“Will you marry me?”
We are sitting at the Chart House on the cliffs near San Francisco, at sunset. Tim has orchestrated the proposal, the restaurant, the ocean view, the sunset. I suddenly feel my almost forgotten hot feeling. It starts in my feet and works its way up. I tell myself to take slow breaths.
“If I can go to LA, to work for a year,” I say, and the hot sea recedes.
* * *
I’m visiting my father.
It’s two o’clock and he is in his leather recliner in the den, watching football. Marge, sitting on the leather couch, lights a cigarette. Is it my imagination or has Marge’s nose been shaped into a bob? I’m not imagining her room-size closet in this house, filled with St. John outfits and endless shoes. Or how easily she has made the transition from her science background into the role of Hollywood wife, a role my mother eschewed, to hobnob with Hollywood royalty couples like the Spellings, or befriend Marlo Thomas.
Now Marge takes several drags from her cigarette then places it on the edge of a black ashtray, unwraps a piece of a candy bar, and offers me a section. The smoke fills the room; my head aches from breathing it in. I think about my mother talking about the afternoon dip that can happen: people’s bodies are sick and are looking for a lift. I want to like Marge, though her children are given privileges I can’t imagine my brothers and me being granted. Her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Lori, lives in this house, for example. My father told us his responsibility toward his own children ended after college.
That night I lie on the blow-up mattress Marge set up for me in the den because the guest room is filled with boxes. I miss my mother. It feels cold here, no love. It occurs to me that the warmth we felt growing up, despite my mother’s dictums, clearly wasn’t coming from my father.
* * *
I have been working for a movie company, traveling back and forth between Los Angeles, seeing Tim on the weekends. Our wedding date is approaching. I don’t want to lose this connection to the movie business, but Tim has a new job working for a brokerage firm in Oakland. He says he can’t live in Los Angeles. The movie business is in my blood; I have always believed I would be famous, one day, like my father. But the day-to-day reality of traffic and the city and smog compared to the wild hillsides of Walnut Creek? The adventure of sailing Tim’s Hobie Cat on the bay and weekend trips to Tahoe? When I imagine myself in LA, alone, even doing what I’ve told myself I always wanted to do, I feel that old panic, the old sadness that Tim vanquishes.
The next weekend Tim and I go for our usual run in the Berkeley hills. The fog rolls in, a thick blanket coming in off the sea. Its fingers reach into the nooks and crevices of the brown hills. I notice again that when I’m with Tim, the cold and gray of the fog doesn’t affect me. Would I go back to feeling like I did those first months in Euclid Hall if I were alone? When I think about Euclid Hall, the fog suddenly seems threatening. The wedding is in one month. I make a deal with Tim that I will move back to the Bay Area, but to keep one foot in the movie world, my job will be to write screenplays. The idea fills me with hope. I imagine wings on my heels, step-flying across the tops of rows of strategically placed columns of plot points. Not sinking. The beauty of a script is that it isn’t prose. Screenplays are distilled from the cream that rises to the top. I tell myself that the murky gray leftover, the medium through which the idea traveled on its trajectory upward, can be ignored. I’m also ignoring something else. The connection Tim and I feel for each other is strong, but each of us brings our own dysfunction to our union. I know how to want what I don’t have. I still haven’t figured out how to want what I do have.
Tim and I buy a house in Walnut Creek, farther inland from our rental, where the fog barely reaches, but writing is not going as I planned. I throw away screenplay idea after screenplay idea. This unweaving happens always about halfway through when the idea seems to thin and I lose the train of whatever had excited me in the first place. When I get into that place, I reject whatever I’m left with and begin an entirely new story. This rejecting of the old and beginning of the new happens over and over again, yet I tell myself it’s not a pattern. I tell myself I’m just looking for the best story idea. Maybe this is what it feels like to write? Screenwriting doesn’t come naturally to me; there is no room for the introspection I’m good at, the description of scenery that indirectly gives so much information. Screenwriting is writing stripped to the bare bones of structure and snappy dialogue, neither of which are my strong suits, but as the panic takes hold—I made a mistake; I shouldn’t have left LA—I just push harder. Writing a screenplay is my way back to the movie industry, to my charmed life, where I was my father’s princess instead of this nobody I’ve become in the nowhere place of Walnut Creek.
