When my son feels sad, I bandage his forefinger. I’ve taught him that sadness is a feeling that happens in the right forefinger.
When he’s tired, I put ointment on his elbow and wrap a bandage around it. “Pressure must be applied to the affected area,” I say, “and exhaustion lives in the elbow.” He’s four years old.
When my son lies to me, I tell him that little boys always lie from the palms of their hands.
“Are your palms burning? Your palms will get burning hot if you tell a lie.”
Now he’s eight years old. The lie he’s telling me is that he didn’t steal eggs and put them in his shoes—a bird did it.
“It’s their nest,” he says. “If you move them, they’ll die. Do you want me to be a bird murderer?” He laughs and laughs. I pull his hand from behind his back and then fall on the ground, clutching my hand and screaming. I make the tendons on my neck stand out.
He puts his wet face on mine and says that he’s sorry, that he just wanted to look at the eggs in private. He keeps his fibbing hands far from my body and tries to hold me with his chest.
My son gets a dangerous flu. He’s nine now, but sickness makes him babyish and pliable.
“Where does a fever live?” I ask him, but not because I don’t know. I’m testing him.
He says, “Sickness is located in the feet, and fever in particular resides in the last two toes of my right foot.”
I show him a picture I always keep in my wallet of a baby deer. My son loves baby deer, but it’s a confused, undeveloped love. When I ask him, he isn’t sure if he wants to pet them or shoot them.
“This is the baby deer that will travel to the God of Fever and bargain with him for your health. Can you feel him in your neck, preparing to make the trip to your feet?”
“I feel him,” says my son with bright, hallucinating eyes.
I tell my son the story of the baby deer’s trip down his body, over mountains, across rivers, through caves, stopping at gas stations to refill a Styrofoam cup of ice that he chews to stay awake, and arriving at last at a nondescript cul-de-sac where the God of Fever has taken up residence. The God of Fever lies around all day in an open bathrobe, surrounded by overflowing ashtrays.
“The baby deer must play violent video games with him in order to negotiate your cure—even though he doesn’t believe in violent video games. But sometimes, children push us to compromise our values. That’s just the reality of life.”
When I’m finished telling my story, in which the baby deer wins (and banishes the God of Fever from my son’s body), he’s asleep on the bus, his cheeks jiggling with every pothole and his breathing regular. We’re on a bus to Philadelphia. There’s silence around us. By listening closely, following the story with my son, anyone on board who was sick is now well.
My son is ten. His teacher asks me into school for a special conference about what she believes are some scientific inaccuracies he’s learned about the human anatomy.
“He thinks that one reads a map with one’s stomach. He’s a very sensitive boy, with strong emotions. When his heart hurts, he holds a key chain shaped like a light saber. He tells me that his heart is located in the key chain. This information is incorrect. The heart sits in the middle mediastinum, at the level of thoracic vertebrae T5-T8.”
I tell her, “He loves that key chain. When you push a button, it lights up. Who are you to say that it isn’t his heart?”
“And if he loses the key chain?”
“Then he’ll be in big trouble, because he’ll also have lost his house keys.”
“And when the batteries run down and it no longer lights up?”
“Do I look like a negligent mother? Do I look like I would allow my son’s heart to go dim?”
“The heart is a four-chambered muscle. A key chain is an impractical organ. It can get lost or broken.”
“A four-chambered muscle can’t break in the traditional sense. But hearts do all the time.”
The teacher stands up and paces about the room. “In all my years of teaching, this kind of confusion is simply without precedent.”
“Not at all,” I say. I inform her that the Egyptians put the liver in a Canopic jar but threw out the brain. I tell her that William Harvey believed the spleen was the location of laughter. I say it’s not confusion and it has plenty of precedent.
“But the Egyptians were wrong!” she said.
“Were they? Could you build a pyramid?”
“You can’t argue with modern science!”
“Modern science! One day they say red wine makes you live longer, the next they say it gives you heartworms.”
I tell her about Galenic physiology, the Cuna people of Panama, and the seventh chakra. I tell her she could stand to have a few chakras opened, and I know a guy in Philadelphia if she needs his number. I say it’ll change her life. I point at my eye and say, “Did you know I used to have a lazy eye? Modern science didn’t fix that. What’s your greatest illness? Has any doctor ever helped you? Can everything be opened with a scalpel?
The teacher clutches at her body, disoriented. “What sensations have I ignored?” she says to herself. She forgets about me, in the colossal presence of her unknowable self. She throws me out of her classroom, holding a breast in one fist. “Toys aren’t even allowed in class. You should be glad I’ve made a special exception.”
I go home to my son, who’s still young enough to love me unconditionally. He shows me a picture he’s drawn of the two of us.
He says, “We’re hugging, and instead of wearing our own separate sweaters, we’re wearing a big sweater that we share.” We’ve never done this in real life, but it feels very realistic.
My son turns into an adult I dislike.
