so nauseous and so dizzy. And he had had such a good time, and he did not want to go inside with me. He wanted to go on that ride again. But I had to take him inside, and I had to go lie down for a few minutes, because to that guy I might have been girlie and honey and it was okay, but it was pretty awful for me. So, that’s the story of the merry-go-round. I usually think of myself as a very friendly, gregarious person, but thank the heavens, I never saw that man again. The people who lived directly below us — we were on the second floor of our building, they were on the first — were from somewhere in New York, and she had a very definite Brooklyn or Bronx accent, and they were not particularly educated people. They were working-class people, and I think she worked, and she became very friendly. Um, I was…as I said, I tried to be friendly with everyone, but I wasn’t looking to, y’know, have relationships where I was obligated to spend time with other people. I felt very keenly my responsibility for my little boy, and my desire was to spend as much time as possible with him. But it was all very pleasant and cordial with my neighbors, and there were no true problems, except with this woman downstairs, who I thought was very warm and loving and friendly to me, but who behaved very badly. Mark was usually up very early in the morning. He was never a great sleeper, never ever, never ever. And just when I thought I had it made — that we had gotten past getting up during the night — he would get, um, a runny nose or his schedule would be off, because we went on a holiday or something, and we’d start sort of all over again. He spoke very early, and he spoke very clearly, and I would hear “Mommy,” and it could be the middle of the night, and I would come in and talk to him and sometimes get him, and, um…This time in particular that I’m thinking of, he had his first real cold, and I know that he was then I guess either three and a half or four because he went to the, uh, Jewish Community Center, to the nursery school, and that was the first experience he had had with a real infection from the other kids, ’cause otherwise he was pretty much protected from that kind of thing, and, to tell you the truth, there were many times that I decided not to send him. Either he wasn’t better from a sniffle or Harry Gerner, his pediatrician, whom I called Uncle Harry, and who was my father’s best friend, and who had also been my pediatrician, would say to me, “Must he go there?” Because Mark would almost invariably get ear infections after he had a cold. So, it was a very sort of divided-up experience. He didn’t go regularly as I had expected him to, because of all these other things. But to get back to that dark-haired lady downstairs…when he did get better from whatever thing he’d had that interrupted his night’s sleep, he clearly didn’t want to go back to the habit of just hanging out in the crib or in the bed, and he would call me or he would come into the bedroom, and I would, I finally had to…Uncle Harry said, “You’ve got to put an end to this, you can’t just keep getting up with him. You can’t keep letting him know that he can do that to the two of you. You’re the grown-ups.” But the idea of letting him cry was not something I was happy with at all. But I would go in and…there were no books on the subject the way there are now, like the Ferber method, Ferbering, whatever it’s called. I would come in, and I would talk to him, and I would say, “I’m not coming back now, I’ve been in here three times, I’ve been in here four times, it’s the middle of the night — look outside, see, it’s very dark out and your father is asleep, and everybody in the building is asleep, and I was asleep, and now I’m going to go back to sleep.” And then sometimes I would come back in just one more time, and then finally I just realized I had to do it. And I let him cry. And he cried and he cried. And he called me and he called me and he cried. And it just made me heartbroken. But I knew that that one night was the night where I had to give it a try. And I would speak out to him every once in a while and say, “No, I’m not coming back, honey. In the morning, we’ll talk, and in the morning, we’ll go into the living room,” etc. So she — the woman downstairs — called me the next day, and she let me have it. She said I was guilty of child abuse and she was going to call the police because I let my child scream all night. And she was right downstairs, and the sound could be heard. And it started the second night again, and then, about the middle of the night, he gave up. But she never forgave me, never forgave me for that, and that’s when I realized that those kinds of casual friendships are just made, not because you really care about those people or you choose them because your interests are the same, but because you’re sort of thrown together. And she was mostly a liar because she was not that worried about him, that’s nonsense; she was worried about losing sleep, and she figured the way to not have that happen was to threaten me with something. Child abuse?! Can you imagine someone having the temerity to even insinuate such a thing? I simply adored Mark. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done to make him happy and comfortable. I made sure that his crib was spotless and beautiful, that his bed was spotless and beautiful, that his room was lovely. I was fanatical about that. To a fault, actually. I had this carpet sweeper, and it had a mechanism inside that turns, that went around like this…and Mark must have either moved his hand at that moment or I was just being clumsy and an idiot for having it out…Why did I have to carpet-sweep while he was playing there, why? Something must have just broken or spilled or a box of crackers fell down or something of that sort and of course being me, I just was going to get rid of it right away, and all of a sudden his little hand was there and I rode over one of his fingers and caught it there. It was caught in there. I remember that trying to get it out was horrific, and he was screaming in pain, and it might have even been his whole little hand that was caught in there. But one finger was looking very damaged and purple. And I ran with him into the bathroom, and I know that what I did to him hurt like anything, but I put it under the cold water, and I kept rubbing it and trying to keep it straight and trying to see if there was a broken bone or anything in it. And I felt like I was doing that for hours while he was screaming, but it actually couldn’t have been for more than a few minutes. And then I dried it off and patted it, and he was still very, uh…he was still in great pain. He was in real pain. I don’t remember going to the doctor. I remember calling Uncle Harry, Harry Gerner. He asked some questions about whether Mark could move his fingers, and I made him, once we could get the pain under some control, uh, I made him move his fingers then, because if anything had been broken…I don’t know what they do about something like that anyway, whether they set it or what…Ugh! Ugh! How horrible! I still think about it! Anyway, as I mentioned before, Mark was never a great sleeper and typically he’d be up by five thirty or six in the morning, and, uh, we would have breakfast and talk to each other, and he’d look at his books and, depending on the age, sometimes I would read to him, and then a little later, when he really memorized, he would look at them himself and he would read some of them back to me. And we would talk about what we were going to do during the day, and if it was a bad day or wintertime or rain or whatever, we would decide whether we were going to stay in or go out or, um, if we were going to, in fact, walk over to Nana Harriet’s or go to the supermarket which was right near there, or go out to play in front of the building where there would be other kids, or the myriad other things that would be on the agenda. Sometimes his father would come and pick us up and bring us to Nana Rose’s house, but mostly the days went along with just the two of us…And it was a delightful, heavenly time for us. Until my second pregnancy. The period during which I was pregnant with my second baby was a very difficult time for me. It was a very difficult pregnancy with a very tragic outcome. I was feeling really terribly ill most of the time and I tried to not let Mark know. He was still a very little boy. And I don’t really even know how much he was aware of then, because I never really asked him in the years following that. I didn’t want to bring it up again — first of all, it was still painful to me, because we didn’t have a baby to bring home and, um, I didn’t want to discuss that time over and over again. I felt guilty because, for a number of months during the pregnancy, I had to have him in the care of my mother, and I just was so ill…My doctor this time wasn’t Schneckendorf, the doctor who’d delivered Mark, it was a different man, it was this guy who was very popular with all the young mothers…I don’t remember his name maybe because I don’t want to. He had a reputation for keeping people well sedated so there was no pain, or as little as possible, and I thought, well, I could use that because I was in labor for so long with Mark that I thought, well, that’s sort of dumb of me to, you know, to go looking for that kind of thing again, this would be much better. And then, um, feel good, feel strong, blah-blah-blah. Well nobody knows about these things and how they’re going to happen, but it turns out that this man did every single thing that he could…put it in another way — everything he did was the wrong thing. When I was throwing up constantly and I couldn’t hold anything down in the very beginning of that pregnancy, he clapped me in the hospital. Because he thought he was going to snap me out of this thing. I think he was obviously a misogynist, and he obviously thought this was like a spoiled-girl reaction to being pregnant. You know? That, uh, if I had more to do…that’s what many men said about this, y’know, if you had more to think about…So he clapped me in the hospital and gave me something called Thorazine, which gave me a reaction that was written about in the