Making Toast (2 page)

While Harris took Jessie and Sammy to Space Mountain, we stayed with Bubs, who launched into another round of perpetual motion. Amy used to say, “James, you’re out of control.” Eventually he tired, and I carried him up to our room, where he got a second wind and ran around some more. I fed him pieces of apple, which were hard, so I chewed them a little first. Finally, he fell asleep.

Jessie had been so worked up about this trip, she had told her classmates the dates they were planning to go. Amy happened to be volunteering in her class that day. The school principal was also visiting the class. When Jessie blurted out the dates of the forthcoming trip, the principal looked aghast. “Oh, you can’t go on
those
days, Jessie,” she said. “They’re
school
days.” Amy, trying to hide behind one of the children’s desks, gave a meek and friendly wave.

The light from the window is pale and cold. The TV is off. No sounds emit from the hotel corridor. All is still in Disney World. Ginny sits at the end of the bed with her back to me. I see the back of her head and the top of Bubbies’s just above her left shoulder.

We begin to fit in to Amy’s and Harris’s house. We knew the house only as visiting family, having stayed for a few days at a time, perhaps a week. Now it is ours without belonging to us, familiar and strange. We learn how to lock the glass door between the kitchen and the deck. We learn how to operate the dishwasher, the thermostat. We learn where the tools, the extension cords, the Scotch tape, and the light bulbs are kept. We note the different dresser drawers for the children’s clothing, the location of favored books and games, such as Balloon Lagoon, Cariboo, The Uncle Wiggily Game, and Perfection. Since one of Bubbies’s many occupations is to reach into the games cabinet and spill the contents on the floor, often losing the crucial pieces, learning where the games are stored soon becomes beside the point.

Ginny handles most of the essentials. She lays out the children’s outfits for the day, supervises the brushing of teeth, braids Jessie’s hair, and checks the backpacks. There is hardly a moment when she is not on call. Harris gave her Amy’s cell phone, for which Ginny recorded her own greeting. Whoever gets the answering machine hears, “Hi. You have reached 301…” and then, “Mimi!”—Jessie needing something in the middle of Ginny’s recording.

I do odd jobs, such as driving the kids to appointments, and food shopping at Whole Foods or Giant. Occasionally I contribute an idea. Shortly after Amy died, I instituted the “Word for the Morning.” At the start of the day, I write a word on a yellow Post-it, which I stick to the side of a wooden napkin holder on the kitchen table. Usually I make a game of the word, asking Jessie and Sammy to find other words in it, or I include a drawing. When the morning’s word was “equestrian,” I drew a horse that looked a lot like a horse. I try to hit upon a word that is a stretch for Sammy but not too easy for Jessie, and when I can think of one, a word with an interesting element, such as a silent letter. The first Word for the Morning was “answer.” Sammy said, “Tomorrow, give us a silly word, Boppo.” The word for the following morning was “poopies.”

I wake up earlier than the others, usually around 5 a.m., to perform the one household duty I have mastered. After posting the morning’s word, emptying the dishwasher, setting the table for the children’s breakfasts, and pouring the MultiGrain Cheerios or Froot Loops or Apple Jacks or Special K or Fruity Pebbles, I prepare toast. I take out the butter to allow it to soften, and put three slices of Pepperidge Farm Hearty White in the toaster oven. Bubbies and I like plain buttered toast; Sammy prefers it with cinnamon, with the crusts cut off. When the bell rings, I shift the slices from the toaster to plates, and butter them.

Harris usually spends half the night in Bubbies’s little bed. When I go upstairs, around 6 a.m., Bubbies hesitates, but I give him a knowing look and he opens his arms to me. “Toast?” he says. I take him from his father, change him, and carry him downstairs to allow Harris another twenty minutes’ sleep.

Sammy remains matter-of-fact. One late afternoon, we watch television together. A mother appears on the show. “No mom for me,” he says. In the beginning, we tried explaining that Amy continued to live in our thoughts and memories. “Mommy is still with us,” I said. Sammy asked where, exactly. He indicated a point in the air. “Is Mommy there?” I said yes. He indicated another point. “There?” I said yes. I said, “She’s always with us, everywhere. We can’t see her, but we can feel her spirit.” He said, “There?”

