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Ira had been divorced for six months and still couldn't get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition was how he explained it. "I'm going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed," he told his friends. The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew?) cinched the blowsy fat of his finger, which had grown twistedly around it like a fucking happy challah. "Maybe I should cut the whole hand off and send it to her," he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. "She'd understand the reference." Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his dove-gray wedding tux—hanging it on a tall stick in his back yard, scarecrow style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. "That sucker went up really fast," he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught, too—and before he was taken overnight to the local lockdown facility. "So fast. Maybe it was, I don't know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid."
"You'll remove that ring when you're ready," Mike said now. Mike's job approving historical-preservation projects on old houses left him time to take a lot of lenient-parenting courses and to read all the lenient-parenting books, though he had no children himself. He did this for project-applicant-management purposes. "Here's what you do for your depression. I'm not going to say lose yourself in charity work. I'm not going to say get some perspective by watching our country's news every night and contemplating those worse off than yourself, those, say, who are about to be blown apart by bombs. I'm going to say this: Stop drinking, stop smoking. Eliminate coffee, sugar, dairy products. Do this for three days, then start everything back up again. Bam. I guarantee you, you will be so happy."
"I'm afraid," Ira said softly, "that the only thing that would make me happy right now is snipping the brake cables on Marilyn's car."
"Spring," Mike said helplessly, though it was still only the end of winter. "It can really hang you up the most."
"Hey. You should write songs. Just not too often." Ira looked at his hands. Actually, he had once got the ring off in a hot bath, but the sight of his finger, naked as a child's, had terrified him and he had shoved the ring back on.
He could hear Mike sighing and casting about. Cupboard doors closed loudly. The refrigerator puckered open then whooshed shut. Ira knew that Mike and Kate had had their troubles—as the phrase went—but their marriage had always held. "I'd divorce Kate," Mike had once confided, "but she'd kill me."
"Look," Mike suggested, "why don't you come to our house Sunday for a little Lent dinner. We're having some people by, and who knows?"
"Who knows?" Ira asked.
"Yes—who knows."
"What's a Lent dinner?"
"We made it up. For Lent. We didn't really want to do Mardi Gras. Too disrespectful, given the international situation."
"So you're doing Lent. I'm unclear on Lent. I mean, I know what the word means to those of us of the Jewish faith. But we don't usually commemorate these transactions with meals. Usually there's just a lot of sighing."
"It's like a pre-Easter Prince of Peace dinner," Mike said slowly. "You're supposed to give things up for Lent. Last year, we gave up our faith and reason. This year, we're giving up our democratic voice, our hope."
Ira had already met most of Mike's goyisheh friends. Mike himself was low-key, tolerant, self-deprecating to a fault. A self-described "ethnic Catholic," he once complained dejectedly about not hav-ing been cute enough to be molested by a priest. "They would just shake my hand very quickly," he said. Mike's friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on to use the phrase "strictly within the framework of."
"Kate has a divorcée friend she's inviting," Mike said. "I'm not trying to fix you up. I really hate that stuff. I'm just saying come. Eat some food. It's almost Easter season and—well, hey, we could use a Jew over here." Mike laughed heartily.
"Yeah, I'll reënact the whole thing for you," Ira said. He looked at his swollen ring finger again. "Yessirree. I'll come over and show you all how it's done."
Ira's new house—though it was in what his real-estate agent referred to as "a lovely, pedestrian neighborhood," abutting the streets named after Presidents, and boasting instead streets named after fishing flies (Caddis, Hendrickson, Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear Road)—was full of slow drains, leaky gas burners, stopped-up sinks, and excellent dust for scrawling curse words. Marilyn blows sailors. The draftier windows Ira had duct-taped up with sheets of plastic on the inside, as instructed by Homeland Security; cold air billowed the plastic inward like sails on a ship. On a windy day it was quite something. "Your whole house could fly away," Mike said, looking around.
"Not really," Ira said lightly. "But it is spinning. It's very interesting, actually."
The yard had already grown muddy with March and the flower beds were greening with the tiniest sprigs of stinkweed and quack grass. By June, the chemical weapons of terrorism aimed at the heartland might prove effective in weeding the garden. "This may be the sort of war I could really use!" Ira said out loud to a neighbor.
Mike and Kate's house, on the other hand, with its perfect lines and friendly fussiness, reeking, he supposed, of historical-preservation tax credits, seemed an impossible dream to him, something plucked from a magazine article about childhood memories conjured on a deathbed. Something seen through the window by the Little Match Girl! Outside, the soffits were perfectly squared. The crocuses were like bells, and the Siberian violets like grape candies scattered in the grass. Soon their prize irises would be gorgeously crested cockatoos along the side yard. Inside, the smell of warm food almost made him weep. With his coat still on, he rushed past Kate to throw his arms around Mike, kissing him on both cheeks. "All the beautiful men must be kissed!" Ira exclaimed. After he'd got his coat off and wandered into the dining room, he toasted with the champagne that he himself had brought. There were eight guests there, most of whom he knew to some degree, but really that was enough. That was enough for everyone. They raised their glasses with him. "To Lent!" Ira cried. "To the final days!" And, in case that was too grim, he added, "And to the Resurrection! May it happen a little closer to home next time! Jesus Christ!" Soon he drifted back into the kitchen and, as he felt was required of him, shrieked at the pork. Then he began milling around again, apologizing for the crucifixion. "We really didn't intend it," he murmured. "Not really, not the killing part? We just kind of got carried away? You know how spring can get a little crazy, but, believe me, we're all really, really sorry."
Kate's divorced friend was named Zora and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn't blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a pair of scissors (in what Ira recognized as post-divorce hysteria: "How long have you been divorced?" he later asked her. "Eleven years," she replied) Ira could see that she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose; thick lashes that spiked out, wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mixture of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title "Women from Venus, Men from Penis."
Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself. When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally nice. And so Zora's laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.
Immediately, he sent her a postcard, a photograph of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote: Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn, he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitable ruin—a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.
But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? The whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings: graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife's full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife produce and star in a fabulous one of her own he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.
He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of van Gogh's room in Arles. Beneath the clock face of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the "g"s and "f"s. It read, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's. Wasn't that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no "too," no emphasized you, just exactly the same words thrown back at him like some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—"You bark at them," Marilyn used to say—was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora's lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling "Z"—as in Zorro. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew? He had to lie down.
He had Bekka for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to the Cartoon Network. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, as the cartoons flashed on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but he tried his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every visit, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week, Bekka had said to him, "When you and Mommy were married, we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you're divorced and we always have spaghetti."
"Which do you like better?" he'd asked.
"Neither!" she'd shouted, summing up her distaste for everything, marriage and divorce. "I hate them both."
Tonight, he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of "Justice League," eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. "Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny."
"And a bunny?" Ira said. When the family was still together, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, "Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!" There'd been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew that Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bath-time reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.
"A dog and a bunny," Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit's bloody head in its mouth.
"So, what do you think about that?" he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.
Bekka shrugged and chewed. "Whatever," she said, her new word for "You're welcome," "Hello," "Goodbye," and "I'm only eight." "I really just don't want all his stuff there. His car already blocks our car in the driveway."
"Bummer," Ira said, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore."
"I don't want a stepfather," Bekka said.
"Maybe he could just live on the steps," Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.
"Besides," she said, "I like Larry better. He's stronger."
"Who's Larry?" Ira said, instead of "bummer."
"He's this other dude," Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a "dudette."
"Bummer," Ira said. "Big, big bummer."
He phoned Zora four days later, so as not to seem pathetically eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. "Hi, Zora? This is Ira," he said, and then waited—narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say?—for her response.
"Yes. Ira Milkins."
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who you are."
Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. "We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate's?" His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.
"Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh—Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy."
"Yeah, the Jew. That was me." Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on. There was a man of theatre for you.
"That was a nice dinner," she said.
"Yes, it was."
"I usually skip Lent completely."
"Me, too," Ira said. "It's just simpler. Who needs the fuss?"
"But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."
Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.
"But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."
Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger. Mom. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the Homo sapiens working Jewish mother—but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.
"What kind of home do you run?" he asked.
"Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."
Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I love pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.
"Actually, I have a teen-age son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teen-ager, everything changes."
Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teen-ager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.
"Well, would you like to meet for a drink?" Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of weariness and the cheery pseudo-professionalism of someone in the dully familiar position of being single and dating.
"Yes," Ira said. "That's exactly why I called."
"You can't imagine the daily drudgery of routine pediatrics," Zora said, not touching her wine. "Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Wope. Here's an exciting one: juvenile-onset diabetes. Day after day, you have to look into the parents' eyes and repeat the same exciting thing—'There are a lot of viruses going around.' I thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they'd gone into such a depressing field they all said, 'Because the kids don't get depressed.' That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don't get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children's books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog."
"Now, what's a hedgehog, exactly?" Ira was eying her full glass and his own empty one. "I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers."
"They're—well, what does it matter, if they're all wearing little polka-dot clothes, vests and hats and things?" she said irritably.
