Chapter 18

Spring 2000

One of the ways Angela and I reconnected was through cooking. More precisely, I couldn’t cook at all, and she taught me.

“How is it possible that you can’t cook anything?”

I thought about my mother, who may have known how to cook but chose not to. Maren and I grew up on takeout, first with our mother, then, when she was working so much, on our own. While my father did like to cook, by the time we lived together I spent all my energy avoiding him and anything he liked. When I was a teenager, I would have liked it if he offered to teach me to cook so I could make a snide comment as I turned him down.

“I don’t exactly come from a family of cooks who sit around passing on recipes and techniques.” And I was happy to keep it that way.

“Well, we’re going to change that. What if Jamie wants Thai food, or even a simple bowl of pasta with lemon sauce?”

“Since when do kids like pasta with lemon sauce, or Thai food, outside of Thailand?”

Despite my skepticism, we ended up in a suburban Target one Sunday afternoon in late March, buying sturdy but inexpensive cookware for my apartment. Teaching me to cook had become one of Angela’s projects, and when she focused on a project, there was no distracting her.

“I don’t think I need a cookie sheet,” I told her. “Cookies aren’t even good for you. Let’s decide right now, Jamie won’t ever eat cookies.”

She ignored me and put two cookies sheets in the cart. We also bought knives, serving utensils, silverware and a full set of dishes to replace the hodgepodge of single pieces I kept in my kitchen.

“What’s wrong with plastic forks? Less to wash, I say,” I suggested.

Angela gave me a sour look. “Grow up, Ellison. We’re not going to raise our son on disposable utensils.”

I tried to goad her as we waited to check out, thinking it might distract her from her mission. “Now you sound like your mother.”

She didn’t take the bait. “Nice try, insulting me. If I sound like Mother, maybe it’s because all your new kitchenware is her treat.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Your mother is paying for all this? Why would she do that?”

Angela swiped her mother’s credit card and grinned at me. “She wouldn’t pay for it if she knew. She gave me the card for emergencies. I think your complete ineptitude in the kitchen qualifies.”

Back at my apartment, Angela pulled the thickest cookbook I’d ever seen from her bag.

“The Joy of Cooking? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Angela laid the book down on the table and pressed her palm flat on the cover, almost caressing it as if it was a holy document.

“This is the bible of cooking. Anything you want to know about cooking, you can find it in here. My mother gave this to me when I was twelve years old and she started teaching me to cook.”

I wanted to laugh but Angela’s face was completely serious. So I put on a solemn look and asked, “What if you don’t want to know anything about cooking? Can you just chuck it in the garbage and order Chinese?”

I knew I had gone too far when Angela’s glare felt as if it heated the entire room. She stepped close to me in a way that made me want to take two steps backward.

“Ellison, this is important to me, and to our son,” she hissed, pointing a small finger at the spot in between my eyes. I wanted to point out that Jamie probably didn’t care, since he was only ten months old, but I wisely kept silent. “I’m going to the bathroom. When I get back, you need to have a whole new attitude about this. Or else.”

She stomped off. I decided I didn’t want to know what “or else” involved, so I picked up The Joy of Cooking and thought of a random question about cooking. It didn’t take me long to find the answer: sweetbreads are not, in fact, brains, as many people believe; instead, they are the thymus or pancreatic glands of young animals. Good to know.

When Angela returned, I put on my biggest smile, told her what I had learned about sweetbreads, and promised to learn to cook. She looked pleased, and I didn’t even flinch when she pulled matching aprons out of her bag and instructed me to put mine on.

“Maybe I’ll even make you dinner sometime,” I offered.

“Sure—as long as it’s not sweetbreads.”

* * *

My classmates all seemed to have known their specialties since the day they were born. Plastic surgery. Pediatrics. Forensic pathology. Epidemiology. I have no idea what I wanted to specialize in. There was no official pressure to choose yet, but from the moment we stepped on campus, hundreds of other first-year medical students were positioning themselves for research internships, grants and future careers. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I needed to be doing this sort of thing, especially not before I’d even taken my first class.

