It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  Eventually Rowen agrees to sit up on Kirsten’s bed if she can be on my lap, so the two of us sit there and Kirsten closes her eyes, hugs us both and says, “Mmmmm, it’s so good to see you.” I am convinced I am going to start bawling, reunion scenes always get me more than anything, every Christmas I start sobbing when Jimmy Stewart runs into the house, tears in his eyes, yelling, “Zuzu! Kids!”, but strangely enough I am able to hold it in during the saddest, happiest reunion I will probably ever see in real life.

  After five minutes we all relax a little, and despite the masks and the gloves and the adjustable bed and Kirsten’s shiny bald head, we all feel more normal than we have in weeks. The three of us are finally together, and this holiday finally feels like it makes some sense. And I get the feeling that if the nurses ran things rather than the doctors, the health care system would be a whole lot less fucked up.

  Merry Christmas.

  Hooray for a New Day

  When Nan was here, she told us that she used to always get her sons up by opening their shades and saying “Hooray for a new day!” I think I mocked her mercilessly for being a corn dog at the time, but today I sort of feel like shouting hooray for a new day myself.

  Rowen and I go out to the movies, which is a great thing to do on this freezing cold day because there is a tunnel from the subway station into the mall where the movie theater is, so once we get on the train at our stop, we don’t have to be outside again until we come home. We go see The Emperor’s New Groove, which I like a surprising amount, especially because it lacks most of the stuff that makes Disney movies insufferable, like villains that are too scary and scenes that are too disturbing, (when I saw Tarzan, kids were screaming as the hunter shot at Tarzan’s family) terrible music, (I know, I know, “Under the Sea,” but I refer you again to Tarzan, and its pseudo-jungle Phil Collins songs and to most of the songs in most of the movies), formulaic, stupid talking animal sidekicks (well, the main character in this one gets turned into a llama, but it wasn’t the usual wisecracking crab, dragon, meerkat, or whatever) and gratuitous violence (I always wondered how electroshock to the testicles gets an R rating for The Lords of Discipline, but merits a G for 101 Dalmatians.) All of which is a rather negative way of saying that I really like this movie and we have a great time and eat way too much popcorn because I am seduced by the “for 25 cents more I can give you the garbage bag instead of the dime bag” routine at the concession stand. I look in the paper the next day and see that this movie has made about 10 bucks, so I guess my taste in Disney movies just doesn’t match up with most of America’s, and which also means that we can probably look forward to more wisecracking ferrets and bad lite-rock soundtracks in future movies.

  I go to the hospital, peek my head in the open door and see the room is empty, and I turn my head and there is Kirsten, pole-free, she has forsaken Baxter and come back to me, and she is just walking down the hallway. “I gotta be seen walking so they’ll let me out of here tomorrow,” she says. “I also have to keep drinking.” She polishes off a Diet Coke and writes it down in her drinking log. She needs to get to two liters today in order to get out tomorrow. I am stunned. Yesterday was one of the worst days yet, we were both crying, she could barely get out of bed, I felt like Ebenezer freaking Scrooge about Christmas, and now she is up smiling and walking around.

  I am sure that the docs here at Major Research Hospital would pooh-pooh this idea as unscientific, but I sure as hell think having Rowen in here yesterday had a lot to do with this. Maybe I’m a corn dog too, but this is the most dramatic change I have seen in Kirsten yet–everything so far has been incremental, both on the down side and on the upside, and now all of the sudden there is this quantum leap, and it just doesn’t seem coincidental to me that it came after Kirsten finally got to see her daughter after almost three weeks. Like I said, I am sure the docs would mock me–well, no, what they actually would do is try desperately to put this “I’m taking you seriously” face on, but be unable to disguise the, “Yeah, whatever, you fucking freak” face trying to break through and say something like, “Yes, well, if it helps you to think that, that’s great,” or something like that.

  I come out of the hospital just elated, and after I pick up some stuff at the grocery store and send Kirsten’s parents on their way, Rowen and I have a great afternoon and evening. We hang out playing her new go fish game, and she cheats shamelessly, and we put on Rowen’s favorite CD (REM’s Monster. It is the only thing she ever wants to hear, and I am getting a little tired of it, but it’s a tribute to “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” that I can still stand to hear it after about a month in heavy Rowen rotation, and I count my blessings that it’s not, you know Barney sings Calypso or something horrible like that) and dance around the living room.

  Later some guys from church come over to do some cleaning, and I must digress here and say that these are the only men who have volunteered for this duty, and they happen to be a gay couple, and I don’t know what to make of that. With the notable exception of the minister and Emerson the prayer warrior, none of the straight men in the congregation have helped out visibly with any of this stuff, though to be fair a lot of them have probably been home watching kids and stuff while the women were here, but I know if the roles were reversed I might give somebody a ride or cook them a dinner, but I damn sure wouldn’t go clean their bathroom, so there you go.

