The first thing that went wrong was Katie got sick. She is one of those people. Real or imagined, she is always down with headache, stomachache, cold, flu, sore throat. She has multitudinous, unspecified, shape-shifting allergies, premature arthritis, severe menstrual cramping, a heart murmur, an ulcer, and one leg which is an inch shorter than the other. She is selectively lactose intolerant (ice cream but not pizza, milk in a glass but not over cereal), fainted once due to lack of sleep, gets dizzy when she sits at a computer too long, and develops bumpy red rashes from ant bites no matter how small. My policy was usually to ignore all of it. But when she came down with a mysterious stomach ailment after church on Atlas’s sixty-day birthday, one of whose manifestations included not just complaining but also lots of diarrhea, Jill tried to kick her out of the house.
“I am not leaving the house,” said Katie.
“Atlas cannot get whatever you have,” said Jill.
“Mmmmnnnnuuuhhhhhnnnn,” moaned Katie pathetically, making her difficult to argue with.
“Fine,” said Jill, “but you stay in your bedroom. With your door closed. And only use your bathroom. And don’t come downstairs. Janey will bring you food and whatever else you need.”
“Hey,” I protested, “I don’t want to be sick either.”
“Better you than Atlas,” Jill said without a trace of apology and hurried away from Katie herself.
I made Katie matzo ball soup and sat on her bed chatting about boys. Then I went downstairs to spell Jill. I went upstairs and downstairs all day, but it was Sunday, and it was fine.
The next day though, Katie wasn’t better. I had to go to seminar, and Jill had to teach, and without Katie, there was no one to take Atlas.
“Probably whatever it is isn’t contagious anymore,” I suggested.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jill.
I went up to check on Katie and make her an appointment at the health center. When I came downstairs, Jill had Atlas in fifteen layers and was toting a diaper bag too large to carry on an airplane.
“You’re dropping him at the daycare center at school,” I guessed, incredulous. It was staffed by early childhood ed majors. They were still learning.
“Don’t be absurd,” she scoffed. “I’m taking him to class with me.”
“You can’t.”
“He’s asleep.”
“What if he wakes up and screams and cries?” I asked.
“Then he wakes up and screams and cries,” Jill said.
“What if the only thing that will placate him is your right breast, and you have to nurse him in front of your whole class?”
“Then he wakes up and screams and cries,” Jill said.
The good news was Atlas slept peacefully through class and offered the added bonus of inspiring hushed awe and rapt attention from Jill’s students on that occasion and several others. The bad news was that Katie had amoebas. She walked into the house that night after spending all day at the health center and then at the clinic and then at the hospital where they’d sent her for more tests, collapsed dramatically across the living room floor, and announced the good news.
“The silver lining, if you want to see it, is that as long as I wash my hands real well, I’m not contagious.”
“Hurrah,” said Jill.
“We’re waiting for test results, but they think I have amoebas.”
“What?” said Jill.
“They think I have amoebas. That’s why I’m always sick. That’s why I have diarrhea. That’s why my poop is weird. That’s what it is. Amoebas.” Having a baby, even for only a couple months, not to mention picking up dog shit in a baggy three times a day, makes you remarkably willing to have conversations featuring poop.
“You have amoebas in your shit?” said Jill, alarmed, trying to shove Atlas under her shirt.
“Yes, actually, and also in my intestine,” said Katie. “From Guatemala, from my mission. The water wasn’t very clean there. We boiled it for drinking and cooking, but you never know. One time I was drinking bottled water, and I was almost finished when one of the other missionaries suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth and screamed. There was this huge worm in the bottom of the bottle.”
Jill looked pale. “That would do it I guess.”
“No, that wasn’t the amoebas. That’s just an example of what can be in bottled Guatemalan water. The amoebas are too small to see.”
“When will they go away?” I asked.
“No one’s sure,” said Katie, a little freaked, but also clearly enjoying how grossed out we were. “There are drugs, but sometimes they take years to work.”
“You’d think you’d have shit them all out by now,” said Jill.
“Evidently,” Katie sniffed, “it does not work that way. The symptoms will come and go. There’s nothing I can do. But the doctor said I should feel better from this bout soon. I already feel better. Did you make dinner?”
I started heating leftovers for her.
“When we were kids, we used to play a game called Amoeba Man,” said Jill thoughtfully. “One person would hide under a blanket, like in the middle of the floor while everyone was watching TV or in the yard while we were just sitting around talking, and you’d forget about the person under the blanket and the amoeba man game, and then suddenly, when you least expected it, the amoeba man would jump up and try to tag people, and everyone would run away, but if the amoeba man tagged you, you got sucked under the blanket and became part of the amoeba. As more kids became part of the amoeba, the odds got worse for the kids who were left, but also it got harder to tag them because it was hard to maneuver with all those kids under the blanket. It was a fun game.”
“That’s really weird,” I said.
“Then at some point the game morphed,” Jill added. “And the older kids would capture each other and go under the blanket and make out and not try to capture anybody. They were more like two-celled organisms. Or one-celled ones that split. And the little kids would just giggle and hide and wait all out of breath, ready to run, like they would be tagged at any moment.”
“Amoebas aren’t one-celled organisms, are they?” asked Katie.
“No idea,” said Jill. “You’re the one who has them living in you.”
“When I was in seventh grade, we had this really weird science teacher,” I said. “He was kind of spacey. We were supposed to read chapters from the textbook for homework, but almost no one ever did, so class was never very productive.”
“I’ve taught classes like that,” said Jill.
“Me too,” said Katie.
“Of course, I was a model student, so I always did the reading, but I never admitted it or answered any questions in class because it was seventh grade, and I was a total nerd and didn’t want to make it worse by being an ass kisser or teacher’s pet.”
“I went to that seventh grade,” said Jill.
“Me too,” said Katie.
“So one day in class, he asked what an amoeba was, and no one answered him. He waited and waited, and no one said anything. So he called on this really popular guy all the way in the back and asked him if he was an amoeba, and the guy said, ‘Um, yeah, I guess.’ So Mr. Fields just stood there and looked real thoughtful and rubbed his chin, and then he asked the guy sitting next to the first guy if he was an amoeba, and that guy said yes, he was an amoeba. And so Mr. Fields went right around and asked everyone in the room if they were an amoeba or not, pausing and saying ‘huh’ and ‘hmm’ and ‘I see’ between each person and looking real thoughtful, and everyone said yes, they were amoebas. It was middle school. Everyone was stupid and totally terrified to be different from everyone else. Finally he got to me. ‘Janey, are you an amoeba?’ I was so frustrated and annoyed, having gotten the point half an hour before, that I blurted out, ‘No, I am not an amoeba. An amoeba is a one-celled protozoan consisting of a mass of protoplasm. It moves by means of pseudopods. It is parasitic in humans.’ ”