Dirty Chick (16 page)

Cheese making is easy—or that's what I thought before I tried it. You just warm up a pot of milk and mix in germs to make it curdle. Then you squirt in a clear serum known as rennet, which is squeezed from the stomach lining of a dead baby cow. When the rotten milk coagulates, you hang it somewhere to drip like a suppurating wound.

And basically, that produces a cheese.

But if you're making an aged cheese, such as a Camembert or a blue, then the process continues. You might spritz your masterpiece with a bottle of live mold. Or inject it with infectious spores, as if your cheese were the victim of an anthrax attack.

Some of the best cheeses are the most disgusting, such as the French Mimolette, which is swarming with millions of live cheese mites. Then there's the Sardinian Casu Marzu, which is populated
with maggots. These maggots, mind you, are alive. Sometimes, they jump out of the cheese and pelt you in the face.

If you are a fussy person who doesn't eat live maggots, you can slip your Casu Marzu into a small paper bag and shake it. This makes the maggots jump out of the cheese and hop around in the bag like popcorn.

But Casu Marzu is advanced, a lofty goal beyond my skill set. So I started with a simple Camembert. My first task was infecting the milk with a specific strain of bacteria. Not just any bacteria. I couldn't just cough in the milk or dip an old sock in the curds. That would have introduced bacteria, but it wouldn't be quite the right kind. Instead, I'd purchased a dime bag of
Penicillium candidum
,
the mold that produces the snowy white surface found on Camembert and Brie.

I sprinkled the mold over lukewarm milk, covered the pot, and waited for the magic to happen. In just three hours the curds were set, and I had a substance that looked very much like a pale, watery Jell-O. I spooned the curds into cheese molds, where they glistened and dripped, looking nothing like anything that would ever be cheese.

The recipe said I had to turn my molds every hour, so I set my alarm throughout the night. Each time it rang, I staggered into the kitchen to flip the dreaded curd. Just before dawn I scrubbed out our spare refrigerator with bleach and hot, soapy water, then sprayed the walls down with vinegar to keep out invasive spores and encourage my cheesy ones to grow.

If this all sounds a little obsessive-compulsive, I may need to explain something about my childhood. For most people there's a particular smell they associate with the comforts of home, such as a berry pie baking in the oven or the scent of your mother's breast
when she pulls you in for a hug. For me, that smell is rot. Specifically, the scent of comfort and love is the smell of a rancid cheese emerging from its sweaty wrapper.

My father loved food, and he held a particular fondness for the nastiest French cheeses he could buy. Reblochon, Roquefort, Morbier—the older, runnier, and more gag-inspiring, the greater his delight. He used to keep these decaying lumps in a separate drawer of our family refrigerator, and each night, after dinner, with lip-smacking anticipation, he'd pull out a selection of plastic-wrapped blight and spread these secretions on pieces of baguette. As a small child, I used to run away, refusing to come back until the cheese course had come to a close.

But as I grew up, I got a taste for it, and now the tangy scent of rancid cow's milk being slathered on a slice of crusty bread is enough to make my lips tingle and my mouth water. I don't know what happened. They say that certain opiates will make you throw up the first time you try them. Then, the next thing you know, you're hooked for life. That's pretty much how I feel about stinky cheese.

The problem is that most of New Zealand doesn't agree. To my dismay, Kiwis persist in the belief that cheese should be appetizing. Serve them a nice warm Morbier redolent of putrefying cow shit and heaven, and your average New Zealander will assume he's been poisoned.

So I had to make my own. For the next two weeks, I flipped my cheeses faithfully, monitoring the temperature and the humidity in their ripening chamber, misting them with cool water like overheated debutantes when they got a little parched.

But then I had to leave for a week, because my oldest friend, Ames, was getting married. Our mothers had been best friends for decades, and Ames and I used to crawl around together on the same
baby blanket. Now he was running an online literary magazine in Brooklyn, and was marrying a Croatian-Colombian poet at his mother's home in Marin County. There was no way I could miss it.

