Why I'm Like This (11 page)

I am “the girl,” “one of the girls,” “the tall one,” “the short one,” and “your sister,” as in “I told your sister that I want her to have all the dishes.” I nod in approval. That will be lovely, I say. Fortunately, because I happen to like those dishes, I don't have a sister. My grandmother doesn't remember that I am married, although she adores David. She cannot fathom the idea that we sleep together. Or that my mother sleeps with my father. (That makes more sense; she's the maid.) I asked her, “Didn't you sleep with Grandpa?” and her answer was: “No, of course not.”

It has been our intention, through all of this, to honor my grandmother's wishes and respect her independence, but it has gotten to a point where she needs help. More help than any of us can give. Professional help. We considered hiring a nurse or attendant but she didn't want a stranger in the apartment. She wouldn't
let
a stranger in the apartment. Well, that is if you don't count the time, recently, when she asked a strange woman, a woman off the street, to come up and dust the furniture for ten dollars. The woman came. It's worrisome, I know.

My parents have found a good nursing home near them and have put her name on the waiting list. “Going to Connecticut” has become our euphemism for the thing we know
she'll hate, but still we are trying to prepare her by talking it up as if it is something to look forward to.

“Wouldn't you like to go live in Connecticut?” I asked.

“What is it, in Connecticut?”

“It's very nice. It's in the country. Near Mom and Dad. There are lots of nice people. You'll make new friends.”

“Oh, that sounds very good.”

Thanks, perhaps, to the Alzheimer's, she is not suspicious of our vagueness. And I think, with her growing limitations, her own home has become a burden. Or something worse. She often says to me, as we sit in her apartment looking at the furniture and paintings, the books and dishes, the appliances and even the wallpaper, “I don't want it. Enough.” And “It doesn't feel like mine.” Sometimes she is more vehement: “Get me out of here, I can't stand it, I'm going crazy.”

I am reminded of the plant wrapped in newspaper. Alive, or so it seems, despite the fact that the most elemental things are stripped away. Without the dirt and the water, without the
alchemy
, though, it cannot live for long. It is dying from the inside out and will eventually collapse. Implode. Is this the way of Alzheimer's? I don't know. It is just one way to describe the slow, dismal ruination of everything but the body, the shocking exposure of roots to air.

When she goes I'm not sure what I'll do. I have gotten used to the squeezing of everything into each day—work, marriage, Grandma. I've gotten used to the terrible dinners and the wonderful Chopin. I've gotten used to repeating
myself, loudly, ad nauseam, and pretending to understand what she is saying when I don't have any idea at all. And I have gotten used to saying good-bye to her as she stands in her doorway, turning and waving every few steps until I am out of sight, as if to say I'm still here, I'm still here.

I
T
happened very suddenly and was, perhaps, the most violent act in which I have ever participated. A space became available and we had to grab it or risk waiting maybe six or eight months for another. I don't know why I thought there would be more warning. It's not like they call you up and say we're expecting Mrs. Feingold to sign off in about two months so you should start to get ready. Mrs. Feingold or whomever just dies and they clean up her room and they call you. That's it. So my parents and I packed up my grandmother's winter clothing, a few pictures and books and some of her music, and tore her out of the ground like a mandrake root, and although she came willingly the silent scream was there, not so silent; I could hear it, we all could. Despite our
best efforts to prepare her, there was no way she could have known what was happening. And despite our best intentions, here is what
was
happening: Come, put on your coat, get in the car, you will never see this place, your home, again. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

At first she was excited. She was finally out of the apartment, out and on her way to, where? Well, to the good new place, we said. To the place near Mom and Dad. With a piano. None of us could say nursing home. But then after half an hour in the car she stopped wanting information and started wanting soup. When we got to The Place everyone gave my grandmother the big welcome. They gave her soup. They gave us all soup. We walked her around the common rooms and garden, which were beautiful. Nurses and aides and administrators made a fuss over her, which she loves. She was bubbly and charming and spoke nonsense and everyone thought she was adorable. My parents and I made furtive eye contact; it was going so well, but still, all I could think was: Just wait.

We went to her room, or rather her
half
room. It was small and the wallpaper was a psychedelic flower pattern that it seemed to me could itself induce dementia. The furniture was old and the bed creaky and hospital-like. I went out into the hall and cried. There was a roommate who was incensed to find people in her room. We drew the curtains that divided the space. At least my grandmother had the window half, looking out onto the garden. At least, at least. She had not
shared a room with anyone besides her husband in seventy years. Now she was going to share it with a mean stranger. I went into the hall again and cried. My grandmother was taken off for evaluations of some kind. We waited in her room in a state of what can only be described as wistful dread. Surely the other shoe was going to drop.

