December 21, 2000
Dear Franklin,
I’m a bit rattled, since the phone just rang and I have no idea how this Jack Marlin person got my unlisted number. He claimed to be a documentary maker from NBC. I suppose the droll working title of his project, “Extracurricular Activities,” sounds authentic enough, and at least he was quick to distance himself from “Anguish at Gladstone High,” that hasty Fox show that Giles informed me was mostly on-camera weeping and prayer services. Still I asked Marlin why he imagined that I would want to participate in one more sensationalist postmortem of the day my life as I understood it came to an end, and he said I might want to tell “my side of the story.” “What side would that be?” I was on record as assuming the opposition when Kevin was seven weeks old. “For example, wasn’t your son the victim of sexual abuse?” Marlin plied. “A victim? Are we talking about the same boy?” “What about this Prozac business?” The sympathetic purr could only have been put on. “That was his defense at the trial, and it was pretty well supported.” “That was his lawyer’s idea,” I said faintly. “Just generally—maybe you think Kevin was misunderstood?” I’m sorry Franklin, I know I should have hung up, but I speak to so few people outside the office.... What did I say? Something like, “I’m afraid I understand my son all too well.” And I said, “For that matter, Kevin must be one of the best-understood young men in the country. Actions speak louder than words, don’t they? Seems to me he got across his personal worldview better than most. Seems to me that you should be interviewing children who are a great deal less accomplished at self-expression.” “What do you think he was trying to say?” asked Marlin, excited at having snagged a real live specimen of what has become a remote parental elite, whose members are strangely uneager for their fifteen minutes on TV. I’m sure the call was recorded, and I should have watched my tongue. Instead I blurted, “Whatever his message was, Mr. Marlin, it was clearly disagreeable. Why on earth would you like to provide him one more forum for propounding it?” When my caller launched into some nonsense about insight into disturbed boys being vital so that next time “we can see it coming,” I cut him off. “I saw it coming for nearly sixteen years, Mr. Marlin,” I snapped. “A fat lot of good that did.” And I hung up. I know he was only doing his job, but I don’t like his job. I’m sick of newshounds snuffling at my door like dogs that smell meat. I am tired of being made a meal of.
I was gratified when Dr. Rhinestein, having lectured that it was practically unheard of, was forced to concede that I had indeed contracted mastitis in both breasts. Those five days in Beth Israel on an antibiotic drip were painful, but I was coming to treasure physical pain as a form of suffering I understood, in contrast to the baffling despair of new motherhood. The relief of simple quiet was immense. Still in the grip of your breadwinning fever and perhaps—admit it—reluctant to put our son’s “good-natured” temperament to the test, you took this opportunity to hire a nanny. Or should I say two nannies, since by the time I came home the first one had quit. Not that you were volunteering this information. In the pickup as you were driving me home you simply began nattering about the marvelous Siobhan, and I had to stop you. “I thought her name was Carlotta.” “Oh, her. You know, a lot of these girls are immigrants who plan to go AWOL when their visa turns into a pumpkin. They don’t really care about kids.” Whenever the pickup hit a bump, my breasts flamed. I wasn’t looking forward to the excruciating process of expressing milk on arrival, which I’d been dictated to do religiously every four hours for the sake of the mastitis, even if only to pour the milk down the drain. “I take it Carlotta didn’t work out.” “I told her up front he was a baby. A pooping, farting, burping—” “—Screaming—” “— Baby. She seemed to have expected, like, a self-cleaning oven or something.” “So you sacked her.” “Not exactly. But Siobhan is a saint. From Northern Ireland, of all places. Maybe folks used to being bombed and shit can keep a little whimpering in perspective.” “You mean Carlotta quit. After only a few days. Because Kevin was—what’s the term of art? Cranky. ” “After one day, if you can believe it. And when I call at lunchtime to make sure everything’s all right, she has the gall to insist I cut my workday short and relieve her of my son. I was tempted not to pay her a dime, but I didn’t want us blacklisted with her agency.” (Prophetic. We were blacklisted by her agency two years later.) Siobhan was a saint. A bit homely at first glance, with unruly black curls and that deathly white Irish skin, she had one of those doll-baby bodies that didn’t narrow at the joints, but merely crimped a bit; though she was slim enough, the columnar limbs and waistless torso gave the impression of thickness. Yet I grew to regard her as prettier with time because she was so good-hearted. True, I was apprehensive when she mentioned at our introduction that she was a member of that Alpha Course Christian sect. I conceived of such people as mindless fanatics and dreaded being subjected to daily testimonials. A prejudice, and one Siobhan did not substantiate; she rarely raised the subject again. Maybe this offbeat religious route was her bid to opt out of the Catholic-Protestant folderol back in County Antrim, of which she never spoke, and from which she had further insulated herself with the Atlantic Ocean as if for good measure. You teased me that I took such a shine to Siobhan just because she was a Wing and a Prayer fan, for she’d used AWAP when traveling the Continent. Unsure what God would “call” her to do, she said she couldn’t imagine a more delightful occupation than professional globetrotting, stirring my nostalgia for a life already growing distant. She ignited the same pride that I hoped Kevin would some day kindle, when he got old enough to appreciate his parents’ accomplishments. I’d already indulged the odd fantasy whereby Kevin would pore over my old photographs, asking breathlessly, Where’s this? What’s that? You’ve been to AFRICA? Wow! But Siobhan’s admiration proved cruelly misleading. Kevin did pour over a box of my photographs once—with kerosene. After a second round of antibiotics, the mastitis cleared up. Resigned that Kevin was on formula for keeps, I allowed my breasts to engorge and dry up, and with Siobhan holding down the fort was at length able to return to AWAP that fall. What a relief, to dress well, to move briskly, to speak in low, adult tones, to tell someone what to do and to have them do it. While I took fresh relish in what had previously grown workaday, I also chided myself for having imputed to a tiny bundle of confusion such malign motives as an intent to drive a wedge