* * *
While in school at Harvard, Greg and Jay talk to one of their professors about Illinois. He is hired to teach a class on jazz. Though it’s been thirty years since big bands were in their heyday, one of his students suggests he create his own. My mother acts as general manager, and she and Illinois start hiring musicians, using Illinois’s basement as the rehearsal hall. This becomes their passion. They play at the Blue Note and the Village Vanguard, at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. They play at Carnegie Hall and at an annual gig closing the Midsummer Night Swing concert at Lincoln Center. Fans overseas book them gigs in Europe. Fashion photographer Arthur Elgort makes a documentary, Texas Tenor: The Illinois Jacquet Story. Under my mother’s direction, they cut a record, Jacquet’s Got It!, in 1988.
* * *
I’m pregnant, which brings a new awareness of how I am eating. I am eating for another; I have a new value. Though my craving for meat is through the roof, I don’t feel the need to punish myself for what I eat. This growing life inside me needs nutrients. The usual worry I have felt whenever I sit down to any meal—will I be able to stay within the boundaries of how I think I should eat or will hunger and cravings drive me to the outskirts of what my conscience dictates?—has been lifted. I’m craving animal protein, and nothing else will do. “You’re building a placenta,” a friend reminds me. Flesh for flesh. The dichotomy of “this is good” and “this is bad” seems irrelevant. It all goes to the baby, so it’s all necessary.
I have found a midwife, Yu-Yan Chen, who grew up helping her grandmother deliver babies in her village in China. I like the idea of blending old-school pre-technology knowledge with modern safety measures. Yu-Yan tells me that the doctors who rely solely on technology have lost something in their understanding of birthing. She describes how she can tell what’s going to happen in labor just by feeling how the baby is sitting when she palpates a pregnant woman’s stomach and by listening to the pace of its heartbeat. She describes how her grandmother would go in and physically shift a baby’s position during birth to facilitate its passage through the birth canal, an art most doctors today have lost in their reliance on ultrasounds and electronic monitoring. I think of how my mother stripped the Dakota of all its modernity and brought it back to its original state, of her trust in Dr. Cursio and Dr. Joshi, men who have gone back to old-school knowledge and brought that knowledge into the present. When I tell her about Yu-Yan, she sounds very pleased.
I’m at the sink, washing the dishes, when I feel a hot wash of water drench my legs. Forty-eight hours later, I’m in the birthing ward of Samuel Merritt Hospital, being induced with a Pitocin drip hooked up intravenously so infection doesn’t set in. Later I will learn that as Pitocin is a take-no-prisoners type of forced induction, its use usually doesn’t go hand in hand with natural childbirth. I am only at six drips per minute, but the cramping has begun, a hot belt tightening in my abdomen. Three hours later I am being dosed forty-eight drips per minute and the agony is real. Whose idea was it to have natural childbirth? Some version of me that had no idea what was in store.
“I want an epidural,” I tell Tim. He and Yu-Yan look at me without expression, a wall of resistance. They are going with allegiance to my pre-labor wishes. I signed some form, even, that stated firmly how I wanted this to go. Well, now I want it to go differently, but no one is listening.
“Back labor, very painful,” Yu-Yan says. She kneels on the bed by my knees and slides her hands up inside me as my body screams in pain from the Pitocin, from the baby attempting to makes its way scraping along the dry birth canal, from the assault of Yu-Yan’s hands pushing against my body. The baby is turned, apparently, facing my back instead of facing my abdomen. This, added to the fact that my water broke days ago and that natural lubrication is no longer present, explains the excruciating pain the baby’s progress is causing. Yu-Yan is up to her elbows now in a very small opening as here comes another contraction and the shrieking urge to push, push the baby, push Yu-Yan’s arms and hands out of me, too.
“Can I have an epidural, please?”
“Epidural will slow down labor; baby will be in trouble,” Yu-Yan says. She explains I’ve missed my window and now it’s too late.
“Do you want some Demerol?” Tim asks. “It’s okay for you to have Demerol.”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t know what Demerol is.
Another contraction hits; the pain is the same, but as the Demerol kicks in, I feel dreamy, not as invested. In fact, as the stretches of relief grow shorter and the duration of each contraction grows longer, I’m traveling through an endless yellow desert. Each section of desert is hotter, the sun more excruciatingly intense than the one before. As I cross boundary after boundary, I understand that I have no choice but to proceed. I also understand that within the rules of this desert, if I continue on in this way, if the ramping of pain and boundaries doesn’t stop, I will reach some final line, a demarcation that leaves sanity behind.