When I finally checked my first-semester grades, I saw that I got two B minuses and two C pluses. Not exactly what I’d been hoping for, but probably better than I deserved. Instead of getting down about the grades, I had adopted Angela’s fresh start theory of the year 2000. The old Ellison was still here, but the new Ellison could handle things the old one couldn’t. I was a father, I’d survived, if not thrived, in my first semester of medical school, and I’d done it on my own. Now, I wasn’t going to be afraid to ask for help to do better, not just for me, but for Jamie.

I didn’t want to be left behind, so I decided I should figure out my specialty, too. I checked out a bunch of books from the library, hoping that something would speak to me. On days when I didn’t have classes, I kept Jamie home from daycare. I wanted to spend as much time with him as I could, even though it meant getting no sleep and studying in between feedings and changing diapers.

One afternoon, Jamie fell asleep on my lap after I fed him a bottle. I eased back on the sofa and reached with one hand, slowly, so he wouldn’t wake, to the pile of books I kept next to the couch. The one on top was Healing the Mind: A History of Psychiatry from Antiquity to the Present by Michael H. Stone. It seemed like a perfect way to put myself to sleep alongside Jamie, so I flipped the book open. I read from Chapter 27 on child psychiatry. “A century ago, for example, 25% of the families in the United States consisted of seven or more persons; today, only 3%. Single-parent households are becoming more and more numerous; fewer children get to spend all of their dependent years in a home containing both parents.”

I stopped reading and looked down at Jamie. We had that in common, at least. Things were progressing between me and Angela, but slowly. We decided that she should live with her parents instead of at my apartment, and between Angela, her parents, Maren and me, we made sure Jamie was always with someone who loved him.

Not only did she teach me to cook, but we were also talking again, about books, about movies, about classes. We even talked about the things we had avoided for so long, including Jason. We were talking about Duke one day, and she brought up the first time we met.

“Remember that first party freshman year?”

How could I forget? That was the moment I met Angela and my whole life was shifted onto a new track, although I didn’t know it then.

“Jason took me. I didn’t know anyone.”

She shook her head. “Those guys were a bunch of jerks.”

“Who, the guys who lived in the apartment, the basketball players?”

“Yeah, them, and Jason.”

We both paused and looked at each other for a moment. We’d never really talked about Jason at all. It was a sore subject that I had thought would best be avoided, perhaps forever. Then, to my surprise, Angela laughed.

“Jason was a big jerk. Huge jerk. The worst one of them all.”

“You don’t even know the half of it. Remember, I lived with him.” Angela’s giggling was contagious, making me laugh along with her. And then I thought of Rob and Sasha, and the story of how they met. I didn’t know why it had taken me this long to figure out that Jason was my Butch.

* * *

Angela and I were certainly on good terms, but I wasn’t sure what that meant or where it might lead. Chico and I talked about it a lot. I often took Jamie with me to the record store while she was working, and we talked in between customers while Jamie bounced in my lap in rhythm with the music.

“How are things with you and Angela?” Chico was spinning an old CD in the reflection the sunlight made coming in the window, and Jamie was mesmerized by the shadows and streaks of light. His smile always reminded me of his mother at her best.

“We’re getting along lately. It’s like when we first became friends in college; we can talk and laugh together.”

Chico nodded. “Are you in love again?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what that means anymore. I always thought love was this specific feeling, this excitement. But what about the day-to-day? The kind of thing that I felt the summer we spent together isn’t really meant to last.”

“That’s the fantasy version of love. Maybe what you have now is the real thing.”

I thought about it. “I just don’t know what would be best for Jamie. Should we be together for him, regardless of whether we’re really in love or not?”

Chico frowned. “Maybe you wonder that because your parents didn’t stay together and you romanticized the idea of living with both of your parents. But my parents stayed together, and most of the time, it didn’t even seem as if they liked each other anymore, forget about love.”

She was right. I had this idea that my life would have been better if my parents had stayed together. But it would have been different, not necessarily better. Maybe worse.

“When I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out why they bothered to stay married, and once I asked my mother,” she continued. “My mother told me that they both loved me, and that was enough.”

Jamie yelled out “Bop, bop!” and held his arms open, demanding that Chico pick him up. She laughed and took him into her arms. Then she looked over his head at me.

“But it’s not enough. Loving your kid isn’t enough of a reason to be together. You have to figure out if there’s something that holds you and Angela together as a couple, as a man and a woman, not as parents.”

I nodded. “We’ll always be parents, no matter what. Now we have to decide if we can be together.”

