It Takes a Worried Man (14 page)

I go over to see Kirsten one day, and after passing through the airlock, I see Dr. J. I spoke to Kirsten earlier, and she told me that she had gotten up in the middle of the night and almost passed out, and that in the morning the nurses were saying things like, “you really gave us a scare last night,” and other such reassurances, so I decide to ask Dr. J what happened. She is her usual friendly, upbeat self, and tells me that Kirsten has low blood pressure, once again using crystal clear analogies (she compares blood pressure to a gas gauge, by way of explaining why they keep taking Kirsten’s both standing up and laying down) and speaking in a methodical but not condescending way, and reassuring me. She is both incredibly knowledgeable and good at the people stuff, which, to judge by our encounters with everybody else, is basically unheard of in the medical profession.

I think once again about how lucky we are to have her on Kirsten’s case. And then I think that it might not all have to do with luck. In some strange way, having Dr. J in charge of Kirsten’s treatment is the result of some small nice thing I did years ago.  Kirsten and I were on the membership committee at church, and one of the things we were working on was being more welcoming to newcomers. See, after church we have this coffee hour thing where everybody socializes, and the people at our church are, as I keep saying, these really nice, kind caring people, but everybody just ignores the newcomers and they stand there, coffee in hand, with this pathetic, “won’t somebody please talk to me” look on their faces while all the nice, kind members of the church are running around to talk to the other nice, kind people and leaving these people feeling like the kid who didn’t get picked for the kickball team.

Now I have become one of those people who ignores newcomers, because I have to chase Rowen around, and I want to check in with the seven nice people that I only see on Sunday, and also I spend so much time in church school that I’ve had a few embarrassing conversations where I go, “So, are you new here?” and they answer, looking kind of annoyed, “Well, I’ve been coming for six months.” But we met Dr. J pre-Rowen, and Kirsten and I remembered all too painfully how much it sucked to stand there in coffee hour feeling invisible because we did it for weeks, so we made it our mission to talk to people we didn’t recognize, and one day I wasn’t really feeling like it, because the fact is that these conversations frequently suck in the way that first conversations tend to:  “So, do you live in the neighborhood? Oh. What do you do for a living?”  Ack. It’s an ironic feature of the Unitarian coffee hour that religion, which is, after all, the one thing you may have in common with someone you meet for the first time at a church, is never discussed. This is partly I think because Unitarians are so afraid of offending anybody that we welcome everybody with a vaguely religious leaning into the church, so you have Christians and Buddhists and even atheists (go figure) all coming to the same church, so talking about religion can be opening a can of worms, but also I think it’s that Unitarians tend to be college-educated liberals, and we are sort of embarrassed by our religiosity, like talking about God will immediately make us seem like one of those Bible-Thumping, gay-hating, secretly-dating-a-hooker guys you see on TV.

Anyway, one morning I wasn’t feeling like having any awkward conversations, but Kirsten poked me in the ribs until I went up to talk to this lady I didn’t recognize, and this turned out to be Dr. J., and as I mentioned, she was a “church friend” for years before she became Kirsten’s doctor, and she always says that my saying hi to her that one morning was the reason she joined the church, because she was on like her third Sunday of standing there feeling stupid, and she said she had decided to never come back if someone didn’t talk to her, and I did.

And in the middle of all this shit, this horrible shit that has made me question just about everything I or anybody else believes, here is something good, something that makes sense: one day I did something nice, admittedly more out of a sense of duty than sheer friendliness, and also to stop the sharp pain in my ribs, but still, I did something nice, and as a result we have this incredibly bright and kind person in charge of the fight against Kirsten’s cancer. It’s kind of humbling, in a way–how often do we have opportunities to do some nice little thing, but we blow it off because nobody’s elbowing us to do it?

