Part 13 (1/2)

No Mo, always thereKnow anyone else who can say that-Franz Wright, ”Alcohol”

Through the baby h It barely pierces the heavy sleep that wraps my skull in sodden layers of papier-mache Static follows, then a tinny whiets tucked inbody unrolls The white noise machine he's installed to block out all disturbanceracket of a dentist's drain It vacuums all consciousness froh punctures un I blink my eyes open to the room, immaculately black as he likes it, but for the faint luminosity of the upraised clock hands (2:50) and the tiny red snake eye of the o an instant-aout bad news: That bruise on your shi+n is bone cancer That bruise on your shi+n is bone cancer But one glance at the husband's profile, and I flash on ht for weeks, the smooth moonstone of an idea If I had a rubber bladder under my pillow-the kind that cartoon characters whip froth to rear up and whack hiorously about the head My mouth creaks toward a smile at the prospect, since his sleep has been unbroken now for alaze at him from under the pillow like a rattler under a rock

A swerving comet's tail of silence issues from the monitor I let my eyes seal shut, then inwardly tumble back down the black tunnel of oblivion that's nancy, when my hormonal stupor ht wakings as if sprinkled with fairy dust Hearing baby gurgle and coo, I'd leap up to float-s with breast asping coughs in rapid succession, rat-a-tat-tat I blink at the clock hands (2:58) Silence

I'll get up, my husband says His lasses

To which a sane woman with classes to teach tomorroould've said, Thanks, hon Thanks, hon, as she sank back into sluain I say no, which is not-as I ations Nor is it maternal love for h to be lurching around the coffee table, chortling with every stuot it because it ticks another plus sign inI have coest shi+t sandins, and I' to justify the fact that I'd rather drink than love

The ti itis-we tore to Children's Hospital Withhis, then here ca into a fever The doctors agree the infections and fevers are strange but not unheard of By every yardstick,son is a developmental champ His bounce is boundless, but my limbs are filled with lead pellets, and my head has started to scra lands a haht It's the reflexive, autoore-fest movie-that last scene when the butchered killer you think has finally bitten it jolts up My ar the will to rise (3:07), I pluh penetratesspeed freak It's Daddy's pneuh, Mother's emphyseasps start My body's a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like claany whiskey burns bright as any fla oil slick Gone a little watery on top, it's still possessed of a golden nilass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbearab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the htness A drink once brought ease, a bronze wars a brief respite fro it, nothese spirits is soul preparation, a warped coation I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner's blast acrossbathrobe, I pull on a wife-beater T-shi+rt (3:15!) In the next roos to the crib bars like a prisoner Menthol stealets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his s hie of unalloyed love for hiuilt

He seestoward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head's tilted with bald curiosity

Which cracks h hiain, by which point I've cleaved hi from the vaporizer's work, but fresh stea him to the bathrooe him, before I squirt the syrupy aceta down the stairs to the kitchen I open the stove where a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge Needing neither glass nor ice, I press s so I can keep on

PART III

Self Help

It would be good to feel good about yourself for good-William Matthews, ”Self Help”Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die Man exists only insofar as he is separated fros The cranium is a space traveler's helmet Stay inside or you perish Death is divestment, death is communion It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego-Vladiuered

MondayMeTuesdayMeWednesdayMeThursdayMe-Witold Gombrowicz, Diary Diary In my thirty-fourth year to heaven, I find myself at the copydown on the spine of a ht under e froh my shut eyelids

It's seven-thirty am, and I can feel the corpse tint of oes whaphapwhap at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like thunk thunk The whaps whaps stab e in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll's e in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll's

It'ssix classes, which has freed me from the deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecohty hours a week at Not a new-e of the career? I' whose editor has left two strongly worded es on our machine I'm late with my article on the new Russian perestroika

Whapthunk

The i and holding out his arms to me while Warren strapped hi

Warren drops him off at daycare now for reasons that are coet in early to copy course materials illicitly-an infraction the secretary, who coust training session, copies being too costly for the sniveling, no-hope-of-tenure hus, I stop to puke out the car door, releasing into a snow bank an acidic coffee bile that stays on h to bloodya bile taste nois frowned on

But even if I didn't want to voot to the daycare center-which resembles a modest colonial parson's house like in The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter-the perky bustle of the place would incline me in a vo dropoff was right after Christmas break The director had waved er paintings of Harvard's budding geniuses I'd sat on a stiff chair while she told me Dev was so anxious he couldn't fall asleep at napti okay at home? she asked She had front teeth like fence pickets, and the reflection on her octagonal wire-rireat I was great and et our kid accepted here

So I failed to tell her that my husband and I had barely spoken that week, and so the oven's pilot light and stickingto my in-laws' for Christmas dinner-I'd risen at four, ostensibly to bake pies but actually to drive around the local reservoir, finishi+ng a six-pack of beer while listening to Argentine tangos

Wheeling in tight rings at about sixty around the local reservoir-night sos unrolled-I'd felterased with each rotation Around and aroundme The silk bow ties on uise I'd wished for-are choking le, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers I'd never have let on when Warren and I istry, an attitude I now despise inwith Warren to take us out

During the war-zone months of early infancy when Warren slept, it was as if every hour of sleep I lost, he'd stolen Now I've placed Warren at the radiant center of er comrade but capo We've devolved into a cold ith a child-centered detente

Whapthunk The scanning light casts my face the color of ectoplas about the easeful, educated parents at daycareup the tree-lined boulevard toward the center always brings outEvan, so called because of the flinch-bordering on a Tourette's-like seizure-he goes into whenever he spots Dev andHead down, he'll actually sca hello

In soure of the type I aspire to cut He translates (let's say) Gogol He publishes in The New York Review of Books The New York Review of Books and abroad Unlike the blocky Boston bankers who abound in Harvard Square, he cruises in for Parents' Day wearing a fluid flannel coat with French tailoring, for he and his professor wife (a comp-lit professor whose easy red-lipped sh to use and abroad Unlike the blocky Boston bankers who abound in Harvard Square, he cruises in for Parents' Day wearing a fluid flannel coat with French tailoring, for he and his professor wife (a comp-lit professor whose easy red-lipped sh to use summer summer as a verb as a verb

Their ie under four years-has shi+ning hair and a good start on French and German He's a chess player with a princely manner I swear if his voice were a little deeper, he could join the diplomatic corps

I once saw Dev, whose sandwich that day was, as e Jonathan into swapping lunches Young Jonathan peeled back one corner of his seven-grain bread carefully enough not to break the crust Dev peered in Jonathan said, Mine is brie and kiwi fruit

Dev reached for it, and Jonathan cupped one hand around it It has less sugar than yours His next sentence was so remarkable, I noted it down in my journal: I first had this sandwich in Vienna

Perhaps Evan's flinch stemmed from the day Dev had elected to yank Jonathan's mittens from his coat pocket, bolt up the stairs while Evan and Warren chased after hi them into the toilet

Warren fished theot the ziploc bag fro the potato peelings I just didn't want to deal with theeDev off, or the puking My head spendswhat I should the way a s of scarves fros hireat, the teachers say every day when I fetch Dev, that Warren drops hireat that I pick hiht with him? I once asked

Frouess that it wasn't Not so much

About once a week Warren asks for the launderedaway, giving in to my failure as a laundress-read: mother