Authors: Debra Ginsberg
“Yes, technically it could happen,” I tell him, “but it won’t. I really don’t think you’ll ever see a whole bunch of garbage trucks lined up at the school. The school doesn’t make that much garbage.”
“Was it only a dream?”
“Yes, it was only a dream.”
We drift off into our own silent reveries for a while after this and I attempt to make it through the Sunday paper. I hear Blaze call my mother on the phone.
“Nana,” he says, “how loud would it be if there was a whole bunch of garbage trucks outside my school? Give me a number.”
There is a pause and then I hear him chuckling. My mother and Blaze are constantly finding ways to make each other laugh. Each one thinks the other is tremendously amusing.
“Get dressed, Blaze,” I tell him, “we’re going out for a walk.”
Blaze protests, as he usually does. “I don’t want to walk, walk, walkery-walk,” he says. We begin the series of negotiations I know so well. He will get dressed, but only in twenty minutes. He will go for a walk, but only if we can stop for a soda. It’s all right to visit Vons, but Ralph’s is out of the question. I tell him we’ll go to Starbucks and we settle that but he refuses to go to Barnes & Noble so I have to argue with him. He has to read a biography and write a report on it for school and we’re going to look for a suitable book today. Grace went into labor a month before she was due to deliver and there is now a new teacher, Mr. B., in her classroom. I like Mr. B., who comes from a special-education background, but I feel somewhat adrift without Grace’s counsel. I feel
that Grace could give me some much-needed pointers on how to get Blaze interested in this project.
“I don’t want to do the stupid biography,” Blaze says, confirming my suspicion that getting him interested in working will be much like extracting impacted molars.
“Too bad,” I tell him.
Once we are out of the house, I feel liberated. Blaze too is happy to be out and he links his arm into mine. I have always loved these outings with him. Since he was an infant, I’ve been taking him on brisk walks to the beach, to the movies, any place where there was a coffee shop where we could stop and rest before turning around. When he was younger, first fitted into a front pack and later strapped into a stroller, we seldom spoke. Now that he walks beside me, our Sunday strolls are times when we discuss everything.
Blaze has much to talk about these days. Since our visit to Dr. S., he’s developed a strong interest in the circumstances of his birth. He’s come up with the request that we restage this event so that this time he will have “enough breath to cry.” He has also been producing some very interesting drawings lately.
I’ve paid careful attention to this because Blaze has never enjoyed drawing or art of any kind, for that matter. He lacks the fine motor control and patience necessary to color for any length of time and finds it impossible to stay within any lines, real or imagined. So it was intriguing to me that, for a period of several days, he chose to do the same drawing over and over again. Each time he’d tear up the finished product, declaring that it wasn’t quite right. Finally, he came up with a version that seemed to satisfy him and he presented it to me for my appraisal.
The drawing consisted of five rows of different brightly colored circles of more or less the same size. He had used every marker in the house so that no one color was repeated. Below the circles was a stick figure lying on its side. I looked at it carefully, searching for clues—
something, perhaps, like the characters in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
who heard the same five notes again and again until they finally made sense. I couldn’t really figure it out until I turned the paper over and saw what Blaze had written in his big, awkwardly shaped letters:
July 23, 1987, 1:15
A.M
., Portland, Oregon.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“That’s what it looked like when I was born,” Blaze said. I stared at him, dumbfounded, for a few moments and he attempted to help me. He pointed to the small stick figure and said, “See, that’s me and that—” he pointed to the circles, “is what it looked like.”
I’m mulling over what these drawings could mean as we pass a construction site where a new block of town houses is going up. Blaze asks me how the electricity gets into the buildings. He wants to know why there is a fence erected in front of the development and can we go behind it and walk around? A car with obvious muffler trouble roars by and Blaze ignores our earlier discussion and ask me to give the noise a number.
“I don’t want to keep giving the noises a number,” I tell him.
“Well, why are there so many loud noises in the world?” he asks.
“Why do you let them all bother you?” I question back.
“I can’t help it,” he says, “my yellow wire is broken.”
“What do you mean, yellow wire?” I ask, baffled.
“When I was born, they didn’t put the yellow wire in right so it got broken and now I’m so sensitive to loud noises.”
“Honey, you need to explain this to me,” I tell him. “Do you have other wires too or just the yellow one?”
“No, there’s other wires,” he says, pleased that I’m taking an interest. “There’s a blue one and a red one. The blue one is for feelings. The red one controls butterflies and dogs and all flying things. The red one is also for talking and playing. The yellow one is for hearing. There’s a girl in my class who has problems with her blue wire. That’s why she cries all the time.”
