Birds of America

by Lorrie Moore

  Now her baby, for all these reasons—lack of motherly gratitude, motherly judgment, motherly proportion—will be taken away.

  The room is fluorescently ablaze again. The Mother digs around in her parka pocket and comes up with a Kleenex. It is old and thin, like a mashed flower saved from a dance; she dabs it at her eyes and nose.

  “The Baby won’t suffer as much as you,” says the Surgeon.

  And who can contradict? Not the Baby, who in his Slavic Betty Boop voice can say only mama, dada, cheese, ice, bye-bye, outside, boogie-boogie, goody-goody, eddy-eddy, and car. (Who is Eddy? They have no idea.) This will not suffice to express his mortal suffering. Who can say what babies do with their agony and shock? Not they themselves. (Baby talk: isn’t it a stitch?) They put it all no place anyone can really see. They are like a different race, a different species: they seem not to experience pain the way we do. Yeah, that’s it: their nervous systems are not as fully formed, and they just don’t experience pain the way we do. A tune to keep one humming through the war. “You’ll get through it,” the Surgeon says.

  “How?” asks the Mother. “How does one get through it?”

  “You just put your head down and go,” says the Surgeon. He picks up his file folder. He is a skilled manual laborer. The tricky emotional stuff is not to his liking. The babies. The babies! What can be said to console the parents about the babies? “I’ll go phone the oncologist on duty to let him know,” he says, and leaves the room.

  “Come here, sweetie,” the Mother says to the Baby, who has toddled off toward a gum wrapper on the floor. “We’ve got to put your jacket on.” She picks him up and he reaches for the light switch again. Light, dark. Peekaboo: where’s baby? Where did baby go?

  At home, she leaves a message—“Urgent! Call me!”—for the Husband on his voice mail. Then she takes the Baby upstairs for his nap, rocks him in the rocker. The Baby waves good-bye to his little bears, then looks toward the window and says, “Bye-bye, outside.” He has, lately, the habit of waving good-bye to everything, and now it seems as if he senses an imminent departure, and it breaks her heart to hear him. Bye-bye! She sings low and monotonously, like a small appliance, which is how he likes it. He is drowsy, dozy, drifting off. He has grown so much in the last year, he hardly fits in her lap anymore; his limbs dangle off like a pietà. His head rolls slightly inside the crook of her arm. She can feel him falling backward into sleep, his mouth round and open like the sweetest of poppies. All the lullabies in the world, all the melodies threaded through with maternal melancholy now become for her—abandoned as a mother can be by working men and napping babies—the songs of hard, hard grief. Sitting there, bowed and bobbing, the Mother feels the entirety of her love as worry and heartbreak. A quick and irrevocable alchemy: there is no longer one unworried scrap left for happiness. “If you go,” she keens low into his soapy neck, into the ranunculus coil of his ear, “we are going with you. We are nothing without you. Without you, we are a heap of rocks. We are gravel and mold. Without you, we are two stumps, with nothing any longer in our hearts. Wherever this takes you, we are following. We will be there. Don’t be scared. We are going, too. That is that.”

  “Take Notes,” says the Husband, after coming straight home from work, midafternoon, hearing the news, and saying all the words out loud—surgery, metastasis, dialysis, transplant—then collapsing in a chair in tears. “Take notes. We are going to need the money.”

  “Good God,” cries the Mother. Everything inside her suddenly begins to cower and shrink, a thinning of bones. Perhaps this is a soldier’s readiness, but it has the whiff of death and defeat. It feels like a heart attack, a failure of will and courage, a power failure: a failure of everything. Her face, when she glimpses it in a mirror, is cold and bloated with shock, her eyes scarlet and shrunk. She has already started to wear sunglasses indoors, like a celebrity widow. From where will her own strength come? From some philosophy? From some frigid little philosophy? She is neither stalwart nor realistic and has trouble with basic concepts, such as the one that says events move in one direction only and do not jump up, turn around, and take themselves back.

  The Husband begins too many of his sentences with “What if.” He is trying to piece everything together like a train wreck. He is trying to get the train to town.

  “We’ll just take all the steps, move through all the stages. We’ll go where we have to go. We’ll hunt; we’ll find; we’ll pay what we have to pay. What if we can’t pay?”

  “Sounds like shopping.”

  “I cannot believe this is happening to our little boy,” he says, and starts to sob again. “Why didn’t it happen to one of us? It’s so unfair. Just last week, my doctor declared me in perfect health: the prostate of a twenty-year-old, the heart of a ten-year-old, the brain of an insect—or whatever it was he said. What a nightmare this is.”

  What words can be uttered? You turn just slightly and there it is: the death of your child. It is part symbol, part devil, and in your blind spot all along, until, if you are unlucky, it is completely upon you. Then it is a fierce little country abducting you; it holds you squarely inside itself like a cellar room—the best boundaries of you are the boundaries of it. Are there windows? Sometimes aren’t there windows?