Tim will later tell the story of the night nurse, as broad shouldered as any army sergeant, coming in for her shift, just as a major contraction hits and the monitor shows the baby’s heart rate slow.
“That nurse just walked over and looked at the situation,” he will say. “Then she put her elbow on Chris’s stomach and dropped. All her weight. Boom. And out popped Emily.”
When Em is placed on my belly, warm, still sticky, part of the floating happiness, of the euphoria, is the cessation of pain. I’ve just given birth to my father, is my first thought when I see her: her long ears, the square shape of her head. I spend the night in the hospital. Tim goes home to find someone has thrown a rock through our bedroom window and our bed is covered in shattered glass. He puts on his sweats, pulls the hood up over his head, and crawls onto the bed, sleeps on top of the shards.
* * *
It’s our first night home and Em isn’t settling down, even as I nurse her hour after hour. Tim has rugby practice and, telling me he thinks this will be a good chance for me and the baby to bond, leaves us. At 8:00 P.M., after I have been nursing Em on and off since we got home from the hospital at 3:00 P.M., I am in a cold sweat. Nothing I’m doing is working. I’m so tired, it’s so late, my nipples are sore and painful, and they need the break they won’t be getting. I just want to sleep, and the vision of a life where I am able to roll over and close my eyes unencumbered seems suddenly like a long-lost utopia. At 10:00 P.M., Em releases my nipple and her eyes close. There is no way I’m going to risk waking her by putting her into the crib that was set up weeks ago with a matching rocking chair and curtains and bedding in a motif of bunnies and pink-and-blue clouds. It seems more natural to keep her here with me anyway, warm against my body, close, so if she wakes, so if something goes wrong—an unfamiliar fear runs through me: I feel so aware of her vulnerability—I will know it. I will soon read about the family bed and what feels right will have a name. For now, though I’m aching to stretch out fully, to lie prone, I stay as still as possible and lean my head back, close my eyes. For all of Em’s babyhood, I will sleep when she sleeps. I attempt once to do what the books suggest, get cleaning done while she naps, but find myself exhausted and resentful the rest of the day when she is refreshed and I am not. She doesn’t sleep steadily enough or deeply enough for me to use her nap times to catch up; she is restless and high-strung—was I right to see her similarities to my father?—and always in need of the soothing that nursing brings. My breasts ache and my nipples crack and bleed, but it also makes sense to me that nursing is nature’s way of soothing and of bonding. I can feel Tim hovering on the outside of this new partnership, waiting for his chance to step in, for my craving for sleep to abate so I will relax, be less rigid about how things are done. I wonder when that will be.
“You need to get out of the house,” Tim says at the end of Em’s first week home.
I bring her to his rugby game and everything seems great until the sidelines erupt in a cheer and Em startles violently and then is racked with sobs. That night, she wakes up at 3:00 A.M. shrieking, drawing her legs up to her chest as if she is in agony. I try everything I can think of to soothe her; even nursing doesn’t work, she spits out my nipple and screams harder, but I can find no source of this much discomfort. After another outing during the day and another night spent with Em screaming, I wonder if she is taking in the sights and sounds and activity of our outings but is unable to process them; if her nighttime screaming and writhing is a cleansing of sorts. After I attempt another rugby game and the screaming happens again at 3:00 A.M., we stop going anywhere. I hole up with her. Sure enough, when our days are quiet with very little outside stimulation, the screaming episodes don’t happen.
“You’re doing the right thing,” my mother says. “It’s important. Emily needs you.”
Okay, but my mother gave up her music for us, gave up everything. It feels noble, and I’m up for this kind of sacrifice because there seems to be no alternative—being kept up in the wee hours of night with a screaming infant isn’t going to make for any productivity—but I wonder if I’m going to be giving up on my dreams forever. I thought I would write while Em napped, but I’m napping while Em naps, to make up for being up a lot of every night because even on good nights, she wakes and needs soothing to go back to sleep. I have heard of leaving a baby and shutting the bedroom door at night, heard that it takes a week and the crying stops. Because she stops trusting someone will care, I tell Tim and myself. My mother agrees. Aren’t I here to instill trust that she is loved and that her needs will be heard and met? If not that, then what? But the panic I used to feel at night in the Dakota when my mother was in bed has become a middle-of-the-day panic. I’m not getting anywhere with writing. Now that I’m no longer pregnant, eating is a struggle again. I don’t know what to consider healthy other than blended salads, which leave me hungry. I go as long as I can not eating in the morning because as soon as I do, the guilt begins and builds to a feeling very close to depression. I consider the option of eating and making myself throw up to alleviate the guilt, as I did with my friend during our college days, but reject the idea. I’m a mother now. I need to set a good example.
