Some Assembly Required (5 page)

Still, I pretend to be beatific in my neutrality. I let them flail it out, because that is the sort of caring soul I am.

Nature is trying to help them define themselves in this new way. They are remaking who they are, at a core level, with a third. Whereas before, sometimes they didn’t do all that well as two. And now three, our fabulous new person dumped into the middle of a tough relationship.

Sorry it is so hard for me to write to you, we are both sick with tiredness most of the time. I loved our first time together at St. Andrew today, how everyone cried with being happy. When Sam stood up while holding him and said, “This is our son,” it was like
The Lion King
, and we both cried, but luckily Jax didn’t, ’cause he was asleep.

And tonight, he had his first bath. You could tell he was very content ’cause he peed very casually, like lah lah lah, just going pee in my bath with my mom and dad.

Jax is a sucker. Even when he’s not hungry, all he wants to do is suck. Sometimes we’ll try to give him a binky, but when he falls asleep, it’ll fall out, and then when he tries to suck again, it wakes him up ’cause he’s mad it’s gone. So we
usually resort to giving him our finger. But tonight more than once he found his thumb and was in total ecstasy.

I am going to take Jax to visit my parents in the next few weeks. They are going to meet us in Chicago so all my aunts and uncles and cousins and best friends can see him (us) too.

My uncle Millard stopped by to meet Jax today, and to see Sam and pay homage, as he put it, to Amy. He lives right up the street with his son Ricky and his grandson Oliver, who has just become a teenager. Millard and I have lunch every two or three weeks, and Sam, Stevo, and I cannot get enough of him. He is the patriarch of the family, the husband of fifty years to my mother’s twin sister, Pat. He is in his mid-eighties and has been a father figure to my brothers and me since our father died; Millard often tells stories about my father, his brother-in-law, with whom he was great friends. He is, or used to be, the same height as my father, six-foot-one, and has always been skinny, even though he is a gourmet chef, cooking constantly, and now I think he is down to about 125 pounds since my aunt Pat’s death. He has small, quick, brown eyes and a skinny chiseled face, a finely strung Jewish scholar’s face, and beautiful teeth that are sort of incongruous— a lovely smile. He is up there with the two or three smartest people I know, a history professor for years at the College
of Marin, with a deep vein of spirituality that he insists be borne up by his understanding of science, and what can be proven, and especially how it might dovetail with what modern physics could prove.

Sam loves him more than any other man except Stevo. He asked Millard to be a grandfather to Jax, but Millard told him, “Oh, sweetheart, I just want to be the very best great-uncle once removed, or great-great-uncle, or whatever the hell it is I would be.”

Millard hugged and kissed Amy and me at the door, and tiptoed into the living room in case Jax was sleeping, but he wasn’t. So Millard sat down next to Sam and took Jax out of his arms, and gave him the big Shalom—it is
always
the big Shalom with Millard, the big skinny welcome, the bagelly Shalom, not Moses and not schmaltzy, but tribal, the chief coming by to welcome the newest brother.

I’m trying not to think about Amy and Jax going to Chicago. It will be hard not seeing him for a few weeks, but I often think of Trudy and Ray, who have to go for months between visits, and this helps me to be less of a whiny baby than I would otherwise be. This is the one fly in the grandma ointment—the total love addiction—the highest highs, and then withdrawal, craving, scheming to get another fix. All I
do is wait for another chance to be with the baby. He has basically ruined my life. I begin to think about Jax the moment I wake up, wondering what he can do now that he couldn’t do yesterday. But it is not my fault—we’re wired to be delighted, obsessed; we’re engineered that way.

Babies’ smells set off chemical reactions through us that make us want to love and nurture them. This is such an unfair advantage, and it is truly how they get you. What if al-Qaeda could weaponize this?

Where else will you see someone who is
never
mean, or who isn’t wrecked yet? By kindergarten, almost all kids have gone a little bad, because so many families are unhealthy and competition to succeed starts so early—way before kindergarten nowadays. For Jax, at nearly a month, nothing is wrecked. His skin is so ethereal and smooth, and he is not required to do anything or make decisions, so he doesn’t have a history of screwing up yet, and all of his needs and desires are fulfilled almost immediately: wet to dry, empty to full, edgy to relaxed, rocked asleep and then awake. You’d almost want to be Jax, if you didn’t know what he was in store for—namely, a fully flawed human life. Stubbed toes, seventh grade, acne, broken hearts.

