scored a line under it and said, “There! Add that up then! And multiply it by 25 while you’re at it, since you think you’re so smart!” I missed you during the day, as I missed my old life when I was too busy to miss you during the day. Here I had become quite well versed in Portuguese history down to the order of the monarchy and how many Jews were murdered during the Inquisition, and now I was reciting the alphabet. Not the Cyrillic alphabet, nor the Hebrew one, the alphabet. Even if Kevin had proved an ardent pupil, for me the regime would doubtless have felt like a demotion of the precipitous sort commonly constrained to dreams: Suddenly I’m sitting in the back of the class, taking a test with a broken pencil and no pants. Nonetheless, I might have abided this humbling role if it weren’t for the additional humiliation of living, for over six years now, up to my elbows in shit. Okay—out with it. There came an afternoon in July that, per tradition, Kevin had soiled his diapers once and been cleaned up with the whole diaper cream and talcum routine, only to complete the evacuation of his bowels twenty minutes later. Or so I assumed. But this time he outdid himself. This was the same afternoon that, after I had insisted he write a sentence that was meaningful about his life and not one more tauntingly inert line about Sally, he wrote in his exercise book, “In kendergarden evrybody says my mother looks rilly old.” I’d turned beet-red, and that was when I sniffed another telltale waft. After I’d just changed him twice. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I lifted him to a stand by the waist, pulling his Pampers open to make sure. I lost it. “How do you do it?” I shouted. “You hardly eat anything, where does it come from?” A rush of heat rippled up through my body, and I barely noticed that Kevin was now dangling with his feet off the carpet. He seemed to weigh nothing, as if that tight, dense little body stocked with such inexhaustible quantities of shit was packed instead with Styrofoam peanuts. There’s no other way to say this. I threw him halfway across the nursery. He landed with a dull clang against the edge of the stainless steel changing table. His head at a quizzical tilt, as if he were finally interested in something, he slid, in seeming slow motion, to the floor.
Eva
JANUARY 19, 2001
Dear Franklin,
So now you know. I had rash hopes when I first rushed over to him that he was all right—he looked unmarked—until I rolled him over to reveal the arm he fell on. His forearm must have struck the edge of the changing table when for the first time, as you once remarked in jest, our son had learned to fly. It was bleeding and a little crooked and bulging in the middle with something white poking out and I felt sick. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I whispered. Yet however weak with remorse, I was still intoxicated from a moment that may put the lie to my preening incomprehension of Thursday. On its far side, I was aghast. But the very center of the moment was bliss. Hurtling our little boy I-didn’t-care-where-besides-away, I had heedlessly given over, like Violetta, to clawing a chronic, torturous itch. Before you condemn me utterly, I beg you to understand just how hard I’d been trying to be a good mother. But trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one. Distrusting my every impulse from the instant he was laid on my breast, I’d followed a devout regime of hugging my little boy an average of three times a day, admiring something he did or said at least twice, and reciting I love you, kiddo or You know that your Daddy and I love you very much with the predictable uniformity of liturgical professions of faith. But too strictly observed, most sacraments grow hollow. Moreover, for six solid years I’d put my every utterance on the five-second delay of call-in radio shows, just to make sure I didn’t broadcast anything obscene, slanderous, or contrary to company policy. The vigilance came at a cost. It made me remote, halting, and awkward. When hoisting Kevin’s body in that fluid adrenal lift, for once I’d felt graceful, because at last there was an unmediated confluence between what I felt and what I did. It isn’t very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness. For two seconds I’d felt whole, and like Kevin Khatchadourian’s real mother. I felt close to him. I felt like myself—my true, unexpurgated self—and I felt we were finally communicating. As I swept a shock of hair from his moist forehead, the muscles of Kevin’s face worked furiously; his eyes screwed up and his mouth grimaced into a near-smile. Even when I ran to fetch that morning’s New York Times and slipped it under his arm he did not cry. Holding the paper under the arm—I still remember the headline by his elbow, “More Autonomy for Baltics Stirs Discomfort in Moscow”—I helped him to his feet, asking if anything else hurt and he shook his head. I started to pick him up, another shake; he would walk. Together we shuffled to the phone. It’s possible that he wiped