* * *
“Em had an episode,” Tim says. We are on the front stoop, and he and Em, eighteen months old, have returned from a walk. Em has just run past me up the front steps. I take immediate note that Tim, who doesn’t like to make a big deal about anything, is telling me this before he even enters the house or puts down the extra jackets he is carrying. Cold fear, an icy hand closes around my heart.
“What kind of episode?”
“She seemed to pass out for a moment.”
“What do you mean?” I turn and face him directly, look into his eyes, order him silently to change his story, to tell me something different this time.
“She was running on the sidewalk ahead of me and she tripped. I picked her up and she seemed to pass out for a few seconds as I was holding her.” His eyes hold mine unwaveringly. There is no new story. He doesn’t want this one as much as I don’t want it. He’s pale, shaken. Something happened that wasn’t in his playbook for Em, for his child. The sudden chill in my solar plexus settles in deeper, makes itself at home. Em runs back to find me. She has taken off her shoes and holds her two matching dolls, Mae and Mollie, one in each arm. I pick her up.
“Did you have fun with Dad?”
“Yeah,” she says, holding Mae and Mollie shoulder to shoulder, examining them. Whatever Tim saw must have been a fluke; she looks completely fine.
A few months later, Em and I are at the playground. I am holding her hand; she is walking along a low wall watching her little feet in the pink jellies she insists on wearing with everything, sporting her favorite checkered floppy hat, swinging her hips so her soft cotton Gymboree dress with stripes on the skirt twirls. Suddenly she jumps without any indication she is about to do so. I am unprepared and her hand slips—how did our hands become sweaty and slippery?—from mine and, instead of having what she trusted was there, my strength to keep her lifted in a slow-motion jump down, she falls through the thinnest of unsupported air, dropping four feet with nothing to stop her, and lands on the side of her head on the sidewalk. I know when I hear the sound—the hollow crack of an egg on a countertop—that this fall will have repercussions. Part of me wants to run now, as far away as I can, to not exist so I don’t have to see the ruin of her, but instead I force myself to take the steps over to where she lies, her mouth open to cry but no sound emerging. Oh God, I’ve killed her.
I stoop and push my fingers under her, separating warm, soft flesh from hard pebbly cement. Her knees are drawing up into her stomach, her mouth opens but no sound comes out, she is slow-motion turning into an animal, a blue animal, her face drains of color, her neck arches back, her fingers curl into claws, her arms stiffen. Someone near me sprints into the house across the street and I’m still holding her, rocking her, when the fire trucks pull in, sirens screaming. A young paramedic puts an oxygen mask against her face. She is in a dreamy quiet now; the blue-clawed creature has uncurled and become human again, though she won’t answer to her name and she looks around her at the sky, the tops of the trees, like nothing’s really there.
“Ma’am, you’re going to have to leave the room if you can’t stop crying,” the nurse says once we get to the hospital.
I am standing beside Em, who is lying in a hospital bed, as several nurses move around us. Am I crying? I didn’t even notice. Another nurse approaches holding two large syringes in each hand. Em has had no drugs in her life thus far, no antibiotics, no aspirin. The Hahnemann Clinic in Berkeley is an office where homeopathic doctors practice. I like the comfort of its clinical feel, the lab coats, since every mother I know relies on her pediatrician’s advice like it is gospel. But I also like the Elephant Pharm, which dispenses homeopathic remedies instead of allopathic, a word that exists now because alternative remedies are becoming fashionable.
“These are antibiotics,” the nurse with the syringes says. Her dark brown hair is pulled too tightly back from her pink scalp. “If we inject them, they will go straight into her bloodstream and work faster.”
Even in my daze, I feel a clear questioning that she should need antibiotics for hitting her head, but everyone is bustling about so efficiently, I want to believe they know what they’re doing. Besides, I’m here for a miracle. Em is still looking around the room like she is in a dream, not focusing on anything or anyone.
The nurse positions herself and, raising each syringe, punches them, at the exact same time, one into each of Emily’s thighs. Em shrieks, shrieks turn to sobs, other nurses hold her down as the syringe nurse too slowly empties the yellowy contents into Em’s legs.
