Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  Often, when I looked over, she’d be staring out the window, eyes darting or peering searchingly up at the ceiling. She was the quiet girl at the back of the class, thinking clear, deep thoughts everyone wanted to know but only a lucky few, like me, got to hear.

  After school we’d walk across the street to Cassie’s house, empty of parents, and pray to the Great Horse God, asking her to grant us Appaloosas, Palominos, Pintos, Mustangs, any creature with a shiny coat capable of a dead gallop. We wanted to have horses, ride horses, know horses, breathe horses, trade horses, sing horses, love horses, be horses.

  Looking at Cassie twenty-five years later, I realized that she’d gotten our wish. She possessed the sprung, flexible energy of a lithe animal on the verge of taking flight. And such was her spirit of generosity that, beside her, you felt infused with the same set of live possibilities. Lumpen perinatal blob though you might be, next to Cassie you felt perkier, more artful. As if she might unscrew her long, articulate arms and offer them to you.

  “Hey,” Cassie said, “are you in there?” She was holding the baby, smiling at her, but talking to me.

  “I was just thinking,” I said, “that you’d probably lend me your arms if I asked.”

  “Only,” she said, “if you promised to conduct a symphony with them.” She picked up a brownie, took a bite, and handed it to me. “I’ve always wanted to conduct a symphony.” I took a bite and handed it back. It was gooey at the center. We’d pass it back and forth until it was nothing but a crumb, and then one of us would bite the crumb in half and pass it back. This was what we did best, share. She took another bite, handed it back. A tiny piece fell off and landed on the baby’s forehead. It looked like a tika, the mark worn by Hindus to indicate the location of the third eye. Thusly blessed by brownie, the baby slept on.

  “How is she?” Cassie said. She was looking at Gracie so intently I had the feeling she might spontaneously diagnose her. Mystery illness solved.

  “She looks OK, is she OK?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Well, she’s got a certain something,” Cassie said, “a definite certain something.”

  A handsome, sexy god in our high school had once said this to Cassie, “You’ve got a certain something.” We’d been pretty sure he didn’t know her name, and he definitely didn’t have the vocabulary with which to describe her presence, falling, as it did, outside the high school box. But he knew she was unique, of note. Entirely original. At the time, we’d filed it under pathetic, backhanded compliment. Now, it was our highest form of praise.

  “All babies have a certain something,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Cass said, “but she’s the somethingest of them all.”

  After Cassie left, the baby and I crawled up to the studio’s loft and fell asleep instantly. New motherhood strips you down to the studs. Almost everything I enjoyed doing in the evenings, pre-baby, like reading books or writing emails or watching CSI or walking to the park, was now an irrelevant luxury. All I needed in this refashioned life were brownies and baby and sleep.

  Through those early days, my mom was a pillar of motherliness. She did laundry, cooked meals, took out the trash, held the baby while I showered, and wiped the glop I hadn’t noticed from my face and clothes. My friends Suzi and David (her college boyfriend, now husband) camped on our couch so that they could keep me company at 3 a.m. Suzi would lie beside me in the loft in the wee hours. “Fall back asleep, Heath. I’ll make sure she doesn’t roll off the bed.” Even Evan and Dylan were useful. Every time the baby cried, one of them would shout over from the main house, “Help her!” And if she didn’t stop crying instantly, they’d appear at my door, indignant on the baby’s behalf.

  Everyone chipped in, everyone doted. But at the end of the day, I was on my own. I didn’t have to work, and I had enough of every necessity. And yet life with the baby seemed impossibly complex.

  Just getting up to bed had become a comical ordeal. The studio had a sleep loft, reachable only by a built-in wooden ladder, angled at a sharp rake. Ascending the ladder, using one hand to clutch the baby to my chest and the other to grab for incrementally higher rungs, was a physical joke. At night, once I’d gotten up to the loft, I was loath to come down again. Did I bring the baby with me, fumbling in the dark? Leave her in the loft alone? She couldn’t possibly wiggle off the bed and over the edge of the loft, right? It was impossible! It couldn’t be done! And then the infant who had not yet learned to burp strikes a match and burns the house down.

