Operating Instructions Read Online Free

true, except that I was also having little blips of fear. I had all these nightmare images, left over from the last few months of my pregnancy, of what a petri dish my house was. Largely because we live under the redwoods, everything ends up breeding lots of mold and spores, and even though Peg had hired her housekeeper to scour the place for me, I was worried. It’s such a drafty old house, rust red, a hundred years old, with three stories. We’re on the bottom floor, and you have to climb up fifty stone steps to get to it. It’s beautiful, everything is green when you look out any of the windows, and there’s a creek in the front yard. Deer come through the yard nearly every day, and you hear a million birds, and butterflies fly by, but my apartment is really funky. It’s got one big long living room with massive built-in bookcases everywhere, and then a smallish kitchen, and then a tiny little bedroom with an elevated platform for the mattress and about five square feet of floor. Through its windows you see so much green beauty that you don’t mind how cramped it is. There are little holes and gaps everywhere, and lots of spiders. Of course, there was also the kitty, who I thought might be a problem. She has been so spoiled for the last five years, like some terrible feline LeonaHelmsley, that I felt sure she would sneak into Sam’s crib late at night and put a little pillow over his face or at the very least suck his milky breath out of him, like in the old wives’ tales.
    Sam had a slight fever following his circumcision, and his pediatrician at Mount Zion had made me promise to take the baby’s temperature when I got home to make sure the fever was going down. I was scared that there would be terrible complications from the circumcision and that I had, after all, made the wrong decision and now he would get a brain fever and need emergency surgery on his wienie. Although about half of my family and friends had made circumcision seem about as humane as nipple piercing, it had been a relatively easy decision to make at the time. To begin with, I had read that penile cancer occurs almost exclusively in uncircumcised males, that uncircumcised men have much more frequent urinary tract infections, and that their female lovers have a much higher rate of cervical cancer. So there were those medical reasons, but there was also the matter of keeping the damn thing clean—you would have to cleanse the foreskin daily with, one supposes, Q-tips and 409. Who’s got the time? One of my best friends had had her baby circumcised ten years ago against much protest from her family. It then turned out that her son was terribly uncoordinated as a young boy. She told me that circumcision was the best decision she ever made: “I had a terrible time teaching him to wash his
hands,”
she said.
    Then there was the matter of aesthetics. I mean to cast noaspersions on the presentability of anybody’s wing-wang, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that all uncut males look like they’re from Enid, Oklahoma, but I’ve got to say that I prefer the look of the circumcised unit. The uncircumcised ones look sort of marsupial, or like little rodents stuck in garden hoses. And the feel of the uncut ones is a little disconcerting, with all that skin to peel back and then the worry that it won’t stay, that it will swallow the missile head right back up. Women’s nerves aren’t bad enough as it is? So for any number of reasons, it seemed obvious to me that circumcision was a great invention—as my friend Donna put it, “It pretty much restores one’s faith in Judaism, doesn’t it?” And while I had not thrust my baby into the doctor’s arms, urging, “Cut! Cut!,” I had with a trembling bottom lip handed him over.
    So there we were, me and my feverish little baby, with Pammy and Peg puttering around the house putting things away. I put Sam facedown on my lap and took off his diaper and even his little T-shirt, so he looked very