MARCH 2, 2001
Dear Franklin,
My colleague Ricky approached me at the end of the workday today, and his proposal was the closest he’s ever come to acknowledging the unmentionable: He invited me to attend his church. I was embarrassed, and thanked him, but said vaguely, “I don’t think so”; he didn’t let it go and asked why. What was I supposed to say, “Because it’s a load of crap”? I always feel a little condescending toward religious people, as they feel condescending toward me. So I said, I wish I could, that I could believe, and sometimes I try very hard to believe, but nothing about my last few years suggests that an entity with any kindness is watching over me. Ricky’s comeback about mysterious ways left neither of us very impressed. Mysterious, I said. Now you can say that again. I’ve often returned to the remark you made in Riverside Park before we became parents, “At least a kid is an answer to the Big Question.” It perturbed me at the time that your life was posing this Big Question with such persistence. Our childless period must have had its shortfalls, but I recall charging in the same conversation that maybe we were “too happy,” a distinctly more agreeable excess than a surfeit of harrowing emptiness. Maybe I’m shallow, but you were enough for me. I loved scanning for your face outside Customs after those long trips that were so much harder on you than on me, and sleeping late the next morning in a hot, pectoral cocoon. It was enough. But our twosome was not, it seems, enough for you. While that may make you, between us, the more spiritually advanced, it hurt my feelings. Yet if there’s no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children’s answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring. I raise this matter because I think that you did expect Kevin to answer your Big Question, and that he could sense that fantastic expectation from an early age. How? Small things. The aggressive heartiness in your voice, under which gasped a shy desperation. The ferocity of your embraces, which he may have found smothering. The resolve with which you cleared your decks every weekend to put yourself at his disposal; while I suspect that children want their parents to be busy, they don’t want to have to fill your schedule with their paltry needs. Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are. I’m not commending neglect. But he was only a little boy, and he alone was supposed to answer a Big Question that had his grown father stymied. What a burden to place on the newly arrived! What’s worse, children, like adults, vary drastically in what I can only call their religious appetites. Celia was more like me: a hug, a crayon, and a cookie, and she was sated. Though Kevin seemed to want practically nothing, I now realize that he was spiritually ravenous. Both of us were lapsed, so it made sense to raise our kids as neither Armenian Orthodox nor Presbyterian. Although I’m reluctant to inveigh that Youth Today just need to crack the Old Testament, it sobers me that, thanks to us, Kevin may never have seen the inside of a church. The fact that you and I were brought up with something to walk away from may have advantaged us, for we knew what lay behind us, and what we were not. So I wonder if Kevin, too, would have been better off had we spewed a lot of incense-waving hooey that he could have coughed back in our faces—those extravagant fancies about virgin births and commandments on mountaintops that really stick in a kid’s throat. I’m being impractical; I doubt we could have faked a faith for the children’s sake, and they’d have known we were posing. Nevertheless, repudiation of self-evident dross like travel guides and Oldsmobile ads must be so unsatisfying. It was Kevin’s starvation that his teachers—with the exception of Dana Rocco—never detected, preferring to diagnose our little underachiever as one more fashionable victim of attention deficit disorder. They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him, because broken machines can be fixed. It was easier to minister to passive incapacity than to tackle the more frightening matter of fierce, crackling disinterest. Clearly Kevin’s powers of attention were substantial—witness his painstaking preparations for Thursday or his presently impeccable command of the malevolents’ Roll of Honor, right down to the population of Uyesugi’s pet fish. He left assignments unfinished not because he couldn’t finish them, but because he could. This voracity of his may go some distance toward explaining his cruelty, which among other things must be an inept attempt at taking part. Having never seen the point—of anything—he must feel so brutally left out. The Spice Girls are dumb, Sony Playstations are dumb, The Titanic is dumb, mall cruising is dumb, and how could we disagree? Likewise, taking photos of the Cloisters is dumb, and dancing to “Stairway to Heaven” in the latter 1990s is dumb. As Kevin approached the age of sixteen, these convictions grew violent. He didn’t want to have to answer your Big Question, Franklin. He wanted an answer from you. The glorified loitering that passes for a fruitful existence appeared so inane to Kevin from his very crib that his claim last Saturday that he was doing Laura Woolford “a favor” on Thursday may have been genuine. But me, I’m superficial. Even once the shine was off travel, I could probably have sampled those same old foreign foods and that same old foreign weather for the rest of my life, just so long as I flew into your arms at Kennedy when I came home. I didn’t want much else. It is Kevin who has posed my Big Question. Before he came along, I’d been much too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvelous marriage to bother about what it all amounted to. Only once I was stuck with a bored child in an ugly house for days on end did I ask myself what was the point. And since Thursday? He took away my easy answer, my cheating, slipshod shorthand for what life is for.
We last left Kevin at the age of fourteen, and I’m getting anxious. I may have dwelt so on his early years to stave off rehashing the more recent incidents that set you and me so agonizingly against one another. Doubtless we both dread wading back through events whose only redeeming feature is that they are over. But they are not over. Not for me. During the first semester of Kevin’s ninth-grade year in 1997, there were two more School Shootings: in Pearl, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky, both small towns I had never heard of, both now permanently marked in the American vocabulary as synonyms for adolescent rampage. The fact that Luke Woodham in Pearl not only shot ten kids, three fatally, but killed his mother—stabbing her seven times and crushing her jaw with an aluminum baseball bat—may have given me an extra private pause. (Indeed, I remarked when the reports first started pouring in, “Look, all they do is go on and on about how he shot those kids. And then, oh, by the way, he also murdered his mom. By the way? It’s obvious that the whole thing had to do with his mother.” This, in due course, was an observation that would qualify in legal terms as admission against interest.) Still, I’m not so pretentious as to impute to myself during that period a sense of deep personal foreboding, as if I perceived these repeated tragedies on the news as an inexorable countdown to our own family’s misfortune. Not at all. Like all news, I regarded it as having nothing to do with me. Yet like it or not, I had morphed from maverick globetrotter to one more white, well-off suburban mother, and I couldn’t help but be unnerved by deadly flights of lunacy from fledglings of my own kind. Gangland killings in Detroit or L.A. happened on another planet; Pearl and Paducah happened on mine. I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn’t submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-singleparent distraction—who couldn’t serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did—without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys’ marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father’s deer rifle: “Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?” And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! Michael Carneal in Paducah was a similar type—overweight, teased, wallowing in his tiny suffering like trying to take a bath in a puddle. But he’d never been a discipline problem in the past; the worst he’d ever been caught at theretofore was watching the Playboy video channel. Carneal distinguished himself by opening fire on, of all things, a prayer group. He managed to kill three students and wound five, but judging from the cheek-turning memorial services and merciful banners in classroom windows—one of which embraced photos not only of his victims but of Carneal himself with a heart—the born-again got theirs back by forgiving him to death. The October night that news of Pearl came in, I exploded as you and I watched the Jim Lehrer Newshour. “Jesus, some kid calls him a fag or pushes him in the hallway, and suddenly it’s ooh, ooh, I’m gonna shoot up the school, I’m gonna crack from all this terrible pressure! Since when did they make American kids so soft?” “Yeah, you gotta ask yourself,” you agreed, “whatever happened to heading out to the playground to duke it out?” “Might get their hands dirty.” I appealed to our son as he glided through on the way to the kitchen; he’d been eavesdropping, which as a rule he preferred to participating in family conversations. “Kevin, don’t boys at your school ever settle their differences with an old-fashioned fistfight?” Kevin stopped to regard me; he always had to weigh up whether anything I asked him was worthy of reply. “Choice of weapons,” he said at last, “is half the fight.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Woodham’s weak, flabby, unpopular. Fistfight’s low percentage. A doughboy’s got way better odds with a 30 millimeter. Smart call.” “Not that smart,” I said hotly. “He’s sixteen. That’s the cutoff in most states for being tried as an adult. They’ll throw away the key.” (Indeed, Luke Woodham would be given three life sentences, and 140 extra years for good measure.) “So?” said Kevin with a distant smile. “Guy’s life is already over. Had more fun while it lasted than most of us ever will. Good for him.” “Cool it, Eva,” you intervened as I sputtered. “Your son’s pulling your leg.”
