The pink replied, “Yes sir, yes sir.”
A third shell—a dull, humble clam—cried out, “Oh no, my babies. Please not my babies!”
I was in deep ideological alignment with the clam, anyone but my babies.
Time for some air; I suggested we picnic for lunch. Brian said, “Why don’t we eat indoors and then go for a walk after.” I shot him a murderous look.
“What?” he said. “I’m a spoilsport? Outdoors-averse New Yorker?”
“We three will go,” I said. “You can stay here.” We would picnic or know the reason why. Gabe went to the front door and opened it. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. Then, “Let’s take a walk in the world.”
I packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, probably forgot to bring water or bug spray, and led both kids outside. We found a spot near the man-made pond to sit and eat. At the water’s edge a disgruntled group of geese waddled in circles, disoriented clowns in search of a homeland.
Gracie studied them. “Would a goose eat a Dorito that fell on the ground?”
“I’m not sure, love.”
They did seem interested in Gabe’s sandwich.
One or two of the geese flapped into our path. I waved my arms and made some grunting noises. A few of their friends hopped over. Was I inadvertently attracting them? I flapped again and made higher-pitched sounds. Another five or six joined the group. Suddenly we were at the epicenter of an angry, honking goose mob focused on Gabe’s peanut buttery fingers. Dozens of goose heads bobbed aggressively; dozens of goose necks craned our way. The crowd honked and hissed and advanced.
I began kicking the air in their general goose direction. They didn’t budge.
Geese, in Europe, guard sensitive military installations. Still, these were not trained ninja geese. These geese were Canadian for God’s sake; how dangerous could they be? But they were alarmingly organized. They closed in, forming an unbroken circle around the three of us. Finally, a threat I can see, touch, kick, strangle.
I would grab their palm-sized heads and swing them through the air, hurl them hundreds of miles. I’d take them out, goose by goose.
The kids didn’t quite see this as the opportunity I did.
Gracie pulled on my hand. “Let’s GO!” She kept pulling. “Mommy!”
I ripped the crust off Gabe’s sandwich and threw it outside the goose flank. Their many gray heads turned in unison. We broke for home.
I was hoping the kids wouldn’t mention the geese to Brian; I didn’t want to affirm his picnic paranoia. But Gabe was nothing if not a sharer of news, and this was an enthralling headline.
“Daddy!” he said. “The gooses eat me.” His outrage, his indignation, made his face shine with excitement.
Gracie added, “Mommy tried to kick the geese. She wanted to fight them. But she missed.” She seemed amused by this: Mommy tried, Mommy missed. The story of Mommy.
“Mommy tried to kick the geese?” Brian said. The kids nodded.
Brian looked at me, half appalled, half admiring, “That’s the thing about Mommy; she never backs away from a good fight.”
That night in bed I said, “Sorry about the goose debacle.” I braced myself for an “I told you so,” an investigation of my motives. I expected Brian to ask why I complicated things; took the kids past their comfort zone to satisfy my own needs. Plus, geese were water fowl rife with germs, something that had not occurred to me until that moment.
Instead he took my hand under the covers. “No apology necessary. Picnicking always involves a certain level of risk. And those geese never stood a chance; you’re a fierce defender.”
I was grateful for the generosity of this description. It might not be accurate, but it was sincere. I nuzzled into him, an unusual gesture for Durham, outside our everyday lexicon. He looked at me, “You’re not against me?”
“When was I against you?”
“Ever since we got here.”
“I haven’t been against you, per se. I’ve just been holding the rope.”
“Oh the rope,” Brian said. “That explains everything.”
And we left it, exhausted as we were, at that.
45
Nearly every evening we’d walk to the deserted playground that was part of the complex. At first Gracie seemed cowed and disoriented by the swings, the slide, the climbing apparatus. Gabe, in deference, hung back. Waited for her to figure things out. Over time, she grew more confident and imaginative on the equipment.
One day she pulled herself the entire length of the tunnel slide. Only a week before her feet couldn’t find purchase on the slick metal; she’d been a cartoon character running in place, going nowhere at a frantic pace. And now, having achieved the top, she stood chest out, flush with pride. “Look, Mama, I’m up!”