* * *
We are in a room, waiting for the doctor-ordered brain MRI. Em is hooked up to a gurney of octopus legs, thin tubes all feeding into her arms. We are alone; the door is closed. I have been told that if I can soothe her to sleep, we can lay her in the MRI machine with no medication. If I can’t, they will sedate her for the process. I’m holding her body against mine with one hand so she can nurse, and pulling the IV pole with the other as I walk in slow circles around the room. I’m afraid of the sedation. She is already not waking up. I hear in my head, Doctors don’t understand the brain, and it sounds like something my mother might have said to me once. I’m hearing it in her voice. The doctors want the MRI, that’s their short-term goal, and sedation would work for that. But what if she never comes out of this creepy daze? Five minutes pass and she is still nursing and squirming in my arm, my skin and hers sweaty, damp, where we are touching. There is nothing here that is conducive to sleep: the glare of florescent lights, the bright black-and-white-checked linoleum floor. On the other side of the door, voices rise and fall, footsteps get loud then fade. She rolls against me, trying to get comfortable. I need to try a different tactic. I hum one of the many songs we listen to from her plastic cassette tape player with the primary-colored stop and start and rewind buttons, which I hook to the back of the baby jogger for walks and runs in the streets behind our house. Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow. Our safe world of nursery songs, of Weemie, her stuffed lamb, of the baby jogger and our dogs and cats and our little cottage against the creek, seem like a fairy-tale dream, a lost world I have never appreciated enough. My knees go weak. Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow, someone warm them from below till the rain comes tumbling down. Finally, I feel her weightless in my arm, the sign that she is surrendering to sleep, then heavy as she gives herself over to it, and I’ve done the impossible, though she has done her part, too, no doubt wanting to escape this bright, loud place with poking hands and cruel needles as much as I do. And then, suddenly, the door opens, letting in all the noise of the hospital bustle and a cold waft of air, and Em sits straight up, all my hard work undone.
“It’s time,” the nurse says.
* * *
Forty minutes later the doctor stands in front of Tim and me and tells us Em fell asleep in the MRI machine the moment she was laid on the table, so there was no need to administer a sedative, though I have never known her, in her entire young life, to fall asleep without the soothing of nursing. He says they can detect nothing abnormal on Em’s brain in the MRI. We can take her home.
“So why did she have a seizure?” I ask Tim while we drive.
He shrugs. He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t know. No one knows. I should feel comforted that her scan was clear, but all that means to me is they didn’t catch whatever was there. How is anyone supposed to bear this much love and helplessness?
Two hours later the three of us are lying in our bed, and Tim and Em are breathing deeply, eyes closed, faces smoothed in sleep. Tonight, Em fell asleep with no battle. Outside the quiet dark of the bedroom, the frogs are loud in the creek; their croaking reverberates against the sides of the hill and the sound thrums, magnifies. I’m afraid to give myself over to unconsciousness. What if she has another seizure while I’m not paying attention? The brain, so unknowable, is the perfect landscape for the fear of things that are undetectable, that lurk and hover, that will get us when we are least aware. If no one can tell me why this happened, then it could happen again and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. This fear feels familiar to me, it feels like a legacy, though it hasn’t been handed to me overtly and with ceremony but rather insidiously, passed down without words. It’s the fear my mother was responding to when she enforced the Program so dogmatically, when she made it her talisman. She must have believed that if we followed the tenants, we would be protected. It suddenly makes sense, her following of a charter that deviated so far from what everyone else was following. If we figured out the rules of the special canon and abided by them, we would be granted immunity from the woes the rest of humanity suffered. I look at Em, her face pale and perfect in sleep. What talisman do I have now? The Program isn’t enough to stop brain damage or seizures. It’s not enough to stop most things. The enormity of all that could hurt her presses down like the darkness around me. Then I notice a light shimmering in the corner. A beam from a streetlight? No, it’s smoke. If I move, I’ll wake Em, Tim, the dogs. I wait for it to dissipate, as smoke would, but this doesn’t. It’s still swirling in the far corner of the bedroom. The smoky swirl of light, I suddenly realize, has intention; I hear, without words, its message. It’s saying, Everything’s all right. I don’t know how this could be, a light in the corner of my bedroom that has no obvious source, but I suddenly feel bathed in peace. This light is peace; it’s love and comfort. I close my eyes, sleep for the first time this night. When I wake up the next morning, the light is gone but its message still feels clear, if only I can get past the worry to hear it.
