What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

by Cohen, Alice Eve

  I performed the twelve characters of The Balinese Frog Prince while watching and judging myself from a distance. “I’ve always wanted a child,” said the Old Farmer’s Wife after giving birth to a frog. “We will raise you as if you were a regular little boy.” Watching my performance from the ceiling, I derided myself for not being able to love my newborn as fully as the Old Farmer’s Wife loved her baby frog. Making an audience laugh had always been a euphoric experience, but the audience’s laughter seemed to have nothing to do with me. The bright lights were colorless. The lively audience was lifeless.

  When it was over I apologized to the producer for my lackluster performance. He looked surprised and claimed he wasn’t aware of a problem. I cabbed home and got in bed, pulling the covers over my head.

  I didn’t want to perform again. Neither did I want to write again—writing a children’s novel or play or picture book required a buoyancy and sense of humor I no longer had. I found little joy this winter in teaching my class. I couldn’t imagine ever jogging again—my body was so heavy and stiff, it hurt to move. I was a failure this time around at parenting. I was too depressed to call my friends, and felt too guilty to have intimate conversations with Michael and Julia that might reveal my unforgivable ambivalence.

  Our old apartment had impressive water pressure and an illegal showerhead from the pre-water-conservation-law days. The hot rainfall was my five-minute daily escape into torrential forgetfulness.

  Late one night, I broached the adoption question. “Since Eliana is quite possibly handicapped, shouldn’t we consider . . .”

  The subject didn’t achieve the status of a conversation. Michael was furious that I was still contemplating adoption. His angry clarity was an unexpected relief, finally releasing me from the broken record that kept skipping back to the same agonized uncertainty.

  The adoption door closed, I called Sasha the social worker to thank her for all her help. I told her we’d made up our mind to keep the baby, promised to make a tax-deductible contribution to Spence-Chapin, and asked her not to call again.

  I hung up the phone, closed my eyes, inhaled and exhaled slowly, silently talking myself into believing the obvious, impossible, astonishing truth: “We are a family of four. . . . I have two daughters.”

  My tiny, emaciated baby Eliana had scoliosis, which made her spine curve to the right like the letter C. Her short right leg might prevent her from ever walking. She was having a hard time eating or growing. In my not-knowing, when she was inside me, I neglected her, harmed her. Now she was so quiet. She demanded nothing but needed everything. I wanted to give her everything she needed, but there was so much I didn’t think I could do, so much I used to be able to do, that I hoped I would rediscover someday. What could I do for her? . . . I could . . . I would give my life to protect her. I could do that.

  I’d expected breastfeeding to be a great bonding experience, but there were all those dopey tubes and the daily comedy of errors of tape coming off nipples and formula spilling on Eliana’s head. Instead, I bonded with Eliana when she napped on my belly, her cheek on my chest, where I imagined her listening to my heartbeat, our bodies completing each other like they had been for nine months. For the duration of the nap, I loved her. It was very simple. If only I could extend that love. That simple, peaceful, unfettered love.

  Grandma Daisy

  In mid-January, Michael’s mother arrived from New Orleans, to help take care of the girls and give me time to work while Michael was in Brussels for a week. He’d canceled all his touring in Eliana’s first month, but he was committed to this international conference for Arthur Andersen LLP, the gigantic global accounting firm, which in the last year had become his most consistent freelance client.

  We’d visited Daisy several times in her modest home in New Orleans East where Michael grew up, most recently in May when Michael, Julia, and I went to the New Orleans Jazz Fest and I nearly fainted in the heat, unaware that I was pregnant. I was very fond of Daisy, and we were generally tolerant of each other’s different worldviews. Michael and I had a running joke that she would surreptitiously try to baptize Julia by sprinkling water on her head when we weren’t looking.

  I loved Daisy’s accent, a blend of her rural Mississippi childhood and five decades in New Orleans. Michael, who had intentionally dropped his New Orleans accent in college to avoid being branded with the stereotypes associated with the Deep South, made fun of my attempts to imitate Daisy’s voice.

  “My mother doesn’t sound like Blanche Dubois.”

