I did, I really did want to be there for Kevin. I was desperate to reestablish that I was a parent he could trust, not a monster who would hurl him about the room at a moment’s notice like a vengeful apparition from
Poltergeist.
But, yes, I was also in dread that Kevin would tell the surgeon or Benjamin Goldblatt what I’d done. They have laws about these things. I could be arrested; my case could be written up in the
Rockland County Times
in an appalled sidebar. I could, as I had so tastelessly joked that I would welcome, have Kevin taken away from me for real. At a minimum I might have to submit to mortifying monthly visits from some disapproving social worker sent to check my son for bruises. However much I deserved rebuke, I still preferred the slow burn of private self-excoriation to the hot lash of public reproof.
So as I stared glaze-eyed into the glassed-in case preserving gushy letters to the nursing staff from satisfied customers, I scrambled for soft-core rewrites.
Oh, doctor, you know how boys exaggerate. Throw him? He was running headlong down the hall, and when I walked out of the bedroom I bumped into him, by accident . . . Then he, ah, of course he fell, hard, against—against the lamp stand ...!
I sickened myself, and every whitewash I concocted sounded preposterous. I had plenty of time to stew in my own juices on one of those hard, sea-green metal chairs in the waiting room, too; a nurse informed me that our son had to undergo surgery to have his “bone ends cleansed,” a procedure I was more than happy to have remain opaque.
But when Kevin emerged three hours later with his blindingly white cast, Dr. Goldblatt patted our son on the back and admired what a brave young man I had raised, while the orthopedic surgeon impersonally detailed the nature of the break, the dangers of infection, the importance of keeping the cast dry, and the date Kevin should return for follow-up care. Both doctors were kind enough to omit mention of the fact that the staff had been obliged to change our son’s dirty diapers; Kevin no longer smelled. My head bobbed dumbly up and down until I stole a quick glance at Kevin, who met my eyes with the clear, sparkling gaze of perfect complicity.
I owed him one. He knew I owed him one. And I would owe him one for a very long time.
Driving back home, I chattered (
What Mommer did was very, very wrong, and she is so, so sorry
—though this distancing device of the third person must have cast my regrets in a dubious light, as if I were already blaming the incident on my imaginary friend). Kevin said nothing. His expression aloof, almost haughty, the fingers of his plastered right arm tucked Napoleonically in his shirt, he sat upright in the front seat and surveyed the flashes of the Tappan Zee Bridge through the side window, for all the world like a triumphant general, wounded nobly in battle, now basking in the cheers of the crowd.
I enjoyed no such equipoise. I might have escaped the police and social services, but I was condemned to run one more gauntlet. Whether up against the wall I might have contrived some cock-and-bull about
bumping into
Kevin for Dr. Goldblatt, I could not imagine locking eyes and flinging patent nonsense at you.
“Hi! Where were you guys?” you shouted when we walked into the kitchen. Your back was turned as you finished slathering peanut butter on a Ritz cracker.
My heart was thumping, and I still had no idea what I was going to say. So far, I had never wittingly done anything that would imperil our marriage—or our
family
—but I was sure that if anything would push us to the brink, this was it.
“—Jesus, Kev!” you exclaimed with a mouth covered in crumbs, swallowing hard without having chewed. “What the heck happened to
you
?”
You brushed your hands hastily and plunged to your knees before Kevin. My skin prickled all over, as if someone had just switched on the voltage and I were an electric fence. I had that distinctive presentiment of I-have-one-more-second-or-two-after-which-nothing-will-ever-be-thesame-again, the same limp apprehension of spotting an oncoming car in your lane when it’s too late to turn the wheel.
But headlong collision was averted at the last minute. Already accustomed to trusting your son’s version of events over your wife’s, you had gone straight to Kevin. This once you were mistaken. Had you asked me, I promise—or at least I like to think—that, with bowed head, I’d have told you the truth.
“I broke my arm.”
“I can see that. How’d that happen?”
“I fell.”
“Where’d you fall?”
“I had poopy pants. Mommer went to get more wipes. I fell off the changing table. On—onto my Tonka dump truck. Mommer took me to Doctor Goldbutt.”
