“See if you can figure out how to get it open.”
She inspected and declined. “Could you just show me how to unlock our toilet?”
“Yeah, just press the red button – hold it down – and swing the arm away from the lid while opening it up.”
Jamie tried unsuccessfully. “You need three hands for this. How do you press the button, move the arm, and open the lid at the same time?”
I stepped in and demonstrated the technique. “Press the button with your left hand and swing the arm with your right. Then, when the plastic arm has moved all the way off the lid, release the button real quick with your left hand and grab the arm before it swings back. Then you can open the lid with this one,” I said, waving my right hand.
“I’m supposed to perform these gymnastics at 3 a.m., when I have to pee?”
I nodded.
“Why are we doing this?”
“So Noa doesn’t drown in the toilet.”
Often, friends visiting would excuse themselves and reappear a few minutes later with a sheepish grin: “How do you open your toilet?” At which point Jamie would look at me, embarrassed, knowing that it wasn’t just a toilet seat lock that was the issue. I’d skip over to the bathroom for the demonstration, saying, “It’s to protect the little one;” saying, “You never know what can happen.”
Exhibit B: Mattress Wrapping: After Noa was born, Jamie and I shared one common fear: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). We had read the pamphlets – tucked in clear, plastic shelves on the walls of Jamie’s doctors’ office – about how, for no perceptible reason, babies everywhere were silently dying during the night, parents finding them motionless in their cribs, cold to the touch. Researchers, confounded and grasping at straws, said that infants sleeping on their stomachs had a higher propensity for dying during the night.
Doctor:
Put her to sleep on her back. The prevalence of SIDS is greatly reduced.
Us:
Why?
Doctor:
We have no idea.
And so we placed Noa on her back when we put her to bed for the night.
We also rejected the crib-down-the-hall approach, instead embracing co-sleeping, refusing to allow our infant to cry herself back to sleep, alone, in a darkened room. The three of us slept in one bed together, where we tossed and woke each other up nightly. Friends and family were worried that Jamie or I would roll over and smother Noa in our sleep, but I knew such horror stories were rare, an awful plight primarily restricted to heavy drinkers and the morbidly obese. That wasn’t my concern. Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about SIDS. During the night, after we’d abandoned the sleep book, I’d wake, lick a finger, and place it before Noa’s lips to make sure she was breathing. I felt wholly out of control, having no way of knowing when or where it might strike as I pressed my ear to the sheets, staring at her abdomen, looking for the rise and fall of her chest in a darkened room where nothing could be seen.
I decided to research the subject, to wrest control away from this mysterious plight, and came across a bit of obscure literature about Dr. Jim Sprott, a chemist and forensic scientist in New Zealand who claimed to have uncovered the cause of SIDS. His theory was that the fire-retardant chemicals found in bedding, when consumed and processed by the fungi that commonly and quite naturally accumulate in mattresses, are converted into nerve gases that interfere with an infant brain’s ability to transmit signals to the lungs and heart. Which is why, according to Dr. Sprott, infants sleeping on their stomachs expired more often – their faces were buried right in the source of these noxious gases.
Dr. Sprott’s defense against the SIDS epidemic was simple: wrap mattresses with a plastic barrier to eliminate the effects of potentially toxic off-gassing. His data were so compelling that in 1994 New Zealand’s government adopted and promoted his advice, encouraging parents to place baby mattresses in a specially designed plastic bag. I found Dr. Sprott online and read on his mattress-wrapping product’s website – www.cotlife200.com – statistics which seemed unimpeachable. No babies had died in New Zealand on wrapped mattresses.5 Or so his numbers told.
Convinced, I decided to encase our king-sized bed with plastic sheeting, an initiative which was quite daunting. When Jamie walked in to see me maneuvering our bed and asked what I was doing, she vetoed the idea of out of hand.
“You’re not wrapping our mattress.”
“I know. I’m just seeing if it’s possible.”
“Well, you can stop. It’s comfortable, and I don’t want it turned all crinkly.”
“But Dr. Sprott – ”
“David, stop. I read that co-sleeping babies do much better. But maybe you can wrap the crib. For the naps.”
“Good thinking.”
So I rushed out to Home Depot and grabbed a roll of ten foot by one hundred foot construction sheeting.
On returning to the apartment, I placed the plastic on the living room floor and wrestled with the mattress. The trick was to cover it tightly such that one side remained a perfectly flat, comfortable surface upon which a baby might sleep, an objective that proved nearly impossible. Each time a side was lifted, folded over, then taped, the material would buckle, forming crisp, raised ranges of creased plastic. The harder I pulled, the firmer the creases became. Jamie, watching me grunt and tug with frustration, suggested treating the plastic as though it were wrapping paper, slitting the material so as to form four parallelograms, one on each side that could easily be folded over.
“This isn’t a present that has to be wrapped. It’s more like toxic waste that has to be hermetically sealed,” I explained.