* * *
Em and I are walking the dogs in the Walnut Creek Open Space. Kate, our Lab, runs by, dragging her leash as Em is taking a step. What are the odds, her foot comes down and makes contact with the gravel path at the exact same time the leash is underfoot, so that instead of finding solid ground, she steps onto a canvas leash moving at twenty-plus miles per hour. Her legs shoot out from under her and her head hits the only stone within ten feet of us.
I am holding her, running to the house outside the gate.
“Please call 911.”
* * *
Em has a high fever; she has the flu. We are lying on the couch. Six months after the last seizure. My arms are around her and now she’s titling her head back, looking at something on the ceiling over our heads.
“What are you looking at, Em?”
She doesn’t answer. I sit up to examine her.
Her eyes are rolling back, her body is going stiff.
Now I am running with her in my arms to the fire station at the end of the block. It will take too much time to call 911. I reach it, knock. The firemen open the door, take her from me, give her oxygen. “We can take her to the hospital or you can take her,” one says. “Or you can wait. Febrile seizures. She might be prone if she’s had a seizure before. They usually grow out of them by five.”
By five? She’s not even three yet.
“Did you have too many blankets on her?”
She said she was cold. I had her piled high with blankets.
“You’ll want to keep her fever down whenever she gets sick,” he tells me. “I give my daughter a sponge bath in cool water, turn on a fan. Give her a fever reducer.”
I remember the two syringes, the MRI, the thousands of dollars, Em’s terror and mine in those corridors, and we head back home. Em is sitting up, coming out of it now.
You’ll want to keep the fever down whenever she gets sick. For now I have been given a road map in the wilderness that is Em’s brain. But I am alone with this; the doctors can’t help. I am the first line of defense.
Em has a fever and I have moved her to my bed again so I can keep the fan on her and sponge her down with cool water when I think she’s getting too hot. This is the protocol and I follow it unerringly.
“Nooooo, Maaaaam. Nooooo,” she moans in her half sleep. She is so cold, her skin hurts, she wants to bundle up, but instead I force her into this nakedness and assault of cold air and water. I run the sponge down her arm, across her chest, her tummy, her thighs, angle the fan so it hits her. After a few moments I feel her skin and it’s cool. I lie down next to her, close my eyes, and sleep for a few moments until I will wake up and sponge again.
* * *
My water breaks with Luke two days before his due date. This time I don’t wait for the Pitocin; I drink a bottle of castor oil, which I have been told is a home remedy to induce labor, and it works. Like Em, Luke is turned so I am in the midst of another painful back labor. At one point, late in the night, in the midst of my contractions, I am screaming so loudly, Tim nods off to sleep on the chair in the corner of the hospital room and dreams that someone is wrapping piano wire around my fingers and pulling them off at their tips, one by one. This time Yu-Yan is stuck in traffic and is thirty minutes from reaching the hospital.
“I want an epidural,” I tell the nurse.
“Your midwife will be here very soon,” the nurse says.
“Give it to me before she gets here,” I say.
I get my epidural and as the pain abates, tears run down my cheeks.
“Don’t feel bad; you didn’t fail.” Tim leans in to reassure me.
“I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m crying because the pain is gone. I’m. So. Happy.”
With the epidural, my entire body relaxes and instead of slowing progress, as Yu-Yan had feared with Em, Luke slips out, effortlessly.
* * *
“My stomach hurts,” Em says. I am holding her in my lap.
Luke is one week old and asleep in the rocking crib. I have given Em an antibiotic for strep throat, though she has had no drugs since the double injection of antibiotics in her thighs three years ago, and the fear of them is still screaming in me, my mother’s programming alive and well, battling with the dilemma of having no choice in this situation, since strep leads to rheumatic fever and a weakened heart, not to mention the bacteria will cause a high fever that the doctor says I won’t be able to contain. The pill is red, red like a stop sign, like a new wound, a color I couldn’t imagine swallowing. The side effects listed on the bottle include stomach distress, so though she is in some pain, I want to believe that a stomachache falls within the parameters of normal. Suddenly she is arching back again, her body shaking and convulsing, and I am screaming to Tim to call the ambulance. I know already this one is too big to handle at home. This time I don’t cry at her bedside; I don’t want to be asked to leave. But, out in the waiting room, I do say to Tim, who is holding Luke, “Maybe she won’t come out of it this time.” Her blank looking around and seeing nothing has lasted almost ten hours. But she does come out of it, and the fireman was right. She is five and, though this seizure clocks the longest duration, it’s her last. By now, someone has mentioned epilepsy and the fact that febrile seizures can be a precursor, but I won’t know until she hits puberty that these childhood seizures will not translate into adult ones.