But I couldn't bear to abandon my cheeses. I was happy to leave twenty animals and my own two kids with Rebecca and Peter, but the cheeses were another matter. “They're so vulnerable!” I opined, handing pages of detailed instructions to my niece. “They're only a few weeks old!”

“Go,” Peter ordered. “Relax. Enjoy yourself.” But I couldn't relax. I'd been out of the United States for years, and I hadn't lived in New York for more than a decade. This wedding party would be full of sophisticated city people, the women wearing real couture from boutiques I'd never heard of. Tucked away in my suitcase was a little black dress I'd purchased on clearance from one of Whangarei's few upscale shops. My black boots were discount. Though technically I was flying home, I felt like Country Mouse taking on the Big Smoke.

So when I got there, I was startled to learn that Peter and I were apparently living the Great Brooklyn Farm Dream. Ames and Danica's wedding guests were a circus troupe of New York creativity, everyone with glamorous-sounding jobs. They were writers, directors, musicians, and puppeteers. “It premiered at Sundance,” was a phrase I actually overheard among the cocktails, along with “We were so excited when Oprah chose it for her book club.”

But despite all the glitter, the theme of the wedding was country farm chic. The invitations showed Ames and Danica wearing plaid and posing together in a field full of wheat. When I arrived at the house, a graphic artist was carefully stenciling the bar menu in chalk on a blackboard, and the nervous bride put me to work wrapping potted plants in burlap. Ames announced to his friends that I lived
“on a
farm
in
New Zealand
,”
and one woman actually squealed, sharing aspirational tales of backyard chickens and urban beehives.

“How long are you out here?” she asked, sipping an artisanal bourbon.

“Just a week,” I told her. “I have to get back. My goat's giving birth any day now.”

“Oh, my God,” she giggled. “That's too funny.”

“No, I'm not kidding,” I told her. “I have to get back. For the . . . kidding.”

“Can you help with the seating?” Ames pressed my arm, leading me to a grassy area by the swimming pool. “We're gonna have the guests sit on hay bales, to make it more farmy.”

“Great,” I said, grinning. “But that's not hay.”

Danica overheard me. “It's not?
Shit.
I
knew
this was going too well. What is it?”

I kicked at the bale. “This is straw. It's better for seating, I guess. It's cheaper than hay. But you can't feed it to animals. It doesn't have any nutritional content.” This little treatise on animal feed came out before I realized what I was saying.

“Sorry,” I blurted, embarrassed. “That . . . was probably more than you needed to know.”

Ames and Danica stared at me. “Oh, my God.” Danica burst out laughing. “We are such
idiots
!
How are we ever gonna get our own farm if we don't know the difference between hay and straw?”

Ames just shook his head and slapped me on the back. “That's awesome.” He chuckled. “Look at you! You're a country girl! Now move this fucking straw so I can get married.”

The wedding went smoothly, and the ceremony was short—a relief, since straw bales don't make the most comfortable chairs. But I didn't want to stay up all night quaffing mojitos and dancing by the
swimming pool. I was worried about my goat. So I slipped out early to call my family on Skype.

“Has Pearl given birth yet?” I demanded as soon as they picked up.

“Not yet!” Rebecca chirped. “But it's happening any day now.”

“Don't worry,” Peter soothed. “Have fun. She's fine. We're all fine.”

But he was wrong. Everyone was not fine. At the end of the week, I boarded my plane to Auckland, hoping to sleep through the night on the long transpacific flight. I pulled on a warm pair of socks and flipped idly through the selection of Hollywood movies. I ate bland chicken with a plastic fork and held up my cup when the flight attendant offered a second glass of wine. I woke up as we began our descent, and before long we were sliding to a stop in New Zealand.

When I turned on my phone, I found a text message from Peter. “Call me on my mobile,” he said. “It's important.”

Still fuzzy from my fitful sleep, I glanced at the time on my phone: 6:00 a.m.
Why would I call him on his cell phone? He hasn't left for work yet. He must be confused.

So I called our home line instead. The phone just rang and rang. Then the answering machine picked up.