While Ligaya and Ginny look after Bubbies and Sammy, I take Jessie to the bus stop. On a damp gray morning we stand together at the corner of our street. One by one, down the hill come the mothers of the neighborhood, their kids running beside them. An impromptu soccer game develops. Jessie joins in. The scene passes for pleasant and ordinary, unless one notes the odd presence of the lone grandfather.

With luck, Ginny and I will live to see all three children grow into adults, and Jessie will become a teenager and throw fits about boyfriends and stamp her feet and yell that we don’t understand a thing, not a thing. But today I help her with her oversize pink backpack, and her little umbrella with pink butterflies before she boards the school bus. And I stand looking as the bus drives off, and tell the mothers to have a good day.

The house Amy and Harris bought in 2004 was a sand-yellow Colonial, built in the 1960s, and it had substance—a family home for a lifetime. The walls were thick, the hardwood floors level, the oak, black walnut, and poplar trees in the backyard, old. Though reared in cities, Amy had always wanted a house in the suburbs. Harris grew up in Bethesda, and went to Burning Tree and to Walt Whitman High School, which is less than a quarter of a mile from the house. His affection for his hometown suited Amy well. Whenever Ginny and I drove down, we phoned her from the car when we were a few minutes away. She would stand framed by the dark-red doorway, holding a child or two. Everyone smiled.

She practiced medicine only two days a week, to be with the children. Her household was like her—full of play, but careful. In the storage area downstairs, there was always a surplus of bandages, paper napkins, cups, coffee filters, paper towels, and Kleenex, as well as batteries of every size. To this day, we have not run out of Advil.

She had a gift for custom and ceremony—the qualities Yeats wished for in “A Prayer for My Daughter.” She chronicled the children’s first years by taking pictures of them in each of their first twelve months, and framing them for the walls of their rooms. The details of birthdays and holidays were important to her—a Dora the Explorer party for Jessie, for which Amy made a treasure map; a Bob the Builder party for Sammy, for which she got hard hats. On the Thanksgiving before she died, seventeen family members arrived, including Harris’s parents, Dee and Howard, and his older sister Beth, and Wendy’s parents, Rose and Bob Huber. There were many cooks, not too many, all toiling under Amy’s supervision. Harris, Howard, Bob, Carl, John, and I watched as much football as we were permitted. The hand surgeon carved the turkey, his skill with a knife impressive and creepy. We took our seats at the table. We clasped our glasses. During the previous year, Howard had had a heart valve repaired, and I was treated successfully for prostate cancer and melanoma. Harris raised a toast to the family’s renewed health.

Harris’s stoicism is undemonstrative. A strong man, built wide and powerful, he easily carries all three children at once in his arms up the stairs. The sight of his back makes me sad. He performs surgery two days a week and heads orthopedics at Holy Cross Hospital. At home, his few remaining hours are devoted to working out the children’s schedules with Ginny and Ligaya, and playing games and watching Sponge Bob with the kids. He bathes them and tucks them in.

On the day Amy died, he had sat beside her body in the hospital—an hour, maybe more. Now, he rarely speaks about his feelings. He and I talk about sports and politics, agreeing over half the time on both. We talk a lot about the children. Ginny tells me that when I am away, and she and Harris sit down to their late dinner in the kitchen, her heart breaks for him. “This should be his wife sitting across the table,” she says.

He says he doubts that he’ll remarry. Self-sufficient, he tends to be a world within himself. He fixes things like lamps and toilets. He sews. He solves problems with electrical wires and fuses. He makes the hands of others work again. And he has done everything one can do in his situation—encouraging the children to talk about Amy whenever they feel like it, and not to hold back tears. Whenever necessary, he and the children visit a psychotherapist who specializes in grief counseling. He keeps in close contact with Jessie’s and Sammy’s teachers. But he also deserves a life.

He embraces the demands put upon him with a gusto that dispenses cheer, and in the lulls we try to keep one another afloat. One night in February, Jessie and Sammy had a meltdown as they were going to bed. Ginny and I sat in the living room, listening to Harris’s steady voice in the intermissions of the children’s wailing. Eventually, they were quieted. He came downstairs and sat staring vacantly at his laptop. “Look,” I said, going over to him. “We’re never going to get over this. That’s a given. But the children will be all right. I promise you. I’ve seen it elsewhere.”

“I’m a scientist,” he said. “It’s hard for me to deal with things that aren’t facts.”

