Cotton Candy

Who could have guessed it would go so fast? In a child’s hand time does not pass. We heard no warning words, nor even an echo

when the screen door slammed we ran melting into the world like spun sugar. Who could have guessed how delicate we'd be -- how crystalline and needy?

We never considered how damned, how ephemeral, sugar whirling from the cooker. So many things we could have done -- stirred slower, worn gloves -- had we known

how delicately sharp the threads of love, how brief sweetness on the tongue.

Rose Marie Eash

What Were You Going to Say?

Max Boorstein is a squirrelly man whose sarcasm at my expense both amused me and made me wonder how he ever succeeded in snagging one of the best EditorIn-Chief gigs around. I couldn’t imagine him, with his loose jocularity, impressing an interview committee of intellectuals with degrees and honors trailing their names. To me, he’d say something like “Hey Grandma, got anything on the Climate Change piece yet?”

To colleagues, “Go see if Janek can put down his knitting long enough to email those proofs to us.”

His cracks had to do with my love of a third-floor office on Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge -- a place I’d called home since graduating with degrees in Biology and Comparative Literature some years back. In that space I read and wrote. Max’s real problem was that as often as not, I also slept, ate, and kicked back there for days on end. And when he felt I’d been holed up in there for too long, he invariably came up with an assignment that shoved me somewhere, anywhere beyond the city limits, which is how I ended up going back to Dauphin County, where I started.

After hours of traffic, construction zones, detours, and tractor trailers breathing down my neck, I pulled into a driveway beside one of the saddest looking Victorian farmhouses ever. On the failing building’s front porch stood Dr. Tom, a diminutive man with exceptionally luminous white skin as dazzling as the implanted smiles of celebrities. I hadn’t even met him and Dr. Tom was already an irritant. His vacant expression said, “nice man,” which more often than not meant “gullible” to me. There were too many people like Dr. Tom in the world -- those purposefully ignorant of the less-than-laudable members of the species. One of the reasons I preferred to so strictly maintain my privacy was to avoid Dr. Toms. They only wanted to argue about seeing the best in people.

Silently cursing Max for putting me through a harrowing drive for what seemed a questionable objective -- to interview an expert on the rare albino hummingbird -- I climbed from the car a little wobbly with fatigue and large with resentment and

impatience. Once on the porch and before I could open my mouth, Dr. Tom turned my extended hand palm up and lowered a tiny ruby-throated hummingbird there. A soft fluff of grey and white. The bird and I exchanged curious, fearless looks, his highcadence heart throbbing palpably, that barely perceptible steady beat absorbing all thought. Tension fell away, I grew smaller.

In the middle of a lush green lawn where a lofty American beech held clear plastic feeders, the child-bird lifted off, taking flight when we were within arm’s length of the closest tree limb, making a quick landing on one of the feeders’ ports. I was here in a way I hadn’t been anywhere in years. Not in Cambridge, not in my own mind, but here, in Dauphin County, and I looked around at forgotten sights: a familiar image of blue wild indigo and bright white Solomon’s Seal blooming on borders of Scot’s pine forests. Here, the pines hugged three sides of the old farmhouse that housed the Bullfrog Pond Nature Center—another name for Dr. Tom’s offices.

Inside, it was cool and smelled of old wood and paper. We studied a photo of the elusive endangered albino hummer. In flight, the bird’s ribbed fan of pearly wing stretching forward, seeking a fluted blossom of lavender columbine, his posture suggesting a desire to embrace the flower. The bird himself would become a womanizer (male hummingbirds have many lovers over a lifetime). He would squabble with fellow birds over nectar-laden flowers. He was no saint, but there was something immediately soothing, if utterly misleading, about the creature’s lack of pigment—a trait people mistake for purity of soul. The fact that his sins and indiscretions would never stick seemed unjust.

“Have you ever banded one?” Dr. Tom shook his head with a smile. “We once banded a leucistic hummer here-- not a true albino but very close, with off-white plumage and the black pigment of more conventional hummers in its eyes, feet, and bill. That was about…” Dr. Tom scanned a random crack in the bulging ceiling over our heads, “10-15 years ago.”

