“I want to move back to Paris,” I said to Paul.
“We’re not moving back to Paris.” He called the nurse for more morphine.
While I was waiting to be called in for surgery, Paul turned to me and said, half-joking, half-not, “Who should I marry if you die?”
My morphine-addled brain took a few extra seconds to digest this. “It’s whom,” I said. “Whom should I marry. It’s the object, not the subject.” My habit of correcting his grammar, as you might imagine, drives my husband mad. It’s also clearly a defense mechanism: correct the grammar, and you can avoid dealing with the actual meaning of the words. “Besides, I’m not going to die. You heard the surgeon. The appendectomy’s a standard procedure. No big deal.”
“I know, but what if…I mean…who will I talk to at night?” He was both smiling mischievously and tearing up around the eyes. Tears do not come easily to my husband. When his mother died from complications following surgery, orphaning him at fifteen, he could not cry. His life since then has been a battle to learn to do so.
I grabbed his hand. Bit my tongue over the misused who. To whom will I talk at night sounded weird anyway. “I don’t know,” I said, picturing another woman lying in my bed, showering in my tub, feeding pancakes to my children on Sunday mornings. “Someone nice, I guess. Who loves you and our kids.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, smiling. “That’ll be easy to find.” Though it was not cold in the room, Paul started to shiver.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m probably just getting a little cold.”
Sometime after 9:00 P.M., twenty-one hours after the first pain appeared, ten hours after having arrived in the emergency room, I was finally wheeled into the operating room for my appendectomy. But while my father had stayed in the hospital for ten days following his surgery, and my mother for five, I was released the next morning, right after breakfast. “You’re good to go,” said the surgeon.
“Really?” My doctor had called to say she was back in town and would be in sometime that afternoon to check up on me. I’d assumed I’d be staying at least until then.
“Have you passed gas?”
“Uh, yeah. I think so.”
“Then you’re fine. I’ll have the nurse bring you your release papers.”
“That’s it? You fart, you’re out?”
“Something like that.”
“Can I call someone to come get me first?” I felt pretty good, relative to the previous day, but that didn’t mean I was able to make it to the bathroom on my own.
“Oh, sure. Yeah. Go ahead. Call whoever you like.”
You can’t even imagine how badly I wanted to say whomever.
I called home. Paul had come down with a 103-degree fever in the middle of the night, which was now blossoming into a full-blown flu. This hadn’t kept him from bringing me my laptop and phone charger in the wee hours of the morning—on our Vespa, in the pouring rain—so I could edit my piece for the Times, but now he was feeling wretched, unable to move.
Hearing all of this, my parents, bless them, had flown up on the early shuttle from D.C. to help out. Dad promised to come get me at the hospital, just as soon as he’d had his shot of insulin and a chocolate croissant. You might think these two things should be mutually exclusive, and you’d be right, but you’re not my father; he wasn’t able to wrap his psyche around the concept of a sugarless life. The day he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, in fact, one of the first things he said to me, after “I’m dying,” was, “You people have been keeping me from chocolate cake for far too long. If I have only months left to live, I’m eating cake every day!”
My mother, who was taking care of the baby until Shanta showed up, got on the phone. “They can’t release you now,” she said. “You had surgery less than twelve hours ago.”
“Apparently, they can,” I said.
“Who says? Let me talk to them.” My mother still thinks she can fix everything with a dispassionate discussion with the right person. The crazy thing is, more often than not, she can. I once heard her get out of a speeding ticket by explaining to the arresting officer that she was on a special diet that required her to drink copious amounts of water, and so she was speeding to get home to pee. The two traded diet tips, and Mom was on her way. When the Baltimore Marriot in which she was staying caught on fire (I know, what is it with my family and fires?), after Dad’s first round of chemotherapy at Johns Hopkins, she was able to convince the officer in charge to let her enter a burning building to retrieve my father’s meds.
“Mom, the doctor’s not here. He already signed my release papers. Just send Dad.”
“He’s eating a chocolate croissant, can you believe it?”
“I can believe it.”
When I hung up, I placed a call to Daniel, my editor, and told him if we didn’t do the edit over the phone, right then and there, it would never get done. My apartment would be a zoo when I got home, what with Paul lying in our bed—aka my home office—sick, the baby’s crib in our room, the big kids off from school, my parents taking over my daughter’s bedroom, and my daughter squeezing in with my son into his, well, you can’t really call it a bedroom. It’s more like a closet with a window. “I don’t think I’ve ever done an edit with someone in a hospital bed before,” said Daniel.
“Well,” I said, popping open my laptop, thinking that if you edit a column called “Modern Love,” you have to figure there are maiden voyages for just about every act imaginable, “now you have.” We talked through the piece, line by line, interrupted only by the various nurses who kept poking their heads in, asking when I’d be leaving. “Soon,” I promised. “My father’s coming soon.”
Dad finally arrived, helped me gather my things, and offered me his arm to lean on. I made it halfway to the nurses’ station before realizing I could not make it any farther, paternal support notwithstanding. “You sure she should go home in this state?” my father asked a nurse.
