Happiness--A Memoir

by Heather Harpham

  I didn’t know exactly what this was. It might have referred to the relationship, the fight, the ill-fated trip to the co-op. All I knew for sure was that I meant something, and that I wanted him to get away from me, from the car, from the kids.

  A tentative crowd had gathered. Or rather a few people exiting the store lingered, hoping not to get involved but also feeling obligated to make sure all was OK. Brian had begun to calm down, and he looked as if he wanted to help clean up. He hesitated, then began to walk away, down Union Street, in the direction of Manhattan. The kids, fabulously, were still asleep.

  A man and woman approached me as I picked up food items off the street, “Can we help?” I brushed off their help, embarrassed, and got into the car as quickly as possible, leaving our mess. Worse things had surely been spilled on Seventh Avenue, but I felt as if I was fleeing the scene of a crime.

  I’ll move back to California, I thought. I can leave now. Tonight. I have credit cards. I have options. I can drive West. The kids are already in the car! This seemed like a viable plan. I could drive cross-country with the two of them in the back. They were a complete system: problem and solution, donor and donee. Brian and I could disassemble this family as fast as we’d assembled it. Fuck him. Seriously. Fuck him.

  But then I would be in California with two small children. Without Brian.

  I called Cassie, hyperventilating into the phone. She understood maybe every third word. She said calming things. In her calming voice. She reminded me to breathe, which seemed reasonable enough. I slowed down. I didn’t get on the highway. I drove toward Webster Place, sobbing. “You are under stress,” Cassie said, “too much stress. One of you, or both of you, is bound to blow up.”

  I relaxed a tiny bit. If this fight was not about grocery shopping or Brian’s writing time, we might be OK. As I sat in the car, parked in front of our house, Brian appeared at the end of the block. I told Cassie it was all right, and I’d call her later.

  I was surprised to see him. Any other time I’d pushed Brian away, he’d gone away. He wasn’t one to be disinvited twice. The old cold shoulder never worked with him; he’d drift farther off. But, this time, he’d come home.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. Do you want me to go sleep at Mark’s?”

  “Yes. I do.” Not because I did, but because I thought I should err on the side of distance, sequestration. Time in my own head.

  I carried the kids to bed and tried to figure out what on earth was happening. Who were we if we could fight like that? If Brian was willing to have a public tantrum when his writing time was whittled down, was he capable of family life? Maybe he’d understood himself better than I had, all along. And what about my hyperbolic This is over; was I that unsure of our life together that I could end things over a single fight, even a bad fight?

  The next day Brian came home early from work. We didn’t say much to each other. It was a Monday night. We fed the kids dinner, then ate peanut rolls and Thai soup. I felt reassured. If we could drink from the same soup bowl, there must be some mutual understanding. We put the kids to bed and went through the routine of med mixing, numbing cream, needle in, pump on. Gracie didn’t wake up, only stirred enough to roll on her side and mumble vowels. Her light brown curls clung to the back of her neck with night sweat.

  When she was hooked up, we went downstairs to talk.

  We sat side by side on the couch, bent double, head to the knees, and turned to each other. This was the ultimate posture of defeat, no stamina to even hold the body upright.

  I looked at him for a long time, and he looked at me.

  “You frightened me.”

  “I know I did, and I’m sorry. I would never hurt you.”

  “You threw groceries at me.”

  “I threw groceries. Not at you.”

  “You frightened me.”

  “I was really angry, but I wasn’t trying to scare you. I’m sorry I scared you. If you want me to go to an anger management program, I will. I will go somewhere where they teach you not to throw organic yogurt, no matter how mad you are.”

  If someone is volunteering to go to anger management, chances are they don’t need anger management. I was wary of him but also comforted that he still looked like himself. Brian’s face, even with the greenish cast of fatigue and worry, was so very Brian. His high forehead; his twice-broken nose that, midlength, bends right, as if, having considered its options, chooses to turn this way; his full mouth, with the sensual lower lip bestowed on lucky Jewish intellectuals. A line from a Sharon Olds poem drifted to mind, in which the iris of her lover’s eye has a calm like “the dignity of matter.”