The unfortunate leucistic hummingbird, a second stringer to his snowy white relation. How disappointing, I thought, to ornithologists who happened on this offwhite, black-eyed fellow, falling short of the real prize and its cloud-like plumage, its pink eyes and legs.

After uploading some of Dr. Tom’s albino photos, we chatted a bit more about habits and migratory patterns, favored sources of nectar, and methods of cataloging worldwide sighting data before we shook hands in the driveway.

Opening the car door, I thought of Dr. Tom’s reaction when the baby hummer took flight from my palm. He’d pressed his clasped hands to his chest, watching the fledgling with a beaming smile and a broad white face turned upward like a priest with a blessing. How could he be so pleased, I asked myself, when his search for the albino—a bird not seen locally in decades—was a hopeless cause? I thought of his small ivory hand uplifted, cupped, and waiting forever. His was a misguided faith, but there was peace in his gestures, an enviable tranquility about him.

I was ducking into my rented Subaru wagon when I heard him say “Janek.” “Yes?” I turned around. “A woman who lives around here named Janek just won a Pulitzer.” ~ ~ ~ I passed barns with silos stretching tall above broad planes of farmland, newly planted cornfields, and remembering the earthy tang of this place, the window went down and I breathed it in. Within miles, farmland dwindled and the familiar two lanes of Route 39 took me to Artie Fenstermacher’s place, a stone’s throw from the house he’d grown up in.

When we were kids, people in town thought I was weird because my mother was a protestor of everything from school lunches to curriculum in a sleepy place filled with mostly quiet, decent working people just getting by. Artie didn’t fare much better because his dad was a redneck in a place and time that found rednecks a dying breed. Still, Mr. Fenstermacher continued to keep the moniker real. Both Mom and Mr. Fenstermacher were usually met with grudgingly polite greetings when spotted in town and people looked at Artie and me with a wary curiosity. Just how far, they asked themselves, could the apple fall from the tree? “Your mom wrote a book.” “So I heard.” “What are you doing here, anyway?” “Writing an article. Visiting you.” “You haven’t been back here since college.” The accusatory tone was undeniable.

“Why don’t you ever come to Cambridge? Artie shoved a bowl of Cheetos in my general direction and cracked open another beer.

“Remember when she refused to send donuts for your birthday? Said it was a crime to feed all that sugar to kids. Sent cookies made with fruit juice.” “Everybody else got to bring donuts. Nobody ate the cookies.” “And the time she yelled at Miss Pletcher because we weren’t learning about any famous women?”

“We were studying presidents—there weren’t any female presidents.” “I bet it pisses her off nothing’s changed.” “Probably does.” “You going to stop in and see her?” “Probably not.”

~ ~ ~ The prize-winning memoir was called Lost Babies: How the Medical Establishment Fails its Youngest Patients. I was not surprised to see that she’d penned a rather long and cumbersome first chapter beginning with the birth of my brother Tristan which started out in a broken-down Airstream nested deep in a grove of laurels in Fishing Creek Valley and ending with the pronouncement of his death hours later at the Hershey Medical Center.

Mom tucked into the Airstream for the last two weeks of her pregnancy. She planned to deliver the baby herself, just as women in other cultures all over the world were said to have done.

At bedtime, I often begged her to tell me again how she’d found that old Airstream on a hike, how she’d leveled it and filled its propane tank. She polished its seamed panels with a buffer until it was a magnificent silvery dome reflecting the forest around it. Inside, she’d batted down cobwebs, scrubbed it top to bottom, created her domicile: a spacious alcove at the front holding a bed with down comforters, robust pillows and cushions rimming a place of repose. A window with lace curtains looked across the room from the bedside; bookshelves lined the curved walls, handpicked titles (Every Woman’s Right, Patriarchy and Institutions, Feminist Theory, etc.) within easy reach. A cassette player and box of tapes (The Times They

Are A-changin’, Clouds, Between the Lines, etc.) nestled among candles of different hues and scents on Grandma’s cedar chest nearby.

In the kitchen, red delicious apples, jars of almonds, walnuts, dried apricots, dates, prunes; tofu, carrots, broccoli, peas, corn, boxes of fragrant Celestial Seasonings teas.

The tiny bathroom aft, with its brightly curtained shower, its basket of French milled soaps, lotions, its plush ovals of carpet. The Airstream was a view into my mother the way she was before I knew her. I was in love with the her of then.

