JANUARY 6, 2001
Dear Franklin,
The Electoral College just certified a Republican president, and you must be pleased. But despite your pose as a sexist, flag-waving retrograde, in fatherhood you were a good little liberal, as fastidious about corporal punishment and nonviolent toys as the times demanded. I’m not making fun, only wondering if you, too, go back over those precautions and ponder where we went wrong. My own review of Kevin’s upbringing was assisted by trained legal minds. “Ms. Khatchadourian,” Harvey grilled me on the stand, “did you have a rule in your household that children were not allowed to play with toy guns?” “For what it’s worth, yes.” “And you monitored television and video viewing?” “We tried to keep Kevin away from anything too violent or sexually explicit, especially when he was little. Unfortunately, that meant my husband couldn’t watch most of his own favorite programs. And we did have to allow one exception.” “What was that?” Annoyance again; this wasn’t planned. “The History Channel.” A titter; I was playing to the peanut gallery. “The point is,” Harvey continued through his teeth, “you made every effort to ensure that your son was not surrounded by coarsening influences, did you not?” “In my home,” I said. “That is six acres out of a planet. And even there, I was unprotected from Kevin’s coarsening influence on me.” Harvey stopped to breathe. I sensed an alternative-medicine professional had taught him some technique. “In other words, you couldn’t control what Kevin played with or watched when he went to other children’s homes?” “Frankly, other children rarely asked Kevin over more than once.” The judge intervened, “Ms. Khatchadourian, please just answer the question.” “Oh, I suppose,” I complied lackadaisically; I was getting bored. “What about the Internet?” Harvey proceeded. “Was your son given free rein to access whatever web sites he liked, including, say, violent or pornographic ones?” “Oh, we did the whole parental-controls schmear, but Kevin cracked it in a day.” I flicked the air dismissively. Harvey had warned me against giving the slightest indication that I didn’t take the proceedings seriously, and this case did bring out my perverse streak. But my larger trouble was paying attention. Back at the defense table, my lids would droop, my head list. If only to wake myself up, I added the kind of gratuitous commentary that the judge—a prudish, sharp woman who reminded me of Dr. Rhinestein—had cautioned against. “You see,” I proceeded, “by the time he was eleven or twelve, this was all too late. The no-gun rules, the computer codes... Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive, it’s a vanity. We want to be able to tell ourselves what good parents we are, that we’re doing our best. If I had it all to do over again, I’d have let Kevin play with whatever he wanted; he liked little enough. And I’d have ditched the TV rules, the G-rated videos. They only made us look foolish. They underscored our powerlessness, and they provoked his contempt.” Although allowed a soliloquy in judicial terms, in my head I’d cut it short. I no longer suffer the constraints of jurisprudential impatience, so allow me to elaborate. What drew Kevin’s contempt was not, as I had seemed to imply, our patent incapacity to protect him from the Big Bad World. No, to Kevin it was the substance and not the ineffectuality of our taboos that was a joke. Sex? Oh, he used it, when he discovered that I was afraid of it, or afraid of it in him, but otherwise? It was a bore. Don’t take offense, for you and I did find great pleasure in one another, but sex is a bore. Like the Tool Box toys that Kevin spurned as a toddler, the round peg goes in the round hole. The secret is that there is no secret. In fact, plain fucking at his high school was so prevalent, and so quotidian, that I doubt it excited him much. Alternative round holes furnish a transient novelty whose illusoriness he would have seen right through. As for violence, the secret is more of a cheap trick. You remember, once we gave up on the rating system to see a few decent films, watching a video of Braveheart as, dare I say it, a family? In the final torture scene, Mel Gibson is stretched on a rack, all four limbs tied to the corners of the compass. Each time his English captors pulled the ropes tauter, the sisal groaned, and so did I. When the executioner thrust his barbed knife into Mel’s bowel and ripped upward, I squeezed my palms to my temples and whinnied. But when I peeked through the crook of my arm at Kevin, his glance at the screen was blasé. The sour half cock of his mouth was his customary expression at rest. He wasn’t precisely doing the Times crossword, but he was absently blacking in all the white squares with a felt-tip. Cinematic carve-ups are only hard to handle if on some level you believe that these tortures are being done to you. In fact, it’s ironic that these spectacles have such a wicked reputation among Bible thumpers, since gruesome special effects rely for their impact on their audience’s positively Christian compulsion to walk in their neighbors’ shoes. But Kevin had discovered the secret: not merely that it wasn’t real, but that it wasn’t him. Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, flayings, impalements, deoculations, and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch. Because he’d mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomfiting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff. So what had we tried to protect him from, exactly? The practicalities of violence are rudimentary geometry, its laws those of grammar; like the grade-school definition of a preposition, violence is anything an airplane can do to a cloud. Our son had a better than average mastery of geometry and grammar both. There was little in Braveheart —or Reservoir Dogs, or Chucky II —that Kevin could not have invented for himself. In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent that we led him down the garden path—that we enticed him with the prospect of the exotic. (Hadn’t I myself nourished the fantasy that I would eventually land in a country that was somewhere else?) When we shrouded our grown-up mysteries for which Kevin was too young, we implicitly promised him that when the time came, the curtain would pull back to reveal—what? Like the ambiguous emotional universe that I imagined awaited me on the other side of childbirth, it’s doubtful that Kevin had formed a vivid picture of whatever we had withheld from him. But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules, nothing. The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic. The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect. Sure, by the time he was fourteen we had given up on trying to control the videos he watched, the hours he kept, what little he read. But watching those stupid films and logging onto those stupid web sites, swigging that stupid hooch and sucking those stupid butts and fucking those stupid schoolgirls, Kevin must have felt so fiercely cheated. And on Thursday? I bet he still felt cheated. Meantime, I could tell from Harvey’s expression of forbearance that he had regarded my mini-lecture as more destructive self-indulgence. Our case—his case, really—was pearled around the proposition that I had been a normal mother with normal maternal affections who had taken normal precautions to ensure that she raised a normal child. Whether we were the victims of bad luck or bad genes or bad culture was a matter for shamans or biologists or anthropologists to divine, but not the courts. Harvey was intent on evoking every parent’s latent fear that it was possible to do absolutely everything right and still turn on the news to a nightmare from which there is no waking. It was a damned sound approach in retrospect, and now that it’s been a year or so, I feel a little sheepish about being so cantankerous at the time. Still, like that depersonalizing rubber stamp of postnatal depression, our there-but-for-the-grace-of-God defense put me right off. I felt driven to distinguish myself from all those normal-normal mommies, if only as an exceptionally crummy one, and even at the potential price tag of $6.5 million (the plaintiffs had researched what W&P was worth). I had already lost everything, Franklin, everything but the company that is, the continuing possession of which, under the circumstances, struck me as crass. It is true that since then I have sometimes felt wistful about my corporate offspring, now fostered by strangers, but at the time I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I lost the case so long as in the process I was at least kept awake, I didn’t care if I lost all my money, and I was positively praying to be forced to sell our eyesore house. I didn’t care about anything. And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin. As usual, I’d conducted my own cross for opposing counsel (they loved me; they’d have liked to call me as a witness for their side), so I was asked to step down. I paused halfway off the stand. “I’m sorry, your honor, I just remembered something.” “You wish to amend your testimony, for the record?” “We did let Kevin have one gun.” (Harvey sighed.) “A squirt gun, when he was four. My husband loved squirt guns as a boy, so we made an exception.”
