Some Assembly Required (12 page)

Sam and I took turns watching Jax while Amy went to the chiropractor. Jax drinks from his bottle like a wino with a bottle of Night Train. His tongue lolls out when he gets a good hit, and then he starts sucking fiercely again. According to Sam, he’s saying, “All I need is one more slug of that, baby. Just to take the edge off.”

Or as my friend Don used to say about his first morning drink, just to get all the flies going in one direction.

He was fussier than usual, as his front teeth are coming in, and he was filibustering most of our offerings, of toys, carpet time, peekaboo.

Millard is losing weight before our very eyes. It is clear that he is dying, but my cousins do not want to call hospice, which is to me the next course of action. This would mean admitting that the end is not too far down the road; my cousins are not ready for that yet. They make it seem like I am hysterical and overreacting when I suggest this.

It is funny how no one seems to want my always excellent advice.

He needs a full-time nurse in case he falls, because his son Ricky, with whom he lives, is gone all day, at work. He needs help in the shower, and will need morphine soon for the pain. My cousins do what my brothers and I did when my dad was sick but still lucid: make jokes and hope for the best. For instance, today when no one was looking, Millard fished his car keys out of the drawer where someone had hidden them, and drove himself to town. My cousin Robby, Millard’s eldest, called to say, “We’ve got a runner.”

I laughed, but this triggers me: My dad sneaked off a few times in the car after his license had been taken away because of his seizures—and there are so many small kids in our neighborhood.

Robby called back an hour later to say, “He just got back from the store with four bags of groceries. He’s okay, he just wants to provide for his family. You Christians are always trying
to bury people early.” This completely hurt my feelings, until I remembered that I have to let them deal in their own way with the trampoline of a family whose patriarch is dying. They are the ones who are going to have to do all the weird work that has to be done at the end of someone’s life, and I have to release Millard to them. If they ask, I can help. Period.

What a concept.

It is foggy, and everyone is in post-holiday hangover, especially me.

I hiked in the hills early this morning with Karen and my dogs.

I said, “What does this fog look like to you?”

“Hopelessness.”

“I mean, physically?”

“Like the world has glaucoma.”

We were way high up, in a thick fog. It looked like God had thrown a dove-gray cashmere blanket over our cage. But the beauty was that you’d been spared having to see too far ahead. Only here, only now, only a few dozen feet in any direction.

It was tragic and romantic, very
Wuthering Heights
. Karen looked unusually pretty—but who doesn’t look better with a scarf draped over the lightbulb? The flaws and imperfections go away.

Instead of the usual feeling you have up here, like you’re the Little Prince standing on the earth, looking out at an endless expanse of sky and universes, it was like being under a lid or a dome. And everywhere we went—on the road, on trails, up a steep green hill—the dome followed directly above us.

“Hi, Mom. We have a new development. If you include Jax in the conversation, like first saying something while
not
talking to him, and then saying it again to him—‘Jax, isn’t the sky blue?’—this makes him laugh.

“Also, sneaking up on him makes him laugh.

“I don’t love the crying, but I guess it’s part of the package. I’ve gotten better at letting the noises go on without cringing—like when he just has to cry it out. I’m a designer, so I want there to be a solution to everything—he’s crying, there must be something wrong, and fixable—but we’re learning that he needs to cry it out. To discharge all the accumulated energy.

“He hates to go to sleep, like he’s missing out, and he fights it. At bedtime, he knows the jig is up. We try to let him cry and tire himself out. This is new to me, and the hardest thing a parent can do. Every nerve in your body wants to move to his side and console him, and not make him be alone or unhappy ever again, for even a second. We crack under the strain.”

I told Sam about when he was three months old, and Pammy came over at night to support me in letting him learn to cry himself to sleep. His stomach was now big enough to hold enough milk for eight hours, but he had developed the habit of waking up every four hours to nurse and check in with me on stuff he might have missed while sleeping.