"I suppose," he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts, like "Why are these things called napkins rather than lapkins?" He tried to focus on the visuals, on her pumpkin-colored silk blouse, which he hesitated to compliment her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had threatened to call off their wedding because he had too strenuously admired the fabric of the gown she was having made; then he had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of "mourning dove," a color he had read about in a wedding magazine. "Are you homosexual?" she had asked. "You must tell me now. I won't make the same mistake my sister did."
Perhaps Zora's irritability was only job fatigue. Ira himself had creative hankerings. Though his position was with the Historical Society's human-resources office, he liked to help with the society's exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show about the state's first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.
"What happens in your hedgehog tale?" Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he now wished he hadn't ordered. He was coveting Zora's wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While other people's cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, on her Honda Zora had a large bumper sticker that said, "Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy, greenish-blue meat is bad for you."
"The hedgehog tale? Well," Zora began, "the hedgehog goes for a walk because he is feeling sad—it's based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house with a sign on it that says, 'Welcome, Hedgehog: This could be your new home,' and because he's been feeling sad the thought of a new home appeals to him. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators—well, I'll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that."
"I don't know about that family of alligators."
She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak. "Every family is a family of alligators," she said. (Later, she would tell him that she'd been "emotionally incested" by her father. "But you turned out so well!" Ira would exclaim. "Daughters who are close to their fathers turn into achievers," Zora said. "That's been statistically shown!")
"Alligators. Well—that's certainly one way of looking at it." Ira glanced at his watch.
"Yeah. To get back to the book. It gives me an outlet. I mean, my job's not terrible. Some of the kids are cute. But some are impossible, of course. Some are disturbed, and some are just spoiled and ill-behaved. It's hard to know what to do. We're not allowed to hit them."
"You're 'not allowed to hit them'?" He could see that she had now made some progress with her wine.
"I'm from Kentucky," she said.
"Ah." He drank from his water glass, stalling.
She chewed thoughtfully. Merlot was beginning to etch a ragged, scabby line in the dried skin of her bottom lip. "It's like Ireland but with more horses and guns."
"Not a lot of Jews down there." He had no idea why he said half the things he said. Perhaps this time it was because he had once been a community-based historian, digging in archives for the genealogies and iconographies of various ethnic groups, not realizing that other historians generally thought this a sentimental form of history, shedding light on nothing; and though shedding light on nothing didn't seem a bad idea to him, when it became available he had taken the human-resources job.
"Not too many," she said. "I did know an Armenian family, growing up. At least I think they were Armenian."
When the check came, she ignored it, as if it were some fly that had landed and would soon be taking off again. So much for feminism. Ira pulled out his state worker's credit card and the waitress came by and whisked it away. There were, he was once told, four seven-word sentences that generally signalled the end of a relationship. The first was "I think we should see other people" (which always meant another seven-word sentence: "I am already sleeping with someone else"). The second seven-word sentence was, reputedly, "Maybe you could just leave the tip." The third was "How could you forget your wallet again?" And the fourth, the killer of all killers, was "Oh, look, I've forgotten my wallet, too!"
He did not imagine that they would ever see each other again. But when he dropped her off at her house, walking her to the door, she suddenly grabbed his face with both hands, and her mouth became its own wet creature exploring his. She opened up his jacket, pushing her body inside it, against his, the pumpkin-colored silk of her blouse rubbing on his shirt. Her lips came away in a slurp. "I'm going to call you," she said, smiling. Her eyes were wild with something, as if with gin, though she had only been drinking wine.
"O.K.," he mumbled, walking backward down her steps in the dark, his car still running, its headlights bright along her street.
The following week, he was in Zora's living room. It was beige and white with cranberry accents. On the walls were black-framed photos of her son, Bruno, at all ages. There were pictures of Bruno lying on the ground. There were pictures of Bruno and Zora together, the boy hidden in the folds of her skirt, Zora hanging her then long hair down into his face, covering him completely. There he was again, naked, leaning in between her knees like a cello. There were pictures of him in the bath, though in some he was clearly already at the start of puberty. In the corner of the room stood perhaps a dozen wooden sculptures of naked boys that Zora had carved herself. "One of my hobbies, which I was telling you about," she said. They were astounding little things. She had drilled holes in their penises with a brace-and-bit to allow for water in case she could someday sell them as garden fountains. "These are winged boys. The beautiful adolescent boy who flies away. It's from mythology. I forget what they're called. I just love their little rumps." He nodded, studying the tight, sculpted buttocks, the spouted, mushroomy phalluses, the long backs and limbs. So: this was the sort of woman he'd been missing out on, not being single all these years. What had he been thinking of, staying married for so long?
He sat down and asked for wine. "You know, I'm just a little gun shy romantically," he said apologetically. "I don't have the confidence I used to. I don't think I can take my clothes off in front of another person. Not even at the gym, frankly. I've been changing in the toilet stalls. After divorce and all."
"Oh, divorce will do that to you totally," she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. "It's like a trick. It's like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, 'Stand there.' And so you do. Then boom." From a drawer in a china hutch, she took out a pipe, loaded it with hashish from a packet of foil, then lit it, inhaling. She gave it to him.
"I've never seen a pediatrician smoke hashish before."
"Really?" she said, with some difficulty, her breath still sucked in.
The nipples of her breasts were long, cylindrical, and stiff, so that her chest looked as if two small plungers had flown across the room and suctioned themselves there. His mouth opened hungrily to kiss them.
"Perhaps you would like to take off your shoes," she whispered.
"Oh, no," he said.
There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew people but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.
"Where are you?" Ira said in the dark. He decided that in a case such as this he could feel a chaste and sanctifying distance. It wasn't he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it. Zora's candles on the nightstand were heated to clear pools in their tins. They flickered smokily. He tried not to think about how, before she had even lit them and pulled back the bedcovers, he had noticed that they were already melted down to the thickness of buttons, their wicks blackened to a crisp. It was not good to think about the previous burning of the bedroom candles of a woman who had just unzipped your pants. Besides, he was too grateful for those candles—especially with all those little wonder boys in the living room. Perhaps by candlelight his whitening chest hair would not look so white. This was what candles were made for: the sad, sexually shy, out-of-shape, middle-aged him. How had he not understood this in his marriage? Zora herself looked ageless, like a nymph, with her short hair, although once she got his glasses off she became a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or the Blob, except that she smelled good and, but for the occasional rough patch, had the satiny skin of a girl.
She let out a long, spent sigh.
"Where did you go?" he asked again anxiously.
"I've been right here, silly," she said, and pinched his hip. She lifted one of her long legs up and down outside the covers. "Did you get off?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Did you get off?"
" 'Get off'?" Someone else had asked him the same question once, when he stopped in the jetway to tie his shoe after debarking from a plane.
"Have an orgasm. With some men it's not always clear."
"Yes, thank you. I mean, it was—to me—very clear."
"You're still wearing your wedding ring," she said.
"It's stuck, I don't know why—"
"Let me get at that thing," she said, and pulled hard on his finger, but the loose skin around his knuckle bunched up and blocked the ring, abrading his hand.
"Ow," he finally said.
"Perhaps later with soap," she said. She lay back and swung her legs up in the air again.
"Do you like to dance?" he asked.
"Sometimes," she said.
"I'll bet you're a wonderful dancer."
"Not really," she said. "But I can always think of things to do."
"That's a nice trait."
"You think so?" and she leaned in and began tickling him.
"I don't think I'm ticklish," he said.
"Oh." She stopped.
"I mean, I probably am a little," he added, "just not a lot."
"I'd like you to meet my son," she said.
"Is he here?"
"Sure. He's under the bed. Bruny?" Oh, these funny ones were funny. "No. He's with his dad this week."
The extended families of divorce. Ira tried not to feel jealous. It was quite possible that he was not mature enough to date a divorced woman. "Tell me about his dad."
"His dad? His dad is another pediatrician, but he was really into English country dancing. Where eventually he met a lass. Alas."
Ira would put that in his book of verse. Alas, a lass. "I don't think anyone should dance in a way that's not just regular dancing," Ira said. "It's not normal. That's just my opinion."
"Well, he left a long time ago. He said he'd made a terrible mistake getting married. He said that he just wasn't capable of intimacy. I know that's true for some people, but I'd never actually heard anyone say it out loud about themselves."
"I know," Ira said. "Even Hitler never said that! I mean, I don't mean to compare your ex to Hitler as a leader. Only as a man."
Zora stroked his arm. "Do you feel ready to meet Bruno? I mean, he didn't care for my last boyfriend at all. That's why we broke up."
"Really?" This silenced him for a moment. "If I left those matters up to my daughter, I'd be dating a beagle."
"I believe children come first." Her voice now had a steely edge.
"Oh, yes, yes, so do I," Ira said quickly. He felt suddenly paralyzed and cold.
She reached into the nightstand drawer, took out a vial, and bit into a pill. "Here, take half," she said. "Otherwise we won't get any sleep at all. Sometimes I snore. Probably you do, too."
"This is so cute," Ira said warmly. "Our taking these pills together."
He staggered through his days, tired and unsure. At the office, he misplaced files. Sometimes he knocked things over by accident—a glass of water or the benefits manual. The buildup to war, too, was taking its toll. He lay in bed at night, the moments before sleep a kind of stark acquaintance with death. What had happened to the world? It was mid-March now, but it still did not look like spring, especially with the plastic sheeting duct-taped to his windows. When he tried to look out, the trees seemed to be pasted onto the waxy dinge of a still wintry sky. He wished that this month shared its name with a less military verb. Why "March"? How about a month named Skip? That could work.
