Why I'm Like This (16 page)

T
HE
day after Thanksgiving, David, John, and I drove to Vermont, hoping to do a little skiing in the preseason lull, but by the time we got to the ski house John had a fever, and we canceled our reservation at the mountain's day-care center for the next day. In the morning, I sent David skiing and I stayed with John, coaxing him to eat a few Cheerios and sip water. I fed him drops of Motrin and when the fever dipped we sat on the orange shag carpet and put the colored balls into the translucent tube and then took them out again. David came back early and I went to the mountain and skied for an hour. When I got home John was slumped on David's shoulder, which is where he spent the rest of the day. That night, he woke up crying, very hot, and we took him into our
bed, where he slept curled against my body, ripples of heat rising from his skin, bending the air.

By early Sunday morning his fever spiked to 104 and he was alternately lethargic and howling, so we took him to a doctor in Manchester, who, after examining him, sent us to the hospital forty miles away in Bennington.

We signed in with an admitting nurse, who took John's temperature and gave him more Motrin, and then we took seats in a waiting area that wasn't much bigger than the reception room of a large dental practice. There were only two other people there, and the nurse told us we could expect to wait about an hour. An hour went by and the nurse came out and said that there had been a serious accident and that we might have to wait longer. Unable to help myself, I asked if it was a car crash—the weather was terrible, cold and rain and fog—but she said, “No, a horse.” A
horse
? David took John for a walk in search of ice cream, and I picked up an old copy of
In Style
magazine and turned the pages without looking at them. A horse.

A horse accident was exactly what I needed. One of the things about being in a hospital is that in order to cope with your own medical crisis, you become obsessed with the medical crises of total strangers. You have to know every diagnosis, prognosis, and outcome that occurs within the constantly shifting thirty-foot radius of your own earshot. Did I say
you
? I always say
you,
but what I really mean is
I. I
have to know every diagnosis, prognosis, and outcome that occurs
within the constantly shifting thirty-foot radius of
my
own earshot. Just my proximity to the surrounding real-life drama gives me some kind of lurid license to shoehorn myself into it.
I was there when…I saw…
What? What did I see? Well, while I was waiting for David and John to come back with ice cream, I saw myself as part of the cast of
The Shooting Party,
a movie starring James Mason in which a bunch of romantically entangled people are staying in a manor house for the weekend and a bird-shooting expedition goes terribly wrong. There is riding in the movie, and Englishmen. It doesn't matter at all that in real life I don't like horses and hate riding. What matters is that it was easier to think about an accident with a horse than to let myself imagine any one of several terrible potential scenarios starring John.

There are many times, particularly in the first year of your first child's life, when you are absolutely convinced he has the Bubonic Plague. And if not the Bubonic Plague, then the Spanish Flu or Mad Cow Disease or that disease you get from being in a barn with owl droppings. Every fever is terrifying, every cold ominous, and you rush to the pediatrician's office so he or she can proclaim, “It's just a virus!” Like “It's just a paper cut!” You feel ridiculous every time you take your baby in. You are a time-sucking alarmist, clogging the works with your piddly worries while truly sick babies languish at home for want of an available appointment. (I
am
a time-sucking alarmist, but that's not the point.) Fortunately, with experience, your paranoia settles into your
subconscious in a way that will sometimes keep you up at night but will most likely allow you to behave rationally during the day. That is, until the day a doctor sends your child to the hospital. In a way, it is as if you have been waiting all year for this moment on the condition, of course, that this moment will never come.

David and John came back and we were ushered into the triage area and assigned an examination room. A nurse arrived to take John's blood, but she had trouble finding a vein. She called for another nurse, and while David and I held John down, they tried, and failed, to draw his blood. His veins were deflated from dehydration. Horrified, I imagined John's blood hardened into a dry, crystalline substance in his veins, like Pixie Sticks. The nurses pointed out that despite the fact that John was crying, his eyes were dry. “No tears, that's a sign,” they said, and they left us with a cup of ice chips.

