by Ann Leary
I decided that first summer of motherhood that even more terrifying than dogs were cats. I had read in one of my British baby-care books that the baby should have plenty of fresh air and that although it’s a good idea to allow the baby to nap in his pram in the garden, the pram must be covered with a protective mesh or screen, to keep cats off. Cats, I learned, will sometimes jump into the pram. Then, always looking for a warm spot to lie down, the cat will choose the baby’s face and smother it to death. Somehow this became inflated in my paranoid mind, and I imagined that Timmy lay in wait for us each afternoon—keeping an eye out for that moment when my back was turned—and then he would pounce into Jack’s pram to suck the very life breath out of his tiny form. I worried that Timmy might sneak into the flat somehow and make his way into Jack’s basket while he was sleeping. I grew to hate Timmy. Sometimes I would encounter him on the stairs, grooming himself, a stiff, arthritic leg extended over his head, his wizened face pausing for a moment to glower at me, before returning to the licking of his matted tail, and I would fix him with a menacing stare. Sometimes I would lift my shoe in his direction, just to give him an idea of how easy it would be for me to send him sailing, head over matted tail, down the staircase. I’m ashamed to say now that one afternoon as he sat on the garden fence eyeballing Jack’s pram with a twitching tail, I plotted his demise. Nobody’ll ever trace the poison back to me, I thought. A cat like Timmy must have a lot of enemies. Or maybe a fall from a window. “I saw him try to jump up onto the windowsill,” I would tell the detective, “but he was unable to catch himself. Poor kitty.”
EIGHTEEN
NORMALLY AN INFANT receives his first inoculations against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio when he’s eight weeks old. When Jack was eight weeks old, he was just being discharged from the hospital and still wasn’t due to be born for another month. The doctors at UCH had told me that he was scheduled for the vaccinations anyway. They said that the National Health Service recommends that preemies receive immunizations on the same schedule following their birth dates as full-term babies. Later, when Jane the health visitor came, she also urged me to schedule the vaccinations at the local clinic as soon as possible. By this time I had done some research. I knew that vaccinations for preemies were somewhat controversial. Immunizations stress the immune system, and a preemie’s immune system is already stressed. I had also read an article theorizing that some SIDS cases seemed to be related to vaccinations. When your baby spends his first two months constantly forgetting to breathe, sudden infant death syndrome becomes a fixation. I don’t think an hour went by in those early months that SIDS didn’t cross my mind. Jack was already at risk, so the idea of injecting him with germs that might make him even more at risk made me wild with fear, and I followed Denis around for days badgering him about the situation.
“Suppose he gets sick from the vaccination and dies, simply because we made the reckless decision to have him vaccinated,” I said the minute Denis woke up one morning.
“What do the doctors say?” Denis asked wearily.
“The doctors!” I replied. “The doctors in this country work for the government. They make decisions based on what is healthiest for the masses. They can’t make exceptions for individual cases like ours.”
“I don’t know how many times I have to say this,” Denis said, “but you’re not a doctor, and these ’doctors of the masses’ have done fine by Jack so far. If we were home, wouldn’t you have him vaccinated? Wouldn’t we have to?”
“I don’t know!” I cried.
“Well, what if we don’t vaccinate him and he catches … whatever …”
“Diphtheria, whooping cough!”
“Whatever,” said Denis impatiently. “How could we live with ourselves then?”
“Well, I’ve already thought of that and it really shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid contact with other people until Jack’s a little older. I could stop taking him to the grocery store and on the bus—”
“Yeah, that’s good because all the diphtheria victims travel by bus,” Denis said. “I think you should do what the doctors suggest.”
The next day I received a phone call from Jane the health visitor, telling me that I should bring Jack to the local clinic the following Wednesday, July 3, for his vaccinations.
“That’s funny,” I said, “July third was Jack’s original due date. I feel like I’ve been a mother forever, and he’s not even supposed to be born yet. He’s so tiny. I don’t know….”
