Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  “We were supposed to do compresses?” asks Pat, looking for clarification.

  Dr. Mom talks to Pat as though he’s the only adult in the room. “I told your wife that she needed to do ten-minute compresses five times a day.”

  Not true! Not true! I want to scream as Pat and Dr. Liar stare at me. The doctor turns back to Pat, sighs like “There’s your problem,” and leaves the room.

  We four wait while nothing much happens. Nothing is said. I know that Pat is wondering why he married me. He looks down unsure, I’m sure, of what to say. Spence flips a loose latch on the examination table. Murph sits on the floor, happily gurgling, sliding his hand across the linoleum.

  “She didn’t say that I had to do the compress, Pat.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said to try it. I don’t remember anything about five times a day. She said a compress might help, but no big deal if Murphy put up a fuss. She didn’t make it sound like it was this for-sure-do-this-thing thing.”

  “Are you sure? It sounded pretty for-sure-do-it to me.”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I was upset and Spence was adding and I was worried and I couldn’t hear her exactly.”

  “You couldn’t hear the doctor?” he says.

  “I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying.”

  Pat stops. I hear the air conditioner. I see Spence flip the latch. I feel Murph’s bottom against the edge of my sandals.

  Looking at us, I think, Is this it? Four people in a room alone together?

  No, I think. Don’t let this be all there is.

  “No” repeats in my head as it has for several days now. No, no, no.

  The third time we see green we are back in Los Angeles. The infection Murphy had in New Orleans finally succumbed to the antibiotic cream and frequent massaging and draining of his eye. But here it is again. Our regular pediatrician sends us to Dr. Goode, a portrait of whom hangs in his waiting room. In it he is seated on a couch next to bespectacled girl triplets.

  I sit in the waiting room without Pat, since he is at work. Spence trots off to the miniature kitchen set up along one wall and Murph crawls over to a pile of blocks. I flip through Parents magazine, occasionally looking up to scan the room.

  Across from me a father reads to his son, who has a patch over one eye. To my left sits a mom with a two-year-old little girl. One of the girl’s pupils lolls in the corner of her eye, her other eye looking straight ahead. Since I’ve had endless eye problems myself, the clinic feels familiar.

  “What kind of food would you like to eat, Mommy?” asks Spencer, holding a spatula and a plastic plate.

  “Um. Eggs.”

  I watch Murph toss a block into a bucket. Spence walks over to the kitchen and plops plastic eggs onto a plate. I expect to see him slip them into the plastic frying pan and hold them over the toy stove. Instead, he opens up a cabinet, slides the plate in, and shuts the door. He presses his finger next to the door, like there’s a button there.

  “Ding,” he says loudly, removing the plate from the cabinet.

  He delivers the eggs to me and I pick them up, making munching sounds around the yellow plastic.

  “Thank you,” I say, dabbing the corners of my mouth with my fingers.

  “What else would you like to eat?” he asks.

  “Pancakes.”

  Spence trots off to throw a plastic pancake onto a plate, slide it into the cabinet, and push the button.

  “Ding.”

  He microwaves everything I order. Spaghetti. Soup. A sandwich.

  I feel warm with embarrassment. Spence’s routine is so obviously a reflection of what he sees me do. I bury my head in the magazine, praying that Spence won’t come over with the yellow square of plastic cheese, tap it on the armrest, and offer me a cigarette.

  If he starts shaking martinis, I’m going to have to reschedule.

  Dr. Goode shines a light in Murphy’s eye and nudges the raised bruise near his tear duct. Murph, now used to all this poking, sits patiently. Spence rolls around under the doctor’s desk.

  “Looks like a blocked tear duct,” Dr. Goode says. “It’s very common.” He recommends a simple procedure in which he inserts a tube through the tear duct, perhaps piercing any organic obstruction, allowing Murphy’s tears to drain. Right now his tears simply collect in the duct, causing repeated infections.

  “I’ve never heard of that,” I say.

  “Very common. Very common,” he says, pulling a book from the shelf.

