The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race

ALSO BY SARA BARRON

People Are Unappealing*
*Even Me

Every week, I scrub the floors of my apartment. The way I go about the chore, personally, is I rip green abrasive tops off kitchen sponges, dampen them with soap and water, and glue them to the bottoms of my socks. Then I start gliding. It all looks a bit like cross-country skiing, which is effective for cleaning, but also exhausting. Once I’m done, I feel I deserve a treat. More often than not the treat comes in the form of a medical miracle show on TLC. This week’s episode was about a legless dancer and recent Juilliard graduate. Asked about her personal triumph over adversity, she stared squarely into the camera.

“Here’s what you do,” she said. “You dream. You believe. You achieve.”

“No,
you
achieve,” I corrected. “I do not achieve. Juilliard won’t let
me
spin on stumps instead of pointe shoes.”

For years, I’ve been jealous of the ailing and deformed: quadriplegics, human mermaids. A girl with organs on the outside. I don’t crave the impairment, really, I just think the attention seems nice. And this puts me in the minority. Murmur, “That looks
fun
,” at the sight of conjoined twins, and learn, ironically, what it means to feel alone.

Allow me to defend my position by explaining how I got here. You’ll like me more that way.

When I was ten years old, my six-year-old brother, Sam, was diagnosed with asthma. This diagnosis was the stone that built the fountain, and it was from this fountain that a neediness would spring. It wasn’t hope that sprang eternal. It was an aspiration for attention, the desire to feel special and unique.

Sam’s diagnosis wasn’t good news per se, but neither was it without its benefits. For it would gift unto my mother the eventual guiltless employment of a maid. And also a motto:

My Son Has Asthma
.

Like most ineffective plans for coping, it emerged the day of diagnosis. I’d gone to visit my brother in his hospital room, where he lay ensconced amid festive pillows and Mylar balloons. My mother sat perched at his bedside massaging his scalp. The attending nurse breezed through. She fluffed Sam’s pillows and saw me sitting in the corner.

“Wow!” she said. “In that polo shirt, you look
just
like Jerry O’Connell!”

It was 1989. Jerry O’Connell was not yet the strapping, chiseled husband of Rebecca Romijn, but rather the rotund child star.

The nurse departed. I said, “Mom. That nurse said I look like a boy, and that I am fat,” and my mother, still massaging, turned impatiently toward me.

“Not now, Sara, please,” she said. “Your brother Sam has asthma.”

Sam was already buoyed by a virtual raft of gifts. He was getting a massage! He was going to be
fine
. This whole asthma situation looked awfully good from my vantage point and a moment or two devoted to my own problems was, I thought, a fair thing to ask.

I considered throwing a tantrum. However, my mother preempted my tantrum by suggesting a stroll down the hallway.

Sam and I agreed. Sam had energy to burn from all the ice cream he was getting. As for me, I hoped to run into a boyishly handsome nurse who would say, “Sorry to bother you, but I simply
had
to ask: Are you Tina Yothers? You two look exactly alike.”

Sadly, the only person we ran into in the hallway was a sickly old man. He was balanced against a wall so he could let go of his cane and eat a Danish. He was blocking our path, and the fact of this had pissed my mother off.

“Look
out
!” she yelled. “
Please:
My son has asthma!”

The phrase became a generic exclamation, an
oy vey
stand-in employed to express varying emotions: Exhaustion, fear, surprise. Disappointment, foreboding, resolve.

Here, a sampling of occasions and the uses they’d inspire:

A hot day: “The humidity! My son has asthma!”

A long line: “This wait! My son has asthma!”

A casual dinner with friends: “Carol, pass the antipasto platter, please! I have a son with asthma!”

MY BROTHER RETURNED
home after three days in the hospital. In an effort to keep his asthma in check, my mother fed him hyperactivity-inducing steroids chased with hysterical advice, including but not limited to, “You’ll
die
if you smoke a cigarette” and/or “You’ll
die
if you stand
near
a lit cigarette.” The other order of business was to ensure a dust- and allergen-free home, and it was for this reason that my mother, for the first time in her life, decided to hire a maid. She’d dreamed of doing so for ages. We all had, as a matter of fact, since being near my mom when she cleaned guaranteed that you, whoever you were, would get to push her martyr button. You’d be minding your own business, for example, braiding your arm hair, when suddenly she’d have you by the wrist to coax you back behind a toilet.

