Maybe it goes without saying that the pea plants died, as did the sprouting avocado that replaced them, while at the same time I noticed idly that I was missing a bottle of bleach. There were mysteries: Subsequent to a particular day in January, the moment I led Kevin by the hand into the classroom, a little girl with Shirley Temple curls began to cry, and her wailing worsened until at some point in February she never came back. Another boy, aggressive and rambunctious in September, one of those biffy sorts always boxing your leg and pushing other kids in the sandbox, suddenly became silent and inward, developing at once a severe case of asthma and an inexplicable terror of the coat closet, within five feet of which he would begin to wheeze. What did that have to do with Kevin? I couldn’t say; perhaps nothing. And some of the incidents were pretty harmless, like the time little Jason stuck his feet in his bright red galoshes, only to find them filled with squares of apple-spice cake leftover from snack time. Child’s play—if
real
child’s play—we’d agree.
What most aggrieved Miss Fabricant, of course, was the fact that one after the other of her other charges started to regress in the potty department. She and I had concurred hopefully at the start of the year that Kevin might be inspired by the example of his peers on bathroom breaks, but I fear that quite the opposite took place, and by the time he graduated there was not just one six-year-old in diapers, but three or four.
I was more unsettled by a couple of passing incidents.
One morning some delicate slip of a thing nicknamed Muffet brought a tea set for show-and-tell. It wasn’t any ordinary tea set, but an ornate, many-cupped affair whose elements each fit into the formfitted cubbies of a velvet-lined mahogany box. Her mother later huffed that it was a family heirloom that Muffet was only allowed to bring out on special occasions. No doubt the set should never have been taken to a kindergarten, but the little girl was proud of the many matching pieces and had learned to handle them with care, painstakingly laying out the cups in their saucers with china spoons before a dozen of her classmates as they sat at their knee-high tables. After she’d poured a round of “tea” (the ubiquitous pineapple-grapefruit juice), Kevin hoisted his cup by its tiny handle in a salutary toast—and dropped it on the floor.
In rapid succession all eleven of his fellow tea-sippers followed suit. Before Miss Fabricant could get hold of the situation, the saucers and spoons quickly suffered the same tinkling fate, in consequence of which when Muffet’s mother retrieved her sobbing daughter that afternoon, nothing remained of the treasured tea set but the pot.
If I had ever nursed the hope that my son might turn out to display leadership qualities, this is not what I had in mind. Yet when I made a remark to this effect, Miss Fabricant was in no mood for drollery. I felt that in general her early twenties exhilaration at molding all those receptive little moppets into multiculturally aware, environmentally responsible vegetarians driven to rectify inequities in the Third World was beginning to fray around the edges. This was her first year of flaking poster paint from her eyebrows, going to sleep at night with the salty taste of paste in her gums, and exiling so many children at a shot for a “time-out” that there was no longer any activity to take a time out from. After all, she had announced at our introduction in September that she “simply
loves
children,” a declaration of which I am eternally dubious. From young women like Miss Fabricant, with a blunt snub of a nose like a Charlotte potato and hips like Idahos, the infeasible assertion seems to decode, “I want to get married.” Myself, after having not
a
child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to
love children
in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to
love people
in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.
After relating her terrible tale in a breathless stage whisper, she clearly expected me to leap to cover the cost of the tea set. Financially of course I could afford to, whatever it was worth, but I could not afford the attendant assumption of total blame. Face it, Franklin, you’d have had a fit. You were touchy about your son’s being singled out, or as you would say,
persecuted
. Technically he had only broken the one setting, and covering one-twelfth of the loss was the most compensation you would countenance. I also offered to speak to Kevin about “respecting the property of others,” though Miss Fabricant was underwhelmed by this assurance. Maybe she intuited that these set lectures of mine had begun to lilt with the swinging, mocking cadence of the
one-potato, two-potato
rhymes to which girls skip rope.
“That wasn’t very nice, Kevin,” I said in the car. “Breaking Muffet’s teacup.” I’ve no idea why we parents persist in believing that our kids yearn to be thought of as
nice
, since when we ourselves commend acquaintances as
very nice
we usually mean they’re dull.
