Parachutes and Kisses (37 page)

“When did she last eat?” he asked.

“All day long,” Isadora said.

“Then we'll have to wait at least six hours for her digestive tract to clear—or she might throw up and aspirate the vomit.”

“Is it safe?” Isadora asked.

“Anything requiring anesthesia involves risk,” the doctor said.

“And if we don't do the exploratory surgery?”

“Then the finger
may
regenerate—but if the tendons are cut, she'll probably never have mobility in the joint again.”

“Never? Even though she's so young?”

“Even in a very young child, tendons don't always regenerate. Look—do you want to talk to the anesthesiologist before you make a decision?”

“I guess so,” Isadora said.

The anesthesiologist was brought and he duly outlined the risks of anesthesia for a young child. They would have to wait until Mandy had digested her food. They would have to hope that she wasn't allergic to anesthesia—a terrifying prospect for the mother of an only daughter, of any daughter, any child.

Isadora wished with all her heart that Josh were there. She was furious at him. She felt abandoned, adrift, betrayed—but he was, after all, Mandy's father and he should have had a part in the decision. Since she didn't know where to reach him, she bit the bullet and took the decision herself.

“We'll do the surgery,” she told both doctors. “I want Mandy to have the use of her right hand.”

In the back of her head were fears of all sorts—death by anesthesia, death by vomit, death by medical negligence. Isadora feared hospitals as much as the next sane person. She knew a hospital could kill you by mistake and then just say, “Sorry—we goofed.” But she wasn't going to let her fears deprive Mandy of a functioning right hand. Life is risk, she thought. Motherhood is risk too. And since Mandy isn't yet old enough to take responsibility for the risk, I have to—whatever the consequences for us both.

The decision having been made, the doctors departed. Mandy was transferred to the pediatric ward and provided with a temporary bandage and an angelic white gown. (The very thought of it as angelic made Isadora shiver.
Engelhemd,
they call this sort of hospital shirt in German, and the term never fails to evoke images of death and transfiguration). The little girl was somewhat calmer now, but still basically terrified. Roland and Errol appeared with books and toys from the playroom and did their best to amuse her. Errol even offered to go back to the house and call for Mandy's own toys, but by then Isadora's parents and Kevin had arrived, bringing armloads of Mandy's familiar things, so it wasn't really necessary.

As they waited for the hours to drag by and for Mandy to digest her food, Isadora tried to explain to her daughter what was going to happen to her. She was going to be put to sleep and her finger was going to be sewn up. Did she understand?

“Will you be with me, Mama?”

This was the hardest question of all.

“No,” Isadora said. “Mommies aren't allowed in the operating room.”

Mandy's lip trembled. Her eyes looked fearful enough to break your heart.

“You'll be asleep, darling,” Isadora said. “You won't feel a thing —and when you wake up, Mommy will be right there.”

“And Daddy?” Mandy asked. “Will Daddy be there?”

“I know he'd
like
to be here and if I can reach him, he'll come right away.”

“Daddy will be here?”

“I don't know, darling,” Isadora said. “I can't make promises for Daddy—but I know he
wants
to be here. And I know he loves you very much.”

“Oh,” said Mandy, her lip trembling.

Six hours later, Isadora stood and watched as her little girl was strapped to a litter, given sedation, gowned, capped, and wheeled down the long hospital corridors, and finally taken through the double doors of the operating room.

Mandy would have to do this one alone, just as Isadora had had to make her decision without Josh. Born alone, we die alone, and whatever companionship and love we get between those two events is pure luck, but not necessarily our birthright. Aloneness is our only birthright. With any determination we can turn aloneness into independence—but nobody guaranteed us love.

As Isadora watched the tiny figure of her child wheeled into the. huge, menacing operating room, she thought: Go, little girl, and Goddess bless. Motherhood is an endless process of letting go. So is life.

The operation took seemingly forever. Isadora, her mother, her father, Roland, Errol, and Kevin, waited in the playroom of the pediatric ward, making strained conversation. What could Errol and Roland and Kevin talk about, after all? The only thing they had in common was Isadora's body. In the past, this would have embarrassed Isadora, but now it seemed utterly inconsequential. Sex seemed inconsequential. Everything seemed inconsequential except Mandy's hand, Mandy's destiny.

The men turned to talk of football; Isadora turned to her mother.

“Do you want to take a walk?” Isadora asked her mother.

“Yes, darling. Maybe we can get some coffee.”

Well, it was something to do to pass the time. And fortunately, the cafeteria was far enough away from the pediatric ward to make the procuring of coffee a major effort. Isadora and her mother had to walk down a long corridor, take an elevator to the basement, follow red lines on the floor which threaded their way from one wing to another, from old building into new building, from new building into an annex, and so on. When they got to the cafeteria, it was closed. Good. The quest would take even longer.

They walked and walked, retracing their steps, now seeking another cafeteria, an automated one promised by an orderly (who seemed in their state of heightened awareness to be a sort of messenger of the gods). The red line on the floor seemed to be Mandy's destiny and Isadora and her mother seemed to be tracing it—almost as if they were the Fates, weaving the web of a mortal's future. Isadora's awareness was so sharp, so cosmic that she felt almost stoned.

“I remember the night you were born,” Isadora's mother dreamily said, preparing to retell an oft-retold tale.

“Yes—what time was I born?” Isadora asked. (This was a sore point between them, since Isadora frequently received offers to have her astrological chart done by willing astrologers who read her books—but since her mother could not remember the hour of her birth, Isadora could never give them adequate information for a detailed horoscope).

“It was during the war,” Isadora's mother said. “How should I remember the time?”

“What does the war have to do with it?”