Picking up a roll of duct tape, I kneeled over the mattress, flexing my fingers and forearms. There was only one way to go about things. I had to impose my will. Grasping handfuls of plastic with spear-tipped strikes, I fought until a section was successfully taped to the exposed underbelly. I made my way around the mattress systematically, progressing until all of the exposed cloth was secured. When I flipped the mattress over, the surface of Noa’s bed looked like disorganized bubble wrap. I worked my fingers into the pockets of trapped air, massaging each one to the open edge of the plastic, pulling the plastic tighter to be secured with more silver strips of industrial-strength tape.
After two hours, I sat on the ground, soaked and disheveled, fingertips rubbed raw and peeling. Jamie walked in.
“You’re done.”
“Yeah.”
“That took a long time. You used the whole roll of duct tape?”
I nodded.
“That’s a lot of tape.”
“I know.”
Jamie walked to the bathroom and returned with a large bath towel, a soft layer to be placed between the crinkling plastic and Noa’s bedding. She sat down on the ground opposite me, and silently we smoothed the towel flat against the mattress and pulled the fitted sheet over, smoothing down the edges, while Noa lay face up on the floor of the hallway, a domed mobile entertaining her, her legs kicking absently.
Exhibit C: The Xylophone Incident: Once, we took a trip, left our apartment for a week, and gave the neighbor, a nice guy, a gentle guy, our mail and door keys, asking him if he would be kind enough to collect the bills and junk catalogues for us while we were away. Which he did. But after returning, on our first night back, lying in bed, I started to think, What if he made a copy of our key? What if he’s not so innocent? Isn’t that what people always say on the news when something tragic happens? “He seemed nice enough,” or “He was so quiet, I never would have suspected.”
I rose and started thinking tactically. Okay, it’s midnight. Too late to get the locks changed, and barricading the door would be ridiculous. That would wake everyone up. Finally, I saw it and grinned: Noa’s toy xylophone, out of which I constructed a makeshift alarm. With the xylophone propped against the doorframe, metal keys facing out toward the ceramic floor, it was certain to produce a racket if disturbed. Satisfied, I returned to bed with a hammer and placed it under the pil
low. Just in case.
I spent that night awake, acutely aware that the source of this improvised security system reached back to Jerusalem: reached back to the Israeli security apparatus that had failed us, to bi-national strategies of violence that had failed us, to the unstable and unsustainable Israeli–Palestinian conflict that had failed everyone. I had enough experience with Kathy to diagnose myself: using a child’s xylophone for home security was a post-traumatic response to a post-traumatic life. I knew my brain was yelling, Someone tried to murder her, was yelling, You didn’t protect her then. Everything connected back to the source, back to burned flesh and skin grafts and shrapnel covered with blood. And I knew, You’re not healed. You’re not where you want to be.
My head on a hammer and a xylophone against the door, I wondered if I’d ever move beyond the trauma, if I’d ever over come all that continued to press tightly around me. The thought of stasis brought on a quiet, cold panic, which rose solidly from my diaphragm and swirled around the back of my throat, a frozen steel rod being washed in the esophagus. I can’t continue this way, I thought, drifting fitfully into a recurring vision of some ethereal exodus, wandering the sand-swept wilderness of the Negev, beyond Mitzpe Ramon, descending into a steep crater where I let the bone-crushing silence press everything noxious out of my eardrums. I lay down in a cracked wadi, blood dripping from my earlobes, listening to the ibex scrabble down the crater’s red walls, looking for a drink. Glancing sideways, I locked eyes with a bronze sand fox, creeping close, and said, It’s fine. Drink. You can have this.
He didn’t believe me, crouching, wondering which part of me would be the first to flinch. I wondered the same, draining slowly into the yellow earth.
12
A few weeks before Mother’s Day in 2004, with the cherry blossoms exploding, marking spring’s arrival, Jamie looked at me one afternoon and said, “Write me a poem.”
I don’t know why she said it, having never before asked for a poem or seen me write one. But the request ignited an impulse that had lain dormant within me for years. As an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, a newly minted English major who had never considered writing as a pursuit, never desired writing as a pursuit, never needed it, I was introduced to James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break by one of my teachers, Coleman Barks, a romantic Santa Claus renowned for his translations of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic. By the time I devoured Wright’s work, the thought I too must write consumed me. I hunted poems in back-alleys, half-packed bongs, and in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I sought meetings with wizened professors, elderly townies, and stumbling-drunk homeless men, hazing myself with experiences befitting a burgeoning writer, shoving the funnel down my throat and pouring in everything that would slide down, excited to find what would come back up to find life on the page.
During my senior year, I found Edward, an eighty-four-year-old vagabond who approached leading his green, antique bicycle as if it were a lover. Whenever he sat down to chat, as he so often did on summer afternoons in downtown Athens, Georgia, it was impossible not to stare at his intensely wrinkled hands, splotched and flecked by the years, or the strange blue and red formations that mapped his bald head. He liked me, I could tell, and intentionally played the part of storyteller, detecting ears eager to digest his stories. Once, after interrupting me while I was writing at Blue Sky, a hip coffee shop in the center of town, he sat down and, in a blended European accent, asked, “Did I ever tell you about my apartment in Paris? My bedroom was on the second floor, and the women, David. The women. So much sex. So much love. We’d make the floor shake, keeping my landlord up at night. Paris, David. Paris.”