away the odd tear when I wasn’t looking, but Kevin would no more suffer in plain view than he would learn to count. Our local pediatrician Dr. Goldblatt met us at Nyack Hospital’s tiny, crushingly intimate emergency room, where I felt certain that everyone could tell what I’d done. The notice for the “New York Sheriff’s Victim Hotline” beside the registration window seemed posted specially for my son. I talked too much and said too little; I babbled to the admissions nurse about what had happened but not how. Meantime Kevin’s unnatural self-control had mutated into the bearing of a martinet; he stood straight with his chin lifted, and turned at right angles. Having assumed responsibility for supporting his arm with the newspaper, he allowed Dr. Goldblatt to hold his shoulder as he marched down the hall but shook off my hand. When he entered the orthopedic surgeon’s examining room, he about-faced in the doorway to announce briskly, “I can see the doctor by myself.” “Don’t you want me to keep you company, in case it hurts?” “You can wait out there,” he commanded, the muscles rippling in his clenched jaw the only indication that it hurt already. “That’s quite a little man you’ve got there, Eva,” said Dr. Goldblatt. “Sounds like you got your orders.” To my horror, he closed the door. I did, I really did want to be there for Kevin. I was desperate to reestablish that I was a parent he could trust, not a monster who would hurl him about the room at a moment’s notice like a vengeful apparition from Poltergeist. But, yes, I was also in dread that Kevin would tell the surgeon or Benjamin Goldblatt what I’d done. They have laws about these things. I could be arrested; my case could be written up in the Rockland County Times in an appalled sidebar. I could, as I had so tastelessly joked that I would welcome, have Kevin taken away from me for real. At a minimum I might have to submit to mortifying monthly visits from some disapproving social worker sent to check my son for bruises. However much I deserved rebuke, I still preferred the slow burn of private self-excoriation to the hot lash of public reproof. So as I stared glaze-eyed into the glassed-in case preserving gushy letters to the nursing staff from satisfied customers, I scrambled for soft-core rewrites. Oh, doctor, you know how boys exaggerate. Throw him? He was running headlong down the hall, and when I walked out of the bedroom I bumped into him, by accident... Then he, ah, of course he fell, hard, against—against the lamp stand...! I sickened myself, and every whitewash I concocted sounded preposterous. I had plenty of time to stew in my own juices on one of those hard, sea-green metal chairs in the waiting room, too; a nurse informed me that our son had to undergo surgery to have his “bone ends cleansed,” a procedure I was more than happy to have remain opaque. But when Kevin emerged three hours later with his blindingly white cast, Dr. Goldblatt patted our son on the back and admired what a brave young man I had raised, while the orthopedic surgeon impersonally detailed the nature of the break, the dangers of infection, the importance of keeping the cast dry, and the date Kevin should return for follow-up care. Both doctors were kind enough to omit mention of the fact that the staff had been obliged to change our son’s dirty diapers; Kevin no longer smelled. My head bobbed dumbly up and down until I stole a quick glance at Kevin, who met my eyes with the clear, sparkling gaze of perfect complicity. I owed him one. He knew I owed him one. And I would owe him one for a very long time. Driving back home, I chattered (What Mommer did was very, very wrong, and she is so, so sorry —though this distancing device of the third person must have cast my regrets in a dubious light, as if I were already blaming the incident on my imaginary friend). Kevin said nothing. His expression aloof, almost haughty, the fingers of his plastered right arm tucked Napoleonically in his shirt, he sat upright in the front seat and surveyed the flashes of the Tappan Zee Bridge through the side window, for all the world like a triumphant general, wounded nobly in battle, now basking in the cheers of the crowd. I enjoyed no such equipoise. I might have escaped the police and social services, but I was condemned to run one more gauntlet. Whether up against the wall I might have contrived some cock-and-bull about bumping into Kevin for Dr. Goldblatt, I could not imagine locking eyes and flinging patent nonsense at you. “Hi! Where were you guys?” you shouted when we walked into the kitchen. Your back was turned as you finished slathering peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. My heart was thumping, and I still had no idea what I was going to say. So far, I had never wittingly done anything that would imperil our marriage—or our family —but I was sure that if anything would push us to the brink, this was it. “—Jesus, Kev!” you exclaimed with a mouth covered in crumbs, swallowing hard without having chewed. “What the heck happened to you?” You