I have an opportunity to find out a few days later. It’s the last day before vacation, school is out, and I am running up the stairs to go get some free food, and I see one of my advisees on the stairs, and she has been having a real crisis lately, like a really super hard time, like a time as hard or maybe harder than mine, and she says, “Oh, my bus pass!”  just like that. And I get annoyed because she wasn’t in advisory to get her bus pass because she always spends advisory time with another advisor, and as stupid as it is, I think that must feed my sense of social insecurity, and I know that’s pathetic–who’s the seventeen year old here anyway? I am running up the stairs and she expects me to run back down into the basement without even bothering to ask me politely. So I say, “Yeah. Your bus pass is downstairs,” and keep moving, and she gets mad and storms out of the building, and I immediately feel like a shit, remembering that I’ve just been shitty to a seventeen year old in crisis, and I have this vanity about having a good relationship with the kids, and what have I done here except shit on somebody a little lower down in the shit than me. What I said may not sound that bad, but it was–it was, and as Unitarian I use this word carefully, a sin because I was deliberately cruel. I knew as I was saying it that I was going to piss her off. I’m like the little brother who kicks the dog because there are no people younger than me, and while I have been pretty proud of the way I’ve held it together during this whole thing, today I am ashamed of myself. One small act of kindness had big repercussions in my life. I can only hope that one small act of cruelty doesn’t.

My mom has a 6:00 a.m. flight, so she needs to get out early. We call for a cab the night before, and it’s supposed to come at 4:45. Ugh. The plan is that she will sneak out and get into the cab and be on her way and not wake anybody else up. This is kind of key for me, because Rowen had woken up at 4:30 the night before crying about being scared of monsters, and since it was after 5:00 by the time she got back to sleep, I never really got back to sleep, and the fact is that Rowen has woken up in the middle of the night scared of monsters for the last five nights in a row, which I guess is her way of dealing with the stress of missing her mom.  I can’t really complain, I mean her very attractive teacher told me the other day that they haven’t noticed any change in her at all at school, which is good, because, you know, she’s four, maybe she would start biting or throwing poop or other horrifying anti-social behavior. But she’s not. She just wakes up crying every night. And this wears me out. When I finally do get an uninterrupted night’s sleep a few nights later, I am amazed at how much difference it makes.

So I am a mess. I am getting through at school because I have taught this stuff before, but I am feeling guilty because I’m not really at the top of my game, and  since I am going to the hospital during all my free time, nothing is getting corrected, and the last week before vacation is tough under the best of circumstances, but it is wearing me down right now. Anyway, I hear my mom leaving, which is difficult to avoid given the fact that we live in five rooms and the door is right outside my bedroom. No problem. But then I wait to hear a little honk, or the heavy thunk of a cab door, and I don’t. After several minutes, I hear her come up and go to the bathroom and then go back down the stairs. Minutes go by, and I still hear no thunk. I am clearly not going to get back to sleep until I satisfy my curiosity, so I throw some clothes on and head out into the hallway. I see my mom standing by the door. She says, “I may need to press you into service. They still haven’t come.” It is now 5:15, half an hour after the cab was supposed to come.

“Did you call them?” I ask.  “No,” she says, like it didn’t even occur to her. Now it’s not that driving her to the airport will be such a hassle–there won’t be much traffic at this hour, and Kirsten’s mom is also here to look after Rowen, but Jesus, how long was she going to wait before calling them? I get that annoyed, “Why do I have to do everything?” feeling, and I call them and they say they will be here in five minutes. They haven’t come after five minutes, so we go get in the car, and just as I am starting the car, the cab comes. I don’t really feel like driving, and anyway I know the cab will bust all eight cylinders of his monstrous vehicle to get to the airport as fast as he can and probably get her there much faster, so I put her into the cab and come back inside and lie in bed and don’t sleep.

Later that day I am on my way to the hospital and I call to make sure she got in ok, and she did, and she tells me that my aunt Margie cleaned her entire house while she was gone, I am talking about scrubbing the kitchen, flowers on the table, the whole deal, and my mom is literally crying because she is so touched.