“And so you figure your yellow wire is broken?”
“Yes, it was too short when they put it in so it snapped.”
“Who put it in?”
“I don’t know. Somebody.”
“So tell me,” I go on, “is there any way of fixing a broken wire? You know, so that the loud noises wouldn’t bother you so much.”
“Yes,” Blaze says, thoughtfully. “You have to find a white wire and patch it together.”
“Where can we get the white wire?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” Blaze says. “I guess we have to look for it.”
By then we are at Starbucks and so the conversation shifts abruptly to what kind of snack we will be having. As Blaze sits and chews on a scone, the topic turns back to the biography.
“I don’t know who to do it on,” he tells me. “Nobody. I want to read a biography of nobody.”
I think about this for a minute and remember last week when each student in Blaze’s class was given a letter of the alphabet and asked to choose a word beginning with the letter and then draw a picture of that word. The idea was to create a sign-language book as a class project. Blaze was assigned the letter
N
. After thinking for a while, he turned in his assignment. He had chosen the word
nothing
and left the space for the picture completely blank. I am beginning to think the biography might go the same way.
“Blaze, you can choose anyone for this biography,” I tell him. “Think about all the famous people you’ve heard about.”
“Do they have to be alive?”
“No. You can do it on somebody who’s died, like a musician or a composer. How about Beethoven or Mozart?”
“How about Marvin Gaye?” he asks. “That’s who I want to do for my biography.” I ponder this for a minute. It’s a great idea, I think, because he’s come up with it by himself, but now I’m torn as to whether or not to shoot it down. I sincerely doubt that I’ll find a kid’s
biography on the life of Marvin Gaye and how could I possibly read him an adult biography on this man? I have a moment picturing Blaze presenting this biography to his class, telling them about Gaye’s drug problem, singing “Sexual Healing,” telling them that Gaye was killed by his own father. No, this is not going to work.
“Maybe Marvin Gaye’s not such a good idea,” I tell him. “There aren’t any kids’ books on him.”
Blaze is irritated by this information and refuses to discuss the biography question any further. When we finally get to the bookstore, I have to convince him to consider someone else to read about. We finally settle on Thomas Edison, but Blaze is not finished with the Marvin Gaye issue.
“Mom,” he says, “did someone kill Marvin Gaye?”
“Yes.”
“Who killed him?”
“Some crazy guy,” I say, unwilling to go into detail. Blaze senses I am not telling him the whole truth.
“I think it was one of his backup singers,” he says.
We take the walk back home slowly, passing a small canyon along the way. Blaze dances along its lip, a little ahead of me. I watch the way his boyish body cuts the space of blue sky and sandy earth and the unbridled joy in his movements. When we are approaching home, he asks me a question he’s been pondering for the last few minutes.
“Remember that frog that was stuck in the drain that one time?”
I do remember. Two years ago we came across a frog trapped in a swimming-pool drain, struggling vainly to get out. “Yes,” I tell him, “I remember.”
“We didn’t rescue it, did we?”
“I asked you to put your hand in there and get it out, remember? You didn’t want to do it.” I don’t remind him that
I
didn’t want to do it, either. The thought of grasping a slippery frog in my hand was a bit too much for me.
“Well, I thought we should just turn him into a prince.”
This is the piece of the story I’d forgotten. Blaze had been adamant. He wasn’t going to put his hand in there to get the frog. The solution was simple; we could just turn him into a prince and then all his worries would be over.
“Well, that didn’t work, did it?” I say. “It’s not so easy to turn a frog into a prince. It would’ve been easier just to pull him out.”
“Whatever happened to him?” Blaze wants to know.
“I think someone else rescued him,” I say, although I’m not sure of this at all. “Why are you thinking about this now?”
“I don’t think we tried hard enough,” Blaze says. “We should have turned him into a prince.”
The rest of the afternoon unfolds lazily and turns into darkness. We follow our established routines, eating dinner, cajoling Blaze into the shower and, finally, I tell him it’s time for bed. He complains, saying he’s not tired, he doesn’t like his sheets, his bed’s too small, his room is the wrong shape, but finally he yields and allows me to tuck him in. I kiss his cheek and he tells me, “Mom, do you think that frog got out of the pool? He didn’t die, did he?”
“No,” I tell him, “I don’t think so.”
I make sure that he’s looking at me and then I tell him, “I love you.”