  Parenting, I discovered, invokes questions you never thought to ask: Are you willing to leave the baby to her peril, even imaginary peril, if you have to pee? What if you have to pee really badly? Will you pee in a cup, in a loft, in the dark? What do you do with said cup? How self-sacrificing are you willing to be? Define peril. Define imaginary.

  Bit by bit, these questions hammer at your sense of self.

  Finally, my mom said, “Just put the baby’s bassinet up in the loft,” and it seemed reasonable to assume that, unless the baby could defy the laws of physics, she would be safe in her bassinet while I went down to the bathroom. But the dilemma of conflicting needs had only just begun. If the phone was ringing, and the stir-fry was burning, and Lulu was barking to be let out, and my pants were sliding off, and the baby was crying—where to start? The baby, of course the baby, but that leaves one hand for all other competing priorities. I dubbed this dance—baby in the left hand, everything else with the right—the one-handed life.

  One-handed as I was, I didn’t miss Brian. I didn’t rage at Brian. For the most part, I didn’t feel he owed me anything in particular, now that the baby was born, except child support. It was as if, at the moment of her birth, my shock, my fury at being left while pregnant became a relic from another era. The hurt that had passed between us was beside the point. The point was her. I hadn’t forgiven him; I just didn’t feel intensely much of anything toward him anymore. I felt intensely for the baby, and the rest of life was white noise. My one-handed life was by design. I chose this girl, squeaky girl, sleepy girl.

  Still, he was psychically hovering, more than I’d expected. He would call around eight each night, and I’d give him the update. She ate! She slept! She pooped! And he was as bowled over by these achievements as I was.

  We never said, “Now we’ll talk every day.” We never said, “I forgive you” or even “I don’t forgive you.” We simply fell into a pattern of contact that reassured us both and, in my imagination at least, helped to form a protective seal around Amelia-Grace. Though we didn’t discuss it, I imagined Brian was living inside a titanic clash of inner tides: know the baby, love the baby, and let all hell break loose; or stay three thousand miles away. I didn’t envy him. She was an irresistible force.

  I told him how her hair had begun to fall out in random patches. “She’s nearly bald, with this weird, Hitchcockian hairline,” I said.

  I described the way she loved to sleep on her back with one arm thrown over her head, her chin stuck out at a contentious angle, daring the world to dish it out. Or how she’d fall asleep while nursing, leaving one eye open, a drunk too far gone to get comfortable. He wanted to hear everything, anything.

  One night, after we’d chatted for a few minutes, Brian said, “Can I talk to her?” I held the phone to the baby’s ear. What was he saying? Was he whispering or just listening to the light whistle of her breath? It seemed like a private conversation. Did he apologize for missing her birth? Missing her blood transfusion? Did he recount the events of his day? I couldn’t know. I didn’t know. She fluttered awake, seemed to listen for a beat or two, and closed her eyes. Back to sleep.

  “Why do you sleep so much?” I said.

  “What?” Brian said.

  “Just talking to the baby.”

  We paused, a semi-comfortable silence.

  “She’s a decent-looking baby,” I said.

  I knew Brian would appreciate the understatement. That was his style. When we’d been together
, if we shared a mind-blowing night, the next morning he’d say something like, “I had an OK time with you.”

  “What’s so great about her?” he said.

  “Well, Cassie says she has a certain something.”

  “Cassie is obliged to say that. But tell me, specifically, what is so great about this so-called baby?”

  “For one thing, she has fantastic breath. I could sell tickets. In fact her whole body is really outstandingly fresh; it’s as if each cell has been aired out at the top of the Sierras.”

  “That is impressive.” Long beat. “I wish I could smell her.”

  Get on a plane, you’ve heard of planes?

  I stayed quiet. Because you do not run out scolding the deer that peeks from behind the bushes. You hold still. You wait. Even when the deer is acting idiotic. If I opened up my anger and impatience, this would be about me. And, more than Brian was my ex, he was Gracie’s dad. My job was to make room for him, at whatever glacial pace, to know his daughter.