“She has a stupid name.”
“That doesn’t mean she deserves—”
“It slipped,” he said lamely.
“That’s not what Miss Fabricant said.”
“How would she know.” He yawned.
“How would
you
feel, kiddo, if you had something that you cared about more than anything, and you brought it to show to the class, and then someone smashed it?”
“Like what?” he asked, innocence tinged with self-congratulation.
I reached casually in my head for an example of a possession that Kevin especially cherished, and it wasn’t there. Searching harder, I felt the same rising dismay of patting down all my pockets after discovering that the one in which I always kept my wallet was empty. It was unnatural. In my own rather underfurnished childhood, I was a fetishistic custodian of the lowliest keepsake, from a three-legged windup donkey named Cloppity to a rinsed-out four-pack of food-coloring bottles.
It’s not as if Kevin didn’t have things in abundance, since you showered him with toys. I’d feel unkind in pointing out that he ignored these Junior Game Boys and Tonka dump trucks across the board, save that your very excess seemed to signal an awareness that none of your previous gifts had taken. Maybe your generosity backfired, by lining his playroom in what must have seemed a kind of plastic dirt; and maybe he could tell that commercial presents were easy for us, being rich, and so, however expensive, cheap.
But I had spent weeks at a time crafting homespun, personalized playthings that should hypothetically have
meant something
. I made sure Kevin watched me, too, so that he knew them for labors of love. The most curiosity he ever exhibited was to ask irritably why I didn’t just
buy
a storybook. Otherwise, once my hand-drawn children’s book was sandwiched between painted pressboard covers, drilled and hole-punched and bound with bright yarn, he looked vacantly out the window as I read it aloud. I admit that the story line was hackneyed, about a little boy who loses his beloved dog, Snippy, and becomes distraught and looks everywhere and of course in the end Snippy shows up—I probably borrowed it from
Lassie.
I’ve never pretended to be a gifted creative writer, and the watercolors bled; I was suffering from the delusion that it’s the thought that counts. But no matter how many references to the little boy’s dark hair and deep brown eyes I planted, I couldn’t get him to identify with the boy in the story who pines for his lost puppy. (Remember when you wanted to buy Kevin a dog? I begged you not to. I was glad you never forced me to explain, since I never explained it to myself. I just know that whenever I envisioned our bouncing black lab, or trusting Irish setter, I was filled with horror.) The only interest he displayed in the book was when I left him alone with it to get dinner, only to find that he’d scribbled Magic Marker on every page—an early
interactive edition
, it seems. Later he drowned the stuffed-sock, button-eyed Teddy, aptly as it happens, in Bear Lake; he fed several pieces of my black-and-white wooden jigsaw of a zebra down the driveway’s drain.
I clutched at ancient history. “Remember your squirt gun?”
He shrugged.
“Remember when Mommer lost her temper, and stamped on it, and it broke?” I had got into the queer habit of referring to myself in the third person; I may have already begun to dissociate, and “Mommer” was now my virtuous alter ego, a pleasingly plump maternal icon with floury hands and a fire surging in a pot-bellied stove who solved disputes between neighborhood urchins with spellbinding fables and hot Toll House cookies. Meantime, Kevin had dropped
Mommer
altogether, thereby demoting the neologism to my own rather silly name for myself. In the car, I was disquieted to realize that he had ceased to call me anything at all. That seemed impossible, but your children generally use your name when they want something, if only attention, and Kevin was loath to beseech me for so much as a turned head. “You didn’t like that, did you?”
“I didn’t care,” said Kevin.
My hands slithered down the wheel from ten-and-two to a desultory seven-and-five. His memory was accurate. Since according to you in defacing my maps he had
only been trying to help
, you replaced the squirt gun, which he tossed into his slag heap of a toy box and never touched. The squirt gun had served its purpose. Indeed, I’d had a spooky presentiment when I finished grinding the barrel into the floor that since he
had
been attached to it, he was glad to see it go.