This is one of my obsessions. I have little compulsions too. Blaze isn’t the only one around here who perseverates. As we both get older, I find more of them cropping up, not so funny now, sometimes ever-so-mildly debilitating. Would I notice them if Blaze didn’t have a pathological aversion to salad, a fear of butterflies, a moratorium on certain words? Maybe not. But I notice them more now than I have before. I have a box that I keep near my desk. In it I keep a small plastic frog, a stamp, a red plastic pyramid puzzle that comes in two pieces (the pieces must form a pyramid in the box or it’s not right and will bother me), and a glass fish from Italy. These things have to be standing up in the box. The box has to be in a certain place. If it’s at the wrong angle to my desk, I can’t work.
There are other things too. Patterns on sheets have to be facing up. Can’t have upside down sheep on the bed, for example. Throw rugs have to have straight corners. I have gotten out of bed late at night to fix corners. I have also gotten out of bed to check my purse. Is my wallet still there? I don’t know why it wouldn’t be—it was there an hour ago—but still, I can’t fall asleep until I check. Oddly, I don’t ever feel compelled to check door locks.
I can occasionally talk myself out of needing to feed these compulsions, but, others—the ones that involve Blaze—can never be swept aside. I have to tell him I love him before he goes to sleep, before either of us goes anywhere. That has to be the last thing he hears from me always. I want Blaze to always know how much I love him. If I don’t tell him, I am convinced, I will suffer. My house will burn. I will lose all that is precious to me. I sense that Blaze has always understood and accepted this. So when I lean over him again and whisper those words, he replies right away.
“I love you too, Mom,” he says, and I turn off the light.
I
n April of 1973, I was ten years old. We had just moved to Los Angeles and I was attending an elementary school in West Hollywood. My new classroom was large and sunny and sometimes I had trouble concentrating on the teacher’s words. I created elaborate fantasies in my head and used my hands as puppets to act them out. Usually one hand played the part of a damsel in distress and the other played the part of a handsome prince who had come to save her. I amused myself like this quite often until, one day, a male classmate noticed me and said, “Hey, what are you doing with your hands? Are you weird or something?” I was gravely embarrassed and never made the mistake of letting myself be seen again. From then on, I was much more subtle. Sometimes I only used my fingers.
I had one good friend, Andrea, who had short, feathery hair, a pug nose, and a freckled face. Andrea was fearless. She was also very confident and never at a loss for words. We spent recess together, walking around the playground, chewing SweeTarts and sucking the sugary liquid from the molded wax lips and bottles that were all the rage then.
Sometime that spring, I found myself in possession of certain facts concerning reproduction. Since I knew only the bare minimum,
however, I discussed my newfound knowledge with Andrea to see if she could offer greater insight.
“Oh, I knew all of that,” Andrea said, unruffled.
“Well, how does it work?” I asked her. “Do the man and the woman stand up?”
“They lie down,” Andrea said knowingly. “The man lies on top of the woman.”
I was disturbed by this piece of information. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I told her.
“Why not?” she countered.
“Because the man’s heavier. The woman should lie on top of him, don’t you think? Are you sure you’ve got it right?”
Andrea was miffed that I would doubt the authenticity of her information and haughtily assured me that she was correct.
“Well, then what happens? How do they know when it’s over?”
I had too many questions even for an authority like Andrea. She had to concede ignorance and the two of us spent that recess, and a few more, trying to work out the answers. I was still puzzled by what I perceived to be major design flaws in the act of sexual intercourse as I knew it, but it didn’t matter because Andrea and I dissolved into giggles and moved on to other topics. Neither of us ever thought to question our parents on the matter. We had each other and that was a much safer alternative.
Shortly after I turned eleven, my family moved again—this time to the other side of the country. There was no more Andrea or anyone like her for me. I started getting my information from novels. By the time my twelfth birthday rolled around, I couldn’t imagine sharing the kind of information Andrea and I shared with anybody. I would be in my thirties before I had that kind of conversation with a girlfriend again.
Blaze does not have the equivalent of an Andrea in his life. What’s more, the ten-year-old world he inhabits is vastly different from the
one I passed through. The borders, I am learning, are drawn in wider circles. Innocence has become something of a packaged concept. Blaze’s peers are exposed to the kind of information I didn’t have until I was in my teens. Everything about the way these kids interact with one another and the thoughts they share is more sophisticated and complicated than I remember. I am sometimes plainly astonished by what they know and how they express themselves.
One day, Mr. B. decides to give the class an assignment he feels will stimulate some creative thought.