So this is being a writer, I thought, listening closely as the world opened to me, revealing its beauty without begging or even asking. I wrote voraciously. But the writer in me was killed by my warped perfectionism, realizing – as I read the literary masters – that my scribbling would never reach their heights. What’s the fucking point? I scrawled one afternoon, recognizing my writing was nothing when compared with that of William Faulkner. The pain of failure overwhelmed those first pangs of need, and so I put the pen down.
But after writing Jamie’s poem, a half-decent number full of awkward metaphors and enjambments, I was stricken with a sharp sense of loss. Then, one night, sitting down for a quick game of Kitty Cannon, I opened up Microsoft Word instead. Without thinking, I began to type some verse and noticed my body expand, a metal frame made malleable by the heat of creativity. And I thought, How did I let this go so easily? as I typed through the night and then through the next year – publishing several pieces in small literary magazines across the country. Colorado Review. Burnside Review. Stickman Review. Pieces about my grandfather and trips to the doctor with Noa and pissing in the bushes as a child. But nothing about the terrorist attack. Not a word.6
On Mother’s Day the next year – May 8, 2005, a Sunday – we hired a babysitter for the first time and walked to Lauriol Plaza, a famed Mexican restaurant nearby. Over a brunch of huevos rancheros and salmon à la parrilla, while talking about this sudden freedom from diaper-changing and drool-wiping, Jamie brought up the subject of my writing.
“You’ve been writing a lot.”
“I know.”
“I think it’s great.”
“Yeah, I wish I had more time for it.”
“Do you think you’ll ever write about it?” she asked cautiously, fiddling with her fork.
I shrugged – a shrug that concealed an answer I had already realized: I needed to write about it, felt compelled to write about it. I’d moved beyond therapy, having reclaimed small pieces of myself during the process, and was now reclaiming the artist within, an artist beginning to feel an out-of-body compulsion to construct this story, our story, on the page. I wanted to wrestle with it in the hopes of choking out something transformative: choking out a blessing. Not as therapy, but as art, as a redemptive expression. I had to try. This was all I had left – a sense that only through storytelling, I could reclaim myself.
But I couldn’t tell Jamie. Not yet, not as she sat opposite me sipping fresh-squeezed orange juice. I shrugged, embarrassed by the cliché – the writer with a book that needed to be written – wondering if wholeness might reside in the pages I’d not yet composed. And then Jamie said, “I think you should write about it. Maybe it would help.”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged again.
“You haven’t thought about it?”
I had thought about it at length – had thought about how, between changing diapers, doing the dishes, and grading papers, between full-time employment and full-time parenthood, I didn’t have the space within which to even consider beginning such a tortuous process. I already felt overwhelmed by daily life, barely able to breathe, much less breathe life into a past which had taken the breath of our friends, and which had nearly taken Jamie’s last breath.
I longed for stretches of time that looked like a coastline upon which I could pour out the Israeli desert sands that were rubbing coarsely under my skin. I was afraid to admit this to Jamie, apprehensive about her possible response. After all, she’d already given too much time to this narrative. She’d lived it. And I feared making her live it again. But I needed to tell her.
“I’ve been thinking about graduate school, about an MFA in creative writing,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I just feel like I need time if I’m going to actually write about everything. It’s not about the degree or anything like that. I’ve just been thinking about ways I could get the time I need to write, and it’s the thing I keep coming back to.”
“So you have thought about writing about what happened, then.”
“Yeah.”
“And graduate school?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think we can afford something like that, David.”
“I know. I know we can’t. I’ve just been thinking.”
“Well, I’m glad you told me – I didn’t
know you were thinking about this.”
“I know.”
“Have you looked at schools?”
“Kind of.”
“Really?”
“Just a bit.”
“Interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Well, a little. I don’t think we can do anything like that, with Noa and everything. But – you should at least look into it.”
“Look into it how?”
“I don’t know. Just find out information,” she said, giving permission, herself intrigued by the permission she was giving.
Several months later, I sent in applications to several writing programs along with requests for teaching assistantships, knowing that, financially, it wasn’t feasible under the rosiest of circumstances. A twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year assistantship was worlds away from sustainable for our family. And Jamie was pregnant again. Applying to graduate school was plain foolery, I thought.
Jamie disagreed.
The following spring, a professor from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington called to inform me that I had been accepted into their program and was being offered an assistantship. By then, memory of my applications had been erased by the birth of our second daughter, Tamar, an event so disorienting it warped time, making it appear as though everything that preceded it existed on a separate plane.
Jamie strolled into our living room one evening late into her pregnancy and announced plainly, “I think my water just broke.” The casual beginning seemed appropriate, since Noa’s delivery had lasted for twenty-four hours. We assumed we had plenty of time. There was no reason to hurry. So I waited while she got her things together and arranged care for Noa. Then Jamie dropped a bag, leaned against a wall, and said, “We need to leave right now.” I jumped off the couch. Her contractions were coming every thirty seconds, overwhelming her, overwhelming me as I tried to get her to the car.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 12