It was an exception to a rule I thought inane to begin with. Keep them away from replicas and kids will aim a stick at you, and I see no developmental distinction between wielding formed plastic that goes rat-a-tat-tat on battery power versus pointing a piece of wood and shouting “bangbang-bang!” At least Kevin liked his squirt gun, since he discovered that it was annoying. All through the move from Tribeca, he’d soaked the flies of our movers and then accused them of having “peed their pants.” I thought the accusation pretty rich from a little boy still refusing to pick up on our coy hints about learning to “go potty like Mommer and Daddy” some two years after most kids were flushing to beat the band. He was wearing the wooden mask I’d brought him from Kenya, with scraggy, electrified-looking sisal hair, tiny eyeholes surrounded by huge blank whites, and fierce three-inch teeth made from bird bones. Enormous on his scrawny body, it gave him the appearance of a voodoo doll in diapers. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it. That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable, and the gift’s expression of raw retributive rage gave me the creeps. Schlepping boxes with a wet, itchy crotch couldn’t have been a picnic. They were nice guys, too, uncomplaining and careful, so as soon as I noticed their faces begin to twitch I told Kevin to cut it out. At which point he swiveled his mask in my direction to confirm that I was watching, and water-cannoned the wiry black mover in the butt. “Kevin, I told you to stop it. Don’t squirt these nice men who are only trying to help us one more time, and I mean it. ” Naturally I only managed to imply that the first time I hadn’t meant it. An intelligent child takes the calculus of this-time-I’m-serious-so-last-time-I-wasn’t to its limit and concludes that all his mother’s warnings are horseshit. So we walk through our paces. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, stop that this instant. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, I’m not going to tell you again. And then (squish-squish-squish) the inevitable: Kevin, if you squirt anybody one more time I’m taking the squirt gun away, which earned me, “NYEH-nyeh? Nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeee, nyeh NYE-nye nye NYE-NYE nye-NYEEEEEEE.” Franklin, what good were those parenting books of yours? Next thing I know you’re stooping beside our son and borrowing his dratted toy. I hear muffled giggling and something about Mommer and then you are squirting me. “Franklin, that’s not cute. I told him to quit. You’re not helping.” “NYEH-nyeh? Nye nyeeh nyeeh. Nyeh nyeh -nyeh nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeeh nyeeh -nyeh!” Incredibly, this nyeh-nyeh minced from you, after which you shot me between the eyes. Kevin honked (you know, to this day he still hasn’t learned how to laugh). When you gave the gun back, he drowned my face in a cascade. I snatched the gun. “Aw!” you cried. “Eva, moving’s such a pain in the behind!” (Behind, that was the way we talked now.) “Can’t we have a little fun?” I had the squirt gun now, so one easy exit was to turn a tonal corner: to squirt you gleefully on the nose, and we could have this rambunctious family riot whereby you wrest the gun away and toss the squirt gun to Kevin.... And we’d laugh and fall all over each other and we might even remember it years later, that mythic squirt-gun fight the day we moved to Gladstone. And then one of us would return the toy to Kevin and he’d go back to soaking the movers and I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on to get him to quit because I’d been squirting people too. Alternatively, I could do the killjoy thing, which I did, and put the gun in my purse, which I did. “The movers peed their pants,” you told Kevin, “but Mommer pooped the party.” Of course I’d heard other parents talk about the unfair goodcop /bad-cop divide, how the good cop was always the kid’s favorite while the bad cop did all the heavy lifting and I thought, what a fucking cliché, how did this happen to me? I’m not even interested in this stuff. Kevin’s voodoo alter ego marked the gun’s location in my purse. Most boys would have started to cry. Instead he turned his bird-bone grimace mutely to his mother. From preschool, Kevin was a plotter. He knew how to bide his time. Since a child’s feelings are bruisable, his privileges few, his chattel paltry even when his parents are well-to-do, I’d been given to understand that punishing one’s own child was terribly painful. Yet in truth, when I commandeered Kevin’s squirt gun, I felt a gush of savage joy. As we followed the moving van to Gladstone in the pickup, the continuing possession of Kevin’s beloved toy engorged me with such pleasure that I withdrew it from my purse, forefinger on the trigger, riding shotgun. Strapped between us in the front seat, Kevin lifted his gaze from my lap to the dashboard with theatrical unconcern. Kevin’s bearing was taciturn, his body slack, but the mask gave him away: Inside he was raging. He hated me with all his being, and I was happy as a clam. I think he sensed my pleasure and resolved to deprive me of it in the future. He was already intuiting that attachment—if only to a squirt gun—made him vulnerable. Since whatever he wanted was also something I might deny him, the least desire was a liability. As if in tribute to this epiphany, he pitched the mask on the pickup floor, kicked it absently with his tennis shoe, and broke a few teeth. I don’t imagine he was such a precocious boy—such a monster—that he had conquered his every earthly appetite by the age of four and a half. He still wanted his squirt gun back. But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