“I want you all to imagine that you could go anywhere in the world for fifteen minutes,” Mr. B. says, “at any moment in time. That means you could go back in history if you wanted or into the future. But you only have fifteen minutes to spend there. So, I want you all to write a paragraph explaining where you would go and why you would want to go there.”
Twelve hands shoot up immediately.
“What?” Mr. B. says.
“Can we go somewhere
out
of the world? Like another planet?”
“Can we stay here, I mean, like in this time? Do we have to go into the future?”
“How long does the paragraph have to be?”
“Can I stay longer than fifteen minutes?”
Mr. B. sighs and establishes that other planets are acceptable, he doesn’t care how long the paragraph is, and that when he says
any time
, he means the present as well. “Now, get to it!” he commands. “We’re going to read these out loud.” There is a collective groan in the classroom, but the kids start scribbling furiously. As usual, Blaze merely looks around.
“Come on,” I tell him. “Do the assignment.”
“What?” he says.
“If you could go anywhere in the world, at any time, where would you go? You’re supposed to write that down.” I am whispering so that
I won’t bother anyone else, but Blaze says, “What?” again loudly and everybody looks up. I hand him the pencil and explain it once more. “Now, write,” I tell him.
“Time!” Mr. B. calls. “Okay, who wants to go first? What, no volunteers? All right, Maria, you’re first.”
Maria stands up and blushes. “Um, if I could go anywhere, I would, um, go to, um…I would go to heaven? To see my grandmother? I would go to heaven because my grandma died last year. She had cancer. I know she’s in heaven and I miss her. That’s all I wrote down because I didn’t have enough time to finish.”
“That’s just fine, Maria,” Mr. B. says and I can swear I hear a tremor in his voice. I’m glad I don’t have to speak because I know I’d be too choked up.
“Scott, why don’t you go next?”
Scott says, “I’d like to go into the future, into the year 2050. I want to see what cars will be like in the future. So, if I had fifteen minutes, I’d go into a car dealership of the future and test-drive a car. Then I could come back here to the present and design a car just like it and make a fortune.”
“Very entrepreneurial,” Mr. B. says dryly. “Ravi, what about you?”
Ravi stands, a deeply serious look on his face. “If I could go anywhere,” he says, reading from his immaculately printed composition paper, “I would go back in time to when the India-Pakistan conflict began and try to persuade the two governments not to begin a war. This way, I could help prevent all the bloodshed that has occurred over all the years.”
“Well, that’s very interesting,” Mr. B. says. “Thank you for sharing that. Denny, your turn.”
Denny stands up so fast that he almost knocks his chair over. “I would spend my fifteen minutes at the White House,” he says. “And I’d tell the president not to have an affair so that we would have a leader to look up to. And—”
“Denny!” Mr. B. cuts in, after shooting me a pleading look to say,
what can I do about
this? “We want to try to keep our essays about appropriate topics. This is not an appropriate topic for the class.”
“Why not?” Denny says. “He’s the president. My father says—”
“Denny, have a seat,” Mr. B. says quickly. “We’re running out of time.” Mr. B. wheels around, looking for a student, I assume, who might break the tension. “Blaze!” he says. “Where would
you
like to go?”
There is a moment of silence in the classroom as everyone waits for Blaze’s response. I offer up a quick, wordless prayer that he’ll say something that makes sense.
“Ace Hardware,” Blaze says without standing up. “I’d like to go to Ace Hardware.”
The class erupts in laughter, but I sense it is not the cruel kind. I am laughing myself, as is Mr. B. “And why would you want to go there?” Mr. B. says.
“It’s good there,” Blaze deadpans. “They have good tools there. And there’s a train that goes around a track at the top of the store. I like it there.”
Mercifully, the bell rings for recess and the class files out. Well, I think to myself, at least I don’t have to worry about my child being jaded before his time. I can rest comfortably in the knowledge that I won’t have to explain war and presidential dalliances any time soon.
I don’t maintain this level of comfort for too long, however. Some time later, as fourth grade marches to its end, certain events dictate that I must explain the facts of life to my son. When this happens, I am distressed. Compared to what his peers know, asking this boy to integrate the “facts” as I can present them seems comparable to asking him to reproduce the Sistine Chapel with a package of crayons.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that Blaze’s classmates will use any opportunity to discuss topics other than those with an academic slant. By the spring of 1998, I’ve been sitting beside them for
eight months, so I know this to be true. In September, I was “Mrs. Blaze’s mom,” my son’s personal aide and some sort of strange, not-very-tall adult. By the Christmas holidays, I had become “Mrs. Ginsberg,” their teacher’s friend and part-time helper. By the time spring break rolled around, I’d morphed into “Ms. Ginsberg” and sometimes, “Debra,” a blend of all the above with the addition of confidante thrown in for good measure.