between you and me. I’d been unwell. It had been harder to adapt to our new life than I’d expected. Recuperating some of my old energy and discovering with pleasure that I had agitated myself back down to my former figure, I assumed that the worst was over and made a mental note that the next time one of my friends bore a first child I would fall all over myself to sympathize. Often I’d invite Siobhan to linger with me for a cup of coffee when I came home, and the enjoyment I took in conversing with a woman roughly half my age may have been less the delight of leaping generations than the more standard one of talking to anybody. I was confiding in Siobhan because I was not confiding in my husband. “You must have wanted Kevin something fierce,” said Siobhan on one such occasion. “Seeing the sights, meeting amazing people—and paid for the pleasure, if you can credit it! I can’t imagine giving that up.” “I haven’t given it up,” I said. “After a year or so, I’ll resume business as usual.” Siobhan stirred her coffee. “Is that what Franklin expects?” “It’s what he ought to expect.” “But he mentioned, like,” she was not comfortable with tattling, “that your running off for months at a go, like—that it was over.” “For a while there, I was a little burned out. Always running out of fresh underwear; all those French train strikes. It’s possible I gave the wrong impression.” “Oh, aye,” she said sorrowfully. I doubt that she was trying to make trouble, though she saw it coming. “He must have been lonely, when you’d go away. And now if you take your trips again, he’d be the only one to mind wee Kevin when I’m not here. Of course, in America, don’t some da’s stay home, and the ma’s go to work?” “There are Americans and Americans. Franklin’s not the type.” “But you run a whole company. Sure you could afford...” “Only in the financial sense. It’s hard enough when a man’s wife is profiled in Fortune magazine and he’s only location-scouted the advertisement on the facing page.” “Franklin said you used to be on the road five months a year.” “Obviously,” I said heavily, “I’ll have to cut back.” “You know, you may find that Kevin’s a wee bit tricky, like. He’s a—an uneasy baby. Sometimes they grow out of it.” She hazarded starkly, “Sometimes they don’t.”
You thought that Siobhan was devoted to our son, but I read her loyalty as more to you and me. She rarely spoke of Kevin in other than a logistical sense. A new set of bottles had been sterilized; our disposable “nappies” were running low. For such a passionate girl this mechanical approach seemed unlike her. (Though she did observe once, “He has like, beady eyes, so he does!” She laughed nervously and qualified, “I mean—intense.” “Yes, they’re unnerving, aren’t they,” I rejoined, as neutrally as I knew how.) But she adored the two of us. She was entranced with the freedom of our dual self-employment, and, despite the evangelical romance with “family values,” was clearly disconcerted that we would willfully impair this giddy liberty with the ball and chain of an infant. And maybe we gave her hope for her future. We were middle-aged, but we listened to The Cars and Joe Jackson; if she didn’t approve of bad language, she may still have been broadly heartened that a codger nearing forty could decry a dubious baby manual as horseshit. In turn, we paid her well and accommodated her church obligations. I gave her the odd present, like a silk scarf from Thailand, which she gushed over so much that I was embarrassed. She thought you devastatingly handsome, admiring the sturdiness of your figure and the disarming flop of your flaxen hair. I wonder if she didn’t “fancy” you a tad. Having every reason to assume that Siobhan was contented in our employ, I was puzzled to note as the months advanced that she began to look curiously drawn. I know the Irish don’t age well, but even for her thinskinned race she was much too young to develop those hard worry lines across her forehead. She could be testy when I returned from the office, snapping when I had simply expressed surprise that we were low again on baby food, “Och, it doesn’t all go in his mouth, you know!” She immediately apologized, and grew fleetingly tearful but wouldn’t explain. She became more difficult to entice into a debriefing cup of coffee, as if anxious to be quit of our loft, and I was nonplussed by her reaction when I proposed that she move in. You remember that I offered to wall off that illused catchall corner, and to install a separate bath. What I had in mind would have been far more capacious than the cubbyhole she shared in the East Village with a loose, boozing, godless waitress she didn’t much like. I wouldn’t have cut her salary, either, so she’d have saved buckets on rent. Yet at the prospect of becoming a live-in nanny, she recoiled. When she protested that she could never break her lease on that Avenue C hovel, it sounded like, well, horseshit. And then she started calling in sick. Just once or twice a month at first, but at length she was phoning in with a sore throat or an upset stomach at least once a week. She looked wretched enough; she couldn’t have been eating well, because those doll-baby curves had given way to a stickfigure frailty, and when the Irish pale, they look exhumed. So I was hesitant to accuse her of faking. Deferentially I inquired if she had boyfriend problems, if there was trouble with her family in Carickfergus, or if she was pining for Northern Ireland. “Pining for Northern Ireland,” she repeated wryly. “You’re having me on.” That moment of humor served to highlight that her jokes had grown rare. These impromptu vacations of hers put me to great inconvenience, since according to the now-established logic of your tenuous freelance employment versus my fatuous security as CEO, I was the one to stay home. Not only would I have to reschedule meetings or conduct them awkwardly in conference calls, but a whole extra day spent with our precious little ward tipped a precarious equilibrium in me; by nightfall on a day I had not been girded for Kevin’s unrelenting horror at his own existence, I was, as our nanny would say, mental. It was through the insufferable addition of that extra day a week that Siobhan and I came, tacitly at first, to understand each other. Clearly, God’s children are meant to savor His glorious gifts without petulance, for Siobhan’s uncanny forbearance could only have issued from catechism. No amount of wheedling would elicit whatever was driving her abed every Friday. So if only to give her permission, I complained myself. “I have no regrets about my travels,” I began one early evening as she prepared to go, “but it’s a shame I met Franklin so late. Four years just the two of us wasn’t nearly enough time to get tired of him! I think it must be nice if you meet your partner in your twenties, with long enough as a childless couple to, I