Our own home was a main street wood frame place left to Mom by her parents. It held a small front room dominated by folding tables on which books and reams of paper towered and featured a squat yellowed Macintosh partnered with a dot-matrix printer by the front window. Old standalone cooling fans and stacks of heavy books covered the remaining floor space. A solitary folding chair held its own in front of the Mac’s tiny screen. A patio table in the kitchen was where peanut butter sandwiches were slapped together from seats of stacked egg crates. A 1961 calendar from Diffendorf’s Tractor Supply graced the wall behind the inoperable four burner stove. A functional refrigerator sat mostly empty and by itself against the longest wall. In second grade, Artie and I got the bright idea that instead of me walking home the three blocks after school, I should get on the bus with him and ride out Route 39 and down the anonymous dirt farm lane that led to his place. At Artie’s the kitchen teemed with food and drink, the furniture was abundant and soft, and there was color television in the family room.

“You must stop this,” Mom said when she’d picked me up for the third time. “Television is for morons. Go straight home and read after school.”

Her mouth was a straight line and her eyes got bulgy. She looked like pictures of Grandma. Mom said Grandma was an intolerant holy roller. “I’m hungry after school and there’s nothing to eat.” “Ride your bike to Karn’s and buy food.” “With what?” She reached into her giant bag brimming with paper and books and pulled out a handful of dollar bills, scattering them in my lap. “Healthy snacks. No sugar.”

When her water threatened to break in the Airstream, Mom calmly rolled out the plastic sheeting she’d stowed under her bed, lit candles, sat down, and sipped tea. Labor rolled through her and she closed her eyes, remembering to accept rather than fight the pain. Without warning, one tremendous convulsion racked her body. After that, everything inside of her went quiet. Mom staggered to the doorway and shot a pistol skyward, summoning Sarah Moyer whose log cabin sat on the grove’s edge and who had remained home that day, just in case. ~ ~ ~ The funny thing about my mom and Artie’s dad is that they had very little in common except for Artie and me and yet they got along. This puzzled me until her memoir laid bare a shared blind spot. It was in the pages of Chapter 2 that I read the story of her academic career—something that had only been hinted at in the PhD behind her name.

Mr. Fenstermacher’s stubbornness was legendary; he refused to hire blacks to work in his plumbing business. When a black family joined the church, Mr. Fenstermacher protested to the minister and stopped attending. It was a puzzle to Artie and his mother who attributed his racism to some troubling incident Mr. Fenstermacher had suffered as a young man in the navy; something made him angry at all black people -- he once alluded to this but did not elaborate. Because he owned the business and there were few black people in town, he suffered no consequences for his hiring practices.

Because she’d been a professor in a small Christian college and not a ruler of her own universe like Mr. Fenstermacher, Mom was often on thin ice for holding stubbornly to her obviously unimpeachable point-of-view. In her Feminist Literature and Theory class, she stretched interpretation, often departing radically from accepted scholarship. She suggested that the church, as a patriarchal institution, should be forced to make restitution for its continued misogyny. Somehow, she managed to keep afloat at the college, although not without plenty of drama, until deciding to leave on her own. Many students, she wrote, complained to the Dean that she’d become increasingly strident, intolerant of any classroom discussion in which opinions other than her own were expressed. Departmental meetings were held to discuss whether or not she should retain her position. Mom wrote about this part of

her life with pride, as though it proved her allegiance to fact when all around her were swallowing fiction.

~ ~ ~ Tristan was dead when he was delivered at the medical center. The quiet doctor told Mom (as gently as he could, I’m certain, although she never relayed it that way) it appeared Tristan had been deprived of oxygen long enough to create the unhappy outcome.

“But my prenatal habits were exemplary,” Mom protested. “Sometimes things go wrong,” the doctor said vaguely. “How was he deprived of oxygen?” “We just don’t know,” the doctor said, meeting her eyes. You would think I was there from my detailed account of the conversation in that antiseptic room; I grew up with the details of Tristan’s birth and death which became as familiar as The Little Engine That Could and The Berenstain Bears were to other kids. I would not draw my first breath for another 12 months, yet I can recall perfectly the weather on the morning Tristan was born (21º, clear, southeasterly winds, no precipitation); the scent of candles (Patchouli) and tea (chamomile) drifting from the little RV when Sarah Moyer arrived there; the color of the walls in the hospital room in which Mom talked with the doctor (mint green, high gloss); and the doctor’s name and appearance (Hammacher, tall and thin with a forward-leaning posture as if in a perpetual state of apology or uncertainty). I could have, if I’d cared to, written an account of Tristan’s birth and death and perhaps won a Pulitzer of my own.

