The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (4 page)

My normal commute into work was about fifteen or twenty minutes—as long as it took to snake through the never-ending construction in my “up-and-coming” neighborhood, past the condos being built near the railroad tracks, the hardware store, corner grocery store, music shop, pub, and appliance repair place; past the place that used to make bowling trophies but is now a swank restaurant, and the old Ford factory, where back in the day they’d assemble cars on the third floor, then use an elevator to lower them down to the first floor so they could be rolled onto train cars for distribution. I drove less than
five miles through my neighborhood, where everything seemed to be turning into the “perfect place”—a perfect coffee shop, vintage clothing boutique, restaurant, or pub, which sold the same beer as the old place but with higher prices; and then I’d hop on the interstate.

Every morning, there was a moment of decision making, a nanosecond where I’d imagine heading south into the sunshine, toward San Francisco, then Los Angeles, and then Mexico; or maybe I’d detour out of L.A. into Joshua Tree National Park, to climb the slabs and sit in the open air for a while. Instead, I’d go north to my office, ten minutes away, just over the Columbia River, except that, for the past few months, on Mondays, I had to continue north another hundred miles to Olympia. There, I’d sit through meetings, stare into a computer screen, and otherwise spend a few days trapped in a gargantuan building that had to pump “white noise” into the workspaces (a constant statticky sound) to keep workers from going mad with the overwhelming clitter-clatter of a hundred computer keyboards, telephone conversations, watercooler gaffes, and slowly ticking wall clocks. It was a temporary situation, “a moment of transition,” my boss had said, where for six months I would be the acting unit supervisor and all of my coworkers would do the best they could to put up with the fact that I had no idea how to supervise.

There was too much paperwork and not enough fieldwork, and I hated being the person that people would call when they
were sick. I didn’t like having to hear about their personal problems—the baby puking; kids with measles, flu, lice, or diarrhea; there was colitis, impacted molars, and the need to stay home and wait for a new hot water heater to be delivered. There seemed to be a steady stream of very specific problems, and I was a lousy supervisor because even while I was saying something like “Oh my, that’s rough,” I didn’t really want to hear about how the toilet had overflowed and then the car wouldn’t start. I didn’t want to know about so-and-so’s aunt dying and how everyone was getting together at her house.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care; it was just so fatiguing to hear how horrible everyone’s life was, because that’s all you hear when people call in sick. No one calls in sick because they’re in love or because they can’t fathom spending another minute away from their toddler. I was no different; every Sunday night, rain or shine, in love or not, I packed a small bag, loaded my dog and me into the car, and drove north to Olympia.

Fortunately, there was an end to the madness and a new supervisor was in the works. I just needed to hang in there for another month, and enjoy the fact that the drive up to Olympia brought me closer to my friends a few days a week.

I had lived in Olympia for six years before moving down to Portland, so it was nice to hang out with Candyce and Paula, whose living room floor ended up being my crash pad for a couple nights each week. We had kept in touch after I moved, but there’s something that shifts when you have time to
stumble into one another on the way to the coffeepot early in the morning.

Along the same line, it was good to see Hugh and Annie more often, and see how big their kids were getting. Over the years while I lived in Olympia, and then even after I moved to Portland, they’d invite me for holiday dinners at Aunt Rita’s house, which was next door and connected to their house by way of a back patio and covered walkway. It seemed like a sweet setup, giving Keeva and Kellen daily access to a surrogate seventy-eight-year-old “grandma” (Rita was Hugh’s aunt—his late mother’s sister).

Even though she was paralyzed on her left side, as a result of a stroke that she’d had years earlier, Rita still lived independently. She drove herself to the store and puttered around her house with the use of a little tripod cane. There were obvious signs that she’d had a stroke, like the big metal brace that was strapped just below her knee and fit into her clunky industrial-looking left shoe, and then there was “lefty,” her lifeless hand that would sometimes get hung up in her sleeve as she was dressing. But from her attitude, you’d never know she was mobility-challenged; she was vital, read the paper every day, and would pitch Wiffle balls at Kellen for hours as he stood in her living room.

We’d all pack into Rita’s house for dinner and later pull out the playing cards for a rousing game of Boonswaggler, a
homemade poker game that involved wearing funny hats and speaking in fake British accents. I never understood the game. I still don’t, but it was hilarious, and made me wish my own family was willing to follow up Thanksgiving dinner with a round of stuffy English card-playing, where we’d stick a playing card to our forehead, just below a funny-looking hunting cap, and say, “Tut-tut there, old chap, I don’t want to be a bother, but I believe you are bluffing.”