When we drove up, the house looked even more hideous than I’d remembered, and I wondered how I would make it through the night without starting to cry. I hopped out of the cab. Kevin could now unstrap himself, and he scorned assistance. He stood on the running board so that I couldn’t shut the door. “Give me my gun back now.” This was no wear-Mom-down whine, but an ultimatum. I wouldn’t be given a second chance. “You were a jerk, Kevin,” I said breezily, lifting him to the ground by his underarms. “No toys for jerks.” I thought, hey, I could come to enjoy being a parent. This is fun. The squirt gun leaked, so I didn’t want to stash it back in my purse. As the movers began to unload, Kevin followed me to the kitchen. I hoisted myself onto the counter and slid his squirt gun with my fingertips on top of the cupboards. I was busy directing what went where and may not have returned to the kitchen for twenty minutes. “Hold it right there, mister,” I said. “ Freeze. ” Kevin had shoved one box next to a pile of two to create a stairway to the counter, onto which one of the movers had slid a box of dishes, making another step. But he had waited for the sound of my footsteps before climbing the cabinet shelves themselves. (In Kevin’s book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.) By the time I arrived, his tennis shoes were perched three shelves up. His left hand was gripping the top of the wavering cupboard door, while his right hand hovered two inches from his squirt gun. I needn’t have shouted Freeze! He was already posing as if for someone to snap a picture. “Franklin!” I bellowed urgently. “Come here, please! Right away!” I wasn’t tall enough to lift him to the floor. As I stood below to catch him if he slipped, Kevin and I locked eyes. His pupils stirred with what might have been pride, or glee, or pity. My God, I thought. He’s only four, and he’s already winning. “Hey, there, buster!” You laughed and lifted him down, though not before he’d snatched the gun. Franklin, you had such beautiful arms. “Little young to learn to fly!” “Kevin’s been very, very bad!” I sputtered. “Now we’re going to have to take that gun away for a very, very, very long time!” “Aw, he’s earned it, haven’t you, kiddo? Man, that climb took guts. Real little monkey, aren’t you?” A shadow crossed his face. He may have thought you were talking down to him, but if so the condescension suited his purposes. “I’m the little monkey,” he said, deadpan. He strode out of the room, squirt gun swinging at his side with the arrogant nonchalance I associated with airplane hijackers. “You just humiliated me.” “Eva, moving’s hard enough on us, but for kids it’s traumatic. Cut him some slack. Listen, I’ve got some bad news about that rocker of yours...” For our new home’s christening dinner the next night we bought steaks, and I wore my favorite caftan, a white-on-white brocade from Tel Aviv. That same evening Kevin learned to fill his squirt gun with concord grape juice. You thought it was funny.
That house resisted me every bit as much as I resisted it. Nothing fit. There were so few right angles that a simple chest of drawers slid into a corner always left an awkward triangle of unfilled space. My furniture, too, was beat-up, though in the Tribeca loft that battered handmade toy box, the tuneless baby grand, the comfortably slumping couch whose pillows leaked chicken feathers hit just the right offbeat note. Suddenly, in our slick new home the funk turned to junk. I felt sorry for those pieces, much as I’d pity unsophisticated but good-hearted high school buddies from Racine at a party milling with hip, sharp-tongued New Yorkers like Eileen and Belmont. It was the same with the kitchenware: Cluttering sleek green marble counters, my 1940s mixer went from quaint to grungy. Later, you came home with a bullet-shaped KichenAid, and I took the ancient mixer to the Salvation Army as if at gunpoint. When I unpacked my dented pots and pans, their heavy-gauge aluminum encrusted, their crumbling handles duct-taped together, it looked as if some homeless person had nested in a household whose jet-set tenants were in Rio. The pans went, too; you found a matching set at Macy’s in fashionable red enamel. I’d never noticed how scummy that old cookware had become, though I’d kind of liked not noticing. In all, I may have been borderline rich, but I’d never owned much, and aside from the silk hangings from Southeast Asia, a few carvings from West Africa, and the Armenian rugs from my uncle, we dispensed with most of the detritus of my old Tribeca life in frighteningly short order. Even the internationalia assumed an inauthentic aura, as if it hailed from an upmarket import outlet. Since our aesthetic reinvention coincided with my sabbatical from AWAP, I felt as if I were evaporating. That’s why the project in the study was so important to me. I realize that for you that incident epitomizes my intolerance, my rigidity, my refusal to make allowances for