Some Assembly Required (8 page)

She looked at me like I was nuts, then got out a notebook as if she were my secretary.

I said that he had successfully mastered an understanding of the basic concepts, transitioning from distress and uncomfortable states to relief and temporary improvement. From hungry to full, cold to warm, wet to dry, anxiety to breast, bored to watching funny people. I said he got an A+, which she put at the top of her paper, and circled.

We listened together for a while to his sounds, coos and peeps and snorfles. Listening to him is my single favorite thing about life these days, along with holding him in my arms while he sleeps. Not long ago, I told my friend Leo how bad my back has been lately, and he said he has a guy in Minneapolis who could help me, a master Chinese ortho pedic surgeon who now heals people by doing
tui na
, Chinese bodywork massage with acupuncture, while making what sound like soft bird and pig imitations. Leo said I would have to step out on my faith, though, because the man is brilliant but not board-certified; he hasn’t been able to take the boards in the United States because his
English
sounds like bird and pig imitations, too.

Maybe
he
would know what Jax is trying to say.

“How are you doing, darling?”

“Bummed. Bad. I can’t find any balance now between school, and Amy and Jax. I can’t schedule any Sam time, not any at all, just to sit with myself. My classes are kicking my butt. The Core classes you have to pour yourself into, because if you do great models, it goes into your portfolio. The rest are stepping-stone classes, in the sense that they are prerequisites to the Core classes, but I think I need to take more of them because I can’t manage the extreme time pressure of the one Core class you are expected to take each term. Every teacher
so far has been great, though, so I guess I just have to figure out a way to calm myself and be grateful, instead of being a jerk. But I’m not there yet. I’m disappointed with myself, not being able to do more. I’m barely hanging on. It’s going to take me five years to graduate instead of four, which is frustrating. It makes me feel like kind of a loser, because I want to get on with my life, and not be in school. I’d like to be working full-time, and take care of my son. Best case would be to work for myself. Worst case would be on a salary, because after you have a kid, money suddenly seems like such a stupid thing to work for all your life. But all of this is the price of having Jax. I’m kind of okay with it. I mean, what are my choices?”

“Are things different between you and God, since you had Jax?”

“Well, when I’m talking to God, it’s still Him and me, which I love, because with friends and family, it all ultimately ends up being about Jax. With God, I don’t feel pressured to talk about Jax. I guess with Jax, I feel more like a brother than a dad, because we’re so close in age. I feel kind of like a taxi driver trying to get God from place to place. I sure don’t feel like a TV dad. It’s more like being in God’s Secret Service: my job is to protect this kid and his destiny.

“I feel desperate of him—maybe that’s not correct grammatically, but I feel
desperate
of him.

“I had no idea how damaged I was until I had a kid—how totally powerless. I feel about him like you do when you hold a really young, vulnerable baby kitten that’s not quite at the
age when you’re supposed to pick it up. Like, if he chooses not to smile at me, or is fixated on Amy, I feel just crushed. Or when we’re hanging out with Kenny Boo’s kid Amari, I totally realize how crazy I am, because Amari is two months older, and I know that, but I still compare him and Jax. Jax isn’t nearly as tough as Amari—he might even be
afraid
of Amari. Then I feel so self-conscious—of
Jax
. Because he’s so little and inept! He has all these tics, and spazzy moves, as if I have this shrimpy little Tourette’s person, but Amari is mellow and cool, like George Clooney. I know at five months old, which is how old Amari is, you get quieter because your nerves are better and you’re much more together. But still! I worry that Jax’s hands aren’t big enough—I mean, Amari’s are baseball mitts compared to his. God, can you even believe this? The cross we bear is self-consciousness. But Jax is really a perfect baby. I’m sickeningly in love with him.”

“What can Jax do now that he couldn’t do before?”

“Oh my God. He can bring his
foot
to his mouth. I mean, YO. I bet you can’t do that anymore. I call it his foot phone. I say, Jax is on the foot phone now. Alex Babakitis and I used to do this when we were about ten. We’d put one of our feet by one of our ears, and talk to our foot. We’d say, ‘Hello? Oh, sorry, wrong number,’ and then hang up our foot.