brushed your hands hastily and plunged to your knees before Kevin. My skin prickled all over, as if someone had just switched on the voltage and I were an electric fence. I had that distinctive presentiment of I-have-one-more-second-or-two-after-which-nothing-will-ever-be-thesame-again, the same limp apprehension of spotting an oncoming car in your lane when it’s too late to turn the wheel. But headlong collision was averted at the last minute. Already accustomed to trusting your son’s version of events over your wife’s, you had gone straight to Kevin. This once you were mistaken. Had you asked me, I promise—or at least I like to think—that, with bowed head, I’d have told you the truth. “I broke my arm.” “I can see that. How’d that happen?” “I fell.” “Where’d you fall?” “I had poopy pants. Mommer went to get more wipes. I fell off the changing table. On—onto my Tonka dump truck. Mommer took me to Doctor Goldbutt.” He was good. He was very, very good; you may not appreciate how good. He was smooth—the story was ready. None of the details were inconsistent or gratuitous; he had spurned the extravagant fantasies with which most children his age would camouflage a spilled drink or broken mirror. He had learned what all skilled liars register if they’re ever to make a career of it: Always appropriate as much of the truth as possible. A wellconstructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform. He did have poopy pants. He remembered, correctly, that the second time I changed him that afternoon I had finished the open box of Wet Wipes. He had, more or less, fallen off the changing table. His Tonka dump truck was indeed—I checked later that night—on the nursery floor at the time. Furthermore, I marveled at his having intuited that simply falling three feet onto the floor would probably not be enough to break his arm; he would need to land haplessly on some hard metal object. And however short, his tale was laced with elegant touches: Using Mommer when he had eschewed the cutesy sobriquet for months lent his story a cuddly, affectionate cast that fantastically belied the real story; Doctor Goldbutt was playfully scatological, setting you at ease—your happy, healthy boy was already back to normal. Perhaps most impressive of all, he did not, as he had at the emergency room, allow himself the one collusive glance in my direction that might have given the game away. “Gosh,” you exclaimed. “That must have hurt!” “The orthopedist says that for an open fracture,” I said, “—it broke the skin—it was pretty clean, and should mend well.” Now Kevin and I did look at each other, just long enough to seal the pact. I had ransomed my soul to a six-year-old. “Are you going to let me sign your cast?” you asked. “That’s a tradition, you know. Your friends and family all sign their names and wish you to get well soon.” “Sure, Dad! But first I got to go to the bathroom.” He sauntered off, his free hand swinging. “Did I hear that right?” you asked quietly. “Guess so.” Rigid for hours—fear is an isometric exercise—I was exhausted, and for once the last thing on my mind was our son’s toilet training. You put an arm around my shoulders. “Man, that must have given you a scare.” “It was all my fault,” I said, squirming. “No mother can watch a kid every second.” I wished you wouldn’t be so understanding. “Yes, but I should have—” “Sh-sh!” You raised a forefinger, and a delicate trickling emitted from the hall bathroom: music to the parental ear. “What do you think did the trick, just the shock?” you whispered. “Or maybe he’s scared of landing back on that changing table.” I shrugged. Despite appearances, I did not believe that by flying into a rage at yet another soiled diaper I had terrorized our boy into using the toilet. Oh, it had everything to do with our set-to in the nursery, all right. I was being rewarded. “This calls for celebration. I’m going to go in and congratulate that guy—” I put a hand on your arm. “Don’t push your luck. Let him do it quietly, don’t make a big deal out of it. Kevin prefers his reversals off-camera.” That said, I knew better than to read pee-pee in the potty as admission of defeat. He had won the larger battle; acceding to the toilet was the kind of trifling concession that a magnanimous if condescending victor can afford to toss a vanquished adversary. Our six-year-old had successfully tempted me into violating my own rules of engagement. I had committed a war crime—for which, barring my son’s clement silence, my very husband would extradite me to The Hague. When Kevin returned from the bathroom tugging up his pants with one hand, I proposed that we have big bowl of popcorn for dinner, adding obsequiously, with lots and lots of salt! Drinking in the music of the normal life that I had minutes before kissed good-bye—your clamorous banging of pots, the clarion clang of our stainless steel bowl, the merry rattle of kernels—I’d a foreboding that this crawling-on-my-belly-like-a-reptile mode could endure almost indefinitely so long as Kevin kept his mouth shut. Why didn’t