfortable—God as cosmic butler. This other way is so hard. It always reminds me of the man who has fallen off a cliff but managed to grab onto a weak vine. Holding it, watching it begin to come loose, he looks up toward the top of the cliff and cries out for help. Suddenly, a deep booming voice from the sky says gently to him, “It is all right, my son. I am here and will never let harm befall you. Just let go of the vine, and fall into my arms. I will catch you.” The surprised man thinks about this for a moment, looks down at the ground thousands of feet below, then up to the ledge above him, clears his throat, and asks, “Is there anybody else up there?”
I have a deep belief that I know what is best for me and now, by extension, what is best for Sam. The fact that I have spent my life proving that just the opposite is true does not keep me from acting like a schizophrenic traffic cop with a mission and a bullhorn. There’s something sort of poignantly ludicrous about it. I heard this old man speak when I was pregnant, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver’s seat.
DECEMBER 1
Sam turned over from his stomach to his back yesterday, and then he forgot how. Later I saw him tugging at his chin like he was trying to remember. At any rate, he hasn’t done it again.
He is a very good but very needy baby. He coos and roars his baby roar and tugs Hasidically at his chin. I know it’s too early for him to be teething, but he is as drooly as a Newfoundland. Everything goes into his mouth. Everything gets gummed to death. We give him bagels to gum, and he works them over with a kind of frantic joy—I think he’s doing his impersonation of Dan Quayle eating.
DECEMBER 2
It has been a terrible day. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him go. He’s an awful baby. I hate him. He’s scum.
Midnight
I’m not even remotely well enough to be a mother. That’s what the problem is. Also, I don’t think I like babies.
Pammy came by late in the afternoon and saved the day. Emmy dropped by with groceries. I felt like I could hardly be nice to Sam because I was so tired and he was such a kvetchy little bundle of shitty diapers and bad attitude. And then while Pammy was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, he inched his way off the futon and did a double gainer onto the floor. He just entirely lost his mind. So I was called in to comfort him, and of course I fell right back in love. I said to Pammy, “Well, there goes your standing in the community. You used to be number two for him, I think,” and she said, “Yeah, and now I’m number twenty-nine, right between George Bush and the nurse who gave him his DPTs.”
We sat outside, and it was so breathtakingly green under the redwoods. All the birds were singing, and Sam fell asleep in my arms. Pammy made us lemonade. It was like a glimpse of paradise. I was not exaggerating when I said earlier that when I was drinking and using I couldn’t take decent care of a cat, so all this feels like a small miracle—and not even such a small one, maybe a medium-sized one in plain brown paper.
I saw a “60 Minutes” show a few years ago about Lourdes, with Ed Bradley interviewing a family of three who came to the shrine every year—a devoutly religious mother of about thirty, a much much older father who could barely look at the camera and who couldn’t say one word because he was so terribly shy, and a little ten-year-old girl with spina bifada who was in a wheelchair. They came to Lourdes every single year, and Ed Bradley was kind of badgering the parents for being so gullible. He said to the little girl, who was so weak she had to be firmly strapped into the wheelchair, “What do you pray for when you come?” and she said, looking at her father really lovingly, “I pray that my dad won’t always have to feel so shy. It makes him feel so lonely.” Which stopped old Ed in his tracks for about ten seconds. But then he looked back at the mother and said something to the effect that “year after year, you spend thousands and thousands of dollars to come here, hoping for a miracle,” and she just looked at her kid, shook her head, and said, “Oh, no, Ed, you don’t get it—we got our miracle.”
DECEMBER 3
Sam was baptized today at Saint Andrew’s. It is almost too painful to talk about, so powerful, so outrageous and lovely. Just about every person I adore was there. They were the exact people I would invite to my wedding.
Everyone cried, or at any rate, lots of people did—all those old faces of the people at my church, and all the younger people, too, and my family and best friends, everyone clapping and singing along with the choir. All these old left-wing atheist friends singing gospel music. The singing was extraordinary, the choir of these beautiful black women and one white man, singing to Sam and me. A friend of nearly twenty years, Neshama, from Bolinas, described the two of us as looking very tremulous and white and cherished. Out of this broken-down old church, out of the linoleum floors and the crummy plastic stained-glass windows, came the most wonderful sounds anyone had ever heard, because of the spirit that moved the day.
