I Will Do Better, page 16
Will Ferrell and Joan Cusack were the co-hosts of a morning talk show. The teleprompter went on the fritz. Asked to ad lib, Ferrell and Cusack panicked. “I had a notion the other day,” Ferrell said. “I was thinking someone should get together a group with guns to clean out those ghettos.” When they cut to the weatherman, David Alan Grier was also panicking, staring at the screen. Before long, Will Ferrell had overturned the set. He and the weatherman wrestled for dominance. Ferrell drank blood from the weatherman’s decapitated head. Then the teleprompter started working again. The crisis was over.
As mentioned earlier, I have no talent as a cartoonist; if I did, here is another place I would insert a drawing, done as if from a children’s book—let’s say a fancy, thin-lined style often used in picture books about young girls. This drawing would show me pushing a stroller down a city street. In the backdrop, gloomy towers, looming brownstones. Zombies in the street. The child is happy, checking out everything. Meanwhile I am thinking:
The teleprompter gets fixed.
If I don’t freak out, she won’t freak out.
Things will get fixed.
Foot traffic backed up; crowds began to clump. I veered us out of the pedestrian flow. A small crowd had started gravitating toward one side of the street. As we got closer, the storefront’s signage became apparent: brick oven pizza. Right—brick ovens didn’t need electricity, explaining why the metal gate was rolled back, the shop open.
Yankees cap, Starter jacket, handsome, emerged from the shop, two paper plates held above his head. “They totally jacked the price,” he announced, breaking into the recognizable patois of a bond trader who enjoys listening to Wu-Tang. “But this shit is gooood.”
“Thirsty?” I asked.
Lily nodded. I reached into my backpack, pulled out our water bottles.
I dug deeper, looking for some fruit leather. While scrounging around the bottom of my bag, I grabbed the transistor radio.
News sports and weather on the ten had nothing new to report.
Same with National Public. Corporate newscasts. Sports and weather on the FAN. Nobody so much as estimated when the lights might come back on.
“Someone, please tell us when this will be fixed,” I said.
“They must have told the news to not bring up any time frames,” said a voice behind me.
“It’s in the public interest to not panic us; we’re just plebes.”
“The juice has to come on, though.” I looked back at them, wanting affirmation. “Tribeca, the Village, Gramercy, Flatiron—these are big-ticket neighborhoods. That’s the whole point of privilege.” I sort of laughed. “Their fancy umbrellas should protect me and my kid on something like this. The cavalry comes for the rich folk, suctions out some water, duct-tapes the circuits—”
I turned to my left, looked around.
Adults. Bodies. Where—
“Lily?”
Turned to my right.
“LILY?”
An announcer was letting the world know that Wall Street and the Nasdaq had both been suspended for the day. The two good people who had been eagerly volunteering their opinion about the government also started looking around, searching with me. An ambulance siren was going off not too far away.
Someone was asking, “Where did you see her?” Someone else was saying, “He can’t find his kid.”
“I …”
“She was right—”
The street had a slight grade to it. I started looking between people.
And saw something.
Maybe a first down away, near the sidewalk. Might have been a triangle. That familiar shade of yellow.
But couldn’t see the whole thing.
The fit body of that Starter jacket bro was in the way, putting the finishing bites to his slice.
“LILY.”
I sprinted, my footsteps pounding through my ears.
“She yours?”
I didn’t answer, veering around him. The sky above was slate and ice. Static from my radio carried.
The stroller’s front wheels had indeed banked against the side of the curb. I ran around to the front.
Beneath the fabric’s canopy, Lily was strapped in, safe, her face fresh and slick, her eyes oblivious.
“You got to use the brake on these things.” From behind me.
I caught my breath, “I swear to Christ I was, not ten seconds ago—”
His hand on my shoulder. “Seriously, though,” he said. “Boss, how awful would that have been, losing your kid in the middle of all this?”
His face was concerned and well-meaning, maybe a tinge of judgment.