he blab? By all appearances, he was protecting his mother. All right. I’ll allow for that. Nevertheless, a balance-sheet calculation may have entered in. Before a distant expiry date, a secret accrues interest by dint of having been kept; compounded by lying, Know how I really broke my arm, Dad? might have even more explosive impact in a month’s time. Too, so long as he retained the principle of his windfall in his account, he could continue to take out loans against it, whereas blowing his wad all at once would plunge his assets back to a six-year-old’s allowance of $5 a week. Further, after all my sanctimonious singsong lectures (How would you feel...?), I had provided him with a rare opportunity to annex the moral high ground—whose elevation would afford a few novel views, even if this was not, at length, a territory destined to suit his preferences in real estate. Mr. Divide-and-Conquer may also have intuited that secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who’s in on them. My chatter to you about Kevin’s needing to opt for baths over showers to keep the cast dry was artificially bright and stilted; when I asked Kevin whether he wanted parmesan on the popcorn, the question was rich with appeal, terror, and slavish gratitude. For in one respect I was touched, and remain so: I think he had experienced a closeness to me that he was reluctant to let go. Not only were we in this cover-up together, but during the very assault we were concealing, Kevin too may have felt whole, yanked to life by the awesome sisal strength of the umbilical tie. For once I’d known myself for his mother. So he may have known himself also, sailing amazedly across the nursery like Peter Pan, for my son.
The remainder of that summer defied all my narrative instincts. Had I been scripting a TV movie about a violent harridan who flew into fits of blind dudgeon during which she was endowed with superhuman strength, I’d have had her young boy tiptoeing around the house, shooting her tremulous grins, offering up desperate gestures of appeasement, and just in general shuffling, cowering, and yes-massa-ing about the place, anything to keep from taking impromptu trips across whole rooms of their home without his feet ever touching the floor. So much for the movies. I tiptoed. My grins quivered. I shuffled and cowered as if auditioning for a minstrel show. Because let’s talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does what we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm. Yet Kevin’s white cast became a blazing emblem, not of what I could do to him, but of what I could not. In resorting to the ultimate power, I had robbed myself of it. Since I could not be trusted to use force in moderation, I was stuck with an impotent arsenal, useless overkill, like a stockpile of nuclear weapons. He knew full well that I would never lay a hand on him again. So in case you worry that in 1989 I became a convert to Neanderthal brutality, all that wholeness and realness and immediacy that I discovered in using Kevin for a shot put evaporated in a New York minute. I remember feeling physically shorter. My posture deteriorated. My voice went wispy. To Kevin, I couched my every request as an optional suggestion: Honey, would you like to get in the car? You wouldn’t mind terribly if we went to the store? Maybe it would be a good idea if you didn’t pick the crust from the middle of Mommer’s freshly baked pie. As for the lessons he found such an insult, I returned to the Montessori method. At first, he put me through a variety of paces, as if training a performing bear. He would demand something time-consuming for his lunch, like homemade pizza, and after I’d spent the morning kneading dough and simmering sauce he’d pick two pieces of pepperoni off his slices and then fold the remains into a glutinous baseball to pitch to the sink. Then he tired of Mother-as-plaything as quickly as he did of his other toys, which I guess made me lucky. In fact, as I foisted on the boy the very salt-laden cheesies and whizzies previously meted out in one-ounce rations, my solicitation soon got on his nerves. I had a tendency to hover, and Kevin would shoot me the kind of daggers you fire at a stranger who sits next to you on a train when the car is practically empty. I was proving an unworthy adversary, and any further victories over a guardian already reduced to such a cringing, submissive condition were bound to feel cheap. Although it was tricky with a sling, he now took baths on his own, and if I stooped to wrap him in a fresh towel, he shied, then swaddled himself. In fact, on the heels of having docilely submitted to diaper changing and testicle swabbing, he developed a stern modesty, and by August, I was banished from the bathroom. He dressed in private. Aside from that remarkable two weeks during which he got so sick when he was ten, he would not allow me to see him naked again until the age of fourteen—at which point I’d gladly have forfeited the privilege. As for my incontinent outpouring of tenderness, it was