  This was what we could offer each other when we were lucky enough to stay awake for a few minutes beyond the children. Looking. Seeing. Being seen.

  We were touching along the length of our sides: ankles, knees, thighs, hips, arms, shoulders. We laid the backs of our hands together, an old intimacy. After a while Brian looked down at the floor.

  “Gracie is sick,” he said.

  “I know she is.”

  There was a long quiet, broken by sounds outside. Teenagers at the end of the block, throwing their voices for dramatic effect. “She fucking lied! What the fuck!”

  “I’m ready to take her to North Carolina,” Brian said. “Are you?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, “I am.”

  We sat for a while longer, listening to the street. Ten p.m. on Webster Place. Faintly, from a few blocks away, the ice cream man’s insanity-inducing jingle. The brisk river of traffic on Prospect Avenue. Beneath this a chorus of harmonic chirps and rubbed notes. “Do you hear crickets?” I sat up. Brian shook off my question with a lift of his left shoulder.

  He looked as if he was bracing himself for something painful and inevitable. Like someone trapped inside the lucid, elongated moments between losing control of the wheel and impact. Those baggy, expanding seconds in which you realize that even as the humped, dark shapes at the edge of the road draw closer, grow bigger, you have no idea what the hell it is you’re about to hit.

  30

  Lifesaving medical care is the kind of thing you buy whether you can afford it or not. And so we prepared to go disastrously broke.

  Shortly after deciding to go to Durham, we received a letter alerting us that, upon reviewing our insurance coverage, the Children’s Organ Transplant Association (COTA, the family support agency we’d been referred to by the hospital social worker) estimated we would need $85,000 to cover uninsured medical expenses and Brian’s commute during the transplant period. I could hardly believe that Brian would once more be living in one state with us and working in another, but we had to keep our health insurance, no matter what. And that meant he had to teach full-time, in New York, while Gracie got treatment in North Carolina.

  Raising $85,000 in a couple of months sounded about as likely as Gabriel translating Moby-Dick into Arabic, tonight. I pictured $85,000 in the form of the kids’ blocks: a stack of plastic cubes towering over Brooklyn in a long, skinny, tilting line.

  Brian was working as hard as was humanly possible. I was taking Gracie to the doctor, watching the kids, my mom was in California, my generous grandmother’s money was long gone. Who exactly was going to raise this money?

  When Brian arrived home I’d said, “Are you ready for this? It turns out we can’t afford a transplant!”

  “What do you mean?” he came toward me for a kiss, with a kiss.

  A kiss between two people in need of $85,000, neither of whom had a clue where to find it. A kiss to keep the world spinning. Brian’s lips were soft and warm, brief and promising.

  I showed him the letter. “Eighty-five thousand dollars,” he said. He wasn’t as shocked as I’d been. He was more of a realist. He knew we were raising money for Gracie to join the ten kids crossing the street.

  We were capable of going $85,000 into debt, or more, if that was what it took. We had credit cards and health insurance; that would get us in the door. But unles
s we raised money for Gracie’s care, and plenty of it, we would come out the other end in bad shape. An absolutely American story.

  If you had told me ahead of time that Kathy would raise the money, that her husband, Steve, would make it happen, that a handful of Brian’s longtime friends and colleagues from Dissent magazine and Sarah Lawrence College and my friends from World College West would rally around in the most astonishing ways, that two separate millionaires would offer to pay the entire thing, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that was what happened.

  On the West Coast, Dawa organized a Westie fund-raiser with two weeks’ notice at the community center in Stinson Beach. On the Upper West Side, Brian’s dear friends Mark and Melissa hosted a fund-raising party/brainstorm session in their big, beautiful apartment for Brian’s Dissent and Sarah Lawrence College colleagues. And in Brooklyn, Kathy dreamed up, organized, and galvanized an entire neighborhood into a block party.