Sam was just great, although I must say I took the liberty of dosing him with perhaps the merest hint of Tylenol beforehand so he wouldn’t weep or whine too much during the service. He wore the baptism gown that my cousin Samuel had worn fifty years ago, very Bonnie Prince Charlie, ver
y lacy and high Episcopalian, with a plain little white cap.
For the huge party at Pammy’s afterward, he changed into his one-piece cow outfit. It was a wonderful party. Everybody mingled like mad, except me, and everyone got to hang out in the garden because it was such a beautiful day. I kept feeling that God was really showing off. The party felt like the secular portion of the show.
I’ve always kept the various parts of my life compartmentalized, but today all the important people from all aspects of my life were finally brought together: my sweet nutty family, in droves; my reading group; people I have worked with at magazines over the years; old lovers; and the women I have loved most in my life. It was my tribe. It felt like Brownian motion, all of these friends who had been strangers to one another bumping off each other in the garden.
Inside Pammy’s house, the sun streamed through the windows, and there were vases of flowers everywhere, dozens of vases, hundreds of flowers of every possible color and shade, some arranged as if by pros, some like crazy hairdos. It was like a Haight-Ashbury wedding. Emmy and Bill brought a whole roast turkey, and everyone else brought the most beautiful dish he or she knew how to make. Mom and Dudu had been in charge of recruiting the food, and there were beautiful bowls and plates of food on every inch of tabletop and counter. My brilliant old friend Leroy from Petaluma, who has been a permanent member of my food review squad for years, told my mother that the food was so exquisite that after eating, one heard the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s Aida, had visions of elephants, camels, cannons. My mother was so proud, so high from the whole thing that she could have chased down an airplane.
The kid made a haul, fantastic toys and clothes and books for the little emir. Dudu and Rex started a savings account for him; my reading group gave us a check for a small fortune. Except for the fact that there was folk music on the stereo, it was like the wedding scene in The Godfather.
A bunch of other babies were there, all of them about Sam’s age, and they were all so much more robust than Sam. He is a skinny little guy. When I mentioned this to Neshama, she said very kindly that the other babies looked like babies on Steroids while Sam was a baby on spirit. I had to hide in a back room with him practically the whole time because I was too overwhelmed, amazed, and profoundly grateful at how loved Sam is and how loved I am. It made my stomach ache.
Now I am sitting here on the futon in the living room, Sam asleep beside me, the kitty sniffing at him with enormous interest as if I had accidentally brought a perfectly broiled Rock Cornish game hen to bed with me. I have spent so much of my life with secret Swiss-cheese insides, but I tell you—right now, Mama, my soul is full.
DECEMBER 5
Pammy showed me a picture that someone took at the baptism of her holding Sam out toward the camera. He definitely looks like he was blown away by the proceedings, too, somehow sort of blank and surprised at the same time, like he had just that moment been plucked from a huge pie.
All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you’re first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn’t look all that great around the cuticles. And I think that because I’m so tired all the time, people feel like I’m sort of saintly. But the shadow knows. The other night I was nursing the baby outside, underneath the redwoods, and you could see the full moon in the clearing of the treetops. Everything smelled so clean and green, and the night birds were singing, and then I started feeling a little edgy about money or the lack thereof. I started feeling sorry for myself because I’m tired and broke, kept thinking that what this family needs is a breadwinner. And pretty soon my self-esteem wasn’t very good, and I felt that maybe secretly I’m sort of a loser. So when my friend John called a few minutes later from L.A. and mentioned that a mutual friend of ours, whose first book was out (for which he had been grossly overpaid, if you ask me), had gotten a not-very-good review in Newsweek recently, all of a sudden, talking on the cordless phone and nursing my baby in the moonlight, I had a wicked, dazzling bout of schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is that wicked and shameful tickle of pleasure one feels at someone else’s misfortune. It felt like I’d gotten a little hit of something. It made me feel better about myself. “Do you have it?” I asked innocently, and he said that he didn’t think so because it was a week or so old. I then found myself clearing my throat and saying in a flat, innocently curious voice, “Why don’t you go look?” So he did, and returned to the phone with it, and I said, nice as pie, “Now read it.” And when he was done, I said, “Man, that was like Christmas for me.” Then we laughed, and it was okay for a minute.