In my mind, cops were cuffing me, pushing my head into a patrol car; the bro was bent over, his nose broken, streaming blood.
I felt control giving way, curled my hands into fists.
Two years now: two years of the bizarre stray shit gathering in my pockets; two years of that baby violin screeching out noises that made dogs howl, the wasted dead time in a freezing emergency room, the barroom brawls about brushing her teeth, my worst instincts, my worst feelings about myself, the bile, the venom, storing up, biding time, working out, getting stronger, just waiting its turn, waiting to be proven right. Incalculable mental energy, and the sad truth is, unquantifiable amounts of it had been generated through my anticipation of whatever new disaster had to be waiting, just around the next corner. Would this disaster be the larger world sweeping in, doing its horrors? Would I be the one who snapped, finally translating my worries about my lack of parental acumen into a self-fulfilling prophecy? What would ignite the next explosion? How would it happen?
I’d been on guard just minutes ago. Hell, this whole book long, you’ve been reading half worried. Was this going to be the fuse?
Now. Now.
From somewhere down below my waist, I felt a pulling, the end of my jacket.
Hair was tangled all over her forehead, and still the fineness of her bone structure was apparent along her temples, her mother’s paleness glowing out at the world.
This frail wisp of a thing; looking up at me, her eyes overly girlish but sensing an unease—more, even.
“If there’s a problem …,” Lily began.
We’d come to another fork in the road. And I could see that Lily was doing her best to veer her old man.
Doing her best to get herself to someplace better.
Gears inside me ratcheted; pulleys tightened.
I welled up, swallowed.
“Yo,” I said.
“I want to walk,” Lily said. She jerked her seat now, shaking the chassis. “I want to go to the playground.”
In my head, Lily was watching me get driven off by cops. What then? If I got charged with assault, would she go to child family services? An orphanage?
I called out thanks. If the bro heard, he did not respond, kept on shrinking into the street scene.
“You’ve been in there awhile.” I wiped sweat from my brow. “You’ve got to be squirmy. Need to pee?”
Harder shakes to the stroller. “I want to play.”
“We’re going to find somewhere for you. Just hang in, okay?”
Lily’s eyes sharpened. Her focus honed and narrowed. I recognized that she did not have the words for what she wanted to say. Right now she wanted so much more than words, wanted out, wanted action, she was eager.
But also was doing something else.
She chewed her thumb knuckle. Her cheeks sucked inward. She considered.
“I will hang in.”
WHEN WE ARRIVED back in our neighborhood, it was just starting to get dark, the overcast sky turning gloomy. A little foot traffic, not much, nobody walking dogs, a patina of normalcy to the street, the familiarity of what is known. Thank hell. We were fried by then. Swings and a really good jungle gym; the discovery of a bank vestibule where the juice was still flowing and people were lined up to recharge their phones and laptops. (I withdrew five twenties, future insolvency taking a back seat to present-day apocalypse.) We’d seen a four-story apartment building with its front sliced away like a birthday cake. (On one high floor was half of a cluttered bedroom, an exposed closet of clothes, the raw power of nature. “A dollhouse,” Lily said. “A giant could reach in and play house.”) We’d also hit the Times Square Toys“R”Us (dolly stroller, lollipops, liquid bubble mix), then found a food truck on Twenty-Fifth for a hot dinner—chicken tacos and rice, eaten beneath the sky’s pastel colors. Now my thighs and calves burned. The bottoms of my feet felt as if I’d ground glass into them.
Lily had caught her sixth wind, though. She was balancing herself on the ledge of a brick flower bed. She was running the block, jumping up and down on different brownstone steps. She blew and chased bubbles. She raced her new dolly stroller back and forth in front of our building. She meandered, reaching for leaves from low branches. I sat on the stoop, watched, appreciated.
A longtime resident was rolling her travel suitcase out of our building. “I found a hotel room uptown,” she said, then headed to the curb, tried hailing a cab.
It seemed clear: most of the neighborhood had bailed. Should we?