  “To me she does.”

  Daisy took care of Eliana and Julia while I edited Play by Play, which needed a lot of attention for me to get the next issue out on time. I was in a lot of physical pain and sad most of the time—grateful that Daisy let me be quiet and sad for as many hours a day as I needed. She blessed every meal and thanked Jesus for everything, above all for our “miracle baby,” but she didn’t expect me or Julia to pray with her. I knew that she was aware of some of the tumultuous decisions made and unmade during the pregnancy, and I expected her to judge me. But she didn’t—or if she did, she kept it to herself. And as far as I could tell, she didn’t try to baptize the girls.

  Daisy loved to take care of people. She was exceptionally good with babies. I was feeling clueless in this arena, and I watched her carefully. She knew how to rock Eliana to sleep, just how close to hold Eliana’s face when she talked to her, how to wipe away baby shit without irritating her skin. She knew how to play with an infant, a skill I’d forgotten. She sang Eliana lullabies and folk songs I’d never heard. She sat on the floor and entertained Eliana on her lap while playing board games with Julia.

  “How’s it working out with Mom?” asked Michael, calling from Belgium.

  “She’s great. We’re all fine. Freezing. How’s Belgium?”

  “It’s a beautiful resort, the food is amazing—I’ll bring home some Belgian chocolate. It’s surreal how much they spend at these conferences. I used to feel guilty about how much I charged, till I saw a planning budget and realized they spend more on balloons than on my weekly fee. But this is a really hard conference.”

  Michael was essentially a corporate court jester. I teasingly told him he was like the trickster in traditional rituals, who made fun of the king while simultaneously reinforcing the status quo. His job at these training conferences was to teach Arthur Andersen culture and to lampoon it at the same time, with these absurdly funny, faux-corporate characters he invented. Through his comic monologues and audience participation bits, he illuminated Arthur Andersen culture—from the tax code to the dress code and everything in-between—while skewering the very precepts he instructed his audience to follow. The firm used these training conferences to acculturate new hires and seasoned employees into Arthur Andersen’s particular worldview. They appreciated Michael’s ability to transform dry information into crowd-pleasing entertainment. His corporate audiences always thought he was hilarious. He was accustomed to being a huge hit.

  “It’s our first European conference, and we’re just figuring out this audience. The first two days totally bombed. All the bits that worked so well in Chicago—the Europeans think it’s dumb and American. So we’ve been adjusting, and we’re finally getting it.

  “And here’s an interesting and unexpected development—one of the partners talked to me last night about possibly joining the firm.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I—think so? Maybe. Yeah, I think so. Wouldn’t happen for a while. Not for a year probably. But if it works out, I’d be working out of the New York office. So I’d be home more. I could walk to work.”

  “Wow. That sounds really . . . complicated. Really good! But complicated. Will you still be Michael if you work for Andersen full time, or will you be like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”

  “Who knows? The last two Januarys I was working in El Paso, creating theater with children of Mexican American migrant farmworkers. How did I end up here?”

  �
��Maybe you could still work in El Paso some of the time.”

  “Yeah, not likely. But this will be good, working in the New York office. I won’t be touring so much. You want me to be home more, right?”

  I don’t know the answer. Yes, of course I want Michael to be home more. I miss him. I need his help with the girls. I asked him to find work that allowed him to be home more, and he’s being incredibly responsive and responsible. But will real Michael—funny, cynical, ethical, penniless-by-choice, loner, edgy Michael—survive, or will he be selling his soul to the company, replaying the life of his dad who worked at an office job he hated for forty years and then died, a scenario Michael has dreaded? I don’t know the answer.

  “I’d love it if you were home more. I miss you.”

  “I miss you and the girls a lot.”

  Daisy walked Julia to school each morning and forged instant friendships with moms in the school yard and with every shop-keeper in a three-block radius, which was as far as she traveled in New York City. She would have enjoyed being a more adventurous tourist, but she was ill-equipped by wardrobe and by constitution for the cold. By midweek, there were five inches of snow on the ground and the windchill was below zero. Daisy walked through an icy wind to the department store three blocks away and came home with the first wool coat and flannel nightgown she had ever owned.