He got a couple of cats from the pound so that Bekka could have some live pet action at his house, too. He and Bekka went to the store and stocked up on litter and cat food.
"Provisions!" Ira exclaimed.
"In case the war comes here, we can eat the cat food," Bekka suggested.
"Cat food, heck. We can eat the cats," Ira said.
"That's disgusting, Dad."
Ira shrugged.
"You see, that's one of the things Mom didn't like about you!" she added.
"Really? She said that?"
"Sort of."
"Mom likes me. She's just very busy."
"Yeah. Whatever."
He got back to the cats. "What should we name them?"
"I don't know." She studied the cats.
Ira hated the precious literary names that people gave pets—characters from opera and Proust. When he first met Marilyn, she had a cat named Portia, but he had insisted on calling it Fang.
"I think we should name them Snowball and Snowflake," Bekka said, looking glassy-eyed at the two golden tabbies. In the pound, someone with name-tag duty had named them "Jake" and "Fake Jake," but the quotation marks around their names seemed an invitation to change them.
"They don't look like a snowball or a snowflake," Ira said, trying not to let his disappointment show. Sometimes Bekka seemed completely banal to him. She had spells of inexplicable and vapid conventionality. He had always wanted to name a cat Bowser. "How about Bowser and Bowsee?"
"Fireball and Fireflake," Bekka tried again.
Ira looked at her, he hoped, beseechingly and persuasively. "Are you sure? Fireball and Fireflake don't really sound like cats that would belong to you."
Bekka's face clenched tearily. "You don't know me! I only live with you part time! The rest of the time I live with Mom, and she doesn't know me, either! The only person who knows me is me!"
"O.K., O.K.," Ira said. The cats were eying him warily. In time of war, never argue with a fireball or a fireflake. Never argue with the food. "Fireball and Fireflake."
What were those? Two divorced middle-aged people on a date?
"Why don't you come to dinner?" Zora phoned one afternoon. "I'm making spring spaghetti, Bruny's favorite, and you can come over and meet him. Unless you have Bekka tonight."
"What is spring spaghetti?" Ira asked.
"Oh, it's the same as regular spaghetti—you just serve it kind of lukewarm. Room temperature. With a little fresh basil."
"What should I bring?"
"Perhaps you could just bring a small appetizer and some dessert," she said. "And maybe a salad, some bread if you're close to a bakery, and a bottle of wine. Also an extra chair, if you have one. We'll need an extra chair."
"O.K.," he said.
He was a little loaded down at the door. She stepped outside, he thought to help him, but she simply put her arms around him. "I have to kiss you outside. Bruny doesn't like to see that sort of thing." She kissed Ira in a sweet, rubbery way on the mouth. Then she stepped back in, smiling, holding the door open for him. Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually better-looking than other people. Dating proved it! The aluminum foil over his salad was sliding off, and the brownies he had made for dessert were still warm underneath the salad bowl, heating and wilting the lettuce. He attempted a familiar and proprietary stride through Zora's living room, though he felt neither, then dumped everything on her kitchen table.
"Thank you," she said, and placed her hand on the small of his back. He was deeply attracted to her. There was nothing he could do about that.
"It smells good," he said. "You smell good." Some mix of garlic and citrus and baby powder overlaid with nutmeg. Her hand wandered down and stroked his behind. "I've got to run back out to the car and get the appetizer and the chair," he said, and made a quick dash. When he came back in, handed her the appetizer—a dish of herbed olives (he knew nothing about food; someone at work had told him you could never go wrong with herbed olives: "Spell it out. H-e-r b-e-d. Get it?")—and then set the chair up at Zora's little dining table for two (he'd never seen one not set up for at least four), Zora looked brightly at him and whispered, "Are you ready to meet Bruny?"
Ready. He did not know precisely what she meant by that. It seemed that she had reversed everything, that she should be asking Bruno, or Bruny, if he was ready to meet him. "Ready," he said.
There was wavery flute-playing behind a closed door down the hallway. "Bruny?" Zora called. The music stopped. Suddenly a barking, howling voice called, "What?"
"Come out and meet Ira, please."
There was silence. Nobody moved at all for a very long time. Ira smiled politely. "Oh, let him play," he said.
"I'll be right back," Zora said, and she headed down the hall to Bruno's room, knocked on the door, then went in, closing it behind her. Ira stood there for a while, then he picked up the Screwpull, opened the bottle of wine, and began to drink. After several minutes, Zora returned to the kitchen, sighing, "Bruny's in a little bit of a mood." Suddenly a door slammed and soft, trudging footsteps brought Bruno, the boy himself, into the kitchen. He was barefoot and in a T-shirt and gym shorts, his legs already dark with hair. His eyebrows sprouted in a manly black V over the bridge of his nose. He was not tall but he was muscular, broad-shouldered, and thick-limbed. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall with weary belligerence.
"Bruny, this is Ira," Zora said. Ira put his wineglass down and extended his hand. Bruno unfolded his arms, but did not shake hands. Instead, he thrust out his chin and scowled. Ira picked up his wineglass again.
"Good to meet you. Your mother has said a lot of wonderful things about you."
Bruno looked at the appetizer bowl. "What's all this grassy gunk all over the olives." It was not really a question, so no one answered it. Bruno turned back to his mother. "May I go back to my room now?"
"Yes, dear," Zora said. She looked at Ira. "He's practicing for the woodwind competition next Saturday. He's very serious."
When Bruno had tramped back down to his room, Ira leaned in to kiss Zora, but she pulled away. "Bruny might hear us," she whispered.
"Let's go to a restaurant. Just you and me. My salad's no good."
"Oh, we couldn't leave Bruno here alone. He's only sixteen."
"I was working in a steel factory when I was sixteen!" Ira decided not to say. Instead, he said, "Doesn't he have friends?"
"He's between social groups right now," Zora said defensively. "It's difficult for him to find other kids who are as intellectually serious as he is."
"We'll rent him a movie," Ira said. "Excuse me, a film. A foreign film, since he's serious. A documentary. We'll rent him a foreign documentary!"
"We don't have a VCR."
"You don't have a VCR?" At this point, Ira found the silverware and helped set the table. When they sat down to eat, Bruno suddenly came out and joined them. The spring spaghetti was tossed in a large glass bowl with grated cheese. "Just how you like it, Brune," Zora said.
"So, Bruno. What grade are you in?"
Bruno rolled his eyes. "Tenth," he said.
"So college is a ways off," Ira said, accidentally thinking out loud.
"I guess," Bruno said.
"What classes are you taking in school, besides music?" Ira asked, after a long awkward spell.
"I don't take music," Bruno said with his mouth full. "I'm in All-State Woodwinds."
"All-State Woodwinds! Interesting! Do you take any courses like, say, American history?"
"They're studying the Amazon rain forest yet again," Zora said. "They've been studying it since preschool."
Ira slurped with morose heartiness at his wine—he had spent too much of his life wandering about in the desert of his own drool; oh, the mealtime games he had played on his own fragile mind—and some dribbled on his shirt. "For Pete's sake, look at this." He dabbed at it with his napkin and looked up at Bruno with an ingratiating grin. "Someday this could happen to you," Ira said, twinkling in Bruno's direction.
"That would never happen to me," Bruno muttered.
Ira continued dabbing at his shirt. He began thinking of his book. Though I be your mother's beau, no rival I, no foe, faux foe. He loved rhymes. They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap.
Soon Bruno was gently tapping his foot against his mother's under the table. Zora began playfully to nudge him back, and then they were both kicking away, their energetic footsie causing them to slip in their chairs a little, while Ira pretended not to notice, cutting his salad with the edge of his fork, too frightened to look up. After a few minutes—when the footsie had stopped and Ira had exclaimed, "Great dinner, Zora!"—they all stood and cleared their places, taking the dishes into the kitchen, putting them in a messy pile in the sink. Ira began halfheartedly to run warm water over them while Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, jostled up against each other, ramming lightly into each other's sides. Ira glanced over his shoulder and saw Zora step back and assume a wrestler's starting stance as Bruno leaped toward her, heaving her over his shoulder, then ran into the living room, where, Ira could see, he dumped her, laughing, on the couch.
Should Ira join in? Should he leave?
"I can still pin you, Brune, when we're on the bed," Zora said.
"Yeah, right," Bruno said.
Perhaps it was time to go. Next time, Ira would bring over a VCR for Bruno and just take Zora out to eat. "Well, look at the clock! Good to meet you, Bruno," he said, shaking the kid's large limp hand. Zora stood, out of breath. She walked Ira out to his car, helping to carry his chair and salad bowl. "It was a lovely evening," Ira said. "And you are a lovely woman. And your son seems so bright and the two of you are adorable together."
Zora beamed, seemingly mute with happiness. If only Ira had known how to speak such fanciful baubles during his marriage, surely Marilyn would never have left him.
