Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  Brian leaned into the doorway. We were just a few inches apart.

  “You could stay,” Brian said.

  At the end of our first date, two years and one child ago, we’d stood in front of my apartment on Twelfth Street, and Brian had declared, “I’m going to kiss you now.” I felt the same rush of excitement. Only now it was shot through with sorrow, worry, uncertainty.

  “Not with her,” I said. “She’s still waking up crying at night.” It was a feint, a punt—we both knew that—but it bought me time to think.

  “OK,” Brian said, “call me if you change your mind.” And he touched my shoulder. The first time either of us had reached for the other in almost a year.

  * * *

  That night I went for a walk up the fire trails with Gracie in the front pack and Lulu by my side. At the end of the paved road we walked past the metal gate that was never locked, past its list of prohibitions against fireworks, unleashed dogs, horses, cigarettes, open fires, beer bottles, and unaccompanied minors under the age of twelve. I’d been walking past this gate with contraband of one kind or another, including unleashed dogs and a defiant pony, since I was ten. Twenty-three years of hiking up this same hill, and it never got old. And now I had a companion.

  Gracie kicked her legs and bobbed her head and made the loudest sound I’d heard from her yet. A piercing squeal of delight. What was exciting her? The fading light, the smell of eucalyptus, the two black labs running circles around each other at the top of the next hill? The fact that she was tucked against the mother ship and able to see a slice of world?

  I tried to focus my thoughts on Brian, on what to do. What was best for her? Was she better off with just me or with a dad in the margins? What about a more central dad? What if that central dad turned inconsistent? Or harmful? Then what? Also, what did I want, and what were the forces behind what I wanted? Could I imagine something for Gracie beyond what I’d experienced?

  I’d grown up as an only child with siblings. It’s complicated; I’d need poster-size paper and a Sharpie to explain it all. But in briefest terms I am the only child of my two parents, both of whom went on to marry other people who already had kids of their own, and then to have kids with those people.

  During my earliest years it was, on a daily basis, just me and my mom, an intrepid team of two. My dad was a weekend dad. A loving dad, but a distracted dad. A dad who remarried when I was six, to a woman who had three young children. Suddenly, every other weekend, I was one of four kids, and, then, with the birth of my sister, one of five. Partly it was fun. At last, other small people! My dad, in a last grasp at bachelorhood, kept his little red Karmann Ghia, from which our newly minted family poured out like clowns.

  But mostly I did not like it at my dad’s; it was chaotic and multispoked and no longer revolved around me. In one year my dad went from part-time parenting one low-key kid to full-time parenting a cabal of kids, several of whom openly resented him. Under stress he turned, periodically, into the kind of tyrannizing father I’d only encountered on TV. My dad, I saw, was too dazed by the turbulence in his own life to care about or respond to the turbulence in mine.

  Life with my mom was equally unpredictable. Though it looked like a buddy movie starring a plucky, pretty single mom and her pigtailed sidekick, it also starred a rotating cast of boyfriends, not all of them well-meaning. When I was sixteen, and she was thirty-seven, she finally remarried. She was pregnant and in love with a man who, at month eight of her pregnancy, became so enraged by something she’d said that he badly bruised her right arm, shoulder to elbow.

  One afternoon I came down the hill after walking the fire trails to piercing screams, the kind of screams people produce when they are under the impression that their life is in danger. As I began to run down the driveway, my mom tore past me in the car. “He’s crazy,” she said through the car window, “really crazy.” And kept driving. I turned and walked back up the hill, back to the fire trails.

  Later, from a pay phone, I’d called Cassie. We were both familiar with domestic drama of one kind or another. She came for me, as she always did, in her teal blue Mazda, circa 1970, with the white rag top. Her parents were on the verge of a divorce, but they did not fight loud. And their house was soothingly full of her mother’s sculpture, oblique figures in alabaster. A good place to wait out any storm.

  Except this storm had no definite end.

