Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  He called me. “I can’t do the sonogram with you; that doesn’t feel right. But I’d like to know how you are feeling.”

  “How superkind and amazing of you to ask,” I said. “I am FANTASTIC. These have been the best few fucking weeks of my entire life, you phenomenal asshole.”

  Stunned silence. We didn’t fight like this. We fought calm; we fought grown-up. We fought in full, well-punctuated sentences without obscenities.

  “Did you hear me?” I said. “You are a PHENOMENAL ASSHOLE. You excel at being one. You have found your calling. Maybe being an asshole and a writer at the same time will be easier than being a writer and a father.”

  More silence.

  I was in misery. And Brian was in misery. And there was no way for either of us to make the other one less miserable.

  On a cellular level it felt like a minor sin, a venal sin, to call the father of your child an asshole.

  The fact that I’d never witnessed Brian behaving like an asshole made it even worse. He was, in fact, an anti-asshole. The only man left in America to hold doors, cede the conversational right of way, wish everyone he knew a happy birthday, ask after your aunt. Seriously, he asked after aunts.

  In the weeks when we were first dating, he’d occasionally need to adjust our plans so that he could visit Simone, an elderly woman he worked with at Dissent magazine and cared for deeply. When Simone was dying, Brian went to see her in the hospital every afternoon. Not in a showy “Hey, look at my act of charity” way. He didn’t experience it as an act of charity; he just wanted to be there, with Simone, as much as he could be, before she was gone. If he was an asshole, it was only to me. I was in a state of cognitive dissonance so complete I could not speak.

  I hung up.

  * * *

  I spent my second NICU night in the skinny room adjacent to the nursery, awake, holding my cell phone. I wanted to call Brian. Or rather, I didn’t want to want to call Brian. But, more than that, I wanted to call Brian. It was midnight in California, 3 a.m. in New York. He’d called me shortly after I’d delivered; he knew the baby was a girl, but he didn’t yet know we’d been transferred or why. Brian answered fully awake, as if he’d also been sitting with the phone in his hand for the sixty or seventy hours since we last spoke. I told him about the transfer to UCSF Med Center, the little hose in her torso, the (as yet unused) blood-cleaning machine, the doctors’ inability to understand why her red cells lacked stability, and how she seemed mostly undisturbed by it all.

  “She barely weighs five pounds,” I said, “and that includes her central line.”

  “Central line?” I could hear the soft pencil scratch as he wrote this down. Brian, in doubt, taking notes. It was what he knew how to do: externalize worry into symbols and syllables. He said, “Will you call again in a few hours? Or can I call you?” I was relieved to hear his fear for the baby but also a little disgusted. He’d be waiting for my call? If I were him, I would get on a plane. But he was him, slow mover, deliberative decider, a man afraid of life beyond the moat.

  In the few minutes before sleep overtook me on the plastic couch I tried to assimilate what was happening. I was with my daughter in the Intensive Care Unit for neonates at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. She’d crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in an ambulance. She was small enough to fit into a handbag; how could you fit an entire soul into something smaller than a handbag? I was, for now, a single mom. I was living on cafeteria food, leaking milk through my nursing bra onto my shirts, I couldn’t decide what to name her, Amelia or Grace. I was a disheveled waffler. Misery Day Parade, by all means.

  But what leapt to the surface of my consciousness before sleep was her face. Holy infant so tender and mild. Thinking of her, I was sick with worry, alone and lonely for her dad. I was scared. But I also felt an intrinsic happiness. She had made it into the world and—though she might not cure plaguing diseases or quell the rage of nations—the world was a better place for her presence.

  * * *

  I went alone to my sonogram and listened to a lush galloping sound, the rush of blood, thrumming and syncopated, that is the human heartbeat. The technician showed me the moonscape of my uterus, where, nestled against the curve, a rambunctious, pixilated alien bobbed. Hello, little alien, welcome to earth.

  She asked, “Do you want me to print this out for your husband to see?”

