Some Assembly Required (18 page)

I hesitated in the parking lot. And I almost went back. Instead, I bought a forty-five-dollar tinted skin lotion. I got a free sample of eye cream. Then I went home.

The sweet dogs tried to comfort me and I was pissy with them. It was not until I hurt Lily’s feelings and told her to back off that I said to God, “I think I’m done. I want to come back.” But I couldn’t think of how to do that, so I called Tom.

He said, “We all enjoy stories of your hysteria and shallowness.”

“Will you talk to me about Ash Wednesday?”

He said, “Everyone hates you.”

“I get so goddamn sick of myself,” I said.

“Ashes are about remembering that we came from dust, and to dust we will return,” he said. “We’re all going to die. Our loved ones will die. But we can repent, and change, become more kind, and present to life—because left to ourselves, we all get burnt out. Think of when you were drinking, feeling better and better as the night progressed—and then how you’d wake up with the taste of ash in your mouth.”

“What does it mean liturgically?”

“It means, I would go door-to-door and explain to your neighbors that now is the time to take down the damn outdoor Christmas lights. Starting tonight, we let go of that which is past, and enter the new season, as a community, as we begin
our observation of Easter. We’re going to let go of everything that got us here, our own best thinking. Liturgically, it means that we say, ‘Let’s change our lives, again, try to be kinder people, again, try not to be such assholes.’

“And it means, as a community, we would
all
like to see some improvement from a certain writer in Marin.”

I laughed, and ate a cherry Tootsie Pop, slowly, and this was how I shook off for a little while the taste of ashes that covers me.

“Sam, tell me what he is like now, at seven months old.”

“He’s a totally roaring, rocking, kicking Godzilla child—like he’s part of a World Series crowd that’s gone wild. He’s gotten such focus and will, and then Amy and I have these clashes of will, so it’s like we’re two alpha-male gorillas, trying to raise Godzilla.

“What’s changed in the last few months is that the buck really stops here—with me. The problem has to stop at this chain of command. I’m not going to turn over my problems to you—to my
mother
—and say, ‘I just can’t take it anymore.’ Now I automatically feel, ‘Let’s just get it done.’ Before, I could perfectly imagine an elaborate drawing or plan, and then stall forever on creating it. Now I know I need to not put it off. With a horrible diaper, before, I might wait for Amy to
discover it and deal with it, which was chickenshit. Now, like I said, the buck stops here. Just do it.

“Boy, we’ve come a long way from those first black-tar poops—now they’re pretty human, kind of manly. Now, because he’s so grown-up and can do so many things and engage with us, I think, ‘Why am I wiping some other guy’s ass? What’s wrong with this picture?’ Before, he was so helpless, but no more. I tell him, ‘I am NOT going to be doing this for much longer.’

“Today he was on my lap being happy and playful with me for a long time, and then he wanted to crawl off and do his own thing. I let him go. Wow. Now he wants to
go
somewhere. Before, there was no somewhere else. Now, he might want to go to his bouncy saucer. And he totally wants to, with conviction, like when one of the dogs wants to go out—he doesn’t give up or forget about it. It’s like he’s going, ‘Hey, dude. What does it take for a guy to get put in his bouncy saucer around here?’”

“How has your relationship with God changed since you became a father?”

“Well, obviously now I know what it feels like to be a father. So I know how my heavenly father feels about me—so loving and protective, wanting me to make something great of my one precious life.

“I wouldn’t even have to think about giving my life for Jax’s. In a split second, I’d say: ‘Oh, here—take it.’

“Our connection is so deep—it’s partly because I saw him when he was just a speck inside Amy, and I saw her, every step of the way, growing bigger with him—and then all those ultrasound photos of him inside her. And now this: Godzilla. That’s pretty profound to watch him grow from a speck. He and I are made of the same flow, the same stock, the same material, so we’re almost like the same thing. Plus we have the same heavenly father, so we’re also like brothers on earth together.

“I think about God constantly, as much as I think about Jax. It’s actually symbiotic—if I think about God, it means that Jax will have a sweet outcome, because I’ll be a sweeter father.