* * *

As Jamie still slept on my lap, I considered my relationship with Angela. It wasn’t like that summer at Duke, but it was nice just the same. The way we were together was changing, but maybe we could weather the changes and end up together instead of apart.

I opened the book again.

“These changes have important consequences for child psychiatry, given the often adverse impact of divorce and paternal absence exerted upon children.”

I stopped reading here and closed my eyes. Calvin’s absence during my childhood was a problem, but then again, so was his presence during my adolescence. Which was more of a problem, I wasn’t sure.

Things were changing between me and Calvin as well. Since I had Jamie, I realized that I maybe needed a father, and Jamie needed a grandfather. There was nothing wrong with needing other people.

Jamie sighed and shifted, squeezing his tiny hand into the space between my arm and chest. I smelled the top of his head, that perfect clean baby smell, and brushed my lips over the fuzz there. He was already nine months old, and I knew that the days of him sleeping on my chest were numbered. He was crawling and was more interested in staying awake to explore the world than cuddling with his father. But that was okay, because he was starting to make sounds that sounded like words, and I was pretty sure that one day, he tried to say “Dad.”

All I wanted for Jamie was for him to be happy. I wanted to be the kind of father I’d always yearned for, the kind that was there, the kind who helped him become a good man. My entire personal life was devoted to Jamie—why shouldn’t my career be as well?

I don’t really believe in signs from God or fate, but it seemed like Michael H. Stone had just sent me one. It would mean a longer time in school and more studying, a prospect that seemed exhausting at that moment. But I would consider it. Child psychiatry didn’t seem like a bad way to go for me. And for Jamie.

* * *

I knew that my own future wasn’t the only one I had to consider. Jamie wasn’t even one year old yet, but we had to start planning for changes. Maren wouldn’t be our nanny forever, and he would need to be in some kind of childcare, then preschool. Where could we send him—what place would be good enough for my son? We figured that Jamie could go to daycare with R.J. between the ages of one and three, and after that we needed to find a good preschool. Rob, Angela and I sat down one afternoon to make a list of all the things we needed to consider in finding a school for the boys. While R.J. and Jamie crawled around on the floor in front of us, we created the list from piles of books, internet sites and magazine articles, and we debated which were the most important factors before we came up with our own list of qualities of a good preschool, in no particular order:

The child is allowed to make choices within a structured environment.

The activities focus on social growth, not just academics.

The atmosphere is fun, relaxed and inviting.

Other parents are active and involved (Angela rewrote Rob’s suggestion, which read “The other parents aren’t jackasses.”)

Children are always active and engaged, not just sitting around doing nothing.

Children have access to various activities throughout the day and should not all be doing the same thing at the same time.

Teachers work with individual children, small groups, and the whole group at different times during the day.

The classroom is decorated with children’s original artwork (I included this one after remembering how much I liked seeing my work on the classroom walls when I was a kid.)

Children learn numbers and the alphabet in the context of their everyday experiences (Rob and I didn’t know what this meant until Angela explained to us that it meant teaching kids to count using carrots and crackers that they got to eat afterward.)

Children have an opportunity to play outside (Rob wanted to add “every day,” but we reminded him that we lived in Chicago, not San Diego.)

Teachers read books to children individually or in small groups throughout the day, not just at group story time.

The school must be clean, bright and well maintained inside and out.

Children and their parents look forward to school.

* * *

After we finished the list, we were quite pleased with ourselves, sitting silently for a moment as we imagined our sons developing into geniuses because of the solid foundation they had received in a quality preschool program. Rob was the first one to break the spell.

“So, now all we have to do is find this utopia, which will no doubt be free and populated by kids of all nationalities and backgrounds, right?”

We looked at each and laughed. “Okay, so maybe we are expecting a lot,” Angela admitted.

I shrugged. “I’m willing to negotiate on the clean floors. Sometimes kids can get a little messy, I get that.”

“Magnanimous of you. My point was really that maybe we should be a bit more realistic going into all this. After all, none of us went to a perfect preschool, and look how we turned out,” Rob said.

“Brilliant,” I said.

“Extremely well-liked by our peers,” Angela added.

“Or at least, we‘re pretty impressed with ourselves,” said Rob. “We could put R.J. and Jamie in a cage with chimps and they’d grow up to cure cancer, broker world peace and other awesome stuff.”