Gabriel, forever the caboose, pulled and slid and scuffled to the top. Together they surveyed the scene: the wood chips, the empty swings, a darkening sky. They sat side by side on the plastic platform singing Barney songs until the slimmest sliver of moon appeared, a translucent slice. “Gracie,” Gabe said, “it’s an onion moon.”
I had a rush of gratitude. Of all the many possible people who might have sprung into existence, we got these two, friendly with the moon.
Except, riding beside my joy was the thought that this moment might not have taken place. She might not have struggled up the slide; he might not have followed. She might not have seen this particular moon, nor any other. The future, the long line of days and nights stretching out before us, might have turned and dipped and disappeared.
* * *
When we’d been back in the apartment about a month, Gracie paused on her way to bed one night and said, casually, a thought tossed over the shoulder, “I have to go back where I belong.”
“Where do you belong?” I peered across the dark room, trying to read her expression. She didn’t answer. I asked again, “Where do you belong?”
“In the dreamy land you can’t get to when you are awake,” she said.
“What’s the dreamy land like?” Brian asked.
“It has a forest. I ran through the forest with my sister. We lost our shoes. We had to run in our bare feet. And then I lost my sister. I have to get back with her, where I belong.”
Brian gave me a look. Don’t overthink this. She’s free-associating.
Gracie looked up at me, relaxed, but sensing my anxiety. “Don’t worry Mama, I will still love you even when I leave you.”
You have got it so wrong, kid. I will leave you. When I’m a brittle husk, a bent wire.
I gathered her up and squeezed. She squirmed down and pulled me by the hand toward her room. I tucked her into bed. She was not in the woods, shoeless, running toward a sister. She was not lost.
I opened the closet. Inside, their shoes lay in a jumbled pile, Gracie’s thin-soled leather sandals with the orange heel straps, Gabe’s bee boots. I wanted to hold the sandals up to her face. These are yours. You are ours.
When she was asleep Brian and I sat on the couch sharing a glass of wine; he thought she was retelling The Wizard of Oz. “Think about it,” he said, “returning home requires the right shoes.”
“Or,” I said, “she could be trying to mentally organize all the scary things she’s endured that she doesn’t understand, creating a sister who died to exorcise the deaths hovering overhead.”
“Maybe,” Brian said.
The dreamy land you can’t get to when you’re awake.
“Or maybe she’s prescient,” I said. “Maybe she senses something coming.”
He looked at me. Calm down. I knew he felt our job was to start seeing her as a regular kid again, to try not to confound our fears with hers. Probably he was right, but when I looked at her, I saw a kid trailing a wake of needles, tubes, midnight drives to the hospital. I saw a child who had lived beside other children, not fifteen feet away, as they died. She never saw their faces but their pain, their parents’ grief, saturated the air she breathed.
We moved to the bed
, without talking. When Brian fell asleep, I turned on my side to watch him; his wide forehead erased of all the grooves of the day was once a sight I’d wait for. Now, I wanted him awake and worrying with me.
Brian always had an uncanny way of knowing when I was thinking about him, or us, with any special intensity.
He woke up and looked at me. “Are we OK?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Well, take a guess,” Brian said. It was a peace offering, a chance to laugh. But I didn’t laugh.
“Brian,” I said. “I don’t have the energy for this.”
I wanted to explain, but what I had to say would sound too strange: I want your ear pressed against the glass wall of Gracie’s unconscious. Listening for signs. I want you vigilant.
If I listed my multiplying fears, pointed to the spore of alienation that grew from them, between us, he’d likely say something reassuring, something to set the record straight.
I didn’t want the record set straight. I wanted his internal landscape to look like mine—a grassy field where a little stick man ran in frantic circles, hands up, eyes wide orbs of panic, clutching his corncob pipe. I didn’t know what Brian’s inner landscape looked like—I hadn’t asked in a long time—but I felt sure that if he had a little corncob pipe man, his man was calm, leaning against a fence.