“He’s reaching for more and more. If he has a goal, like the plastic rings on his car seat, and tries for them, but it doesn’t go well, he stops and wriggles his hands back and forth. Sometimes he can do it perfectly—get what he reaches
for—other times it doesn’t go so smoothly, and then he Etch A Sketches it—shakes his hands up to start over.

“It’s all changing. It’s getting more real.”

The Day of the Dead is today and tomorrow, so I invited Millard, Stevo, Jax’s cousin Clara, Sam, Jax, Amy, and cousin Neshama for a party; Annette had to work. It’s such a great holiday, so we can remember life by celebrating food and colors as the days grow darker and colder, smokier; it’s a time of deep change. We’re moving into the darkest time of the year. I have a huge beautiful photo on my dining room wall, of an older woman selling marigolds from a wheelbarrow on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. She looks like a jack-o’-lantern, with her broad face and enormous teeth. She’s rooted and grounded and solid, but she’s also aloft with joy. Her wheelbarrow holds hundreds of flowers in a tumble, all held together somehow, yet at the same time exuberantly spilling over.

Sam and Amy seemed really close today, and Sam was especially glad to be with Millard, who has lost even more weight, so he actually looks like a Day of the Dead figurine. I had decorated the house and lit the darkness with bright flowers and candles, and everyone shuffled in through the piles of dead leaves outside, hunched over in heavier clothes. Clara alone stopped to jump in the leaves, wearing an embroidered
blouse that I got her in Mexico. She has come through the bad divorce between her mother and Stevo with her spirit more than intact. She is blonde and funny, really the light of our lives. She bent her knees to jump. You can’t jump until you sink down a little. And when you are aloft, there is always such dark and sad stuff underneath, below you. But if you touch down into it first, it helps you get aloft.

Jax and Amy were here all day. Jax can now scrunch up his face into what Sam calls his Hard Look, with his brow furrowed, while he splutters and drools. It is just terrifying. What next? Will he start giving me the finger?

I think about the idea of his having dual citizenship—a child of God and heaven, with a human life here—and how confusing that has always been for me. And what he is in for, because our spiritual and human identities coexist, the way light is both a particle and a wave.

I bought a ticket today to meet my friend Bill Hanson in Delhi around the time of Jax’s six-month birthday. Now I cannot remember why that seemed like a good idea. The timing is dicey, because there’s so much on my plate—Jax, Millard beginning to fail, the book I’m pretending to write—but
I need something bigger to shake up my snow globe, and boy, this is bigger.

I’m stuck in the usual small neuroses and obsessive pain, but India is global dreams and madness. Is it crazy that I am going? Maybe deliciously ludicrous.

Bill has been to India many times, and speaks a little Hindi, and always said he would meet me if I could get myself there. He never thought in a million years that I could do it. He’s great; hardly anyone makes me laugh harder. The fact that I might have a nervous breakdown if I can’t see Jax for two weeks: reason enough to go.

Plus I had hundreds of thousands of frequent-flyer miles from various book tours. Although that does not explain why something inside me picked the single hugest, most sprawling, grotesque place on earth. I guess the left brain doesn’t know what the right brain is doing.

Usually, when I travel, I want to go only between the pages of a book—or a movie. So I’m going there in person, to compare, contrast, and gape. I want to see what I’ve been seeing my whole life in movies, the giddily colorful amid the squalor, right out there on the streets for all to see. A pantheon of wild deities who are everywhere, embodied in cows wandering in traffic, holy men, murals, cow dung, and storefront temples. The celebrations of death in the river that you also
bathe
in—all the elements present at the same time in these moments: earth, fire and ash, air, water, dung.

Is dung an element? It may as well be.

“Hello, darling. Tell me the latest.”