  And then it went wider. Kathy’s husband, Steve, had worked as a journalist. He got in touch with a few media people interested in Gracie’s story, they ran short pieces, and then suddenly, and briefly, her story caught fire. She was on the cover of the New York Post, on NY1 (the local cable TV station), in almost all of the Brooklyn papers. Every paper ran COTA’s website address for donating. Donations began to pour in.

  At Kathy’s block party there were clowns, face painters. The local fire truck drove Gracie and a gaggle of pals around the block. An older couple came up and introduced themselves; they had read about Gracie’s story, and the man had built her a Victorian dollhouse, complete with gingerbread trim. They brought a photo of it. “Gracie’s Mansion” was hand-lettered above a light blue front door.

  “When she comes home, swing by and pick it up,” they said. I love their optimism. When.

  Around five o’clock, as the party took on a mellow vibe, Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president, arrived. He stood on our porch to address the crowd. He declared this “Gracie Day” and wished her well. I cried and said something inarticulate. Brian welled up and said something articulate. Gracie shrieked and ran in circles and generally embarrassed us with her appearance of good health. “She really is sick,” I wanted to tell people. “I swear.” Gabriel fell asleep over Brian’s shoulder.

  All afternoon Gracie, who’d only lived in Brooklyn for one year, was claimed by folks all through the neighborhood and beyond, claimed by the working-class guys who drank at the bar where they ran a fifty-fifty raffle for her. Claimed by a young man from the DMV. How could he know how much his generosity meant? He was barely more than a teenager, with his teenage girlfriend by his side whom he called “my fiancée,” both of them barely looking old enough to drink, much less marry, or care about sick children they’d never met, but there he was with an envelope stuffed full of cash. He’d taken up a collection at work and wanted to deliver it in person. Claimed by the mother and daughter who rang our doorbell, long after the party was over, with two fluffy stuffed chairs they’d bought at Target—one Elmo, one Dora—to take with us to North Carolina so that, as the mother put it, “your little ones can be comfy at least.”

  Without the block party, we might have raised enough money, maybe. But we would have missed out on knowing the full kindness of strangers, the power of a few determined friends, and the deep heart of Brooklyn. And it was also good that we raised the money because, as it turned out, we needed every cent.

  At the end of the night, exhausted and grateful beyond all measure, I hugged Kathy. “You did this. You are superhuman. My God. How are we ever going to thank you?”

  “Come back and be my writer-mom friend again. Let the girls grow into truculent teenagers together.” Pause. “OK?”

  That she posed it as a choice was her parting gift.

  DURHAM

  31

  The day before Thanksgiving, we flew to Durham. Brian and I held hands across the narrow aisle. Gabriel stood on Brian’s lap, peering up his nose, convinced that, given enough time, he’d find treasure. Gracie kept up a happy running monologue of questions and assertions.

  “I am going to see Eden again. You know that, right?”

  “I do.”

  “Look, Mama, we are up. We are going up.” She was obsessed with the clouds, their fluffiness. Were they cold? Were they scratchy? Could they hold you?

  “If you jump high enough, can you get from the ground to a cloud?”

  “Maybe,” I said, noncommittal, wanting to promise nothing, wanting to get off the subject of clouds, uncomfortable cousin to heaven. But she was curious.

  “If I called ‘Mommy’ from the sky, could you hear me?”

  “What do you think?” I don’t know, don’t want to know.

  “You say the answer.”

  “Yes, I would hear you.” I hope.

  “Are the clouds soft? Will they snuggle you, like a blanket?”

  “Look,” I said, “here comes the lady with snacks.”

  “I want a fuzzy drink. Daddy! I see animal crackers. Get me animal crackers. Don’t give Gabriel the elephant. No! I want the elephant, Daddy!”

  Gabriel is giving you his stem cells, I wanted to say. Let him have the ever-loving elephant.

  After a very long time, we were nearly there.

  “We are going down, Mama. Look down!”