~ ~ ~ When I returned to Cambridge, Mom’s book was stowed in a deep drawer of my solid oak roll-top desk which faced the windowed portrait of the parking lot behind the Harvard Square Hotel. A line of colorful burgees waving on breezy days could be seen in the distance, raised as they were above the hotel’s roofline. The tranquil smallness I’d felt at Dr. Tom’s diminished and dissonance overtook me: continue reading the memoir or toss it? I was large with anxiety, turbulent with some unarticulated inner battle. Why? What’s the big secret? What was I afraid of? From Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, she’d leapt from Tristan to her early academic career with no mention of her parents, of growing up. What was in Chapter 3?

I was afraid she’d take another leap, this time over me. And if she didn’t leap over me, what could she possibly have said?

“You’re a puzzle, Janek,” Max Boorstein, my editor, remarked periodically. Max’s four daughters, all Harvard grads, all exemplary in their fields with many degrees, accomplishments, prizes, were well-launched. Their lives were full of rewarding work, adoring husbands, beautiful children.

“No puzzle at all here, Max,” I replied, more often than not, to his pronouncement.

What invariably followed was a fatherly lecture about my closed-off demeanor, my underachievement, and my hermit-like ways. Because I preferred to read and write small, cogent articles in this room above buses and pedestrians, with an occasional solitary outing to a film or lecture, or a gathering with poker-playing post docs in a room tucked away behind the Human Genome lab, or a quick trip to my studio for a shower and change of clothes, Max labeled me troubled. “Puzzle” was merely his polite way of saying I needed counseling or medication or both. Once, after an impulsive weekend surfing expedition to Nauset Beach, I returned to meet his hopeful gaze. “Well?” “Well, what? The surfing was great.” “You meet any girls?” “Sure. And boys. We had cookies and lemonade. It was like the first day of kindergarten all over again.”

“You’re a puzzle, Janek.” “No puzzle at all here, Max.”

~ ~ ~ The morning after returning from Dauphin County, I spent the rest of the day writing the albino piece with Max checking in frequently, flopping down on the rose velvet-covered sofa, clicking my Tiffany lamp on and off, eventually opening the pages of the Times splayed across the plush hand-knotted Nepalese carpet, pretending to read, growing restless within minutes, and finally slumping out of the room. I knew him well enough to know he was after something, but it was obviously something he could not come out and ask for.

I don’t know who fathered either Tristan or me. Mom was on the brink of 41 when she realized her procreating years were running out. As Chapter 1 confirmed, she was fascinated with the idea of experiencing pregnancy and delivering a child. If Tristan had lived, her curiosity thus successfully satisfied, she would have found some other cause to which to devote her life. As it was, she left her faculty position, became a licensed midwife, outspoken advocate of home birthing, monitor of hospital maternity mortality rates, and acknowledged expert in the dangers of conventional medically supervised child delivery.

The Airstream having been deserted for good after Tristan’s birth and death, Mom moved back into town to the little house in which she’d been raised. She lost no time becoming pregnant again, this time hiring both a licensed midwife and a doulah to oversee her prenatal care and delivery. All went well, I was a perfect, living specimen, born on what would have been my brother’s first birthday, just six days before Christmas. She hoped, I believe, this successful self-managed pregnancy and delivery would brush earlier tragedy to the side. When it failed to do so, she took me along for the ride.

When I wasn’t at Artie’s place or waiting for her to come home, I was with her while her second career overtook our lives. Mom became a whistle-blower devoted to publicizing the shortcomings of the medical community as it related to childbirth practices. I listened to her record papers on misguided childbirth protocols in hospitals and increasing rates of exposure to MRSA in delivery rooms. I photocopied pamphlets promoting her midwife practice; in no time, I spell-checked her articles for midwife journals. Schoolwork eventually became an escape from Mom’s increasingly monomaniacal journey.