Isadora's mother looked cross—as if Isadora ought to know that the war had
everything
to do with it. (Oh, the gap between generations! Isadora would never quite know the
feel
of the Second World War the way her mother knew it, nor had her mother ever quite known the
feel
of the First World War the way
her
father, Isadora's grandfather, had known it; nor would either of them ever truly know what Mandy knew of her moment in history—starting with now, her lonely experience in the O.R., her first major war.) .

“Well, of course the war had
everything
to do with it,” Isadora's mother said. “In the first place, there were no doctors, only nurses —which was fine with me. I could have delivered you in a half-hour, I was that dilated—and you were a second child—but the nurse was afraid that I'd sue the doctor if I knew he wasn't there for the delivery, so right after the baby slid out—
after you
slid out, she slapped an ether mask over my face to try to cover up for the doctor's not being there. Well-I was livid. I was enraged! You were already born, of course, and I wanted to hold you. So I bit the nurse's hand ... Too late. I heard her scream as I went out cold...”

They had found the automated cafeteria. It was brightly lit with bluish fluorescent lights which flickered as in some Technicolor nightmare. Pictures of crullers, donuts, cups of coffee, chicken soup, hot cocoa with marshmallows were displayed on the vending machines as in some Pop Art fantasy. The whole place was beautiful, Isadora thought—beautiful in a grotesque sort of way.

Isadora and her mother busied themselves with making change at the change machine, with pressing buttons for extra cream, extra strong, extra sweet. Going through this mechanized feeding ritual (always with the hovering awareness that Mandy's fate hung in the balance upstairs), Isadora was reminded of some of the most visceral memories of her early childhood. They all dealt with food, of course. Patriotism, says Lin Yutang, is the memory of foods eaten in childhood. Food evokes our strongest loyalty.

 

Isadora remembered running through the underground arcade at Rockefeller Center when she was just a tiny child, no bigger than Mandy—tall enough to see the world as a forest of legs, a forest of kneecaps, but too short to see the faces that belonged to these legs and knees. She is holding an adult hand and running as fast as her baby legs can go. She is afraid of losing that hand and being irretrievably lost in the bowels of the earth like some baby Persephone, erring irredeemably in letting go of Demeter's hand. She is running, running, following an adult stride belonging, of course, to her mother (who would never willfully lose her—or would she?), when all at once a smell of halcyon sweetness overtakes her, overtakes her nostrils, her tonsils, even, it seems, her eyes—and then a large hand comes down from above and pops a piece of gooey chocolate fudge into her mouth: fresh-made fudge from some underground candy stand, and she receives the fudge sacramentally from her mother's (the Mother Goddess‘) hand.

Now it is thirty-six years later and they are exactly the same height. Goddess and disciple grown into equals. They are buying coffee together to fill the time until they hear the fate of their little offspring—the mutal sprout on the tree of both their lives—Amanda.

Isadora gulps her coffee, burns her tongue, then puts down her cup on one of the tables. She embraces her mother tightly.

“Thank you,” she says, “for biting the nurse's hand. Thank you for bearing me. Thank you for everything, everything.”

She has said the one thing most mothers never hear, most daughters never say—because blessings embarrass us, while curses always come readily to our lips.

Isadora's mother is touched—yet she draws away, abashed by her own surfeit of emotion—and her daughter's.

“Well—” she says huffily, “what did you
expect
me to do?”

Mission accomplished, they go back upstairs to the playroom in the pediatric ward and find the men still discussing football.

“Has the doctor come out yet?” Isadora asks.

“Not yet,” says her father.

“Not yet,” says Roland.

“No,” says Kevin.

“Soon,” says Errol.

They sit and wait.

Isadora thinks of Mandy, her little life so new, yet also so firmly rooted in her, in everyone around her. If Mandy were to be taken away, nothing would ever restore Isadora's will to live. Art would not compensate. Religion would not compensate. Good works would not compensate. It was unthinkable, yet she thought of it. Josh had given her this child—yet now he was gone, leaving the decisions, the consequences, almost entirely to her.

“Did anyone reach Josh?” she asked.

“I reached his sister,” said Roland. “She promised to try to get him.”

“Poor Josh,” said Kevin, “he'll be sick at heart when he realizes what happened in his absence.”

“Poor Josh!” said Roland. “Poor Josh? That pig! If Mandy were
my.
baby, I wouldn't have left her and her mommy for the world. What a fool that man is! He deserves anything he gets.”

Just then the plastic surgeon appeared at the playroom door. Isadora's heart seemed to miss two beats.

“Mrs. Ace?” he said. “Mr. Ace,” he said, addressing Roland.

“No—” said Roland, “unfortunately, I'm not Mr. Ace. Mr. Ace is not here.”

“Well,” said Isadora, “how is she?”

“She's going to be fine,” said the surgeon, “just fine. And it's a good thing we made the decision to operate because both tendons had been severed and both nerves, and even a little piece of bone had been sliced off. You made the right decision.”

“When can I see her?” Isadora asked.

“She's in the recovery room now,” said the surgeon, “but she won't wake up for a while. You can go up and wait there.”

Isadora embraced the surgeon in a great bear hug, and her father, Roland, Errol, and Kevin broke out in a spontaneous round of applause.

Later, when Isadora waited outside the recovery room for the sleeping Amanda to awaken, she thought: Well, I got through it without Josh. This is another milestone.

But she missed him; she still missed him. And when Mandy opened her eyes, her first words were:

“Where's Daddy?”

Some for the Glories of This World; and some Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

—
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists

JOSH
flew back immediately to see Amanda. Flying from west to east always seemed interminable (because of the time change) and especially at Christmas, flights were unbearably delayed.

By the time Josh got to Connecticut, Amanda was home, ably manipulating all her Christmas presents with one hand and seemingly not much the worse for wear.