For most of his life, Kevin’s troubles, too, remained on a minor scale. He was bright but hated school; he had few friends, and the one we knew was smarmy; there were all those ambiguous incidents, from Violetta to let-uscall-her-Alice, that set off alarm bells at a volume only I seemed able to hear. Yet character expresses itself with remarkable uniformity, be it on a battlefield or in the supermarket. To me, everything about Kevin was of a piece. Lest my theories about his existential disposition seem too highfalutin, let’s reduce the unifying glue to one word: spite. Consequently, when two Orangetown policemen showed up at our door on that night in December 1997 with Kevin and the unsavory Leonard Pugh in tow, you were shocked, while I regarded this constabulary visit as overdue. “What can I do for you, officers?” I overheard. “Mr. Khadourian?” “Plaskett,” you corrected, not for the first time. “But I am Kevin’s father.” Having been helping Celia with her homework, I crept up to hover behind you in the foyer, buzzing from voyeuristic excitement. “We had a motorist phone in a complaint, and I’m afraid we found your son and his friend here, on that pedestrian overpass over 9W? We had to run these two down, but it seemed pretty obvious that they were the kids throwing detritus onto the roadway.” “ Onto the cars?” you asked, “ or just empty lanes?” “Wouldn’t be much sport in empty lanes,” snarled the second officer. “It was mostly water babies, Dad!” said Kevin behind the police. I know his voice was changing, but whenever he spoke to you, Franklin, it skipped up an octave. “Wasn’t water balloons this motorist called in about,” said the second, chunkier cop, who sounded the more worked up. “It was rocks. And we checked the highway on either side of the overpass—littered with chunks of brick.” I nudged in urgently. “Was anyone hurt?” “Thankfully, there were no direct hits,” said the first officer. “Which makes these boys real, real lucky.” “I don’t know about lucky,” Lenny sniveled, “when you get nabbed by the cops.” “Gotta have luck to push it, kid,” said the policeman with the hotter head. “Ron, I still say we should—” “Look, Mr. Plastic,” the first cop overrode. “We’ve run your son through the computer, and his record’s clean. Far as I can tell, he comes from a good family.” (Good, of course, meaning rich.) “So we’re going to let this young man off with a warning. But we take this sort of thing real serious—” “Hell,” the second cop interrupted, “a few years back, some creep tossed a quarter in front of a woman doing seventy-five? Shattered the windscreen and drove right into her head!” Ron shot his partner a glance that would get them the more quickly to Dunkin’ Donuts. “Hope you give this young man a good talking to.” “And how,” I said. “I expect he’d no idea what kind of risk he was taking,” you said. “Yeah,” said Cop No. 2 sourly. “That’s the whole attraction of throwing bricks from an overpass. It seems so harmless.” “I appreciate your leniency, sir,” Kevin recited to the primary. “I’ve sure learned my lesson, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.” Policemen must get this sir stuff a lot; they didn’t look bowled over. “The leniency won’t happen again, friend,” said the second cop, “that is for damned sure.” Kevin turned to the hothead, meeting the man’s eyes with a glitter in his own; they seemed to share an understanding. Though picked up by the police for (as far as I knew) the first time in his life, he was unruffled. “And I appreciate the lift home. I’ve always wanted to ride in a police car— sir. ” “Pleasure’s all mine,” the cop replied jauntily, as if smacking gum. “But my money says that’s not your last spin in a black-and-white— friend. ” After a bit more fawning gratitude from both of us, they were on their way, and as they left the porch, I heard Lenny whining, “We almost outran you guys you know, ’cause you guys are like, totally out of shape...!” You had seemed so sedate and courteous through this exchange that when you wheeled from the door I was surprised to observe that your face was livid and lit with rage. You grabbed our son by the upper arm and shouted, “You could have caused a pileup, a fucking catastrophe!” Flushed with a morbid satisfaction, I stepped back to leave you to it. Cursing, no less! Granted, had one of those bricks indeed smashed someone’s windshield I’d readily have forgone this petty jubilation for the full-blown anguish at which I would later get so much practice. But spared calamity, I was free to muse with the singsong of the playground, You’re gonna get in trou-ble. Because I’d been so exasperated! The unending string of misadventures that trailed in Kevin’s wake never seemed, as far as you were concerned, to have anything to do with him. Finally, a tattletale besides me—the police, whom Mr. Reagan Republican had no choice but to trust—had caught our persecuted innocent red-handed, and I was going to enjoy this. Moreover, I was glad for you too to experience the bizarre helplessness of being this supposedly omnipotent parent and being completely flummoxed by how to impose a punishment that has the slightest deterrent effect. I wanted you to apprehend for yourself the lameness of sending a fourteen-year-old for a “time-out,” the hackneyed predictability of “grounding” when, besides, there was never anywhere that he wanted to go, and the horror of realizing that, if he did launch out to his archery range in defiance of your prohibition on practicing the sole activity that he seemed to enjoy, you would have to decide whether to physically tackle him to the lawn. Welcome to my life, Franklin, I thought. Have fun. Celia wasn’t used to seeing you manhandle her brother, and she’d started to wail. I hustled her from the foyer back to her homework at the dining table, soothing that the policemen were our friends and just wanted to make sure we were safe, while you rustled our stoic son down the hall to his room. In such an excitable state, I had difficulty concentrating as I coaxed Celia back to her primer about farm animals. The yelling subsided surprisingly soon; you sure didn’t burn out that fast when you were mad at me. Presumably you’d switched to the somber disappointment that for many children is more devastating than a lost temper, though I’d tried stern gravity ad nauseum with our firstborn, and this was one more impotence I was glad for you to sample. Why, it was all I could do to stop myself from creeping down the hall and listening at the crack of the door. When you emerged at last, you closed Kevin’s door behind you with ministerial solemnity, and your expression as you entered the dining area was curiously at peace. I