  He flips open to a picture of a boy with a fleshy mound obscuring half of his eye. I pull back.

  “Ughhh.”

  Spence jumps up to see the picture. “Wow,” he says before I can pull the book away.

  “Obviously, this is a bad case,” says Dr. Goode. “Nothing like Murphy’s.”

  Then why the hell did you show it to me? I think. Just to scare me shitless?

  “But we should nip this in the bud,” he continues. “I recommend surgery this week.”

  “Surgery?”

  “You can get a second opinion,” he says, snapping the book closed. “But they’ll only refer you back to me. See, I wrote the book.”

  He hands the book to me and I see that he did indeed write the book.

  Dr. Goode tells me a little more about the tube he’ll insert into the duct. “Most likely, it’ll come out by itself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh. You may see the tube poking out of his eye at some point. If that happens, just cut it off with a pair of scissors and give me a call.”

  Sure, I think, after I run around the house screaming, “HOLY FUCK, THERE’S A TUBE COMING OUT OF MY SON’S EYE!” After I pass out, come to, and crawl to the phone to call Pat and demand that he come home.

  “All right,” I say, my voice tight.

  Then something occurs to me.

  “Could the obstruction be caused by food? I mean, could Murphy have rubbed food into his eye?”

  Dr. Goode shakes his head. “No. He’s probably always had this.”

  Aha, I think. I want to call Pat right now and tell him that it’s not because of the food on Murphy’s hands. It’s not because I don’t clean my baby well enough. It’s not because I’m negligent or lazy.

  I stop there, realizing that Pat has never called me negligent and lazy. That accusation is all mine.

  “Then what causes it?” I ask.

  “Murph was probably born with a duct that didn’t go all the way through. We’re only just seeing evidence of that because he’s started crying tears.”

  Murphy wiggles in my lap and I let him down. I reach in my backpack for my phone so I can call Pat.

  Spence squats in front of Murphy and stares into his eye. He is all concern. I look at the two brothers nose-to-nose and feel a pull in my chest.

  That night I lie next to Pat, feeling his skin against mine. I think about Murphy’s tears and I think about his eye. I think about how you can know a lot about someone and still not know much. Today I found out that a tiny part of Murphy is made differently. I don’t know how important this little biological kink is. It doesn’t seem like a complicated thing. But it does make me think about the whole universe that’s inside us.

  I think about Murph’s tears giving him an infection. Right now he cries over a lost toy. Later, when there’s true heartbreak, could his tears quite literally cause an infection, coursing through his body? In centuries past, before tubes and sophisticated medical care, did children quite literally die, infected with grief?

  Pat rolls toward me and flops his heavy arm over my stomach. Usually, the weight of his arm makes me uncomfortable. But right now I like it.

  I dream of being shrunk down so small that I can commandeer a submarine through Murphy’s veins, right up to the inside of his left eye.

  I want to be there for the operation, which is scheduled for 6 a.m., but Pat and I decide that it might be upsettin
g for Spence to go. And I don’t want to leave him with a babysitter, knowing that we’re all at the hospital with Murphy. So I stay home, padding through the living room in the early morning. Glancing at my watch every two minutes. I look into the boys’ room several times to see Spence still sleeping, one leg hanging off the bed.

  I sit at the dining table, drinking a cup of tea. I think about Murph, but I don’t want to think about him. So I think about my recent discontent.

  Is it simply that I am mourning a carefree, careless youth? Do I really want to be young like that again? Do I really want to be single again? Childless?

  Sometimes I do, I think. Sometimes. Well, often.

  I clink the spoon against the teacup that I inherited from my grandmother. It’s floral. Not a bit like the kind of teacup I would choose if I were choosing.

  Something new occurs to me as I stare at the painted flowers. I know it’s new because I rarely have a thought that cannot be traced to a former thought or one uttered by someone far wiser than myself.

  It is this: The only difference between Now and Then (aside from the obvious tracks of time) is that Now I have something to lose.

  Spence wakes up, and instead of making breakfast, I say we’re going to go get a milk shake.