“Can’t, Mom,” became my response when she asked for help. “Homework.” The day I found out I had a full ride to Harvard was the same day Mom found out her article featuring a census of specific airborne microbial communities in hospital versus home deliveries would be published in a highly respected medical journal.

“I got into Har—” “You won’t believe what happened to me today,” she broke in while opening the front door at the sound of my footsteps on the porch stairs. “I’m going to be in JAMA.”

“That’s awesome, Mom.”.

“What were you going to say?” “Nothing.”

“Natriuretic peptides.” ~ ~ ~

I rubbed my eyes and sat up, losing my 19 th

century Amish quilt to the floor.

Buses roared down in the street. Max was in the doorway. “What about them?” “You come off a little heavy-handed in this piece. I like you more when you write about birds in danger of extinction. So do your readers, I think.” “So give me an assignment you like, Max.” “I thought I had. It was supposed to be an investigation of the physiological marvels of the human heart, remember? You’re the one who turned in a dissertation on understanding natriuretic peptide processing and signaling for heart failure therapy. Good grief, Janek. What’d you do -- get a B-12 shot? Ready to hang up your shawl and cane -- join the outside world? “Maybe.” I hadn’t thwarted Max on purpose. I’d dived in, trying to lose myself in a complex topic, stuff that needed more thought and energy than I’d been used to expending. Maybe Max was right: I’d been working with one hand tied behind my back but now there was a need to burrow in real work, to challenge myself, to avoid Chapter 3.

~ ~ ~ Max sent me back to Dauphin County, to the Hershey Medical Center where I had an appointment with a cardiovascular surgeon who would, in Max’s words, get me straightened out about the human heart. After my interview with the surgeon, the elevator stopped on the neonatal unit, a floor below the cardiovascular unit. The doors opened and a wall of windows confronted me. Behind the window, a row of babies.

White, brown, black, tan—all wrapped in pink and blue blankets, lined up in clear-sided bassinets.

“Where’s Hammacher?” A doc in scrubs called out from down the hallway.

“In there,” replied a nurse in a Donald Duck-covered tunic nodding at the wall of windows.

A man in scrubs and mask appeared beside one of the bassinets. With a sad cast to his eye, he gazed at a sleepy-looking infant.

“Tall and thin with forward-leaning posture as if in a perpetual state of apology or uncertainty.” He had a tuft of white hair and a sun-weathered face. ~ ~ ~ “What’s this article for, Mr. Janek?” “I’m not sure yet,” I smiled, “I write for the Science and Nature page of the Harvard Review. . . not sure how this one fits. I might query some other journals. It’s a recent interest.”

Hammacher studied his desktop before looking up. “What made you come to me?” “You’ve been here a long time. Probably delivered more infants than anyone else.”

“Still, I’m no expert on neonatal fatalities attributed to oxygen deprivation.” “But you’ve got anecdotal experience. I can get the statistics easily enough on my own. My questions would be more of an experiential nature. For example, how often have you seen a newborn die of acute oxygen deprivation and what do you think caused it?”

Hammacher’s face tightened. “Do you have any ID?” “Of course,” I pulled my wallet out and flipped it open to my Harvard badge. “This would be strictly anecdotal. My opinion. You don’t have permission to quote me.”

“Sure. No problem.” “There was a case years ago.” He described the patient wheeled into the ER, a team waiting standby. Hammacher delivered the baby boy who had not survived.

“There was no immediately overt indication of what had gone wrong.” Hammacher sat back in his chair fidgeting with a paperclip. “I have your word you won’t mention me?” “You do.”

“I found a badly compressed section of the umbilical cord. I saw a deep impression about the length of the compressed section of the cord on the baby’s scalp. My theory remains the cord got squeezed between the uterine wall and the baby’s head at some point during labor, cutting off oxygen.” He studied the twisted paperclip in his hand. “Anything else?” He tossed the paperclip on the desk and folded his hands. “It was an attempted home delivery; there was no fetal heart monitor. Had the patient been wearing one, it would have warned her of changes in the baby’s breathing and if she were in the hospital we’d have done an emergency c-section. That baby was perfect. He would have been fine.” “How did the mother take it?” Dr. Hammacher raised his eyes to meet mine and shook his head. “Now, what good would it have done to tell her a thing like that?” I started the trip back to Cambridge, but my head was aching, my heart banging, and I was driving like a bat out of hell, tailgating in every lane I tried. I pulled over, the silent car listing a little with the gust of each passing eighteenwheeler.