* * *
While Em is at school from 9:00 A.M. until noon and Luke naps, I try to write. In the afternoons I sit on the porch steps and watch them play. The answer to whatever I need to figure out with writing seems to be buried so deeply inside me, I need more time than the day affords. Still, I have a vague sense that everything I’m struggling with is connected. The middle, the longest, the least-structured part of the day is related to the middle, the longest, the least-structured part of a story is related maybe, somehow, to the middle of me, to the parts of myself that I haven’t examined too closely or labeled and that I don’t like very much. I decide this is about willpower. I face Act Two like it’s a wave towering toward me. I take it bravely, try to swim up and over, muscle my way through, but the wave slams me flat on my back in the sand. I continue to attempt screenplay after screenplay. In screenwriting I get to stay on the surface of a story. A screenplay is a story told visually. From the outside. Going too deep to examine the story, myself, or the day, feels like I will drown.
* * *
Em and I visit Illinois and my mother’s house in Queens. The first thing I notice is Illinois’s house is wall-to-wall shag. We weren’t allowed one rug and now she lives in carpets times a million.
I don’t ask.
The musicians are arriving for rehearsal. My mother is in the kitchen with Em, stirring the kitchari simmering on the stove to feed them when they’re through. I climb down the long flight of creaking wood steps into the basement to get something from my suitcase. Illinois has a drumstick in his hand, tapping in time as a young trumpet player plays a page of music. His back is to me; the young musician doesn’t take his eyes off of Illinois’s stick. I watch Illinois and the trumpet player for a moment, soak in the unspoken connection of shared passion and talent, then head back up the stairs without disturbing them.
* * *
My mother comes for two-week visits and sits crossed-legged on the floor to play with Em and Luke. The rest of the time, she cooks, never leaving the kitchen, so that it’s impossible to eat anything without her eyes on us. She has switched completely now from following the tenants of the Program to following the science of Ayurveda, an ancient system of medicine, she explains, that was transcribed, according to legend, from the gods to human sages. According to Ayurvedic principles, she is vata. She says I am most likely pitta, which means all the foods I like most, like hot peppers, inflame my already inflamed dosha. She now drinks ginger tea with cumin, coriander, fenugreek, turmeric, and cinnamon, the specific herbs for her dosha, prescribed by Dr. Joshi. She spends hours peeling the ginger with a little knife, and eats the kitchari and drinks the tea, nothing else, three times a day. The smell of freshly peeled ginger, ghee, turmeric, and cumin fills our small house as she extols the virtues of this thousands-of-years-old dosha-pacifying food. I like kitchari; it’s warm and soothing and it makes sense that there is real value in eating an ancient food that has been used for millennia to heal, but after a few days of eating only that, my body is screaming for more. By now, after years of their own struggles with food, my brothers have openly become omnivores. I feel, even more, the pressure of being the eldest, the only daughter, the only remaining legacy of her life’s mission and purpose.
My mother is sure that Em is pitta, too, and after explaining the behavior that seems a carryover from the days of her being up at night screaming, her temper, to Dr. Joshi, he mails me a jar of little round balls made up of herbs to help cool her colon. If her colon is cooled, he tells my mother and my mother tells me, her temper will cool as well. If it’s allowed to stay as it is, too hot, Dr. Joshi says permanent damage could result. It’s possible, he says, that even her tendency toward seizures can be related to her inflamed colon. Swallowing one little ball a quarter of the size of an M&M can keep seizures at bay and soothe her intensity? This seems like the talisman I was hoping for. The problem is the herb balls are so pungent, they smell up the kitchen and Em won’t touch them. My mother goes to the health food store with me. We buy ice cream, we buy peanut butter. I give her the ball in a spoon with each. She spits out the ice cream but swallows the peanut butter if I promise an ice cream chaser. In this way I am able to get the ball down her once a day. We do this for a year, at which point Em, who will grow up to forever hate peanut butter because of its association with the taste of the dark pungent balls, begs to be allowed to stop taking them. Despite my fear (what will protect her?), I acquiesce.
At mealtimes, my mother is satisfied to see me feeding Em and Luke kale and quinoa and tofu. Tim doesn’t cook meat while she’s visiting, so they don’t have the opportunity to ask for it at night. Tim, though free like my brothers to veer from her dogma, says he doesn’t want to be disrespectful, so while my mother visits, he stashes In-N-Out Burgers in the laundry hamper, taking bites whenever he goes in and out of the house. I can’t betray her even in secret while she’s with us, so I go back to feeling hungry all day.