I stop being interested in the details of his life, which are depressing or unethical. He rarely calls, except to ask for money, or to complain that many of his current health problems are because I fed him substandard fish as a child.
“You think just because the supermarket puts the grouper on ice that means it’s freshly caught. You were so naive.”
“You turned out fine,” I say, but my palms are burning.
When I take him out to dinner after not having seen him for several months, he spends half the meal mocking the dandruff of a man sitting at the next table. He complains about some technological issues he’s recently had with his stereo system, and expresses little concern for how the loud music affects his neighbors with children.
When the food takes too long, he squeezes an old handkerchief, where I once taught him his hunger resides. He twists it around his fist and bangs it on the table.
I say, “Your table manners are terrible. All the stuff I hoped would stick hasn’t, and all the stuff I never thought would stick, has.”
“You’re a real bitch. I know the truth about the world now, even if you don’t think I do.”
“For example?”
“I know that I hear music with my ears, not with my eyes!”
“So why then, when I took you to Il Trovatore as a boy, did you cry from your eyes and not from your ears?”
“I want my bear back! It belongs in my house!”
He means a large, tacky figurine that my great aunt gave me of a wooden bear playing golf. I disliked this bear but couldn’t throw it out because it was a gift. I made use of it by telling my son (when he was twelve) that it was his sex drive. Or maybe his soul. I can’t remember.
I say, “It works fine where it is. You can’t have the bear.”
“It belongs in my house. It’s mine!”
“It was yours a long time ago. It may not be anymore. That was before you developed disturbing interests. That was before your knife collection, your Churchill biographies. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
My son leaves the restaurant in a rage, and I go home and e-mail my son a picture of the wooden bear with my hand around its neck. Sometimes you have to remind your children to respect you.
My son doesn’t talk to me for two years.
One day while watching the hummingbirds at the feeder, I decide enough is enough and I axe the bear into many little pieces. I use a hatchet that I’ve never needed all the time it sat in the garden shed, although on some level I think I’ve always known how I would use it.
I try to burn the pieces, but the bear’s hat and golf club smolder without catching. I was never good at building fires, not even when I was a little girl at camp. I give up.
For a day or two, nothing happens. Then a strange man shows up at my door. He introduces himself as my son’s lawyer. He says, “I’ve known your son for years. Not only do I act as his attorney, I’m also his accountant, assistant, friend, confessor, career-coach, and, on occasion, masseur.” The man displays his muscular hands, as if ordering ten of something.
“Well I’ve never heard of you,” I say.
“Your son’s in the hospital. I’m not sure what you expected.”
I invite him in. He’s polite and asks for a glass of water like a dishwasher repairman.
I let him know that I’m much more than just my son’s mother. I say, “I don’t know what my son told you about me. But I’m not some kind of deadbeat. For a long time, I’ve been a consultant in physical and organizational ergonomics.” I show him an apparatus I’ve built out of a mop and several tires. The device is marked at intervals with blue tape, to denote possible locations for pivoting parts. “In a real-life factory situation, this would be a lathe.”
The man is only interested in technical issues related to mending the wooden bear. He sits at the kitchen table with the broken pieces and a hot glue gun.
I say, “I’m something of an outsider in the field. The focus is generally on efficiency and speed of movement, but I prefer to concentrate on quality and beauty of movement. This loses me clients, and I don’t expect my contributions to be recognized for their worth until long after my death. Someday, they’ll call me revolutionary.”
The man doesn’t look up. He says, “Your son will be fine, but you know what you have to do.”
I bring the man his water, floating from cabinet to ice dispenser to faucet, with motions that are inefficient and graceful. He mustn’t think I fail at everything. “Many professionals would pay good money to see this demonstration of enlightened ergonomic technique,” I say, still floating back and forth.
The man makes brief, potent eye contact. He’s wearing a wool suit in summer, but his skin is dry and nonreflective. “I look forward to mutual cooperation in this matter that concerns us both.”
I go into the bathroom, clutching my phone.
When my son picks up, his voice is crisp and pissed off. Someone who wasn’t his mother might not even think he was ill.
I say, “How is the hospital food? Is the fish up to your standards?”
“Let’s get this over with.”
I text him a picture of a baby deer. I tell him, “This is the baby deer that will travel to the golf course to meet the wooden bear. The bear’s aches and pains will make him uncooperative. The baby deer may have to offer him unsavory amounts of money, or even provide him with confidential stock market tips. Are you prepared to ask that of him? Can you feel him, lining a suitcase with large bills?”
My son says, “Can you pick something else, besides a baby deer? I’m not a child anymore.”
“It’s never been a matter of picking, and you know that.”
“A tiger, maybe. Or a shark. Or an aircraft carrier.”
“Can you feel him?”
My son doesn’t say anything for several seconds.
I wait and look outside the bathroom window at my yard full of ergonomic machines. The wind hoots through their metal apertures.
“Yes, I feel him,” says my son, with a trace of that pliability he always has when he is sick.