don’t know, get a little bored even. Then in your thirties you’re ready for a change, and a baby is welcome.” Siobhan looked at me sharply, and though I expected censure in her gaze I caught only a sudden alertness. “Of course, you don’t mean Kevin isn’t welcome.” I knew the moment mandated hurried reassurances, but I couldn’t furnish them. This would happen to me sporadically in the coming years: I would do and say what I was supposed to week upon week without fail until abruptly I hit a wall. I would open my mouth and That’s a really pretty drawing, Kevin or If we tear the flowers out of the ground they’ll die, and you don’t want them to die, do you? or Yes, we’re so awfully proud of our son, Mr. Cartland would simply not come out. “Siobhan,” I said reluctantly. “I’ve been a little disappointed.” “I know I’ve been poorly, Eva—” “Not in you.” I considered that she may have understood me perfectly well and had misinterpreted me on purpose. I shouldn’t have burdened this young girl with my secrets, but I felt strangely impelled. “All the bawling and the nasty plastic toys... I’m not sure quite what I had in mind, but it wasn’t this.” “Sure you might have a touch of postpartum—” “Whatever you call it, I don’t feel joyful. And Kevin doesn’t seem joyful either.” “He’s a baby!” “He’s over a year and a half. You know how people are always cooing, He’s such a happy child! Well, in that instance there are unhappy children. And nothing I do makes the slightest bit of difference.” She kept fiddling with her daypack, nestling the last of her few possessions into its cavity with undue concentration. She always brought a book to read for Kevin’s naps, and I finally noticed that she’d been stuffing the exact same volume in that daypack for months. I’d have understood if it was a Bible, but it was only an inspirational text—slim, the cover now badly stained—and she had once described herself as an avid reader. “Siobhan, I’m useless with babies. I’ve never had much rapport with small children, but I’d hoped... Well, that motherhood would reveal another side of myself.” I met one of her darting glances. “It hasn’t.” She squirmed. “Ever talk to Franklin, about how you’re feeling?” I laughed with one ha. “Then we’d have to do something about it. Like what?” “Don’t you figure the first couple of years is the tough bit? That it gets easier?” I licked my lips. “I realize this doesn’t sound very nice. But I keep waiting for the emotional payoff.” “But only by giving do you get anything back.” She shamed me, but then I thought about it. “I give him my every weekend, my every evening. I’ve even given him my husband, who has no interest in talking about anything but our son, or in doing anything together besides wheeling a stroller up and down the Battery Park promenade. In return, Kevin smites me with the evil eye, and can’t bear for me to hold him. Can’t bear much of anything, as far as I can tell.” This kind of talk was making Siobhan edgy; it was domestic heresy. But something seemed to cave in her, and she couldn’t keep up the cheerleading. So instead of forecasting what delights were in store for me once Kevin became a little person in his own right, she said gloomily, “Aye, I know what you mean.” “Tell me, does Kevin—respond to you?” “Respond?” The sardonicism was new. “You could say that.” “When you’re with him during the day, does he laugh? Gurgle contentedly? Sleep? ” I realized that I had refrained from asking her as much for all these months, and that in so doing I’d been taking advantage of her ungrudging nature. “He pulls my hair,” she said quietly. “But all babies—they don’t know—” “He pulls it very hard indeed. He’s old enough now and I think he knows it hurts. And Eva, that lovely silk muffler from Bangkok. It’s in shreds.” Ch-plang! Ch-plang! Kevin was awake. He was banging a rattle onto that metal xylophone you came home with (alas), and was not showing musical promise. “When he’s alone with me,” I said over the racket. “Franklin calls it cranky —” “He throws all his toys out of the playpen, and then he screams, and he will not stop screaming until they are all back, and then he throws them out again. Flings them.” P-p-plang-k-chang-CHANG! PLANK! P-P-P-plankpankplankplank! There was a violent clatter, from which I construed that Kevin had kicked the instrument from between the slats of his crib. “It’s desperate!” Siobhan despaired. “He does the same thing in his highchair, with Cheerios, porridge, cream crackers... With all his food on the floor like, I haven’t a baldy where he gets the energy!” “You mean,” I touched her hand, “you don’t know where you get the energy.” Mwah... Mmwah... Mmmmwhawhah... He started like a lawnmower. Siobhan and I looked each other in the eye. Mwah-eee! EEEeee! EEEEEEEE! EEahEEEEEEEE! Neither of us arose from our chair. “Of course,” said Siobhan hopefully, “I guess it’s different when it’s yours.” “Yup,” I said. “Totally different.” EEahEEEEEahEEEE! EEahEEEEEahEEEE! EEahEEEEEahEEEE! “I used to want a big family,” she said, turning away. “Now I’m not so sure.” “If I were you,” I said, “I’d think twice.” Kevin filled the silence between us as I fought a rising panic. I had to say something to forestall what was coming next, but I couldn’t think of any comment to pass that wouldn’t further justify what I wished fervidly to prevent. “Eva,” she began. “I’m knackered. I don’t think Kevin likes me. I’ve prayed until I’m blue—for patience, for love, for strength. I thought God was testing me—” “When Jesus said Suffer the little children,” I said dryly, “I don’t think nannying is what he had in mind.” “I hate to think I’ve failed Him! Or you, Eva! Still, do you think there’s any chance—do you think you could use me at Wing and a Prayer? Those guidebooks, you said loads of them’s researched by university students and that. Could you—could you please, please send me to Europe, or Asia? I’d do a brilliant job, I promise!” I sagged. “You mean you want to quit.” “You and Franklin been dead decent, you must think me terrible ungrateful. Still, when you lot move to the suburbs you’d have to find someone else anyway, right? ’Cause I came over here bound and determined to live in New York City.” “I am, too! Who says we’re moving to the burbs?” “Franklin, of course.” “We’re not moving to any suburbs,” I said firmly. She shrugged. She had already withdrawn so from our little unit that she regarded this miscommunication as none of her affair. “Would you like more money?” I offered pathetically; my full-time residence in this country was beginning to take its toll. “The pay’s great, Eva. I can’t do it anymore, just. Every morning I wake up....” I knew exactly how she woke feeling. And I couldn’t do it to her any longer. I think I’m a bad mother, and you always thought so, too. But deep inside me lurks the rare maternal bone. Siobhan was at her limit. Though it ran wildly