And I know this makes me a bad person, but it is all I can do to not say, voice dripping with sarcasm, “Yeah, it sure is nice to have someone take care of you, isn’t it?”  Or I guess maybe I’m not such a bad person because I don’t end up saying every shitty thing that comes into my mind. I am annoyed, because being taken care of is what I really want and need at this point. I am getting up in the middle of the night every night, I am running around trying to do everything, I am exhausted, and I just feel like I really would have liked to have someone take care of me. And my mom just can’t. I mean, it’s not like she did nothing, she did a lot of things–she hung our Christmas decorations, she took Rowen to school every day, she went grocery shopping, but the logistical support was not overwhelming the way that my aunt’s scrubbing my mom’s house was. Stuff got done at a maintenance level, which is admittedly more than I could have ever done on my own, but I never had that “Relax, I’ll take care of everything” feeling. And I was keenly aware the whole time that my mom had this agenda about bonding with Rowen, and as her outburst showed, she can’t really take care of me emotionally, so I just feel like a petulant little kid when I hear that someone has done this overwhelming nice thing for my mom, because that’s what I want.

Not that I ever communicated this to her. And I realize this is exactly the reverse of what happened last Christmas. She had something she wanted out of that visit that she never told us, and she was mad when we didn’t read her mind, and I complained that she was nuts, and it looks like I’m the one who’s nuts now. It depresses me. It seems like we each want something that the other one can’t give–I want her to take care of me, and she wants me to take care of her, and for whatever reason, we can’t do that.

This naturally leads me to the fear that the same thing will happen to me and Rowen. I have been tapdancing around some of the messier details of it all, but I think what’s fucked up about our relationship all goes back to my dad’s death. Or maybe not–I know plenty of people who have fucked up relationships with their parents that haven’t been informed by tragedy, so maybe my little analysis here is just so much bullshit, but here goes.

See, my mom went a little bit nuts after my dad died. And I do not blame her for this one bit. When she was my age, she was already widowed a year, and she too had been with her spouse since she was a teenager, so I know exactly why it sent her over the edge. But anyway, she went a little bit nuts, basically trying to have the rowdy adolescence or early twentyhood that she never really got to have. And I should say here that she was never an addict, and we always had food, and, miraculously enough given the pitiful sums we lived on, I never felt poor as a child. Which I think may have had to do with some creative financing using credit cards, and my mom still has a problem with that that I sort of chide her for, but I never complained when I was actually getting Christmas presents when she was working for minimum wage. But anyway, she was gone a lot, partying with friends during my middle school years, and maybe this is part of why I got so independent. And I know that she has tremendous guilt about this time, which I wish she wouldn’t because if Kirsten dies I am heading straight up to the park to look for the crack dealers, or more likely I’ll just start buying beer by the keg and suck from the tap until I can’t feel anything anymore, but I wonder if she feels like my independence is this constant rebuke for those times and that’s why it hurts so much.

What the hell do I know? Not much, except that we can’t stop hurting each other’s feelings. I hate it.

Because it is Christmastime, I start listening to a lot of Christmas music. Well, actually, I have only 3 Christmas albums that I put into heavy rotation: Elvis’ Christmas Album, which I don’t really know the title of because I have all the songs as part of a box set,
A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
, and
The Jackson 5 Christmas Album
. That’s the order in which I listen to them, and I like rock and roll Christmas albums a lot more than sort of more traditional kinds of albums–I have a Sinatra Christmas album that I rarely listen to, and my mom used to always play the Barbra Streisand Christmas album, and what she does to “Jingle Bells”ought to be punishable by public flogging. Rock and roll Christmas albums do have a significant problem, though. This is that everybody figures they are going to write the next big Christmas standard by writing about how they want somebody who’s far away to come home for Christmas, or how they want the estranged lover back for Christmas, or whatever. I initially forget about this and am therefore surprised to find myself moved by “Blue Christmas,” which is a good song but has about as much genuine emotion as, say, an episode of
Providence,
and there is another song on the Elvis record called “Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me” that also catches me by surprise, but after a few listens I seem to be kind of inoculated to the whole thing, so that by the time I hit “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the Phil Spector album, I seem to be immune.