“You put a wheelchair under that butt, she’ll be fine,” she replied. In her arms were new sheets she was delivering to my room, to replace the used ones on my bed. She was busy, damn it. The hospital was busy.
A wheelchair was procured, a taxi hailed. I felt every pothole on Amsterdam Avenue pierce straight through my dissected belly into my sternum, then I waited ten minutes for the unreliable elevator, walked into my apartment, and barfed everywhere. As in everywhere. The living room. The hallway. The bathroom floor. The baby’s crib. I was Linda Blair on smack and ipecac, and when I finally collapsed onto the bed, completely depleted, Paul rolled over and asked if I could fetch him some Motrin.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“I feel so sick,” he moaned. Though it was April and mild outside, he was wearing a wool hat and thermal underwear under his pajamas. He was clutching a hand towel, which he would periodically use either to wipe his brow or blow his nose, he didn’t really make a distinction between the two.
I felt bad for him, and I realized he’d sacrificed the previous day and probably his own health and career to my suffering, but, you know, I’d just had major abdominal surgery. “I can give you one of my Percocets if you’d like,” I said, shaking the new bottle on my nightstand. “But you’ll still need to get your own glass of water.” The last thing I needed was the flu on top of everything else.
And wouldn’t you know it? Thanks to Paul’s snot-and-sweat-covered towels, which he left lying around on every surface, including the baby’s changing pad, that’s exactly what I got. As did my entire family, including my parents. The seven of us spent the rest of the week stacked one on top of the other in our small living room, blowing our noses, taking our meds, watching episode upon episode of Lost, which made us all feel a little better about our own woes, in a way, but also jealous that Jack, Kate, Locke, and the rest of the gang had all that room to spread out from one another if need be. Plus they were on a beach in Hawaii, which if you’re going to be lost, is not such a terrible p
lace to be. You could be stranded in the emergency room of a New York hospital. Or stuck in a doughnut. Or trapped in an unsustainable situation, like being a working parent in America.
Three days after my surgery, I took the subway to Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to fetch a double stroller from my friend Katie. Our regular sitter was still caring for her sick brother in the Philippines, and the final edit of my novel was due, so Shanta had said we could drop Leo off at her regular employer’s apartment for the week, so long as they were okay with it and I could find a stroller that Baby Rachel, now back in town, could share with Baby Leo. Both Paul and my father had initially offered to go down to Katie’s to fetch it, but their fevers were still above 102, and mine had broken. Though I was still forbidden from lifting anything over ten pounds (this included my baby, whom my mother was in charge of lifting that weekend), or from overexerting myself in any unnecessary way, I had no choice. A taxi there and back would have cost nearly the same as the stroller itself. I figured I’d take a two-dollar subway ride down and a cab service back—Katie had promised to lift the heavy stroller into the back of the cab, and I’d tip the driver a few extra dollars to remove it—and forty-odd dollars later I’d be in possession of a double stroller.
During the subway ride down, however, I had an epiphany: what I was doing was crazy. Spending an hour on a train, three days after an appendectomy, to pick up a double stroller from a friend just so I could get my work done the following week was crazy. Spending $750 a week on childcare was crazy. Relying on a single person, who had emergencies and responsibilities and illnesses and dying relatives in faraway places like everyone else, was crazy.
Two days after my epiphany, I signed up Leo for day care. Luckily I’d visited the center when I was three months pregnant and had put my name on a list, else we wouldn’t have been able to get the empty spot two months later, when it became free. It’s no French crèche—it still costs more than we can afford, and nobody’s checking Leo for strep and ear infections every Friday, and it’s not subsidized by the government—but it’s cheaper than an individual sitter, and it’s absolutely reliable, and the teachers are highly skilled and well trained, and best of all, Leo seems to like it. Yes, someone else is still wiping his rear while I’m at work, but they’re also teaching him about music and art and social skills and patience, as he often has to wait his turn if his diaper’s dirty. Or if I happen to get there after work, and I see that Leo needs to be changed, I simply pick him up and change him.
Other parents think I’m crazy for having him spend so many hours outside the home. I think I’m crazy for not having enrolled him sooner. American cultural biases against day care are deeply ingrained, but if we don’t break them, they’ll break us. As I sit here and write this, the median middle-class income, for the first time in our country’s history, is on the decline, at a time when our childcare, health care, and housing and fuel costs have never been higher.
I still pine for Paris, but I don’t think that kind of ache can ever be cured. Plus, I know I’ll be returning, one day or another, for good. Just before being wheeled into the operating room, after Paul asked who (whom, whatever) he should marry if I didn’t make it out, I told him that if such a gust came to pass, he was to burn my remains in the kind of flames that once nearly swallowed us, and then scatter my ashes into the Seine.
Not only would he and the kids get an excellent meal out of it, plus a lovely walk across the Pont des Arts, taking a family of five—or rather four and an urn—to France and back would still cost less than an American funeral.
The Adolescent Vulcan
Several dozen severed body parts were stacked neatly on a shelf behind the table where my son was seated, wearing a garbage bag. Atop the table was a pillow, covered in a towel, upon which Jacob had been asked to lean his head so that the potato salad container covering his right ear could lie flat. Into this plastic container, its bottom sliced off, a hip-looking Asian woman and a man with a Mohawk were spooning a goopy, white substance with a Popsicle stick, completely covering my son’s ear. If you’re having trouble picturing this, I have photos.