“Just go and get it over with,” said Jane. “They’ll weigh him and everything, and you’ll feel more at ease when it’s over. You’ll be flying home with him before long, and you don’t want him on an international flight with all those germs.”
“All right, all right,” I said, and the next Wednesday I took Jack to the local clinic.
All English councils have a community health clinic with one or more GPs, or general practitioners. The GP performs all duties that most Americans now entrust to specialists like obstetricians, pediatricians, gynecologists, and internists. The GP, like the old-fashioned American country doctor, looks after all the babies and old men and pregnant women in his council, and I imagined that my local GP would be a fatherly Marcus Welby type. I thought it likely that when I arrived at the clinic, a sweet, plump nurse would welcome me into an oak-paneled office, where I would find the doctor seated at an antique desk. He would invite me to sit hearthside in an overstuffed chair and would ask me all about Jack’s health and mine. Then he would administer the vaccinations so gently that Jack would sleep through the whole thing, and when it was all over, he would reassure me with a warm embrace and send me on my way.
I arrived at the clinic at ten o’clock on Wednesday, just as Jane had instructed, and when I walked through the front door, I found myself in a long, narrow hallway. The hallway was lined on both sides with benches that were occupied with women holding babies. It was a rare, bright London morning that I had left outside, and I had trouble adjusting my eyes to the dimness in this windowless, antiseptic space. The other women were reading or breast-feeding and chatting quietly with one another. Some had older children with them, and a few were accompanied by their husbands. I walked along the benches until I came upon a window with a door next to it. Behind the window was a nurse with a clipboard. I told her Jack’s name, and she checked it off a long list and asked me to have a seat. I found a spot on the bench and sat down. Jack, missing the lull of my pace, awoke. I removed him from his pouch and put him to my breast, and I sat with the other mothers and babies and waited. I realized that all these women were here to have their babies vaccinated, and all the babies, except for Jack, appeared to be about two months old. In their company Jack looked like the world’s tiniest eighty-year-old. He still hadn’t acquired the plump baby features that would later cause Caroline, our landlord, to comment that Jack seemed to be growing younger by the day. He had a worried, age-worn look, and I was aware of it only now that I was surrounded by these fleshy full-term babies.
The woman seated next to me was turned slightly away, as she was talking with her neighbor, and her baby was held against her shoulder, facing me. I looked at the baby, and he looked back at me, but he was so close that he could take in only a little of me at a time. First the baby stared seriously at my chin, then looked right at my nose. Then, wobble-headed, he moved his eyes around my face, and when they finally settled on my own eyes, the baby’s face froze for a moment in surprise, and then it lit up with a bright smile of recognition. The baby knew me for what I was, and I smiled back almost involuntarily. I felt obliged to confirm for him our human kinship, and we remained for a moment, eyes locked and smiling. Then he bit his mother’s neck, and she lowered him onto her lap.
We waited for what seemed like hours. The clinic vaccinates babies only once or twice a month, I discovered. I sat there and fretted about the baby with the runny nose on my left and the close air in the waiting hall, and I recalled a chapter in one of my baby books that had w
arned of the dangers of vaccinating a sick baby. What if Jack contracted whatever vile infection the baby next to me carried and then was vaccinated at exactly the same time? Would he survive? Perhaps a bigger baby stood a chance, I thought, but Jack was so little….
Finally Jack’s name was called, and I carried him into the examination room. Marcus Welby wasn’t there. Just a nurse who asked me to undress Jack and place him on a baby scale. He was a whopping six pounds, nine ounces, and I remembered suddenly that today was Jack’s due date—the date he was meant to be born—and I wondered what his real birth weight would have been if he had gone to term. Would he have weighed more or less? I wondered, and as the nurse swabbed Jack’s tiny bicep, the smell of rubbing alcohol brought me back to the SCBU and the alarms and tubes and babies made of skin and bones and little else. I watched the needle approach Jack’s arm. The syringe was loaded with manufactured disease that, I hoped, would ward off the more serious biological plagues of our world, and when the needle pierced his skin—his clean, delicate baby skin—I gasped aloud, then burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
“Don’t worry,” said the nurse. “It’s not the first time I’ve made the mum cry louder than the baby. He must be your firstborn.”