children. But that’s not what it means to me. For my study, I chose the one room in that house that didn’t have any trees growing through it, had only one skylight, and was almost rectangular—no doubt designed near the last, when thankfully our Dream Home couple was running out of bright ideas. Most people would consider papering fine wood an abomination, but we were swimming in teak, and I had an idea that might make me feel, in one room at least, at home: I would plaster the study with maps. I owned boxes and boxes: city maps of Oporto or Barcelona, with all the hostels and pensions I planned to list in IBERI-WAP circled in red; Geographical Survey maps of the Rhone Valley with the lazy squiggle of my train journey highlighted in yellow; whole continents jagged with ambitious airline itineraries in ruled ballpoint. As you know, I’ve always had a passion for maps. I’ve sometimes supposed that, in the face of an imminent nuclear attack or invading army, the folks with all the power won’t be the white supremacists with guns or the Mormons with canned sardines, but the cartographically clued who know that this road leads to the mountains. Hence the very first thing I do on arrival in a new place is locate a map, and that is only when I couldn’t get to Rand McNally in midtown before hopping the plane. Without one, I feel easily victimized and at sea. As soon I have my map, I gain better command of a town than most of its residents, many of whom are totally lost outside a restrictive orbit of the patisserie, charcuterie, and Luisa’s house. I’ve long taken pride in my powers of navigation, for I’m better than the average bear at translating from two dimensions to three, and I’ve learned to use rivers, railroads, and the sun to find my bearings. (I’m sorry, but what else can I boast about now? I’m getting old, and I look it. I work for a travel agency, and my son is a killer.) So I associated maps with mastery and may have hoped that, through the literal sense of direction they had always provided, I might figuratively orient myself in this alien life as a full-time suburban mother. I craved some physical emblem of my earlier self if only to remind me that I had deserted that life by choice and might return to it at will. I nursed some distant hope that as he got older, Kevin might grow curious, point to Majorca in the corner, and ask what it was like there. I was proud of my life, and while I told myself that through an accomplished mother Kevin might find pride in himself, I probably just wanted him to be proud of me. I still had no idea what a tall order for any parent that could turn out to be. Physically, the project was fiddly. The maps were all different sizes, and I had to design a pattern that was not symmetrical or systematic but still made a pleasing patchwork, with a balance of colors and a judicious mix of town centers and continents. I had to learn how to work with wallpaper paste, which was messy, and the older, tattier maps had to be ironed; paper readily browns. With so much else to attend to in a new house and constant hands-on consultation with Louis Role, my new managing editor at AWAP, I was papering my study over the course of several months. That’s what I mean by biding his time. He followed the papering of that study and knew how much trouble it was; he had personally helped to make it more trouble, by tracking wallpaper paste all over the house. He may not have understood the countries the maps signified, but he did understand that they signified something to me. When I brushed on the last rectangle by the window, a topographical map of Norway stitched with fjords, I climbed down the ladder and surveyed the results with a twirl. It was gorgeous! Dynamic, quirky, lavishly sentimental. Interstitial train ticket stubs, museum floor plans, and hotel receipts gave the collage an additionally personal touch. I had forced one patch of this blank, witless house to mean something. I put on Joe Jackson’s Big World, lidded the paste, furled the canvas covering my six-foot rolltop desk, rattled it open, and unpacked my last box, arranging my stand of antique cartridge pens and bottles of red and black ink, the Scotch tape, stapler, and tchotchkes for fidgeting—the miniature Swiss cowbell, the terra-cotta penitent from Spain. Meanwhile I was burbling to Kevin, something all very Virginia Woolf like, “Everyone needs a room of their own. You know how you have your room? Well, this is Mommer’s room. And everyone likes to make their room special. Mommer’s been lots of different places, and all these maps remind me of the trips I’ve taken. You’ll see, you may want to make your room special some day, and I’ll help you if you want—” “What do you mean special,” he said, hugging one elbow. In his drooping free hand drizzled his squirt gun, whose leakage had worsened. Although he was still slight for his age, I’d rarely met anyone who took up more metaphysical space. A sulking gravity never let you forget he was there, and if he said little, he was always watching. “So it looks like your personality.” “What personality.” I felt sure I’d explained the word before. I was continually feeding him vocabulary, or who was Shakespeare; educational chatter filled the void. I had a feeling he wished I’d shut up. There seemed no end to the information that he did not want. “Like your squirt gun, that’s part