MARCH 8, 2001
Dear Franklin,
My God, there’s been another one. I should have known on Monday afternoon when all my coworkers suddenly started to avoid me. Standard issue. In a suburb outside San Diego, fifteen-year-old Charles “Andy” Williams—a scrawny, unassuming-looking white kid with thin lips and matted hair like well-trod carpet—brought a.22 to Santana High School in his backpack. He hid out in the boys’ bathroom, where he shot two, proceeding to the hallway to fire at anything that moved. Two students were killed, thirteen injured. Once he had retreated to the bathroom again, the police found him cowering on the floor with the gun to his head. He whimpered incongruously, “It’s only me”; they arrested the boy without a struggle. It almost goes without saying by now that he’d just broken up with his girlfriend—who was twelve. Curiously, on the news Monday night, some of his fellow students characterized the shooter, as usual, as “picked on,” persecuted as a “freak, a dork, and a loser.” Yet a whole other set of kids attested that Andy had plenty of friends, wouldn’t remotely qualify as unpopular or especially ragged on, and was to the contrary “well-liked.” These latter descriptions must have confused our audience, since when Jim Lehrer revisited the story tonight for another inquiry into why, why, why, all depictions along the lines of “well-liked” had been expunged. If Andy Williams hadn’t been “bullied,” he failed to support the now fashionable revenge-of-the-nerds interpretation of these incidents, which were now meant to teach us not stricter gun control but concern for the agonies of the underage outcast. Accordingly, while “Andy” Williams is now nearly as famous as his crooner counterpart, I doubt there’s a news consumer in the country who could tell you the name of either of the two students he shot dead—teenagers who never did anything wrong outside of heading to the bathroom on a morning that their more fortunate classmates resolved to hold their bladders through Geometry: Brian Zuckor and Randy Gordon. Exercising what I can only regard as a civic duty, I have committed their names to heart.
I’ve heard parents throughout my life allude to horrifying incidents in which something happened to their children: a full-immersion baptism by a boiling pot of turkey stew or the retrieval of a wayward cat via an open third-story window. Prior to 1998, I had casually assumed that I knew what they were talking about—or what they avoided talking about, since there’s often a private fence around such stories, full access to which, like intensive care units, only immediate family is allowed. I’d always respected those fences. Other people’s personal disasters of any sort are exclusionary, and I’d be grateful for that Don’t Enter sign, behind which I might shelter a secret offensive relief that my own loved ones were safe. Still I imagined that I knew roughly what lay on the other side. Be it a daughter or a grandfather, anguish is anguish. Well, I apologize for my presumption. I had no idea. When you’re the parent, no matter what the accident, no matter how far away you were at the time and how seemingly powerless to avert it, a child’s misfortune feels like your fault. You’re all your kids have, and their own conviction that you will protect them is contagious. So in case you expect, Franklin, that I’m simply setting about one more time to deny culpability, to the contrary. Broadly, it still feels like my fault, and broadly, it felt like my fault at the time. At the very least, I wish I’d stuck to my guns on our child-care arrangements. We’d hired Robert, that seismology student from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, to pick up Celia from school and stick around the house until one of us got home, and that’s the way the rules should have stayed. Against all odds, we managed to keep Robert, too—though he threatened to quit—once we assured him that Kevin was now old enough to look after himself and he need only look after Celia. But you were on this responsibility kick. Kevin was fourteen, as old as many sitters in our neighborhood. If Kevin was to become trustworthy, he had first to be trusted; sure, it sounded good. So you told our child-minder that as long as Kevin had returned from ninth grade and had been apprised that he was now to keep an eye on Celia, Robert could go. That solved the problem that kept cropping up, that you would get stuck in traffic and I would work a bit late, and (however well-compensated for his time) Robert would get stranded, chafing, on Palisades Parade when he had research at Lamont to which he needed to return. When I try to remember that Monday, my mind shies, like ducking a hurtling tether ball. Then the memory curves centrifugally back around again, so that when I stand back up it hits me in the head. I was once more working a little late. The new arrangement with Robert made me feel less guilty for putting in an extra hour, and AWAP’s preeminence in the budget-travel niche had started to slide. We had so much more competition than when I started out— The Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide had sprung up; meanwhile, with the whole country aslosh in cash from a buoyant stock market, demand for the really dirt-cheap travel in which we specialized had dropped. So against my better judgment, I was working up a proposal for a whole new series, Wing and a Prayer for Boomers —whose target audience would be flush with Internet start-up stock, probably overweight, nostalgic about their first seat-of-the-pants trip to Europe with a beat-up copy of W&P in the sixties, convinced they were still college students if not in fact then in spirit, accustomed to $30 cabernets but, by conceit, still adventurous, that is, eager for comfort so long as that’s not what it was called and by all means in horror of resorting to the stodgy Blue Guide like their parents—when the phone rang. You said to drive carefully. You said that she was already in the hospital and there was nothing I could do now. You said that her life was not endangered. You said that more than once. All this was true. Then you said that she was going to be “all right,” which was not true, though for most messengers of dismal tidings the urge to issue this groundless reassurance seems to be irresistible. I had no choice but to drive carefully, because the traffic on the George Washington