“He is,” I sobbed, and then I carried Jack out of the clinic. We went home and found Denis working in the kitchen. He was writing notes for his act, and when I walked in, I was still teary-eyed. I told Denis about the clinic and the vaccinations. I already felt that Jack seemed somehow weaker, even though he was sound asleep.
“He just doesn’t seem the same,” I said.
“Give him to me.”
I lifted Jack out of his pouch and handed him over. Jack blinked and made a little crying noise and then nodded back off to sleep. Denis held him up and looked him over carefully. He gazed at his face, and then he sniffed his head and kissed his hair.
“He’s fine,” Denis declared. “There’s nothing wrong with him.” Then Denis handed him back to me, and I saw that he really was fine, and I made a silent vow to be like Denis and never read another book or article about pediatrics or neonatology
NINETEEN
BEFORE JACK WAS born, I had never considered myself particularly patriotic, but now just the word “America” made me weak with longing. I was tired of being an obliging guest in a foreign city, tired of laughing at anti-American jokes, and tired of the unattractive aspect of my personality that I hadn’t had a chance to discover before being trapped in a foreign country: It turns out that I’m an inveterate turncoat. It frightens me sometimes to think how hasty I am to join ranks with the other side. Not only did I try to behave as much like a Brit as I possibly could that long summer, but I would usually agree with anyone who had a negative, sarcastic word about the United States. For example, a doctor taking a break outside the unit one day, while Jack was still in the hospital, described to me a film he had seen the night before. The film was The Hunt for Red October.
“Typical Hollywood tripe,” he said.
I said, “Yes, those Hollywood films, they just… suck.”
“Mind you, you know what you’re getting when you put your six pounds down for an American film. You know you’re going to walk out all excited about the special effects and the action scenes, but later you’ll realize that the film was not only mind-numbingly stupid, but the actors don’t know the first thing about acting.”
“I know.” And then I said, “I’m embarrassed to be an American when I see films like The Hunt for Red October. I really am. Give me a good Merchant-Ivory film any day.”
I had actually just seen The Hunt for Red October. I had splurged the previous week and walked down to the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, and I can easily count it as one of the top five most exciting experiences of my life.
Although the multiplex is slowly taking over, there are several grand cinemas left in London, and the Empire is one of them. When you arrive at the box office, the ticket seller provides you with a seating chart and you can choose your seats, just like at a theater box office. Then you make your way into a velvet-draped lobby and find a concession stand that offers both salted and sugared popcorn, a wide array of other snacks, and beer and wine. I hadn’t been out at night in such a long time that I was literally dazzled by the sheer thrill of leaving the dark street and entering such a bright, lively environment. I bought a popcorn and a Coke and climbed the stairs to the balcony seats I had chosen. I was in the first row of the balcony, in my mind the most coveted seats in any theater, and I settled in with my snacks just in time for the commercials and trailers. I never knew advertising could be so entertaining! And then the film began, with a panoramic shot of the sea, and when a submarine surfaced, it sent forth a Dolby-enhanced spray of surf that seemed so real I actually ducked. I felt like an Aboriginal bushman being shown his first movie, and my heart raced, and I realized that my cheeks were sore from smiling. Now, discussing the dismal state of American films with a British doctor, however, I shook my head in disgust at the mere mention of the film.
I realize now how fortunate I am that I never crossed paths with a Hare Krishna or a Moonie—I’m such a ready convert. I always knew that Patty Hearst was innocent. Put in her position, I never could have held out as long as she did. Within minutes of being captured by the Symbionese Liberation Army, I would have said, “Hand me that gun, gorgeous,” to the creepy ringleader, and that would have been me posing in the bank with a jaunty beret.