“What do you see back there?” she’d ask.

“It’s very clean,” you’d answer. “So … nothing?”

“Nothing
but
…?”

“Nothing but … evidence of how hard you work?”

“I slave.”

“Nothing but evidence of how hard you slave?”

“Exactly.”

The guilt my mother associated with hiring a maid floated away on Sam’s first grating wheeze.

“I wish I didn’t
have
to have one,” she’d say about a person, like a person was an enema. “But I do, of course. I have a son with asthma.”

The following Monday a van pulled into our driveway. A woman climbed out and walked toward our front door.
This woman was truly enormous. I never did measure her for fear she’d slap my hand off, but my guess is that she measured in at a healthy six-foot-one. She entered the house, and it was only then that I noticed the smell. It was as though she’d smeared herself in salmon, then thought,
That
was stupid, and then smeared herself in Pine-Sol.

“Al-oh,” she’d said, in what I’d soon learn was a Polish accent. “I am Wanda.”

“
Witam
, Wanda,” said my mother. “I am Lynn. Lynn the missus and the mommy.
Witam, witam
.”

My mother spent a portion of 1968 on a kibbutz in the company of an Israeli boyfriend named Yoni with whom she spoke Hebrew. The experience left her with the impression that she had a knack for language, and now, with a chance to test the theory, she’d spent the afternoon prior to Wanda’s arrival riding her stationary bike, poring over a Polish-English dictionary.

“It’s my way of reaching out,” she said. “Foreigners appreciate the effort. I know these things. I traveled before I had you, you know. And before I had a son with asthma.”

A house tour commenced between my mother and Wanda. With nothing better to do I trailed along behind. I listened as my mother used the occasional bit of Polish. There was
da
(yes) and
nie
(no), as well as the more complex
nie spóznij
(do not be late) and
nie ukrywam moje pieniadze w moim domu
(I do not hide my money in my house).

As for the bulk of their communication, it was a language of their mutual invention. Watching it unfold was not unlike watching a lovers’ waltz, the coming together of two halves of a whole. You can’t put a price on chemistry,
see, and these two shared a wavelength. Call it kismet. Then tell me this is easy to decipher:

“Go here for a vroom-vroom, yes? BSHHHHHHHH? Dusty dirty go gone!”

That’s what my mother said to Wanda. And presume what you will, but Wanda did
not
respond, “Missus! Stop!
You
embarrassing
you
!”

No. She rather nodded like,
Thank you, Lynn, for showing me the vacuum in the closet
.

“BSHHHHHHHHH!” Wanda shouted. “Dirty go gone!”

“Da!”
said my mother, and nudged Wanda toward the kitchen, where a plate of Triscuits sat on the counter alongside a hunk of cheddar cheese. My mother pointed at the cheese and crackers, and then at Wanda’s stomach. “It goes GRRR? Wanda go munch-munch.” She mimed feeding herself. “Okay, okay?”

Wanda nodded. “Yes. Okay.”

They proceeded upstairs to the bathroom.

“One toilet?” asked Wanda. “One for the mister and the missus and the babies?”

“One bathroom, yes,” said my mother. “Lynn no a fancy lady, Lynn house no so fancy. See the toilet?”

“
Da
. I see you toilet.”

“Okay. Toilet yucky-yucky. So you scrub toilet
super
, Wanda. You scrub it super-super.”

Wanda launched her sternum toward the toilet to pantomime aggressive scrubbing. “Super-super missus, yes?” she asked.

“Oh,
yes
,” my mother answered. “This missus tells you:
Yes
.”

The house tour concluded with a conversation on the subject of Sam’s asthma. My mother called to Sam in his bedroom, and out he came, trotting along. She positioned him such that his back was to her and his face was to Wanda.

“Wanda,” said my mother, “here is Baby Sam. If home is dusty dirty, Sam go, ‘Hack, hack.’ Dusty dirty bad for Sam. You no scrub super-super
all
the home, Baby Sam is …” She performed wheezing. She made a woo-woo noise like a siren. “Baby Sam to doctor. BABY SAM AT DOCTOR BAD!”

Wanda gave a solemn nod. She pointed a sizable finger at my mother. “You a mommy,” she said.