And that's when it hit me. If Peter wanted me to call him on his cell phone, then he was in town. And there was only one reason he'd be in town before dawn on a workday.

Someone was in the hospital.

FROG IN MOUTH

H
eat rising in my cheeks, I called the cell phone. Peter picked up on the second ring.

“Baby?” he said. “We're okay. Silas had a seizure.”

Maybe it's from years of sailing together, but Peter and I almost always speak calmly to each other, even in a crisis. We've been in some dangerous spots, when a single bad choice could have crushed the boat. Even sailing over treacherous sandbars or threading the narrow entrance to a reef, Peter never raised his voice. He always sounded clear and calm.

I, on the other hand, was not calm. “What does that mean?” I asked, my throat clenched. “What kind of a seizure?”

“A big one. A . . . grand mal. Then he had a—whoops, there he goes again. Sorry, baby. Gotta go.”

The line went dead. I stared at my phone. The plane was mostly empty, and flight attendants were moving down the aisles, collecting trash and forgotten magazines.

“Ma'am?” A pretty young woman dressed in the jade green Air New Zealand uniform approached me. “Did you need some help today?”

“No, I don't know. My—son just had a seizure.” I got to my feet and realized I was still in my socks. I looked dumbly at the flight attendant. “And I can't find my shoes.”

I was waiting in line at customs when Peter called back to explain. Twenty hours prior, as I was dropping off my rental car and getting ready to board my flight, Silas had a grand mal seizure in the back of the school bus.

“Rebecca got him to the hospital,” Peter explained. “Amanda came, too. I met them there, and the doctors were just trying to decide whether or not to admit him when he started having another seizure, right there in the emergency room. So they kept him overnight. I'm with him now.”

“Where's Miranda?” I demanded. “Is she okay?”

“She's fine. Rebecca took her to day care. Then, this morning, when you called, he had another one. That one was pretty bad.”

Peter has spent a great deal of time on the ocean by himself, and he's not one to exaggerate for dramatic effect. So when he said “pretty bad,” my stomach flipped. I hung up to get through customs, then I had to board a commuter flight to Whangarei.

By midmorning my last plane had landed. Rebecca was at the airport to meet me. She hugged me without saying anything, her eyes filling up with tears. I didn't want to notice. There wasn't any time for that.

On the car ride to the hospital, Rebecca explained what had happened the day before. She'd walked Silas out to the school bus, as she'd done every day that week. She clipped him into his seat belt and waved good-bye.

“Bus,” said Silas. “Bus-ah-bus.” Then, strangely, he said, “home.”

“You've been at home,” Lish sang out from the driver's seat. “Now it's time for
school,
Silas.”

Rebecca slid the door shut and strolled back down the driveway, getting ready to feed the chickens and start on the breakfast dishes.

Lish said she'd heard something tapping behind her seat. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see Silas stiff, his arms and legs straight out like a robot's, his eyes rolling back in his head. He had a little blue Smurf toy clutched in his fist, and he was hammering it against the window. His face went gray. Foam started bubbling out of the side of his mouth.

She slammed on the brakes, unclipped her seat belt, and switched off the ignition, diving into the backseat. She grabbed Silas by the shoulders and eased him to her lap, releasing his seat belt, holding him on his side while he shuddered and shook.

Two other first-graders were riding with them that day. “
Why
are you holding Silas?” Ethan demanded.

Silas was still in midseizure, his eyes rolling, and Lish didn't want to scare the others. “He just has a little froth in his mouth, Ethan,” she explained.

“
Why
does he have a frog in his mouth?” Ethan wanted to know, and then Silas's shaking slowed, went rhythmic, as though electric shock waves were pulsing through his body. He blinked. The color started coming back to his face.

Lish held him in her arms, rocking him gently. After a minute or two his eyes began to focus, and she said, “Where ya been, poppet? You were a million miles away.”

Rebecca went on with her story. “Then the school bus came back to the house, and I thought,
What
happened?
Did I forget Silas's bag?
And then Lish carried him out and I just—I didn't know what to do.”

“Was he still seizing?”