Over the past few months, I’d gotten to know Hugh and Annie even better as I traveled up to Olympia for work. We had dinner more often, and they also gently enlisted me to help their friend Mark, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer. It was a challenging time for him, his wife Shelly, and their two young sons, Brett and Kai.

Sometimes we’d do important things such as help organize Mark’s pills, a chore that left us sitting around a low coffee table like drug lords, counting and sorting various foul-smelling capsules into tiny Ziploc bags. Other times we did simple tasks: heat the casserole, juice the carrots, wash the dishes, chop wood, stoke the stove, watch Kai practice somersaults on the couch while showing Brett how to make a round paper airplane.

Once, Annie talked me into driving out to Mark and Shelly’s house at midnight to secretly placard their yard with signs that said “We Love You” and “Happy Birthday Mark!” I felt like a thirteen-year-old as we sprinted down the long gravel driveway,
snickering with our arms full of signs. I had nearly ruptured my spleen holding back a belly laugh when a motion-sensitive light blinked on, surprising us and causing Annie to leap like a fox, pouncing straight up in the air and then dropping down behind one of the smallest shrubs on the planet. God, that was funny.

Another time, Mark asked if we’d help him out to a bonfire pit that was set in a field, four or five hundred feet from the house. Mark wasn’t doing well, and couldn’t walk on his own, so getting him out to this spot was a bit of a challenge. Someone—probably Hugh—came up with the idea of loading him into a lounge chair, then hefting him in the chair into the back of a truck so we could drive over to the bonfire pit.

It worked! And a half hour later we had a makeshift picnic in the field. Mark leaned back in the lounger, and Brett and Kai saddled up on the armrests to roll into the stick man that was their dad. Shelly sat nearby, while Hugh, Annie, and a few other friends and I sat around on blankets, eating food and watching the clouds float by, forming themselves into castles, chopsticks (not very inventive clouds), and breaking ocean waves. I remember offering, “Oh look, that one looks like a giant baby doll arm. The rest of it should be around here somewhere,” which caused us all to furtively search the sky for baby doll legs, hunting for about a nanosecond, until we caught ourselves and started laughing at the weirdness of looking for baby doll body parts in the sky. It was a sweet moment, seeing Mark
and Shelly laughing together, doing what normal, cancer-free couples do—what people do when they view the sky like a miracle and there’s nothing more fantastic than lounging around under a canopy of clouds with your sweetie.

Late at night, as I was driving home to Portland, I’d sometimes think about what I was leaving in Olympia. I’d wonder if I could talk Candyce and Paula into meeting me at the gym the following week, and if they minded (really, sincerely) that I was sleeping in their living room so often. I wondered who was sorting pills at Mark and Shelly’s house, which would then send me into how I’d said good-bye—sticking my head into Mark’s room and seeing the hospital bed and Hugh beside it, both of them looking at me with a nod and a smile.

I felt connected to Olympia in a new way, and that somehow made the constant highway travel worthwhile; it at least made the monotony worthwhile. Every time I left Olympia to go home, I felt that it had been a good trip.

Things were good, even with the big commute. I felt lucky in the simplest ways, like when I’d search for a parking spot, driving up and down one street and then another, leaning forward into the steering wheel and rubbernecking every ten seconds. Then out of nowhere someone would pull away from the curb, leaving a perfect parking spot.

That’s the kind of sheer luck I’d been having lately, but in odd circumstances.

I’d been feeling overly tired, like I was fighting the flu or simply sick of being on the road all the time, and feeling like I needed to sit, lean, rest, relax—and amazingly, perfect resting spots had been showing up out of the blue. In the middle of a walk with my dog, I’d find a set of stairs to sit and catch my breath. At work, as I was standing on a grated platform surrounded by acid baths, I’d find a nearby handrail where I could lean my hip into the metal and rest for a minute while I examined the fire extinguisher mounted on the baluster. I’d relax in my car for a minute, tipping my head back into the headrest after loading groceries into the trunk, sucking in a big breath before cranking the engine to life and carrying on like always.

