The Age of Grief (21 page)

“But you never really get sick. I always think there’s a kind of purity about you. Untouched. You remind me of some kind of flower.”

“A flower?”

“I don’t mean that you aren’t masculine. You know that. I don’t know.” She looked out the window, speculating.
“You know when you lean down and look right into a tulip? You know the way the petals look thick with color, but thin with light, permanent and delicate at the same time?”

“I suppose.”

“That makes me think of you. Always has.”

“Do you think of me?”

She looked back at me. She smiled slightly and said, “I have been lately, for some reason.”

“Dana—”

“I better go and release them from bondage, or they’ll be furious for the rest of the night.” And then the whirlwind swept us up again.

However the flu took Leah, with nausea she couldn’t puke out or give voice to, with aches and pains, with lethargy, it took her for three days, and I walked her for most of those three days. At first I was tired and bored: she was heavy, and the urge to put her off was more pressing than hunger, more like a raging thirst. I would panic at the thought of the hours, even the minutes, before me, of walking and carrying until my whole left side, the side she leaned upon, was numb, and my legs were leaden. After a while, though, say late Sunday night, it was as if Leah and our joining had sunk more deeply into me, so that I only did it, didn’t think about it, didn’t rebel against it. They say that this happens with the KGB, too.

Dana had gone to bed, leaving one lamp in the living room dimly lit. I remember looking at my watch, at the way the time looked there, eleven fifteen, and the previous four weeks of nights, myself lying awake in fear or hope or whirring thought, suddenly seemed like a deck of shuffling cards to me, and yet each moment had been a lengthy agony. That was why the face of my watch was so familiar to me—I had
looked at it repeatedly in disbelief at the tormented slowness of time. Then I remember looking down at Leah, whose face, as familiar as the face of my watch, glowed with fever and sleep. Her mouth was partly open and she breathed at me. I felt the tiny rush of it on my lips, where the nerves cluster, on my cheeks, like the first breeze after you have shaved your beard, even on my forehead. There was a fragrance to it, too, sour and pungent, the odor of sick child, but so familiar, so entwined with the lasting pleasure of holding the child’s flesh to your own, that I drank it in. I lifted her higher and kissed her hot cheek, hot silk against the searching ganglia. I shifted her over to the right and she settled in. It seemed to me that I had never loved anything—object, or feeling, or person—the way I loved her right now. Love is in the body as well as the mind, a rush of blood to the surface, maybe, an infinitesimal yearning stretch of the nerve endings. I looked at her without seeing her, blinded by the loveliness of her nose, the grace of her forehead, the curl of her upper lip and the roundness of the lower. I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.

After all, it was harder to cherish hers for me. Hard to appreciate the way she climbed the stairs looking for me, held my leg when I was trying to walk across the kitchen, yearned for my presence in the middle of the night, hard even to appreciate her glances into my face, her man-pleasing chatter, the stroke of her baby fingers on my forehead. And these hours of walking were unbearable, although I was bearing them. I stopped and looked down at her, thinking, Open your eyes. After a long while, she opened her eyes with a sigh, and I said, “Leah, it’s time for bed.”

She said, “Not go to bed.”

“Yes, I’m tired. I’ll walk you in the morning.”

“Picky up.”

“I’m going to take you to your bed now. You can have a bottle of juice. Tonight, even the dentist says you can have a bottle of juice.”

“Picky up.”

I carried her into the kitchen, filled a bottle with diluted juice, and began up the stairs.

“No bed.”

“Time for bed. I’ll lie down beside you on the floor.”

“No bed.”

I put her in. She was wide awake. I lay on the rug, and she rolled over and looked down at me through the bars. Her eyes were big in the dark. She reached her hand through the bars, and I gave her mine, though it was awkward. She looked at me and held my hand, and I fell asleep. Maybe she never fell asleep. We were up and walking by six. When Dana got up, I said, “I talked her into letting me get some sleep. I talked her into it.” Dana handed me a piece of toast. I grew, once again, overconfident. The goodness of warm toast, the sweetness of cold orange juice, the attentions of my wife, the new maturity of my two-year-old. “Two years old!” I said. “I
talked
her into it.” I thought I knew what I was doing.