The humid evening provided no answers.
Cut to upstairs. We’re in our bedclothes, cozy under the covers. Lily took her familiar position, nestled into my side, leaning the back of her head on my chest, just below my shoulder.
But was still jittery, couldn’t stay in place. I put the compact disc of Singin’ in the Rain into my laptop, called up one of her favorite songs—Debbie Reynolds busting out of the cake.
“No,” she said, rocking left to right.
“How about ‘Make ’Em Laugh’?”
“I don’t want that.”
I ran through songs; she did not want songs. I tried Sesame Street; she did not want Sesame Street. I asked what she wanted. She didn’t know what she wanted.
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” I began, off-key as usual.
Lily started crying, clawed her nails into my side.
“It makes sense if you are freaked. You did a great job keeping it together.”
“No,” she said.
“It’s been a very long day. This blackout is hard. Everyone’s having problems.”
Fully melting down now, bawling.
“Okay, do you have any ideas?”
“NO. NO.”
“Hey.” I felt myself starting to lose it. “You’re not the only one who had a long day.”
“NOOO.”
I took a breath, then another. Maybe there was something special I could show her, something to comfort her?
“No,” Lily repeated.
“Hold on a sec,” I said.
“NO.”
I called up a few other files from the hard drive. “Just hold on, goddamn it.”
PEOPLE ASK WHETHER Lily has any memories of her mom. Simple bottom-line answer: No. Freud posited that none of us have memories from before age three, and this statement basically holds true with all adults. It definitely holds with children, specifically with Lily. No conscious memories, no tactile recall, zero.
However, there’s also a more complex formulation, one that takes a bit to unpack.
It’s worth remembering: when Diana got pregnant—back during the Paleolithic era of 2008—more than a few insightful people were suspicious about the wide-scale cultural effect of smartphones. Attention spans and inner lives were going to be put at risk, went the thinking: resistance was important. This argument has turned out to be both true and immaterial. The future futured forward; we are where we are; even the dumbest of smartphones has capacities well beyond any single mortal’s imagination, and the cell phone isn’t just accepted, but is a necessity for daily life in our half-civilized twenty-first century.
Back in the aughts, though, Diana and I had committed to the team with books and internal rumination. Which is a pretentious way of saying we consciously decided to be behind the technological curve. Diana had a cell phone, but the kind where every number on the keypad corresponded to three possible letters for texting. I didn’t even have that: no cell for me, not until after Lily was born, when we both conceded, okay, it was important to reach one another on short notice. We purchased BlackBerries and, you guessed it, immediately took to our new toys, filling our phones’ limited memory cards with pictures of the infant, as well as ten to twenty videos.
Some are all of three seconds. A few are as long as two minutes. Every video is grainy. Every one of them focuses on the baby. We parents are outliers, other people are extras. I report this for context.
When Diana was diagnosed with leukemia, our focus, as I’ve mentioned, turned to that fight. During which time, we applied a certain approach to the disease. This approach was something I’d learned back in my twenties, when I lucked into two seasons covering a professional football team as a beat writer for a small newspaper. The coach and players constantly fielded if questions from us media: If the 49ers beat the Rams, that makes Sunday an elimination game. What would that mean for the franchise? The answers were always the same: We don’t deal with hypotheticals. We can only focus on the game we have to play.
At my urging, Diana and I adopted this attitude: Let’s worry about what’s in front of us.
Even at the end, planning out and filming something for Lily, a speech or address—whether on a mobile phone or a camcorder— would have felt like an acknowledgment, admission that none of the herbal remedies, the meditation and yoga, the chemo and radiation, the experimental drugs, the whole chimichanga—none of it—was going to work.
I want to write that our focus was so great, our confidence so high, that we couldn’t even acknowledge that it was natural, human, at certain moments, to look beyond the fight. But this would not be true. Our fear was just so large. How could we stare into it? Yet we did, sort of.