He gave Zora a quick kiss on the cheek—the heat of wrestling had heightened her beautiful nutmeg smell—then kissed her again on the neck, near her ear. Alone in his car on the way home, he thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments that were made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Middle East was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before, when he first got the divorce papers from Marilyn—now, there was shock and awe for you; there was decapitation—but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn't the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with these randomly seized tidbits.
He started up again, slowly; it was raining now, and, at a shimmeringly lit intersection of two gas stations, one QuikTrip, and a KFC, half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers were holding up signs that read "Honk for Peace." Ira fell upon his horn, first bouncing his hand there, then just leaning his whole arm into it. Other cars began to do the same, and soon no one was going anywhere—a congregation of mourning doves, but honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility, windshield wipers clearing their fan-shaped spaces on the drizzled night glass. No car went anywhere for the change of two lights. For all its stupidity and solipsism and self-consciously scenic civic grief, it was something like a gorgeous moment.
Despite Bekka's reading difficulties, despite her witless naming of the cats, Ira knew that his daughter was highly intelligent. He knew it from the time she spent lying around the house, bored and sighing, saying, "Dad? When will childhood be over?" This was a sign of genius! As were other things. Her complete imperviousness to the adult male voice, for instance. Her scrutiny of all food. With interest and hesitancy, she studied the antiwar signs that bestrewed the neighborhood lawns. " 'War Is Not the Path to Peace,' " she read slowly aloud. Then added, "Well—duh."
" 'War Is Not the Answer,' " she read on another. "Well, that doesn't make sense," she said to Ira. "War is the answer. It's the answer to the question 'What's George Bush going to start real soon?' "
The times Bekka stayed at his house, she woke up in the morning and told him her dreams. "I had a dream last night that I was walking with two of my friends and we met a wolf. But I made a deal with the wolf. I said, 'Don't eat me. These other two have more meat on them.' And the wolf said, 'O.K.,' and we shook on it and I got away." Or, "I had a strange dream last night that I was a bad little fairy."
She was in contact with her turmoil and with her ability to survive. How could that be anything less than emotional brilliance?
One morning she said, "I had a really scary dream. There was this tornado with a face inside? And I married it." Ira smiled. "It may sound funny to you, Dad, but it was really scary."
He stole a look at her school writing journal once and found this poem:
**{: .break one} ** Time moving Time standing still. What is the difference? Time standing still is the difference. **
He had no idea what it meant, but he knew that it was awesome. He had given her the middle name Clio, after the Muse of history, so of course she would know very well that time standing still was the difference. He personally felt that he was watching history from the dimmest of backwaters—a land of beer and golf, the horizon peacefully fish-gray. With the windows covered in plastic sheeting, he felt as if he were inside a plastic container, like a leftover, peering into the tallow fog of the world. Time moving. Time standing still.
The major bombing started on the first day of spring. "It's happening," Ira said into Mike's answering machine. "The whole thing is starting now."
Zora called and asked him to the movies. "Sure," Ira said. "I'd love to."
"Well, we were thinking of this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but Bruno would also be willing to see the Mel Gibson one." We. He was dating a tenth grader now. Even in tenth grade he hadn't done that. Well, he'd see what he'd missed.
They picked him up at six-forty, and, as Bruno made no move to cede the front seat, Ira sat in the back of Zora's Honda, his long legs wedged together at a diagonal, like a lady riding sidesaddle. Zora drove carefully, not like a mad hellcat at all, as for some reason he had thought she would. As a result, they were late for the Mel Gibson movie and had to make do with the Schwarzenegger. Ira thrust money at the ticket-seller—"Three, please"—and they all wordlessly went in, their computerized stubs in hand. "So you like Arnold Schwarzenegger?" Ira said to Bruno as they headed down the red-carpeted corridor.
"Not really," Bruno muttered. Bruno sat between Zora and Ira, and together they passed a small container of popcorn back and forth. Ira jumped up twice to refill it out in the lobby, a kind of relief for him from Arnold, whose line readings were less brutish than they used to be but not less brutish enough. Afterward, heading out into the parking lot, Bruno and Zora reënacted body-bouncing scenes from the film. When they reached the car, Ira was again relegated to the back seat. "Shall we go to dinner?" he called up to the front.
Both Zora and Bruno were silent.
"Shall we?" he tried again, cheerfully.
"Would you like to, Bruno?" Zora asked. "Are you hungry?"
"I don't know," Bruno said, peering gloomily out the window.
"Did you like the movie?" Ira asked.
Bruno shrugged. "I don't know."
They went to a barbecue place and got ribs and chicken. "Let me pay for this," Ira said, though Zora hadn't offered.
"Oh, O.K.," she said.
Afterward, Zora dropped Ira at the curb, where he stood for a minute, waving, in front of his house. He watched them roll down to the end of the block and disappear around the corner. He went inside and made himself a drink with cranberry juice and rum. He turned on the TV news and watched the bombing. Night bombing, so you could not really see.
A few mornings later was the first day of a new month. The illusion of time flying, he knew, was to make people think that life could have more in it than it actually could. Time flying could make human lives seem victorious over time itself. Time flew so fast that in ways it failed to make an impact. People's lives fell between its stabbing powers like insects between raindrops. "We cheat the power of time with our very brevity!" he said aloud to Bekka, feeling confident that she would understand, but she just kept petting the cats. The house had already begun to fill with the acrid-honey smell of cat pee, though neither he nor Bekka seemed to mind. Spring! One more month and it would be May, his least favorite. Why not a month named Can? Or Must! Well, maybe not Must. Zora phoned him early, with a dour tone. "I don't know. I think we should break up," she said.
"You do?"
"Yes, I don't see that this is going anywhere. Things aren't really moving forward in any way that I can understand. And I don't think we should waste each other's time."
"Really?" Ira was dumbfounded.
"It may be fine for some, but dinner, a movie, and sex is not my idea of a relationship."
"Maybe we could eliminate the movie?" he asked desperately.
"We're adults—"
"True. I mean, we are?"
"—and what is the point, if there are clear obstacles or any unclear idea of where this is headed, of continuing? It becomes difficult to maintain faith. We've hardly begun seeing each other, I realize, but already I just don't envision us as a couple."
"I'm sorry to hear you say that." He was now sitting down in his kitchen. He could feel himself trying not to cry.
"Let's just move on," she said with gentle firmness.
"Really? Is that honestly what you think? I feel terrible."
"April Fool's!" she cried out into the phone.
His heart rose to his throat then sank to his colon then bobbed back up close to the surface of his rib cage where his right hand was clutching at it. Were there paddles nearby that could be applied to his chest?
"I beg your pardon?" he asked faintly.
"April Fool's," she said again, laughing. "It's April Fool's Day."
"I guess," he said, gasping a little, "I guess that's the kind of joke that gets better the longer you think about it."
He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but now more than ever he was convinced that there should be strong international laws against their being too physically attractive. The public's safety was at risk!
"How are you liking Zora?" Mike asked over a beer, after they'd mulled over the war and the details of Dick Cheney's tax return, which had just been printed in the paper. Why wasn't there a revolution? Was everyone too distracted with tennis and sex and tulip bulbs? Marxism in the spring lacked oomph. Ira had just hired someone to paint his house, so now on his front lawn he had two signs: "War Is Not the Answer" in blue and, on the other side of the lawn, in black and yellow, "Jenkins Painting Is the Answer_."_
"Oh, Zora's great." Ira paused. "Great. Just great. In fact, do you perhaps know any other single women?"
"Well, it's just that she might not be all that mentally well." He thought about the moment, just the night before, at dinner, when she'd said, "I love your mouth most when it does that odd grimace thing in the middle of sex," and then she contorted her face so hideously that Ira felt as if he'd been struck. Later in the evening, she'd said, "Watch this," and she'd taken her collapsible umbrella, placed its handle on the crotch of her pants, then pressed the button that sent it rocketing out, unfurled, like a cartoon erection. Ira did not know who or what she was, though he wanted to cut her some slack, give her a break, bestow upon her the benefit of the doubt—all those paradoxical clichés of supposed generosity, most of which he had denied his wife. He tried not to believe that the only happiness he was fated for had already occurred, had been with Bekka and Marilyn, when the three of them were together. A hike, a bike ride—he tried not to think that this crazy dream of family had shown its sweet face just long enough to torment him for the rest of his life, though scarcely long enough to sustain him through a meal. Torturing oneself with the idea of family happiness while not actually having a family, he decided, might be a fairly new circumstance in social history. People had probably not been like this a hundred years ago. He imagined an exhibit at the society. He imagined the puppets.
"Sanity's conjectural," Mike said. His brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Zora's very attractive, don't you think?"
Ira thought of her beautiful, slippery skin, the dark, sweet hair, the lithe sylph's body, the mad, hysterical laugh. She had once, though only briefly, insisted that Man Ray and Ray Charles were brothers. "She is attractive," Ira said. "But you say that like it's a good thing."
"Right now," Mike said, "I feel like anything that isn't about killing people is a good thing."
"This may be about that," Ira said.
"Oh, I see. Now we're entering the callow, glib part of spring."
"She's wack, as the kids say."
Mike looked confused. "Is that like wacko?"
"Yes. But not like Waco—at least not yet. I would stop seeing her, but I don't seem to be able to. Especially now, with all that's happening in the world, I can't live without some intimacy, companionship, whatever you want to call it, to face down this global insanity."
