by Lucia Berlin
“I’m trying to help out,” I said.
“Yeah, thanks a lot.”
We were all up early the day I took him to the surgeon’s. Lupe had to take the kids to day care. It’s free and they like it better than staying home with just me so they were happy. But Lupe was mad because she had to drive so far to child care and now Ramón had to take the subway. It was scary, the bus, and then the BART and then another bus. I was too nervous to eat so I was hungry and dizzy from being frightened. But then I saw the big sign like they told me and I knew it was the right place. We had to wait so long. I left home at six in the morning and the doctor didn’t see Jesus until three. I was so hungry. They explained everything real clear and the nurse told me about feeding him different to make more milk. The doctor was nice with Jesus and said he was bonito but he thought I hurt him, showed her blue spots on his arms. I didn’t see the spots before. It’s true. I hurt my baby, mijito. It was me who made them last night when he cried and cried. I had him under the blankets with me. I held him tight, “Hush hush stop crying, stop it stop it.” I never grabbed him like that before. He didn’t cry any less or any more.
Two weeks went past. I marked the days on the calendar. I told Lupe I had to go to the pre-op one day and for the surgery the next day.
“No way, José,” Lupe said. The car was in the shop. She couldn’t take her Willie and Tina to child care. So I didn’t go.
Ramón stayed home. He was drinking beer and watching an A’s game. The kids were taking a nap and I was feeding Jesus in the kitchen. “Come on in and watch the game, prima,” he said so I went in. Jesus was still drinking but I had him covered with a blanket. Ramón got up for more beer. He hadn’t seemed drunk until he got up but then he was falling around, then he was on the floor by the sofa. He pulled the blanket down and my T-shirt up. “Gimme some of that chichi,” he said and was sucking on my other breast. I shoved him away and he hit the table but Jesus fell too and the table scratched his shoulder. There was blood running down his little arm. I was washing it with a paper towel and the phone rang.
It was Pat the lady from surgery real mad because I didn’t call and didn’t go. “I’m sorry,” I told her in English.
She said there was a cancellation tomorrow. I could get the pre-op on the same day if I for sure took him real early. Seven in the morning. She was mad at me. She said he could get real sick and die, that if I kept missing surgeries the State could take him away from me. “Do you understand this?”
I said yes, but I didn’t believe they could take my baby away from me.
“Are you coming tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. I told Ramón that the next day I had to take Jesus for surgery, could he watch Tina and Willie.
“So I suck your tit you think you get something back? Yeah, I’ll be here. I’m out of work anyways. Don’t get any ideas about telling Lupe nothing. Your ass would be out of here in five minutes. Which would be fine with me, but as long as it’s here I mean to get me some.”
He took me in the bathroom then, with Jesus in the living room crying on the floor and the kids hitting on the door. He bent me over the sink and banged and banged into me but he was so drunk it didn’t last long. He slid to the floor passed out. I went out. I told the kids that he was sick. I was shaking so bad I had to sit down, rocked mijito Jesus and watched cartoons with the kids. I didn’t know what to do. I said an Ave María but it seemed like there was so much noise everywhere how could a prayer ever get heard?
When Lupe got home he came out. I could tell the way he looked at me he knew he had done something bad but he didn’t remember what. He said he was going out. She said terrific.
She opened the refrigerator. “Asshole drank all the beer. Go to the Seven-Eleven, Amelia, will you? Oh Christ, you can’t even buy beer. What good are you? Have you even looked for a job or a place?”
I told her I had been watching the kids, how could I go anywhere? I said tomorrow was Jesus’ surgery.
“Well, as soon as you can, you get started. They have ads for jobs and houses on billboards in groceries, the pharmacy.”
“I can’t read.”
“They have ads in Spanish.”
“I can’t read Spanish tampoco.”
“Fuck a duck.”
I said it too. “Fuck a duck.” It made her laugh, at least. Oh how I miss my pueblo where the laughter is soft like breezes.