tainted with apology, and Kevin was having none of it. When I kissed his forehead, he wiped it off. When I combed his hair, he batted me away and rumpled his locks. When I hugged him, he objected coldly that I was hurting his arm. And when I averred, “I love you, kiddo”—no longer recited with the solemnity of the Apostle’s Creed but rather with the feverish, mindless supplication of a Hail Mary—he’d assume a caustic expression from which that permanent left-hand cock of his mouth was enduringly to emerge. One day when I avowed yet again I love you, kiddo, Kevin shot back, Nyeh NYEE nyeh, nyeh-nyeeeeh! and I gave it a rest. He clearly believed that he had found me out. He had glimpsed behind the curtain, and no amount of cooing and snack food would erase a vision at least as indelible as a first encounter with parental sex. Yet what surprised me was how much this revelation of his mother’s true colors—her viciousness, her violence—seemed to please him. If he had my number, it was one that intrigued him far more than the twos and threes of our dreary arithmetic drills before his “accident,” and he side-eyed his mother with a brand new—I wouldn’t call it quite respect— interest. Yes. As for you and me, until that summer I’d become accustomed to concealing things from you, but mostly thought crimes—my atrocious blankness at Kevin’s birth, my aversion to our house. While to some extent we all shelter one another from the cacophony of horrors in our heads, even these intangible unsaids made me mournful. But it was one thing to keep my own counsel about the dread that had descended on me whenever it was time to fetch our son from kindergarten, quite another to neglect to tell you that, oh, by the way, I broke his arm. However wicked, thoughts didn’t seem to take up space in my body, while keeping a three-dimensional secret was like having swallowed a cannonball. You seemed so far away. I’d gaze at you as you undressed at night with a spectral nostalgia, half expecting that when I crossed to brush my teeth you’d step through my body as easily as through moonlight. Watching you in the backyard teaching Kevin to cup a baseball in a catcher’s mitt with his good right hand—though in truth he seemed more gifted with pizza—I’d press my palm against a sun-warmed windowpane as if against a spiritual barrier, stabbed by the same vertiginous well-wishing and aching sense of exclusion that would have tortured me had I been dead. Even when I put my hand on your chest, I couldn’t seem to quite touch you, as if every time you shed your clothes there were, like Bartholomew’s hats, another L. L. Bean work shirt underneath. Meantime, you and I never went out just the two of us anymore—to catch Crimes and Misdemeanors, grab a bite at the River Club in Nyack, much less to indulge ourselves at the Union Square Café in the city. It’s true that we had trouble with sitters, but you acquiesced to our housebound nights readily enough, prizing the light summer evenings for coaching Kevin on fourth downs, three-pointer field goals, and the infield-fly rule. Your blindness to the fact that Kevin displayed neither interest nor aptitude in any of these sports nagged me a bit, but I was mostly disappointed that you didn’t ever covet the same quality time with your wife. There’s no purpose to talking around it. I was jealous. And I was lonely.
It was toward the end of August when our next-door neighbor leaned on our doorbell with censorious insistence. I heard you answer it from the kitchen. “You tell your kid it’s not funny!” Roger Corley exclaimed. “Whoa, slow down, Rog!” said you. “Criticize anybody’s sense of humor, gotta tell the joke first.” Despite your jocular cadence, you did not invite him in, and when I peered out to the foyer I noticed that you had only opened the door halfway. “Trent just rode his bike down that big hill on Palisades Parade, lost control, and landed in the bushes! He’s knocked up pretty bad!” I’d tried to stay on amicable terms with the Corleys, whose son was a year or two older than Kevin. Though Moira Corley’s initial enthusiasm for arranging play dates had waned without explanation, she’d once displayed a gracious interest in my Armenian background, and I’d stopped by only the day before to give her a loaf of freshly baked katah —do you ever miss it?—that slightly sweet, obscenely buttery layered bread my mother taught me to make. Being on congenial terms with your neighbors was one of the few appeals of suburban life, and I feared that your narrowing our front door was beginning to appear unfriendly. “Roger,” I said behind you, wiping my hands on a dish towel, “why don’t you come in and talk about it? You seem upset.” When we all repaired to the living room, I noted that Roger’s getup was a little unfortunate; he had too big a gut for Lycra cycling shorts, and in those bike shoes he walked pigeon-toed. You retreated behind an armchair, keeping it between you and Roger like a military fortification. “I’m awful sorry to hear about Trent’s accident,” you said. “Maybe it’s a good opportunity to go through the fundamentals of bike safety.” “He knows the fundamentals,” said Roger. “Like, you never leave the quick-release on one of your wheels flipped open. ” “Is that what you think happened?” I asked. “Trent said the front wheel started wobbling. We checked the bike, and the release wasn’t only flipped over; it’d been turned a few times to loosen the fork. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to conclude that Kevin was the culprit!” “Now wait just one minute!” you said. “That’s one hell of a—” “Trent rode that bike yesterday morning, no problem. Nobody’s been by since but you, Eva, along with your son. And I want to thank you for that bread you sent over,” he added, lowering the volume. “It was real good, and we appreciated your thoughtfulness. But we don’t appreciate Kevin’s tinkering with Trent’s bike. Going a little faster, or around traffic, my kid could’ve been killed.” “You’re making a lot of assumptions here,” you growled. “That release could have been tripped in Trent’s accident.” “No way. I’m a cyclist myself, and I’ve had my share of spills. The release never flips all the way over—much less turns around by itself to loosen the spring.” “Even if Kevin did do it,” I said (you shot me a black look), “maybe he doesn’t know what the lever is for. That leaving it open is dangerous.” “That’s one theory,” Roger grunted. “That your son’s a dummy. But that’s not the way Trent describes him.” “Look,” you said. “Maybe Trent had been playing with that release, and he doesn’t want to take the rap. That doesn’t mean my son has to take it instead. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some work to do around the yard.” After Roger left, I had a sinking feeling that the Irish soda bread Moira had promised to bake me in return would never materialize. “Boy, I sometimes think you’re right,” you said, pacing. “A kid can’t skin his knee anymore without it having to be somebody else’s fault. Country’s completely lost touch with the concept of accident. When Kevin broke his arm, did I give you a hard time? Did it have to be somebody’s fault? No. Shit happens.” “Do you want to talk to Kevin about Trent’s bike?” I said. “Or should I?” “What for? I can’t see he’s done anything.” I said under my breath. “You never do.” “And you always do,” you said levelly. A standard exchange—not even exceptionally acrimonious—so I’m not sure why it flipped something in me, like Trent Corley’s quick-release. Maybe because it was standard now, and once it hadn’t been. I closed my eyes, cupping the back of the armchair that had walled off Roger Corley’s outlandish accusations. Honestly, I’d no idea what I was going to say until I said it. “Franklin, I want to have another child.” I opened my eyes and blinked. I had surprised myself. It may have been my first experience of spontaneity in six or seven years. You wheeled. Your response was spontaneous, too. “You cannot be serious. ” The time didn’t seem right for reminding you that you deplored John McEnroe as a poor sport. “I’d like us to start trying to get me pregnant right away.” It was the oddest thing. I felt perfectly certain, and not in the fierce, clutching spirit that might have betrayed a crazy whim or frantic grab at a pat marital nostrum. I felt self-possessed and simple. This was the very unreserved resolve for which I had prayed during our protracted debate over parenthood, and whose absence had led us down tortuously abstract avenues like “turning the page” and “answering the Big Question.” I’d never been so sure of anything in my life, so much so that I was disconcerted why you seemed to think there was anything to talk about. “Eva, forget it. You’re forty-four. You’d have a three-headed toad or something.” “Lots of women these days have children in their forties.” “Get out of here! I thought that now Kevin’s going to be in school full-time you were planning to go back to AWAP! What about all those big plans to move into Eastern Europe post-glasnost? Get in early, beat The Lonely Planet?” “I’ve considered going back to AWAP. I may still go back. But I can work for the rest of my life. As you just observed with so much sensitivity, there’s only one thing I can do for a short while longer.” “I can’t believe this. You’re serious! You’re seriously—serious!” “ I’d like to get pregnant makes a crummy gag, Franklin. Wouldn’t you like Kevin to have someone to play with?” Truthfully, I wanted someone to play with, too. “They’re called classmates. And two siblings always hate each other.” “Only if they’re close together. She’d be younger than Kevin by at least seven years.” “She, is it?” The pronoun made you bristle. I shrugged my eyebrows. “Hypothetically.” “This is all because you want a girl? To dress in little outfits? Eva, this isn’t like you.” “No, wanting to dress a girl in little outfits isn’t like me. So there was no call for you to say that. Look, I can see your having reservations, but I don’t understand why the prospect of my getting pregnant again seems to be making you so angry.” “Isn’t it