“Do we have to have meat every night?” I ask Tim after my mother’s visit. I forget how good it feels to be light. Despite the gnawing hunger I experience when she visits and I have to limit so much of what I would normally eat, I love the ease in my body that results.
It also suits me so much better, morally, not to eat animals.
“You can eat whatever you want,” Tim says.
But I can’t, because when his food is around at the end of a long day, sizzling in a pan or in the broiler, fat crisping and browning, juices running and pooling, and I can smell it from every room, I want it. If I don’t eat it, I think about what I missed all the next day, the power of suggestion, and it lodges in my psyche and boomerangs around to hit me twice as hard the next night. Each night I go without, I am scraping something of me away, too, meat from bone, until it feels like there will be nothing left; all the good stuff, the best me, is best fueled with meat.
“Why can’t we be vegetarian?”
“I’d never be vegetarian.”
“That’s so predictable. Do you like being a predictable male?”
“I like meat.” He fake-growls at me and comes at me to tickle me, but I push his hands away. Why is he so bullheaded?
When Tim is with me visiting my dad in LA, Marge says she so appreciates a man’s man. None of this pretending to be something you’re not. He’s masculine; it’s just who he is. It’s refreshing, she says.
* * *
My mother has invited me, Emily, and Luke on the SS Norway for the Jazz Cruise where Illinois is a featured musician. I love that my kids and I get to hang out “backstage” in my mother and Illinois’s cabin as the Caribbean sunlight pours through the window and the ocean rolls by. Illinois’s silk jacket and dark lavender shirt, his slacks and patent leather shoes are laid out on the bed, though he is still in his underwear, a white sleeveless undershirt and boxer shorts. My mother’s outfit is laid out, too, her purple silk jacket still wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic. She makes Illinois freshly squeezed orange juice; she has carried the oranges and the squeezer on board, along with bags of dal and spices for kitchari and the seitan she stir-fries so it tastes like chicken. Now she is busy combing his hair the special way he likes it for performing, no exceptions, for the stage. Then she scurries over with his juice, hands him the glass. He sits back in his chair, undershirt on; it’s almost time to dress but not yet. He accepts her ministrations; they are their rituals.
* * *
I’m back from the SS Norway trip. Tim and I find a house for sale one mile from our old house in Walnut Creek, in a new pasture. This one has floor-to-ceiling windows that back up against the hills and look out over the mountain. All wild grass and sunlight and leafy branches and sky. This house has the elegance of the Dakota; it sits high and majestic above the town, with the Shell Ridge line and Mount Diablo rising out of the foothills, filling our vista.
A Whole Foods goes up in Walnut Creek. Shopping feels like going to Disneyland, too good to be true. Healthy food that tastes good? That’s marketed to appeal? No more sawdust floors and shapeless, brick-hard cookies. Lighting, skylights, a half-a-football-field-size section of thriving, beautiful produce, and deli counters filled with salads, slaws, sliced meats, dishes for every craving. My mother visits and I take her. I can’t buy all the things I really want when she’s here, so the store becomes a temptress for the two weeks we eat kitchari and drink only ginger tea. But as soon as she leaves, I guiltily go back, in baby steps, to buying the things I want.
“You have broken the chain,” my brother Greg tells me when he visits. He watches me offer both Em and Luke quinoa and tofu, notices the fact that I tend to Luke, who seems to need chicken or steak at dinnertime to feel full, and Em, who is fine having only legumes all day. He means I am listening to them, not imposing my will and therefore will not be passing down the rigidity of dogma our mother passed down to us. Each of my brothers has had their own struggle with diet. Braddy tells me he can’t eat one of anything. He devours an entire baked Safeway chicken in minutes, then looks around for the next thing to consume. Greg and Jay both feel as I do, guilt and self-recrimination when we eat certain foods, the backlash of self-flagellation. I am an adult, living with my own husband and children. I am free to eat what I want. But it’s difficult for me to watch my children eat meat and I can’t eat it myself during the day when I’m alone. Only with Tim and only when I’m distracted from what I’m actually doing. Otherwise, the guilt is blinding. So I eat too much cheese, too many sweets. My mother said sugar was poison, but it’s still not that point of no return of meat. Yes, I have broken the chain of control and rigidity and guilt for my own children. The chain I haven’t broken is the one still binding me.