“Yes you do,” Brian said. “You have the energy of ten thousand suns for the things that matter to you. Talk.”
“Your corncob man is too calm.”
“I see, my corncob man. And is he also holding the rope?”
“I want you to be as worried as I am, about everything. That is what I want.”
“I take your worries seriously, I share them. But I don’t think we have to be in the same psychic state to be connected. And I don’t feel like you give much thought to what I want. Or even to what I can give you. It’s like you’ve turned me into some genial uncle who you smile at politely and push out the door before pie.”
I laughed, finally. But Brian grew serious and sad.
“It feels, lately, like you’re pretending to be in this relationship when you’re not. Like our being together is more a matter of geography than desire. If you could go back to the West Coast and I could still see the kids, we might do that.”
I was stunned. Beyond stunned; slapped awake in cold, open ocean. To say such a thing, he must be very lonely. Which I could understand. I was lonely too. But it was more than that.
If I understood him, Brian was saying anything could happen, even the unthinkable. And that included the dissolution of us.
A person you cherished could pass right through you, atom by atom. Vanish into the mystery. We’d seen that happen. Children loved to the farthest star and back again had disappeared from the discernible world.
“Brian,” I said. “I love you. I want to be with you.”
It was true; I could feel its truth as I said it. But I also felt rigid and breakable, encased in a veneer of ice.
Our very first Valentine’s together, I’d written Fiona Apple lyrics into a card: And all my armour falling down, in a pile at my feet. And my winter giving way to warm, as I’m singing him to sleep.
That felt like a hundred thousand years ago.
He was right; I’d given virtually nothing to our relationship since we’d arrived in Durham. I’d assumed Brian had shared my sense that there would be time for each other later. After.
“I just thought we’d see each other on the other side. And this isn’t the other side yet.”
“Let me know when we get there.”
46
A few days later the kids were outside, playing on the porch, when Gracie screamed, “Get back! Get away!” I thought she was hassling Gabe over a toy and ignored them. Brian went out to see what was actually going on and found Gracie bent double, clutching Gabe’s diaper to keep him away from a bag of birdseed. Gabe, in defiance, was struggling to plunge his hands into the bag. Floating above them both was a fat black spider with a red hourglass on its belly. Black widow. Brian scooped them up and carried them inside. “That’s not the spider for us, kiddies.”
They clung to his neck. “Don’t put us down!” He didn’t.
“Gracie, you did good,” Brian said. “You kept your brother safe.”
“I know that,” Gracie said. “I saved his Gabey lives.”
“And Gabe saved yours with his cells,” I said, trying make their efforts at lifesaving sound even.
Brian gave me a look, might be better if we didn’t keep score.
Later, in bed, he said, “We have to get back to civilization. It’s the savage wild out there. The geese, the rude insects keeping us awake, and now lethal fucking spiders.”
Outside, the tame, manicured lawns of Alexan Farms were hemmed with box hedges; the trees were pruned into sleek, obedient obelisks. I rolled my eyes.
“Eye rolling is a sign of disdain,” Brian said. “Very bad on the Gottman scale.”
We’d been reading a book, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, by this guy, Gottman.
“I take it back,” I said. And rolled my eyes in the opposite direction. I nested into him.
Brian kissed me. I kissed him back, quickly. Any moment, the great veil of exhaustion would drop. Or my mood would shift against my will.
“Thanks for the reversal,” Brian said.
He picked up the remote. “Should we?”
We watched The Wire. Watching The Wire is not the same as making love, but it’s something.
47
To celebrate Gracie’s fourth birthday, we planned a visit from Kathy and Steve and Eden and Chloe, our Brooklyn tribe. In advance of their visit, Gracie and Eden talked on the phone.
“Eden, do you think I am still three years old?” Gracie said. “I am not. I am four!”
A few days before they arrived, Gracie woke up bearing a striking resemblance to Ernest Borgnine. This was the rampant, random hair growth of cyclosporine, one of the drugs that prevented her body from rejecting Gabe’s marrow. The hair was very dark and downy and grew in a sort of Uncle Fester pattern, a thick fringe along the hairline and forehead and then down across the eyebrows and cheeks. Brian said she looked like Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman.