  Anyway, so Robert and Tim are here cleaning, and they are both really kind people, and I just like having them in the house because they give off good vibes, and Rowen is helping me cook some spring rolls while I sipsome kick-ass stout. I am pleasantly, mildly buzzed, and I have one of these moments of perfect happiness. I am full of gratitude for the nice people cleaning our house and for Kirsten’s turnaround, I am full of love for Rowen and proud and happy that she seems interested in sharing my hobby (as she inexpertly rolls a spring roll, she says, “I wanna help you cook every night,” and my heart just sings), and I am perfectly happy. For several minutes, I am just completely, perfectly happy, and I realize that I am incredibly lucky, sick spouse or no, because I think these moments are just so rare for so many people, and here I am having one right now, and it feels wonderful. Hooray for a new day.

  Trickster God

  Thinking about God, I can see the appeal of a lot of those old, dead religions that are now, because there are no adherents around to get mad, called “mythology” because they tend to include wacky trickster gods. Well, it’s tough to pick out the tricksters in Greek mythology, since they all pretty much are jealous, murderous, lustful, and deceitful, and humans quite frequently come out on the wrong end of those traits (Zeus the serial rapist literally originates the “golden shower”! It’s true! Go check your Edith Hamilton!) These old religions include as part and parcel of the whole thing the idea that the Gods are fucking with you just because they can.

  Here is more theology that seems to fit the data of my life, especially recently. For example: Christmas. Outside of marveling at the genius of Phil Spector, I tried really hard not to get into the spirit. I even blew off church, which I think I have done maybe two other times that I can remember in my whole life, because even as a kid we used to go to mass with relatives on Christmas Eve, but this year I just couldn’t be bothered. I just didn’t want to go without Kirsten, I didn’t want it to feel like Christmas, but, like the Grinch, I found that I couldn’t stop Christmas from coming–it came just the same. Church or no, I felt this horrible void on Christmas.

  Then, after the lowest day yet, the next day Kirsten is prowling the halls, practically bouncing off the walls ready to go home. And I am happy, and grateful, but my first reaction is like, “are you fucking with me?”

  Then I have my moment of absolute happiness, but then I wake up in the middle of the night and puke up my spring rolls in my freshly cleaned and disinfected toilet. Ok, I did have another stout, and they were pretty high-octane, but still, we’re talking about two beers. And about eight really inexpertly fried spring roll
s that were just dripping with peanut oil, and I am very vain and usually annoyingly immodest about my cooking ability, (like when people at work see me heating up leftovers and say, “that smells great,” I am an incredible wiener and say something like “it is great. I made it”) but I can’t deep fry anything for shit, so after the best day and night I have had in weeks, possibly months, there I am hunched over the toilet in the middle of the night puking up acidy, oily goo.

  What am I to make of all this? We have a wonderful, healthy kid, and this causes our neighbor to get in touch with the asshole within. We get a great deal on a new house and then find that Kirsten has cancer. Kirsten tolerates the chemo very well, and then we find out it doesn’t work. I am grateful that it’s not all bad, because God knows there are plenty of people in real life as well as in Dennis Lehane novels who live lives of unrelenting misery–I am still incredibly grateful for the night with the spring rolls. The memory of that moment is not tainted or ruined by the fact that I puked six hours later. I feel like that’s good, like that must mean I’m making progress, but still… I feel like someone’s fucking with me.

  And I am worried, because now, three days later, Kirsten is home from the hospital, tired but herself. It is just magical to have her in the house again, things feel right, I feel whole, Rowen is happy (I slipped down to number two parent in a hurry, but I am not taking it personally), and I can’t shake the feeling that right now while I’m standing up, some asshole is putting a tack on my chair.

  Vacation

  Kirsten returning home is like a second honeymoon or something: we spend the first two or three days just saying, “I’m glad you’re home,”or, in her case, “It’s good to be home,” and every night that I crawl into bed and she is there pressing her freezing cold feet against me I am just so thankful to have her here.

  After two days, she has to go to the hospital for a checkup, and they tell her she’s dangerously dehydrated and keep her there all day pumping fluids into her veins. They tell her she has to be much better about drinking, so the rest of the vacation she is constantly drinking something, and when she’s not, I am going, “Can I get you something? Tea? Soda? Water?” and she writes it all down in her drinking log, until her mom tidies up her drinking log by mistake one day (because it’s scrawled on the back of an envelope–it’s an easy mistake to make), so Kirsten takes to wearing this stitch counter that she has for knitting projects and using it to total up her daily fluid intake.

  Saturday we are expecting a big snowstorm–six to twelve inches. I think about getting a snowblower, but by the time I get my lazy ass over to the Home Despot, they are all sold, and anyway they are hugely expensive, so I figure well, it’s vacation, I’ve got time to shovel, no big deal, so I buy 50 pounds of salt and 50 pounds of sand and one of those crooked-handled back saver shovels and figure I’ll make do the old fashioned way.

  I am once again right across the giant, treacherous, freezing cold parking lot from Toys “R” Us, so I once again go and ogle the game selection, but I haven’t even really gotten good at the ones I have yet, not to mention the fact that Toys “R” Us after Christmas looks kind of like this bare-shelved Soviet-era toy store, but also I realize that really it’s just about owning them. It’s not about wanting to play them. I want to own lots of them. And then..what? I won’t die, or Kirsten won’t die, or somehow sitting on our broke asses amidst a pile of game cases, we’ll be secure. I end up not buying any.