“OK, Amelia. Tomorrow I’ll look for you, I’ll call around. Do me a favor and watch the kids now. I need a drink. I’ll be at the Jalisco.”
She must have run into Ramón, they came back together really late. There was only beans and Kool-Aid for the kids and me to eat. No bread, no flour for tortillas. Jesus was fast asleep in our corner in the kitchen but the minute I lay down he started to cry. I fed him. I could tell he was getting more now but after he slept awhile he was crying again. I tried to give him a pacifier but he just pushed it out. I was doing it again holding him so tight whispering, “Hush hush,” but then I stopped when I realized that I was hurting him but also I didn’t want the doctor to see blue marks. The shoulder was bad enough all scraped and bruised, pobrecito. I prayed again to our mother Mary to help me, please to tell me what to do.
It was dark when I left the next morning. I found people who helped me get the right bus and BART and bus. At the hospital they showed me where to go. They took blood from Jesus’ arm. A doctor examined him but he didn’t speak Spanish. I don’t know what he was writing down. I know he wrote about the shoulder because he measured it with his thumb and then wrote. He looked at me with a question. “Childrens push,” I said in English and he nodded. They told me the surgery would be at eleven so I had fed him at eight. But hours and hours went by until it was one o’clock. Jesus was screaming. We were in a space with a bed and a chair. I was sitting in the chair but then the bed looked so good I got on it and held him to me. My breasts were dripping with milk. It’s like they heard him crying. I couldn’t bear it and I thought just a few seconds of milk wouldn’t hurt.
Dr. Fritz was yelling at me. I took Jesus off my breast but he shook his head and nodded at me to go on ahead and feed him. A Latina nurse came in then to say they couldn’t do the surgery now. She said they had a big waiting list and I had screwed them over twice. “You call Pat, get another date. Go on now, go home. Call her tomorrow. That child needs the surgery, you hear me?”
In my whole life at home nobody ever got mad at me.
When I stood up I must have fainted. The nurse was sitting by me when I woke up.
“I ordered you a big lunch. You must be hungry. Did you eat today?”
“No,” I said. She fixed pillows behind me and a table over my lap. She held Jesus while I ate. I ate like an animal. Everything, soup, crackers, salad, juice, milk, meat, potatoes, carrots, bread, salad, pie; it was good.
“You need to eat well every day while you’re nursing the baby,” she said. “Will you be all right, going home?”
I nodded. Yes. I felt so good, the food was so good.
“Come on, now. Get ready to go. Here are some diapers for him. My shift was over an hour ago and I need to lock up.”
Pat has a hard job. Our office of six surgeons is in Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Every day each surgeon has a packed schedule. Also every day some get cancelled, others put in their place and several emergencies added as well. One of our doctors is on call every day for the emergency room. All kinds of traumas, chopped-off fingers, aspirated peanuts, gunshot wounds, appendixes, burns, so there can be six or eight surprise surgeries a day.
Almost all of the patients are Medi-Cal and many are illegal aliens and don’t even have that, so none of our doctors are in this for the money. It’s an exhausting job for the office staff too. I work ten-hour days a lot. The surgeons are all different and for different reasons can be a pain in the butt sometimes. But even though we complain we respect them, are proud of them too, and we get a sense that we help. It is a rewarding job, not like working i
n a regular office. It has for sure changed the way I see things.
I have always been a cynical person. When I first started working here I thought it was a huge waste of taxpayers’ money to do ten, twelve surgeries on crack babies with weird anomalies just so they could be alive and disabled after a year spent in a hospital, then moved from one foster home to another. So many without mothers, much less fathers. Most of the foster parents are really great but some are scary. So many children who are disabled or with brain damage, patients who will never be more than a few years old. Many patients with Down’s syndrome. I thought that I could never keep a child like that.