When I told you about the tea set, you were about to brush it off, but I shot you a warning glance; we had talked about the need for presenting a united front. “Hey, Kev,” you said lightly. “I know teacups are for girls and sort of prissy, but don’t break ’em, okay? It’s
uncool
. Now how about some Frisbee? We’ve just got time to work on that bank shot of yours before dinner.”
“Sure, Dad!” I remember watching Kevin streak off to the closet to fetch the Frisbee and puzzling. Hands fisted, elbows flying, he looked for all the world like a regular, rambunctious kid, exhilarated at playing in the yard with his father. Except that it was
too
much like a regular kid; almost studied. Even that
Sure, Dad!
had a rehearsed,
nyeh-nyeh
ring to it that I couldn’t put my finger on. I had the same queasy feeling on weekends when Kevin would pipe up—yes,
pipe up
—“Gosh, Dad, it’s Saturday! Can we go see another
battlefield
?” You’d be so enchanted that I couldn’t bring myself to raise the possibility that he was pulling your leg. Likewise, I watched out the dining room window and could not believe, somehow, that Kevin was quite that inept at throwing a Frisbee after all this time. He still tossed the disc on its side, hooking the rim on his middle finger, and curled it ten yards from your feet. You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.
Oh, I don’t remember all the incidents that year aside from the fact that there were several, which you tagged with the umbrella dismissal, “Eva, every boy pulls a few pigtails.” I spared you a number of accounts, because for me to report any of our son’s misbehavior seemed like
telling on him
. I ended up reflecting badly not on him but on myself. If I were his sister I could see it, but could a mother be a tattletale? Apparently.
However, the sight I beheld in—I think it was March, well, I’m not sure why it unnerved me quite so much, but I couldn’t keep it to myself. I had gone to pick up Kevin at the usual time, and no one seemed to know where he was. Miss Fabricant’s expression grew pinched, though by this point, were Kevin abducted by the murderous pedophiles we were then led to believe lurked behind every bush, I’d suspect her of having hired them. The missing child being our son, it took a while before one of us thought to check the bathrooms, hardly his bolt-hole of choice.
“Here he is!” sang his teacher at the door to the Girls’ Room. And then she gasped.
I doubt your recollection of these rusty stories is all that sharp, so allow me to refresh your memory. There was a slight, dark-haired kindergartner named Violetta whom I must have mentioned earlier that school year, since she touched me so. She was quiet, withdrawn; she would hide in Miss Fabricant’s skirts, and it took me ages to coax her to tell me her name. Quite pretty, really, but you had to look at her carefully to discern that, which most people didn’t. They couldn’t get past the eczema.
It was dreadful. She was covered in it, these massive scaly patches, red and flaking and sometimes cracked, where it scabbed. All down her arms and spindly legs, and worst of all across her face. The crinkling texture was reptilian. I’d heard that skin conditions were associated with emotional disorders; maybe I was myself susceptible to faddish presuppositions, since I couldn’t help wondering if Violetta was being mistreated in some way or if her parents were undergoing a fractious divorce. In any case, every time I laid eyes on her something caved in me, and I fought the impulse to gather her in my arms. I’d never have wished vast angry blemishes on our son per se, but this was just the sort of heartbreaking affliction for which I had hankered at Dr. Foulke’s: some temporary misfortune that would heal but that would meantime stir in me when faced with my own boy the same bottomless pool of sympathy that rippled whenever Violetta—a stranger’s child—shuffled bashfully into view.
I’ve only had one outbreak of eczema, on my shin, just a taste but enough to know that it itches like fury. I’d overheard her mother urging the girl murmurously not to scratch and assumed that the tube of cream that Violetta always carried, clutched shamefully in the pocket of her jumper, was an anti-itch ointment, since if it was a curative it was snake oil; I’d never seen Violetta’s eczema do anything but get worse. But those antipruritics are only so effective, and her self-control was impressive. She’d trace a fingernail tantalizingly over her arm, and then grasp the offending hand with the other, as if putting it on a leash.