So I just enjoy the records. The thing I listen to the most on the Elvis CD is “Santa Claus is Back in Town,” which is a totally raunchy kind of R&B number in which a the king basically boasts of his earning power and sexual prowess. There is one part that is just unbelievably raunchy where he instructs the listener to hang up her pretty stockings because Santa Claus is coming down her chi-him-ney tonight. I know what he’s talking about. You hear a lot of these salacious double entendres in old songs like this, and I am stunned that they dared to put this on a Christmas album and a little sad that we don’t seem to have much in the way of salacious double entendres in music these days. Much as I love Prince, a song like “Feel U Up,” just to pick a random raunchy one, just doesn’t pack the same clever punch as some of these old R&B numbers. I mean, comin’ down your chimney. Honestly.

I then shift over to Phil Spector, and I am just stunned by this record every year. I think it just might be one of the best pop records ever. And sure, the CD really reveals the limitations of the original recording–Phil’s famous “Wall of Sound” sounds a lot more like a “55-Gallon Drum of Sound”, but the arrangements are just great. The “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” arrangement is so great that it was stolen by both Bruce Springsteen and the Jackson 5.  Except for the shrill “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” there really isn’t a bad song on it–he even manages to make the creepy Oedipal fable “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” kind of palatable. It ends with Phil ranting incoherently over a string arrangement of “Silent Night” about how much the album means to him, and he uses “so” and “very” like 5 times in each sentence, and he comes across as such a freak on this track that it’s sort of surprising that it took him another seventeen years to snap so badly that he pulled a gun on the Ramones.

The
Jackson 5 Christmas Album
is uneven but has two outstanding tracks:  “Up on the Housetop,” which I play over and over again because it just sounds like pure joy, and “The Little Drummer Boy,” which is a song that always gets me anyway, but if you ever have a chance, you really need to hear what Michael Jackson does to this song. He sings it so well and really packs each “rum-pa-pum-pum” with emotion, and I am not talking about the kind of hysterical overemoting that passes for soul in Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey (and, sadly, latter-day Michael Jackson) songs, I am talking about understated but very moving singing. I am struck as I listen to it that he was just a little kid, and I would guess by the amount of horrible little kid singing you hear that this kind of thing is pretty much impossible to teach, and he really must be some kind of musical genius. So what the hell happened? How did he become the King of Tripe?

The other thing that strikes me as odd about this is that, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jacksons didn’t celebrate Christmas, or at least they weren’t supposed to. And yet this album is full of them talking about the stuff they want from Santa. As much as the songs are moving, they are basically a lie–one more cynical Christmas money grab. I have to wonder how this whole thing played down at the Kingdom Hall, and when I think about these kids in the recording studio feigning Christmas joy and then going home and being told that celebrating Christmas is a sin, it gets kind of easy to see how they’re such fucked up adults.

And speaking of fucked up adults, that just about describes me. My Christmas spirit is about as fake as Jermaine Jackson’s at this point. I am listening to the music, but it just isn’t getting me there. Kids at school ask me what I want for Christmas, and I say, “my wife back,” and they kind of don’t know what to say, and I know it’s a crappy thing to say to a teenager who is trying to make conversation, but it’s true. I just don’t give a shit about Christmas, and it’s a damn good thing that Kirsten bought all of our presents before she went in the hospital, because I just can’t bring myself to shop. I am sort of reminded of the Kinks song “Father Christmas” where the poor kids beat the shit out of Santa and take his money and basically say in that cynical Kinks way that Christmas is a luxury, and while I certainly have the money, I don’t have the energy to care about this holiday, though I wish I could buy into the whole idea that it’s a time of rebirth and hope. I do feel hopeful that they will save Kirsten’s life–but mostly I just want to sleep for a week.

Driving over to the hospital one day, I hear “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” which I always liked much better than any of the other treacly benefit songs, because it at least has a little bit of an edge. Though even in high school we thought about how many of the famine victims the song was about were not Christians, and how maybe “Do They Care it’s Christmas” was a more appropriate question, but anyway, the line I am thinking of they give to Bono, who yowls, “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you,” and while I do not claim to compare my fat ass to a famine victim, I also sort of feel like my family is a walking (or in Kirsten’s case, lying in bed) billboard for that sentiment at this time of year which is so very very special to so very many people, as Phil Spector might say.