Sam can see now what beauty
he
sprang from, and how pathetically I loved him as a baby. It’s unimaginable that we were all so perfect and lovely once, as opposed to our current conditions—awful, slightly scaly, plumping up, and in decay.
Beckett said we were all bonny once. And babies’ needs are achievable for the time being. They know they want something in their tummies; there’s a lot of pleasure for them in fullness, in contact with warm skin, in the sweet circuit with the mother and father.

Jax is puzzled in a mellow, curious way, like “Huh? Now what? Excuse me, people, now something big and hairy is licking my ear.”

I pissed off Amy by waking him up in his car seat so my friend Judy could meet him. Judy is famous in these parts as Miss Kitty, the folksinger who performs at
all
your better little kids’ parties. I was in Stepford Wife mode, mad at Amy for being hours later than when she’d said they’d get here. Judy was ecstatic to meet Jax, and I think relieved that it was my son who was the father and not hers. We raised our boys together from when they were three, and we still hang out together. When Jax woke, he gaped at Judy like he knew she was a huge star in these parts, Beyoncé to the nursery set.

Jax was lovely and dear for a long time today, just delicious smells and wonder, and then sleepy, cranky, gritching, flapping and kicking, and then dropping off in my arms. But if I tried to shift my arm even an inch, he’d blink wide-awake—there’s something so horror-movie about the way babies’ eyes pop open, to
catch
you, like you’re trying to escape. You feel like Daffy Duck when he finally gets away from the huge bad guy, and nails the door shut, but turns around to find the guy behind him in the same room.

Amy took a long bath here, and then painted my toenails even though I was mad at her for being late, and then for being mad at me, for being mad at her for being late. Aye-yi-yi. I was trying to suppress it but felt tense and sort of nuts. So it was definitely grace when she gave me a pedicure, with red toenail polish; it was a laying on of hands, like she used to do for Gertrud. Not that there is
any
correlation, I’m sure, between the way she intuitively knew how to care for that sometimes fussy old German woman, and youthful, adorable, endlessly patient me.…

Later Amy nursed, and when I put Jax, who was asleep, on the couch to change him, my dog Lily cleaned his ears. Then she got up in her usual space at the far end of the couch, by Jax’s head. Her tail was slapping the couch like a windshield wiper, an inch from his face, and with each slap, I was trying to protect Jax’s head from getting whapped, and miraculously Amy and I were in hysterics; slap slap slap. Jax slept, totally unaware that he was about to get a heavy, bushy tail right in the chops. I will start to take him to Judy’s weekly sing-along for little kids, at Fort Baker, near the Golden Gate Bridge, as soon as he develops neck control. Miss Kitty makes up for a lot. Ask any kid in this county—they all grew up on her albums and performances. She had a boy in one music class who said, while listening to a concerto for oboe, “I
love
the hobo.” And the little girl beside him said, “The hobo
rocks
.”

No further comments about Amy and Jax going to Chicago, although I know she wants to go soon. She is missing everyone there terribly, and everyone is desperate to see her and the baby. Her grandmother is slipping away, and the estate pays for Amy to visit as often as possible. Trudy is there frequently, and will make a point of being there whenever Amy and Jax can visit, too.

My dear friend Neshama came for dinner, as she does most Tuesdays, even when there are other friends and family visiting. She loves my family, and they love her. I have been close to her since 1974, thirty-five years. She is in her seventies, with short gray fuzzy hair, reads as much as I, works at the Fairfax Library, and has three grandchildren who live in the East Bay, with whom she is close. I can tell her anything, even my ugliest thoughts. I confessed today that I love having a grandson partly because if Sam dies, which I’ve dreaded since
my
pregnancy test came back positive, then there will still be a mini-Sam. I asked her if she would hear my confession. Afterward, she said, “Oh, we all have it. It’s genetics. It’s what they call in England an heir and a spare.” You need to have a lot of kids, because some of them will be killed by snakes and Visigoths. Plus you need to be sure someone will be there to change you when you’re old.

On bad days, when life felt ludicrous, or like we’re all here
in a big penal colony, my hilariously crabby Vedanta friend Karen used to look at her twin babies and think, What did you do last round to get sentenced to this joint? Arson?