reasoned that getting all that shame and disgust out of your system must have been cleansing, and when you motioned me over to the kitchen, I assumed that you were going to explain what kind of punishment you’d levied so that we could exact it as a team. I hoped that you’d come up with some novel, readily enforceable penalty that would get to our son in a place—I’d never found it—where it hurt. I doubted he was now remorseful about the brick-throwing itself, but maybe you had convinced him that outright juvenile delinquency was a tactical error. “Listen,” you whispered. “The whole caper was Lenny’s idea, and Kevin went along because Lenny was only proposing water babies at first. He thought the balloons would just make a splash—and you know how kids think that kind of thing is funny. I told him even a little balloon exploding might have startled a driver and been dangerous, and he says he realizes that now.” “What,” I said. “What—about—the bricks.” “Well—they ran out of water babies. So Kevin says that before he knew it, Lenny had pitched a stone—maybe it was a piece of brick—when a car was coming. Kevin says he immediately told Lenny not to do that, since somebody could get hurt.” “Yeah,” I said thickly. “That sure sounds like Kevin.” “I guess Lenny managed to get a few more bits of brick over the side before Kevin leaned on him hard enough that he cut it out. That must have been when somebody with a mobile called the cops. Apparently they were still up there, you know, just hanging out, when the police pulled up on the shoulder. It was spectacularly dumb—he admits that, too—but for a kid who’s never had trouble with the law before those blinking blue lights must be pretty scary, and without thinking—” “Kevin’s a very bright boy, you always say.” Everything that came out of my mouth was heavy and slurred. “I sense he’s done plenty of thinking. ” “Mommy—?” “Sweetheart,” I said, “go back and do your homework, okay? Daddy’s telling Mommy a really good story, and Mommy can hardly wait to hear how it ends.” “Anyway,” you resumed, “they ran. Didn’t get very far, since he realized that running was crazy, and he grabbed Lenny’s jacket to put the brakes on. And here’s the thing: It seems our friend Lenny Pugh already has something on his record—the old sugar-in-the-gas-tank trick, or some such. Lenny had been told that if he was caught at anything else they’d press charges. Kev reckoned that with his own clean record, they’d probably let him off with a warning. So Kevin told the cops that he was the ringleader, and he was the only one who threw rocks. I have to say, once the whole thing was on the table, I felt kind of sheepish for laying into him like that.” I looked up at you with dumbstruck admiration. “Did you apologize?” “Sure.” You shrugged. “Any parent’s got to admit when he’s made a mistake.” I groped my way to a chair at the kitchen table; I had to sit down. You poured yourself a glass of apple juice, while I declined one (what was wrong with you that you couldn’t tell I needed a stiff drink?). You pulled up a chair yourself, leaning forward chummily as if this whole misunderstanding was going to make us an even more closely knit, supportive, rememberthat-daft-business-about-the-overpass family. “I’ll tell you,” you said, and took a gulp of juice, “we just had this terrific conversation, all about the complexities of loyalty, you know? When to stick by your friends, where to draw the line when they’re doing something you think is out of bounds, how much you should personally sacrifice for a buddy. Because I warned him, he could have miscalculated by taking the fall. He could have been booked. I admired the gesture, but I told him, I said I wasn’t exactly sure that Lenny Pugh was worth it.” “Boy,” I said. “No holds barred.” Your head whipped around. “Was that sarcastic?” Okay, if you weren’t going to attend to a medical emergency, I would pour a glass of wine myself. I resumed my seat and finished off half of it in two slugs. “That was a very detailed story. So you won’t mind my clarifying a few things.” “Shoot.” “Lenny,” I began. “Lenny is a worm. Lenny’s actually kind of stupid. It took me a while to figure out what the appeal is—for Kevin, I mean. Then I got it: That’s the appeal. That he’s a stupid, pliant, self-abasing worm.” “Hold on, I don’t like him much either, but self-abasing —?” “Did I tell you that I caught them out back, and Lenny had his pants down?” “Eva, you should know about pubescent boys. It may make you uncomfortable, but sometimes they’re going to experiment—” “Kevin didn’t have his pants down. Kevin was fully clothed.” “Well, what’s that supposed to mean?” “That Lenny isn’t his friend, Franklin! Lenny is his slave! Lenny does anything Kevin tells him to, the more degrading the better! So the prospect of that miserable, sniggering, brownnosing dirtbird having an idea to do anything—much less being the ‘ringleader’ of some nasty, dangerous prank, dragging poor virtuous Kevin unwillingly along—well, it’s perfectly preposterous!” “Would you keep it down? And I don’t think you need another glass of wine.” “You’re right. What I really need is a fifth of gin, but Merlot will have to do.” “Look. He may have made a dubious call, and he and I discussed that. But taking the rap still took guts, and I’m pretty damned proud—” “ Bricks,” I interrupted. “They’re heavy. They’re big. Builders don’t store bricks on pedestrian overpasses. How did they get there?” “Piece of brick. I said piece.” “Yes,” my shoulders slumped, “I’m sure that’s what Kevin said, too.” “He’s our son, Eva. That should mean having a little faith.” “But the police said—” I left the thought dangling, having lost my enthusiasm for this project. I felt like a dogged attorney who knows that the sympathy of the jury is already lost but who still has to do the job. “Most parents,” you said, “apply themselves to understanding their kids, and not to picking apart every little—” “I am trying to understand him.” My ferocity must have carried; on the other side of the partition, Celia started to whimper. “I wish you would!” “That’s right, go tend to Celia,” you muttered as I got up to leave. “Go dry Celia’s eyes and pat Celia’s pretty gold hair and do Celia’s homework for her, since God forbid she should learn to do one miserable assignment by herself. Our son was just picked up by the cops for something he didn’t do, and he’s pretty shaken up, but never mind, because Celia needs her milk and cookies.” “That’s right,” I returned. “Because one of our children is spelling farm animals, while another of our children is pitching bricks at oncoming headlights. It’s about time you learned to tell the difference.”