  I would like to add that video games sure have changed since my day (yes, I know, stupid old man comment). What I remember about video games was that you could usually get past the first level, or screen, or opponent, or whatever with very little skill, and that with a lot of time and/or quarters invested, you could get good enough to move on. But these games are incredibly hard to even start. The game that Kirsten’s brother gave me has this little test you have to pass in order to continue the game, and I have been trying for three days, and I’m almost there, but I still haven’t gotten into the real game because I keep failing the test of driving skills. I guess these games are designed with dorks like I used to be in mind, rather than with dorks like I currently am in mind. I mean, yeah, if you’re sixteen, what the hell else are you going to do except sit in front of your tv for fifteen hours trying to figure out a game, and anyway it cost you the equivalent of maybe 4 or 5 hours of folding sweaters at the Gap or whatever, so you’re going to be pissed off if it can’t hold you for a long long time. Whereas if you’re 32 and get to play an hour every other day, what you really want is something you can be kinda good at without really trying, and that you can get steadily better at. Like Defender, or Pac Man, or something. Sigh. Time has moved on and left me in the dust clutching my joystick.

  But I was talking about the snowstorm. So the thing is that one of Rowen’s classmates has a birthday party scheduled for that day, and I call in the morning and it’s not called off, and it is half an hour away at a location of small children’s activity centers, so I am annoyed going over there, and I am hoping that it’s going to start snowing early in the morning so we can beg off, but of course what happens is that the first flakes start to fall as we pull into the parking lot.

  And there is something about parties that just brings out the misanthrope in me these days. I see all these other parents, and I just can’t stand them. I guess because there is this gulf between us. We are not good friends (not because I hate them or anything, but, you know, I have never seen one of them socially, so I don’t really know them very well), so I don’t feel comfortable taking about what’s really happening with us right now, and yet I am also completely unable to make pleasant conversation. I have always been terrible at this anyway, but my meager abilities at making small talk have completely disappeared. So I just kind of sit and sulk, and Rowen clings to me, which I think is sort of strange because the kids at this party are the same kids she spends all day playing with. I look at her and remember being shy as a kid, and how I was just so afraid of joining in with groups of other kids (looking at my behavior with adults, I guess not too much has changed), and I see her doing this, and it just kind of makes me sad, because I think I missed out on a lot of fun as a kid because I was afraid.

  And yet, looking at what’s happening here, I sort of have to applaud Rowen’s discernment. We are at this Children’s Activity Center™, and there is this woman kind of running the show, and I have to say that whoever put this “curriculum” together knew a lot about little kids, because this woman sings a song, leads some kind of activity, and then tells the kids they can run around on the play equipment for a few minutes. All of which is cool, but this woman is just so obviously not into it even though she sings well, (making sure to mention the corporate name in just about every song–ie, “we’re spreading out the parachute, parachute, parachute, we’re spreading out the parachute, here at Children’s Activity Center™,” which I find kind of creepy). Still, most of the kids have a great time and get to do some kind of rambunctious play on a shitty day.

  We leave, and the drive home is not too bad, because the snow is really slushy, so it’s not too slippery, and as we get home, the snow turns into rain. Which is pretty close to a quote from a Dan Fogelberg song, if I remember correctly, and as much as I think he’s a cheese merchant, I have to give him credit that that’s a pretty good line for summing up something magical turning into something depressing. (How about that “Leader of the Band” song, though–what’s up with “his blood runs through my instrument”? Eeewww!)

  And I get cranky and surly that this storm that I was dreading driving through has fizzled into a crappy rainstorm, because I love snow. I think this pretty well typifies my attitude these days: I am pissed about having to drive through a storm, then pissed when the storm turns out to be not as hazardous as I feared. As much as I have questioned God through this whole thing, on this day I can just imagine her (I sort of like to think of God as female, cause I think, well, if God were female [and yes, I think it's kind of puerile
to assign God a gender, but what the hell, so is quoting Dan Fogelberg] she would pretty much have to be a total babe. )–ahem, I can just imagine God looking down at me going, “Jesus! What the hell do you want!? There’s just no pleasing you, is there?”

  Nope.

  Sick of It

  While it is of course wonderful to have Kirsten home and it is lucky that she is released during a time when I am off of work anyway, I find that the hustle and bustle of the time when she was in the hospital was in some way easier.

  I mean, yeah, I complained a lot, but when you are just go-go-going all the time, you don’t have much time to stop and think. Whereas when you are not go-go-going very much at all, there is little else to do. I should say at the outset here that I don’t do vacations well. I never have. That is to say, if I go away, I can do a vacation just fine–I am happy to hang out, take naps, and basically do nothing at all for days at a time. But when I am at home, I start to get squirrelly after a few days. It’s a kind of funny contradiction, because on the one hand, I consider myself to be fundamentally a pretty lazy person, but on the other hand, I have to work or I go insane. Go figure.