  After our fight on the phone, days had floated past without contact. And then one night there was a message from Brian, asking to talk. He was calling from nearby. I called him back, buzzed him up. Walking down the hall, he looked like Brian, only worn and whippet thin. His face, always pale, was pinched and gaunt. Seeing that he’d lost weight, that he couldn’t sustain the rhythms of daily life, satisfied me. At least he was suffering. But he was suffering from a great distance. When he drew closer I started to cry.

  Stop, I commanded myself. Have a little dignity, show a little pride, fuck him! But the tears appeared at the same rate as I brushed them away.

  “This is not what I want,” he said. “I wish that it were.”

  I wanted to kill him, on the spot, not for his decision, which I disbelieved and rejected, but for the formality of his grammar, I wish that it were. Who the fuck did he think he was? The blameless hero of a Henry James novel?

  At the same time that I was in a rage at him—and couldn’t express anything toward him except a biting anger—I pitied him. I knew for certain that, in the long run, I would be happy. But for Brian it would never be OK. He could never live happily, having failed to parent his child.

  “I don’t want this,” Brian said. “I am not able to give you what you want.”

  Sitting between us on the couch was my purse; inside was the sonogram photo of the baby, taken by the technician who thought I had a husband. She’d been delighted by the baby’s energetic swimming; “Such active guy!” she’d said, in a thick eastern European accent.

  I put a hand in my purse and felt around for the sonogram. I was waiting for the right moment. This was my trump card. I actually believed the baby looked like Brian. It certainly had a long sloping forehead like his. Maybe that was a signature feature of all fetuses, but I believed the baby looked like Brian because it was Brian’s. If he would only look at the baby, he’d want the baby. Knowing that this was ridiculous and that it reduced me to a form of begging or guerrilla tactics didn’t dampen my determination. The baby he was rejecting was a theoretical baby, a faceless thought-baby, not this wiggler, not an “active guy.”

  Brian’s eyes had followed the motion of my hand, reaching into the bag. “Thank you,” he said, “I should take my keys.”

  I looked up at him. Keys? What did keys have to do with the sonogram?

  Then it sank in. Did he think I would break into his apartment? Light his computer on fire? Toss the latest draft of his novel out the window and watch the pages flutter down twenty-six floors to Amsterdam Avenue?

  Would I?

  I could certainly picture myself throwing his keys out the window, a casual, underhanded toss. With any luck they would land in the rain grate, wash out to sea. Or lie on the street, waiting for a stranger to pick them up; a nefarious stranger with warped intentions. He’d never know who. Nothing would drive him crazier than having a set of his keys loose in the world. He was key neurotic. It unnerved him to lose anything, but especially a key.

  I lifted my hand toward the window. But I was too exhausted for the high dramatic gesture. Instead, I dropped the keys into the palm of his hand without touching him.

  “Thank you,” he said. His voice was cold and formal; he seemed to resent me for putting him in the position to hurt me. I’d made him choose between his own well-being and someone else’s.

  Brian stood up. “I should go.” We lingered at the door. I had no idea when I’d see him again. Did we kiss? I can’t remember. He left. I closed the door and locked it. In my bedroom I slid under the slippery white duvet, quiet. A bird was perched on the wrought-iron rai
ling of the fire escape, twittering out a Morse code of undecipherable glee. “Shut up,” I said.

  My upstairs neighbor called from her balcony, “Are you talking to me?”

  “Jane,” I said. “No! I was talking to that crazy bird.”

  “What bird?” she called back. “Want dinner?”

  I could smell marinated meat grilling on her hibachi. I knew that if I walked upstairs, Jane would feed me. She was a born feeder of the friendless, a hospice nurse, a maker of handcrafted cards, a pioneer in the movement to destigmatize AIDS, a person who appeared with wildflowers from upstate just when you needed them most. If I caught her up on my plight, she would cluck and tut and truly care, and serve me everything in her fridge. She was an older woman with cobalt eyes, and no children, who gave her maternal love to all. Could I be that? No, too selfish. I wanted one person to devote myself to, or three. I wanted my own tribe. I was feudal at heart.