It did. My grandmother returned distraught, furious. She hates to be poked and prodded and questioned and she was ready to go home. She said: “Get me out of here. You have to take me out of here. I've had enough. You can just kill me if you want but I won't stay here. I'll just lay down on the floor. That's all. I'll just lay down on the floor and die.”

Now we had to explain to her why she wasn't going home, why she had to stay tonight, and maybe for a while. We didn't mention forever; what a ridiculous, damaging concept
that
is. My father left the room for a few minutes, maybe to figure out what would be the best thing to say, maybe to cry. While he was gone the roommate poked her head through the curtain and said, “It's a nice place, really.” But my grandmother was inconsolable. My father came back and said quietly, “Mom, you have to stay.” That was it for me and I went back out into the hall.

 

Somehow, a few weeks went by. At least one of us has seen her every day, even though she doesn't always know our names and will probably not remember that we were there. We walk with her in the garden. We sit and people-watch. We talk her
into playing the piano in the lobby. (She complains that it is not as nice as hers, and she's right.) We have endless conversations with her aide and nurse and social worker so they'll know what she likes and doesn't like, who she is, so they'll understand her. My brother has come with his children, and even my mother-in-law, way above and beyond the call of duty, has visited.

She is still very confused by her surroundings, calls everyone names behind their backs (actually, she barely waits until they are out of view, much less out of earshot) and thinks the social worker is someone she knows from the beach. Sometimes when we arrive she seems all right, sometimes she collapses into our arms, lost and distraught. Each day she takes her clothes out of the drawers and the closet, folds them beautifully, packs what she can into the small straw bag I brought for her piano music, then leaves the rest piled on the bed and dresser. She carries her pocketbook everywhere and sometimes tries to go out the emergency door. She talks incessantly of going home (who wouldn't?), of getting on the train she sometimes hears in the distance and going back to her apartment.

This will change, we know. In time she will make friends and have activities. (Okay, she'll never have activities, she hates activities.) She will be cared for around the clock by professionals who are trained to meet the needs of people with Alzheimer's. We tell her: Stay for now, stay for the winter, it's better, safer, warmer, whatever. We tell her what we
hope she'll understand. But she is planning a breakout, I think.
Dear Sarah,
(Who?)
Send help. I need help. Help please.
She has written this on a paper towel and put it in her pocketbook. She is our hostage. As I said, it feels like the most violent act in which I have ever participated. I would take it back, if I could.

H
EY
, you know how your doctor and your mother and all the books and everyone you ever trusted in your entire life and even your own common sense told you that when you got pregnant you would stop menstruating? They lied. You don't. You still get your period. It just comes out your nose. Do not be alarmed. You'll get used to it. About half the times you blow your nose, blood will pour from it in torrents. Some days big bloody clots will come out and on other days the blood will drip back into your sinuses and when you retch in the morning the blood will come back up and out your mouth and you will think that you are dying. Someone could make a lot of money in the nose-tampon business.

And you will have no air. No oxygen. Oxygen is carried
by the blood, and if you remember you don't have any of that. Every time you unplug your hemorrhaging nose you will look at the bloody Kleenex and think, there goes the day. There goes your healthful walk in the park, right into the trash. Some days you're too tired to speak. You just moan, which is an activity in itself. People who mourn the loss of their waists are just big fat crybabies. You have no bodily fluids. And yet you're puffing up anyway. You're like a big Rice Krispie. So why you're peeing thirty times a day really is anybody's guess. It's not like you're drinking so much water. (Eight glasses, eight glasses. Shut the fuck up.) Water tastes like pennies. It tastes like shit. A lot of things taste like shit. You eat so many saltines to try to keep yourself from vomiting that eventually they are what makes you vomit.

And you don't understand why, if the baby is using up everything else in your body, it can't suck some fat out of your thighs and ass. After years of vain secret gloating, suddenly the inner parts of your upper thighs are touching each other. And let's not even talk about your ass. Every day you are more and more convinced that that's where the baby is. Don't be at all surprised if one day your OB says that she's going to deliver the baby through your asshole.