counter to our interests, her earthly salvation was within my power to grant. “We’re updating NETHERWAP,” I said morosely; I had an awful premonition that Siobhan’s resignation would be effective right away. “Would you like that? Rating hostels in Amsterdam? The rijsttafels are delicious.” Siobhan forgot herself and threw her arms around me. “Would you like for me to try and quiet him?” she offered. “Maybe his nappy—” “I doubt that; it’s too rational. No, you’ve put in a full day. And take the rest of the week off. You’re shattered.” I was already sweetening her up, to get her to stick around until we found a replacement. Fat chance. “One last thing,” said Siobhan, tucking my note with the name of NETHERWAP’s editor into her pack. “Wee’uns vary, of course. But Kevin should really be talking by now. A few words anyway. Maybe you should ask your doctor. Or talk to him more.” I promised, then saw her to the elevator, shooting a rueful glance at the crib. “You know, it is different when it’s yours. You can’t go home.” Indeed, my yearning to go home had grown recurrent, but was most intense when I was already there. We exchanged wan smiles, and she waved behind the gate. I watched from the front window as she ran down Hudson Street, away from our loft and wee Kevin as fast as her unshapely legs could carry her. I returned to our son’s marathon and looked down at his writhing dudgeon. I was not going to pick him up. No one was there to make me and I didn’t want to. I would not, as Siobhan had suggested, check his diaper, nor would I warm a bottle of milk. I would let him cry and cry. Resting both elbows on the crib rail, I cradled my chin on intertwined fingers. Kevin was crouched on all fours in one of the positions that the New School commended for birthing: primed for exertion. Most tots cry with their eyes shut, but Kevin’s were slit open. When our gazes locked, I felt we were finally communicating. His pupils were still almost black, and I could see them flintily register that for once Mother was not going to get in a flap about whatever might be the matter. “Siobhan thinks I should talk to you,” I said archly over the din. “Who else is going to, since you drove her off? That’s right, you screamed and puked her out the door. What’s your problem, you little shit? Proud of yourself, for ruining Mummy’s life?” I was careful to use the insipid falsetto the experts commend. “You’ve got Daddy snowed, but Mummy’s got your number. You’re a little shit, aren’t you?” Kevin hoisted to a stand without missing a yowl. Clutching the bars, he screamed at me from just a few inches away, and my ears hurt. So scrunched up, his face looked like an old man’s, and it was screwed into the I’m-gonna-get-you expression of a convict who’s already started digging a tunnel with a nail file. On a purely zoo-keeping level, my proximity was hazardous; Siobhan hadn’t been kidding about the hair. “Mummy was happy before widdle Kevin came awong, you know that, don’t you? And now Mummy wakes up every day and wishes she were in France. Mummy’s life sucks now, doesn’t Mummy’s life suck? Do you know there are some days that Mummy would rather be dead? Rather than listen to you screech for one more minute there are some days that Mummy would jump off the Brooklyn Bridge—” I turned, and blanched. I may never have seen quite that stony look on your face. “They understand speech long before they learn to talk,” you said, pushing past me to pick him up. “I don’t understand how you can stand there and watch him cry.” “Franklin, ease up, I was only kidding around!” I shot a parting private glare at Kevin. It was thanks to his caterwauling that I hadn’t heard the elevator gate. “I’m blowing off a little steam, okay? Siobhan quit. Hear that? Siobhan quit.” “Yeah, I heard you. Too bad. We’ll get someone else.” “It turns out that all along she’s regarded this job as a modern rewrite of the Book of Job—Look, I’ll change him.” You wrenched him away. “You can steer clear until you get your mind right. Or jump off a bridge. Whichever comes first.” I trailed after you. “Say, what’s this about moving to the suburbs? Since when?” “Since—I quote— the little shit is getting mobile. That elevator is a death trap.” “We can gate off the elevator!” “He needs a yard. ” Sanctimoniously, you balled the wet diaper in the pail. “Where we can toss a baseball, fill a pool.” The awful revelation dawned that we were dealing with your childhood—an idealization of your childhood—that could prove, like your fantasy United States, an awesome cudgel. There’s no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary. “But I love New York!” I sounded like a bumper sticker. “It’s dirty and swimming in diseases, and a kid’s immune system isn’t fully developed until he’s seven years old. And we could stand to move into a good school district.” “This city has the best private schools in the country.” “New York private schools are snobbish and cutthroat. Kids in this town start worrying about getting into Harvard at the age of six.” “What about the tiny matter that your wife doesn’t want to leave this city?” “You had twenty years to do whatever you wanted. I did, too. Besides, you said you yearned to spend our money on something worthwhile. Now’s your chance. We should buy a house. With land and a tire swing.” “My mother never made a single major decision based on what was good for me. ” “Your mother has locked herself in a closet for forty years. Your mother is insane. Your mother is hardly the parent to look to as a role model.” “I mean that when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I’m a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can’t believe this.” I flounced onto the couch. “I want to go to Africa, and you want to go to New Jersey. ” “What’s this about Africa? Why do you keep bringing it up?” “We’re going ahead with AFRIWAP. The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide are starting to squeeze us badly in Europe.” “What does this edition have to do with you?” “The continent is huge. Someone has to do a preliminary canvass of countries.” “Someone other than you. You still don’t get it, do you? Maybe it was a mistake for you to think of motherhood as ‘another country.’ This is no overseas holiday. It’s serious—” “ We’re talking about human lives, Jim! ” You didn’t even smile. “How would you feel if he lost a hand reaching through that elevator gate? If he got asthma from all this crap in the air? If some loser kidnapped him from your grocery cart?” “The truth is, you want a house,” I charged. “ You want a yard. You have this dorky Norman Rockwell vision of Daddydom, and you want to coach Little League.” “Got that right.” You straightened victoriously at the changing table, Kevin in his blazing fresh Pampers on your hip. “And there are two of us, and one of you.” It was a ratio I was destined to confront repeatedly.