“The main thing is that even when Jax was new, you could make plans, even though you knew the plans wouldn’t work out. Before, I’d wake up at eight, walk to school, work ten hours, come home. Now I wake at six-thirty, help get the morning started, which takes forever, walk to school, work eight hours, be behind,
always
be behind.

“Two weeks ago, if Jax was fussy, you could bend down and smile, and he’d come right back to happy. Now the human quality of his not always being fine has come out—doors are opening for him. Now if you don’t smile right or pick him up the exact way he likes, he makes his mad face at you—the Hard Look—and he might not get over it for a whole minute. He’ll make unhappy, frustrated farting noises at you, and he has the face to go with it—doing this for about sixty seconds is his limit now, but I can see that, like you always say, it is
all
downhill from here. It’s
all
over for England.”

The mother of a boy Sam went to school with since first grade came up to me at the health food store today and asked if it was true. “Is it true?” she said, in full-tilt, fake-concerned schadenfreude. Her son, whom I adore, is in his sophomore
year at Berkeley. When Jax first arrived, and parents of Sam’s friends would either tell me how great it was or ask how things were going, I would lapse into an embarrassed explanation—I’d say that I’d always longed to be a grand parent, but of course had thought it would be in another ten years or so, and I’d paw at the ground and repeat, “But who asked me?” This always got a laugh. Mostly everyone has been sweet and positive about Sam’s having a baby, except for one mother who lives in our neighborhood, who has been very distant, as if we were a cautionary tale and contagious, or as if Sam had joined the Taliban. But today I showed the woman in the health food store my most recent pictures of one of the handsomest babies anyone has ever seen, and one of Sam holding him, both of them looking like Gap models, and one of Amy, so beautiful, holding out a laughing Jax toward the camera. And as the mother oohed and aahed, I thought to myself, This is the single greatest fucking thing that has ever happened to me.

The only son of some people Sam and I know from town has died.

How on earth can the parents survive that? How can the grandparents?

Same old inadequate answer: They will survive with enormous sadness and devastation. I don’t see how that is possible.
But looking back over the years, I see that people do go on against absolutely all odds, and truly savage loss.

Some of us have a raggedy faith. You cry for a long time, and then after that are defeated and flattened for a long time. Then somehow life starts up again. Other people set up foundations so other kids don’t die the way theirs did, and so their kids didn’t die in vain, or they do political work for the common good. Your friends surround you like white blood cells. It’s just fucking unbelievably sad, pretty much forever, when so much love and life have been packed into one person and then the person dies too soon. But you can shake your fist at the void with scorn and say, “You didn’t get her, you bastard. We did.” Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break through the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few moments, or maybe they tickle you into movement and response, if only because you have to scratch your nose.

“I’m blown away by how beautiful Jax’s skin is. He has brown legs, like Amy’s. I do not. I have see-through legs. I got
this from
you
, Mom. You don’t realize how tan, what a rich color he has to him, until you see him lying next to me, like a baby Mayan, with a white radioactive daddy.”

A friend of Amy’s and mine blurted out this morning while we were walking the dogs on the ridge that Amy told her she is thinking of having Jax baptized at her old Catholic church in Chicago. The floor dropped out from under me, and I roared, “She’s thinking of what?” Then the friend hemmed and hawed, and said, Well, a date’s actually been set. Amy and her parents apparently planned it when she was with them in North Carolina.

I pooh-poohed the ridiculousness of this with a wave, and we continued walking along the ridge in the fog. Instantly I was in Richard Nixon levels of twitch and paranoia and glower. I faked equanimity, which is my strong suit, and pointed out the few autumn wildflowers: buttercups and white milkmaids. But betrayal and suspicion streaked across my mind like vapor trails.

I felt so crazed that I had to call horrible Bonnie, even though I knew she would say that something beautiful was being revealed. Luckily she wasn’t home. I called Neshama, who said wisely that Amy is desperate to mark her space, to even have a space of her own at all. She said I must seem like
such a threat, because I have such huge love for and from Jax, while Amy wants to be the font of love for him, the Vaillancourt Fountain on the Embarcadero.