Bridge was barely moving. When at last I laid eyes on your collapsed expression in the waiting room, I realized that you loved her after all, which I castigated myself for ever having doubted. Kevin wasn’t with you, to my relief, because I might have clawed his eyes out. Your embrace had rarely offered so little solace. I kept hugging you harder to get something out of it, like squeezing an empty bottle of hand lotion until it wheezes. She was already in surgery, you explained. While I’d driven in, you’d run Kevin home, because there was nothing to do but wait, and there was no point making this harder on her brother than it was already. But I wondered if you hadn’t whisked him from the waiting room to safeguard him from me. We sat in those same sea-green metal chairs where I had agonized over what Kevin would tell the doctors when I broke his arm. Maybe, I supposed miserably, for the last eight years he’d been biding his time. I said, “I don’t understand what happened.” I was quiet; I didn’t shout. You said, “I thought I told you. Over the phone.” “But it doesn’t make sense.” Anything but contentious, my tone was simply baffled. “Why would she—what would she be doing with that stuff?” “Kids.” You shrugged. “Playing. I guess.” “But,” I said. “She’ll, ah—.” My mind kept blanking out. I had to reconstruct what I’d wanted to say all over again, repeating the conversation to myself, where we were, what came next.... Bathroom. Yes. “She’ll go to the bathroom by herself now,” I resumed. “But she doesn’t like it in there. She never has. She wouldn’t play in there.” An incipient insistence in my voice must have sounded dangerous; we would shrink back from the ledge. Celia was still in surgery. We wouldn’t fight, and you would hold my hand. It seemed hours later that the doctor emerged. You’d called home on your cell phone, twice, out of my earshot as if sparing me something; you’d bought me coffee from the machine along the wall, and it was now topped with crinkled skin. When a nurse pointed us out to the surgeon, I suddenly understood why some people worship their doctors, and why doctors are prone to feel godlike. But with one look at his face, I could see that he wasn’t feeling very godlike. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We really tried. But there was too much damage. I’m afraid we couldn’t save the eye.”
We were encouraged to go home. Celia was heavily sedated, and she would remain so for some time. Not long enough, I thought. So we stumbled from the waiting room. At least, you pointed out numbly, he says the other eye is probably okay. Just that morning I’d taken for granted the fact that our daughter had two. Out in the parking lot, it was cold; in my flight from the office, I’d left my coat. We had two cars to drive home, which made me feel colder. I sensed we were at a junction of sorts and feared that if we each launched off in separate vehicular universes we would end up in the same place only in the most banal, geographical sense. You must have felt the same need to confirm that we were, as my staff had lately taken to saying five times a day, on the same page, because you invited me into your truck for a few minutes to debrief and get warm. I missed your old baby-blue pickup, which I associated with our courtship, powering along the turnpike with the windows down and sound system pounding, like a living Bruce Springsteen lyric. And the pickup was more you, old-you anyway: classic, down-home, honest. Pure, even. Edward Hopper would never have painted the bulky 4x4 with which you replaced it. Reared up unnaturally above wide, oversized tires, the body had the blunted, bulging contours of an inflatable dinghy. Its bullying fenders and puffed-up posture reminded me of those poor little lizards whose only weapon is display, and the truck’s overdrawn, cartoon manliness had prompted me to quip in better days, “If you check under the chassis, Franklin, I bet you’ll find a tiny dick.” At least you’d laughed. The heating worked well; too well, since once we’d idled for a few minutes the cab got stuffy. It was bigger than the Ford, but your baby-blue had never felt this claustrophobic with just the two of us. Finally, you knocked your head back on the padded headrest and stared at the ceiling. “I can’t believe you left it out.” Stunned, I didn’t respond. “I thought about not saying that,” you proceeded. “But if I swallowed it, I’d be not saying it, and not saying it, for weeks, and that seemed worse.” I licked my lips. I had begun to tremble. “I didn’t leave it out.” You dropped your head, then sighed. “Eva. Don’t make me do this. You used that Liquid-Plumr on Saturday. I remember because you went on about how the kids’ drain smelled weird or something, and then later that afternoon you warned us not to run any water in that sink for the next hour because you’d put drain cleaner in it.” “I put it away,” I said. “Back in that high cabinet with the child-lock on it, which Celia couldn’t even reach with a chair!” “Then how did it get out?” “Good question,” I said icily. “Look, I realize that you’re usually very careful with caustic substances and lock that shit up automatically. But people aren’t machines—” “I remember putting it away, Franklin.” “Do you remember putting your shoes on this morning, do you remember closing the door behind you when you left the house? How many times have we been in the car, and we’ve had to go back inside and make sure that the stove isn’t on? When turning it off is presumably second nature?” “But the stove is never on, is it? It’s almost a rule of life, a, what, some kind of fortune-cookie aphorism: The Stove Is Never On.” “I’ll tell you when it’s on, Eva: the one time that you don’t bother to double-check. And that is when the fucking house burns down.” “Why are we having this inane conversation? With our daughter in the hospital?” “I want you to admit it. I’m not saying I won’t forgive you. I know you must feel terrible. But part of getting through this has to be facing up—” “Janis came this morning, maybe s he left it out.” In truth, I never thought for a moment that Janis had been so sloppy, but I was desperate to keep at bay the picture that began to form in my head when I entertained a more credible suspect. “Janis had no need for drain cleaner. All the drains were clear.” “All right,” I said, steeling myself. “Then ask Kevin how that bottle got left out.” “I