  I lay my cell phone on the counter of the local coffee shop. Why isn’t it ringing? Pat must know I’m anxious. The surgery must be over by now.

  “Why do you keep looking at the phone, Mommy?”

  “I’m just wondering when Daddy’s going to call.”

  “Is he with Murphy?”

  “Yes. They’re fixing Murphy’s eye.”

  When the phone finally does ring, I pounce. “How’s Murph?”

  “He’s fine, honey. We’re on our way home. I couldn’t get reception at the hospital, so I couldn’t call. I knew you’d be worried.”

  “Murphy’s fine?”

  “He’s fine.”

  But he’s not fine.

  The next time we see green, and the next time and the next, we follow a routine of draining Murph’s eye and visiting Dr. Goode, who is stumped.

  After four unsuccessful operations—four mornings of Pat driving off with Murph as Spence and I hang by the phone—Dr. Goode says that he thinks that Murph should get an MRI.

  “Okay,” says Pat.

  We say okay to everything. Dr. Goode shows us more pictures in his book. Pictures of children with huge growths coming out of their eyes, abscesses oozing from their lids.

  Pat and I talk very little about Murphy’s eye. I think, but don’t know, that he is thinking what I am thinking: If I follow the instructions, if I do everything the doctor tells me to do, if I am good and thorough and responsible and practical, it will be all right.

  The night before the MRI, I lie in bed with Pat’s arm across my stomach. I watch my thoughts go close to the thing I haven’t said to Pat or anyone. I watch my thoughts go forward and pull back, go forward and pull back. “Don’t think about it,” I say to myself. “Don’t ask. Don’t say the word ‘cancer.’”

  I dream that I am hanging off a cliff . . .

  I know that it’s not real. It’s not real because it’s impossible for me to bear my own weight with just my hands digging into the grass of the precipice.

  “God,” I say. “God, keep me hanging on.”

  Dr. Goode looks at the results of the MRI.

  “This doesn’t really tell me why the eye isn’t draining,” he says.

  “Let me ask a stupid mom question,” I say, determined to say the unsayable.

  I look to Pat, who turns from showing Spence and Murph the eye chart.

  In a voice that sounds like it’s hardly worth asking, I ask, “There isn’t a chance that this could be cancerous?”

  Dr. Goode clears his throat. “No. We don’t think there’s any malignancy. That was, of course, the first thing we looked for.”

  It was? Why didn’t he tell us that?

  “And you’re saying there’s no cancer?”

  “I’m almost positive.”

  “Almost?”

  “I’d say there’s no cancer.”

  “Are you going to check again?”

  “Yes. We’ll be checking again.”

  Pat says, “But you have no reason to believe, right now, that there’s any malignancy.”

  “Right.”

  I don’t know why I don’t feel better. I guess I’m looking for some signed statement from Mr. Guy-who-wrote-the-book-on-all-this that my son does not have and never will have cancer.

  “I want you to take Murphy to see Dr. Braunstein,” says Dr. Goode. “He’s a friend of mine in Beverly Hills. He’s a plastic surgeon.”

  “Why do we need a plastic surgeon?” asks Pat.

  “I think I want him with me the next time I go in. He may have to reconstruct Murphy’s tear duct.”

  Pat and I look at each other.

  “Uh. Okay,” says Pat.

  The four of us cram into Dr. Braunstein’s office for the usual eye poking. Dr. Braunstein talks fast, treating Pat’s and my questions like annoyances that must be endured. The effect of which is that we don’t ask many. We listen to him give his theory that perhaps the network near the eye is vastly different from one that functions normally. He might have to cut into the nose, he says. He might have to reconstruct passageways.

  I put Murphy on the floor and square myself. I feel like I need to slow all of this down. How did we get from bothersome infections to slicing into my son’s face?

  “If we choose not to do anything about this,” I say, “what would be the consequence? I mean, would we simply have a child who got occasional eye infections?”

  Dr. Braunstein looks at me like I’m a remedial student who accidentally got funneled into honors class.

  He sighs loudly. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that everything’s connected up there in his head. And you don’t want any infections, especially repeated ones, happening that close to the brain.”