The baby book said to put him down, pat his back, and not pick him up, no matter how piteous he sounded. I was committed to letting him cry it out, for however long it took, and I made Pammy promise to help me keep my butt on the couch, like Ulysses strapped to the mast.

I lasted close to six minutes, then did crack under the strain and picked him up. Ulysses had an unfair advantage over me: the mast, and wax in his ears.

All willingness to change comes from pain, and it wasn’t for another month of psycho-exhaustion that Pammy and I tried again. Then it took only three or four nights.

Sam: “This is a point in my life when I need God to have a plan, because I don’t have a plan. I don’t have any idea of where this is all going. I keep finding this trust and surrender to take the next right step, because I don’t have a choice. I can be miserable and controlling, or I can trust and surrender—like when Amy told me in November of 2008 that she was pregnant and keeping the baby; well, after a few awful days, I saw that either I could be a pain-in-the-ass no-show, or I could understand that history was being made. Every day, this little guy—who
was
going to get born—was growing
a little bit more ready for life, so I decided I would love him sight unseen as he grew inside Amy. So I did have a choice.

“I’m grateful that I have these two people to completely put love energy into, even if things are not perfect between me and Amy, if Jax is demanding or is getting a tooth—I can stand it better, that things are unendingly hard and loud. It’s like a spiritual skin-hardening—like my skin is toughening up, and not just the hands and the high-traffic areas.

“The price of all this love energy is the tremendous burden and self-sacrifice and total hundred-eighty-degree overhaul of your life. Some people live a bachelor life their whole life and either do or don’t love it, but they aren’t forced into doing spiritual weightlifting and aerobics, as I am by Jax and school. I think God needs me to master this level of hardship for what is coming. One good thing is that this year, people didn’t even want to say their excuses in front of me, because on top of what we are all doing collectively at school, I’m also raising a baby. I’m doing what they’re doing in school and what they used to complain about, and also doing this other job, of being a father. So my peers are seeing that you can get a lot more done than you would have ever imagined, if you have to, and they have the choice to rise to that level. I am showing up every day like a raggedy, pathetic soldier, shell-shocked with exhaustion, like part of my uniform and hat are blown away, but I stagger to the lab or the shop where all the materials are, the saws and drills and equipment
and resins and paint booths and foam blocks and clay and fiberglass. And my friends feel like, If Sam can get to the shop, with Jax and Amy at home, with all those huge needs, then what possible excuse can I have to blow it off?

“Maybe I’m growing up because I don’t have the choice not to. I couldn’t say to God, ‘Look, I
want
to grow up into manhood, but the timing on this isn’t good.’

“I see the hardest patches as stepping-stones for what I will need as I go out from here.”

Sam’s tuition and my quarterly income taxes are both due now, but I found out today that I am getting a check from my publisher this week. I told Sam and he said, “Thank you, Riverhead Books, for employing the unemployable.”

I did not tell a soul that I was feeling so anxious about our finances. If you get too tweaked about money, it means you have bad values, and you feel like a shit for caring so much, and it gets you at a deep level, down to the bone—your greed, and superficiality, all sense of worth and safety.

When you don’t have enough or you run out, you feel in your core that the leak has begun and there will be no end to the leakage. And this makes you feel like a chump. Whereas having some money gives you the conviction that you’re not naked in the howling wind, even though you basically are, existentially. It assures you that at least you’re better than
some people—you’re not with the crack addicts or, maybe even worse, living with the relatives. So there’s that.

Everything in the culture supports the illusion that if you get the right products, spouse, and house, and keep your weight down in general, the real you will not be exposed, and people may be able to love you—horrible you.

But the winds of opinion or the bus or cancer can still mow you down, equally, whether you have money or not. Money can’t even protect you from baldness. Many of the richest, most powerful men in the world are bald, and all the money in the world can’t prevent or reverse this. There’s no treatment you can buy, even with your millions. Rogaine helps a few men, a little. You’d think there would be
something
you could do if money was no object—some advanced procedure, in São Paulo, involving gene-splicing with a hairy monkey. But no.