knew we’d get around to this. First it’s oh, what a mystery, then it’s the housekeeper’s fault, who’s left? And, what a surprise, that Eva—who never does anything wrong herself—should finger her own son!” “He was supposed to be taking care of her. You said he was old enough—” “Yes, it was on his watch. But she was in the bathroom, he says the door was closed, and we’ve hardly encouraged our fourteen-year-old boy to bust in on his sister in the john.” “Franklin, this story doesn’t add up. Never mind for now why it was out, all right? Forget that. But why would Celia pour drain cleaner in her own eye?” “I haven’t a clue! Maybe because kids are not only dumb but creative and the combination is death. Why else would we keep that shit locked up? What’s important is Kevin did everything he should have. He says when she started to scream he came running, and when he found out what it was he ran water over her face and rinsed her eye the best he could, and then he called an ambulance, even before he called me on the cell—which was just right, the order was just right, he was a star. ” “He didn’t call me,” I said. “Well,” you said. “I wonder why.” “The damage—” I took a breath. “It’s bad, isn’t it. It had to have been very, very bad—.” I had started to cry, but I made myself stop, because I had to get this out. “If she’s lost the eye, and surgeons are better at this kind of thing than they used to be, then it was—. It was a mess. It takes, ah. It takes a while.” I stopped again, listening to the wah from the heat vents. The air had grown dry, my saliva sticky. “It takes a while for that stuff to work. That’s why the label tells you to—to let it sit.” Compulsively, I had pressed my fingertips against my own eyes, padding the papery lids, guarding the smooth, tender roll of the balls. “What are you saying? Because it’s bad enough to accuse him of neglect—” “The doctor said there’d be scarring! That she was burned, all across that side of her face! Time, it would have taken time! Maybe he did wash it out, but when? When he was finished?” You grabbed each of my arms, raised them on either side of my head, and looked me in the eye. “Finished with what? His homework? His archery practice?” “Finished,” I groaned, “with Celia. ” “Don’t you ever say that again! Not to anyone! Not even to me!” “Think about it!” I wrenched my arms free with a twist. “Celia, douse herself with acid? Celia’s afraid of everything! And she’s six, she’s not two. I know you don’t think she’s very smart, but she’s not retarded! She knows not to touch the stove, and she doesn’t eat bleach. Meanwhile, Kevin can reach that cabinet, and Kevin can work child-locks in his sleep. He’s not her savior. He did it! Oh, Franklin, he did it—” “I’m ashamed of you, ashamed,” you said at my back as I curled against the door. “Demonizing your own kid just because you can’t admit to your own carelessness. It’s worse than craven. It’s sick. Here you’re flailing around making outrageous accusations, and as usual you have no proof. That doctor—did he say anything about Kevin’s story not squaring with her injuries? No. No, he didn’t. Only his mother can detect a cover-up of some unspeakable evil because she’s such a medical expert, such an expert on corrosive chemicals because she’s occasionally cleaned house.” As ever, you couldn’t keep shouting at me while I was crying. “Look,” you implored. “You don’t know what you’re saying because you’re upset. You’re not yourself. This is hard, and it’s going to keep being hard, because you’re going to have to look at it. She’s going to be in pain, and it’s going to look nasty for a while. The only thing that’s going to make it easier is if you confront your part in this. Celia—even Celia, with that elephant shrew—admits it’s her fault. She left the cage open! And that’s part of it, what hurts, that not only did something sad happen but if she’d done something differently it wouldn’t have happened. She takes responsibility, and she’s only six! Why can’t you?” “I wish I could take responsibility,” I whispered, fogging the side window. “I’d say, ‘Oh, I could kill myself for leaving that drain cleaner where she could find it!’ Don’t you see how much easier that would be? Why would I be so upset? If it were my fault, only my fault? In that case, it wouldn’t be frightening. Franklin, this is serious, it’s not just a little girl scratching her eczema anymore. I don’t how he got this way but he’s a horror, and he hates her —” “That’s enough!” Your announcement had a liturgical finality, deep and booming like the ringing Amen in a benedictory prayer. “I don’t often lay down the law. But Kevin’s been through an incredible trauma. His sister will never be the same. He kept his head in a crisis, and I want him to be proud of that. Still, he was the one baby-sitting, and he’s inevitably going to worry that it was all his fault. So you are going to promise me, right now, that you’ll do everything in your power to assure him that it wasn’t. ” I pulled the handle of the door and opened it a few inches. I thought, I have to get out of here, I have to get away. “Don’t go, not yet,” you said, holding my arm. “I want you to promise.” “Promise to keep my mouth shut or to believe his feeble story? I might add, another one.” “I can’t make you believe in your own son. Though I’ve sure as fuck tried.” On one point you were right: I didn’t have any proof. Only Celia’s face. Hadn’t I been right. She’d never be beautiful, would she. I climbed from the truck and faced you through the open door. The chill wind whipping my hair, I stood at attention, reminded of brittle military truces struck between mistrustful generals in the middle of barren battlefields. “All right,” I said. “We’ll call it an accident. You can even tell him, ‘I’m afraid your mother forgot to put the Liquid-Plumr away on Saturday.’ After all, he knew I unclogged that drain. But in return you promise me: that we will never again leave Kevin alone with Celia. Not for five minutes.” “Fine. I bet Kevin’s none too keen for more baby-sitting jobs right now anyway.” I said I’d see you at home; a civil farewell was an effort. “Eva!” you called at my back, and I turned. “You know I’m not usually big on shrinks. But maybe you should talk to somebody. I think you need help. That’s not an accusation. It’s just—you’re right on one score. This is getting serious. I’m afraid it’s beyond me.” Indeed it was.