  Down was the gentle green of Raleigh-Durham, a mild landscape. No dramatic cliffs, no edge of ocean, no peaks, no dense tangle of buildings. Just a few lakes, lots and lots and lots of trees, and a modest-sized city in the distance.

  Gracie was pulling on Brian’s collar, “Did Gabriel eat my cookie?”

  Quiet, hush, hush. We’ll give you anything you want. We are flying to the hospital in North Carolina. Everything is about to change.

  When we stepped off the plane, the air felt like a skim coating of whipped cream applied to the skin. That’s good; air is oxygen. We were all for oxygen.

  We collected our stuff, rented a car, and drove to Alexan Farms, the condo complex we’d seen only online. Our sublet unit was much bigger than our place in Brooklyn but too near a busy road. I looked out the window at the cars whizzing past. They were about a hundred yards away, but only a quaint wood fence with wide-spaced slats separated us from them. I gestured with my head toward the road and said to Brian, “How would that be for an ironic twist?”

  I went to the management office, Gracie in tow as evidence. She skipped ahead of me into the lobby where a tall bronze horse raked the air with its hooves. She ran her hands along its muscled legs, “What makes him so cold?” I rambled about the core temperature of metals, realizing that, on the inside, Gracie herself was essentially gilded.

  “Are you chilly?” I pulled the cuffs of her pink shirt out from the sleeves of her darker pink sweater.

  The woman at the desk stopped typing as soon as we walked in. This must be the South, I thought, if people pay attention to an opening door. I explained our plight. She gave me a rueful look. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I hate to disappoint the transplant families. We try to accommodate y’all in every way we can, but we don’t have any units left except that one by the road.” Her obvious distress at not being able to help, the look on her face as she glanced from me to Gracie and quickly away, this was something new.

  Gracie had always looked and seemed healthy enough to pass. We hadn’t yet been subjected to the double-edged blade of pity and kindness most people display when encountering a visibly sick kid. I was at once piqued; this woman assumed my life circumstances were worse than her own (never mind that they likely were); and then grateful (she knew, she understood); and then flooded with a quick dose of potential power—the sick-kid trump card!

  I tried to look somber. “Well, we really need the next unit that comes up. My son is only one and a half, and he’ll be home with the babysitter while I’m at the hospital with my daughter, so I’d feel much easier if we were away from the road.” She nodded and promised to relocate us if possible. Gracie said, “No! I don’t want to mo
ve again!”

  I didn’t explain that she wasn’t going to be living in the apartment long, that she would be in the hospital. I took her hand and led her back past the tidy line of mailboxes, the pristine blue pool, the petunias in neat rows, the long shiny bank of Camrys and Nissans, the border shrubs groomed into tight angular lines. Every living thing had bowed its head in submission to the landscaping team. It seemed like a movie set or Disneyland, where my little brother Dylan had once run up to each tree, placed his palms upon the bark, and asked, “Is it real?”

  Surely living in such a controlled environment was a hedge against chaos or heartbreak. But I hated it. Every time I drove into the complex, the phrase “a less soulful life” would dart across my mind.

  Back in the apartment Gabe was riding Brian around our new living room. For a man happiest discussing the nuanced differences between Henry James’s late and early work, Brian was surprisingly willing to be a pony. He moved at an old-mare pace, afraid Gabe would fall off. Gabe flung his legs up and down. “Go, go!”

  I looked around the room, flummoxed: there were no lamps and no dining room chairs. At the furniture rental place, a beleaguered woman answered the phone, probably juggling multiple disgruntled customers at once.

  “Listen, if you can’t get it together to deliver what we need, I’ll come there,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she answered, “we don’t disclose our location.”

  “You don’t disclose your location? Really? You must be a very exciting, black ops furniture rental business.” Lately, my public face had begun to warp.

  She didn’t say anything. Maybe she had a policy against responding to people who, within the first minute of a phone call, stooped to sarcasm and political innuendo.

  I felt for her. But I also felt for me. I was exhausted and frightened, and she was the only one I could get on the phone. There were, to my knowledge, no customer service centers open for questions along the lines of Why do innocents suffer?