“I got the two main prayers from you, ‘Help help,’ and ‘Thank you thank you,’ but I pray now with more detail than that. Now I know God has a tool crib, and I can borrow from it. I say, ‘Hey, God, lend me some patience,’ or I pray for Him to lend me some perseverance so I can see my inventions through to the marketplace. The only problem for me is remembering to ask for the loan. Oh, and maybe patience.

“Like, say I have to get rid of an imperfection in a Maple Cube for class—a tiny excess bit of wood that I need to sand or saw off if I want an A. It has to be perfectly square and plumb. So Sam’s hands are going to be shaking, because I get anxious and I’ll have bad self-esteem. Then I remember God has a tool crib. So I’ll say, ‘Hey, could you lend me your steady hands?’”

Sam and Amy called yesterday, and both were in tears of exhaustion, and Jax was sobbing in the background, and Amy said in a tiny voice, “You know how you keep offering us Sleeping Through the Night Boot Camp? Could that start tonight? Can we come over right now?”

I taught Sam to sleep through the night when he was a few months old, because babies’ stomachs can hold enough milk to see them through and I was at the end of my rope. You nurse them at bedtime, put them down, and when they sob inconsolably, you go in and tell them what a good job they are doing. But you do not pick them up. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done, and the best. It makes you fall in love with your baby again.

Last night Jax did great. Amy was piteous but committed, and I was coldhearted and clinical about the whole thing—“Do
not
touch the baby, Amy. Step away from the baby. He has plenty of milk in his tummy to last the night. And do not sing to him, either, or he will expect it every night.”

Amy did great, too, and I did not crack under the strain, until Jax woke up at ten and sobbed. Amy went in, gave him assurances, and then went into my office to use my computer. Jax kept crying, and finally I sneaked like a thief into the guest room, where he was sleeping, lifted him out of his crib for a few minutes, calmed him down. I put him back, and was
tiptoeing out of the room when Amy appeared at the door. “Annie,” she said angrily, and gave me a very bad look. He cried for twenty minutes, and then he stopped. He began to sob again in the middle of the night, and it woke me, and I tiptoed into the kitchen to listen, and I heard Amy saying in the guest room, “You are doing a great job, Jax. I’m right here, but I’m not going to pick you up.” I went back to bed, and after a few minutes, he stopped crying.

I did okay when she put him down for his morning nap—boy, she is tough, and she is in with him now, nursing him before the gulag door slams shut for ten or fifteen minutes.

He sobbed during his afternoon nap, when Amy was doing Facebook on my computer. I crept in and patted him. It was not enough, and I sneaked out.

Then I went to find Amy at my computer, hung my head, and said, “I patted him.” She was mad. You’d have thought I’d given him IV Valium. “Jeez,” I said. “I just patted him!”

I’m in disgrace now, and cannot be trusted.

She told me that I have to admit in this journal that I sneak around like a dog, breaking the only boot-camp rule.

My friend Lizzy, who has grandchildren, happened to e-mail me today, and I replied and told her what was going on, what a generally awful, weak person I am, but also how contrite. She wrote back: “You are right about having to let Jax cry it out, but it is hard. As a grandma, I have done what you did. I struggled, and backslid. Remember, I called myself the Neville Chamberlain of the nursery—peace at any price.
Don’t be mean to yourself, though. You told old atheist me once that this is the only sin.”

Last night Jax got himself to sleep after ten minutes of crying, and then slept through the night. He passed out after crying a few minutes for both naps today. We all like him again and have decided to renew his lease.

Today was Millard’s memorial service, at a bigger house across the street from my cousin Ricky’s, where Millard had lived. The timing couldn’t have been worse: two days ago, I went to my dermatologist for my annual melanoma check, and she offered to burn some age spots and precancerous things off my face, and then she really got into it, and I wasn’t thinking about how awful and scabby I would look for the next few days. So today I woke looking like Dick Cheney’s best friend, that poor Mr. Whittington, after Cheney blasted him in the face with quail shot while hunting. Also, Amy and Jax are going to visit the relatives in Chicago for two weeks. Sam is distressed, as it is too long for him and Jax to be apart, but Amy has adamantly insisted on this arrangement, and that is that. She has a will like no other. Luckily, she also has a cosmetology license, and so, upon seeing my crazy duck-hunter
face, she started slapping unguents and foundations and powders on me, until I was presentable, in a
Six Feet Under
kind of way.

