For my study, I chose the one room in that house that didn’t have any trees growing through it, had only one skylight, and was
almost
rectangular—no doubt designed near the last, when thankfully our Dream Home couple was running out of bright ideas. Most people would consider papering fine wood an abomination, but we were swimming in teak, and I had an idea that might make me feel, in one room at least, at home: I would plaster the study with maps. I owned boxes and boxes: city maps of Oporto or Barcelona, with all the hostels and pensions I planned to list in IBERI-WAP circled in red; Geographical Survey maps of the Rhone Valley with the lazy squiggle of my train journey highlighted in yellow; whole continents jagged with ambitious airline itineraries in ruled ballpoint.
As you know, I’ve always had a passion for maps. I’ve sometimes supposed that, in the face of an imminent nuclear attack or invading army, the folks with all the power won’t be the white supremacists with guns or the Mormons with canned sardines, but the cartographically clued who know that this road leads to the mountains. Hence the very first thing I do on arrival in a new place is locate a map, and that is only when I couldn’t get to Rand McNally in midtown before hopping the plane. Without one, I feel easily victimized and at sea. As soon I have my map, I gain better command of a town than most of its residents, many of whom are totally lost outside a restrictive orbit of the patisserie, charcuterie, and Luisa’s house. I’ve long taken pride in my powers of navigation, for I’m better than the average bear at translating from two dimensions to three, and I’ve learned to use rivers, railroads, and the sun to find my bearings. (I’m sorry, but what else can I boast about now? I’m getting old, and I look it. I work for a travel agency, and my son is a killer.)
So I associated maps with mastery and may have hoped that, through the literal sense of direction they had always provided, I might figuratively orient myself in this alien life as a full-time suburban mother. I craved some physical emblem of my earlier self if only to remind me that I had deserted that life by choice and might return to it at will. I nursed some distant hope that as he got older, Kevin might grow curious, point to Majorca in the corner, and ask what it was like there. I was proud of my life, and while I told myself that through an accomplished mother Kevin might find pride in himself, I probably just wanted him to be proud of me. I still had no idea what a tall order for any parent that could turn out to be.
Physically, the project was fiddly. The maps were all different sizes, and I had to design a pattern that was not symmetrical or systematic but still made a pleasing patchwork, with a balance of colors and a judicious mix of town centers and continents. I had to learn how to work with wallpaper paste, which was messy, and the older, tattier maps had to be ironed; paper readily browns. With so much else to attend to in a new house and constant hands-on consultation with Louis Role, my new managing editor at AWAP, I was papering my study over the course of several months.
That’s what I mean by biding his time. He followed the papering of that study and knew how much trouble it was; he had personally helped to make it more trouble, by tracking wallpaper paste all over the house. He may not have understood the countries the maps signified, but he did understand that they signified something to me.
When I brushed on the last rectangle by the window, a topographical map of Norway stitched with fjords, I climbed down the ladder and surveyed the results with a twirl. It was gorgeous! Dynamic, quirky, lavishly sentimental. Interstitial train ticket stubs, museum floor plans, and hotel receipts gave the collage an additionally personal touch. I had forced one patch of this blank, witless house to mean something. I put on Joe Jackson’s
Big World,
lidded the paste, furled the canvas covering my six-foot rolltop desk, rattled it open, and unpacked my last box, arranging my stand of antique cartridge pens and bottles of red and black ink, the Scotch tape, stapler, and tchotchkes for fidgeting—the miniature Swiss cowbell, the terra-cotta penitent from Spain.
Meanwhile I was burbling to Kevin, something all very Virginia Woolf like, “Everyone needs a room of their own. You know how you have your room? Well, this is Mommer’s room. And everyone likes to make their room special. Mommer’s been lots of different places, and all these maps remind me of the trips I’ve taken. You’ll see, you may want to make your room special some day, and I’ll help you if you want—”
“What do you mean
special
,” he said, hugging one elbow. In his drooping free hand drizzled his squirt gun, whose leakage had worsened. Although he was still slight for his age, I’d rarely met anyone who took up more metaphysical space. A sulking gravity never let you forget he was there, and if he said little, he was always watching.
“So it looks like your personality.”
“What personality.”
I felt sure I’d explained the word before. I was continually feeding him vocabulary, or who was Shakespeare; educational chatter filled the void. I had a feeling he wished I’d shut up. There seemed no end to the information that he did not want.
“Like your squirt gun, that’s part of your personality.” I refrained from adding, like the way you ruined my favorite caftan, that’s part of your personality. Or the way you’re still shitting in diapers coming up on five years old,
that’s
part of your personality, too. “Anyway, Kevin, you’re being stubborn. I think you know what I mean.”
“I have to put junk on the walls.” He sounded put-upon.
“Unless you’d rather not.”
“I’d
rather not
.”
“Great, we’ve found one more thing you don’t want to do,” I said. “You don’t like to go to the park and you don’t like to listen to music and you don’t like to eat and you don’t like to play with Lego. I bet you couldn’t think of one more thing you don’t like if you tried.”
“All these squiggy squares of paper,” he supplied promptly. “They’re dumb.” After Idonlikedat,
dumb
was his favorite word.
“That’s the thing about your own room, Kevin. It’s nobody else’s business. I don’t care if you think my maps are dumb. I like them.” I remember raising an umbrella of defiance: He wouldn’t rain on this parade. My study looked terrific, it was all mine, I would sit at my desk and play grown-up, and I could not wait to screw on my crowning touch, a bolt on its door. Yes, I’d commissioned a local carpenter and had added a
door
.
But Kevin wouldn’t let the matter drop. There was something he wanted to tell me. “I don’t get it. It was all gucky. And it took forever. Now everything looks dumb. What difference does it make. Why’d you bother.” He stamped his foot. “It’s
dumb
!”
Kevin had skipped the
why
phase that usually hits around three, at which point he was barely talking. Although the
why
phase may seem like an insatiable desire to comprehend cause and effect, I’d eavesdropped enough at playgrounds (It’s time to go make dinner, cookie!
Why?
Because we’re going to get hungry!
Why?
Because our bodies are telling us to eat!
Why?
) to know better. Three-year-olds aren’t interested in the chemistry of digestion; they’ve simply hit on the magic word that always provokes a response.
But Kevin had a real why phase
. He thought my wallpaper an incomprehensible waste of time, as just about everything adults did also struck him as absurd. It didn’t simply perplex him but enraged him, and so far Kevin’s
why
phase has proved not a passing developmental stage but a permanent condition.
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.
Eva
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.