“No, he was—really asleep. Lish had to take the other kids to school, so I called Amanda, and Amanda drove us to the hospital. I met Uncle Peter there.”

I glanced at her. “Sounds like you did all the right things.” Rebecca was a sheltered twenty-year-old kid who spent most of her time spinning yarn, but she'd managed a crisis with a five-year-old in a foreign country. I was impressed.

We pulled into the parking lot of Whangarei Hospital, a vast public building of bleak white concrete.
Here we go again
, I thought. This was the hospital where they treated Silas when he was first born, because he was weak and needed support. It's where the psychologists told us he was “delayed,” because no one likes to say
retarded
or
handicapped
. It's where we went when he tumbled off a chair and broke his arm, so they could shoot him full of morphine and set his bones with plaster and steel.

Each new crisis with Silas takes us back to the hospital. And now here we were again, rushing to the children's ward because Silas's brain had gone offline with no warning.

Peter was sitting by Silas's bed, halfheartedly thumbing through a paperback. Silas was tucked under clean white sheets, sleeping deeply. A thick white bandage was tied around one arm.

Peter hugged me, and then I pointed to the bandage. “What's that about? Did he hurt himself?”

“They put a line in, just in case they want to give him something intravenously. He kept ripping it off, so they bandaged it up.”

A hard plastic chair stood at one end of the bed, and I collapsed into it. All I could think was
Brain tumor
. Finally, I had to say it out loud.

“Why else would a person suddenly start having seizures?” I
hissed. “His brain just stopped. There's got to be something
growing
in his
brain
.”

Peter shook his head. “I don't know. The pediatrician's coming to talk to us soon. You could ask him about it.” Restless, I pulled out my phone and Googled “epilepsy brain tumor.”

If there's one thing you don't want to Google when you're worried about your child's health, it's “epilepsy brain tumor.” I read about glioblastoma tumors, evil tentacles that ensnare your kid's brain and squeeze until there's nothing left. Swallowing hard, I shut off my phone.

Silas's pediatrician is Dr. Osei, a tall, elegant man from Ghana. He strode in later that morning holding Silas's thick case folder under one arm. “Well, hello,” he said, greeting me. Dr. Osei's speech has a slightly exotic cadence, his vowel sounds especially round. “I thought you were on holiday?”

“I got in this morning,” I explained. “I came right here. Do you know what's happening? Why is Silas having seizures all of a sudden?”

The doctor raised his eyebrows, a humorless smile at his lips. “That is the big question, of course. And at this stage we do not have an answer. As I explained to your husband, every child is allowed one fit. But now Silas has had several . . .” He trailed off, looking down at Silas's sleeping form. “It's difficult to know why this would happen,” he explained. “Seizures are quite common, with . . . these sorts of children.”

Peter and I exchanged a look.
What sorts of children?
I wanted to snap.
The kind who listen to Broadway musicals? The kind who love hopping up and down and messing with their father's computer?
Of course I knew what he meant: handicapped children, children with intellectual disabilities. But I didn't ask him to clarify.

Instead, I took a deep breath. “Is it possible he has a . . . brain tumor?” I asked. “I mean, how can this just start, out of nowhere? How come my son is epileptic all of a sudden?”

I looked at him as if he were some kind of oracle, but Dr. Osei just cleared his throat. “I can tell you that it's likely not a brain tumor. Localized tumors produce asymmetrical seizures. You might see one or two limbs going stiff, but not the whole body. As to why, it is difficult to say. We will investigate, of course. But we might never know.”

I'd heard that one before. “Okay,” I conceded, shifting on my plastic chair. “But there're drugs for this, right? I mean, we'll get the seizures under control, and then we won't have to come back to the hospital?”

“Likely not.” The doctor glanced at his chart. “There are a few red flags. If he gets into a cycle of seizures, as we've seen here, yesterday and today. If he has another seizure, without waking up from the first one. And”—he scribbled something on a prescription pad and handed me the paper—“if he has a seizure that lasts more than five minutes, you will need to give him this medicine. It's Midazolam. Then you must call an ambulance.”