Then a technician came by to take us to X ray. In order to X-ray John's chest, the technician insisted (I want it on record that we argued with her) on strapping him into a contraption that could only have been descended from a medieval torture device, like the rack, and was improbably called a Pigg-O-Stat. I could not even guess to what the name referred, except the obvious, and I have never heard of a pig getting a chest X ray, never. All I could think of was those squealing, writhing pigs that some people, somewhere in this great country of ours, grease up and then try to pin
down, for fun and/or a blue ribbon. Honestly, couldn't someone in marketing have come up with a less disturbing name? The Pigg-O-Stat was made mostly of Plexiglas, an outdated material if there ever was one, and it consisted of a little bicycle seat, upon which the unsuspecting baby was perched upright, and a back and chest plate, also Plexiglas, which came together with leather straps and immured its tiny victim like a sausage casing.
Saucisson de bébé.
David and I stood, shocked, behind a heavy door, while the technician clicked away and John wailed in fright. When it was over, she took a moment to review the X ray. She put it in a light box and made a face like Whoo! and then refused to say anything to us. We returned to our holding pen and soon a resident came in and announced that John had a big, whopping pneumonia.

Then the pediatrician arrived from her home five minutes away and expertly inserted an IV line in the back of John's hand, and we were taken upstairs where we stayed for two days and nights.

 

Bennington is not a very big city. I'm not sure it is a city. It might be just a town. Or a hamlet. At its center is Bennington College, a liberal-arts school where I have always imagined modern dancers are continually performing on the lawn, whatever the weather, and which my bookish mother attended. Twenty minutes south is Williamstown, the home of Williams College. When we pass by Williams during the
school year on our way to the ski house, our car slows to a crawl and David and I both strain to see into the lit dorm rooms, to relive for a millisecond our college experiences as they did not happen. Sometimes I think about how I never got to audition for the Williamstown Theater Festival and probably never will. The border between Williamstown and Bennington is also the Massachusetts–Vermont border, and as we cross from one to the other, there is a perceptible shift, the countryside yawns and opens, the light changes. We drive north past dairy farms and two-hundred-year-old houses and corn fields and hay fields, the configurations of which have hardly changed for centuries. It is starkly romantic, at once inviting and fearful, like
Ethan Frome
(except there's a little more money to go around and three-quarters of the way through, Zeena, thank God, dies). I stare silently from the car window at the pale dusting of snow and the black trees and imagine, you know, stuff. That I live in a different time, when things were, um, different. More. More something. More horse accidents. Not everyone makes it back from the hunt.

I am not one of these New Englanders who marvels at the glory of autumn. Sure, show me a flaming red maple and I'll say, “Wow,” but really, I am just biding my time until the rot sets in. I am waiting for the leaves to curl in upon themselves and fall and become brittle beneath my feet. I am waiting for the pumpkin pickers to clear the pumpkin patch and leave the last, lonely, misshapen pumpkins to their soggy fates. I am waiting for the end of the harvest so I can get a clear view of
those empty brown rows, the dry stalks, the bare branches. To me, late fall days carry an electrically charged current of dread. The winter is coming, maybe it will snow, something could die. It is not that I
want
something to die, but I am peculiarly energized by the idea that it could.

All of my life I have romanticized death. I do it in a vague, movie way, something like: my husband dies suddenly (not actually my real husband, just some movie husband, the one I live with in the Movie of Me, which runs on an endless loop in my head) and I am thrust into the center of attention. That's what a death does, for someone who has never experienced a death, that is. It makes you the center of attention. People gather around you and protect you and shush everyone else and you become a tragic movie figure and are eventually courted by a man who has loved you from afar for years but you always thought of as a friendly acquaintance until now. More likely than not he has an English accent. The Movie of Me is all about redemption, about reawakening. It is about starting over and being newborn and shaking off my old self: Now that I am who I am, maybe I can start again and not be who I was.