And you keep reading about how by the end of pregnancy, this thing called the mucus plug (guess where
that
is; I'll give you a hint, it's not up your nose) pops out at some point to let the baby through the cervix. Unfortunately, you have not nor will you ever read how you spend your entire pregnancy
making the mucus plug yourself by swallowing horrible, gaggy blobs of mucus that drip corrosively from your sinus, down the back of your throat, through your gorge, and if at that point you somehow manage not to vomit them up, they continue through your digestive tract and end up as the plug. (Don't quote me on this. It's only a theory.) And if you weren't exactly sure what your gorge was before there'd be no doubt about it now. At any given moment, when you're walking down the street, perhaps, or at lunch with your mother-in-law or auditioning to be the next Sprint PCS girl, it will rise up like Godzilla from the sea.

What else? There's more to come, of course, but why ruin the surprise? For now, let's just join hands in a circle and take a moment to curse the authors of that despicable tome—you know the one. The one that makes you feel like you've been arrested by the pregnancy police. The one that claims its special pregnancy diet is the solution to everything from nipple soreness to acid rain. The one that deserves to be remaindered into infinity. This is the book that purports to tell you what to expect. Let
me
tell you what to expect. Expect this five-hundred-page-long book about pregnancy to dedicate no more than two pages to nausea. Expect to be very very angry because believe me, ladies, if you haven't barfed up your own bile, you haven't barfed.

That said, the truth, the real truth, is that none of this stuff matters at all. When you walk down the street, if you can walk down the street, you will perhaps feel more special than
you ever have in your life. Or maybe you won't. Maybe you've had sex with Mick Jagger and that brought you to the apex of specialness. Whatever. But you might surprise yourself. I love my growing belly beyond all reason. And I hate my fat ass a lot less than you would expect. Most days it is all I can do not to sit in the little chair and weep with relief and gratitude. Some days it is all I do. David, the Saint Bernard of husbands, will say matter-of-factly: “I can't comfort you in that chair. It's too small. You have to come over here.” And he'll sit in the big armchair and somehow I will shlumph my way to him and sob in his arms. I will bury my soaking face in his neck and leave his soft skin glistening with my bloody mucus.

I
T
is two-fifteen in the afternoon and my day just ended. Just like that, over. I was on the second floor of Bloomingdale's, where the inexpensive shoes are, waiting for the elevator to take me and my son—whom I had roped into accompanying me by virtue of the fact that he is five months old and doesn't know the phrase “count me out” yet—to the fourth floor, where the expensive shoes are, so I could buy a pair of hot pink shoes because I needed them to go with my new dress with the hot pink trim. When the elevator doors finally opened we could not get in because we had to wait for a man in a wheelchair to get out. It took a while. It seemed that he was blowing into a tube in order to operate the wheelchair.
He was pretty well set up, all things considered, or rather, no things considered, if you know what I mean. He had a little rearview mirror to look into and plenty of padded headgear to keep him steady as he looked and some tubes and then this breathing apparatus that appeared to tell the chair what to do, although when I told my husband about the chair he said he didn't think there was that kind of technology and I said I saw what I saw and if it wasn't his breath that steered him around than it was mental telepathy, jerk. But even if it was just a breathing tube (
just
a breathing tube, what is that?) and there was some other mechanism I did not know of, what did it matter when he had some children's clothing piled on his wheelchair tray? Because that is when my day ended. When I saw that he was shopping for a child. I said good-bye to my day, and my son and I got in the elevator.

Now, here's a question. Do we still go to 4 and look at pink shoes? The answer, of course, is yes. There is no point in having a dress with pink trim if you don't have any shoes to wear it with. Or rather, if you're lucky enough to have a dress with pink trim, it's okay to have the shoes, too. It's okay to be lucky. I think. Yes.

Maybe it depends on what your definition of luck is. You can't live everyone else's life. That would be terrible. You have to live your own. Everything is relative. Or everything
can't
be relative. That's it. Yes. Because either all of it is your fault or none of it is your fault. And it's not your fault. Well,
maybe some of it is your fault. Angry, lucky, angry, lucky. You know what angry and lucky make together? Lungry. No, just kidding. Guilty.

You could blow your brains out like this.

Or you could focus. You could just think about your own situation and do the best you can and try to be grateful and productive.

 

You go all of your life wondering will this or that ever happen, will I be happy, will I get married or have a baby or even a car. Will I ever play tennis again? You ask yourself these things when you are alone and struggling and kind of poor. And maybe you worry about the tennis more than the others because it is less scary; it is the benign host of everything you always assumed you'd eventually have and be, that is until the day you get out of graduate school and take a job as a waitress to support your acting career, neither of which supports you or your tennis habit. The future is completely up for grabs. You date actors, who are notoriously both noncommittal and broke, but they are sexy and they are there. It is a jovial but stunted culture. All that moving around and sleeping around and poverty. No one travels except for work. No one plays sports. No one has insurance. No one, including me, wants to do anything but act. There isn't room for the other things. Extraneous things. Frivolous, self-indulgent things. Like marriage and children.