“Why?” I wanted to know. “What happens in five minutes?”

Dr. Osei smiled apologetically. “A slight possibility of brain damage. You would not want it to go that long.”

Silas was discharged that evening, and we all drove home. We had two cars at the hospital, so Peter and Rebecca took the kids home in one, and I stopped off at the pharmacy. I had two prescriptions to fill, the emergency medicine and a cherry-flavored syrup they'd said would control the seizures. Standing in line waiting for the drugs, I thought I should feel sad or angry, but I didn't. I felt punched in the gut.

Halfway back to the house I started breathing too fast, and I wasn't sure if I was having a panic attack—until I pulled to the side of the road and wept. Nothing we did made a difference. No one knew why Silas was delayed, or why he couldn't talk, or why his brain was now flickering in and out. And if no one could figure out what was wrong, then nothing could ever be fixed.

Peter and the kids were home when I got there, the front deck lit up from the living room. Through the sliding glass doors, I could see Peter easing Silas into clean clothes. The spinning wheel stood in the middle of the living room floor, looking reproachful. Three large sacks of alpaca fleece leaned against the wall, waiting to be spun into yarn. I felt like that nameless sucker, the miller's daughter in “Rumpelstiltskin,” the one who needed a miracle but didn't have a clue. Who has the skills to spin straw into gold?

“Hey,” I said, coming inside. “How's the patient? I scored his drugs in town.”

“Seems good.” Peter tucked him up on the couch with his Dart. “Tired. Rebecca already went to bed.”

Miranda started tugging on my shirt right away. “Mama,” she announced. “I would like one chicken bone for my dinner please, and a chunk of cucumber. And two sprinkle cookies for dessert.”

I glanced at Silas. All I wanted to do was lie down with him, curl my body around his and sleep. But Miranda still needed to eat, so I opened the refrigerator and peeked inside. A flabby pink chicken that would have to be roasted. Lettuce that had to be washed. Suddenly, it all looked impossible.

“Hey, there's a message on the machine,” Peter commented. “Did you check it?”

I pushed the Play button. “Just wondering how you guys are.” It was Amanda's voice, sounding like a fairy godmother's on the
scratchy phone recording. “Thought you might not feel like coping with dinner. We're having something simple, if you want to come round.”

She didn't need to ask twice. When we got to her house, Amanda was pulling two roasted chickens from the oven, the steel pan dripping with golden juice. A huge tray of potatoes, pumpkin, and kumara waited on the dining table. She poured oversize glasses of white wine and passed steaming plates of food. Seated around her dining table with her three daughters all chattering about spies and spooky ghosts, I felt absurdly grateful.

Still exhausted from the hospital, Silas curled up on the couch. Miranda leaned in next to me, contentedly gnawing a drumstick. “Do you understand what a seizure is?” I asked her when there was a lull in the conversation.

“Yes.” She nodded solemnly. “Silas has a sneejur because his brain doesn't work so well.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“And he can't talk like me.”

I shook my head. “No, he can't.”

She sneezed and wiped her nose on my blouse. “Mama, I think I just had a sneejur.”

“No, that was a sneeze.”

“And you have to take me to the hostibal.”

“I don't think so.”

“And if a crocodile tries to bite me, then you will take a gun and dead him.”

Amanda's husband, Nick, sat on one end of the table, tucking into his chicken. “Bit worried about the seizures, are we?” he asked.

“I guess we all are,” I admitted.

“It's quite common,” he pointed out. “Lots of the kids I work
with have them. Sometimes dozens of fits a day. Big ones, little ones. Some of them have seizures all day long.”

This wasn't exactly comforting. “I think maybe he's been having them for a while,” I observed. “All that heavy breathing, losing his words the past few weeks, until all he could say was ‘bus.' Do you think maybe he's been having mini-seizures, and no one ever noticed?”

“Could be.” Nick nodded thoughtfully. “I really don't know.”

If I heard that phrase one more time, I thought I might start throwing things. I decided to change the subject. “Skin was over the other day.”

Amanda raised her eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? Teach you how to butcher a pig, did he?”