The following couple of weeks were eerily quiet around the house, with Celia still recovering in the hospital. You and I spoke little. I’d ask what you’d like for dinner; you’d say you didn’t care. In relation to Celia, we largely addressed logistics—when each of us would visit. Although it seemed sensible for us to go separately so that she’d have companionship for more of the day, the truth was that neither of us was anxious to share your overheated 4x4 once more. Back home, we could discuss the particulars of her condition, and though the particulars were distressing—an infection subsequent to her enucleation, a vocabulary lesson I could have skipped, had further damaged the optic nerve and ruled out a transplant— facts fed the conversational maw. Shopping for an oculist for her follow-up, I seized on a doctor named Krikor Sahatjian on the Upper East Side. Armenians look out for each other, I assured you. He’ll give us special attention. “So would Dr. Kevorkian,” you grunted, well aware that the godfather of assisted suicide was one Armenian my conservative community was reluctant to claim. Still, I was grateful for an exchange that almost qualified as banter, in conspicuous short supply. I remember being on my best behavior, never raising my voice, never objecting when you barely touched a meal that I’d have gone to great trouble to fix. Cooking, I tried not to make too much noise, muffling the clang of a knocked pot. In respect to Celia’s uncannily sunny disposition in Nyack Hospital, I swallowed many an admiring remark for seeming somehow indecorous, as if her improbable good nature were an affront to lesser mortals who quite reasonably wail from pain and grow irascible during convalescence. In our household, my praise of our daughter always seemed to get confused with bragging on my own account. Throughout, I made a concerted effort to act normal, which, along with trying to have fun and trying to be a good mother, we can now add to our list of projects that are inherently doomed. That remark you made about my “needing help” proved disquieting. I had replayed the memory of putting that Liquid-Plumr away so many times that the tape was worn and I couldn’t quite trust it. I would review my suspicions and sometimes they didn’t... well, nothing would seem clear-cut. Did I put that bottle away? Was the injury too severe for the story the way Kevin told it? Could I point to a single shred of solid evidence that would hold up in court? I didn’t want to “talk to somebody,” but I’d have given my eye teeth to be able to talk to you. It was only a couple of days after the accident when you convened our roundtable of three. We’d just had dinner, loosely speaking; Kevin had shoveled his food directly from the stove. Humoring you, he assumed his rueful, sideways slouch at the dining table. Having been unwillingly summoned to this convocation as well, I felt like a kid myself, once more forced at age nine to formally apologize to Mr. Wintergreen for pilfering drops from the walnut tree in his front yard. Sneaking a glance at Kevin, I wanted to say, Wipe that smirk off your face, this isn’t a joke; your sister’s in the hospital. I wanted to say, Go put on a T-shirt that isn’t five sizes too small for you, just being in the same room with that getup makes me itch. But I couldn’t. In the culture of our family, such commonplace parental admonitions, from me anyway, were impermissible. “In case you’re nervous, Kev,” you began (though he didn’t look nervous to me), “this isn’t an inquisition. We mostly want to tell you how much you impressed us with your quick thinking. Who knows, if you hadn’t called those medics in right away, it could have been even worse.” (How? I thought. Though I suppose she could’ve taken a bath in it.) “And your mother has something she wants to tell you.” “I wanted to thank you,” I began, avoiding Kevin’s eye, “for getting your sister to the hospital.” “Tell him what you told me,” you prompted. “Remember, you said you were concerned, that he might feel, you know... ” This part was easy. I looked at him straight on. “I thought you probably felt responsible.” Unflinching, he squinted back, and I confronted my own widebridged nose, my narrow jaw, my shelved brow and dusky complexion. I was looking in the mirror, yet I had no idea what my own reflection was thinking. “Why’s that?” “Because you were supposed to be taking care of her!” “But you wanted to remind him,” you said, “that we’d never expected him to watch her every single minute, and accidents happen, and so it wasn’t his fault. What you told me. You know. In the truck.” It was exactly like apologizing to Mr. Wintergreen. When I was nine, I’d wanted to blurt, Most of those stupid walnuts were wormy or rotten, you old coot, but instead I’d promised to harvest a full peck of his crummy nuts and return them fully shelled. “We don’t want you to blame yourself.” My tone duplicated Kevin’s own, when he’d spoken to the police— sir this, sir that. “I’m the one at fault. I should never have left the Liquid-Plumr out of the cabinet.” Kevin shrugged. “Never said I blamed myself.” He stood up. “I be excused?” “One more thing,” you said. “Your sister’s going to need your help.” “Why?” he said, ranging into the kitchen. “Only one eye, wasn’t it. Not like she needs a guide dog or a white stick.” “Yes,” I said. “ Lucky her. ” “She’ll need your support,” you said. “She’s going to have to wear a patch—” “Cool,” he said. He came back with the bag of lychees from the refrigerator. It was February; they were in season. “She’ll be fitted with a glass