I was really angry about that night, and I wasted most of my subsequent workday at AWAP mumbling to myself about how I could have married a complete fool. I’m sorry. And this was despicable of me, but I never told you what I stumbled across late that afternoon. Maybe I was just embarrassed, or too proud. So beside myself with fury and frustration that I was getting nothing done, I took the CEO’s prerogative of cutting out early. When I got back and relieved Celia’s baby-sitter Robert, I heard voices down the hall. It seems that the stupid, pliant, self-abasing worm didn’t even have the good sense to make himself scarce for a few days after showing up at our door with the police, because I recognized the nasal, querulous pule emitting from Kevin’s nightmarishly tidy bedroom. Unusually, the door was ajar; but then I wasn’t expected home for another two hours. When I headed toward the bathroom I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, but—oh, I guess I was eavesdropping. The urge to listen at that door had been upon me the night before and had lingered. “Hey, you see that cop’s fat butt hanging out his pants?” Lenny was reminiscing. “Working man’s smile grinning ear-to-ear! I bet if that guy’d taken a dump while he was running, it would’ve cleared his belt!” Kevin did not seem to be joining in with Lenny’s cackle. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Lucky for you I got Mr. Plastic off my back. But you should have heard the scene in here, Pugh. Straight out of Dawson’s Creek. Fucking nauseating. Thought I’d bust into tears before a commercial break from our sponsors.” “Hey, I hear you! Like, with those cops dude, you were so smooth dude, I thought that fat fuck was going to take you to some little room and kick the shit out of you, ’cause you were driving him like, fucking insane! Sir, I really must terribly protest, sir, that it was me— ” “It was I, you grammatical retard. And just remember, chump, you owe me one.” “Sure, bro. I owe you big-time. You took the heat like some superhero, like—like you was Jesus!” “I’m serious, pal. This one’s gonna cost you,” said Kevin. “’Cause your low-rent stunt could do my reputation some serious damage. I got standards. Everybody knows I got standards. I saved your ass this time, but don’t expect a sequel, like, ‘Ass-Save II.’ I don’t like associating myself with this shit. Rocks over an overpass. It’s fucking trite, man. It’s got no class at all, it’s fucking trite. ”
Eva
MARCH 3, 2001
Dear Franklin,
You’ve put it together: I felt ashamed of my false accusations, and that’s the real reason I decided to ask Kevin on that mother-son outing, just the two of us. You thought it was a weird idea, and, when you commended so heartily that Kevin and I should do that sort of thing more often, I knew you didn’t like it—especially once you added that barb about how we’d better avoid any pedestrian overpasses, “Since, you know, Kev would have an uncontrollable urge to throw whole Barcaloungers onto the road.” I was nervous about approaching him but pushed myself, thinking, there’s no point in moaning about how your adolescent never talks to you if you never talk to him. And I reasoned that the trip to Vietnam the summer before last had backfired for being overkill, three solid weeks of close familial quarters when at thirteen no kid can bear to be seen with his parents, even by communists. Surely one day at a time would be easier to take. Besides, I had forced my own enthusiasm for travel down his throat, instead of making an effort to do what he wanted to do—whatever that was. My dithering beforehand over how to pop the question made me feel like a bashful schoolgirl gearing up to invite our son to a rock concert. When I finally cornered him—or myself, really—in the kitchen, I went with the sensation, saying, “By the way, I’d like to ask you out on a date.” Kevin looked mistrustful. “What for.” “Just to do something together. For fun.” “Like, do what.” This was the part that made me nervous. Thinking of something “fun” to do with our son was like trying to think of a really great trip to take with your pet rock. He hated sports and was indifferent to most movies; food was chaff, and nature an annoyance, merely the agent of heat or cold or flies. So I shrugged. “Maybe do a little Christmas shopping. Take you to dinner?” Then I pulled out my ace in the hole, playing perfectly to Kevin’s absurdist strong suit. “And play a round or two of miniature golf. ” He cracked that sour half smile, and I’d secured a companion for Saturday. I worried about what to wear.
In a switch-off reminiscent of The Prince and the Pauper, I would assume the role of Kevin’s caring, engaged parent, while you would become Celia’s protector for the day. “Gosh,” you quipped lightly, “going have to come up with something to do that doesn’t terrify her. Guess that rules out vacuuming.” To say that I wanted, truly desired, to spend all afternoon and evening with my prickly fourteen-year-old son would be a stretch, but I did powerfully desire to desire it—if that makes any sense. Knowing how time went slack around that boy, I had scheduled our day: miniature golf, shopping on Main Street in Nyack, and then I would treat him to a nice dinner out. The fact he didn’t care about Christmas presents or fine dining seemed no reason to skip the lesson that this is simply what people do. As for our sporting escapade, no one is meant to care about miniature golf, which must be why it felt so apt. Kevin reported for duty in the foyer with an expression of glum forbearance, like a convict being hauled off to serve his sentence (though in that very circumstance not two years later, his face would instead appear cool and cocky). His ridiculous child-sized Izod knit was the loud orange of prison jumpsuits—not, as I would have much opportunity to establish, a very becoming color on him—and with the tight shirt pulling his shoulders back, he might have been handcuffed. His low-slung khaki slacks from seventh grade were at fashion’s cutting edge: Extending to mid-calf, they presaged the renaissance of pedal pushers. We climbed into my new metallic double-yellow VW Luna. “You know, in my day,” I chattered, “these VW bugs were everywhere. Rattletrap and usually beaten up, full of destitute longhairs smoking dope and blasting Three Dog Night on tinny eight-tracks. I think they cost something like $2,500. Now this reissue is ten times that; it still fits two adults and a cat, but it’s a luxury automobile. I don’t know what that is—ironic, funny.” Silence. At last, laboriously: “It means you’ll spend twenty-five grand to kid yourself you’re still nineteen, and still not get any trunk space.” “Well, I guess I do tire of all this retro-boomer stuff,” I said. “The film remakes of The Brady Bunch and The Flintstones. But the first time I saw it, I fell in love with this design. The Luna doesn’t copy the original, it alludes to the original. And the old Beetle was poky. The Luna is still a little bump on the road, but it’s a surprisingly beautiful car.” “Yeah,” said Kevin. “You’ve said all that before.” I colored. It was true. I had. I pulled into that funky little course in Sparkhill called “9W Golf” and