We walked all of that day, until about six, when she got down out of my arms to interfere with Lizzie and Stephanie at their Parcheesi game. After dinner her fever went up and we walked until eleven. On Tuesday, we walked from six fifteen in the morning until ten thirty, when she got down for good at the sight of the Barbie bubbling spa boxed up in the front hall closet. I set it up. I found every Barbie and every water toy in the house, all the hair ornaments and four
spoons. I gave her Tylenol and a bottle of juice, and then I went into the living room and collapsed on the couch. After a few minutes I could hear her start talking to herself and humming. I ached from the soles of my feet to my chin.

At noon I still hadn’t moved, and Leah came in the living room to chat. She said, “Are you sleeping now?”

I said, “You’re soaking wet.”

She said, “Are you sleeping on the couch?”

I said, “Let’s go upstairs and change out of your pajamas. Is your diaper wet?” And just then Dana walked in, her face as white as her jacket, which she hadn’t bothered to take off. She closed the door behind her and, without speaking, turned and climbed the stairs. I said, “What’s the main symptom?” and she said, “Aches and pains. My joints feel as if they’re fracturing and knitting every second.” Her voice trailed off and I sat up on the couch. Leah said, “Are you waking up now?”

Stephanie and Lizzie came in at three ten, when I was thinking about dinner. I hadn’t thought about dinner in four days, and I was ruminating over steak and baked potatoes and green beans in cheese sauce, my father’s favorite meal. They threw down their backpacks and called for milk. While I was in the kitchen, someone turned on the TV. By the time I had returned, Stephanie was face down on the couch. I was nearly jovial. I thought I knew what I was doing. I said, “Is it your turn, Steph? Have you got it?”

She rolled over. She said, “I feel bad now.”

“Do you want to go upstairs? Mommy’s up there. She’s got it, too, but I have a feeling it will go away fast for you and Mommy.” She held out her arms and I picked her up. There was Tylenol in every room in the house, and I grabbed some. She said, “Ooooh.” It was a long-drawn-out and deeply
resigned moan, the sound, it later turned out, of the fever rising in her veins like steam in a radiator. By the time I had carried her to her room, my shirt where she lay against me was soaked with her sweat. She said, “The yellow one.”

I thought she was asking for a certain nightgown. I said, “Sweetie, you don’t have a yellow one. How about the pink one?”

“Throw away the yellow one. My house.”

I sat her on the bed and counted out five children’s Tylenol. She collapsed, and I sat her up, opened her mouth with that practiced dental firmness, and put in the tablets, one by one. Her hair was soaked with sweat. She said, “Melon. Melon, melon, melon.” I laid her out, and put my hand across her forehead. She was incandescent. I took my hand away and placed it in my lap. From downstairs came the sound of the Superfriends. From down the hall came Dana’s voice, low and annoyed, saying, “Shit. Oh shit.” She is not long-suffering in illness, and generally keeps up a steady stream of expletives as long as she feels bad. I sat quietly, because in myself I felt panic, a little void, needle-thin but opening. The thermometer was on the table next to Lizzie’s bed. I stared at it for a long time, then at Stephanie, then at my hand reaching for it, then at my hand putting it in her mouth. The Superfriends broke for a commercial, Lizzie called, “Daddy!” Dana said, “Damn I hate this,” and the thermometer, held up to the light, read 104.2.

There is the permanent threat of death. In the fifties, people used to grow trees through the roofs of their houses sometimes, and I often think of death as an invisible tree planted in our living room. When the doors are closed and locked, the insurance paid, the windows shaded, injury and
the world excluded so that we, thinking that we know what we are doing, can sit complacently at the dining room table, that invisible tree rustles, flourishes, adds a ring of girth. Any flight of stairs is treacherous, the gas furnace is a bomb waiting to go off, Renuzit may stray, unaided by the human hand, from top shelf to bottom. A child carrying a scissors might as well be holding a knife to her breast; bicycles beside the door yearn to rush into traffic. A tongue of flame can lick out of the wall socket, up a cord carelessly left plugged in, and find the folds of a curtain. From time to time, unable to sleep, I have lain in bed counting household hazards: radon in the basement, petroleum products in the carpeting, gas fumes in the stove. I don’t often think of illness, but a child in the next block had meningitis last year. When Eileen, that is the mother, went to the hospital, they looked her in the face and said, “Twenty-five percent chance of death, twenty-five percent chance of severe brain damage, twenty-five percent chance of minimal brain damage, twenty-five percent chance of full recovery,” and they were so matter-of-fact, Eileen says, that she just nodded and said, “Oh. Thanks,” as if she were taking a rain check on a sale at K-mart.