  At the end of the frigid week, Daisy came down with a terrible cold. I gave her hot tea and chicken soup and Advil, and helped her get a cab back to the airport. She had to take care of her ailing sister in Mississippi and her grandbabies in St. Louis.

  “I’ll see y’all in June!” she said.

  Home Remedies

  “I have a gift for you,” said my friend Sue Schulman. “I’ve arranged for my yoga teacher to give you private yoga classes at home.”

  Parvati was her Sanskrit name. She was small, slim, and muscular, about thirty years old, with close-cropped black hair, black lashes, pale skin, and velvety lips—incredibly sexy. It took me by surprise, not that I was attracted to a woman, but that I had any sexual feelings at all. I watched her take off her puffy down jacket and several layers of oversized sweaters, revealing her lithe body in a tank top and sweatpants. There was a lot of touching in my yoga sessions. In my postpregnancy, post-three months of bed rest, post-forty-seven-hours-of-labor, still anemic state, my body was a foreign thing. Before the pregnancy, I’d been strong and flexible. Now my muscles were atrophied and stiff. My body still hurt.

  Parvati was gentle but forceful, pressing her body on mine while I was standing, sitting, lying down, using her weight to stretch my legs, my back, my shoulders. I told Parvati, Sue, and Michael that the yoga was restoring my sense of physical well-being. I didn’t mention that it was reawakening my libido. I loved her smell, the feel of her hair on my skin when she stood behind me and positioned my pelvis, my shoulders, my neck. The yoga positions were quite painful, but she was intent upon activating my dormant body.

  For one hour a week, I practiced yoga poses, which I allowed myself to think of as Parvati embraces. Between her visits, I practiced on my own. Each time I saw her she pressed me into deeper bends, opened my legs in wider stretches.

  Eliana was also promised home visits from personal trainers, compliments of New York State’s Early Intervention Program.

  On a blustery January day, Michael and I took Eliana to be evaluated for services, at the Upper East Side office of Stepping Stone Day School, our Early Intervention administrator. She lay on a gym mat strewn with baby toys, surrounded by a team of five therapists and social workers who carefully observed her and took copious notes. So much attention focused on such a tiny baby! The disparity in cubic space occupied by the observers and the observed was remarkable.

  Eliana did what babies do: Reach. Grasp. Look. Make sounds. Then, one by one, the therapists did what Early Intervention evaluators do: Move a toy from side to side, three inches from her face; make eye contact; put a finger in her palm; put a finger in her mouth.

  Michael and I held our breath when the cognition specialist spoke. “Eliana presents as an adorable and alert baby girl. . . . No cognitive delays. . . . Educational services are not needed.”

  Michael and I exhaled.

  The other therapists had more complicated diagnoses and goals. They reminded me of the good fairies surrounding newborn Sleeping Beauty’s bed, trying to counteract the damage caused by the Evil Fairy, who wished for Baby to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. Eliana’s evaluators waved their wands and made wishes that would offset the less-than-perfect hand Eliana had been dealt.

  “I wish you a straight spine!” said the physical therapy evaluator. (Anyway, that was how I understood her Latin-infused, anatomy-textbook shop-talk about correcting Eliana’s scoliosis and minimizing skeletal damage resulting from her asymmetry.)

  “I wish you a better suck and a stronger tongue!” (my rough translation), said the speech, language, oral motor, and feeding therapy evaluator, after withdrawing her rubber-gloved finger from Eliana’s mouth.

  They sent us home with written reports: “Eliana presents as an adorable baby girl with a C-curve from her longer (left) to her shorter (right) side, and severe scoliosis,” wrote the physical therapist. “Eliana presents as an adorable baby girl with evidence of palsy on the right side of her face, which interferes with oral motor functioning, nursing of most immediate concern,” wrote the speech, language, oral motor, and feeding therapist. Three therapists would be assigned to her case. Home visits from the physical therapist and oral motor therapist would begin in a month.