Eva
December 25, 2000
Dear Franklin,
I agreed to visit my mother for Christmas, so I’m writing from Racine. At the last minute—when he found out I was coming—Giles decided that his family would spend the holiday with his in-laws instead. I could choose to feel injured, and I do miss my brother if only as someone with whom to mock my mother, but she’s getting so frail now at seventy-eight that our patronizing despair on her behalf seems unfair. Besides, I understand. Around Giles and his kids, I never mention Kevin, Mary’s lawsuit; a little traitorously, I never even mention you. But through benign discussion of the snow, whether to put pine nuts in the sarma, I still personify a horror that, in defiance of my mother’s locked doors and sealed windows, has gotten inside. Giles resents my having co-opted the role of family tragic figure. He only moved as far as Milwaukee, and the child at closer hand is always chopped liver, while for decades I made a living from being as far away from Racine as I could get. Like De Beers restricting the supply of diamonds, I made myself scarce, a cheap gambit in Giles’s view for artificially manufacturing the precious. Now I have stooped even lower, using my son to corner the market on pity. Having kept his head below the parapet working for Budweiser, he’s in grudging awe of anyone who’s been in the newspaper. I keep trying to find some way of telling him that this is the kind of dime-store fame that the most unremarkable parent could win in the sixty seconds it takes an automatic assault rifle to fire a hundred bullets. I don’t feel special. You know, there’s a peculiar smell in this house that I used to find rank. Remember how I used to insist that the air was thin? My mother rarely opens a door, much less airs the place out, and I was convinced that the distinctive headache that always hit me on arrival was the beginnings of carbon dioxide poisoning. But now the close, clinging admixture of stale lamb grease, dust, and mildew sharpened with the medicinal reek of her colored inks comforts me somehow. For years I wrote off my mother as having no grasp of my life, but after Thursday I came to terms with the fact that I’d made no effort to understand hers. She and I had been distant for decades not because she was agoraphobic but because I’d been remote and unsparing. Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. During my traveling days, I must have seemed uppity and superior, and my new desperation for safety has restored my status as a proper child. For my part, I have come to recognize—since any world is by definition self-enclosed and, to its inhabitants, all there is—that geography is relative. To my intrepid mother, the living room could be Eastern Europe, my old bedroom Cameroon. Of course, the Internet is the best and worst thing that ever happened to her, and she is now able to order anything from support hose to grape leaves over the Web. Consequently, the multitude of errands I used to run for her whenever I was home is already dispatched, and I feel a little useless. I suppose it’s good that technology has granted her independence—if that’s what it’s called. My mother, by the way, doesn’t avoid talking about Kevin at all. This morning as we opened our few presents beside her spindly tree (ordered on-line), she noted that Kevin rarely misbehaved in the traditional sense, which always made her suspicious. All children misbehave, she said. You were better off when they did so in plain view. And she recalled our visit when Kevin was about ten—old enough to know better, she said. She’d just finished a stack of twenty-five one-of-a-kind Christmas cards commissioned by some wealthy Johnson Wax exec. While we were preparing khurabia with powdered sugar in the kitchen, he systematically snipped the cards into ragged paper snowflakes. (You said—a mantra—he was “just trying to help.”) That boy had something missing, she pronounced, in the past tense, as if he were dead. She was trying to make me feel better, though I worried that what Kevin was missing was a mother like mine. In fact, I trace the flowering of my present filial grace to a gasping phone call the night of Thursday itself. To whom else was I to turn but my mother? The primitiveness of the tie was sobering. For the life of me, I can’t remember a single time that Kevin—distraught over a scraped knee, a falling-out with a playmate—has called me. I could tell from her collected, formal greeting, Hello, Sonya Khatchadourian speaking, that she hadn’t seen the evening news. Mother? was all I could manage—plaintive, grade-school. The ensuing heavy breathing must have sounded like a crank call. I felt suddenly protective. If she lived in mortal dread of a trip to Walgreens, how would she confront the vastly more appreciable terror of a murderous grandson? For pity’s sake, I thought, she’s seventy-six, and she already lives through a mail slot. After this, she’ll never pull the covers off her head. But Armenians have a talent for sorrow. You know, she wasn’t even surprised? She was somber but remained composed, and for once, even at her advanced age, she acted and sounded like a real parent. I could depend on her, she assured me, an assertion that hitherto would have made me scoff. It was almost as if all that dread of hers finally redeemed itself; as if on some level she was relieved that her whole batten-down-the-hatches gestalt hadn’t proved baseless. After all, she’d been here before, where the rest of the world’s tragedy lapped at her shore. She may have hardly left the house, but of everyone in our family, she most profoundly appreciated how the careless way adjacent people live their lives can threaten all you hold dear. Most of her extended family had been slaughtered, her very husband picked off by Japanese like skeet; Kevin’s rampage fit right in. Indeed, the occasion seemed to liberate something in her, not only love but bravery, if they are not in many respects the same thing. Mindful that the police were bound to expect me to remain on hand, I declined her invitation to Racine. Gravely, my shut-in mother offered to fly to me.