eye down the line,” you said, “but we’d appreciate your sticking up for her if neighborhood kids tease her—” “Like how?” he said, carefully pulling the rough salmon-colored husk off the fruit, exposing the pinkish-white flesh. “Celia does not look like a geek?” When the pale translucent orb was peeled, he popped it in his mouth, sucked, and pulled it back out. “Well, however you—” “I mean, Dad. ” Methodically, he splayed the lychee open, parting the slippery flesh from the smooth brown seed. “Not sure you remember too good, being a kid.” He angled the mangle into his mouth. “Ceil’s just gonna have to suck it up.” I could feel you internally beaming. Here was your teenager trotting out his archetypal teenagery toughness, behind which he hid his confused, conflicted feelings about his sister’s tragic accident. It was an act, Franklin, a candy-coated savagery for your consumption. He was plenty confused and conflicted, but if you looked into his pupils they were thick and sticky as a tar pit. This teenage angst of his, it wasn’t cute. “Hey, Mister Plastic,” Kevin offered. “Want one?” You demurred. “I didn’t know you liked lychees,” I said tightly once he’d started on a second one. “Yeah, well,” he said, stripping the fruit bare and rolling the pulpy globe around the table with one forefinger. It was the ghostly, milky color of a cataract. “It’s just, they’re very delicate,” I said, fretting. He tore into the lychee with his front teeth. “Yeah, whadda you call it.” He slurped. “An acquired taste. ” He was clearly planning to go through the whole bag. I rushed from the room, and he laughed.
On the days that I took the early afternoon visiting hours, I worked from home; Kevin’s school bus would often drop him off at the same time as I returned from the hospital. The first time I passed him as he sauntered languidly across Palisades Parade, I pulled over in my Luna and offered him a ride up our steep drive. You’d think that just being alone with your own son in a car was a pretty ordinary affair, especially for two minutes. But Kevin and I rarely put ourselves in such stifling proximity, and I remember babbling associatively all the way up. The street was lined with several other vehicles waiting to rescue children from having to walk as much as ten feet on their own steam, and I remarked on the fact that every single car was an SRO. It was out of my mouth before I remembered that Kevin hated my teasing malapropism for SUV—one more pretend-gaffe to service the myth that I didn’t really live here. “You know, those things are a metaphor for this whole country,” I went on. I had been put on notice that this sort of talk drove my son insane, but maybe that’s why I pursued it, much as I would later bring up Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in Claverack just to goad him. “They sit up on the road higher and mightier than anyone else, and they have more power than anyone knows what to do with. Even the profile they cut—they always remind me of fat shoppers, waddling down the mall in squarecut Bermuda shorts and giant padded sneakers, stuffing their faces with cinnamon buns.” “Yeah, well, ever ride in one?” (I admitted I hadn’t.) “So what do you know?” “I know they piggy up too much of the road, guzzle gas, sometimes roll over—” “Why do you care if they roll over? You hate these people anyway.” “I don’t hate—” “Single-room occupancy!” Shaking his head, he slammed the VW door behind him. The next time I offered him a lift up the hill, he waved me off. There was even something strangely unbearable about those couple of hours he and I sometimes shared the house before your 4x4 plowed into the garage. You’d think it would be easy enough, in that vast splay of teak, but no matter where each of us settled I never lost an awareness of his presence, nor he, I suspect, of mine. Lacking you and Celia as a buffer, just the two of us in the same residence felt—the word naked comes to mind. We barely spoke. If he headed for his room, I didn’t ask about his homework; if Lenny stopped by, I didn’t ask what they were doing; and if Kevin left the house, I didn’t ask where he was headed. I told myself that a parent should respect an adolescent’s privacy, but I also knew that I was a coward. This sensation of nakedness was assisted by the real thing. I know that fourteen-year-old boys are brimming with hormones, all that. I know that masturbation is a normal, vital relief, a harmless and enjoyable pastime that shouldn’t be slandered as a vice. But I also thought that for teenagers—let’s be serious, for everyone—this entertainment is covert. We all do it (or I used to—yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn’t customary to say, “Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I’m going to go masturbate.” It had to happen more than once for me to finally mention it, because after our set-to in the hospital parking lot I had blown my tattling allowance for several months. “He leaves the bathroom door open,” I reported reluctantly in our bedroom late one night, at which point you began to brush the hairs from your electric shaver intently. “And you can see the toilet from the hallway.” “So he forgets to close the door.” You were clipped. “He doesn’t forget. He waits until I go to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee, so I’ll see him on my way back to my study. It’s very deliberate. And he’s, ah—loud.” “At his age, I probably jerked off three times a day.” “In front of your mother?” “Around the corner, behind the door. I thought I kept it secret, but I’m sure she knew.” “Behind