I was determined that we would; I was moving cross-country to stay with him. And yet I did not pack. I did not plan. I did not book flights. Because, as much as it made logical sense, moving back East with Brian felt like lunacy. Like leaping from a moving train onto a speeding boat. Like asking history to repeat itself.
When my own parents moved East together, in 1969, it was the beginning of their end. They relocated to Stony Brook, New York, for my mom to attend graduate school. Right before they left, my dad had passed the California bar; unable to practice out of state, he was miserable in New York. He took odd jobs as an insurance salesman, junior high school history teacher, tree cutter. After a year he told my mom he couldn’t do it anymore, and booked a ticket back to California. Why he didn’t just take the New York bar exam was never explained. My mom was only halfway through her graduate degree but decided to quit and leave with him. The day before they were scheduled to fly, she got her first and only migraine. The pain was so intense she sequestered herself in the bathroom, where she lay down in an empty claw-foot tub for three hours. When she came out, she’d made a decision: she would stay in New York and finish her master’s.
“I knew that if I left,” she said, “I’d be completely dependent on your dad, and that would be bad.”
This story had an iconic power in my imagination. It wasn’t just an act of self-assertion for my mom; it was the turning point for a generation of women. So why was I leaving my base of support to return to New York, scene of the crime?
I waited for my migraine. I waited as I dropped off stuff with Goodwill and gave oodles of baby gear to Suzi, as I bought going-away gifts for my brothers and had a good-bye dinner with my dad and his wife. As I nuzzled Lulu good-bye, “Thanks Wonder Dog. You’re solo pregnant woman’s best friend.” As I scheduled the movers for a Sunday, I waited for my head to split with pain. But it did not come. And, finally, the obvious dawned on me: I was not my mother. Brian was not my father. Together, we were not anyone from the past. And, as potentially unsound as our little family of four was, we were in fact a family of four. Our unit was primary. Trying to make a family is a gamble, and if I was going to bet on something, I would bet on what I wanted, what I hoped for, what I believed in. And that was a life with Brian.
It was a leap of faith, and I was already midair.
BROOKLYN (briefly)
22
“Why do you dress up to fly?” Brian said.
I was drinking tomato juice in a plastic cup, red sludge on ice. Brian had a Coke, always a Coke. At forty thousand feet, wedged among rumpled strangers, we toasted each other.
“My grandmother flew in silk stockings and patent leather heels,” I said. “This is a pale imitation.”
We were over Oklahoma. Both kids had been asleep for a blissful, overlapping hour. I took his hand. I didn’t tell him that I also dressed up to fly because I still wanted to feel like a contender in the realm of attraction. I didn’t want to be written off, to disappear into the wallpaper of people. Even with two small children. I wasn’t trying to be the prettiest person in the room—my shot at ingenue was long over—but I wanted to register, even a faint blip, on someone’s sexual radar.
I squeezed Brian’s hand again. I had my legs crossed. Brian slid a hand between my knees. We exchanged a look; we’d been reduced, mostly, to looks. There was very little time, energy, or space for more. But at this, looking, we were world-class. A solar system of desire and insinuation sprang up between us, holding everything we had inside the gravitational pull of our bond: one chubby seven-month-old son; one sickly two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, connected to me by a strand of spittle, thin and delicate as spider silk, strung from the corner of her mouth to a spreading pool of drool on my blouse. We didn’t look away.
But there was also a virus in our gaze. What we passed back and forth was not only desire, commitment, and respect, but a needling, constant anxiety. We were building our lives on marshland. The primary unknowable was whether or not Gracie would be OK. Neither of us had the first foggy idea how that would go. We didn’t say, “This could go wrong in so many ways.” We didn’t say, “This will all be fine.” We just touched plastic rim to plastic rim and drank.
Outside the window, a pastel city of lilac clouds and dark gray columns grew upward at asymmetrical angles, like a collection of misty, artfully arranged skyscrapers. I wanted to get out and walk around. If nature was capable of beauty on this scale, why allow for mutation? The rogue nations of autism, faulty heart valves, cancer always, forever, cancer, blood disease—what the hell was their point?
“Wake up and pay attention,” I said.
“Are you talking to me?” Brian said.
“Um, are you God?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then I’m not talking to you.”
I leaned back in my seat and pushed Gracie’s damp bangs off her forehead.
“Before she was born,” I said, “it never occurred to me, not once, that I might have a sick kid.”
Brian was quiet for a while. “I never once thought about having a kid without worrying that something would go wrong.”
I was stunned, and a little spooked.
Unlike me, who disliked articulating the darker possibilities for fear of inviting them to manifest, Brian had to plan for the worst, as a form of preemptive exorcism. That meant that, more or less, every bad thing that transpired in his life was something he’d considered ahead of time. Of course lots of bad things he’d thought of hadn’t come to pass. But this one had.
I started collecting all our garbage and shoving it into the diaper bag: half-eaten animal crackers, soiled baby wipes, a bottle of coagulated milk. I looked for Gabe’s favorite toy, a plush elephant. He was waking up, cooing in a pleasant way that might or might not turn into high-pitched screams during descent.
Gracie stirred and looked around her. “Where are we? Are we up or down?”
“We’re almost in New York,” I said, and kissed the crown of her head.
“Is New York up or down?”
Good question. We are about to find out.
23
“Imagine ten children crossing the street,” Brian said. “Five boys, five girls, in a line holding hands. They cross. On the other side, only nine arrive.”
We had been in Brooklyn for about six months, without Gracie getting any better. We were having an argument—the argument—in our Brooklyn bedroom. I wanted to transplant Gracie. Brian did not. At least not now.
The transplant doctors—we had seen many, on both coasts—had told us that one in ten children didn’t make it through. Transplant carried a mortality risk of least 10 percent, maybe higher—15, 20 percent. What level of risk was unlivable? I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew Brian wasn’t arguing for argument’s sake. He was terrified.
I tried not to picture the children, but it was too late; they had sprung to life. A chatty throng of kindergarteners: five boys in Velcro superhero sneakers; five girls with plastic pastel barrettes holding their limp bangs in place.