  The ubiquitous “Eliana presents as an adorable baby girl” appeared on every doctor’s and therapist’s report Michael and I read, often followed by “failure to thrive.” I thought Eliana was adorable, but I doubted that adorableness was an objectively observable quality. Did “adorable” carry any useful medical information? I suspected it was the scrap thrown to anxious parents, hungry for good news, any good news, about their special needs child. “Adorable” was comfort food for a starving parental ego.

  A Diagnosis

  When Eliana was four weeks old, Dr. Melina Christopoulos, the miniskirted endocrinologist, called us.

  “I’d like you to come in and meet my colleague Dr. Abigail Arbogast. When I examined Eliana on day she was born, I noticed that she had some unusual features I think Dr. Arbogast would be interested in seeing. I will make point of being there. It will be nice to see you.”

  Dr. Arbogast left us in the waiting room for three hours, so we were feeling somewhat defensive going in, even though Dr. Christopoulos visited us periodically, wearing a red leather miniskirt and matching thigh-high boots.

  “This baby has all of the CLASSIC Russell-Silver syndrome features. Lookit that! Doctor Christopoulos, do ya see those curved PINKY FINGERS! Lookit the small EARS, wouldja lookit that pointy CHIN. . . .”

  Dr. Arbogast wore cowboy boots, a denim skirt, and a string tie with a turquoise pendant over her denim shirt. Her Texas accent completed the middle-aged cowgirl effect.

  “And look at this leg length DISCREPANCY. That is the most EXTREME ASYMMETRY I have ever, ever seen on a Russell-Silver child. Usually you don’t notice the asymmetry till they’re older. Wouldja look at this baby lyin’ on her back, she is shaped like a C, a classic C-curve as a result of her asymmetry. This is quite remarkable. Yes! Unmistakable!

  “Mom, Dad, your baby, Elayna, has Russell-Silver SYNDROME.”

  “So we gathered,” said Michael.

  “I am very pleased that you brought her to me. I am an expert on Russell-Silver syndrome. I have patients with Russell-Silver syndrome who come to see me from around the world. The little girl who you passed when you were walking in, she and her family fly in to see me from Michigan several times a year. You’re gonna bring Elayna to see me every month. Do you realize, Mom and Dad, how lucky you are to have little Elayna—”

  “It’s Eliana,” Michael corrected her.

  “Do you know how
lucky you are that Elayna has been diagnosed at such a young age? There are some RSS children who are not diagnosed till they’re seven or eight months old, and by then a great deal of damage has already been done.”

  “What kind of damage?” asked Michael.

  Dr. Arbogast answered Michael’s question with relish. She relished everything about Russell-Silver syndrome, every gosh darn little bit of it.

  “These children have digestive difficulties, you see. They are unable to eat, utterly UNABLE, because they have such severe REFLUX that they develop EATING AVERSIONS. And you see, these Russell-Silver children would rather STARVE to death than take nourishment. For many of my patients, the only way to nourish them is through a FEEDING TUBE, so we operate on them as babies or as toddlers, and if they won’t eat by day, we put that food into their BELLIES at night through a FEEDING TUBE. Which is why I am so PLEASED that Dr. Melina Christopoulos here identified ELAYNA at birth, so that we can try to AVOID having to use the feeding TUBE. Dad, what is the matter with your wife?”

  “She’s having a hard time taking this all in,” he said—an understatement, as I was on the verge of falling apart.

  “What’s so hard to take in, Mom? You’ve raised a child before. This is no different. You just raise this baby the way you would raise any other baby, just that she’s got a DWARFING syndrome, and we’ll be giving her growth HORMONES to make her grow, and I think, because her leg length discrepancy is so EXTREME, you’ll probably be looking at some leg-lengthening SURGERIES throughout her childhood, which could mean a lot of time in and out of WHEELCHAIRS, but it’s worth it, as long as there’s no NEUROLOGICAL DAMAGE. And then a lot of these children have LEARNING DISORDERS, nobody knows why but they do, so they tend to go to special schools, and one of my RSS patients is autistic. Dad, what is the matter with your wife?”