It Takes a Worried Man (11 page)

So while I’ve blown off parents’ night at my own school, I do make it to parents’ night at Rowen’s school. I am in a kind of daze even though the imperial stout has finally worn off. Rowen and her classmates perform a version of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” which has been the focus of a lot of activity at her school for a few weeks now, and which seems kind of ironic to me because we got ahold of a version of this story, about three goats who want to get across a bridge but are hindered by the evil troll who lives below, right about the time when we wanted to move to a new place but were hindered by the evil troll who lived below, and we even christened the Troll after the troll in this story.

The play is short and predictably cute. Rowen plays the water under the bridge (when you have fifteen kids and a four-character story, you have to stretch a little), and she does a good job, and I’m impressed because she is terribly shy, and last time they had one of these events she refused to get off of Kirsten’s lap. The kids all sing three songs, and Rowen refuses to get off my lap for this part, but she is singing. Afterwards there is a potluck, and I like a lot of the other parents and want to be social, but I just can’t. Rowen and I kind of huddle by ourselves and eat and are joined by the seven-year-old sister of one of her classmates. She is very nice to both of us and talks about why she likes her school and hips us to the fact that her dad has brought these amazingly delicious dessert items, and again I guess I have to wonder about God intervening. On this night when I just can’t deal with talking to grownups, I find this gregarious kid in my path who makes this dinner a real pleasure for both of us.

I go home and get Rowen to bed, and my friend Scott comes over with pizza and beer which I consume joylessly because I am so blitzed out, and at about 9:30 I start to feel chilly and check the thermostat and find that the temperature is 6 degrees lower than the thermostat setting. This is not something working furnaces allow to happen. I head down to the basement, flashlight in one hand, box of matches in the other, and if dining with a nice kid felt like God sort of patting me on the back, coming home after taking my wife to the hospital and having my furnace break when it’s20 fucking degrees outside feels like God kicking me in the nuts.

For a little background, the furnaces have been the curse of this building. Since we bought the house, each of the three furnaces has broken, in numerical order, so now it is unit three’s turn. Each breakage has required at least two visits from the heating people. I have stopped calling the 24-hour emergency line in the off-hours (when, for some reason, each of these things has been discovered) because I found out that what these guys do is charge you two hundred bucks to come out at nine o’clock and tell you that they don’t have the part they need on the truck, and you really should schedule a service call tomorrow.  The sad part is that it took me three of these visits to finally see the pattern. I have learned a little bit about furnaces from all this. I know now what a thermocouple is. I also know something to try when your pilot light has gone out and you relight it and your furnace starts sputtering with flames licking back toward the gas pipe in a really alarming way. I try it, and it doesn’t stop the sputtering. Last time this happened I was told that I could run the furnace like this for a while, but, you know, don’t go to sleep while it’s doing that, so I run it long enough to make up the missing six degrees and then shut it down, hoping the house will hold the heat overnight.

I wake up in the middle of the night stressed out, cold, and alone.

After a few days in the bubble, the days start to run together for Kirsten. The same thing happens to me. I go over to the hospital every day, but it gets harder and harder to remember if something happened yesterday or the day before, or even the day before that.

One thing that happens is that my glove selection grows smaller and smaller. On the first day there were five kinds of gloves, and by day six, we are down to two. I have been experimenting, and I find that the powder-free gloves totally suck, because they are incredibly hard to get on your hands, and, once on, they give you that sticky, thighs on the hot car seat feeling, only, you know, on your hands. On day six, my only options are the vinyl powdered gloves, and these horrible blue powder-free gloves, which is really no choice at all. I mean, blue! What am I, a Smurf?

So Kirsten gets progressively worse for the first few days. She is hooked up to four different pumps which feed into the four-way hose implanted in her chest. She sleeps a lot. A couple of times when I see her, she kicks me out after a short time because she needs to rest. On day three, she starts to puke. They have her on any number of antinausea drugs, but the medicine is too strong, and she pukes everything up and then pukes up bile. I am there for one of these and hold the pink plastic bucket as she hunches over, green liquid dribbling out of her mouth. It is gross, but more than that, it’s just sad. She still has never been sick from the cancer, but now they are killing her. I mean, they are literally killing her. It is really strange to realize that without major medical intervention (the stem cell transplant) , the dose of medicine they are giving her is fatal. I realize that what I am watching is my wife dying. And then, I guess, thanks to the transplant, she will come back to life. So that she won’t die from the disease that’s not making her sick. This whole thing is just so incredibly bizarre.