A few days ago, I went to a bookstore and started to feel weird—so light-headed and sweaty that I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face, only to wake up a few minutes later with my head on the tiles, a store employee was holding my hand and asking if she should call 911. I offered her a sheepish smile and patted her hand, calming her down and explaining that I felt great, even though my heart seemed to be vibrating, purring like I had a cat curled up on the engine block of my chest, a sensation that wasn’t painful or uncomfortable, but rather fascinating in the way your front (your tummy and boobs, kneecaps and nose) can be so easily connected to your back
(your butt cheeks, shoulder blades, skull, and heels resting on the floor); my whole body vibrated. I didn’t think much of it—just figured I needed to take more vitamins, cut back on the coffee, and muscle through it like always, like I’d done a thousand times before . . . but I was wrong.

(PORTLAND, OREGON, DECEMBER 2003)

W
hen I was a little girl taking a bath, I would lie back in the tub with my ears underwater. I could hear the air pouring in and out of my lungs, my sister making
wa-wa-wa
talking sounds from the other side of the tub, and the gentle lapping sound of bathwater slushing around my body. Thirty years later, pinched into an exam table in the emergency room, it was much the same. I could hear the nurses making
wa-wa
shouting sounds, hear the space unfold between me and them, and the silence between each blip on the heart monitor. I could feel my heart expanding and contracting, pushing blood up into my ears, polarizing and depolarizing, animating my lungs, firing my brain, bringing me to life just like it should.

My shoes were missing, my arms were tied to the hospital bed, and my chest was exposed to the ceiling. I remember
thinking that my boobs looked so small lying there drooping east and west toward the gurney, washed out and nearly disappearing in a sea of electric wires and fluorescent light. My whole body (jaw bone, teeth, soft throat, open airway, rib cage rising and falling, and rising again), my essence, my bearing, and the way I am a loudmouth; my ideas and dreams; my history, lineage, personhood, character, and all of who I imagined I was . . . it was small. The only big thing—the only ginormous, fantastic, real, and over-the-top thing—was the ER nurse’s face and the way it seemed to appear out of nowhere to tell me, “Deann . . . Deann . . . Stay with me! You are going to be okay.”

“Okay,” I puzzled, sounding out the word in my head as if I’d never heard it before, like the nurse was speaking Italian and pretending to know me like my mother, because only my mom would call me Deann.

The day after my foggy dreams in the emergency room, I woke up in an intensive care unit. One of the nurses told me I had fainted and landed there. I’d been resuscitated, once in the ambulance and again in the ER, only to wake up there: lucky and thankful and profoundly confused. The day before (or maybe it was the day before that), I had been a normal, middle-class, middle-of-the-road woman with a mortgage and a job and friends, who went running and climbing and paddling, racing in a thousand different directions at a thousand miles per hour. I was a homeowner who could rewire a bathroom fan, an inspector who had taken a class in “verbal judo” but still got
tongue-tied when it came to seeing how nature and some people never really have a chance in life; I was a friend, a sister, a daughter, a wannabe comedian; and now I was a cardiac care patient.

And I was trapped; pinned to the machines that beeped and shooshed all night long, checking blood pressure, respiration, oxygen level, and heart rate. I was tethered to a urine bag and an IV pole, and a heart monitor that seemed to go off every ten minutes, sending a nurse rushing into the room to flick on the fluorescent light, check my IV, and yell, “Deann, you need to keep the cannula in your nose,” as she rearranged the plastic tube across my face, behind my ears, and in my nose.

A few days later, I was moved to another room (a sign that I was on the mend), where I could get up to go to the bathroom and order my own meals. I found that the hospital menu confused me with its “heart wise” meals that included coffee and a noodle dish with chipped beef, and then there was the sheer willpower that it took to sit up, organize the various wires, tubes, and electronic gadgets that made reaching for the phone a mystery. It was easier to have them bring whatever food they thought I might like: pudding or red Jell-O cubes, decaffeinated coffee, saltine crackers, meat loaf and mashed potatoes. It was the food they served my grandma at her old folks’ home.

Everything was confusing, especially the number of medical people who would walk in and thumb through my chart, then ask me to sit up so they could examine me like a plastic
dummy who wouldn’t mind a cold stethoscope on her back and under her left breast, then the right; then back to the left, but this time above the areola, squarely over the heart, where the scope would sit for a long time while I listened to the doctor’s breath whistle into my ear. There were doctors and interns, two shifts of nurses, phlebotomists, X-ray technicians, a cardiologist, and an electrophysiologist, who seemed to talk right past me.