We all hiked together from my house—Neshama, Stevo, Annette, Clara, Sam, Amy, Jax; we are such a funny family. I got happy again. Sam told us as we walked that after Sleeping Through the Night Boot Camp, Jax has come into his own. Before that, if you said his name, he’d look right over. Now, if he’s involved with something, like his plastic phone or keys, and you call out to him, he’ll look up eventually, like he’s working on a presentation and time is money. Like he’ll have his people call your people.

Dozens of people had gathered, relatives of all ages, old friends, aged and middle-aged professors from Millard’s decades of teaching at the College of Marin. Some were unable to get up from their seats without young male volunteers and major construction-crane efforts. I have known many of them all my life, when their children were still at home and their spouses were alive. Now they were old, bruised by life, tweaked and achy but still whole, not to mention brilliant conversationally—in essence, like Millard was, and is.

Millard’s Jewish relatives came, and people from my father’s side, like my aunt Eleanor, whom Millard claimed as his sister-in-law once removed, and the former babies in the family, who were getting along now, all of whom I’ve been eating holiday meals with my whole life. Jax, Clara, and my
cousin Ricky’s three kids were the new generation, and boy, did they look new, compared with us.

There were great buffet tables of fine food—good food had been so important to Millard’s life. Fifty or so people bustled about; three old professors sat on one couch the entire time. We were disparate elements of Millard’s life, meeting in some cases for the first time, although I knew most people there. At some point, my cousin Kathy asked me to get everyone to sit down so our service could begin. You needed a cattle dog to round up all these people who wanted more food or another glass of wine, and I guess I was that cattle dog.

Millard’s spirit came through the dry, funny stories about him—as a father, an uncle, a wild and inspiring teacher, and a friend—but people focused mostly on his love for Pat. My cousins talked about how he was with her, which was something that you don’t see all that often on this side of things. He was so faithful in his love, even when she faded and was mentally diminished at the end. He honored and saluted her essence to the absolute end of her life, and of his. In my eulogy I said that I loved his personality combinations, his being brilliant and yet patient, learned and ethereal, loving and caustic, and his being down-to-earth, whether he was trying once again to help you understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, or a unified field theory, or the quirks and madness and genius of the Tudor dynasty—or trying to help you save a chicken
stew over the phone, or nagging you into having another helping of his latest and greatest new curry, and then accusing you of anti-Semitism if you declined. I loved his total devotion to and belief in family, in gathering, meeting, mourning, celebrating, and eating—and eating and eating. He loved the very old people in our family, and the babies, and the babies of the babies. He always remembered the ancestors. My brother John said that watching his love and de votion to my funny, bossy aunt Pat over the years was probably the most spiritual aspect of my family while he was growing up. I remember Millard and Pat coming to visit my mom a few days before she died, and how impatient Pat was, as usual, with my mom—how exasperating she found her, even when she was just lying quietly in a nursing home—and I remember how patient Millard was with both of them. He had always seen, through the decades, how hard my mom’s life was, and he was kindly and inclusive. My mother always felt what I always felt—that Millard thought she was wonderful, just as she was, and who she was, which was, in a word, family.

Sam, Amy, Jax, Clara, Stevo, and Neshama huddled together, joined by John, whom we adore but who lives a distance away and rarely makes appearances at family gatherings. Jax, in Amy’s lap in an easy chair near the fire, was dressed in teddy-bear football sweats, instead of the more formal baby wear I would have selected. It was to him, and not Millard, that we kept returning. Millard was the old year; Jax was the new.

Jax was comfortable, social, solid, observant, like Millard, and never cried. We took turns playing with him, and Sam walked around with him proudly, rocking him in his arms while answering people’s questions. “He’s seven months.… Oh,
me?
I’m twenty.”

Outside the huge windows were eucalyptus, bay laurel, the northern face and hills of Tamalpais. The service was a mix of sweet, uncomfortable, hilarious, touching. There was a sense of grace and economy, as had distinguished Millard’s departure.