"You shouldn't use people as human shields." Mike paused. "Or—I don't know—maybe you should."
"I can't let go of hope, of the illusion that something is going to come out of this romance. I'm sorry. Divorce is a trauma, believe me, I know. It's death within life! Its pain is a national secret! But that's not it. I can't let go of love. I can't live without some scrap of it. Hold my hand," Ira said. His eyes were starting to water. Once, when he was a small child, he had got lost, and when his mother had finally found him, four blocks from home, she'd asked him if he'd been scared. "Not really," he had said, sniffling pridefully. "But then my eyes just suddenly started to water."
"I beg your pardon?" Mike asked.
"I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand," Ira said, but Mike had already taken it.
On the bright side, the hashish was good. The sleeping pills were good. He was walking slowly around the halls at work in what was a combination of serene energy and a nap. With his birthday coming up, he went to the doctor for his triannual annual physical and, having mentioned a short list of nebulous symptoms, he was given dismissive diagnoses of "benign vertigo," "pseudo gout," or perhaps "migraine aura," the names, no doubt, of rock bands. "You've got the pulse of a boy, and the mind of a boy, too," his doctor, an old golfing friend, said.
Health, Ira decided, was notional. Palm Sunday—all these goyim festivals were preprinted on his calendar—was his birthday, and when Zora called he blurted out that information. "It is?" she said. "You old man! Are you feeling undernookied? I'll come over Sunday and read your palm." Wasn't she cute? Damn it, she was cute. She arrived with Bruno and a chocolate cake in tow. "Happy birthday," she said. "Bruno helped me make the frosting."
"Did you, now?" he said to Bruno, patting him on the back in a brotherly embrace, which the boy attempted to duck and slide out from under.
They ordered Chinese food and talked about high school, advanced-placement courses, homeroom teachers, and James Galway (soulful mick or soulless dork, who could decide?). Zora brought out the cake. There were no candles, so Ira lit a match, stuck it upright in the frosting, and blew it out. His wish was a vague and general one of good health for Bekka. No one but her. He had put nobody else in his damn wish. Not the Iraqi people, not the G.I.s, not Mike, who had held his hand, not Zora. This kind of focussed intensity was bad for the planet.
"Shall we sit on Bruno?" Zora was laughing and backing her sweet tush into Bruno, who was now sprawled out on Ira's sofa, protesting in a grunting way. "Come on!" she called to Ira. "Let's sit on Bruno."
Ira began making his way toward the liquor cabinet. He believed there was some bourbon in there. He would not need ice. "Would you care for some bourbon?" he called over to Zora, who was now wrestling with Bruno. She looked up at Ira and said nothing. Bruno, too, looked at him and said nothing.
Ira continued to pour. At this point, he was both drinking bourbon and eating cake. He had a pancreas like a rock. "We should probably go," Zora said. "It's a school night."
"Oh, O.K.," Ira said, swallowing. "I mean, I wish you didn't have to."
"School. What can you do? I'm going to take the rest of the cake home for Bruny's lunch tomorrow. It's his favorite."
Heat and sorrow filled Ira's face. The cake had been her only present to him. He closed his eyes and nuzzled his head into hers. "Not now," she whispered. "He gets upset."
"Oh, O.K.," he said. "I'll walk you out to the car." And there he gave her a quick hug before she walked around the car and got in on the driver's side. He stepped back onto the curb and knocked on Bruno's window to say goodbye. But the boy would not turn. He flipped his hand up, showing Ira the back of it.
"Bye! Thank you for sharing my birthday with me!" Ira called out. Where affection fell on its ass, politeness might rise to the occasion. Zora's Honda lights went on, then the engine, and then the whole vehicle flew down the street.
At the cuckoo private school to which Marilyn had years ago insisted on sending Bekka, the students and teachers were assiduously avoiding talk of the war. Bekka's class was doing finger-knitting while simultaneously discussing their hypothetical stock-market investments. The class was doing best with preferred stocks in Kraft, G.E., and G.M.; watching them move slightly every morning on the Dow Jones was also helping their little knitted scarves. It was a right-brain, left-brain thing. For this, Ira forked over nine thousand dollars a year. Not that he really cared. As long as Bekka was in a place safe from death—the alerts were moving from orange to red to orange; no information, just duct tape and bright, warm, mind-wrecking colors—turning her into a knitting stockbroker was O.K. with him. Exploit the system, man! he himself used to say, in college. He could, however, no longer watch TV. He packed it up, along with the VCR, and brought the whole thing over to Zora's. "Here," he said. "This is for Bruno."
"You are so sweet," she said, and kissed his ear. Possibly he was in love with her.
"The TV's broken," Ira said to Bekka, when she came that weekend and asked about it. "It's in the shop."
"Whatever," Bekka said, pulling her scarf yarn along the floor so the cats could play.
The next time he picked Zora up to go out, she said, "Come on in. Bruno's watching a movie on your VCR."
"Does he like it? Should I say hello to him?"
Zora shrugged. "If you want."
He stepped into the house, but the TV was not in the living room. It was in Zora's bedroom, where, spread out half naked on Zora's bedspread, as Ira had been just a few days before, lay Bruno. He was watching Bergman's "The Magic Flute."
"Hi, Brune," he said. The boy said nothing, transfixed, perhaps not hearing him. Zora came in and pressed a cold glass of water against the back of Bruno's thigh.
"Yow!" Bruno cried.
"Here's your water," Zora said, walking her fingers up his legs.
Bruno took it and placed it on the floor. The singing on the same television screen that had so recently brought Ira the fiery bombing of Baghdad seemed athletic and absurd, perhaps a kind of joke. But Bruno remained riveted. "Well, enjoy the show," Ira said. He hadn't really expected to be thanked for the TV, but now actually knowing that he wouldn't be made him feel a little crestfallen.
On the way back out, Ira noticed that Zora had added two new sculptures to the collection in the living room. They were more abstract, made entirely out of old recorders and wooden flutes, but were recognizably boys, priapic with piccolos. "A flute would have been too big," Zora explained.
At the restaurant, the sound system was playing Dinah Washington singing "For All We Know." The walls, like love, were trompe-l'oeil—walls painted like viewful windows, though only a fool wouldn't know that they were walls. The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things—cheeks, tongues, thymus glands. The candle, like love, flickered, reflected in the brass tops of the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper shakers. He tried to capture Zora's gaze, which seemed to be darting around the room. "It's so nice to be here with you," he said. She turned and fixed him with a smile, repaired him with it. She was a gentle, lovely woman. Something in him kept coming stubbornly back to that. Here they were, two lonely adults lucky to have found each other, even if it was just for the time being. But now tears were drizzling down her face. Her mouth, collecting them in its corners, was retreating into a pinch.
"Oh, no, what's the matter?" He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away to hide her eyes behind it.
"I just miss Bruny," she said.
He could feel his heart go cold, despite himself. Oh, well. Tomorrow was Easter. Much could rise from the dead. Yesterday had been "Good Friday." Was this all cultural sarcasm—like "Labor Day" or "Some Enchanted Evening"?
"Don't you think he's fine?" Ira tried to focus.
"It's just—I don't know. It's probably just me coming off my antidepressants."
"You've been on antidepressants?" he asked sympathetically.
"Yes, I was."
"You were on them when I first met you?" Perhaps he had wandered into a whole "Flowers for Algernon" thing.
"Yes, indeedy. I went on them two years ago, after my 'nervous breakdown.' " Here she raised two fingers, to do quotation marks, but all of her fingers inadvertently sprang up and her hands clawed the air.
He didn't know what he should say. "Would you like me to take you home?"
"No, no, no. Oh, maybe you should. I'm sorry. It's just I feel I have so little time with him now. He's growing up so fast. I just wish I could go back in time." She blew her nose.
"I know what you mean."
"You know, once I was listening to some friends talk about travelling in the Pacific. They left Australia early one morning and arrived in California the evening of the day before. And I thought, I'd like to do that—keep crossing the international date line and get all the way back to when Bruno was a little boy again."
"Yeah," Ira said. "I'd like to get back to the moment where I signed my divorce agreement. I have a few changes I'd like to make."
"You'd have to bring a pen," she said strangely.
He studied her, to memorize her face. "I would never time-travel without a pen," he said.
She paused. "You look worried," she said. "You shouldn't do that with your forehead. It makes you look old." Then she began to sob.
He found her coat and drove her home and walked her to the door. Above the house, the hammered nickel of the moon gave off a murky shine. "It's a hard time in the world right now," Ira said. "It's hard on everybody. Go in and make yourself a good stiff drink. People don't drink they way they used to. That's what started this whole Iraq thing to begin with: it's a war of teetotallers. People have got to get off their wagons and high horses and—" He kissed her forehead. "I'll call you tomorrow," he said, though he knew he wouldn't.
She squeezed his arm and said, "Sleep well."
As he backed out of her driveway, he could see Bruno laid out in a shirtless stupor on Zora's bed, the TV firing its colorful fire. He could see Zora come in, sit down, cuddle close to Bruno, put her arm around him, and rest her head on his shoulder.