It was shortly after Siobhan jumped ship (she never did come back, and I had to post her last paycheck to AmEx in Amsterdam) that Kevin stopped screaming. Stopped cold. Maybe, his nanny dispatched, he felt his mission accomplished. Maybe he’d finally concluded that these high-decibel workouts did not reprieve him from the remorseless progress of life-in-a-room and so were not worth the energy. Or maybe he was hatching some new gambit now that Mother had grown inured to his wailing, as one does in the latter stages of a neglected car alarm. While I was hardly complaining, Kevin’s silence had an oppressive quality. First off, it was truly silence—total, closed-mouth, cleansed of the coos and soft cries that most children emit when exploring the infinitely fascinating three square feet of their nylon net playpen. Second, it was inert. Although he was now able to walk—which, like every skill to come, he learned in private—there didn’t appear to be anywhere he especially wanted to go. So he would sit, in the playpen or on the floor, for hours, his unlit eyes stirring with an unfocused disaffection. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t at least comb up a little aimless fluff from our Armenian rugs, even if he refused to loop colored rings on their plastic spike or crank the noisemaker on his Busy Box. I would surround him with toys (there was hardly a day you didn’t come home with a new one), and he would stare at them or kick one away. He did not play. You’d remember that period largely as the time we were fighting about whether to move and whether I would take that long trip to Africa. But I mostly remember staying home on those draggy days after we’d once again lost a nanny, and mysteriously they did not pass any faster than the ones during which Kevin bellowed. Previous to motherhood I had imagined having a small child at elbow as something like owning a bright, companionable dog, but our son exerted a much denser presence than any pet. Every moment, I was hugely aware he was there. Though his new phlegmatism made it easier to edit copy at home, I felt watched and grew restive. I’d roll balls to Kevin’s feet, and once I did entice him into rolling it back. Excited, ridiculously so, I rolled it back; he rolled it back. But once I rolled it between his legs a third time, that was that. With a listless glance, he left the ball at his knee. I did begin to think, Franklin, that he was smart. In sixty seconds, he got it: Were we to pursue this “game,” the ball would continue to roll back and forth along the same trajectory, an exercise that was overtly pointless. I was never able to engage him in it again. This impenetrable flatness of his, combined with a reticence extending well past the point that all your manuals forecast first attempts at speech, compelled me to consult our pediatrician. Dr. Foulke was reassuring, ready with the conventional parental sop that “normal” developmental behavior embraced a range of idiosyncratic stalls and leaps, though he did subject our son to a battery of simple tests. I’d expressed concern that Kevin’s unresponsiveness was due to a hearing deficit; whenever I called his name, he turned with such an in-his-own-good-time deadpan that it was impossible to tell whether he had heard me. Yet though he was not necessarily interested in anything I said, his ears worked fine, and my theory that the volume of his infantile screaming had damaged his vocal chords was not borne out by medical science. I even voiced a worry that Kevin’s withdrawn quality might indicate early signs of autism, but apparently he did not display the telltale rocking and repetitive behavior of such unfortunates trapped in their own world; if Kevin was trapped, it was in the same world as yours and mine. In fact, the most I wrested from Dr. Foulke was his musing that Kevin “was a floppy little boy, wasn’t he?” in reference to a certain physical slackness. The doctor would lift our son’s arm, let go, and the arm would drop like a wet noodle. So insistent was I that Foulke pin a disability to our son, stamp a name-brand American syndrome on Kevin’s forehead, that the pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization’s latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction. And honestly, I did want him to find something wrong with Kevin. I yearned for our son to have some small disadvantage or flaw to kindle my sympathy. I was not made of stone, and whenever I espied a little boy with a piebald cheek or webbed fingers waiting patiently in the outer office, my heart went out to him, and I quivered to consider what tortures he would suffer at recess. I wanted to at least feel sorry for Kevin, which seemed a start. Did I truly wish our son to have webbed fingers? Well, yes, Franklin. If that’s what it took. He was underweight, in consequence of which he never had those rounded, blunt features of the roly-poly toddler that can make even homely children adorable for that photogenic window between two and three. Instead his face had that ferret-like sharpness from his earliest years. If nothing else, I’d have liked to have been able to gaze later at photographs of a pudgy heartbreaker and wonder what went wrong. Instead, the snaps I have (and you took stacks) all document a sobersided wariness and disturbing self-possession. The narrow olive face is instantly familiar: recessed eyes, sheer straight nose with a wide bridge and slight hook, thin lips set in an obscure determination. Those pictures are recognizable not only for their resemblance to the class photograph that appeared in all the papers but for their resemblance to me. But I wanted him to look like you. His whole geometry was based on the triangle and yours on the square, and there is something cunning and insinuating about acute angles, stable and trustworthy about the perpendicular. I didn’t expect to have a little Franklin Plaskett clone running around the house, but I wanted to glance at my son’s profile and apprehend with a flash of lambent joy that he had your strong tall forehead—rather than one that shelved sharply over eyes that might begin as strikingly deep-set but were destined with age to look sunken. (I should know.) I was gratified that his appearance was noticeably Armenian, but I had hoped that your robust Anglo optimism would quicken the sluggish, grudge-bearing blood of my Ottoman heritage, brightening his sallow skin with ruddy hints of football games in fall, highlighting