They now have no qualms talking to me about anything that comes into their heads. I am clearly an adult and an authority figure, but I also sit at the table with them and go through lessons with them as if I am another student. I help with homework, but I still complain when I feel the math is too hard. I offer dictionary definitions and vocabulary words. I listen to stories of baby sisters and read from the giant book of Beanie Babies. I am also Blaze’s mother and I believe that status has granted me some special favors because, while he often inspires a cross of bewilderment and amusement from his classmates, Blaze is genuinely liked. My position in this classroom is one I cherish. Even better, I am privy to many unedited moments of ten-year-old life, providing me with a priceless education of my own.
This is how it comes to pass that, one Monday morning, the barely ten-year-old Jimmy asks me, “Ms. Ginsberg, do you like
South Park
?”
I weigh all the possible answers before giving one. I don’t particularly like what I know of the TV show he is referring to. Its constant desire to be as politically incorrect as possible doesn’t seem that funny to me, but I figure I am probably too old and out of the loop to appreciate it. I definitely don’t think it is appropriate for kids Jimmy’s age. Should I tell him that I’ve seen it and don’t think it’s so great or should I just act like a grown-up and tell him he shouldn’t be watching it at all?
“Does your mother let you watch that show?” I ask after a moment or two of this internal debate.
“Well, she doesn’t want me to watch it,” he says, “but I complain
that all my friends get to watch it so she says that if I have to watch it, she doesn’t want to know about it.”
“Well, in my opinion, I don’t think that it’s an appropriate show for kids your age,” I tell him, feeling stuffy and aged. “I don’t even think it’s appropriate for
me
and I’m an adult.”
“But why?” he asks me. “It’s the best show on television. It’s really funny.”
This sounds like parroting to me, so I ask him, “What makes it so funny? Tell me about one of the shows and explain to me why you think it’s funny.”
There is just the vaguest hint of embarrassment on Jimmy’s face when he says, “Well, there is one thing, but I can’t tell you about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s inappropriate for school.”
“Aha, so what does that tell you about the show?” I ask him.
Jimmy shrugs, seemingly glad that I’m not going to press him to explain. At this point, however, our conversation has attracted the attention of our other tablemates who are waiting, curious, for the other shoe to drop.
Steffi, a petite blonde with a cherubic face, pipes up. “I’ll tell you,” she volunteers and proceeds to describe a complex scene, high in sexual content, that ends with a character licking a length of carpet for several hours. The word
lesbian
is bandied about at the table as the rest of the kids chuckle self-consciously. For a moment or two, I am too shocked to respond. When I manage to lift my dropped jaw from the tabletop, I ask Steffi and Jimmy, who are both blushing, “Do you understand what all of this means?”
“Oh, yes,” they both assure me, but I have to believe that they do not. It is completely beyond my ken that two ten-year-olds can find this scene funny unless they are aware only of its literal elements. I debate pressing them further, but I am clearly out of my depth, so I turn to Maria and Ali, who are looking at us as if we were speaking
Greek and ask, “Your mothers don’t let you watch this show, do they?”
“Hmpf,” Maria snorts. “My mother doesn’t even
know
about that show.” Ali merely shakes his head.
As usual, Blaze contributes nothing to the conversation, preferring to watch and listen. He enjoys watching me interact with his peers for many reasons. For one, I am less likely to be demanding any academic output from him if I am concentrating on other kids in the class. For another, he is often able to get a clearer view on their thoughts and feelings if they are filtered through me. He doesn’t pay careful attention to the actual words spoken during these conversations but rather takes note of the emotional current of our interactions. He will often remark later that when I was talking to Maria, she was happy or that when I was discussing homework with Jimmy, he was frustrated. He always notices distress in his classmates, even when nobody else does. It is for this reason that I’m not worried that he’ll start asking uncomfortable questions about the content of this particular conversation.
The
South Park
discussion sparks a debate at the following Tuesday-night dinner with my family.
“These kids can’t possibly understand what the show means,” I tell my father. “They just know it’s supposed to be dirty and that’s why they’re laughing.”
“You’re wrong,” my father says. “They
do
know. They’re getting all this stuff from their parents.”
My mother agrees with him and then Maya jumps in to agree with me. I find it ironic that, in this case, the younger generation is clinging to old-fashioned notions of innocence.