The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic.
The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.
Sure, by the time he was fourteen we had given up on trying to control the videos he watched, the hours he kept, what little he read. But watching those stupid films and logging onto those stupid web sites, swigging that stupid hooch and sucking those stupid butts and fucking those stupid schoolgirls, Kevin must have felt so fiercely cheated. And on Thursday ? I bet he still felt cheated.
Meantime, I could tell from Harvey’s expression of forbearance that he had regarded my mini-lecture as more destructive self-indulgence. Our case—his case, really—was pearled around the proposition that I had been a normal mother with normal maternal affections who had taken normal precautions to ensure that she raised a normal child. Whether we were the victims of bad luck or bad genes or bad culture was a matter for shamans or biologists or anthropologists to divine, but not the courts. Harvey was intent on evoking every parent’s latent fear that it was possible to do absolutely everything right and still turn on the news to a nightmare from which there is no waking. It was a damned sound approach in retrospect, and now that it’s been a year or so, I feel a little sheepish about being so cantankerous at the time.
Still, like that depersonalizing rubber stamp of postnatal depression, our there-but-for-the-grace-of-God defense put me right off. I felt driven to distinguish myself from all those normal-normal mommies, if only as an exceptionally crummy one, and even at the potential price tag of $6.5 million (the plaintiffs had researched what W&P was worth). I had already lost everything, Franklin, everything but the company that is, the continuing possession of which, under the circumstances, struck me as crass. It is true that since then I have sometimes felt wistful about my corporate offspring, now fostered by strangers, but at the time I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I lost the case so long as in the process I was at least kept awake, I didn’t care if I lost all my money, and I was positively praying to be forced to sell our eyesore house. I didn’t care about anything. And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
As usual, I’d conducted my own cross for opposing counsel (they loved me; they’d have liked to call me as a witness for their side), so I was asked to step down. I paused halfway off the stand. “I’m sorry, your honor, I just remembered something.”
“You wish to amend your testimony, for the record?”
“We did let Kevin have one gun.” (Harvey sighed.) “A squirt gun, when he was four. My husband loved squirt guns as a boy, so we made an exception.”
It was an exception to a rule I thought inane to begin with. Keep them away from replicas and kids will aim a stick at you, and I see no developmental distinction between wielding formed plastic that goes rat-a-tat-tat on battery power versus pointing a piece of wood and shouting “bangbang-bang!” At least Kevin liked his squirt gun, since he discovered that it was annoying.
All through the move from Tribeca, he’d soaked the flies of our movers and then accused them of having “peed their pants.” I thought the accusation pretty rich from a little boy still refusing to pick up on our coy hints about learning to “go potty like Mommer and Daddy” some two years after most kids were flushing to beat the band. He was wearing the wooden mask I’d brought him from Kenya, with scraggy, electrified-looking sisal hair, tiny eyeholes surrounded by huge blank whites, and fierce three-inch teeth made from bird bones. Enormous on his scrawny body, it gave him the appearance of a voodoo doll in diapers. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it. That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable, and the gift’s expression of raw retributive rage gave me the creeps.
Schlepping boxes with a wet, itchy crotch couldn’t have been a picnic. They were nice guys, too, uncomplaining and careful, so as soon as I noticed their faces begin to twitch I told Kevin to cut it out. At which point he swiveled his mask in my direction to confirm that I was watching, and water-cannoned the wiry black mover in the butt.
“Kevin, I told you to stop it. Don’t squirt these nice men who are only trying to help us one more time, and I mean it.” Naturally I only managed to imply that the first time I hadn’t meant it. An intelligent child takes the calculus of this-time-I’m-serious-so-last-time-I-wasn’t to its limit and concludes that all his mother’s warnings are horseshit.
So we walk through our paces. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, stop that this instant. Squish-squish-squish. Kevin, I’m not going to tell you again. And then (squish-squish-squish) the inevitable: Kevin, if you squirt anybody one more time I’m taking the squirt gun away, which earned me, “NYEH-nyeh? Nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeee, nyeh NYE-nye nye NYE-NYE nye-NYEEEEEEE.”
Franklin, what good were those parenting books of yours? Next thing I know you’re stooping beside our son and borrowing his dratted toy. I hear muffled giggling and something about Mommer and then you are squirting me.