Amy used to say, “Harris makes do,” twisting his ability to adjust to uncomfortable or difficult circumstances into a failing. He retaliated by ribbing her about her perfectionism. Once, when Carl asked him how Amy liked their new cable TV and Internet system, Harris said, “Amy hates everything.” He told me she had set the North American record for excessively particular coffee orders at Starbucks. The orders varied according to the seasons. Her winter order was triple grande, skim gingerbread latte. Her summer order was iced venti Americano with room, and four pumps of sugar-free vanilla.

It figured. When Amy was no more than three years old, and we would stop at McDonald’s on a trip, she would order her hamburger plain. Since orders for a plain hamburger were not anticipated in the billion hamburgers prepared by McDonald’s daily all over America, it took as long as twenty-five minutes for the fast food restaurant to dish one up.

“You know, Amy, when I was a little girl…”

“Oh, Daddy!”—tired of the joke.

On one occasion, we were driving to New York from Cambridge, where I was teaching at Harvard. It was the day before Thanksgiving so the trip took hours longer than usual. After our interminable wait for Amy’s hamburger, she decided she would also like a piece of McDonald’s apple pie. She was taking her sweet time with that, too. I told her, “Hurry up, A.” (We called her A.) She tossed her pie in the trash. When we arrived at my parents’ apartment, my younger brother Peter asked Amy how she’d enjoyed the trip. She said, “Daddy didn’t let me finish my pie.”

Amy and Harris could kid each other without risk because their marriage was like a solid tennis doubles team. Neither one had to look to see where the other was standing on the court. A few years ago, on a Saturday night, Ginny and I baby-sat while they went to a medical benefit dinner. They almost never had the time or energy to go out, or dress up, though, like most young parents, they seemed indefatigable. Before leaving, they stood together in the hallway. They looked stunning. Another time, we drove down from Quogue to take care of the three children. Bubbies was eleven months old. Amy and Harris went off to Bermuda with Liz and James Hale, longtime friends from medical school. When they returned after four days, Ginny and I were flopped on the sectional, barely sentient. We greeted them with a popular song of that year, altering the lyrics: “They tried to make us go to rehab. We said yes, yes, yes!”

Ginny taught kindergarten and first grade in Cambridge and in Washington, D.C., during the early years of our marriage. Now she volunteers in the children’s schools, as Amy did. She helps Jessie with her homework. I watch them at the kitchen table, bent over a book, and overhear their soft talking. Ginny asks, “How does the chrysalis protect itself against predators?” Jessie says, “It shakes to scare them off.”

I do puzzle books with Jessie, and Sammy peppers me with questions about animals and the stars and planets. I can’t answer most of his questions. “What are afternoons like on Jupiter?” he asks me. I have to look that up.

I am often confounded by something else I’d forgotten about children: they have no respect for sequential thought. Responding to one of their relentless questions, I will go as deep as I can into an explanation of, say, a solar eclipse. Sammy will ask, “What’s the biggest number in the world?” At the same time, Jessie will ask, “How tall will I be, Boppo?” Then, Sammy: “Do marlins have lips?”

“So when the moon moves between the earth and the sun…”

“What are you talking about, Boppo?”

Bubbies has been attending to his own education, proceeding from one word, to several, to two-word sentences, to three and more. Some say that children learn to speak in order to tell the stories already in them. An early word of his was “back.” He wanted reassurance that when any of us left the house, or even a room, we were coming back. He has always used one-word sentences to his advantage, his vocabulary consisting mainly of references to things he favors—the mower, the stove, birds, bananas. The single words suit his despotic streak. “Outside” means “Let’s move it, Boppo!”

Jessie’s first-grade teacher, Coleen Carone, has me visit the class at the Burning Tree School to talk about writing. Ms. Carone is young and hip, with dancing and darting eyes. She calls the kids “Baby.” Jessie introduces me to her classmates, who sit with their hands folded on their desks and give me the once-over. “This is my grandfather. We call him Boppo.” The children discuss stories they are working on. I begin to suspect I am out of my depth.

Ms. Carone asks me, “How is character developed, Boppo?” I bumble through an answer involving matters of consistency and variation in character development. The more I temper my language, the more befuddled I sound. My discourse is greeted with polite stares. Jessie is proud of me anyway, and stands at my side. Ms. Carone looks at me brightly, as if to say, “Don’t worry. We’ll take it from here.” She asks the children to consider a main character, then list his or her qualities—loyal, jealous, rude, brave, generous. Each child stands before the class to answer questions. Arthur writes about a superhero.