When I pulled up at Dr. Tom’s, it was twilight and the grassy lawn emerald, rich in comparison to the fading sky. The doctor was on the porch studying something through binoculars.

“Have a look,” he whispered, handing me the glasses. I swung the glasses toward the feeders in the vast American beech, majestic against the cloudless sky.

“Not there,” he nudged my hand gently to the left, “there.” In a branch of a Scot’s pine soaring above the wildflower border, in a nest so small it looked like a balled-up gym sock, was a baby hummer’s head visible above the weave of twigs. It was not an albino hummer. It was not even the albino’s ugly stepbrother. It was as ordinary-looking as the puff of feathers I’d held in my hand a few weeks earlier, only this one was so new it had no defining color or shape. Its mother flew in from a nearby tangle of honeysuckle. Clutching the side of the nest, she slid her beak into the baby’s open bill.

Twelve hours later, back in my office, I tossed a draft of “The Mysteries of the Human Heart” at Max as he came through the door.

“I gotta hand it to you,” I stood up from the desk and stretched. Traffic was light on the street below. A couple of students huddled in a gust of wind, scurrying toward Starbucks.

“That albino story? I had no idea you were just trying to get me to a kumbaya with my mother. But, really. All the way back there, again? To talk to a cardiovascular surgeon when there are dozens within a mile of Cambridge?”

He admitted to creating the albino story idea when he read of Mom’s prize. “I was just trying to help you solve your puzzle, Janek.” “Ah Max.” Poor Max. Having cared for four loving girls so completely, giving so much of himself, he could not accept that lesser human beings could fail where he’d succeeded. It would be hard to leave Max.

“A present,” I said, reaching in the lower drawer of my desk, tossing the memoir to him.

~ ~ ~ Halfway through my residency in Internal Medicine, after a long night in the ER, I saw Mom on one of the overhead televisions in the waiting room. The lights had been dimmed. A janitor slept in a straight back chair, his industrial broom propped against a neighboring chair, brush up and turned toward the dozer, like a patient friend waiting for the tired man to wake up.

Watching her on television, I could only marvel that Mom continued to hold the spotlight, that no one had ever challenged her on the facts of Tristan’s birth and death. Med school had taught me a dirty little secret about doctors—that it was not at all unusual for them to withhold really bad news when such news would not change an outcome: “The baby is dead” -- bad enough. “The baby is dead because you made a mistake” -- much worse. Everyone from her editor to the Pulitzer committee, to every single suburban book club member in the world was taken in by her tragic fiction.

Or were they? I took a seat away from the sleeping man.

Maybe it was a conspiracy of silence, a complicity born of compassion. Because she was a girl growing up in a small town where change was slow, because a girl then and there was more often than not considered a flawed version of a boy, my mother misinterpreted academic mantras of independence and worthiness to mean invincibility and perfection. This is how she came to believe she was uniquely qualified to bring her child into the world, that she could not possibly fail at that, that it was the fault of an institution he died. She would never see that institutions hold human beings as susceptible to failure as was she or any of us. I tapped her number into my phone. “Hi Mom.” “Well now.” “How are you doing?” “Where are you?” “Stanford.” “I read your Harvard articles.” “Read your book,” I lied. Silence. “Anyway,” I cleared my throat, “are you okay? Everything going okay? You’re on television a lot. You’re on right now, as a matter of fact. You look good.” Silence. “Mom, I just want to--” “I should have taken care of you,” she whispered in rush of breath. Dr. Tom’s white face came to me, his shimmery eyes watching that fuzzy little puff of no particular hue, the baby bird’s sharp black bill the only feature defining his anatomy: open, stretched upward, waiting to receive his mother’s beak of nectar. I watched the doctor turn to look at me, the idea of miracle still reflected in his eyes. He would never be discouraged by a futile search for the albino because he had other worthy birds to care for.

“What were you going to say?” She asked. I clicked off my phone, rose quietly, and headed for the exit.