This Columnist’s Job Was to Speak, Not Spew

The moment it is clear President Bush has won, friends and Berkeley neighbors begin e-mailing articles to me about how to expatriate. As if anyplace else on Earth could be further from Bush than Berkeley. Even Tallulah, age 5, when asked who she wants to be president, knows to say “anybody but Bush.”

At 1 o’clock in the morning there come screams from the children’s bedroom. I wake up, as always, with the question in mind: Which child? Spotting beside me a strangely tiny snoring lump, I grab the bedsheets and locate what feels like a 2-year-old body: Dixie. She has, as usual, found her way into our bed in the dead of night. I stumble downstairs and there find Tallulah, in her top bunk, sitting straight up.

“Daddy, I threw up!” she says, with remarkable poise. I clean her up, put her to sleep next to Dixie and Tabitha, then, with a selflessness foreign to my nature, attack the mess. I rope off the afflicted area and I inventory the damage: one carpet, four sheets, two bunk beds, two ordinary pillows, two impossible-to-wash new foam pillows from Brookstone that I bought on a whim and Tabitha doesn’t much care for anyway, Tallulah’s special blanket (also impossible to wash), a 6-foot-long stuffed dog (ditto) and a complicated pile of books and papers on the floor.

One of the great mysteries of small children is that they can stare blankly at three meals a day and yet, when it comes time to vomit, create a mess worthy of Fat Bastard. Nothing, it appears, has been left clean. But then, amid the soiled books and papers, I spot a bright orange flier, completely unsullied. It’s from Tallulah’s kindergarten teachers, sent to parents before the school’s Halloween parade. It says: “Please refrain from the following: costumes of violence (e.g. dripping blood, slashers, Freddy Kruegers, “Friday the 13th” characters, etc.), costumes with weapons (e.g., swords, guns, knives, etc.), or any negative representations of currently or historically maligned ethnic groups or nationalities.”

I set to work. Whenever I feel especially sorry for myself, I make mental lists of the many unfinished chores that lay ahead of me. This helps me to feel even more sorry for myself. As I hurl bedsheets into bathtubs and grab for paper towels and the vacuum cleaner, I consider the vast amount of work I’m meant to complete before Thanksgiving: two TV pilot scripts, one movie script, an 8,000-word article for the New York Times Magazine, five public lectures in five cities.

Twenty minutes into this orgy of self-pity, Tabitha, half-asleep, appears in the doorway.

“I can do it,” she says.

“No,” I say, with just the right amount of heroism, “you get some sleep.”

“But you have to give a speech in the morning,” she says.

“I know,” I say even more heroically, “but I’ll take care of it.”

Long pause.

“Michael, I don’t think you can clean up puke with a vacuum cleaner.”

But you can!

An hour later, just as the mess is cleaned, Tallulah starts the cycle all over again -- in our bed. Two rooms down, five to go. By the end of the night there isn’t much inside the house that she hasn’t thrown up on. I leave the house at 5 a.m. to catch a cab for the airport.

“Have fun,” says Tabitha.

One public lecture down, I head for the computer to get cracking on the movie script when I feel a rumbling in my stomach. I spend the next seven hours in a hotel in Santa Barbara retching over a toilet bowl. As a child, vomiting, while not enjoyable, was at least laden with incentives. You got sick, made a great deal of noise, drew all sorts of pleasant attention to yourself, and then recuperated in style. As a grown-up, there’s no reward in being sick -- except the guy banging angrily on the wall of the adjacent room.

At 4:30 in the morning a cabdriver calls to announce that it’s time for me to leave for the airport. Still in a fog I stumble from cab to terminal and from terminal to airplane, which takes me to Chicago. There are obviously many things worse than being sick to one’s stomach on an airplane, but not to the person who actually is sick. The man next to me keeps shooting what I take to be accusatory looks. I wonder, vaguely, if I look like one of those carriers of Ebola, the highly contagious virus that causes an abrupt and fatal discharge of bodily fluids.

I fixate on trivial details I would normally ignore. For example, the flight attendant’s voice comes over the sound system three separate times to ask, rhetorically, “Will passengers please use lavatories in their class of service?” I can’t get it out of my mind. What does she mean? Of course she doesn’t mean that first-class people cannot vomit in coach-class toilets. She means that coach-class people cannot vomit in first-class toilets! She doesn’t come right out and say that because she is afraid of reminding coach-class people that they are not being treated as well as first-class people. But don’t they know?

When I land, still sick, I call home. Tallulah answers the phone. She’s upbeat, giddy even. Indeed, no child ever sounded less troubled by ill health. She’s entirely forgotten that she spent an entire night throwing up. All she knows now is that she doesn’t have to go to school and gets to spend the day in front of the TV.

I tell her that I caught her bug, but that it doesn’t appear to want to leave me as quickly as it left her. “Then you have a little piece of me with you!” she says, cheerily.

“Can I speak to Mama?” I ask.

“Mama’s in bed,” she says. “I think she’s sick.”