the door,” I noted. “The door. It’s important.” My, that shaver was really clogged with stubble tonight. “Knowing I can see—I think it excites him.” “Well, no matter how healthy you try to be about it, everybody’s a little weird in this department.” “You’re not, um—getting it. I know he’s going to do it, I don’t have a problem with his doing it, but I’d rather not be included. It’s inappropriate.” That word took heavy duty during this era. The Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken the month before, and President Clinton would later put a napkin over the specifics by deeming their relations inappropriate. “So why don’t you say something?” You got tired of intercession, I suppose. “What if Celia were masturbating in front of you? Would you talk to her about it or prefer that I did?” “So what do you want me to say?” you asked wearily. “That he’s making me uncomfortable.” “That’s a new one.” I flounced onto the bed and grabbed a book I’d be unable to read. “Just tell him to keep the goddamned door shut.” I shouldn’t have bothered. Yes, you reported that you’d done as you were told. I pictured you poking your head into his room and saying something jovial and collusive about “growing a little hair on the palm,” a dated expression he probably didn’t get, and then I bet you tossed off, supercasual, “Just remember it’s private, okay sport?” and said good-night. But even if you instead had a long, earnest, stern discussion, you’d have tipped him off that he’d gotten to me, and with Kevin that’s always a mistake. So the very next afternoon after your “talk,” I’m heading to the study with my cup of coffee and I can hear a telltale grunting down the hall. I’m praying that he’s gotten the message and there will at least be a thin but blessed wooden barrier between me and my son’s budding manhood. I think: Aside from closets, there are only about four, five doors in the whole bloody house, and we should really be getting our money’s worth out of them. But as I advance another step or two the noise level belies this most minimal attempt at propriety. I press my warm coffee cup between my eyes to soothe a nascent headache. I’ve been married for nineteen years and I know how men work and there’s no reason to be afraid of a glorified spigot. But subjected to the urgent little moans down the hall, I’m ten years old again, sent on errands across town for my shut-in mother, having to cut through the park, eyes trained straight ahead while older boys snicker in the bushes with their flies down. I feel stalked, in my own house, nervous, hounded, and mocked, and I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty pissed off about it. So I dare myself, the way I always got home in the old days, when I would discipline myself not to run and so give chase. I march rather than tiptoe down the hall, heels hitting the floorboards, clop-clop. I get to the kids’ bathroom, door agape, and there is our firstborn in all his pubescent splendor, down to a rash of fiery pimples on his backside. Feet planted wide and back arched, he has pivoted his stance at an angle to the toilet so that I can see his handiwork—purple and gleaming with what I first assume is K-Y jelly, but which the silver wrapper on the floor suggests is my Land O’Lakes unsalted butter—and this is my introduction to the fact that my son has now grown fine, uncommonly straight pubic hair. Though most males conduct this exercise with their eyes closed, Kevin has cracked his open, the better to shoot his mother a sly, sleepy glance over the shoulder. In return, I glare squarely at his cock—doubtless what I should have done in the park instead of averting my gaze, since the appendage is so unimpressive when confronted head-on that it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. I reach in and pull the door shut, hard. The hallway rings with a dry chuckle. I clip back to the kitchen. I’ve spilled coffee on my skirt.
So. I know you must have wondered. Why didn’t I simply walk out? Nothing stopped me from grabbing Celia while she still had one eye left and hightailing it back to Tribeca. I could have left you with your son and that horrible house, a matched set. After all. I had all the money. I’m not sure you’ll believe me, but it never occurred to me to leave. I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you’re related to. I hated the prospect of defeat; if in bearing Kevin to begin with I picked up my own gauntlet, bearing Kevin on a daily basis involved rising to a greater challenge still. And there may have been a practical side to my tenacity as well. He was about to turn fifteen. He had never spoken of college—had never spoken of his adult future at all; never having expressed the slightest interest in a trade or profession, for all I knew he was sticking to his five-year-old vow to go on welfare. But theoretically our son was out of the house in about three years. Thereafter, it would just be you, me, and Celia, and then we would see about that happy family of yours. Those three years are almost over now, and if they have proved the longest of my life, I had no way of anticipating that at the time. Lastly, and this may strike you as simplistic, I loved you. I loved you, Franklin. I still do. Nevertheless, I did feel under siege. My daughter had been half blinded, my husband doubted my sanity, and my son was flouting his butter-greased penis in my face. Abetting the sensation of assault from all sides, Mary Woolford chose this of all times to make her first indignant visit to our house—and the last, come to think of it, since