  The Mother is not a shopper. She hates to shop, is generally bad at it, though she does like a good sale. She cannot stroll meaningfully through anger, denial, grief, and acceptance. She goes straight to bargaining and stays there. How much? she calls out to the ceiling, to some makeshift construction of holiness she has desperately, though not uncreatively, assembled in her mind and prayed to; a doubter, never before given to prayer, she must now reap what she has not sown; she must assemble from scratch an entire altar of worship and begging. She tries for noble abstractions, nothing too anthropomorphic, just some Higher Morality, though if this particular Highness looks something like the manager at Marshall Field’s, sucking a Frango mint, so be it. Amen. Just tell me what you want, requests the Mother. And how do you want it? More charitable acts? A billion starting now. Charitable thoughts? Harder, but of course! Of course! I’ll do the cooking, honey; I’ll pay the rent. Just tell me. Excuse me? Well, if not to you, to whom do I speak? Hello? To whom do I have to speak around here? A higher-up? A superior? Wait? I can wait. I’ve got all day. I’ve got the whole damn day.

  The Husband now lies next to her in bed, sighing. “Poor little guy could survive all this, only to be killed in a car crash at the age of sixteen,” he says.

  The wife, bargaining, considers this. “We’ll take the car crash,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Let’s Make a Deal! Sixteen Is a Full Life! We’ll take the car crash. We’ll take the car crash, in front of which Carol Merrill is now standing.”

  Now the Manager of Marshall Field’s reappears. “To take the surprises out is to take the life out of life,” he says.

  The phone rings. The Husband gets up and leaves the room.

  “But I don’t want these surprises,” says the Mother. “Here! You take these surprises!”

  “To know the narrative in advance is to turn yourself into a machine,” the Manager continues. “What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and—let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.”

  The Mother, though shy, has grown confrontational. “Is this the kind of bogus, random crap they teach at merchandising school? We would like fewer surprises, fewer efforts and mysteries, thank you. K through eight; can we just get K through eight?” It now seems like the luckiest, most beautiful, most musical phrase she’s ever heard: K through eight. The very
lilt. The very thought.

  The Manager continues, trying things out. “I mean, the whole conception of ‘the story,’ of cause and effect, the whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.”

  Did they own a gun? The Mother begins looking through drawers.

  The Husband comes back into the room and observes her. “Ha! The Great Havoc that is the Puzzle of all Life!” he says of the Marshall Field’s management policy. He has just gotten off a conference call with the insurance company and the hospital. The surgery will be Friday. “It’s all just some dirty capitalist’s idea of a philosophy.”

  “Maybe it’s just a fact of narrative and you really can’t politicize it,” says the Mother. It is now only the two of them.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “I’m on the Baby’s side.”

  “Are you taking notes for this?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. I can’t. Not this! I write fiction. This isn’t fiction.”

  “Then write nonfiction. Do a piece of journalism. Get two dollars a word.”

  “Then it has to be true and full of information. I’m not trained. I’m not that skilled. Plus, I have a convenient personal principle about artists not abandoning art. One should never turn one’s back on a vivid imagination. Even the whole memoir thing annoys me.”

  “Well, make things up, but pretend they’re real.”

  “I’m not that insured.”

  “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Sweetie, darling, I’m not that good. I can’t do this. I can do—what can I do? I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I can do succinct descriptions of weather. I can do screwball outings with the family pet. Sometimes I can do those. Honey, I only do what I can. I do the careful ironies of daydream. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built. But this? Our baby with cancer? I’m sorry. My stop was two stations back. This is irony at its most gaudy and careless. This is a Hieronymus Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs. This is a nightmare of narrative slop. This cannot be designed. This cannot even be noted in preparation for a design—”

  “We’re going to need the money.”

  “To say nothing of the moral boundaries of pecuniary recompense in a situation such as this—”

  “What if the other kidney goes? What if he needs a transplant? Where are the moral boundaries there? What are we going to do, have bake sales?”

  “We can sell the house. I hate this house. It makes me crazy.”

  “And we’ll live—where again?”

  “The Ronald McDonald place. I hear it’s nice. It’s the least McDonald’s can do.”

  “You have a keen sense of justice.”

  “I try. What can I say?” She pauses. “Is all this really happening? I keep thinking that soon it will be over—the life expectancy of a cloud is supposed to be only twelve hours—and then I realize something has occurred that can never ever be over.”

  The Husband buries his face in his hands: “Our poor baby. How did this happen to him?” He looks over and stares at the bookcase that serves as the nightstand. “And do you think even one of these baby books is any help?” He picks up the Leach, the Spock, the What to Expect. “Where in the pages or index of any of these does it say ‘chemotherapy’ or ‘Hickman Catheter’ or ‘renal sarcoma’? Where does it say ‘carcinogenesis’? You know what these books are obsessed with? Holding a fucking spoon.” He begins hurling the books off the night table and against the far wall.