his sullen black hair with glints of Fourth of July fireworks. Moreover, the furtiveness of his gaze and the secrecy of his silence seemed to confront me with a miniature version of my own dissembling. He was watching me and I was watching me, and under this dual scrutiny I felt doubly self-conscious and false. If I found our son’s visage too shrewd and contained, the same shifty mask of opacity stared back at me when I brushed my teeth. I was averse to plunking Kevin in front of the television. I hated children’s programming; the animation was hyperactive, the educational shows boppy, insincere, and condescending. But he seemed so understimulated. So one afternoon when I had burned out on bubbling, It’s time for our juice! I switched on the after-school cartoons. “I don like dat.” I reeled away from the beans I was tailing for dinner, certain from the lifeless monotonic delivery that this line had not escaped from the A-Team. I rushed to turn the TV down low and stooped to our son. “What did you say?” He repeated levelly, “I don like dat.” With more urgency than I may ever have applied to this foundering relationship, I took one of his shoulders in each hand. “Kevin? What do you like?” It was a question that he was not prepared to answer and that to this day at the age of seventeen he is still unable to answer to his own satisfaction, much less to mine. So I returned to what he didn’t like, a subject that would soon prove inexhaustible. “Sweetheart? What is it you want to stop?” He batted a hand against the television tube. “I don like dat. Turn id ov.” I stood up and marveled. Oh, I turned the cartoon off all right, thinking Christ, I have a toddler with good taste. As if myself the child, I was impelled to experiment with my riveting new toy, to poke at its buttons and see what lit up. “Kevin, do you want a cookie?” “I hate cookies.” “Kevin, will you talk to Daddy when he comes home?” “Not if I don feew wike it.” “Kevin, can you say ‘Mommy’?” I’d been queasy about what I wanted our son to call me. Mommy sounded babyish, Ma rube-ish, Mum servile. Mama was the stuff of batteryoperated doll babies, Mom rang earnest and gee-whiz, Mother seemed formal for 1986. Looking back, I wonder if I did not like being called any of the popular names for mother because I did not like—well, because I was still ill at ease with being one. Little matter, since the predictable answer was, “No.” When you came home, Kevin refused to repeat his loquacious performance, but I recited it word for word. You were ecstatic. “Complete sentences, right off the bat! I’ve read that what seem like late bloomers can be incredibly bright. They’re perfectionists. They don’t want to try it out on you until they’ve got it right.” I nursed a competing theory: that, having secretly been able to talk for years, he had enjoyed eavesdropping on the unwitting; that he was a spy. And I attended less to his grammar than to what he said. I know this kind of assertion always gets up your nose, but I did sometimes consider that, between us, I was the more interested in Kevin. (In my mind’s eye, I can see you going apoplectic.) I mean, interested in Kevin as Kevin really was, not Kevin as Your Son, who had continually to battle against the formidable fantasy paragon in your head, with whom he was in far more ferocious competition than he ever was with Celia. For example, that evening I remarked, “I’ve been waiting ages to find out what’s going on behind those piercing little eyes.” You shrugged. “Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.” See? Kevin was (and remains) a mystery to me. You had that insouciant boy-thing going and blithely assumed that you had been there yourself and there was nothing to find out. And you and I may have differed on so profound a level as the nature of human character. You regarded a child as a partial creature, a simpler form of life, which evolved into the complexity of adulthood in open view. But from the instant he was laid on my breast I perceived Kevin Khatchadourian as pre-extant, with a vast, fluctuating interior life whose subtlety and intensity would if anything diminish with age. Most of all, he seemed hidden from me, while your experience was one of sunny, leisurely access. Anyway, for several weeks he would talk to me during the day, and when you came home he clammed up. At the clank of the elevator, he’d shoot me a complicitous glance: Let’s put one over on Daddy. I may have found a guilty pleasure in the exclusivity of my son’s discourse, thanks to which I was apprised that he did not like rice pudding with or without cinnamon and he did not like Dr. Seuss books and he did not like the nursery rhymes put to music that I checked out from the library. Kevin had a specialized vocabulary; he had genius for N-words. The sole memory I retain of any proper childhood glee during this era was at his third birthday party, when I was busy pouring cranberry juice in his sippy cup, and you were tying ribbons on packages that you would only have to untie for him minutes later. You had brought home a threetiered marble layer cake from Vinierro’s on First Avenue that was decorated with a custom butter-cream baseball theme and had placed it proudly on the table in front of his booster chair. In the two minutes our backs were turned, Kevin displayed much the same gift that he’d exhibited earlier that week by methodically pulling all the stuffing through a small hole in what we thought was his favorite rabbit. My attention was drawn by a dry chuckle that I could only characterize as a nascent snicker. Kevin’s hands were those of a plasterer. And his expression was rapturous. Such a young birthday boy, not yet fully comprehending the concept of birthdays, had no reason to grasp the concept of slices. You laughed, and after you’d gone to so much trouble I was glad you could take the mishap as comedy. But as I cleaned his hands with a damp cloth, my chortle was muted. Kevin’s technique of plunging both hands mid-cake and spreading its whole body apart in a single surgical motion was uneasily reminiscent of those scenes in medical shows when the patient is “coding” and some doctor yells, “Crack ’em!” Gorier programs toward the end of the millennium left little to the imagination: The ribcage is riven with an electric hacksaw, the ribs pulled back, and then our handsome ER doc plunges into a red sea. Kevin hadn’t simply played with that cake. He had ripped its heart out.