Now I open the door to the waiting room and Toby who is all distorted and shaky, Toby who can’t talk, is there. Toby who pees and shits into bags, who eats through a hole in his stomach. Toby comes to hug me, laughing, arms open. It’s as if these kids are the result of a glitch God made answering prayers. All those mothers who don’t want their children to grow up, who pray that their child will love them forever. Those answered prayers got sent down as Tobys.
For sure Tobys can crack up a marriage or a family, but when they don’t it seems to have the reverse effect. It brings out the deepest good and bad feelings and the strengths and dignity that otherwise a man and a woman would never have seen in themselves or the other. It seems to me that each joy is savored more, that commitment has a deeper dimension. I don’t think I’m romanticizing either. I study them hard, because I saw those qualities and they surprised me. I’ve seen several couples divorce. It seemed inevitable. There was the martyr parent or the slacking parent, the blamer, the why-me or the guilty one, the drinker or the crier. I’ve seen siblings act out from resentment, cause even more havoc and anger and guilt. But much more often I have seen the marriage and the family grow closer, better. Everybody learns to deal, has to help, has to be honest and say it sucks. Everybody has to laugh, everybody has to feel grateful when whatever else the child can’t do he can kiss the hand that brushes his hair.
I don’t like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn’t the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing.
I admit it is pretty fascinating when the women bring in Jay for a pre-op with Dr. Rook. Everything is bizarre. They are midgets. They look like sisters, maybe they are, they are very tiny and plump with rosy cheeks and curly hair, turned-up noses and big smiles. They are lovers, stroke one another and kiss and fondle with no embarrassment. They had adopted Jay, a dwarf baby, with multiple, serious problems. Their social worker, who is, well, gigantic, has come with them, to carry him and his little oxygen tank and diaper bag. The mothers each carry a stool, like a milking stool, and sit on the little stools in the exam rooms talking about Jay and how much better he is, he can focus now, recognizes them. Dr. Rook is going to do a gastrostomy on him so he can be fed by a tube through an opening in his stomach.
He is an alert but calm baby, not especially small but with a huge deformed head. The women love to talk about him, willingly tell us how they carry him between them, how they bathe him and care for him. Pretty soon he’d need a helmet when he crawled because their furniture was only a foot or so high. They had named him Jay because it was close to joy, and he brought them so much joy.
I am going out the door to get some paper tape. He is allergic to tape. Look back and see the two mothers on tiptoes looking up at Jay who is on his stomach on the exam table. He is smiling at them, they at him. The social worker and Dr. Rook are smiling at each other.
“That is the sweetest thing I ever saw,” I say to Karma.
“Poor things. They’re happy now. But he may only have a few more years, if that,” she says.
“Worth it. Even if they had today and no more. It’s still worth all the pain later. Karma, their tears will be sweet.” I surprised myself saying this, but I meant it. I was learning about the labor of love.
Dr. Rook’s husband calls her patients River babies, which makes her furious. He said that’s what people used to call such babies in Mississippi. He is a surgeon with us too. He somehow manages to get almost all surgeries with real insurance like Blue Cross. Dr. Rook gets most of the disabled or totally non-functioning children, but not just because she is a good surgeon. She listens to the families, cares about them, so she gets a lot of referrals.
Today there is one after another. The children are mostly older and heavy. Dead weight. I have to lift them, then hold them down while she removes the old button and puts in a new one. Most of them can’t cry. You can tell it must really hurt but there are just tears falling sideways into their ears and this awful unworldly creaking, like a rusty gate, from deep inside.
The last patient is so cool. Not the patient, but what she does. A pretty red-faced newborn girl with six fingers on each hand. People always joke when babies are born about making sure it has five fingers and five toes. It’s more common than I thought. Usually the doctors schedule them for an in-and-out surgery. This baby is only a few days old. Dr. Rook asks me for Xylocaine and a needle and some cat gut. She deadens the area around the finger and then she ties a tight knot at the base of each extra little finger. She gives them some liquid Tylenol in case the baby seems to be hurting later, tells them not to touch it, that pretty soon, like a navel, the finger would turn black and fall off. She said her father had been a doctor in a small town in Alabama, that she had watched him do that.