On the second day I go to the hospital, I feel a big cry coming on. I am just so sad, and yet I have not broken down yet. Probably because there has just been too much to do–call to get the furnace fixed, get my mom settled in, teach my classes, go to the hospital, make dinner–I haven’t had time to get as sad as I know I need to get. I even packed the Prince Greatest Hits CD with “Purple Rain” on it, which is a song that, in times of high stress, never fails to move me to tears, but all I get today is a dribble, even out of the part near the end where he is going “ooo–oooweoo-oooo-ooweeeoo-ooo-oo-oo” in that crazy falsetto, which is usually where I lose it.

And now I am walking down the street going to the hospital, and I feel like I am about to sob. So I do what I have done so much since this started–I call Danny, who has been my best friend since the seventh grade.  We lived two blocks from each other for about five years as adults, and–well, saying what he means to me is probably another book in itself, so I call him up, and I tell him I need some help getting my game face on, because I am going in to see Kirsten and I can’t be this sad, I have to be upbeat, but they’re killing her for God’s sake, and I can’t remember what exactly he says to me, but I know that it involves mocking me in some way, and it works perfectly. I think later on that he is the only person apart from Kirsten who would dare to mock me when I am sad about going to see Kirsten in the hospital, and the only person apart from Kirsten who could possibly know that that is the best thing he could do for me. I am lucky to have him.

The days all start to run together. Some days we have conversations where I tell her about my day and she tells me about why she didn’t sleep and makes fun of the medical staff. Some days she is really sleepy, and she says, “I’m sorry I’m not very good company,” and I hold her hand for a while until she says, “I’m sorry, hon, but you have to leave so I can sleep.” I bring her videos of Rowen and of people at church saying hi. She is puking pretty much nonstop through the church video, which is no reflection on lovely people there or their nice and heartfelt greetings, but she does seem to appreciate it. She raises her head long enough to sort of see who’s talking, then hunches over her little puke bucket while they talk. The sound is bad anyway, so not much is lost. One day we have a hilarious time because she is high on Atavan, which is something they are giving her for her nausea but which is also, I guess, some kind of narcotic, and I am high on lack of sleep and caffeine. I can’t really remember the conversation, and I know she doesn’t either, but I just remember both of us sitting there and laughing a lot. Some days I feel good about what’s happening, and some days I feel horrible. I am not used to being able to see her for only forty-five minutes a day. Mostly I just miss her.

Kirsten and I have not been separated like this in twelve years. It sucked then, and it sucks now, but then it was also kind of fun in a romantic longing kind of way; now it just sucks.

We met as sophomores in college. We both lived in this Modern Language dorm, which I know sounds freakish, and I guess it kind of was, but I really loved it there because it was where I finally found the weirdos at this big school. My freshman year I lived on a hall where, but for the would-be Scientologist who tried to get his tuition refunded and run away to be re-educated or something, I was the weirdest person there. I am much more comfortable being the normal person among weirdos than the weirdo among normal people, so I was at home in the Modern Language House.

The dorm was unremarkable except that it had this really cushy, nice lounge with a kitchen, comfy furniture, and this kind of solarium deal. It was a great place to hang out, and Kirsten and I did a lot of hanging out that year.  We, along with five or six other people, came to call ourselves “the lounge rats,” because we were just there all the time. There were many many Saturdays when everyone would kind of stagger down there at like 10:00 a.m., sit around and shoot the shit for a couple of hours, talk about how we all had work we needed to do (sometimes if somebody really felt the need to pretend they were going to study, they would bring books that they never opened), drift out at about noon to get sandwiches or make mac and cheese in the kitchen, drift back with food and say Okay, after lunch I am absolutely starting my work, and then sit around shooting the shit until around dinner time, when we would frequently find ourselves so lazy that we would get a pizza delivered from the pizza place we could see right across the street and endure the disgusted looks of the delivery guys rather than get off our lazy asses. It was really great.

Although Kirsten and I spent hours in each other’s company, we never spent any time together outside of this group, so in a strange way we didn’t know each other that well, and we did not become a couple right away.  I actually ended up dating a non-lounge-rat woman that year. Well, “dating” is not exactly the right word. I mean, we did go on some dates, but it was a college relationship, so what we mostly did was have enthusiastic, inexpert sex in those tiny, uncomfortable dorm beds. I should say in fairness that I am speaking only of myself when I say “inexpert,” because I was a virgin before this and had an endurance of about twenty seconds, and when I think about it I guess that means I can really only speak for myself when I say “enthusiastic” too.