In the end, of course, we finalized the inevitable swap: I would license you to find us a house across the Hudson; you would license me to take my reconnaissance trip to Africa. My deal was pretty raw, but then desperate people will often opt for short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses. So I sold my birthright for a bowl of soup. I don’t mean that I regret that African sojourn, though in terms of texture it was badly timed. Motherhood had dragged me down to what we generally think of as the lower matters: eating and shitting. And that’s ultimately what Africa is about. This may be ultimately what every country is about, but I have always appreciated efforts to disguise that fact, and I might have been better off traveling to more decorative nations, where the bathrooms have roseate soaps and the meals at least come with a garnish of radicchio. Brian had commended children as a marvelous antidote for jadedness; he said that you get to re-appreciate the world through their awestruck eyes and everything that you were once tired of suddenly looks vibrant and new. Well, the cure-all had sounded terrific, better than a facelift or a prescription for Valium. But I am disheartened to report that whenever I saw the world through Kevin’s eyes, it tended to appear unusually dreary. Through Kevin’s eyes the whole world looked like Africa, people milling and scrounging and squatting and lying down to die. Yet amid all that squalor I still couldn’t locate a safari company that could properly be considered budget; most charged hundreds of dollars per day. Likewise, the lodging divided off in a way that eliminated my target market: It was either luxurious and pricey, or filthy and too cut-rate. A variety of Italian and Indian restaurants were a good value, but authentic African eateries served mostly unseasoned goat. Transport was appalling, the train lines prone to simply stop, the aircraft decrepit, the pilots fresh from Bananarama Flight School, the driving kamikaze, the buses bursting with cackling passengers three times over capacity and aflap with chickens. I know I sound finicky. I had been to the continent once in my twenties and had been entranced. Africa had seemed truly elsewhere. Yet in the interim, the wildlife population had plummeted, the human one burgeoned; the intervening rise in misery was exponential. This time appraising the territory with a professional eye, I discounted whole countries as out of the question. Uganda was still picking corpses from the mouths of crocodiles discarded by Amin and Obote; Liberia was ruled by that murderous idiot, Samuel Doe; even in those days, Hutus and Tutsis were hacking each other to pieces in Burundi. Zaire was in the grip of Mobutu Sese Seko, while Mengistu continued to ransack Ethiopia and Renamo ran amok in Mozambique. If I listed South Africa, I risked having the entire series boycotted in the States. As for the bits that were left, you may have accused me of being unnurturing, but I was reluctant to take responsibility for callow young Westerners trooping off to these perilous parts armed only with a distinctive sky-blue volume of Wing and a Prayer. I was bound to read about robberies in Tsavo that left three dead in a ditch for 2,000 shillings, a camera, and a guidebook and feel certain it was all my fault. As Kevin would later illustrate, I attract liability, real or imagined. So I began to conclude that the marketing people’s heads were up their backsides. They had researched the demand, but not the supply. I did not have faith that even our intrepid army of college students and my thoroughgoing staff could put together a solitary volume that would protect its users from making the grossest of missteps for which they could pay so dearly that a continent full of bargains would still seem overpriced. For once I did feel motherly—toward customers like Siobhan, and the last place I’d want pastily complected, there’s-good-in-all-of-us Siobhan to end up was in a scorching, pitiless Nairobi slum. AFRIWAP was a nonstarter. But my greatest disappointment was in myself. While relinquishing the idea of AFRIWAP might have freed me to gallivant about the continent without taking notes, I’d grown dependent on research for a sense of purpose on the road. Released from an itinerary dictated by conveniently tabbed chapters, I felt aimless. Africa is a lousy place to wonder incessantly what you are doing there, though there is something about its careless, fetid, desperate cities that presses the question. I could not shut you and Kevin from my mind. That I missed you fiercely served as an aching reminder that I had been missing you since Kevin was born. Away, I felt not emancipated but remiss, sheepish that unless you’d finally solved the nanny problem you’d have to cart him with you in the pickup to scout. Everywhere I went, I felt laden, as if slogging the potholed streets of Lagos with five-pound leg weights: I had started something back in New York, it was not finished by any means, I was shirking, and what’s more, what I had started was going badly. That much I faced; that much my isolation was good for. After all, the one thing you cannot escape in Africa is children. In the latter legs of the three-month trip, which you’ll recall I cut short, I made resolutions. One too many sojourns—this one launched less in a spirit of exploration than simply to make a point, to prove that my life had not changed, that I was still young, still curious, still free—was only proving beyond doubt that my life had indeed changed, that at fortyone I was not remotely young, that I had truly sated a certain glib curiosity about other countries, and that there was a variety of liberty of which I could no longer avail myself without sinking the one tiny island of permanence, of durable meaning and lasting desire, that I had managed to annex in this vast, arbitrary sea of international indifference. Camping in Harare’s airport lounge on gritty linoleum because there were no seats and the plane was eight hours late, the whole 737 having been appropriated by some government minister’s wife who wanted to go shopping in Paris, I seemed to have unaccountably lost my old serene certainty that inconvenience (if not outright disaster) was the springboard for nearly every proper adventure abroad. I was no longer persuaded by that old saw planted in every AWAP intro that the worst thing that can happen to any trip is for everything to go smoothly. Instead, like any standard Western tourist, I was impatient for air-conditioning and disgruntled that the only available drinks were Fanta orange, which I did not like. With the concessions’ refrigeration broken down, they were boiling. That sweaty, protracted delay allowed me to contemplate that so far my commitment to motherhood had been toe-in-the-water. In a funny way, I resolved, I had to remake that arduous decision of 1982 and jump into parenthood with both feet. I had to get pregnant with Kevin all over again. Like his birth, raising our son could be a transporting experience, but only if I stopped fighting it. As I was at pains to teach Kevin for years thereafter (to little effect), rarely is the object of your attentions innately dull or compelling. Nothing is interesting if you are not interest ed. In vain, I had been waiting for Kevin to prove out, to demonstrate as I stood arms folded that he was worthy of my ardor. That was too much to demand of a little boy, who would only be as lovable to me as I allowed him to be. It was past time that I at least met Kevin halfway. Flying into Kennedy, I was bursting with determination, optimism, and goodwill. But in retrospect, I do feel obliged to observe that I was at my most passionate about our son when he was not there.
Merry Christmas,
Eva