God, it was painful though, too, and the hangover was debilitating. I was deeply aware of the worm inside of me and of the grim bits that I feed it. The secret envy inside me is maybe the worst thing about my life. I am the Saddam Hussein of jealousy. But the grace is that there are a couple of people I can tell it to without them staring at me as if I have fruit bats flying out of my nose, who just nod, and maybe laugh, and say, Yep, yep, I get it, I’m the same. Still, I feel like it must drive Jesus just out of his mind sometimes, that instead of loving everyone like he or she is my sibling, with a heart full of goodwill and tenderness and forgiveness, I’m secretly scheming and thinking my dark greedy thoughts. I say to him, Bear with me, dude. He does give me every single thing I need, but then I still want more, and I picture him stamping around like Danny DeVito, holding up these gnarled beseeching hands of frustration, saying, “Oy fucking veh.”
DECEMBER 6
We had a great time today. He slept a lot, laughed a lot, played, roared. Later we had a Hoagy Carmichael dance contest, and we won—we won big. It was just Sam, the kitty, and me, but still, we felt good about it.
It takes Sam a long time to fall asleep at night, and when he does, I can’t tiptoe around cleaning up because (I think) he subconsciously hears me sneaking around and finds it unbecoming and he wakes up crying. So often I just sit by him and watch him sleep. I tell him while he sleeps that it’s a jungle out there, and you have to be really, really careful or else the eagles will get you, like they got Johnny G. My friend Mary had six cats at one point, until her cat Johnny G. disappeared, and eagles had been seen in the sky that very same day, so of course you could only draw one conclusion. After that she used always to warn the other cats to be really careful so that the eagles didn’t get them, too. The odds seemed so stacked. Have you ever seen that awful PBS nature movie on baby turtles, where they show you the beach where twenty million turtle eggs are laid and then hatch? Then they show you those twenty million baby turtles trying to race across the sand before the seagulls swoop down and gobble them up. About forty-five baby turtles make it to the water. It makes you shake your head. You double over and have to hold onto your stomach. I say, Please, please, please, God, let Sam make it to the water.
He can roll over to one side and no longer just says, Ah-goo. He does all these fabulous babbles and bellowings now. He’s so pretty that it’s sort of nuts. I’m sure he will be as gay as an Easter bonnet. My friend Larry gave him a naked Ken doll that Sam took a shine to one evening when my reading group met at Larry’s, and it’s totally Fire Island around here now. Sam licks and chews the naked Ken doll at every opportunity. I called Larry and said, “You’re trying to recruit my son,” and he said, “Look at it this way—in twenty years you won’t be losing a son; you’ll be gaining a son.” Larry has AIDS, or at any rate has HIV and no T-cell count these days. Boy, talk about the baby turtles. I worry that he won’t be here when Sam is four or five. Of course, I don’t know if I’ll be here, either. Larry called one night at the end of my pregnancy when I was just devastated by the thought of the hole in Sam’s life because he wouldn’t have a dad, how much that was probably going to hurt and how I wasn’t going to be able to do much about it. He said that I was just an opening for Sam to come into the world, that I wasn’t supposed to be a drug for him. I was ju
st supposed to be his mother. Sam was meant to be born into the world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets who would die and acne and seventh-grade dances and AIDS. He simply wasn’t meant to be born in the paradise behind the mountains.
DECEMBER 7
I woke him last night at 12:30 to nurse him, and he looked at me like “Are you out of your fucking mind?” But then he nursed for a long time. He woke up at 4:00, but I gave him his pacifier, patted him, and told him what a good kitty-cat he was, and he fell right back to sleep until 9:00. So I feel like a million dollars, like I am on the road to a complete recovery. Steve came by with take-out Mexican food tonight and after dinner sat talking to Sam about life while I took a bath. I eavesdropped: Steve said that meeting Sam was one of the best things that had ever happened to him but that another was having finally learned to swim at the age of thirty. “Life is really great sometimes,” he said. The fact that he couldn’t swim was always this deep secret that Steve went to great lengths to hide, like the men and women who can’t read or write but who have all these fabulous tricks and games they play to keep their illiteracy a secret. Then this summer Steve did one of the bravest things I’ve ever heard of. He took swimming lessons where all these kids could watch him. He said it was like learning to ride a bike when you’re thirty years old and six-foot-three, with a bunch of kids on skateboards looking on.
But he did it. He learned to swim. He was telling Sam tonight that he went around for all these years dreading that somehow he would be found out, someone would have a foolproof way to get him into the ocean or into a pool, and he’d have to admit he couldn’t swim. And now he can.