“You have ventricular tachycardia with torsades,” he said, staring at me like I should have a reaction; like I was born with an encyclopedia in my ear and at any moment would reach up, flip to page 864, and know exactly what was going on. “You’ll need to make some changes. You won’t be able to drive a car for a while, and we’ll have to run more tests.” I blinked and cocked my head like a spaniel, trying to understand how their commentary fit with what I knew of myself. They continued the discussion, making
wa-wa-wa
talking sounds while I nodded my head in the affirmative. I was lost and assumed that whatever the problem was, the best solution was to leave the hospital as soon as possible. When I asked one of the nurses about that, she said, “Oh, well, we’ll see what the doctor thinks.”

I was trapped, left conjuring which was the best way to escape—thinking that if I could fine some nurse scrubs in the hallway closet, or perhaps convert the IV stand into an axe for tunneling through the floor . . . If I could somehow become someone I’m not then everything would be okay.

My roommate was a lady in her fifties or sixties (actually, I wasn’t at all sure of her age, only that she was old enough to have grandkids, and she was sad she couldn’t smoke in bed). She was a large lady with a kind, no-nonsense face, reminding me of the cafeteria ladies in grade school—strong women who we all bet could beat up the principal but who would also give you a little wink when you said “Thank you.” My roommate would holler over the noise of the television, over the loudness that she had programmed into the TV, to ask me if I was okay. She was maternal. I wasn’t. I’d yell back, “Yes. YOU?” secretly praying she wouldn’t take the opportunity to talk.

After a few days, when I was feeling more like myself (weak and thin, but me) and like I just wanted to go home, I wandered to her side of the room and asked why she was in the hospital. She went into a long story about cancer and her heart, and then she started crying, sobbing more than any human I’ve seen, crying about how her boys still needed her even though they were all “growed up,” and how she couldn’t “go and die” before her second grandbaby was born. I sat on the side of her bed with my hands in my lap, overwhelmed but trying to be sympathetic, as she dug her hands into her eyes like lava was pouring out of them.

The next night, she died.

It was three or four in the morning, and I woke up when one of her monitors started to alarm; and then there was a rush of shoes and more alarms, and a nurse took the curtain that
separated us and quickly threw it shut so I couldn’t watch how they pulled off her hospital gown and exposed her chest, before yelling, “One, two, three, clear!” They barked orders at one another and yelled “Clear!” half a dozen more times, while I sat on the edge of my bed like a little girl, dangling my feet a few inches from the floor and gripping the edge of the mattress, not breathing, and flinching every time they yelled “Clear!” and hearing her body lift as a jolt of electricity rammed into her rib cage.

Everything grew quiet after that. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, listening for her raspy breathing, the way she occasionally sent out an enormous
phuft
of breath like a teakettle about to boil over. But all I heard was my own slow heartbeat, banging so hard it made the plastic liner on my bed crinkle, over and over; and it made my head throb, and everything got so hot, my tears dried up before they had a chance to come out of my eyes and the wax in my ears started melting. I sat there for ten, fifteen, then twenty minutes as a steady stream of people came, shuffled around my roommate’s bed, and exited. I was waiting. Patient. Wondering how I was supposed to live normally, like always, like an everyday person doing everyday things after this.

I had called my housemates the day before, explaining that I’d fainted at the store near a salad spinner and an onion bin. I made a joke about how the hospital gown made me feel more naked than if I really was naked, and that I was certain
the Jell-O cubes were full of wood dust. They told me they were worried, and I’m fairly certain (although I have hardly any memory of it) that I joked around about that too.

Now nothing was funny. I was scared, confused, and angry all at once; so, at any given moment, I wasn’t sure how I would react. If the nurse got busy (it was a hospital, after all), I might respond normally with a little joke or at least a smile when she finally popped her head in the room; or, as it happened, I’d react like a freak show . . . so over-the-top frustrated that I imagined I could just rip the IV needle out of my arm, get dressed, and go home.

I stayed. I ate Jell-O and sipped my decaffeinated coffee, which tasted exactly like warm black water with a splash of something resembling what I remembered as “coffee”—a trick, a concoction that plays with your mind, like maybe real coffee wasn’t as great as you once thought. They seemed to do this with all the food.

I was released with various heart medications and a promise that I would be evaluated in another couple of weeks to see how things were going. John, my housemate, picked me up and we immediately drove to a burger joint, gripping the curbs like an ambulance, so I could order a chocolate milk shake. It was perfect, and John was perfect. The car was perfect, and the way the sun filtered through the clouds and made the seat belt buckles glisten . . . that was perfect.