  6

  My mom and I thought that twenty-one days of life on earth sounded auspicious, and so we were sitting in the sun, at an outdoor café, celebrating the baby’s three-week birthday when the full foolishness of my pretend-the-baby-is-fine-and-eat-Salade-Niçoise plan dawned on us. Or rather, it dawned on my mom; I wasn’t even thinking about the baby. I was watching a pair of toddler twins, a boy and girl, play at the edge of a nearby fountain, both of them emanating good health like gamma rays. They had the sun-burnished skin and brown-gold hair of kids who spend their days collecting seashells. Looking at them, I ached. It was nearly impossible to imagine my fragile, pasty baby transforming into this kind of bursting, cell-dividing, condensed sunlight child.

  I didn’t say any of this to my mom. Instead, I held up People magazine and pointed at a picture of Halle Berry wearing ripped jeans, flip-flops, and a white men’s shirt as she pumped gas not as a mere mortal but as a demigod whose body inspired an unwavering allegiance from any object it touched. On her, the button-down shirt was impossibly sexy.

  “Look how buoyant she is,” I said. “Her body practically floats. How is that possible?”

  “Untold hours of yoga,” my mom said. “Or, an all-raw, mostly nothing diet combined with salt scrubs and Finnish saunas. Whatever it is, regular people don’t have time to be buoyant. Anyway, not everything is the way it appears; I’m sure there are unseen things weighing her down.”

  We routinely discussed celebrities as if they were extended family members. In fact, my mom believed celebrity culture had replaced tribal affiliations.

  “She lost most of the hearing in her left ear from an abusive boyfriend,” I said. My mom looked at me. I’d stepped into territory she preferred to avoid. I took a bite of my salad. “Maybe,” I said, “she has a team of people who pull her muscles north, south, east, west, intoning ancient chants.” No response. “I’d pay a thousand dollars to see her naked,” I said. “Not to touch. Just to check her out, at my leisure.”

  Given her incredible levitating body, Halle Berry, it went without saying, would have a gorgeous and peppy baby. Not a pasty over-sleeper.

  I waited for my mom to respond, but she was looking at the baby. Really looking at her. She touched the baby’s cheek and looked up at me, “I think you better take her in.”

  We both knew where in was, even though we’d barely spoken of the hospital since we’d left. I regarded the hospital like a bad acid trip: the less said afterward the better. I glanced down at the baby, at the twins circling the fountain, at Halle Berry happily filling up her car, at the baby again.

  I didn’t want to take her back in. I wanted to take her home.

  My mom was emphatic. “She’s so pale. And she never really wakes up.”

  She wasn’t only pale; she was nearly see-through. Her skin was parchment thin and transparent, like an anatomy doll. Beneath her skin a tributary of veins formed intricate, lacy patterns in violet hues. I was afraid to press on her, afraid she could be breached.

  I looked down at her. She was just a little comma, a small curved thing, cupping air. Her face was peaceful, her hands quiet on top of the blanket, her moist lips pushed forward in the involuntary pout of infants. Her eyelids didn’t flicker or twitch. Either she wasn’t dreaming, or her dream was of an unmoving landscape.

  “Don’t drift off,” I whispered into the curve of her ear, sunny yellow with wax at the core. She didn’t stir.

  My mother was right; she was a girl in need of a doctor, probably several doctors. But I hesitated. I didn’t want to set the medical wheels in motion. I didn’t want her examined or diagnosed or written up. I wanted to finish eating the goodies of Provence (anchovies, olives, bits of seared tuna) and decoding Halle Berry’s sex appeal.

  I wanted to be a person dedicated to earthbound pleasures. A person from another era—my great-grandmother, born in an olive grove before email, before permanent paper trails, with nothing to verify her birth except her. She raised her children outdoors with a minimum of medical interference. They ran through the olive groves and grew strong. End of story. The only trouble with this vision was that, back then, my girl wouldn’t have lived twenty-one days.

  I took a last look at the bronzed twins and at Gracie, still sleeping, hands motionless. I collected the diaper bag and hoisted the baby carrier into the crook of my arm. “OK. Fine,” I said, and started walking toward the car, dialing the pediatric hematologist’s pager. My mom trailed after me, saying, “Let me help, let me hold that.” I shrugged her off, irrationally furious.