Once Dr. Kelly had seen a little boy who had six fingers on each hand. His parents really wanted the surgery but the child didn’t. He was six or seven years old, a cute kid.
“No! I want them! They’re mine! I want to keep them!”
I thought old Dr. Kelly might reason with the boy, but instead he told the parents that it seemed to him the child wanted to continue having this distinction.
“Why not?” he said. The parents couldn’t believe he was saying this. He told the parents that if the boy changed his mind then they could do it. Of course, the younger the better.
“I like how he sticks up for his rights. Put her there, son,” and he shook the kid’s hand. They left, the parents furious, cursing at him, the child grinning.
Will he always feel this way? What if he plays the piano? Will it be too late if or when he changes his mind? Why not six fingers? They are weird anyway and so are toes, hair, ears. I wish we had tails, myself.
I am daydreaming about having a tail or leaves instead of hair, cleaning and restocking the exam rooms for the night when I hear a banging on the door. Dr. Rook had gone and I was the only one there. I unlock the door and let in Amelia and Jesus. She is crying, shivering as she speaks. His hernia is out and she can’t push it in.
I get my coat, turn on the alarms and lock the door, walk with her down the block to the Emergency Room. I go in to be sure she gets registered. Dr. McGee is on call. Good.
“Dr. McGee is a sweet old doctor. He’ll take care of your Jesus. They’ll probably operate on him tonight. Don’t forget to call to bring the baby to the office. In about a week. Call us. Oye, for God’s sake, don’t feed him.”
It was crowded on the subway and the bus but I wasn’t afraid. Jesus was sleeping. It seemed like the Virgin Mary answered me. She told me to take my next Welfare check and go home to Mexico. The curandera would take care of my baby and my mamacita would know how to stop him from crying. I would feed him bananas and papayas. Not mangos because sometimes mangos give babies stomachaches. I wondered when babies got teeth.
Lupe was watching a telenovela when I got home. Her kids were asleep in the bedroom.
“Did he get the surgery?”
“No. Something happened.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. What dumb thing did you do? Huh?”
I put him down in our corner without waking him up. Lupe came into the kitchen.
“I found a place for you. You can stay there at least until you find your own place. You can get your next check here and then tell Welfare your new address. Do you hear me?”
“Yes. I want my check money. I’m going home.”
“You’re crazy. First place this month’s money is spent. Whatever you have is the last of it. Estas loca? It wouldn’t get you even halfway to Michoacan. Look, girl, you’re here. Find a job in a restaurant, someplace they’ll let you stay in the back. Meet some guys, go out, have some fun. You’re young, you’re pretty, would be if you fixed yourself up. You’re as good as single. You’re learning English fast. You can’t just give up.”
“I want to go home.”
“Fuck a duck,” she said and she went back to the tele.
I was still sitting there when Ramón came in the back door. I guess he didn’t see her on the sofa. He started grabbing my breasts and kissing my neck. “Sugar, I want some sugar!”
“Ya estuvo,” she said. To Ramón she said, “Go soak your head, you stinking fat pig,” and shoved him out of the room. To me she just said, “You’re out of here. Get all your shit together. Here’s a plastic bag.”
I put everything in my bolsa and the bag, picked up Jesus.
“Go on, take him and get in the car. I’ll bring the things.”
It looked just like a boarded-up old store but there was a sign, and a cross over the door. It was dark but she banged on the door. An old Anglo man came out. He shook his head and said something in English but she talked louder, pushed me and Jesus through the door and took off.
He turned on a flashlight. He tried to talk to me but I shook my head. No English. He was probably saying they didn’t have enough beds. The room was full of cots with women on them, a few children. It smelled bad, like wine and vomit and pee. Bad, dirty. He brought me some blankets and pointed to a corner, same size as my kitchen corner. “Thank you,” I said.