Ira brusquely swung the car away. Was this his problem? Was he too old-fashioned? He had always thought he was a modern man. He knew, for instance, how to stop and ask for directions. And he did it a lot! Of course, afterward, he would sometimes stare at the guy and say, "Who the hell told you that bullshit?"
He had his limitations.
He had not gone to a single seder this week, for which he was glad. It seemed a bad time to attend a ceremony that gave thanks in any way for the slaughter of Middle-Eastern boys. He had done that last year. He headed instead to the nearest bar, a dank, noisy dive called Sparky's, where he had often gone just after Marilyn left him. When he was married he never drank, but after the divorce he used to come in even in the mornings for beer, toast, and fried side meat. All his tin-pot miseries and chickenshit joys would lead him once again to Sparky's. Those half-dozen times that he had run into Marilyn at a store—this small town!—he had felt like a dog seeing its owner. Here was the person he knew best in life, squeezing an avocado and acting like she didn't see him. Oh, here I am, oh, here I am! But in Sparky's he knew he was safe from such unexpected encounters. He could sit alone and moan to Sparky. Some people consulted Marcus Aurelius for philosophy about the pain of existence. Ira consulted Sparky. Sparky himself didn't actually have that much to say about the pain of existence. He mostly leaned across the bar, drying a smudgy glass with a dingy towel, and said, "Choose life!" then guffawed.
"Bourbon straight up," Ira said, selecting the barstool closest to the TV, from which it would be hardest to watch the war news. Or so he hoped. He let the sharp, buttery elixir of the bourbon warm his mouth, then swallowed its neat, sweet heat. He did this over and over, ordering drink after drink, until he was lit to the gills. At which point he looked up and saw that there were other people gathered at the bar, each alone on a chrome-and-vinyl stool, doing the same. "Happy Easter," Ira said to them, lifting his glass with his left hand, the one with the wedding ring still jammed on. "The dead are risen! The damages will be mitigated! The Messiah is back among us squeezing the flesh—that nap went by quickly, eh? May all the dead arise! No one has really been killed at all—O.K., God looked away for a second to watch some 'I Love Lucy' re-runs, but he is back now. Nothing has been lost. All is restored. He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps!"
"Somebody slap that guy," said the man in the blue shirt down at the end. ♦


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text:
Second derivative test in Wikipedia says that:
For a real function of one variable:
If the function f is twice differentiable at a stationary point x, meaning that $\ f^{\prime}(x) = 0$ , then:
If $ f^{\prime\prime}(x) < 0$ then $f$ has a local maximum at $x$. If $f^{\prime\prime}(x) > 0$ then $f$ has a local minimum at $x$. If $f^{\prime\prime}(x) = 0$, the second derivative test says nothing about the point $x$, a possible inflection point.
For a function of more than one variable:
Assuming that all second order partial derivatives of $f$ are continuous on a neighbourhood of a stationary point $x$, then:
if the eigenvalues of the Hessian at $x$ are all positive, then $x$ is a local minimum. If the eigenvalues are all negative, then $x$ is a local maximum, and if some are positive and some negative, then the point is a saddle point. If the Hessian matrix is singular, then the second derivative test is inconclusive.
My question is why in the multivariate case, the test requires the second order partial derivatives of $f$ to be continuous on a neighbourhood of $x$, while in the single variable case, it does not need the second derivative to be continuous around $x$? Do both also require that the first derivative and the function itself to be continuous around $x$?
- Similarly, does first derivative test for $f$ at $x$ need $f$ to be continuous and differentiable in a neighbourhood of $x$?
- For higher order derivative test, it doesn't mention if $f$ is required to be continuous and differentiable in a neighbourhood of some point $c$ up to some order. So does it only need that $f$ is differentiable at $c$ up to order $n$?
Thanks for clarification!


text:
Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library
supported the electronic publication of this title.
Text scanned (OCR) by
Yin Tang
Text encoded by Allen Vaughn and Jill Kuhn
First edition, 1999
ca. 15K
Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Source Description:
(title page) Liquor and Lincoln
s. n.
between 1861 and 1865
Call number 4739 Conf. (Rare Book Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH
digitization project, Documenting the American South.
Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as " and " respectively.
All em dashes are encoded as --
Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
Running titles have not been preserved.
Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell check programs.
Languages Used:
LC Subject Headings:
Revision History:
From the Lincoln ursurpation, every lover of Constitutional liberty desires to be free. And every honest patriot, no matter how ardently attached to the Old Union he may have been, now freely offers his life and property, if need be, to secure that freedom. But ardent wishes and patriotic resolves--loud professions of attachment to our Southern Republic, and boastful acclamations of what we can, and mean to do will never secure our independence. God reigns and rules supremely, over nations and individuals alike; and He will permanently prosper no cause, the advocates of which are guilty of a constant disregard of his laws or authority. This He has proclaimed in his Holy Book, and ignore it as we may, it is inexorably true and certain. At one period of our struggle, the God of heaven beheld a nation on its knees, and in answer to their earnest prayers, His unseen hand was outstretched to direct and support our struggling troops on the bloody plains of Manassas, and lead them to victory. But since that memorable day, our people have become vainglorious and boastful--our soldiers profane and licentious; and now God has deserted us, and the tide of fortune has changed, and we are in danger of being overrun. Officers and privates--church members and worldlings, gather around the festive board, and spend the hours and days, in drinking, gambling, and too often, alas! In obscene and profane jocularity. The man who raises his stalwart arm to break the shackles which an earthly Despot would impose on this sunny South, now bows at the shrine of Bacchus, and sells himself to a Despot, who has enslaved both soul and body. While he refuses to submit to the authority of one, who can do no more, that destroy body and property--he is paying his devotions to another, who will do no less than destroy his body and property here, and his immortal soul in hell! And all this is
done, under the specious plea, that whiskey, "prevents disease, increases the energies, protects against cold and heats, AND IS ADVANTAGEOUS TO AN ARMY ABOUT TO ENGAGE IN BATTLE!" In a brief article, it is impossible to give the evidence, which is in the possession of every respectably intelligent physician, to establish the folly and falsehood of these declarations. Suffice it to say, that carefully collected and arranged statistics, prepared by the sanitary officers of the British army through a space of thirty years, establish the following facts:
1. That the Total Abstinence regiments, can endure more labor, more cold, more heat, more exposure, and more privations than those who have their regular grog rations.
2. That they are less liable to fevers, fluxes, pleurisies, colds, chills, rheumatisms, jaundice aud cholera than other regiments.
3. That when attacked by any of these diseases their recovery is much more certain and speedy.
4. That they are much more readily aroused from the effects of concussions and severe wounds, and are far less liable to lockjaw or mortification after wounds.
5. That only about six in the temperance regiments die, from all causes, to ten of the other regiments.
These facts are collected from various fields of observation--from Africa, Canada, Greenland, India, the East Indias, West Indias, and the Crimea. And facts as these are worth all the theories and conjectures, which may be spun out in a thousand years, by the unreliable, and unconsciously suborned witnesses of King Alcohol. For it is the easiest matter in the world for any man to convince himself, that whatever he wishes to do is really the best thing he can do.
How sad it is to reflect, that fathers and mothers have sent their sons into the army of independence, to be watched over and protected by faithful and competent officers, and those officers should become the instruments of initiating these ingenuous youths into the vices of drinking and gambling? And yet it is no less true than sad.
But how is it that "a little whiskey is beneficial to an army about to engage in battle?" Medical writers tell us; that it increases thirst, unduly excites the mind and body for a time, to be speedily followed by a corresponding depression. It can not then be of any benefit physically. The soldier
has to obey the orders of his officers, and his obedience is rather mechanical than intellectual. So it must be alone morally beneficial! But have the defenders of the South so far degenerated already, as to require the aid of whiskey to arouse them to a sense of their obligations to country, friends and home? Have they no higher incentive to action than low, brute passion, which is alone excited by whiskey? Heed they not the appeals of oppressed sons and daughters from every Southern State, who have been driven from their homes by the cruel invader? Do they feel no patriotic impulse animating their souls, and nerving their arms to strike for the honor and liberty of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, and all that the heart holds dear, unless they are under the influence of whiskey? Is it possible that State pride--love of home and country, a high sense of honor and a patriotic devotion to principle, are not enough to nerve every arm and fir every heart, without the aid of whiskey? Oh! Shame upon my countrymen if this be so!
Better had we lowed the neck to Lincoln's yoke, than made ourselves the willing slaves of groveling passions, and depraved appetites. All the honors and glories of a hundred battles fought and won, cannot efface from the fair escutcheon of the South, this foul and degrading moral pollution. Nor, so long as it lasts, can the prayers of all the saints, and the blood and fat of all the goats and bullocks from a thousand hill, propitiate the favor of heaven, or secure in our behalf the interposition of a benignant Providence.
This evil must be abated--this nefarious habit must be broken, or our liberties will be lost, and our country ruined. No wonder the bones of thousands of our brave defenders have been left to bleach on their native hills, when drunken ignoramuses, under the appellation of "Surgeon," have delt them more numerous and deadly blows than the missiles of the enemy. No wonder that disasters have befallen our arms, when in defiance of the mandates of heaven and the melting appeals of suffering humanity, reeling inebriates, are appointed to lead our brave cohorts to the charge. No wonder that God has forsaken us when we raise the puny arm of rebellion against his authority, and proclaim, that we will not have this man, Christ Jesus, to reign over us. Nor should any one wonder to see our fields desolated during
the present year by blighting droughts, when we are consuming the bountiful supplies of Providence, in past years, in "distilled damnation," to destroy the souls and bodies of our people!