  When my brother Evan was born, I stared at him through the window of the nursery at UCSF, crying. I must have cried for a long time because a nurse came by and said something to soothe me. I tried to tell her that these were tears of joy, which they were. But they were also tears of frustration, and shock, and an annihilating impotence; my mom was going to keep this man around. In fact, she was going to have another son with him, my brother Dylan, just a few years later. I couldn’t imagine choosing a violent man to father my child. But then her own father had been violent both professionally (he was a boxer and a wrestler) and domestically, and so the circle goes.

  My family of birth—extending outward from my two parents in a complex web of attachments—contained multiple fissures, outlying siblings, half-attached parents, unclear rules, an abundance of love, but also true harm. Family life with a father, as created by each of my parents, looked at best unappealing and at worst outright dangerous.

  The calmest and easiest years of my childhood were early ones, those years that count most and shout the loudest, when I lived in a kid/mom dyad. That was my map, and consulting my map, I couldn’t figure out where Brian fit, much less whether I could trust him.

  While I’d lollygagged along, Lulu had dashed off to join the two black labs on the adjacent hilltop. The baby and I trudged after her. As we watched Lulu play, Gracie squealed again. I kissed her head; she grasped two of my fingers and squeezed. Not a reflexive squeeze, an intentional one. “You are mine,” her squeeze said. “I couldn’t agree more,” I said. But our world was insular, an airtight system of singular authority. And too familiar. I’d already lived this story from the role of the little girl.

  I wanted to know how it felt to be a family of three, two stable adults with a child between them. Maybe I would fail, maybe I would not be able to forgive Brian, or maybe unconscious motives I couldn’t envision from the top of this hill would derail us. Maybe Brian’s nature was not roomy enough to accommodate change on this scale. Maybe mine wasn’t either. But at least this would be a new plot, something beyond mom-and-girl versus world. It held the potential for being a surprising life, a life that was the product, the gift, of multiple imaginations.

  I started back down the hill. What was the worst that could happen? Something bad, I thought. The worst, from what I knew of fathers and father figures. Unbearable. But maybe that wasn’t Brian. He was reactive and selfish when cornered. But who wasn’t? He was not like the fathers I grew up with. Not dangerous in the ways I feared. He was in good faith. And he was smart, kind, funny. The trifecta of marriage material. And Jewish! Jewish was a bonus.

  Lulu was trotting along beside us, sniffing the perimeter for anything untoward. I kissed Gracie’s nose, cold from the night air. “Do you have a general position on fathers?” She pulled my hair. Affectionately.

  I took out my cell. “Okeydoke,” I said when Brian answered. “You can come over.”

  By the time we reached the top of our street, Brian was leaning against my mom’s mailbox, holding Proust. When he and Gracie spotted each other, he broke into a grin and she kicked her feet. At least these two were unambivalent.

  “Hi, Gracie,” he said. He leaned in and kissed her cheek, leaned in further and kissed mine. In the studio we put Gracie to sleep in her bassinet downstairs and went up to the loft. “It won’t be long until we hear from her,” I said. “She’s still waking up every few hours.”

  “That sounds nice,” Brian said. “I’d like to hear what she sounds like at all hours of the day.”

  “You say that now, but it’s not really that fun to pull yourself out
of REM and fumble down the ladder.”

  “Actually, that sounds fantastically fun.”

  We lay down side by side in my loft bed. Brian lifted my hair away from my face. I put my hand into his hair; I loved its texture. It was wavy, coarse, athletic, outdoorsy hair, antithetical to the rest of him. Hair I’d wanted to sink my hands into, even before we’d spoken.

  “Salt-and-pepper hair,” I said.

  “I think the color you’re looking for is brown,” Brian said.

  “It’s salt-and-pepper, and it’s outstanding. No intellectual deserves hair like this.”

  “You’re my kind of gal.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “The you kind.”

  “That’s circular logic.”

  “I know,” Brian said, “all roads lead to this.” He ran his fingers up my throat, to my lips.

  We lay still for a long time. Looking at each other, then drifting in and out of sleep.

  Brian asleep smelled like Brian awake. This was a man who mysteriously had no body odor, ever. He smelled like warm cotton cloth. I moved my face into the cubbyhole between his shoulder and neck. He put an arm around my waist and pulled me in.