The goop would harden into a mold, which would then be used to create pointy ear extensions made out of the same fleshlike rubber as the other disembodied appendages on the shelf, some recognizable: Keanu Reeves’s head; the red-horned devil from the mock rock movie classic Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny; Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face, its eyes gouged out; seven increasingly receding iterations of Tom Cruise’s hair. “Is that where Jacob’s ears are going to go when you’re done with them?” I asked, pointing to the shelf.
“Nah,” said Barney, owner of both the grisly parts and of the special effects company that created them. He was checking out the texture of a disembodied arm into which another one of his technicians was poking human hairs, one by one. “We’ll probably hide ’em somewhere else. Those Trekkies are hard-core. Somebody tried to steal the trash out of our dumpster the other day.” Pleased with the arm’s hirsuteness, Barney now turned his attention to the work of another of his employees, a woman in her sixties who was doing something that looked vaguely S&M-like to a headless torso.
“Really? I thought they were just being paranoid,” I said, referring to the producers of the new Star Trek film, who’d just hired my son to play Adolescent Spock. Not only had we yet to read a word of the script, save a few pages of Jacob’s lines (known in industry parlance as “sides”)—which he wasn’t even allowed to see prior to the audition until both of us had signed nondisclosure agreements—but also every piece of communication between the film company and us, including those sides, Jacob’s contract, and the many e-mails, faxes, and phone calls suddenly flooding my various electronic devices, all stated that Jacob would be playing the part of “Young Gil” in a film called Corporate Headquarters. As in, “Hi, this is Heather from Corporate Headquarters. Am I speaking with Mrs. Kogan?” An opener that, when I first heard it, had me asking to be placed on a do-not-call list.
“Paranoid?” said Barney of the grisly parts. “Hardly.” People were starting to show up in his parking lot, he said, snooping around for either sentimental memorabilia or stuff to sell on eBay. I noticed that the shades of the studio’s windows, which looked out over the parking lot, were completely drawn. “You don’t understand. Star Trek is…huge.”
The day Jacob was asked to join the crew of the Enterprise, you would have thought from my husband’s reaction that his son had been anointed the next Dalai Lama. Star Trek, to a shy, geeky, nine-year-old Soviet émigré growing up on welfare in Washington Heights in the mid-1970s, as my husband had once been, was more than just a TV show. It was an escape hatch from the daily rigors of trying to assimilate into a new culture; it was a mirror held up to Paul’s own hard-to-articulate alienation; it was both the best English lessons a native Russian-speaking Yeshiva bocher could ever hope for and the only entertainment he could afford. “You don’t understand,” he’d said, when he heard the news. “Star Trek is…huge.”
“Live long and prosper, dude,” I’d responded, holding my hand up in the Vulcan salute, the priestly blessing of the Kohanim (aka Jews named Cohen), which Leonard Nimoy had witnessed as a young boy in synagogue with his grandfather and one day appropriated for his character. Ironically, for those who care about such things, my son is actually a member of the Kohanim. Kogan is the Russian form of Cohen—the Cyrillic alphabet substitutes gs for hs, as in Gamlet, Gawaii, and, speaking of Kohanim, Gitler—although, following the exact theological letter of the law, since Paul’s late mother, Rachel Kogan, was actually a single parent who passed down her name matrilinearly, Jacob would not officially be allowed to perform the Vulcan salute in an orthodox shul, should he ever be so inclined.
“Don’t make fun of me,” said Paul. “I’m serious, this is a big deal.”
“No,” I said. “One of our kids winning the Nobel? That would be a big deal. This is just…a film. Spock is just a part.”
Our friends Michael and Jonatha
n, both science fiction buffs, were equally dumbfounded when they heard the news. “Nooooooooo waaaaaayyyyyyy,” I could hear Michael saying in the background as his wife, whom I’d called to chat about other things, told him the news. “Noooooooooooooooo waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!” This is a man who won a Pulitzer for his perspicacity with words. Jonathan, a MacArthur Fellow, pulled me aside at a work event we were both attending to try to get me to understand the significance of Jacob’s ascension to Star Trek lore. “You do realize your son will now be the answer to a trivia question for the rest of his life,” he said, without irony. “You do understand what this means?”
“Not really,” I said. To me, Star Trek was that show my grandfather watched, instead of watching me. And Spock was the pediatrician whose book I consulted whenever one of my babies got sick. Trekkies (or Trekkers, as the real enthusiasts prefer to be called) were those guys lampooned in Galaxy Quest. And my son’s minor role in the canon—his part was only a few pages long, we were told—would nevertheless mean I’d have to spend ten days on set in Los Angeles, at a time when my family could ill afford my absence. The book you now hold in your hands was due imminently. And my daughter, following the whole sex-with-a-lemming debacle, was having a rough go of it at school.
“Everyone thinks I’m bad!” she kept saying.
Hell Is Other Parents Page 7