And yet, here I am with my incredible son. What a fatty he
is. We spoke on that very subject just last night. I said, “What a fatty you are,” and he said, “Aahroo” and “Mmnnn.” He stroked my cheek and then he punched himself in the nose. We read
Go, Dog. Go!

David and I started trying to get pregnant around the beginning of the 1998. I'd procrastinated—no, that's not it, what's another word, a word for being afraid you will disappear from the world as you know it when you have a baby even though the truth is that no one will even know you've been gone: woondangled or hublittered, something stupid and vain and meaningless. I assumed the first time we had unprotected sex I would get pregnant. I felt edgy and worried, like what if my big break, whatever that means at my age, nothing, comes and I am in the family way? Then of course my period arrived and I breathed a sigh of relief. When you are young you are taught that the easiest thing in the world to get is pregnant. So for a while it's the last thing you worry about. Or rather, you spend a lot of your twenties afraid that you are. It can happen at any time, even when you have your period. Even if you only did it once. You're a fertile field, a sea monkey, a packet of self-rising yeast, just sprinkle with water and watch things grow. But you're not, really, and of all the things that finally fall into place when you grow up, this is one that sometimes doesn't. The window of opportunity is really very small, you are informed, and getting smaller. Sometimes it takes years. Or doesn't take at all. There are statistics. You don't want to know. Suddenly,
the worst thing in the world that could ever happen to you becomes the worst thing that could ever not.

The next thing I knew, seven months had gone by and every time I went into the bathroom and found blood I sobbed. There goes another baby, I thought. You'd think women would get used to the blood, wouldn't you? And we sort of do, most of the time, although we never get over what a godawful mess and pain in the ass it is. But on some occasions, for example, when the bleeding is not just inconvenient but metaphorical, when the blood flows from what feels like a wound—I am not pregnant,
and I am bleeding
—it is a shock.

All kinds of things would go through my head during this time. I am not getting pregnant because I used up all my luck landing someone as special as David for a husband. I am not getting pregnant because I made such a big deal about the whole thing before or because I am still not
ready
. I am not getting pregnant because I am too busy helping to take care of my grandmother;
she
is my baby. I am not getting pregnant because that is just the way of the world, some people do and some people don't.

We went to a doctor, an infertility doctor. At first I kept referring to him as the fertility doctor, until I realized it was
infertility,
as in, that's what he treats people for. But I preferred the other, with its vague voodoo appeal; if he had wanted to dance around me singing
sha sha sha
and sprinkling herbs, that would have been fine. Instead, he gave us a little pamphlet which he had designed to explain the course
of our treatment. We would take all the easy, noninvasive diagnostic tests right away, in the hopes that our problem, that is, the one that wasn't caused by some kind of bad karma I had drummed up for myself, would have a noninvasive solution.
Invasive
being another relative concept, but I'll get to that later. The doctor gave me a routine pelvic exam, told us that he did not take insurance, and we were on our way.

Our first official test was the Post-Coital Test, where David's sperm was swabbed from my vagina the morning after and tested for signs of life, for pep, for mettle. The doctor showed them to me under a microscope, zipping around, frantic, directionless, wagging their tails. Like college dropouts, aimless but free. Expecting to make millions anyway. I thought them very beautiful and I was proud.
My children.
Next came the Quality of Ovulation Test, wherein my serial blood progesterone level was tested seven, nine, and eleven days after ovulation. Without sufficient progesterone the uterine lining cannot nourish the egg. If it adheres at all it will quickly slough off and die. That sounded very sad. People with this problem often miscarry over and over and do not even know it. They spot some time in the week or so after ovulation, and then they get their periods as usual and it doesn't occur to them that anything is wrong. Sitting in the doctor's office I wracked my brain. Had I spotted? I actually wanted to have spotted. What I wanted most was to have a definitive reason for not getting pregnant. The best you can hope for is that the doctor says, “Eureka! I found it! I'll just
fiddle with this and tinker with that and you go home and take three of these and stand on your head reciting ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn' and you'll be fine.” There are many amazing remedies for infertility these days that didn't exist even five years ago. But you have to fit into one of the categories or you could end up like space junk, untethered, floating off into the galaxy, a wasted miracle.