  I was aware that whatever it was we were doing, we were doing it backward. Couples usually decide to have a baby together before they have the baby. First we had the baby, and now we were deciding whether or not to have it together.

  Every once in a while, if something is troubling me, a phrase will appear in my mind as I wake up, a floating sentence. Like those inexplicable visions of Christ on a piece of toast. This never happens when I ask for it. But it does happen. When I woke up beside Brian the next day a one-word sentence appeared: try.

  I turned to face him.

  “You again,” Brian said.

  We were exhilarated to be together but exhausted. Gracie had woken multiple times in the night, and each time Brian had gotten up in sympathy with me, with her, and been kept awake for the thirty minutes or so of shuffling and snuffling downstairs, until I came back up to the loft and lay down, a bag of lead.

  I’d occasionally, over the last month, tried to “Ferberize” Gracie, but I could only tolerate her cries for a minute, three max; upsetting her in any way seemed too cruel given all she’d gone through medically. I’d cave and rush down the ladder. This undermines the Ferber approach, which explicitly calls for no caving.

  She was almost six months old, big enough to sleep through the night, to comfort herself, and I was wrung out from climbing up and down a ladder in the wee hours, but I had been unable to change the status quo. Brian, after listening to me sum up this situation, expressed faith in Gracie’s ability to learn. “Let’s try it,” he said. “She’s a tough cookie.”

  The next night, when Gracie cried, Brian laid an arm across my chest, “Hang on,” he said. “Give her a minute.” Though I’d asked for his help earlier, I was stunned: where did he get off? Alarm bells were trilling in my head: GET BABY. Brian’s arm was a steady, warm weight on my chest.

  “She can do it,” he whispered. Who the hell was he to tell me how to respond? He’d already missed more than half the movie. Did biology alone entitle him to chime in?

  Inside this queasy miasma I was the smallest bit grateful. He considered her cries his problem too. Within a few minutes her cries wound down. Maybe she sensed his determination; his faith in her. Whatever she felt, or didn’t, she flopped over and sighed. Snuffled and grunted, but did not cry again.

  12

  We leapt, in a series of small leaps. Brian came for visit after visit, staying a day or two longer each time. He made plans to bring his mom, Tasha, out to meet Gracie. I told my mom that we were in the process of figuring things out, and told Cassie and Suzi and David and my dad the same. All were a little cautious, or a lot cautious, but also wanted what was best for Gracie and me, and seemed willing to accept that the best might be Brian.

  On his third or fourth visit, we started to see Virginia together, to work on our reunion, but also to work through all the fears and ongoing questions we had about Gracie’s health. Our world was dominated by one question: How could we make our girl better? Nestled inside that question, like tiny, nefarious Russian dolls, were sets of other questions we were afraid to ask: Was it our fault? Would she survive?

  She continued to be hospitalized, transfused, and monitored. She settled into a schedule of needing blood about once every three to four weeks. The doctors insisted we let her hemoglobin drift down to five or six. At that point, with very little oxygen in circulation, she’d become wan and listless, a dollop of baby who said and did very little. Letting her red count drop so low, said her docs, might “kick-start” her marrow into making red cells on its own. But that was a mirage. No matter how low we let her levels fall, she never made new cells in significant numbers. The older cells disintegrated one after another. She was our darling wind-up toy, who, after each transfusion, was funny, active, and chirpy for two weeks and then grew increasingly inert as her cells diminished and she wound down.

  Gracie turned one in March, and Brian was finding it harder and harder to come and go, to worry about her from afar, and to be apart from me. I was finding it harder and harder to parent on my own when he was gone, and to sleep without him. We’d already lost irreplaceable time; it felt urgent that we not lose more. Brian suggested he move to California at the beginning of May when his teaching semester was done, and then take a sabbatical for the next fall. That would give us a solid eight months of living together. I was nervous but ready to try. I found us a new apartment, still in San Anselmo, but bigger, with two real bedrooms, a vaulted ceiling, and a wooden deck over a creek. I would miss Lulu, who would stay at my mom’s. I would miss my mom and the coziness of living next door. But this was a path forward. I hoped.