finally noticed that Kevin hadn’t worn a jacket. It was chilly, too, and overcast. “Why didn’t you wear a coat?” I exploded. “You just can’t get uncomfortable enough, can you?” “Uncomfortable?” he said. “With my own mother?” I slammed the door, but with that German engineering it only made a muffled clump. Heaven knows what I’d been thinking. Miniature golf being fundamentally ludicrous, maybe I’d hoped that it would lend our afternoon a leavening element of whimsy. Or maybe I’d hoped instead for some emotional inversion, whereby because everything that meant something to me meant nothing to Kevin, something that meant nothing to me might mean something to Kevin. In any case, it was wrongheaded. We paid the attendant and marched to the first hole—a bathtub sprouting dead weeds, guarded by a plaster giraffe that looked like a pony with a wrung neck. In fact, all the course’s models were gimcrack and careless, lending the place an ambiance of, as Kevin would say, who-gives-a-rat’s-ass. The traffic on 9W was loud and relentless, and meanwhile, stiff goose bumps rose on Kevin’s arms. He was freezing and I was making him do this anyway, because I had this wonky notion of having a mother-son “outing” and we would, goddamn it, have fun. Naturally, anybody could roll a golf ball between the claw feet of that bathtub, since the feet were a yard apart. But once the course grew harder—under the missile, over to the lighthouse, down the suspension bridge, around the milk churns, through the doors of the model Sparkhill-Palisades Fire Department—Kevin set aside the studied ineptitude of curling a Frisbee on its side in the backyard, displaying instead the striking hand-eye coordination that his archery instructor had remarked upon more than once. But somehow the very fact that he was so good at this made it all the more pointless, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of our first “game” when he was two, rolling the ball back and forth on the floor exactly three times. For my part, the rank silliness of this exercise had become so glaring that I grew apathetic and muffed the holes. We said nothing, and the course took very little time to complete, if only by the clock; I glanced constantly at my watch. This is what it’s like to be Kevin, I thought. The leaden passage of minute by minute: This is what it’s like to be Kevin all the time. At the end Kevin posed with his club like a dapper gentleman, still silent but with a now-what? look, as if to say, okay, I did what you wanted and I hope you’re satisfied. “Well,” I said grimly. “You won.” I insisted on driving home to get his jacket, though reappearing back at the house so soon embarrassed me—you looked bemused—and going up through Nyack to Gladstone and back to Nyack to shop introduced yet more awkwardness. Nevertheless, now that Kevin had made a hash of my one playful, offbeat idea for our afternoon—having turned it into a mechanical, bone-chilling farce—he seemed more contented. Once we parked (way down Broadway, because the mid-December traffic was bumper-to-bumper and we were lucky to find the space we got), to my astonishment he volunteered a thought. “I don’t get why you celebrate Christ mas when you aren’t a Christ ian.” He pronounced the Christ with a long I to emphasize the Jesus bit. “Well,” I said, “it’s true that your father and I don’t believe that some young man who was good at sound bites 2,000 years ago was the son of God. But it’s nice to have holidays, isn’t it? To make part of the year a little different, something to look forward to. I learned studying anthropology at Green Bay is that it’s important to observe cultural rituals.” “Just so long as they’re totally empty,” said Kevin breezily. “You think we’re hypocrites.” “Your word, not mine.” He glided past the Runcible Spoon around the corner to Main Street, turning the heads of some older high school girls loitering across the way by the Long Island Drum Center. Frankly I don’t think his smoky Armenian looks drew their attention so much as the languid elegance of his manner, at such odds with his preposterous clothes: He moved levelly on the same plane, as if rolling on casters. Then, those fine exposed hipbones couldn’t have hurt. “So,” Kevin summed up, weaving through pedestrians, “you want to keep the presents and the high-test eggnog, but chuck the prayers and the boring Christmas Eve service. To cash in on the good stuff without having to pay for it with the shit.” “You could say that,” I agreed cautiously. “In a broad sense I’ve tried to do that all my life.” “Okay, long as you can get away with it,” he said cryptically. “Not sure it’s always possible.” And he let the subject go. Conversation once again ceased to flow, so when one of them almost ran me over, I supposed aloud that maybe we could buy Celia one of those superthin aluminum Razor scooters that had abruptly become so popular. Kevin said, “You know, couple years ago, you give a kid some geeky scooter for Christmas and he’d have bawled his eyes out.” I lunged at the chance to be collegial. “You’re right, that’s one of the things that’s wrong with this country, it’s so faddish. It was the same with in-line skates, right? Overnight, a must-have. Still—” I bit my lip, watching yet another boy whiz past on one of those narrow silver frames. “I wouldn’t want Celia to feel left out.” “Mumsey. Get real. Ceil would be scared shitless. You’d have to hold her little hand everywhere she went or you’d have to carry her, scooter and all. You ready? ’Cause count me out.” Okay. We didn’t get the scooter. In fact, we didn’t buy anything. Kevin made me so self-conscious that everything I considered seemed to damn me. I looked at the scarves and hats through his eyes and they suddenly seemed stupid or unnecessary. We had scarves. We had hats. Why bother. Though I was sorry to lose our parking space, I was glad of the chance to act the proper mother for once and announced sternly that we would now go back to the house, where he would dress for dinner in normal-sized clothes —although his airy response, “Whatever you say,” made me more aware of the limits to my authority than of its force. As we passed back in front of the Runcible Spoon on the way to the car, a corpulent woman was sitting alone at a table by the window, and her hot fudge sundae was built on that lavish American scale that Europeans both envy and disparage. “Whenever I see fat people, they’re eating,” I ruminated safely out of the diner’s earshot. “Don’t give me this it’s glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It’s food. They’re fat because they eat the wrong food, too much of it, and all the time.” The usual lack of pickup, not even mm-hmm, or true. Finally, a block later: “You know, you can be kind of harsh.” I was taken aback and stopped walking. “You’re one to talk.” “Yeah. I am. Wonder where I got it.” Driving home, then, every time I came up with something to say—about pushy SUV drivers (or, as I preferred to playfully misspeak, SRO drivers), garish Nyack Christmas lights—I realized it was whittling, and I’d swallow the remark. I was apparently one of those types who, should she follow that edict about if you can’t say something