the next time we’d meet would be in court. She was still whippet slim then, her dark hair jet to the roots so I’d never have known it was dyed; the way it was pinned up was a tad severe. Even to make this neighborly call she was dressed to the nines in a Chanel suit, a demure jeweled spray on her lapel twinkling with respectability. Who’d have guessed that a scant three years later she’d be shambling the Nyack Grand Union in a streaked outfit that needed pressing and vandalizing raw eggs in the child seat of another woman’s cart. She introduced herself curtly, and, despite the chill, declined an invitation inside. “My daughter, Laura, is a lovely girl,” she said. “A mother would naturally think so, but I believe her attractiveness is also apparent to others. With two important exceptions: Laura herself, and that young man of yours.” I wanted to reassure the woman that by and large, my surly son failed to see the attractiveness of anyone, but I sensed that we were still in the preamble. This sounds unkind considering that my son would, in just over a year, murder this woman’s daughter, but I’m afraid I took an immediate dislike to Mary Woolford. She moved jaggedly, her eyes shifting this way and that, as if roiling from some constant inner turmoil. Yet some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pâté. Mary struck me straight off as one of this sort, for whom my private shorthand was Looking for a Problem—rather a waste of detective powers I always thought, since in my experience most proper problems come looking for you. “For the last year or so,” Mary continued, “Laura has suffered under the misapprehension that she is overweight. I’m sure you’ve read about the condition. She skips meals, she buries her breakfast in the trash, and lies about having eaten at a friend’s. Laxative abuse, diet pills—suffice it to say that it’s all very frightening. Last September she got so frail that she was hospitalized with an intravenous drip, which she would tear out if not watched round the clock. Are you getting the picture?” I mumbled something feebly commiserating. I would normally lend a sympathetic ear to such stories, though just then I couldn’t help thinking that my daughter was in the hospital, too, and not—I was fiercely convinced—because she done anything stupid to herself. Besides, I’d heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess. “We had been making progress,” Mary continued. “For the last few months she’s submitted to her modest portions at family meals, which she is compelled to attend. She’s finally gained a little weight back—as your son Kevin was more than eager to point out. ” I sighed. In comparison to our visitor, I must have looked haggard. What I wouldn’t have looked is surprised, and my failure to gasp oh-mygoodness-me-what-has-that-boy-done seemed to inflame her. “Last night I caught my beautiful daughter vomiting her dinner! I got her to admit, too, that she’s been making herself upchuck for the last week. Why? One of the boys at school keeps telling her she’s fat! Barely 100 pounds and she’s tormented for being a ‘porker’! Now, it wasn’t easy to get his name out of her, and she begged me not to come here tonight. But I for one believe it’s time we parents start accepting responsibility for our children’s destructive behavior. My husband and I are doing everything we can to keep Laura from hurting herself. So you and your husband might please keep your son from hurting her, too!” My head bobbed like one of those dogs in car windows. “Ho-ow?” I drawled. It’s possible she thought I was drunk. “I don’t care how—!” “Do you want us to talk to him?” I had to tighten the corners of my mouth to keep them from curling into an incredulous smirk all too reminiscent of Kevin himself. “I should think so!” “Tell him to be sensitive to the feelings of others and to remember the Golden Rule?” I was leaning on the door jamb with something close to a leer, and Mary stepped back in alarm. “Or maybe my husband could have a man-toman chat, and teach our son that a real man isn’t cruel and aggressive, but a real man is gentle and compassionate?” I had to stop for a second to keep from laughing. I suddenly pictured you jaunting into the kitchen to report, Well, honey, it was all a big misunderstanding! Kevin says that poor skin-and-bones Laura Woolford simply heard wrong! He didn’t call her “fat,” he called her “fab”! And he didn’t say she was a “porker”—he said she told a joke that was a “corker”! A grin must have leaked out despite me, because Mary turned purple and exploded, “I cannot for the life of me understand why you seem to think this is funny!” “Ms. Woolford, do you have any boys?” “Laura is our only child,” she said reverently. “Then I’ll refer you back to old schoolyard rhymes as to just what little boys are made of. I’d like to help you out, but practically? If Franklin and I say anything to Kevin, the consequences for your daughter at school will be even worse. Maybe it’s better you teach Laura—what do the kids say? To suck it up. ” I would pay for this bout of realism later, though I could hardly have known then that my hard-bitten counsel would be trotted out in Mary’s testimony at the civil trial two years hence—with a few acid embellishments for good measure. “Well, thank you for nothing!” Watching Mary harumph down the flagstones, I reflected on the fact that you, Kevin’s teachers, and now this Mary Woolford woman were regaling me that as a mother I must accept responsibility. Fair enough. But if I was so all-fired responsible, why did I still feel so helpless?