obvious?” “Anything but. I thought you’ve enjoyed being a parent.” “ I have, yes! Eva, what gives you the idea that even if you do have this fantasy daughter everything’s going to be different?” “I don’t understand,” I maintained, having learned the merits of playing dumb from my son. “Why in the world would I want everything to be different?” “What could possess you, after it’s gone the way it’s gone, to want to do it again?” “It’s gone what way?” I asked neutrally. You took a quick look out the window to make sure Kevin was still patting the tether ball to spiral first one way around the pole, then the other; he liked the monotony. “You never want him to come with us, do you? You always want to find somebody to dump him with so we can waltz off by ourselves, like what you obviously consider the good old days.” “I don’t remember saying any such thing,” I said stonily. “You don’t have to. I can tell you’re disappointed every time I suggest we do something so that Kevin can come, too.” “That must explain why you and I have spent countless long, boozy evenings in expensive restaurants, while our son languishes with strangers.” “See? You resent it. And what about this summer? You wanted to go to Peru. Okay, I was game. But I assumed we’d take a vacation as a family. So I start supposing how far a six-year-old can hike in a day, and you should have seen your face, Eva. It fell like a lead balloon. Soon as Peru would involve Kevin, too, you lose interest. Well, I’m sorry. But I for one didn’t have a kid in order to get away from him as often as possible.” I was leery of where this was headed. I’d known that eventually we would need to discuss all that had been left unsaid, but I wasn’t ready. I needed ballast. I needed supporting evidence, which would take me a minimum of nine months to gather. “I’m with him all day,” I said. “It makes sense that I’d be more anxious than you for a break—” “And I never cease to hear about what a terrible sacrifice you’ve been making.” “I’m sorry that it means so little to you.” “It’s not important it mean something to me. It should mean something to him.” “Franklin, I don’t understand where—” “And that’s typical isn’t it? You stay home for him to impress me. He just never enters in, does he?” “ Where is all this coming from? I only wanted to tell you that I’d like us to have another baby, and for you to be happy about it, or at least start getting used to the idea.” “You pick on him,” you said. With another cautionary glance at the tether-ball court up the hill, you had an air of just getting started. “You blame him for everything that goes wrong around this house. And at his kindergarten. You’ve complained about the poor kid at every stage of the game. First he cries too much, then he’s too quiet. He develops his own little language, and it’s annoying. He doesn’t play right—meaning the way you did. He doesn’t treat the toys you make him like museum pieces. He doesn’t pat you on the back every time he learns to spell a new word, and since the whole neighborhood isn’t clamoring to sign his dance card, you’re determined to paint him as a pariah. He develops one, yes, serious psychological problem having to do with his toilet training—it’s not that unusual, Eva, but it can be very painful for the kid—and you insist on interpreting it as some mean-spirited, personal contest between you and him. I’m relieved he seems to be over it, but with your attitude I’m not surprised it lasted a long time. I do what I can to make up for your—and I’m very sorry if this hurts your feelings, but I don’t know what else to call it—your coldness. But there’s no substitute for a mother’s love, and I am damned if I am going to let you freeze out another kid of mine.” I was stunned. “Franklin—” “This discussion is over. I didn’t enjoy saying all that, and I still hope things can get better. I know you think you make an effort—well, maybe you do make what for you is an effort—but so far it’s not enough. Let’s all keep trying.—Hey, sport!” You swooped Kevin up as he sauntered in from the deck, raising him over your head as if posing for a Father’s Day ad. “At the end of your tether?” When you set him down, he said, “I wrapped the ball around 843 times.” “That’s terrific! I bet next time you’ll be able to do it 844 times!” You were trying to make an awkward transition after an argument that left me feeling run over by a truck, but I can’t say I care for the Hollywood gaga that’s expected of modern parents. Kevin’s own expression flickered with a suggestion of oh-brother. “If I try really hard,” he said, deadpan. “Isn’t it great to have a goal?” “Kevin.” I called him over and stooped. “I’m afraid your friend Trent has had an accident. It’s not too bad, and he’ll be all right. But maybe you and I could make him a get-well card—like the one Grandma Sonya made you when you hurt your arm.” “Yeah, well,” he said, moving away. “He thinks he’s so cool with that bike.” The AC must have been turned too high; I stood up and rubbed my arms. I didn’t remember mentioning anything about a bicycle.
Eva