Every thing worthy of a manly consideration in our land demands of our people, our army and our Government to abate this evil. The mothers and maidens from very hill and vale in the South, demand it. The thousands of treasure squandered by drinking, drunken, stupid, thoughtless, callous legislators demand it. The alarming increase of bloody crime in the capital of the Confederacy demands it. The waining fortunes of bleeding Liberty, as she bends with weeping eyes over her struggling sons, demand it. The present welfare and future hopes of the entire South, in earnest and eloquent tones, importunately and imperiously demand it. The clouds of ghosts wrested daily from the bodies of our brave defenders by this monster evil, pointing to their bleaching bones as they lie scattered by every by-path of the army, demand it. Our duty to ourselves, our country and our God demands it. "For if a nation forsakes the statutes and commandments of God," he has declared, "he will cast them out of his sight and make them a proverb and a by-word among all nations. And to him who asks, why bath the Lord done this unto this land, it shall be answered because they forsook the Lord God, therefore hath he brought all this evil upon them." "But if you will call upon my name," saith Jehovah, "humble yourselves, pray and seek my face and turn from your wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, forgive your sins, and heal your land." WHAT GOD SPEAKETH, LET A STRUGGLING NATION HEED!
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finger fun:
4 comments
Love your blog Caroline!Perfect mix of arts/crafts and all things makeup! Just spend a while reading through your posts, you have inspired me to get creative and do something arty, and I've just got out my Models Own Ibiza Mix to wear this weekend :) xxxReplyDelete
Ah brilliant! I'm in love with that polish! I'm just about to tackle a new nail art design tonight, fingers crossed!ReplyDelete
hoping to make something crafty this weekend, I'll try and post something soon :D xx
Really like the nail decal's where did you get them from? xReplyDelete
I got them all on eBay! I cant remember the name of the shop though?! If you search on google for moustache nail transfers/decals you should be able to find them pretty easily though! I saw some on etsy as well :) xxDelete
thanks for stopping by- I love reading your comments! I'll always reply so check back in a few days if you've asked me any questions x


text:
Hearing of Commissioner-designate Didier Reynders
The Civil Liberties and Legal Affairs committees questioned Didier Reynders, Belgian candidate for the Justice portfolio, on rule of law and modernising justice systems.
Hearing of Vice-President-designate Maroš Šefčovič
Constitutional Affairs and Legal Affairs MEPs questioned the candidate for the Inter-institutional Relations and Foresight portfolio.
Parliament's committees elect chairs and vice-chairs


text:
CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. – Brian "Bj" Wade scored both of his goals in the second half to help the Gators defeat Wheelock in a competitive 2-0 contest.
The first half was a very fast paced game for the Gators as they took twenty-five shot attempts compared to only three by the Wildcats. Jordan Bernard managed to save fifteen shots in the opening period and finished with seventeen for Wheelock.
The Gators didn't let their slow start effect their moral but instead within first forty-five seconds into the second half the Gators finally connected on their first goal with a free kick by Stan Park to Daniel Alanis who then gave a cross pass setting up Wade's goal. At the fifty-five minute mark Wade then got a clear steal then took it himself all the way for his second goal of the day. The Gators remained aggressive and on the attack throughout the entire second half ending the game with forty-two shot attempts. The day was relatively easy for goal keeper Oscar Estrada who finished the game with three saves on three shot on goals
Wheelock now drops to 0-3 on the season with their next game on Wednesday September 30th at Mount Ida College. Kickoff will be at 7:00 p.m.
Pine Manor now improves to 5-2 with their next challenge against Vermont Tech on Sunday September 27th. It will be a doubleheader with the Women's game at 12:00 p.m. followed by the Men's at 2:00 p.m.


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30+ Top-Notch Tool Sheds
Functional storage can be beautiful too with these stylish outdoor structures that feature everything from mod to cottage looks.
Double Door Delight
This traditional style garden shed from Garden Affairs is designed for smaller yards and can function as either a potting shed or a storage unit for lawnmowers and other yard tools. The pitched roof, glazing bars and double doors add visual appeal to the structure.
Utilitarian Ideal
Super fancy utility shed, man cave or mini-office, this sustainable creation from Modern-Shed can fulfill a variety of needs for the yard and is made from materials certified by the Forest Stewardship Council which promotes high environmentally conscious standards in wood products.
Compact Style
This white and gray beauty is a re-imagining of the backyard shed which can be adapted to your space needs with sizes ranging from 6 feet by 8 feet up to 12 feet by 28 feet. This model in the Signature series from Studio Shed also features a 36 inch steel door and CloudLite aluminum clad double pane windows.
Art Object
There is no reason why your garden shed can't be the visual centerpiece of your yard. This unique potting shed, created by Art/Harrison Interiors, works as both a garden folly and an all-purpose tool/utility shed.
Sneak Peek
A behind-the-scenes look at the elegant potting shed created by Art/Harrison Interiors displays the inner shelves and wall space for tools and garden paraphernalia.
The Carport Shed
If you prefer some additional functionality with your storage shed, this blue with white trim model from Tuff Shed comes with a carport.
Wood Worship
Ideally suited for city yards and compact spaces, the Iroko Box is a stylish alternative to standard prefab sheds. The premium softwood frame of white pine with hardwood cladding includes 19mm tongue and groove floors and roofs that will keep the space dry and water resistant.
Petite Retreat
Whether you choose to use this eco-friendly prefabricated structure as a private backyard getaway or utility shed, you can customize this shed to your preference with such options as solar panels or denim insulation which contains 85 percent post-industrial recycled fibers.
Metal Fortress
The customization features for many prefab contemporary sheds are endless as you can see from this unique structure which sports Galvalume siding (55 percent aluminum-zinc alloy coated sheet metal) and a solid steel door to ensure the longevity of the shed.
Blue Transom
Standing out against the brilliant fall foliage is this spacious shed with double wide doors topped with a transom.
Part garden shelter, part potting shed, the RHS Centenary Arbour/Tool shed is constructed from pressure treated redwood and is available in several stain finishes. This is a unique combination of garden storage space and private relaxation area where you can enjoy refreshments after a hard day of gardening.
The Secret Tool Shed
Here is a clever idea for those who want their tool shed to blend into the surroundings and not stand out. This imaginative design also houses an air conditioner unit in the base and is easily accessible through a removable panel.
The current concept of garden sheds is changing rapidly and here is a perfect example of a new look for the traditional garden structure which can serve multiple purposes while promoting sustainable materials and design.
Double Duty
What we have here is a 10 foot by 12 foot home office shed alongside a 4 foot by 8 foot mini-storage shed (on the right) in a configuration that is visually striking as well as compact and practical for smaller yards.
Animal Friendly
Believe it or not, some garden sheds and outbuildings are designed specifically for animals such as this dog kennel model.
The Iroko Box Shed
Constructed from premium quality northern European pine, the Iroko Box D sports a sleek, contemporary design that can easily house tools, bicycles, lawnmowers or other garden paraphernalia.
Alternative Office
If you are looking for a genuine "green" shed, you might consider a stylish contemporary structure like this one which can function as a private office or guest room. This shed is made from eco-friendly materials and comes with options like a GreenGrid roof, a modular vegetative roof system that reduces energy costs and helps manage rainwater runoff.
Dayglow Green
One appealing aspect of most contemporary prefabricated sheds is the option to be as creative as you like with color designs such as this Dayglow green creation which is made from such eco-friendly materials as FSC certified lumber and mixed-source recycled metal.
Traditional Favorite
One of the more popular shed models is the Garden Ranch from Tuff Shed with its classic, all-purpose design and wide door access.
Perfectly Posh
If you are looking for a posh shed that will easily fit into a corner of your yard, you might consider the Prima Fifth Avenue shed which is manufactured from 28mm tongue and groove timber and comes with a pyramid roof finished in standard felt shingles.
Cool Cube
Why settle for an unattractive, prefab tool shed when you can highlight your garden with a chic, modernistic design which is also multi-functional and visually alluring?
Red and White Accents
It might look like a little one-room schoolhouse but this red and white toned ranch shed is ideal for garden storage or as an attractive but functional outbuilding.
The Tokyo E Shed
A striking flat roof design and a sliding room for easy access make the Tokyo E shed a popular backyard choice. Clear or frosted glass is available for the door panels and you have the option to paint the structure any color you desire.
The Shed as Guest House
Fitness room, art studio or guest house, this dazzling addition to the yard and garden is typical of the wide variety of prefabricated shed options available today, most of which offer customization from the shape, size and materials used to special features like cedar tongue and groove ceilings and interior partition walls.
Lean on Me
If your storage needs are minimal, you might consider a space efficient shed such as this handsome lean-to model.
The Ashford
Made from slow grown timber from managed forests, the Ashford measures 2.0m x 2.5m and is ideal for housing your tools, bicycles and other garden products. It is also customizable with alternative door and window options.