Celia came home at the beginning of March. Kevin had never been to visit her once; protective, I’d never encouraged him. You’d issued the odd invitation to come along, but backed off in deference to his trauma. He never even asked how she was doing, you know. Anyone listening in wouldn’t have thought he had a sister. I had only made modest headway in accommodating myself to her new appearance. The burns spattered on her cheek and streaked across her temple, though starting to heal, were still crusty, and I begged her not to pick at them lest she make the scarring even worse. She was good about it, and I thought of Violetta. Hitherto out of touch with monocular fashions, I’d expected her eye patch to be black, and Shirley Temple flashbacks of The Good Ship Lollipop may have comforted me with anodyne visions of my little blond pirate. I think I’d have preferred a black one, too, so that I might have run out to buy her a three-cornered hat and made some pathetic attempt at turning this macabre nightmare into a fancy-dress game to distract her. Instead, the flesh color of those stick-on 3M Opticlude patches turned the left-hand side of her face blank. Swelling on the left side obliterated any defining structures like her cheekbone. It was as if her face wasn’t quite three-dimensional anymore, but rather like a postcard, with a picture on one side and clean white paper on the other. I could catch a glimpse of her right-hand profile, and for a moment my cheerful moppet was unchanged; with a glimpse of the left, she was erased. This now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t quality to her countenance gave expression to my painful new awareness that children were a perishable consumer good. Though I don’t think I had ever taken her for granted, once she came home I pretty much gave up on whatever effort I had ever made to disguise my preference for one child over the other. She could never bring herself to leave my side any longer, and I allowed her to shadow me softly around the house and join me on errands. I’m sure you were right that we shouldn’t have let her slip any further behind in school and that the sooner she got used to her disability in public the better, but I still took some time off from AWAP and kept her home for two more weeks. Meanwhile, she lost some of the skills she had mastered, for instance, tying her tennis shoes, and I’d have to go back to tying them for her and start the lesson from scratch. I watched her around Kevin like a hawk. I admit that she did not act afraid of him. And he went right back to issuing her a plenitude of bored orders; ever since she’d gotten old enough to run and fetch, he’d treated her like a pet with a limited range of tricks. But even in response to some small, harmless request like to grab him a cracker or toss him the TV remote, I thought I now detected in his sister a momentary hesitation, a little freeze, like a hard swallow. And though she had once begged to carry his quiver and felt honored to help him prize his arrows from the target out back, the first time he casually suggested that she resume these duties, I put my foot down: I knew he was careful, but Celia had only one eye left and she was not to go near that archery range. I had expected Celia to whimper. She was always desperate to prove of use to him and had loved to watch her brother stand Hiawatha-tall and release those arrows unerringly into the bull’s-eye. Instead she shot me a glance that looked grateful, and her hairline glistened from a light sweat. I was surprised when he invited her out to play Frisbee—play with his sister, now that was a first—and even a little impressed. So I told her it was all right so long as she wore her safety glasses; my relationship to her good eye now was hysterical. But when a few minutes later I looked out the window, he was playing with his sister only in the sense that one plays with the Frisbee itself. Celia’s depth perception was still very poor, and she kept grabbing for the Frisbee before it had reached her, missing, and then it would hit her in the chest. Very funny. Of course, the hardest part at first was addressing that hole in Celia’s head, which had to be swabbed frequently with baby shampoo and a moistened Q-Tip. While Dr. Sahatjian assured us that the secretions would subside once the prosthesis was fitted and the healing complete, at first the cavity oozed that yellowish discharge continually, and sometimes in the morning I’d have to soak the area with a wet Kleenex because the lid would have crusted shut in her sleep. The lid itself sagged— sulcus, her oculist called it—and was also puffy, especially since it had been damaged by the acid and had been partially reconstructed with a small flap of skin from Celia’s inner thigh. (Apparently eyelid augmentation has developed into a fine art because of high demand in Japan for anglification of Occidental features, which in better days I’d have found a horrifying testimony to the powers of Western advertising.) The swelling and slight purpling made her look like one of those battered children in posters that encourage you to turn in your neighbors to the police. With one eyelid depressed and her other eye open, she seemed to be winking hugely, as if we shared a lurid secret. I’d told Sahatjian that I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to clean that hollow daily; he assured me that I’d get used to it. He was right in the long run, but I fought a swell of nausea when I first lifted the lid myself with my thumb. If it wasn’t quite as harrowing as I’d feared, it was disturbing on a subtler level. No one was home. The effect recalled those almondeyed Modiglianis whose absence of pupils give the figures a hypnotic mildness and tranquillity, though a dolorousness as well, and a hint of stupidity. The cavity went from pink at the rim to a merciful black toward the back, but when I got her under the light to administer her antibiotic drops, I could see that incongruous plastic conformer, which kept the socket from collapsing; I might have been staring into a doll. I know you resented my fawning over her so much, and that you felt bad for resenting it. In compensation, you were firmly affectionate with Celia, drawing her into your lap, reading her stories. Me, I recognized too well the mark of deliberateness about these efforts—so this was trying to be a good father —but I doubt that it looked to Kevin like anything other than surfaces would suggest. Clearly his little sister’s injury had won her only more doting—more Do you need an extra blanket, honey? more Would you like another piece of cake? more Why don’t we let Celia stay up, Franklin, it’s an animal show. Checking out the tableau in the living room as Celia fell asleep in the crook of your arm and Kevin glared at “My Granny Had My Boyfriend’s Baby” on Jerry Springer, I thought, Didn’t our little stratagem backfire. In case you’re wondering, I did not ply Celia unduly for details about that afternoon in the bathroom. I was every bit as shy of discussing the matter as she was; neither of us had any desire to relive that day. Yet out of a sense of parental obligation—I didn’t want her to think the subject taboo, in case its exploration would prove therapeutic—I did ask her just once, casually, “When you got hurt? What happened?” “Kevin—.” She pawed at the lid with the back of her wrist; it itched, but lest she dislodge the conformer she had learned to always rub toward her nose. “I got something in my eye. Kevin helped me wash it out.” That’s all she ever said.
Eva