Anyway, this woman was actually dating some guy who had gone away for a semester abroad, so I was The Other Man. Which ended up hurting, because I wanted her to pick me, but she told me from the beginning that she wouldn’t, and because I was an idiot I thought we were in love, and because she wasn’t she knew that we had fun together and shared a mutual attraction and that was about it, but it took me years to realize that I resented her for not believing the lies I told myself about our relationship, and that she was right and I was wrong and I caused myself a lot of grief wanting this relationship to be something it wasn’t.

The only real negative implication of this is that over the summer after all this ended, my ex-girlfriend from high school came over and just threw herself at me, but she was also dating somebody else, and since I was tired of being somebody’s piece on the side, I pretended that I didn’t get that she was throwing herself at me, and I know that it was the right thing to do, but I still sort of regret it. How pathetic is that?

Kirsten and I finally spent some time alone together at the end of that year, when we were both getting our paperwork together for our junior years in the U.K. We went and got passport pictures taken, picked up forms, and stuff like that. It was all aboveboard and totally non-romantic, but I felt vaguely guilty because I was “dating” somebody else and this felt kind of like a date. We then kept in touch over the summer–she lived in Boston and I lived in Cincinnati–and later that summer her sister Nan got married and moved to Cincinnati, and so Kirsten came to visit her, and this happened to coincide with my friend Rick’s big polka party that he had been planning for weeks, so I suggested that she come along, and she agreed.

Now when I say polka party, it was just a party where Rick was playing a lot of polka music; it’s not like there were actual accordions or anything. I don’t remember much about the party except that Kirsten and I did flirty stuff like throw ice at each other, and I was sort of starting to wonder about that, and one of Rick’s friends was hitting on Kirsten and I found myself getting totally jealous, and I hated this guy for years because of this, and Rick would say stuff like, “but he’s a really nice guy!” and I’d be like, “he was hitting on my wife!” and Rick would sensibly reply that she wasn’t even my girlfriend, much less my wife at the time, and eventually I did hang out with this guy again and found that Rick was right about him. An interesting postscript is that after we left, the cops showed up with this decibel-o-meter and gave Rick a ticket for violating the noise ordinance, but he decided to go in front of a judge for some reason, and when the judge heard that it was polka music, she laughed and dismissed the case.

Anyway, both Kirsten and I were headed to the U.K. for our junior year–she to London and me to Edinburgh. We wrote letters a lot, and once she came up to visit and we went to the movies and then to a pub and came back to my room, and something was on the verge of happening, I mean I was about thirty seconds away from going for the awkward first kiss, when my friend Hugh burst into my room drunk off his ass and planted himself for a good hour. That pretty well killed the moment, so nothing happened, but now I was thinking about her all the time. When Christmas break came, I went to London for the first week, and I just remember thinking that it was too much for me, I had to say something. So at some point we were out walking around London and I ended up picking her up, I mean literally lifting her off her feet under some pretext I no longer remember, so I was holding her around the waist and I said something smooth like, “so what’s going on with us anyway?” and she replied something equally smooth like, “I dunno,” or something, but we decided that something was happening, and I remember the first time we kissed we were standing outside the British museum, and for the whole rest of the week we held hands and kissed constantly, and it was just wonderful.

We saw each other at least twice a month for the rest of the year and wrote letters daily.  I took the eight-hour bus ride from Edinburgh to London what seemed like a hundred times, and you can tell how in love I was by the fact that I came to love those bus rides. They were full of romantic anticipation, (too much! Magic Bus!) and even now if I saw the bus station in Edinburgh I would probably well up, because the bus meant Kirsten, and even eight hours on the bus was painless because she was waiting at the other end.

We called each other a lot, and this was frustrating, because in my dorm the phone was down the hall and through a door, and hardly anybody ever heard it ring, and in Kirsten’s dorm there were three phones for the entire dorm, and I had to depend on the goodwill of some sullen person who was trying to watch their Australian soap opera in the lounge next door to answer the phone and then page the person on the PA. Then I would wait for a long time for her to get downstairs if she was there and wait even longer if she wasn’t there, and all the while the minutes would be ticking off of my phone card.

Anyway, we did the best we could to stay in constant contact, and we saw each other a lot and drank a lot and kissed a lot and had sex a lot, and after we came back we were pretty much inseparable–we both lived in the Language House again as seniors, and we went to Taiwan for six months after graduation and then moved in together right after that. We had shitty first jobs and a shitty first apartment together, learned to cook together, got married, had a kid together, and basically I went from being a kid to an adult with her, and when I say I don’t know who I am without her it’s because we have been together as I have become everything –husband, parent, teacher–that makes me who I think I am right now, and as I sit here writing this she is in the hospital and I miss her so much I can’t stand it. I literally think the last time I spent this long without sleeping next to her was the summer after that junior year abroad, and it sucked then, but it sucks a whole lot more now.