Trend Setter
Compact yet spacious, this new breed of garden shed is not only a design showcase but also a smart combination of durable materials such as galvanized metal and aluminum as well as sustainable materials such as glue-lam beams and Oriented Strand Boards (OSB).
Dual Purpose
This charming ranch shed can be used as a mini-guest house or storage space while still offering a covered porch space for relaxation.
Prime Emma
Wooden double doors with double glazed frosted glass panels are one of the highlights of the Prima Emma shed but you can also customize that feature and choose from four different stain finish colors.
Backyard Getaway
This sleek model makes a wonderful studio or backyard getaway for the homeowner. and is a more sophisticated re-imagining of the garden shed.
The Garage Shed
Here is a rustic approach to a stand alone garage that incorporates shed capabilities into the wood frame design.


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Released via GrindEthos Records, NJ based riff-rockers Little Vicious are proud to reveal their newest album, Dark Country.
It took two years, but the result is a rock and roll saga that compels any listener to be possessed by the boogie.
Produced by Pete Steinkopf of the Bouncing Souls, Dark Country has already received numerous accolades and definitely doesn't suck.
Listen to it on Spotify or wherever it is you listen to rad riffs.
Stay Vicious.


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Premature Birth
After a premature birth my baby girl had been home for just 9 days when she stopped breathing in my arms. Today is the first year anniversary of that day.
Born prematurely at 29 weeks weighing 2lb 8oz, Amelie spent the first 11 weeks of her life in hospital. She came home on her 40 week due date, the 28th December. Her triplet sisters had come home on the 22nd December, meaning Amelie spent 6 days on her own in hospital, including Christmas Day. It broke my heart that she spent much of those 6 days on her own as we snatched visits to her, between caring for her baby sisters and a then 3 year old brother at home. Each visit she would hold me so tightly, as I did her, and I desperately wanted her home. I asked the nurses to give her extra cuddles in our absence.
Home at Last
We were delighted when she came home on her due date. The relief of being able to care for our babies in their own home, instead of being surrounded by alarms, medical paraphernalia and staff was enormous. I'd happily of never set foot in a hospital again, despite our enormous gratitude to the NHS for saving our lives on more than one occasion.
Looking after 3 babies on a three hourly feed cycle and their big brother was not for the faint hearted. It would take up to two hours to feed them, half an hour to express my milk, leaving just enough time to get ready for the next feed to start. My husband and I grabbed snippets of sleep where we could. Those first few weeks became about survival. We'd occasionally get time to grunt at each other as the days passed in the haze of routine. We were deliriously tired, but deliriously happy, our babies were home and there ensued a beautiful chaos.
The Vulnerability of Premature Babies
The Doctors had warned us of their vulnerability to illness due to suppressed immunity following their premature birth. We did all we could to keep them safe based on their Paediatric consultants advice. Despite this they all became ill and started to drop their feeds. We were particularly worried about Amelie and when David took her to the GP on January 4th, we were advised that her chest sounded clear.
The next morning I felt relief when I managed to get Amelie to take 70ml on her first feed. I thought it meant she was getting better. As David was home I had time to hold Amelie and give her a really good wind whilst he carried on to feed Etta. As I held Amelie with her little chin resting on my shoulder, I became aware that she felt very still.
Amelie Stopped Breathing & My World Stood Still
Everything went into slow motion. David walked into the room at that moment and I stood up and asked him to look at Amelie, explaining that she felt so still. I remember an urgency in his voice as he told me her lips were blue, she's not breathing. I screamed and lifted her into the air to look at her. She was lifeless.
In that moment I dropped her into a backwards motion. As I did so it was as if she took her first breath. I tried to call 999 on my mobile and fumbled to find emergency services. I screamed as I had to enter my passcode to get the keypad up to dial 999. As I did so Amelie stopped breathing again and I dropped her backwards again.
This was to happen several times during the call and I became hysterical. David took the phone off me and informed the operator of what was happening. When the paramedics arrived, Amelie was breathing and pink.
Back to Hospital
David went with Amelie in the ambulance whilst I looked after Etta and Maya. Felix was with his grandparents. Everything felt surreal. I half expected to be told we'd imagined it and that she was fine. Little did I know that she had stopped breathing in the ambulance and they had called her in as a cardiac arrest as they raced her to A&E.
David kept me updated and told me she was being looked after well. The doctor and nurse on duty wouldn't leave her side. The nurse telling David "no lunch today, I'm staying with her – I've got a feeling about this one".
Needing Help to Stay Alive
I continued to believe that Amelie would be sent home that day with an explanation and everything would be ok. The next time David contacted me was to inform me that Amelie was being put into an induced coma and transferred to a paediatric intensive care unit.
Amelie had continued to stop breathing. The doctors were worried that her lungs couldn't cope and whilst she was responding to the staff bringing her back round, they couldn't let her continue as her little body was becoming too tired. Amelie now needed help to stay alive.
Neighbours rallied round and took me to the hospital. When I arrived at the hospital it was to witness a doctor manually operating a machine to breathe for Amelie whilst they waited for the emergency paediatric transfer team. Amelie was being transferred to the nearest PICU bed in Stoke.
No "What Ifs"
I asked the doctor what would have happened if she hadn't been in my arms when she'd stopped breathing. The doctor touched my arm and said "she was in your arms, we don't need to think about what would have happened if she hadn't been". The thought that in normal circumstances I would have had to place her back into her cot sooner in order to feed her sister made me shudder. We were so fortunate that David had been home that day.
As David left with our neighbour, I waited to be transferred to Stoke with Amelie. I couldn't take my eyes off her little body lying there covered in tubes and wires. This was so unfair that she should have had such a short time at home before being back in a hospital fighting for her life. I tried to find a private place to cry, but couldn't find anywhere and broke down in the corridor. A woman came to comfort me.
For 3 days I stayed by Amelie's bedside whilst family helped David at home. During this time Amelie had her lungs drained by a team of physiotherapists several times a day. Tests revealed that she had paraflu.
Brought out of her coma
Amelie had to be brought out of her coma whilst still intubated as they monitored that she was able to breathe for herself. It was distressing for her and I was relieved when doctors said it was safe to remove her ventilation, though I was advised it may not be best for me to observe its removal. To hold my baby in my arms again as she was able to breathe for herself was magical. It meant we were closer to home, again.
On the day I brought Amelie back home, our smallest triplet Maya was blue lighted from our local A&E to the nearest HDU as her health deteriorated. David and I saw each other briefly whilst I said goodbye to Maya as she was taken in the ambulance. I took Amelie and Etta home and David stayed with Maya in the HDU. Amelie cried all night in pain as the morphine left her body. I felt spent, in shock from what had happened and desperately worried about Maya, who was more vulnerable due to a heart condition.
Living with Post traumatic Stress Disorder
Following a life threatening birth trauma at 29 weeks gestation, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Unfortunately, as a family we have experienced several medical traumas since.
I am only able to write about this experience due to undertaking EMDR and CBT therapy. Prior to both, I could not bear to think about the medical traumas we have endured. I lived in a constant state of anxiety as to what was going to happen next. I want to write more about my experience of managing PTSD in the hope that it can help others with similar experiences.
Amelie's surgery
As I write this we are preparing for Amelie to have surgery next week. This is to remove a lump in her neck. Amelie is being fast tracked to surgery as the lump is compromising her airway.
Due to the proximity of the lump to Amelie's airway, we have been informed to call an ambulance in the event of stridor breathing. Despite my best efforts to keep the girls safe from germs and out of hospital this winter, Amelie and Etta both got croup last week and were blue lighted to Birmingham Children's Hospital on Christmas Day with stridor breathing.
Clearly the breathing concerns related to Amelie's lump have meant great anxiety, but thanks to the work I have done through CBT therapy I have been able to take a more mindful approach, living in the day and having an action plan, so I am not overwhelmed by what may happen in the future. As we approach Amelie's operation I am trying to stay mindful, knowing that we will manage it when it happens.
That's perhaps one of the valuable lessons of trauma, it can break you or it can make you stronger: we have a choice. And even if there are times that you feel broken, it doesn't mean you will feel like that the next day. It's through experiences like this that I have truly learnt the meaning of the cliches we grow up hearing: 'what doesn't kill you will make you stronger'. It's true.
During the birth trauma and the ups and downs of the medical traumas since, my girls have kept surviving. In doing so, I keep learning to believe. I have also acquired a magnitude of gratitude to the NHS for the life saving care we have received and the kindness, just the kindness.
Amelie's story
During the last few months I have read about the experiences of others and how they have managed trauma. In particular, I found solidarity and comfort in reading Cathy Rentzenbrink's: A manual for heartbreak. It is enormously refreshing when people of generous spirit are able to share with others, even if its just to say its ok to feel as you do. If I can help another person to feel not alone, then I hope I am able to return some of the kindness I have received.
Most importantly, I want to write about my babies stories so that I can illustrate to them the superhero powers they were born with. I am immensely proud of all that they have achieved in their short lives already.
This is a part of Amelie's story. Amelie, I hope you are as proud of yourself when you read this, as I am of you when I write it.
My beautiful Amelie and your sticky up hair. I love you xxx