This morning I called Sam to say hello, and it turned out that he and Amy had had a terrible argument the night before. She’d threatened again to take the baby to Chicago or go live with her parents in North Carolina. They’d had a long-drawn-out fight while window-shopping at Saks, and she’d left with Jax, just disappeared. So Sam, four months after quitting smoking, went straight into a smoke shop and bought a cigar (he didn’t want to start smoking cigarettes again); he stepped outside, sat down on the curb, and started smoking it. He was apoplectic. He said that he started praying for a cougar—the human, female kind, i.e., a stunning and successful older woman—to come along and spoil him for the day. Or an Eskimo, like in the story I’ve told him since childhood, where the man crashes his plane in the tundra, then wakes up in a hospital, furious with God for not having been there to save him—He would have left him to die if this stupid Eskimo hadn’t finally come along.

But instead of Michelle Pfeiffer or Demi Moore, along came two middle-aged, heavily bearded East Indian men, one in a saffron robe. They walked past him, then backtracked. The man in the robe pointed to the cigar and said, with a
heavy Indian accent, “The smoke is on the outside, but the problem is on the inside.”

Sam said he felt as if he’d just been Tasered, but in a good way—a God shot. He thought, Are these guys my Eskimo?

He said, “You have my attention.”

“Come with us and meditate,” said the sidekick, also with a thick accent. “It will be what you need.”

“How much will it cost?” Sam was hoping for a reason not to go.

The two men erupted in laughter. “What kind of meditating do
you
do? It costs nothing. Come with us.”

Sam looked inward and wondered whether these guys had anything to do with his prayer for a cougar five minutes before, whether maybe God had gotten His signals crossed, but he decided to trust his gut that this is what God had sent in place of that.

He stood up and began walking with the cigar in his hand. One of the men said, with great authority, “You don’t need that,” so Sam threw it onto Geary. The other man said, “No, no, someone needs that, just not you.” So Sam retrieved it and put it on the curb. They went together down the street, to the apartment of a very kind woman whom Sam guessed was about forty, who has a small gathering every week. A group of eight people of all stripes were doing a standing meditation, moving slowly from foot to foot, chanting a mantra. He watched until they were done, and then ate a fresh vegetarian meal with them and talked about meditation. It
turned out they met more formally on Sundays at a meditation center in beautiful Los Altos Hills, forty-five minutes southeast of the city, and they invited him to meet them there whenever he could make it. One of the men would teach him meditation, one of the women would teach Amy, and everyone would help mind Jax.

When Sam got home, he was so refreshed that it didn’t really matter if Amy was still mad or not.

“Oh, no,” I exclaimed over the phone in my most understanding way. “What if you become a Hare Krishna?”

“I’m not going to leave St. Andrew,” he said. “But now me and Amy have free meditation teachers. Want to come to the ashram with the three of us on Sunday?”

I laughed and said I was teaching Sunday school.

“Well,” he said. “I just knew you’d love this story. It’s so you.”

It is Sam’s twentieth birthday today. Thank God; it sounds so much older. Another way of looking at it is that he is in his third decade now, so it doesn’t seem like such a big deal that already he’s a father. Yesterday it did, when he was nineteen.

He, Amy, and Jax went to the ashram in Los Altos Hills for the second Sunday in a row, for what is called kirtan—chanting, meditating, a vegetarian meal together afterward,
with ten or so Indian and other Asian people. Dada, the man in the saffron robe, is the teacher of the people who gather on Sundays. He is visiting from India and is Sam’s meditation teacher. Didi is Japanese and teaches the women, but she wasn’t there that day. The universal mantra of the group is
Baba nam kevalam,
and I cannot get it out of my head. It is the most user-friendly mantra I have heard. It means: Love is all there is; everything is made of love, and love is who you are, period. Amy was offered rice, salad, dal, green olives, and two fruit smoothies, one with honeydew and one with berries. But first she had to nurse Jax. Ragu, the other of the two men who had approached Sam on Geary, came over to sit with her in the living room while she finished nursing Jax, who then passed out. Ragu held him for half an hour while Amy and Sam ate with the other people in the kitchen and, as Amy reports, Dada was on the computer, doing only God knows what. Day trading? Facebook?