  On the day of our move into the new apartment, Gracie discovered the joys of an empty box. She crawled in, shrieking with excitement. Over the top of the box, she bobbed her head up and down, the happy seal, the classic Gracie. She was fifteen months, not yet walking or talking, but on the cusp of both. She looked, to all the world, like a healthy child.

  During our first few months in the new apartment, Gracie was everything you could ask for in a toddler. She learned to toddle, for one thing. Toddled from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bathroom, shocked and pleased by her new powers. She still loved nothing more than to snatch the glasses off Brian’s head and lift them above her own, a height she perceived as impossible for him to reach. Or she would grab my hats and throw them across the room, then careen after them like a drunken speed walker.

  She began to speak an invented language all her own; she called water nangi and carousel ponies, slides, indeed anything you could ride (which, from her point of view, also included Lulu) wha wha. She was an imp, into everything. An imp with a hospital habit. The only good thing was that she seemed to have a fantastically short short-term memory. Whenever we entered the hospital, she would waddle in, waving at strangers as we walked toward the lab, toward the blood draw. She would greet the nurse on duty with her porpoise grin. It was not until the needle appeared that she would try to climb me like a tree.

  We were no closer to an answer as to what exactly was wrong with her. At various points, Dr. Koerper believed she might have: Diamond-Blackfan anemia, a malfunctioning spleen, megaloblastic anemia, thalassemia, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, pernicious hemolytic anemia, Biermer’s anemia, and on it went. She had none of these, but to be fair to Dr. Koerper, neither did she have anything else with a name and a prognosis. What she did have, more every day, almost every hour, was personality.

  She loved horses and feared tigers. If you showed her the scene in Spirit (the Disney movie about wild Mustangs) where the herd thunders over the horizon, she would shout, “Dey go! Dey go!” Her first two-word sentence. Their exhilaration was her exhilaration. Some months later, she would begin to call out to us from bed, perhaps reflecting on some of the more invasive things she’d exp
erienced, “I not afraid of tigers. I safe, I safe!”

  Our clown, our playful sprite. Our terrified girl who denied her fright.

  That she was not safe, that there was nothing we could do to keep her safe, was the vein of misery running through our lives.

  Because we were in California, we approached this problem as Californians. We tried everything: cranial sacral therapy (touch the head and hope for the best); moxa treatments, in which one lights a thick bundle of herbs and holds it near various pressure points (accidentally burnt her leg); homeopathy ($400 to walk in the door and hear homeopath’s thoughts, $300 for actual remedies to support baby’s constitution); visits to a Brazilian faith healer, who said, “She is very sick, and she will get well” ($100); visit to the cranial sacral guru in a hushed hall where we awaited him, with restless toddler, for over two hours (he arrived, wearing a sleek black turtleneck, and instructed us to address him in the honorific). We were hoping, hoping, hoping. In vain.

  As cynical as I sound, I’m a believer. I’ve been helped, many times, by complementary medicine. But whatever Gracie had lay beyond its fragile reach.

  It astonished and moved me that Brian tolerated all this. In fact, he endorsed it, sought it out. What more vivid sign of his desperation to help Gracie could there be? This highly rational man with the aristocratic forehead, this man who did not believe, even, in God, was willing to believe, if briefly, in a cure predicated on skull tapping.

  * * *

  One Sunday after two long days at the hospital “getting blood,” Brian and I took a drive out to Bolinas Bay. I wanted Gracie to see the water, wanted her to play in the sand. Wanted her to forget about indoor life. But she was her father’s daughter—deeply suspicious of any situation that requires removing your shoes.

  Before Gracie, I’d once taken Brian to a California beach; I was excited to show him the Pacific Ocean. It was a clear, bright, windy day. At the edge of the sand I took off my shoes and ran toward the waves. Brian followed hesitantly. When I looked back he was trudging toward me still wearing his black “work shoes.” I was a little alarmed.