And when we got home, I realized the house was perfect
too—even with the front porch steps tilting a little left, and with the drafty windows that we’d sealed up with plastic for the winter making the house look like it was squinting (ogling its way past filmy Coke-bottle glasses). It was inviting and warm, and as I walked in, I took a deep, overly exaggerated breath, the sort of over-the-top gesture that was filmed for commercials about scented laundry detergent, but in this case was my way of trying to absorb every molecule of my old normal life. I loved the smell of the living room, the kitchen, Jenna’s recycling porch, the cupboards, and the basement laundry room. I loved everything, and it seemed to love me back. It was as if my heart had grown to three times its normal size, and it could now hold the specialness of every person who crossed my path; it could track how phenomenal every scent, sound, taste, or texture was. Everything was beautiful, even if it was just the laundry that I’d pulled out of the dryer, still warm, and hugged like a small, lost child.

Over the next few weeks, things continued to be weird. I fainted and got sweaty, and felt that rumbling vibration in my chest far more often than I like to admit. It was as if my heart was weathering a storm, a tornado blowing out transformers and knocking the windows, just like the tornados I saw as a kid growing up in the Midwest.

When I was a junior in high school, a small tornado hit Liberty, Missouri—the town located a few miles from our family’s farm. The day after, my friends and I drove around in a
stupor, looking at the damage: cars flipped over like toys, like someone had picked them up and simply turned them upside down in their parking spot. There was a horse in a tree, and the oaks and elms near the junior high school had been stripped of their leaves and now looked like a collection of giant pitchforks. It was horrifying, and then there were the unbelievable-but-true stories we heard: how one family was in the middle of a birthday party, sitting at the dinner table, when they heard the tornado sirens in town. They had just enough time to race into the bathroom, where all four of them lay like sardines in the bathtub as the wind invaded their house. In the kitchen, the tornado opened cabinets, threw dinner plates, and smashed canned goods into the dishwasher. It snatched spoons and forks off the table and shot them through the walls, and launched the roast chicken like a wrecking ball into the ceiling. Minutes later, when the family finally crawled out, thankful to be alive and happy to see their house still standing, they found the kitchen looking like a bomb had gone off, but—this was the weird part—the birthday cake that had been sitting in the middle of the kitchen table was perfectly fine. They found it still sitting in the same spot, without so much as a finger-dab in the frosting.

My cardiac problems were confused like that: like a horse in a tree and a surviving cake. And I needed to feel less wonky in the world; I needed to feel like me.

I threw myself into my routine—walking the dog, making
dinner, racing to work, paying the mortgage and bills. I happily hid behind the chaos of each day, and then alone at night I thought about what had happened and what was happening. I kept replaying that feeling of waking up in the hospital, of seeing the nurses race through a series of moves, setting IVs and prepping me for the next series of moves. It felt like death, or my mortality, or something bigger still, was leaning into my bed with the moonlight, clattering when I moved hangers in the closet, buzzing behind the sound of the shower running or my car idling in traffic. The wall that kept opposites in place—life, death, me, others, lucky or not—had been toppled; nothing made sense anymore.

I sat in the kitchen one day after buying a bag of clothespins, a simple task, engineered so I could dry my laundry in the basement near the hot furnace, and then months later in the summer sun. As I was pouring them onto the kitchen table, I realized the technical genius in this simple tool. Perfectly shaped wood pinchers and a dime-size metal spring that creates just enough tension to hold a pair of pants on a clothesline—there must be a dozen patents assigned to clothespins. I looked a bit closer, and without much imagination at all, I could see birch trees growing in a forest, gathering sun (having a life), when all of a sudden everything shifted. The trees were cut down and rolled through a mill, and turned into a million three-inch pinchers with precise quality-controlled diameters, lengths, weights, and future function. Meanwhile, on the other
side of the planet, iron ore was being blasted out of the ground, then melted and extruded and formed into long bits of wire that were eventually twisted into the springs that were shipped halfway around the world to a factory where they could be joined to the wood pinchers to make clothespins. And all the while, on both sides of the planet, there were any number of human workers (having a life) being paid pennies a day to run the machines or to hand-count the clothespins, bundling them into bags and inventorying them into boxes that were then loaded into crates to be sent by barge to America so good environmental stewards and penny-pinchers like me could pin up their clothes in the sun.