  “Thanks, Jane,” I said, “I’m good.”

  “You don’t sound good,” she called back. “You sound rotten. Come eat meat.”

  I got up and quietly shut the window.

  After about an hour, for no reason I could identify, I went out into the hall. I wasn’t going upstairs to Jane’s; I was just … going to the hall. Brian was sitting on the wide marble landing. I sat down beside him. The anger had drained out of the moment; we’d surprised each other out of it. After a while he said, “How did you know I was out here?”

  “I didn’t know I knew,” I said.

  If we sit here long enough, I thought, things will shift. We’ll recognize that we’re birds magnetized to the same pole. The pinging pole within me. But sitting on the steps of my landing, side by side in silence, we were the exact same people we’d been an hour ago. After ten minutes or so Brian stood up. “OK,” he said. And he left. He walked down the stairs, through the lobby, out onto Twelfth Street, and over to Sixth Avenue, where he turned north, and away.

  I woke up the next day knowing I would go back to California, to the studio next door to my mom’s house. I needed my mom, like it or not. I was embarrassed to be a highly educated, unpartnered mother, but I was also hugely lucky to have support, on any coast, and it was time to move toward it. It meant accepting Brian’s no; it meant flying away from the father of this apple seed; it meant facing reality. But the alternative was to moon around Manhattan in pursuit of a phantom figure who, however much he might love me, did not want what I wanted. At least he’d given me the gift of an unambiguous answer.

  * * *

  At 6:30 every morning in the NICU, our team, the Red Team, rounded through; discussing the baby, ignoring me. By our fourth day, I was determined to insinuate myself into their private conversation.

  “Her bili is down, that’s good,” said one.

  “But her crit has dropped too,” said another.

  I wanted to ask them to slow down, repeat, wait, how do you spell that? But their talk was like Philip Glass music, filled with repetitive, incomprehensible sounds, unstoppable and forward marching. Even when I asked, they seemed not to hear. They had eager, scrubbed faces and kept looking at the attending physician for validation. Did they know what the hell they were doing? The attending was calm, patient, a good teacher. But there was a room full of sick babies here, and she had to keep moving.

  “Keep an eye on the crit, run it again in three hours,” she said. In my notebook I scribbled, “Crit low (bad), bili low (good),” hoping this would make sense later.

  That night a new nurse came on duty. She wasn’t part of the usual crew and nothing like my Irish favorite. She introduced herself by saying, “These babies are so pissed off, that’s why they’re crying all the time.” I moved the baby’s box a few inches away from her.

  She cracked open a small can of apple juice with vengeful force and drank it in one gulp, saying, “I need to hydrate.” Were her hands shaking? When she stumbled on the edge of a rubber floor mat and muttered, “Fuck this place,” it was so quiet I couldn’t be sure that’s what she said. And so what if she did? Could I report her for swearing? To whom? She kept encouraging me to go to bed.

  If she were a cartoon character, I thought, she’d be surrounded by a visible force field of lightning bolts. In real life, she was a well-groomed brunette with razor creases in the sleeves of her uniform—evil wearing over-pressed cotton. I was aware that my impressions of her were likely exaggerated by a lack of sleep, maternal terror, and an all-vending-machine diet. That I might be using her as a totem, a repository for my rapidly iterating fears. But still, there was no way I was going to bed. I would not leave my baby under the care of a woman who interpreted the cries of the NICU as proof that the newborns sheltered here were “pissed off” rather than disoriented, fighting for their lives, or lonely for their mothers.

  I pulled a rocker beside the baby’s incubator. I could sleep there. There were limits to how long I was permitted to hold her, how long she was allowed out of her box, but because I was a nursing mother, technically I couldn’t be kicked off the unit. I was dozing in the chair, struggling to stay conscious enough to notice if the wacko nurse was pinching any nearby babies, when she touched my shoulder. “I ran another crit, and it’s not good.” Crit, I’d discovered, is hospital slang for hematocrit—the baby’s red cell count was dropping again.