There were two conversations about Diana’s wishes for after she passed. She also left me letters—one saying what she hoped for me, one with instructions about what she wanted after her passing—and also a letter that Lily is supposed to read later, when she’s older: fifteen or sixteen will be the appropriate age.
We also talked about filming a video message Lily could watch later in her life. But we never filmed it. Too great a breach of our faith, I guess.
The truth is, most of our attention and energies and work went into keeping her around.
A long way of saying: there are just a few videos of Diana and her daughter together.
A glance at the laptop’s battery icon showed it to be middling, more than capable.
I didn’t tell Lily what I was doing, just asked her—once more— to watch.
I double-clicked.
May 23, 2010: After the first transplant, taken by Diana’s mother during Diana’s first remission. A video of the baby. She is one and a half, playing on the floor of our apartment. Diana’s head and body are in the shot for a few seconds via a snippet: the bottom of her chin and most of her neck; they look pale, dry, and doughy, decades older than Diana’s real age (thirty-nine at the time). Diana is sitting in her desk chair, watching the child. She is beaming, hugely entertained by her little girl.
Lying in that familiar part of the bed, which she thought of as hers, assumed to be hers, looking like an impossible, miniature incarnation of her mother, Lily did not move. Her mouth hung open.
She had seen it before, but not many times.
Not enough times.
She sat up.
“Again,” she said.
We watched again.
June 25, 2010: Lily, still one and a half. Diana is back in Memphis, having gotten approval for the trip, thanks to reasonably clean test results. Jacuzzis are against doctor’s orders but there isn’t much chance of her staying out of her aunt and uncle’s backyard hot tub. Diana is in the water; also in the water, her aunt, uncle, and Lily. Diana’s hair is black, short, and curly, in all ways different than the brown shag she had before the transplant, taking the hair and fingernail characteristics of your donor being one of the effects of a bone marrow transplant. Diana is wearing granny glasses, smiling. A wet T-shirt loosely covers her frame, which is skeletal at best. In her lap she holds Baby Lily beneath those chubby baby arms. Lily is all skin and skull, possessing only a slick cowlick of hair. Diana’s uncle and aunt are lightly tossing small plastic balls at Lily, who picks up and bites down on a yellow ball. A red one. “Baaaw. Baaw,” Lily squeals. Delighted, she examines the balls. Holding the camera, Peg asks if Lily got water in her eye. Lily answers, “Yeah,” then splashes. Diana reaches and helps Lily balance. Lily plays peekaboo with her uncle. Diana watches them—again, enthralled.
Lily scooted upward, into a sitting position. The comforter fell in front of her. She cared not a whit.
“Another one,” she said.
November 26, 2011: two weeks before Diana died. Sitting in her desk chair, facing into our living room. Her hair is brown scrub. A yellow paper mask covers the bridge of her nose and her mouth. She’s wearing pajamas, a pink robe. In her lap, unsuspecting Toddler Lily, resplendent in a yellow blouse and purple pants with flowers. Mother and daughter look across the room, to our television screen—the part of The Wizard of Oz where the world’s just gone color. Dorothy is arriving in Oz, receiving those famous sung orders: “Follow the yellow brick road.”
The child is enrapt. Diana watches as well. Neither moves. The sounds from the television are faint.
THE THREE CLIPS combined lasted maybe a minute and fifteen seconds. Nothing, really. The last one, the “Wizard of Oz” clip, wasn’t even thirty seconds. It had been too hard for me to stand there and film, had felt voyeuristic, maybe even predatory. I’d watched it only maybe four times since Diana had passed. It always acted like an atom bomb upon me. I mean, they all hurt, made me feel like heading into bed and curling into a ball for a few hours. But this last clip—we’d been on the cusp of so much: Diana, Lily, me, each of us with our fates just ahead. Diana had to know it, and how could this have been anything but terrifying? Even then, I knew my wife well enough to understand that, seated in that chair, she was channeling all of her strength and soul to stay in that moment, to just sit and appreciate that time, those seconds with her girl.