nice, would say nothing at all. Our raw silence in my Luna supplied a foretaste of the long periods of dead air that would pass in Claverack. Back home, you and Celia had been working on homemade tree ornaments all afternoon, and you’d helped her to weave tinsel in her hair. You were in the kitchen arranging frozen fish sticks on a tray when I bustled from the bedroom and asked you to fasten the top button of my hot-pink silk dress. “Wow,” you said, “you’re not looking very maternal.” “I’d like to create a sense of occasion,” I said. “I thought you liked this dress.” “I do. Still,” you mumbled, buttoning, “That slit up the thigh is cut pretty high. You don’t want to make him uneasy.” “I’m making someone uneasy, obviously.” I left to find some earrings and to splash on a little Opium, then returned to the kitchen to discover that Kevin had not, for once, merely followed the letter of my law, for I’d half expected to find him decked out in a “normal-sized” bunny suit. He was standing at the sink with his back to me, but even so I could see that his lush black rayon slacks rested gently on his narrow hips and fell to his cordovans with a slight break. I hadn’t bought him that white shirt; with its full sleeves and graceful drape, it may have been fencing garb. I was touched, I really was, and I was about to exclaim about what a handsome figure he cut when he didn’t wear clothes designed for an eight-year-old when he turned around. In his hands was the carcass of a whole cold chicken. Or it had been whole, before he clawed off both breasts and a leg, the drumstick of which he was still devouring. I probably turned white. “I’m about to take you to dinner. Why are you eating the better part of a roast chicken before we go?” Kevin wiped a little grease off the corner of his mouth with the heel of his hand, ill-concealing a smirk. “I was hungry.” A rare enough admission that it could only be a ruse. “You know—growing boy?” “Put that away right now and get your coat.” So naturally once we were seated in Hudson House our growing boy had grown enough for the day, and he allowed that his appetite had waned. I would break bread with my son only in the most literal sense, for he refused to order an entrée or even an appetizer, preferring to tear at the basket of hard rolls. Though he ripped the sourdough into ever smaller pieces, I don’t think he ate any. Defiantly, I ordered the mesclun salad, pigeon-breast appetizer, salmon, and a whole bottle of sauvignon blanc that I sensed I would finish. “So,” I began, battling discomfiture as I picked at greens under Kevin’s ascetic eye; we were in a restaurant, why should I feel apologetic about eating? “How’s school going?” “It’s going,” he said. “Can’t ask for more than that.” “I can ask for a few more details.” “You want my course schedule?” “ No. ” I badly did not want to get annoyed. “Like, what’s your favorite subject this semester?” I remembered too late that for Kevin the word favorite attached exclusively to the enthusiasms of others that he liked to despoil. “You imply I like any.” “Well,” I thrashed, having difficulty stabbing a forkful of arugula small enough that it wouldn’t smear honey-mustard dressing on my chin. “Have you thought about joining any after-school clubs?” He looked at me with the same incredulity that would later meet my inquiries about the cafeteria menus at Claverack. Maybe the fact that he wouldn’t deign to answer this question at all made me lucky. “What about your, ah, teachers? Are any of them, you know, especially—” “And what bands are you listening to these days?” he said earnestly. “Next you can wheedle about whether there isn’t some cute little cunt in the front row that’s got me itchy. That way you can segue into how it’s all up to me of course, but before balling the chick in the hallway I might decide to wait until I’m ready. Right around dessert you can ask about druuugs. Careful, like, ’cause you don’t want to scare me into lying my head off, so you have to say how you experimented but that doesn’t mean I should experiment too. Finally, once you’ve sucked up that whole bottle you can go gooey-eyed and say how great it is to spend quality time together and you can shift out of your chair and put an arm around my shoulder and give it a little squeeze. ” “All right, Mr. Snide.” I abandoned my lettuce. “What do you want to talk about?” “This was your idea. I never said I wanted to talk about a fucking thing.” We squared off over my pigeon breast and red-currant confit, and I began to saw. Kevin had a way of turning pleasures into hard work. As for the turn he took after three or four minutes’ silence, I can only conclude that he took pity on me. Later in Claverack he would never be the one to blink first, but after all, in Hudson House he was only fourteen. “Okay, I’ve got a topic,” he proposed slyly, picking up a carmine crayon from the restaurant’s complimentary glass of Crayolas, grown ubiquitous as scooters. “You’re always griping about this country and wishing you were in Malaysia or something. What’s your problem with the place. Really. American materialism?” Much like Kevin when I proposed this date, I suspected a trap, but I had an entrée and two-thirds of a bottle to go, and I didn’t want to spend it drawing tic-tac-toes on the disposable tablecloth. “No, I don’t think that’s it,” I answered sincerely. “After all, as your grandfather would say—” “ Materials are everything. So what’s your beef?” This is sure to dumbfound you, but in that moment I couldn’t think of one thing wrong with the United States. I’m often stymied in this vein when some stranger on a plane, making conversation when I put down my book, asks what other novels I’ve enjoyed: I draw such a perfect blank that my seatmate might infer that the paperback stuffed in the magazine pocket is the first fiction I’ve read in my life. My leery outlook on the United States was precious to me—even if, thanks to you, I had learned to give the country grudging credit for at least being a spirited, improvisational sort of place that, despite its veneer of conformity, cultivated an impressive profusion of outright lunatics. Abruptly incapable of citing a single feature of this country that drove me around the bend, I felt the bottom fall out for a second and worried that maybe I hadn’t kept the U.S. at arm’s length from sophisticated cosmopolitanism, but rather from petty prejudice. Nevertheless, on airplanes it eventually comes to me that I adore Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. Then I remember V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which always reminds me of Paul Theroux’s delightful Girls at Play, and I’m away, restored to literacy again. “It’s ugly,” I submitted. “What? The amber waves of grain?” “The fast-food taka-taka. All that plastic. And it’s spread all around the country like potato blight.” “You said you like the Chrysler Building.” “It’s old. Most modern American architecture is horrendous.” “So this country’s a dump. Why’s anywhere else any better.” “You’ve hardly been anywhere else.” “Vietnam was a shithole. That lake in Hanoi stank.” “But didn’t you think the people were gorgeous? Even just physically gorgeous.” “You