  “How low?” I asked. No answer. In my experience, if you don’t get a factual answer to a direct question in the hospital, it means the facts are so unpleasant the staff doesn’t want to say them out loud.

  I repeated my question, “How low is her count?”

  “Low enough that she needs blood.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means we need to get in.”

  “In where?” Into the baby, of course. I immediately regretted asking.

  In medical vernacular, accessing the vein with an IV is “getting in.” The baby’s low red cell count meant many other things. But to that nurse, on that shift, the primary thing it meant was that she had to thread a needle into a very, very thin vein. Placing an IV into a severely anemic five-pound infant is an art spun out of skill, luck, confidence, and faith. If only we’d left that rubber hose in her belly button; it had been removed just the day before. No central line. No obvious way in.

  4

  My mom and my best childhood friend, Cassie, met me at the airport. Cassie had found a sublet for me in Berkeley until my mom could persuade her tenant to move out and let me have the studio. The sublet was a concrete loft, cold, dusty, but available immediately. Cassie had swept the floor, bought flowers, stocked food: roasted almonds, eggs, rice cakes, milk, juice, chocolate, and fruit (so much fruit, in a giant blue bowl). Under the flowers she’d left a note, “Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy. Virginia Woolf.” After the quote, she’d added, in her tiny, precise script formed with authority, “And vice versa.”

  I put the note in my wallet and zipped it closed. Cassie. My mom. Suzi. Maybe I would be OK.

  I got into bed and picked up the only book that looked remotely readable, The Hobbit. I tried to focus on poor Bilbo’s plight. I imagined myself ensconced in a hobbit house with a round blue door, not pregnant, not miserable, not even human. Sign me up. I’d be a microbe. Anything but what I was, 2,904 miles away from Brian.

  I dreamt in fitful sequences, a string of thwarted activities—running in snow with no sense of direction, no destination. And then a baby, my baby, born healthy with a vigorous cry and pinkish skin, perfect in every regard except that when you held her up to the light you could see right through her. She was translucent and fragile, nothing more than a sheet of vellum.

  If a baby is the unfathomable concoction of two people, what happens when one of those two, upon discovering a baby is under way, changes his mind? I was physiologically bewildered; carrying around, in my body, the genetic material of someone who had said no to fatherhood. Meanwhile his genes and my genes were sketching the blueprint of a person. If I
was constructing a human out of a reluctant set of building blocks, with genes that lay themselves out with reservations and regret, in sequential order, step by step, but under duress, what then?

  * * *

  The nurse, drinking yet another can of apple juice, said, “I’ll just call another nurse to hold the baby.”

  “I’ll hold her.”

  “It’s better if another nurse holds.”

  “No thank you.”

  First she tried to place the IV in the baby’s hand, poking in multiple places without success. My job was to keep the baby’s body completely still as the needle searched the vein. Every time she was punctured, the baby howled a new howl I’d never heard before. She’d been alive less than a week and was rapidly expanding her repertoire of sounds for pain.

  After twenty minutes of jabbing various locations with sweaty determination and what I feared was the slimmest hint of enjoyment, the nurse reluctantly gave up and said she would call the pediatric IV team. The team? The TEAM! There was a fucking TEAM? Somewhere in this hospital was a team of people specifically trained to place IVs into children, and she’d just spent twenty minutes pincushioning her? Later I learned that hospital policy allows only two “sticks” per nurse. It is commonly understood that if you don’t get in quickly, the building tension and anxiety hinder further attempts. Two sticks, and you’re out. But I didn’t know that yet.

  When the IV team arrived, they were “in” within minutes.

  The blood was ordered from the blood bank. “Make sure the blood is washed and irradiated,” the resident on duty said. I wrote down, “Blood 2B washed and irradiated,” again with no idea what it meant and no energy to ask.

  “They know what they’re doing,” my mom had said the day before. “They are keeping all these babies alive.”