  “Hey,” says the Mother, trying to soothe. “Hey, hey, hey.” But compared to his stormy roar, her words are those of a backup singer—a Shondell, a Pip—a doo-wop ditty. Books, and now more books, continue to fly.

  Take Notes.

  Is fainthearted one word or two? Student prose has wrecked her spelling.

  It’s one word. Two words—Faint Hearted—what would that be? The name of a drag queen.

  Take Notes. In the end, you suffer alone. But at the beginning you suffer with a whole lot of others. When your child has cancer, you are instantly whisked away to another planet: one of bald-headed little boys. Pediatric Oncology. Peed Onk. You wash your hands for thirty seconds in antibacterial soap before you are allowed to enter through the swinging doors. You put paper slippers on your shoes. You keep your voice down. A whole place has been designed and decorated for your nightmare. Here is where your nightmare will occur. We’ve got a room all ready for you. We have cots. We have refrigerators. “The children are almost entirely boys,” says one of the nurses. “No one knows why. It’s been documented, but a lot of people out there still don’t realize it.” The little boys are all from sweet-sounding places—Janesville and Appleton—little heartland towns with giant landfills, agricultural runoff, paper factories, Joe McCarthy’s grave (Alone, a site of great toxicity, thinks the Mother. The soil should be tested).

  All the bald little boys look like brothers. They wheel their IVs up and down the single corridor of Peed Onk. Some of the lively ones, feeling good for a day, ride the lower bars of the IV while their large, cheerful mothers whiz them along the halls. Wheee!

  The Mother does not feel large and cheerful. In her mind, she is scathing, acid-tongued, wraith-thin, and chain-smoking out on a fire escape somewhere. Beneath her lie the gentle undulations of the Midwest, with all its aspirations to be—to be what? To be Long Island. How it has succeeded! Strip mall upon strip mall. Lurid water, poisoned potatoes. The Mother drags deeply, blowing clouds of smoke out over the disfigured cornfields. When a baby gets cancer, it seems stupid ever to have given up smoking. When a baby gets cancer, you think, Whom are we kidding? Let’s all light up. When a baby gets cancer, you think, Who came up with this idea? What celestial abandon gave rise to this? Pour me a drink, so I can refuse to toast.

  The Mother does not know how to be one of these other mothers, with their blond hair and sweatpants and sneakers and determined pleasantness. She does not think that she can be anything similar. She does not feel remotely like them. She knows, for instance, too many people in Greenwich Village. She mail-orders oysters and tiramisu from a shop in SoHo. She is close friends with four actual homosexuals. Her husband is asking her to Take Notes.

  Where do these women get their sweatpants? She will find out.

  She will start, perhaps, with the costume and work from there.

  She will live according to the bromides. Take one day at a time. Take a positive attitude. Take a hike! She wishes that there were more interesting things that were useful and true, but it seems now that it’s only the boring things that are useful and true. One day at a time. And at least we have our health. How ordinary. How obvious. One day at a time. You need a brain for that?

  While the Surgeon is fine-boned, regal, and laconic—they have correctly guessed his game to be doubles—there is a bit of the mad, overcaffeinated scientist to the Oncologist. He speaks quickly. He knows a lot of studies and numbers. He can do the math. Good! Someone should be able to do the math! “It’s a fast but wimpy tumor,” he explains. “It typically metastasizes to the lung.” He rattles off some numbers, time frames, risk statistics. Fast but wimpy: the Mother tries to imagine this combination of traits, tries to think and think, and can only come up with Claudia Osk from the fourth grade, who blushed and almost wept when called on in class, but in gym could outrun everyone in the quarter-mile fire-door-to-fence dash. The Mother thinks now of this tumor as Claudia Osk. They are going to get Claudia Osk, make her sorry. All right! Claudia Osk must die. Though it has never been mentioned before, it now seems clear that Claudia Osk should have died long ago. Who was she anyway? So conceited: not letting anyone beat her in a race. Well, hey, hey, hey: don’t look now, Claudia!

  The Husband nudges her. “Are you listening?”

  “The chances of this happening even just to one kidney are one in fifteen thousand. Now given all these other fac
tors, the chances on the second kidney are about one in eight.”

  “One in eight,” says the Husband. “Not bad. As long as it’s not one in fifteen thousand.”

  The Mother studies the trees and fish along the ceiling’s edge in the Save the Planet wallpaper border. Save the Planet. Yes! But the windows in this very building don’t open and diesel fumes are leaking into the ventilating system, near which, outside, a delivery truck is parked. The air is nauseous and stale.

  “Really,” the Oncologist is saying, “of all the cancers he could get, this is probably the best.”

  “We win,” says the Mother.

  “Best, I know, hardly seems the right word. Look, you two probably need to get some rest. We’ll see how the surgery and histology go. Then we’ll start with chemo the week following. A little light chemo: vincristine and—”

  “Vincristine?” interrupts the Mother. “Wine of Christ?”

  “The names are strange, I know. The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called ‘dactinomycin.’ People move the D around to the front.”