I wonder once in a while how my father would have reacted if one of us had died. It seems to me that he would have noticed something missing, that my absence, or my brother’s, would have prickled at him through the day, and he would have upheld the forms of grief, but I don’t know that he ever really looked at us, or perceived enough about us so that the removal of one of us would have been a ripping of flesh. Soon enough he would have gotten behind the stove or the clothes dryer or the dehumidifier with his electrical meter and forgotten about it entirely, as he did about us
alive. Dana said that I often underestimate him, but in this case, I think he was a wise man, to have addressed himself to the world at large like that, to have stood in front of us, only half perceiving us, reassured by the shuffle of our feet and our sighings and breathings that all of us, whoever we were, were back there.

When you are in the habit of staring at your children, as almost everyone my age that I know is, of talking about them, analyzing them, touching them, bathing them, putting them to bed, when you have witnessed their births and followed, with anxious eyes, the rush of the doctor and nurses out of the delivery room to some unknown machine room where some unknown procedure will relieve some unknown condition, when you have inspected their stools and lamented their diaper rash and, mostly, held their flesh against yours, there is no turning away. Their images are imprinted too variously and plentifully on your brain, and they are with you always. When I agreed with Dana that I wanted to be “an involved father,” I foresaw the commitment of time. I didn’t foresee the commitment of risk, the commitment of the heart. I didn’t foresee how a number on a thermometer would present me with, paralyze me with, every evil possibility. Stephanie lay there, stupefied with fever. Lizzie came into the room. She said, “Didn’t you hear me? I want some more milk.” She sounded annoyed.

“You can pour it yourself.”

“I can’t. It’s too heavy.”

“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice. Can’t you say please?”

“Please!”

“Say it as if you mean it.”

She drew it out. “Pleeeeease.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

“It’s always in a minute. That’s what you and Mommy always say—in a minute. Then you forget.”

“You aren’t the only person in the house, Elizabeth.”

“You always say that, too.” She backed away, not sure how far she could take this discussion. She glanced at Stephanie on the bed. I said, “Stephanie has a very high fever.”

“Is it dangerous?”

I turned the word over in my mind, because it is a big word in the family vocabulary, a dangerous word, in fact, that always signals to Lizzie that she ought to panic. I was still rather annoyed about her recent demanding tone. I contemplated sobering her up, but I needed her as my ally, didn’t I? I said, “It’s not good, but it’s not dangerous.” She nodded. I said, “Do me a favor, and go ask Mommy how she feels.” She turned in the doorway and called, “Mommy! How do you feel?” Dana groaned. I surveyed Lizzie and wondered, Is this defiance on her part, ill-taught manners, stupidity? I said, “Go ask her. Be polite. I need you to help me.” Now she surveyed me. I was not kidding. She went into the master bedroom, and I stuck the thermometer back in Stephanie’s mouth, thinking that the Tylenol would have had time to take effect. 104.1. Lizzie returned. “She feels as if she’s been run over.”

“What’s Leah doing?”

“Watching TV.”

“Can you do everything I say for the next two days?”

“Do you mean like cleaning my room?”

“I mean like getting me stuff and watching Leah, and getting stuff for Mommy.”

She shrugged.

“I think you can. It’s important.”

“Okay.” She and I looked at each other. Her eyes are blue, too, but darker blue than Dana’s, more doubtful. Simultaneously I thought that this would be a good lesson in responsibility for her and that no lessons, however good, would preserve her from her own nature. I said, “Go into the bathroom and get a washcloth and wring it out in cold water. I’m going to talk to Mommy for a minute, and then we are going to try and cool Stephie off, okay?”

Dana lay on her side with her eyes closed. The lids were purple all the way to her eyebrows, as if she had eyeshadow on, but the skin of her face was opaquely pale. The blood was elsewhere, heart, brain. She was not sleeping, but I don’t think she was aware of me. Her lips formed words, Fuck this, I can’t take this, dammit. I leaned down and said, “Can I get you anything?”