Wow.

After all those uncomfortable patches we’ve come through, we had a delayed, lovely, just fine twenty-first-birthday party for Amy at my house, with Neshama, Stevo, and Clara, who manages to be exultant and shy; my cousin Robby, Emmy Smith, Sam, Amy, Jax.

Sam has been out of school for two weeks. He’s a different person.

Jax was a fully shared human being today. Amy released
him to the tribe, and everyone clamored for a turn to hold him.

Sam’s tickling Jax as a means of happy contact seems redundant, because Jax is all smiles, laughs, and connection. Still, this image, whenever I witness it, breaks my heart.

For the first time in months, Sam, though weary, showed real flexibility and ease, maybe even a little bounce. For once he was not trapped in “Oh God, I should really be doing something else,” or “I’m dying, I need to get some sleep, I have so much to do.”

I was blown away by everyone, especially Sam and Amy—it’s all kind of a mess sometimes between them, but today was what love looks like. Sam was on time, wearing a clean dress shirt and jeans, occasional joy on his face in seeing Amy honored. I know he’d rather be out and about, cruising with his friends, with the guys, after the last three grinding weeks of projects and finals. But he is here, in the midst of the love of our friends and family, and just so totally present after having been away.

Love looks like kindness.

Love also looks like the cake Robby made for Amy, the best cake I’ve ever had. It was three layers of dark chocolate, with a cooked buttercream frosting. It was chewy and resistant, but it melted in your mouth at the same time, don’t ask me how. It was a perfect metaphor for life, the light and the dark together, several textures at once.

And it wasn’t pretty at all.

I don’t trust pretty. Petit fours are pretty, but they’re always a little sawdusty.

The cake looked like the earth. When you cut through the top layer of frosting, though, it was like looking into a hole in the snow and seeing dark dirt below—out of such homeliness came the sublime, which pretty much sums up most of life these days.

The frosting coated every raw place in you, like an emollient or an unguent. And it wasn’t too sweet. There was no gritty sugar feel that would make your teeth crunkle.

It had a funny crust, like a protective layer, and did not have a perky shape: the three layers weren’t stacked exactly right. It looked like a Dr. Seuss cake.

Cute cakes squash down too fast. I’m not saying I couldn’t eat a whole one all by myself, and they are reduced to dope-rush-sweet even as you chew—which, don’t get me wrong, I like. But you could have fed Robby’s cake to the Queen of England, and it was so great he made it for Amy’s twenty-first-birthday party and Jax’s five-month, even though Jax preferred to eat the plate and Lily’s ear.

I bought a used mini-laptop, an Asus, on eBay to take to India with me, and it was hilariously tiny, and sophisticated. But when I went into Borders to check out the Wi-Fi, it didn’t work. I spent an hour on my cell phone with a technical
support person at Asus, but she could not figure out the problem and get it working. She suggested that I mail it to the company. But I was leaving in a few days. So I called Sam from the car, feeling distraught, duped, ripped off. I’d bought another lemon, which must mean that
I’m
a lemon.

“Now, Mom,” he said sternly, “what is the first thing we do?” I didn’t have a clue, unless it was to assign blame. “We seek wise counsel. You call Rachel after we hang up.” Rachel is the IT person who always fixes our computers.

“I know the feeling,” he said. He reminded me about his buying a used paintball gun for several hundred dollars when he was fourteen. All of his friends in eighth grade had them, and went to special sites in the woods where they shot each other with ammo balls of paint. (Eighth grade was only six years ago. Eighth grade. God almighty. I need to stop and put my head down between my knees.) Anyway, the gun was defective—but he couldn’t get a refund, since it was used. So he started replacing it part by part. He said it was the Corvette of paintball guns. And three great things happened: He ended up with a much better piece of equipment. He could use it more effectively than the other kids could use theirs, because he knew every square inch of it and what each tiny part did. And after that he was able to help all of his friends with their paintball guns.