took me to Asia for chink pussy? I could of booked one of those package holidays on the Web.” “Having fun?” I asked dryly. “I’ve had better.” He shot a ball of bread into the basket. “’Sides. The guys all looked like girls to me.” “But I thought it was refreshing,” I insisted, “along that lake—even if it does smell—the way the Vietnamese pay entrepreneurs with bathroom scales a few dong to weigh themselves, in the hopes that they’ve gained a few pounds. It’s biologically sane.” “Put those gooks around a bottomless vat of French fries for long enough and they’ll pork out wider than they are tall, just like mall rats in New Jersey. You think only Americans are greedy? I don’t pay attention in European History too good, but I don’t think so.” Served the salmon for which I now had little appetite, I drummed my fingers. With the backdrop of the wallwide seascape at Hudson House, in that flashy white shirt with its billowing sleeves, raised collar, and a V-neck cut to the sternum, Kevin could have passed for Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. “The accent,” I said. “I hate it.” “It’s your accent, too,” he said. “Even if you do say tomahto. ” “You think that’s pretentious.” “Don’t you?” I laughed, a little. “Okay. It’s pretentious.” Something was loosening up, and I thought, my, maybe this “outing” wasn’t a bad idea after all. Maybe we’re getting somewhere. I began to throw myself into the conversation in earnest. “Look, one of the things about this country I really can’t stand? It’s the lack of accountability. Everything wrong with an American’s life is somebody else’s fault. All these smokers raking in millions of dollars in damages from tobacco companies, when, what, they’ve known the risks for forty years. Can’t quit? Stick it to Philip Morris. Next thing you know, fat people will be suing fast-food companies because they’ve eaten too many Big Macs!” I paused, catching myself. “I realize you’ve heard this before.” Kevin was winding me up, of course, like a toy. He had the same intent, mischievous expression I’d seen recently on a boy making his model race car hurtle off the rocks in Tallman Park by remote control. “Once or twice,” he allowed, repressing a smile. “Power walkers,” I said. “What about them.” “They drive me insane.” Of course, he’d heard this, too. But he hadn’t heard this, because until then I hadn’t quite put it together: “People around here can’t just go for a walk, they have to be getting with some kind of program. And you know, this may be at the heart of it, what’s my beef. All those intangibles of life, the really good but really elusive stuff that makes life worth living—Americans seem to believe they can all be obtained by joining a group, or signing up to a subscription, or going on a special diet, or undergoing aroma therapy. It’s not just that Americans think they can buy everything; they think that if you follow the instructions on the label, the product has to work. Then when the product doesn’t work and they’re still unhappy even though the right to happiness is enshrined in the Constitution, they sue the bejesus out of each other.” “What do you mean, intangibles,” said Kevin. “ Whatever, as your friends would say. Love—joy—insight.” (To Kevin, I could as well have been talking about little green men on the moon.) “But you can’t order them on the Internet or learn them in a course at the New School or look them up in a How-To. It’s not that easy, or maybe it is easy... so easy that trying, following the directions, gets in the way... I don’t know.” Kevin was doodling furiously on the tablecloth with his crayon. “Anything else?” “Of course there’s anything else,” I said, feeling the momentum that gets rolling in those plane chats when I finally get access to the library in my head, remembering Madame Bovary, and Jude the Obscure, and A Passage to India. “Americans are fat, inarticulate, and ignorant. They’re demanding, imperious, and spoiled. They’re self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they’ve got it right—never mind that half the adult population doesn’t vote. And they’re boastful, too. Believe it or not, in Europe it isn’t considered acceptable to foist on new acquaintances right off the bat that you went to Harvard and you own a big house and what it cost and which celebrities come to dinner. And Americans never pick up, either, that in some places it’s considered crass to share your taste for anal sex with someone at a cocktail party you’ve known for five minutes—since the whole concept of privacy here has fallen by the wayside. That’s because Americans are trusting to a fault, innocent in a way that makes you stupid. Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can’t stand them.” I was talking too loudly for such a small establishment and such abrasive sentiments, but I was strangely exhilarated. This was the first time that I’d been able to really talk to my son, and I hoped that we’d crossed the Rubicon. At last I was able to confide things that I well and truly believed, and not just lecture—please don’t pick the Corleys’ prize-winning roses. Granted, I’d begun in a childishly inept way, asking how’s school, while he was the one who’d conducted our talk like a competent adult, drawing out his companion. But as a consequence I was proud of him. I was just fashioning a remark along these lines, when Kevin, who had been scribbling intently on the tablecloth with that crayon, finished whatever he was drawing, looked up, and nodded at the scrawl. “Wow,” he said. “That’s a whole lot of adjectives.” Attention deficit disorder in a pig’s eye. Kevin was an able student when he bothered, and he hadn’t been doodling; he’d been taking notes. “Let’s see,” he said, and proceeded to check off successive elements of his list with his red crayon. “ Spoiled. You’re rich. I’m not too sure what you think you’re doing without, but I bet you could afford it. Imperious. Pretty good description of that speech just now; if I was you, I wouldn’t order dessert, ’cause you can bet the waiter’s gonna hawk a loogie in your raspberry sauce. Inarticulate? Lemme see... ” He searched the tablecloth, and read aloud, “ It’s not that easy, or maybe it is easy, I don’t know. I don’t call that Shakespeare myself. Also, seems to me I’m sitting across from the lady who goes on these long rants about ‘reality TV’ when she’s never watched a single show. And that—one of your favorite words, Mumsey—is ignorant. Next: boasting. What was all that these-dumb-fucks-suck-dead-moose-dickand-I’m-so-much-cooler-than-them if it wasn’t showing off? Like somebody who thinks she’s got it right and nobody else does. Trusting... with no idea other people can’t stand them. ” He underscored this one and then looked me in the eye with naked dislike. “Well. Far as I can tell, about the only thing that keeps you and the other dumb-ass Americans from being peas in a pod is you’re not fat. And just because you’re skinny you act s elf-righteous—condescending— and superior. Maybe I’d rather have a big cow of a mother who at least didn’t think she was better than everybody else in the fucking country.” I paid the bill. We wouldn’t conduct another mother-son outing until Claverack.
