I knelt. I looked into his stormy, pinched-up face and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Because I love my new study. I love the maps. I love them.”
I could have been speaking Urdu. “They’re dumb,” he said stonily. I stood up. I dropped my hand. The phone was ringing.
The separate line for my study wasn’t installed yet, so I left to grab the phone in the kitchen. It was Louis, with another crisis regarding JAP-WAP, whose resolution took a fair amount of time. I did call to Kevin to come out where I could see him, more than once. But I still had a business to oversee, and have you any notion how fatiguing it is to keep an eye on a small child every single moment of every single day? I’m tremendously sympathetic with the sort of diligent mother who turns her back for an eye blink—who leaves a child in the bath to answer the door and sign for a package, to scurry back only to discover that her little girl has hit her head on the faucet and drowned in two inches of water. Two inches. Does anyone ever give the woman credit for the twenty-four-hours-minusthree-minutes a day that she has watched that child like a hawk? For the months, the years’ worth of don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth-sweeties, of whoops!-we-almost-fell-downs? Oh, no. We prosecute these people, we call it “criminal parental negligence” and drag them to court through the snot and salty tears of their own grief. Because only the three minutes count, those three miserable minutes that were just enough.
I finally got off the phone. Down the hall, Kevin had discovered the pleasures of a room with a door: The study’s was shut. “Hey, kid,” I called, turning the knob, “when you’re this quiet you make me nervous—”
My wallpaper was spidery with red and black ink. The more absorbent papers had started to blotch. The ceiling, too, since I’d papered that as well; craning on the ladder had been murder on my back. Drips from overhead were staining one of my uncle’s most valuable Armenian carpets, our wedding present. The room was so whipped and wet that it looked as if a fire alarm had gone off and triggered a sprinkling system, only the nozzles had flung not water but motor oil, cherry Hawaiian punch, and mulberry sorbet.
From the transitional squirts of a sickly purple I might later conclude that he had used up the bottle of black India ink first before moving on to the crimson, but Kevin left nothing to my deduction: He was still draining the last of the red ink into the barrel of his squirt gun. Just as he’d posed in the process of retrieving the gun from the top of our kitchen cabinet, he seemed to have saved this last tablespoon for my arrival. He was standing on my study chair, bent in concentration; he did not even look up. The filling hole was small, and though he was pouring intently, my burnished oak desk was awash in spatter. His hands were drenched.
“Now,” he announced quietly, “it’s special.”
I snatched the gun, flung it on the floor, and stamped it to bits. I was wearing pretty yellow Italian pumps. The ink ruined my shoes.
JANUARY 13, 2001
Dear Franklin,
Yes, second Saturday of the month, and I’m debriefing in the Bagel Café again. I’m haunted by the image of that guard with the mud-spatter of facial moles, who looked at me today with his routine mixture of sorrow and distaste. I feel much the same way about his face. The moles are large and puffy, like feeding ticks, mottled and gelatinous, widening toadstoollike from a narrower base so that some of them have started to droop. I’ve wondered if he obsesses over his lesions, doing overtime at Claverack to save for their removal, or has developed a perverse fondness for them. People seem able to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
In fact, I read recently that a neural operation has been developed that can virtually cure some Parkinson’s patients. So successful is the surgery that it has moved more than one of its beneficiaries to kill themselves. Yes, you read correctly: to kill themselves. No more trembling, no more spastic arm swings in restaurants that knock over the wine. But also, no more aching sympathy from doe-eyed strangers, no more spontaneous outpourings of tenderness from psychotically forgiving spouses. The recovered get depressed, reclusive. They can’t handle it: being just like everybody else.
Between ourselves, I’ve started to worry that in some backhanded way I’ve become attached to the disfigurement of my own life. These days it is solely through notoriety that I understand who I am and what part I play in the dramas of others. I’m the mother of “one of those Columbine kids” (and how it grieves Kevin that Littleton has won the generic tag over Gladstone). Nothing I do or say will ever outweigh that fact, and it is tempting to stop fighting and give over. That must explain why some mothers of my ilk have abandoned any attempt to recoup the lives they led before, as marketing directors or architects, and have gone on the lecture circuit or spearheaded the Million Mom March instead. Perhaps this is what Siobhan meant by being “called.”
Indeed, I’ve developed a healthy respect for fact itself, its awesome dominance over rendition. No interpretation I slather over events in this appeal to you has a chance of overwhelming the sheer actuality of Thursday, and maybe it was the miracle of fact itself that Kevin discovered that afternoon. I can comment until I’m blue, but what happened simply sits there, triumphing like three dimensions over two. No matter how much enamel those vandals threw at our windowpanes, the house remained a house, and Thursday has the same immutable feel about it, like an object I can paint but whose physical enormity will persist in shape, regardless of hue.
Franklin, I’m afraid I caught myself giving over in the Claverack visitors’ waiting room today. And by the way, I’d be the last to complain about the facilities overall. Newly constructed to supply a burgeoning market sector, the institution is not yet overcrowded. Its roofs don’t leak, its toilets flush; Juvenile Detention on a Wing and a Prayer (JUVIEWAP) would give the joint an enthusiastic listing. Claverack’s classrooms may provide a better meat-and-potatoes education than trendy suburban high schools whose curricula are padded with courses in Inuit Literature and Sexual Harassment Awareness Training. But aside from the incongruous Romper Room primary colors of the visiting area, Claverack is aesthetically harsh—laying bare, once you take away the frippery of life, how terrifyingly little is left. Cinder-block walls a stark white, the pea-green linoleum unpatterned, the visitors’ waiting room is cruelly lacking in distractions—a harmless travel poster for Belize, a single copy of Glamour—as if to deliberately quash self-deceit. It is a room that does not wish to be confused with anything so anodyne as an airline ticket-purchasing office or a dental waiting room. That lone poster for AIDS prevention doesn’t qualify as decor, but as an accusation.
Today a slight, serene black woman sat next to me, a generation younger but doubtless a mother. I kept shooting fascinated glances at her hair, plaited in a complex spiral that disappeared into infinity at the crown, my admiration fighting a prissy middle-class foreboding about how long the braids went unwashed. Her restful resignation was characteristic of the black relatives who frequent that room; I’ve made a study of it.