I worry that this kind of fantasizing is dangerous (puh, puh, puh), although, God knows, I've dreamt often enough that Tony Kushner decided to start writing plays for me to star in and
that
hasn't come to pass. And, of course, all this flies in the face of my almost pathological fearfulness. How is it possible to live in an constant state of dread and simultaneously
court it? Easy. The same deviant impulse that tortures me with insomniac visions of pain and loss redeems itself with the dream-promise that when it is all over I will have amazing sex on the castle floor.

 

The hospital provided twin beds for David and me. I felt like we were on some kind of hospital dream vacation. In New York we would have been lucky if one of us had been able to sit up all night in a chair. Unfortunately, John was not as appreciative of his accommodation—a metal cage—so we pushed the beds together and David slept in one bed, I slept on the crack, and John slept next to me in the other bed. Every hour throughout the night, someone in pastel scrubs checked his temperature and his blood pressure, replaced an empty saline bag with a full one, adjusted his antibiotic drip, or wafted medicinal fumes across his face. John cried out and tossed, and I stroked his forehead and whispered to him and rearranged his IV lines around him. Between these ministrations, I lay awake, speculating in agony what would have happened if we hadn't brought him to the hospital, if we'd tried to ride it out, to “see how things go,” in the words of the pediatrician. How the hell had we missed the tear thing? That baby had cried and cried, yet his eyes were dry, were we blind? Children all over the Third World die of dehydration daily. We have plenty of fluids at our disposal, clean ones, flavored ones. Of course, if I'd still been
nursing,
he'd have been belly up to the bar. But no,
I
had to go to the Bahamas.
And he'd been congested all week, coughing each morning like a tubercular old man. And he'd thrown up on Thanksgiving. Actually, I had gotten myself into a bit of a tizzy over the throwing up, but my entire family practically chanted in unison: “Kids throw up. Kids throw up. Kids throw up.” I hated them.

The night wore on. It is impossible to sleep when you are angry at yourself; all you want to do is punch yourself in the head. I finally nodded off by deflecting my anger onto my brother, who never put a gate at the top of the stairs when his girls were small.

By the morning John's fever had ebbed, and he drank juice and ate a little and wandered around our room and the adjoining playroom (the place was bigger than our apartment), one arm opening and shutting the door of the play oven, the other arm, a comical mummy arm, wrapped to the elbow in gauze and covered with a diaper to protect the IV line. David and I trailed him, rolling his IV pole, relief washing over us in endless waves.

At exactly this point, I began to think of myself as The Mother in a Lifetime Network “Moment of Truth” movie:
For the Love of Her Child: The Cynthia Kaplan Story.
There was a little kitchen on the pediatric ward and every time I went to fetch some milk or a box of raisins or Cheerios, I imagined the camera following me:
There she is, the woman whose baby is sick.

I also felt compelled to find out what had really happened
with the horse, so I asked around the ward—discreetly, I thought, although David thought otherwise—but no one had heard about it. As we prepared to leave the hospital on Tuesday afternoon I bought the local paper, the
Bennington Banner,
out of a coin-operated box in the lobby. (“Serving the communities of Bennington County.” County!) I scanned the front page over John's head as he sat in my lap. There it was.
HORSE KILLS ITS OWNER IN ACCIDENT
. A forty-six-year-old woman, recently transplanted from “down-state” New York, was preparing to ride the horse she had owned for fifteen years, a gentle horse, by the account in the paper, when it broke away and ran out of the barn and into a field. As the woman and her boyfriend tried to regain control of the horse, it kicked her in the chest. The boyfriend carried her in from the field, screaming for help.

Oh. Nothing is ever how you think it is going to be. Or how you imagine it should be.

As we drove away, I stared out at the barns and the fields and the gray Vermont sky. They did not look as they had. I cried then for the first time since all this had begun. I kissed John's sweet, cool cheek, and then I closed my eyes and let David take us home.