But hey! I had a progesterone deficiency. I started using natural progesterone suppositories after each ovulation. That's as gross as it sounds. But I felt so proactive. And we didn't stop there, because infertility can be the result of a confluence of pathologies. So next we had the Sperm Antibody Test. Evidently it is possible for the sperm to reject the vaginal mucus or vice versa. (Don't freak out here; if you want to have a baby you have to say words like
vaginal mucus
out loud or at least mutter them under your breath.) Hooray! We win again! David's sperm was creating antibodies. By the time they had swum upstream they had formed little protective helmets that might be keeping them from penetrating the egg. So next came the Sperm Penetration Assay: Could the sperm penetrate the egg, under optimum conditions? That is, without their helmets? Why, yes. Yes, they could. Okay. We responded to this news with monthly IUIs. Those are intrauterine inseminations—sessions with the doctor and a high-tech turkey baster which he used to place the sperm directly at my uterus, avoiding my pestilent fluids. David would masturbate in the morning and drop off the sperm at
the doctor's office on his way to work. I would show up about an hour later and after confirming that the sperm the doctor was offering was, indeed, David's, I would accept it from the doctor, like a communion cracker, sort of.

But we kept having sex, too. Because, as the doctor said, who knows?!

The fifth test on our doctor's prospectus was the Hysterosalpingogram or, if you were feeling zippy, the Hysterogram, for short. I was warned that some found this procedure painful and it would be a good idea to take Advil or Motrin before and after it was performed. What I was not warned was that this procedure was excruciating. A doctor, not my doctor but one he'd recommended, flooded my uterus with a dye solution and then x-rayed my entire reproductive tract looking for blockages. He suggested it might feel like slightly more intense menstrual cramps. Nice try. I knew what intense menstrual cramps felt like and this wasn't it. This felt like someone was ripping my insides out with a pair of needle-nose pliers and on top of it, the unavoidable sexual aspect of it, not sexual as in sexy but sexual as in involving my sex organs, was profoundly disturbing. It may be the most I have ever felt invaded. I sobbed hysterically through the entire thing. David could hear me in the waiting room and asked if he could come in and they told him no. Most people probably don't know this and don't need to know this, but the Greek root of
hysteric
means “suffering in the womb.”

There's a point when you are starting to think about hav
ing children that you begin to notice other people's. And you say to each other, I want one of those. And you get excited. And then, oddly, the longer you try the more children you notice. In fact, everyone on the street is pushing a stroller and the ratio of pregnant women to non-pregnant women in your neighborhood is at least three to one. Everyone has a baby but you. Everyone
can
have a baby but you. All the other things your life is about aren't what it is about anymore. They all go away. What were all the things I used to do? I was in a lot of plays. I was in some independent movies, but then, everyone in the world has been in some independent movies. I still hadn't gotten on
Law & Order.
I wrote some stuff. A script, some essays, and some stories that I performed around. I went places with my husband. We went to movies and met up with friends and played tennis and went on ski vacations together. He's a terrific guy, of course, but he's no baby.

Everyone says that the best way to get pregnant is just to get on with your life and not worry about it, and that's what I tried to do. On the outside. But on the inside I did nothing and went nowhere. On the inside I was sick at the thought that I might not be able to have a child. I finally had a husband and security and work that I cared about, all the things I'd always considered the prerequisites of motherhood. And I was less woondangled and hublittered than I'd ever been. It never occurred to me in a million years that anything I was doing in my life was about becoming a mother but in retro
spect, all roads led here. They would, I presumed, lead away again at some point. Or who knows, maybe not. But I kept coming back to the idea of Luck. I just wasn't lucky. Other people were lucky. Why were other people lucky? And to me, being unlucky wasn't just a manifestation of unseen forces in the universe; it was a personal flaw. Luck was something I somehow
failed
to have. Which by definition is contradictory, but it's so like me to seek blame and yet refuse it at the same time.

Every month I would take a blood test ten days after my presumed ovulation. A blood test could determine pregnancy several days earlier and with greater accuracy than a urine test, and the doctor wanted as much time as possible to prevent an early miscarriage. So one morning each month I would give blood at a lab on Eighty-sixth and Park and then the doctor's assistant would call in the afternoon with the results. In order to prevent any miscommunication, her greeting was this: “Hi, it's Suzanne, I'm sorry, sweetheart.” That was it. Every month. And then, after a few bloody, disconsolate days, she'd call with the next month's instructions and we'd start again.