of your personality.” I refrained from adding, like the way you ruined my favorite caftan, that’s part of your personality. Or the way you’re still shitting in diapers coming up on five years old, that’s part of your personality, too. “Anyway, Kevin, you’re being stubborn. I think you know what I mean.” “I have to put junk on the walls.” He sounded put-upon. “Unless you’d rather not.” “I’d rather not. ” “Great, we’ve found one more thing you don’t want to do,” I said. “You don’t like to go to the park and you don’t like to listen to music and you don’t like to eat and you don’t like to play with Lego. I bet you couldn’t think of one more thing you don’t like if you tried.” “All these squiggy squares of paper,” he supplied promptly. “They’re dumb.” After Idonlikedat, dumb was his favorite word. “That’s the thing about your own room, Kevin. It’s nobody else’s business. I don’t care if you think my maps are dumb. I like them.” I remember raising an umbrella of defiance: He wouldn’t rain on this parade. My study looked terrific, it was all mine, I would sit at my desk and play grown-up, and I could not wait to screw on my crowning touch, a bolt on its door. Yes, I’d commissioned a local carpenter and had added a door. But Kevin wouldn’t let the matter drop. There was something he wanted to tell me. “I don’t get it. It was all gucky. And it took forever. Now everything looks dumb. What difference does it make. Why’d you bother.” He stamped his foot. “It’s dumb!” Kevin had skipped the why phase that usually hits around three, at which point he was barely talking. Although the why phase may seem like an insatiable desire to comprehend cause and effect, I’d eavesdropped enough at playgrounds (It’s time to go make dinner, cookie! Why? Because we’re going to get hungry! Why? Because our bodies are telling us to eat! Why?) to know better. Three-year-olds aren’t interested in the chemistry of digestion; they’ve simply hit on the magic word that always provokes a response. But Kevin had a real why phase. He thought my wallpaper an incomprehensible waste of time, as just about everything adults did also struck him as absurd. It didn’t simply perplex him but enraged him, and so far Kevin’s why phase has proved not a passing developmental stage but a permanent condition. I knelt. I looked into his stormy, pinched-up face and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Because I love my new study. I love the maps. I love them.” I could have been speaking Urdu. “They’re dumb,” he said stonily. I stood up. I dropped my hand. The phone was ringing. The separate line for my study wasn’t installed yet, so I left to grab the phone in the kitchen. It was Louis, with another crisis regarding JAP-WAP, whose resolution took a fair amount of time. I did call to Kevin to come out where I could see him, more than once. But I still had a business to oversee, and have you any notion how fatiguing it is to keep an eye on a small child every single moment of every single day? I’m tremendously sympathetic with the sort of diligent mother who turns her back for an eye blink—who leaves a child in the bath to answer the door and sign for a package, to scurry back only to discover that her little girl has hit her head on the faucet and drowned in two inches of water. Two inches. Does anyone ever give the woman credit for the twenty-four-hours-minusthree-minutes a day that she has watched that child like a hawk? For the months, the years ’ worth of don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth-sweeties, of whoops!-we-almost-fell-downs? Oh, no. We prosecute these people, we call it “criminal parental negligence” and drag them to court through the snot and salty tears of their own grief. Because only the three minutes count, those three miserable minutes that were just enough. I finally got off the phone. Down the hall, Kevin had discovered the pleasures of a room with a door: The study’s was shut. “Hey, kid,” I called, turning the knob, “when you’re this quiet you make me nervous—” My wallpaper was spidery with red and black ink. The more absorbent papers had started to blotch. The ceiling, too, since I’d papered that as well; craning on the ladder had been murder on my back. Drips from overhead were staining one of my uncle’s most valuable Armenian carpets, our wedding present. The room was so whipped and wet that it looked as if a fire alarm had gone off and triggered a sprinkling system, only the nozzles had flung not water but motor oil, cherry Hawaiian punch, and mulberry sorbet. From the transitional squirts of a sickly purple I might later conclude that he had used up the bottle of black India ink first before moving on to the crimson, but Kevin left nothing to my deduction: He was still draining the last of the red ink into the barrel of his squirt gun. Just as he’d posed in the process of retrieving the gun from the top of our kitchen cabinet, he seemed to have saved this last tablespoon for my arrival. He was standing on my study chair, bent in concentration; he did not even look up. The filling hole was small, and though he was pouring intently, my burnished oak desk was awash in spatter. His hands were drenched. “Now,” he announced quietly, “it’s special. ” I snatched the gun, flung it on the floor, and stamped it to bits. I was wearing pretty yellow Italian pumps. The ink ruined my shoes.
Eva