  My stomach takes a dive like I’m on a roller coaster. Pat’s face goes soft.

  Infections near the brain? No one told me this. Not in the four months that we’ve been hauling Murphy in and out of offices.

  The roller coaster shuttles up the next rickety hill. My breathing gets tight as I approach the apex. I hear nothing but the pounding of my pulse. Then down I go, whizzing through the last terrifying loop. The car seems to careen out of control. I scream, “Noooo,” as I hang on, feeling it shudder. As the loop flattens out, I feel a drag, slowing me down. Up ahead, I see the end. I try to steady my breathing as I pull into the platform. The safety bar clangs over my head and I get out, my knees quivering, my heart thumping, my shirt soaking.

  “. . . avoid reconstruction, we will,” Dr. Braunstein is saying.

  I look down at Murphy tugging on my shoelace.

  “I don’t want him to have any more infections,” I say.

  The nurse smiles at Murphy as Pat and I check him in the next morning. Spence is still asleep at home, I hope, while my brother watches the Today show.

  “Aww,” she says. “Little Murph is back.”

  As Pat checks us in, various nurses and technicians smile or wave at Murph.

  He’s a regular.

  I follow as Pat carries Murph through the familiar maze of swinging doors and polished floors. We follow arrows. We buzz buzzers. We walk past adult patients on gurneys. I try not to look at them. It seems invasive.

  Curtains are shushed open by a nurse who also seems to know Murph. On a rolling bed is a small pair of pale green scrubs. Pat starts to take off Murphy’s clothes.

  “They make scrubs this small?” I ask, holding them up.

  “I guess it’s standard for anyone who’s having an operation,” says Pat.

  He puts Murph’s arms through the armholes of the scrubs and begins to tie up the back.

  “I didn’t imagine the tiny scrubs,” I say. “You didn’t tell me he wore these.”

  “I didn’t think abou
t it.”

  I’ve missed all this, I think. I haven’t been here. It’s true I’ve been home with Spence. But I think I was too afraid to come, before.

  Pat finishes the tying and picks Murphy up as the nurse wheels a cart next to the bed. There are more forms this time, she says. Forms that give our permission for the doctors to do anything that they feel is required, once they’re “inside.”

  His head, I think. Once they’re inside his head.

  Pat puts Murph on the bed and starts to sign. Murph grabs the edges of the papers as Pat flips through them.

  The nurse hands me a Sharpie. “And just write the word ‘yes’ over the eye that’s going to be operated on.”

  “Write ‘yes’?”

  “Over the eye. It’s another sign of permission from the parents.”

  I pick Murph up and lay him down on the bed. He looks at me, unwavering, as I take the cap off the pen and write the word “yes” over his left eye.

  The next hour is like a generic scene from a hospital movie. The doctors talk to us briefly before going into the OR. They wear scrubs that look similar to Murph’s. I train my attention on what they are saying, calmed a bit at the thought that these highly moneyed, very important doctors are dressed in what looks like green pajamas.

  Murph is given a sedative that makes him heavy in my arms. His head rolls off my shoulder every time I move.

  When the time comes, I lay Murph on the gurney. He looks at me like he has a question he’s unable to ask. Pat and I watch as he’s wheeled into the OR, the doors swinging shut.

  While Murph is gone, we wait. We pace. We drink Diet Coke from the machine. We pace. We look at our watches. We talk about other things. We look out the window. We flip through magazines. We go to the bathroom. We sip from the water fountain. We try not to look at the other patients through the break in their curtains.

  Finally, the green doctor twosome appears and tells us that things went better than they could have imagined.

  Pat and I melt with relief as Braunstein draws us a picture of what was done to Murph’s eye on the back of a newspaper. He’s happy to report that they did the whole procedure through the duct and didn’t have to cut through the nose. I want to hug Braunstein, but I don’t. He hands me the newspaper with the drawing on it and shakes my hand. He turns to shake Pat’s, but Pat pulls him into his chest, enveloping him in a grateful embrace.