Discouraged from getting her the scooter, I went to considerable trouble to locate a “small-eared elephant shrew” as a Christmas present for Celia. When we’d visited the Small Mammals exhibit in the Bronx Zoo, she’d been enchanted by this incongruous little fellow, who looked as if an elephant crossed with a kangaroo had interbred with several generations of mice. The importation was probably illegal—if not outright endangered, this tiny creature from southern Africa was identified at the zoo as “threatened, due to habitat loss”—which didn’t help my case when you grew impatient with the time it took to find one. At length we struck a deal. You’d look the other way as I located a pet shop that specialized in “unusual” animals on the Internet, I the other way as you bought Kevin that crossbow. I never told you what Celia’s present cost, and I don’t think I’ll tell you now, either. Suffice it to say that once in a while it was nice to be wealthy. The short-eared elephant shrew—inaptly named; neither elephant nor shrew, it has flanged, cupped ears that are proportionately enormous—was, bar none, the most successful present I’ve ever given. Celia would have been bowled over by a roll of Lifesavers, but even our agreeable daughter expressed degrees of exhilaration, and when she unwrapped the big glass cage her eyes bulged. Then she flew into my arms with a torrent of thanks. She kept getting up from Christmas dinner to check that the cage was warm enough or to feed him a raw cranberry. I was already worried. Animals don’t always flourish in alien climates, and giving such a perishable present to a sensitive child was probably rash. Then, I may have purchased “Snuffles,” as Celia christened him, as much for myself as for her, if only because his delicate, wide-eyed vulnerability reminded me so of Celia herself. With long, downy fur reminiscent of our daughter’s fine hair, this five-ounce fluff ball looked as if, with one good puff, he would scatter to the winds like a dandelion. Balanced on haunches that narrowed to slender stilts, Snuffles looked precarious when upright. His signature snout, trumpet-shaped and prehensile, routed about the dirt-lined cage, both touching and comic. The animal didn’t run so much as hop, and his bounding within the confines of his hemmed-in world exuded the cheerful make-the-best-of-it optimism with which Celia would soon face her own limitations. Although elephant shrews are not strictly vegetarian—they eat worms and insects—massive brown eyes gave Snuffles an awed, frightened appearance, anything but predatory. Constitutionally, Snuffles, like Celia, was quarry. Appreciating that her pet mustn’t be overhandled, she would poke a nervous finger through the cage door to stroke the tips of his tawny fur. When she had friends over to play, she kept her bedroom door shut while she decoyed playmates to more durable toys. Maybe that means she’s learning, I prayed, about other people. (Celia was popular partly for being indiscriminate, since she brought home the playmates that other children despised—like that spoiled, strident creature Tia, whose mother had the gall to advise me quietly that it was “really better if Tia is allowed to win board games.” Celia deduced as much without being told, as she asked me pensively after her bossy companion had left, “Is it okay to cheat to lose?”) Contemplating our daughter as she defended Snuffles, I searched for a firmness, a resolve in her expression that might indicate an incipient capacity to defend herself. Yet unwillingly, I considered the possibility that, while lovely to my own eye, Celia was fetching in a way that outsiders might be apt to overlook. She was only six, but I already feared that she would never be beautiful—that she was unlikely to carry herself with that much authority. She had your mouth, too wide for her small head; her lips were thin and bloodless. Her tremulous countenance encouraged a carefulness around her that was wearing. That hair, so silken and wispy, was destined to grow lank, its gold to give way to a dingier blond by her teens. Besides, isn’t true beauty a tad enigmatic? And Celia was too artless to imply concealment. She had an available face, and there is something implicitly uninteresting about the look of a person who will tell you whatever you want to know. Why, already I could see it: She would grow into the kind of adolescent who conceives a doomed crush on the president of the student council, who doesn’t know she’s alive. Celia would always give herself away cheaply. Later, she would move in—too young—with an older man who would abuse her generous nature, who would leave her for a more buxom woman who knows how to dress. But at least she would always come home to us for Christmas, and had she opportunity, she would make a far finer mother than I ever was. Kevin shunned Snuffles, its very name an indignity to a teenage boy. He was more than willing to catch spiders or crickets and dangle the live morsels into the cage—standard boy-stuff and the perfect job for him, since Celia was too squeamish. But the cool, deadpan teasing was merciless. You couldn’t have forgotten the night I served quail, and he convinced her that the scrawny carcass on her plate was you-know-who. I know, Snuffles was just a pet, an expensive pet, and some kind of unhappy ending was inevitable. I should have thought of that before I gave her the little beast, though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life. I had hoped he’d last longer, but that wouldn’t have made it any easier for Celia when calamity hit. That night in February 1998 is the only instance I can remember of Celia’s dissembling. She kept darting around the house, crawling on the floor, picking up the couch skirting and peering under the sofa, but when I asked her what she was looking for she chirped, “Nothing!” She continued scuffling around on all fours past her bedtime, refusing to explain the game she was playing, but begging to play it longer. Finally, enough was enough, and I hauled her off to bed as she struggled. It wasn’t like her to be such a brat. “How’s Snuffles?” I asked, trying to distract her when I turned on the light. Her body stiffened, and she didn’t look at the cage when I bounced her onto the mattress. After a pause, she whispered, “He’s fine.” “I can’t see him from here,” I said. “Is he hiding?” “He’s hiding,” she said, in an even smaller voice. “Why don’t you go find him for me?” “He’s hiding,” she said again, still not looking at the cage. The elephant shrew did sometimes sleep in a corner or under a branch, but when I searched the cage myself, I couldn’t spot any tufts. “You didn’t let Kevin play with Snuffles, did you?” I asked sharply, in the same tone of voice I might have asked, You didn’t put Snuffles in a blender, did you? “It’s all my fault!” she gasped, and began to sob. “I th-thought I closed the cage door, but I guess I d-d-d-didn’t! ’Cause when I came in after supper it was open and he was gone! I’ve looked everywhere!” Shsh, now there, we’ll find him, I cooed, but she would not be quieted. “I’m stupid! Kevin says so and he’s right. I’m stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She hit herself so hard on the temple with her balled up fist that I had to grab her wrist. I was hopeful that her crying jag would burn itself out, but a little girl’s grief has astonishing staying power, and the strength of her selfloathing tempted me to make false promises. I assured her that Snuffles could not have got very far and that he would definitely be right back in his cozy cage by morning. Grasping at my perfidious straw, Celia shuddered and lay still. I don’t think we gave up until about 3 A.M.—and thanks, again, for your help. You had another scouting job the next day, and we would both miss sleep. I can’t think of a cranny we didn’t check; you moved the dryer, I combed the trash. Mumbling good-naturedly, “Where is that bad boy?” you pulled all the books out of the lower shelves while I steeled myself to check for hair in the disposal. “I don’t want to make this worse with an I-told-you-so,” you said when we both collapsed in the living room with dust balls in our hair. “And I did think it was cute. But that’s a rare, delicate animal, and she’s in first grade.” “But she’s been so conscientious. Never out of water, careful about overfeeding. Then to just, leave the door open?” “She is absent-minded, Eva.” “True. I suppose I could order another one...” “Fugeddaboutit. One lesson in mortality is enough for the year.” “You think maybe he got outside?” “In which case he’s already frozen to death,” you said cheerfully. “Thanks.” “Better than dogs.... ” That was the story I put together for Celia the next day: that Snuffles had gone to play outdoors, where he was much happier with lots of nice fresh air, and where he’d make lots of animal friends. Hey, why not turn it to my advantage? Celia would believe anything.
All things being equal, I’d expect to recollect our daughter’s ashen mope of the following week, but not ordinary h
