Operating Instructions Read Online Free Page A

sweet and vulnerable, like a chicken. Right then the kitty ran into the house and straight through the living room into the kitchen, very deliberately keeping her eyes off Sam and me. I was putting petroleum jelly on the thermometer when she tore from the kitchen, back through the living room, and out the front door, still with her eyes averted, as if she had little blinders on. A minute later, I inserted the thermometer into Sam’s rectum. I think it surprised him a little bit, and right at that exact second the kittytore back into the house and ran up to the couch to check out the new arrival. In the next few seconds, with the kitty’s eyes on us, shit began spouting volcanically out of the baby’s bum, and I started calling for help. The shit just poured voluminously out of Sam while the kitty looked up at me with total horror and disgust, like “You have
got
to be kidding, Annie, this one’s
broken.”
Like she had put her trust in me to pick one up at the pound, and this was the best I could do.
    For the next few hours, she avoided him, as though the image of the shit storm were too painful and disgusting for her to forget, but by that night, she was butting her head against his and licking his ears. We all slept together on the big queen-sized futon in the living room, where it’s warmer.

S EPTEMBER 16, 5:30 A.M.
    W e slept for six straight hours and are up nursing now. There is milk everywhere. I go around looking like I’ve got a wet bathing suit on under my clothes. When Sam was six days old, I took him to my little black church in Marin City, the church where I’ve been hanging out for four years now. I wandered in one day the year before Istopped drinking, because it was right next to the most fabulous flea market on earth, where I liked to spend time when I had terrible hangovers. I got into the habit of stopping by the church on Sundays but staying in the back, in this tense, lurky way, and leaving before the service was over because I didn’t want people to touch me, or hug me, or try to make me feel better about myself. I had always pretty much believed in God, and I just naturally fell into worshiping and singing with them. Then after I got sober and started to feel okay about myself, I could stay to the end and get hugged. Now I show up and position myself near the door, and everyone
has
to give me a huge hug—it’s like trying to get past the border patrol. Once I asked my priest friend, Bill Rankin, if he really believed in miracles, and he said that all I needed to do was to remember what my life used to be like and what it’s like now. He said he thought I ought to change my name to Exhibit A.
    Anyway, the first Sunday after Sam’s birth, I kind of limped in with Peg beside me. I was holding Sam and she was holding my little inflated doughnut seat, and everyone was staring joyfully and almost brokenheartedly at us because they love us so much. I walked, like a ship about to go down, to a seat in the back. But the pastor said, Whoa, whoa, not so fast—you come up here and introduce him to his new family. So I limped up to the little communion table in the front of the half circle of folding chairs where we sit, and I turned to faceeveryone. The pain and joy were just overwhelming. I tried to stammer, “This is my son,” but my lip was trembling, my whole face was trembling, and everyone was crying. When I’d first started coming to the church, I couldn’t even stand up for half the songs because I’d be so sick from cocaine and alcohol that my head would be spinning, but these people were so confused that they’d thought I was a child of God. Now they’ve seen me sober for three years, and they saw me through my pregnancy. Only one (white) man in the whole congregation asked me who the father was. Toward the end of my pregnancy, people were stuffing money into my pockets, even though a lot of them live on welfare and tiny pensions. They’d sidle up to me, slip a twenty into the pocket