When she saw the hair on her face, she said, “Mommy, there is something horrible that we have never noticed. This!” She pointed to the darkening mustache above her lip. She’d been standing on a table to see into the mirror; she jumped down shouting, “Now presenting the most Gracie-est of jumpers.” Problem dismissed. But at bedtime she said, as if working out the solution to an intractable problem, “I know! I’ll go deep, deep inside the forest, where they can’t find me.”
What would Eden make of her friend, as wolfman?
When they arrived late on Thursday night, exhausted from the drive, Eden dashed into Gracie’s room and shouted, “Hi Bracie!” The adults stood silent, eavesdropping: long pause, in which (we assumed) Eden was taking account of the many changes in her friend’s appearance. Finally, “Are you a girl or a boy?”
“I’m a girl,” Gracie said, unruffled. Stating the facts. And they both seemed satisfied that everyone was who they said they were.
On the last day of their visit, we took the kids to the Museum of Life and Science, to its legendary butterfly tent. When we got there I realized how stupid I’d been. Of course it was not made of netting. It was an enclosed plastic dome, which Gracie couldn’t enter. She couldn’t be sealed into a crowd, period. Not in a store, a movie theater, a mall. Not even in a butterfly tent. Gracie saw this as ludicrous. What harm could butterflies do her?
She begged to go in. When I told her there were too many people and thus too many germs, she said, “I won’t breathe the whole time, Mom, I promise.”
Eden, in solidarity, waited outside with her. It had rained hard earlier, and they ran in circles through the puddles, playing nothing. Just running, two girls glad to be getting their heads damp and their feet wet. “Remember,” Kathy said, “when they go
t drenched at Coney Island and thought it was the best thing that ever happened to them?”
That is what a friend is, I guess: someone who sees the potential in you, even when you can’t go in the fun place; someone who, given a second, accepts you as either a girl or a boy. These two people couldn’t yet recite their address or fry an egg, but they enjoyed a complex relationship. They could accommodate foundational changes, hurt each other’s feelings, forgive, reminisce, crack each other up. Run for it.
Later, we bade good-bye to Kathy and Steve and Eden and Chloe on our driveway.
The kids played in the yard, procrastinating. Kathy and I leaned against their van, procrastinating. All of us trying to squeeze more out of the last few minutes. The grown-ups had spent three days talking, but we’d also been bathing and feeding four kids; we’d barely said anything.
“Are you guys happy?” I asked, pointing my chin toward Steve.
“Mostly. Mainly on the weekends and after ten p.m. You?”
“Is there a category between sort of and mostly?”
She slung an arm around my shoulder, I slung one back. More to say, no time to say it.
“Are you writing?”
“I’m writing,” Kathy said. “If you count writing in my head, in the five minutes before I fall asleep.”
We laughed but we were sad. It was astonishing how little time there was to make sense of the world.
Their gang climbed into the van and drove away. Our gang stood on the driveway waving. Gracie said, “I hope Eden knows me when I get back to Brooklyn.” Gabriel watched Gracie’s face fall as the van pulled out of sight.
“Gracie,” he said, “are you sad when I leave you?”
“I don’t know, Gabe,” she said. “Will you be sad when I leave you?”
Let’s not find out. Let’s all stay where we are.
48
Day 100 arrived; we did not go home.
We’d known we wouldn’t. Day 100 was always a pretty mirage to trudge past. Instead, we made bubbles. The humid, still-cool evening was perfect bubble-making weather. Spring drew an ad hoc community of transplant families onto the common lawns at twilight. We stood in clusters, reciting our kids’ strange side effects as incantations to stave off worse: hair loss, hirsutism, muscle weakness, deformed toenails, fungal infections, gooey eyes, bacterial invasion of the central line, loss of appetite, ravenous appetite, hearing loss, neuropathy of the feet, fingers, and knees, light sensitivity. We could go on.
Happiness--A Memoir Page 26