We looked down at the boys, who seemed to be having a contest to see who could stuff the most wooden blocks in his mouth. So far, the limit was one, since the blocks were large. After they stuffed a block in, they then chattered at each other until one of them gave up, spit out the block and crawled off, the other following.

“Yup, geniuses in the making.”

* * *

Angela had also been thinking about the future on her own, which I discovered when she came over one night for dinner. It was a Thursday in April, and we’d gotten into the habit of getting together with Rob and RJ to watch CSI. Chico refused to watch on the grounds that America was too obsessed with police procedurals for its own good, and she wouldn’t be a part of it. Rob watched for the gory parts where they followed the path of a bullet through someone’s intestines, reasoning that it would help desensitize him. I watched because I wanted to keep Rob company.

“And you have a crush on Marg Helgenberger,” Angela added.

“Well, she wears those tight shirts and her character used to be a stripper,” Rob said.

“Exotic dancer,” I corrected him.

Angela shook her head. “Men.” She turned to Jamie and RJ, who were busy playing on a rug in the next room. “Boys, don’t grow up to be like your fathers, ogling women without shame.”

RJ looked up, his head titled to the side as if he was taking this advice under consideration. He had the same blond afro as his father, and always seemed to be in deep thought. Jamie yelled “Da!” and threw a block in our direction.

“I think ‘Da’ means that Mommy is full of it,” I said. She stuck out her tongue at me.

After the show, Rob took RJ home. After she put Jamie to bed, Angela came and sat next to me.

“Can we talk?”

My first instinct was to say “no” and leave the room, the apartment, maybe the city. Nothing good can come of that phrase, and in my experience with Angela, her desire to talk had only ended in:

a) a devastating breakup;

b) the announcement that she was pregnant, I was not the father and she intended to have an abortion;

c) the revelation that she was, in fact, still pregnant and I was the father

Given the evidence, I felt well within reason to be wary of one of Angela’s little talks. At least I knew she wasn’t pregnant this time. At least, not by me, since we hadn’t had sex since the time Jamie was conceived.

My mind raced through the possibilities. She wanted to move far away and take Jamie. She was getting married to someone else who wanted to adopt Jamie. DNA tests had shown I wasn’t Jamie’s father after all. I couldn’t think of anything important enough for the tone she’d taken except things that involved taking Jamie away from me. There was no way I was going to let that happen, and I started to get angry.

But no, I was being unreasonable. Whatever problems Angela and I had, she knew I was a good father to our son. She wasn’t a mean person. She wouldn’t try to separate me from Jamie. I took a deep breath and tried unsuccessfully to relax my brow. My jaw was still clenched, but I tried to make a joke.

“Uh-oh. Is this where you tell me it’s not working out between us?”

She looked away. “Don’t mess around. I’m being serious.”

I wanted her to hurry and get it over with. Whatever the bad news was, I wished she would just say it and then I could get on with the aftermath.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time, but I always got scared, or the timing wasn’t right. You were angry with me for how I handled things between us, and you had every right to be.”

Please just say it. Say it. Say it. I turned away from her. She took a deep breath.

“I don’t know if you have forgiven me for what I put you through, but I just need to say this, no matter what. I want to be a better person, a more honest person, and this is one way I can do that. I think…no, I know. I love you.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“And I don’t just mean because of Jamie, or because of everything we’ve been through. Or maybe everything we’ve been through is part of it. I don’t know. I just know that I do love you, and I wanted to say it so you would know, too.”

I wanted to be able to say the words back to her, to declare my love, and then we would live happily ever after. But it wasn’t that simple, and I didn’t want to make a mistake by jumping in too fast again.

“Thank you.” We both laughed at how formal I sounded. “I mean, it means a lot to me that you told me that. It was a risk, and it shows that you trust me. But I’m not at all sure how I feel. I just need some time to think about things. Okay?”

Angela look disappointed, but she didn’t argue. “I was hoping you would declare your love and we’d ride off into the sunset.”

“You know, we’re more alike than I ever thought. That romantic streak gets in the way of real life.”

She nodded. “I know. We need to be adults, for Jamie’s sake. So now what?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think it’s a good place to start figuring it all out, don’t you?”