  I got the page prompt and entered my number. I had no idea that the act of paging this specialist would be replicated dozens of times over the next year, or that Marion Koerper’s number, even years after it was decommissioned, would remain in my consciousness, the one number I could remember without trying.

  7

  When Dr. Marion Koerper, renowned hematologist, called back, she sounded like a warm, chatty grandmother, like someone who might invite you over for raspberry scones. When I told her that the baby was see-through and slept most of the day, she gave me instructions in a calm, authoritative voice: “Take her to Marin General. They can check her blood counts. I’ll call in the orders. Step one is to determine if we need to transfuse her.” A pause. “This must be very scary for you.”

  I wanted to hug her through the phone. I didn’t yet know what she looked like, that she had ungovernable silver hair that flew around her face in long independent-minded strands. I didn’t know she had a wide smile populated by a band of unruly teeth. I only knew the sound of her voice made me want to curl up in her lap and sleep.

  Eventually, I came to know that she’d wanted to be a doctor from the age of six, that she had two sons, both in medical school, that her husband was also a doctor. That she’d been raised in the Midwest, loved ice-skating, and didn’t consider herself dressed without medium heels and panty hose. That she treated the nurses with respect, always, even in private.

  And she came to know that I was on my own with my daughter, that I had feelings, of one kind or another, for the father, who lived in New York. That I lived in a studio beside my mother’s house, together with a dog whose white and black hairs clung to the baby’s clothes, despite my occasional efforts to dehair her. That I was sometimes rude to the nurses, sometimes nice, and was the granddaughter of Greek immigrants, one of them a wrestler who went by the name of Pete the Greek. That I also liked to ice-skate. That I had not one doctor in the family. That I was a worrier, a hoverer, and couldn’t be counted on to hand the baby over easily.

  That first day, when she said, “Take her to Marin General … I’ll call in the orders,” I believed she’d take good care of Gracie.

  The nurses on duty at Marin General, where Gracie had been born only three weeks before, recognized us. The kind-faced doctor who had transferred us to UC Med was there too, Dr. Eric Scher. “Call me Dr. Eric,” he said, smiling. It made me feel like I was ten, but I was happy he wanted us to feel comfortable. “Y
ou remember us?” I was pleased. He gave a smile and a shrug. “Not many newborns need central lines or are transferred by ambulance to UC,” he said. “Your girl is unique.”

  One good thing about having a sick kid: it confirms what you’ve secretly believed all along—what your mother repeated to you, like a mantra, all through your childhood—you are special. Well, technically, only your kid is special, but you’re the mom. You made her. It’s fame by association.

  “Dr. Eric” had spoken with Dr. Koerper on the phone and taken down her orders. “Your hematologist asked us to transfuse the baby if her hemoglobin is under six,” he said. “So let’s see what her numbers are and then figure out what to do.” He paused, surveying her like an engineering problem. “Does she still have the central line?”

  “No,” I said. “They took it out when we left UC.”

  “OK, then we have to get in. We might as well place the IV at the same time we draw her blood. Then, if she does need a transfusion, we will already be in.”

  Again, in was the key concept.

  “OK,” I said, unclear on what I was agreeing to or if my consent had even been requested.

  A nurse came over to look at Gracie’s veins. “Is she a hard access?” she asked. I hesitated. I wasn’t sure what a hard access was, and I didn’t want to brand her as a difficult patient. She wasn’t yet a month old. But on the other hand, what if being a hard access qualified her for special treatment? I remembered our experience with the brutal nurse the night of her first transfusion. If there was a team of crackerjack IV placers, we wanted them.

  “She’s very hard,” I said. “Super hard.”

  “Most infants are,” said the nurse. She was slight, waifish, a dishwater blonde with a delicate crucifix at her throat. She stroked Gracie’s forehead and picked up one hand, bending it at the wrist so that the hand stretched flat at a ninety-degree angle. A padded layer of baby fat lay between the skin and the veins; no amount of stretching would disperse the fat completely. The veins, visible as they were, would be hard to hit at the precise angle necessary. From the way the nurse touched Gracie, looked at her, looked back at me, I could tell she was on the side of babies everywhere.