It wasn’t until Denis and I were living together in Islington that I began to feel I could behave like an American—and behave like Americans we did. Every Thursday was trash-collection day on Thornhill Road, and all the other tenants of that house would carry their week’s supply of garbage down to the road. They would need to make only one trip, as their week’s refuse could fit into a bag so small it looked as if it were carrying a child’s lunch. Our week’s supply of garbage was contained in about twenty industrial-size garbage bags, and on Thursdays we had to devote the better part of the afternoon to its removal. We would put Jack down for a nap and begin the countless trips up and down the stairs until we had removed the last bag and the road in front of the house looked as though it had been barricaded against a nuclear assault. Sometimes we would catch a glimpse of Caroline staring out her window at us, and I would say, “This is embarrassing. We look like such … consumers. Wasteful consumers.”
“So?” Denis would reply.
“Well, everybody has this impression that Americans are wasteful consumers, and I’d hate for people to think …”
“That you’re an American?” Denis laughed. “I’ve got news for you….”
“Maybe I’ll start using cloth diapers. I think that’s why we have so much garbage,” I said.
Denis had to deprogram me in a sense, and he did this by remarking constantly about how inconvenient everything was in England.
“This is a country that is centuries old, whose vast empire once ruled the world. You’d think in all that time they might have been able to come up with a recipe for absorbent toilet paper!” he’d holler from the bathroom.
“Jesus Christ!” he’d say, returning from a late-night gig. “I just took a minicab home, but it was no cab—it was a covered skateboard. I could barely get myself out of the thing.”
“It’s the twentieth century!” he’d bellow from the shower. “We have the technology to make water come out stronger than a fuckin’ trickle. I’m fuckin’ freezing in here!”
BY THE TIME the Fourth of July rolled around, I imagined that if I ever did make it back to my beloved homeland, I would sink trembling to my knees and kiss her hallowed earth. On that day I was watching a documentary about Elvis Presley, and he sang a medley that began with “Dixie” and ended with “God Bless America.” Although the only southern state I’ve ever visited is Florida, when Elvis sang “Dixie,” my heart ached for the old times there, and by the time the King finished his mournful ballad, I was sobbing. Right around t
hen, Queen Elizabeth was visiting the United States and was taken on a tour of a Philadelphia housing project. The press followed her into the home of one of the residents, who decided that the best way to greet a famous queen was to give her a big ol’ bear hug, which sent the queen into a state of shock and was the subject of headlines all over the UK for at least a week. To me the encounter said volumes about British-American relations, and I felt very much like the affable but clueless American woman in the news.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to drink strong cups of brewed coffee and talk on the phone with my mother about nothing important. I wanted to order a sub or a slice to go and drink lemonade made from real lemons and eat fresh corn on the cob. I wanted to meander down a familiar street with my baby in a stroller and know that there was a possibility I might run into an old friend.
An older English doctor I had met at the hospital told me she’d done one year of college in America. She reminisced about the way she had wanted to be able to walk like American girls. “The way they ambled along, swinging their arms—I really wanted to emulate their uninhibited style, but I couldn’t.” Now I wanted, more than anything in the world, to go home and move freely and unabashedly like the American girl I used to be. My American, pre-baby self was recalled in my mind now like a dear, departed friend. Like a dead friend, really, and just as we usually retain only rosy memories of our dead friends, when I thought of my former self, it was always in glowing terms. I recalled with loving affection the carefree young girl who loved dogs and horses and dancing at nightclubs and watching old movies. I remembered how I used to walk home to Charlestown on the North End Bridge after work and how I would smile flirtatiously back at the leering longshoremen and construction workers I passed along the way. How I used to wake up on Sunday and buy coffee and the paper on the corner and stop in the local bakery for hot, fresh-baked sticky buns to take back home to Denis. I remembered the summers when Denis would work comedy clubs on the Cape and how the club owners would put us up in fly-infested cabins for a week and we would swim and eat fried clams and drink beer and stay up all night playing gin rummy and then making love. When I was young, I always thought of myself as worldly and wise beyond my years, but now I was a mother, and I saw my former self as I really was—hopelessly innocent and naïve and unfinished, and I desperately wanted to be that way again.