He was good. He was very, very good; you may not appreciate how good. He was smooth—the story was ready. None of the details were inconsistent or gratuitous; he had spurned the extravagant fantasies with which most children his age would camouflage a spilled drink or broken mirror. He had learned what all skilled liars register if they’re ever to make a career of it: Always appropriate as much of the truth as possible. A wellconstructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform. He did have poopy pants. He remembered, correctly, that the second time I changed him that afternoon I had finished the open box of Wet Wipes. He had, more or less, fallen off the changing table. His Tonka dump truck was indeed—I checked later that night—on the nursery floor at the time. Furthermore, I marveled at his having intuited that simply falling three feet onto the floor would probably not be enough to break his arm; he would need to land haplessly on some hard metal object. And however short, his tale was laced with elegant touches: Using
Mommer
when he had eschewed the cutesy sobriquet for months lent his story a cuddly, affectionate cast that fantastically belied the real story;
Doctor Goldbutt
was playfully scatological, setting you at ease—your
happy, healthy boy
was already back to normal. Perhaps most impressive of all, he did not, as he had at the emergency room, allow himself the one collusive glance in my direction that might have given the game away.
“Gosh,” you exclaimed. “That must have hurt!”
“The orthopedist says that for an open fracture,” I said, “—it broke the skin—it was pretty clean, and should mend well.” Now Kevin and I did look at each other, just long enough to seal the pact. I had ransomed my soul to a six-year-old.
“Are you going to let me sign your cast?” you asked. “That’s a tradition, you know. Your friends and family all sign their names and wish you to get well soon.”
“Sure, Dad! But first I got to go to the bathroom.” He sauntered off, his free hand swinging.
“Did I hear that right?” you asked quietly.
“Guess so.” Rigid for hours—fear is an isometric exercise—I was exhausted, and for once the last thing on my mind was our son’s toilet training.
You put an arm around my shoulders. “Man, that must have given you a scare.”
“It was all my fault,” I said, squirming.
“No mother can watch a kid every second.”
I wished you wouldn’t be so understanding. “Yes, but I should have—”
“Sh-sh!”
You raised a forefinger, and a delicate trickling emitted from the hall bathroom: music to the parental ear. “What do you think did the trick, just the shock?” you whispered. “Or maybe he’s scared of landing back on that changing table.”
I shrugged. Despite appearances, I did not believe that by flying into a rage at yet another soiled diaper I had terrorized our boy into using the toilet. Oh, it had everything to do with our set-to in the nursery, all right.
I was being rewarded
.
“This calls for celebration. I’m going to go in and congratulate that guy—”
I put a hand on your arm. “Don’t push your luck. Let him do it quietly, don’t make a big deal out of it. Kevin prefers his reversals off-camera.”
That said, I knew better than to read pee-pee in the potty as admission of defeat. He had won the larger battle; acceding to the toilet was the kind of trifling concession that a magnanimous if condescending victor can afford to toss a vanquished adversary. Our six-year-old had successfully tempted me into violating my own rules of engagement. I had committed a war crime—for which, barring my son’s clement silence, my very husband would extradite me to The Hague.
When Kevin returned from the bathroom tugging up his pants with one hand, I proposed that we have big bowl of popcorn for dinner, adding obsequiously,
with lots and lots of salt!
Drinking in the music of the normal life that I had minutes before kissed good-bye—your clamorous banging of pots, the clarion clang of our stainless steel bowl, the merry rattle of kernels—I’d a foreboding that this crawling-on-my-belly-like-a-reptile mode could endure almost indefinitely so long as Kevin kept his mouth shut.
Why didn’t he blab? By all appearances, he was protecting his mother. All right. I’ll allow for that. Nevertheless, a balance-sheet calculation may have entered in. Before a distant expiry date, a secret accrues interest by dint of having been kept; compounded by lying,
Know how I really broke my arm, Dad?
might have even more explosive impact in a month’s time. Too, so long as he retained the principle of his windfall in his account, he could continue to take out loans against it, whereas blowing his wad all at once would plunge his assets back to a six-year-old’s allowance of $5 a week.
Further, after all my sanctimonious singsong lectures
(How would you feel . . . ?),
I had provided him with a rare opportunity to annex the moral high ground—whose elevation would afford a few novel views, even if this was not, at length, a territory destined to suit his preferences in real estate. Mr. Divide-and-Conquer may also have intuited that secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who’s in on them. My chatter to you about Kevin’s needing to opt for baths over showers to keep the cast dry was artificially bright and stilted; when I asked Kevin whether he wanted parmesan on the popcorn, the question was rich with appeal, terror, and slavish gratitude.
For in one respect I was touched, and remain so: I think he had experienced a closeness to me that he was reluctant to let go. Not only were we in this cover-up together, but during the very assault we were concealing, Kevin too may have felt whole, yanked to life by the awesome sisal strength of the umbilical tie. For once I’d known myself for his mother. So he may have known himself also, sailing amazedly across the nursery like Peter Pan, for my son.
The remainder of that summer defied all my narrative instincts. Had I been scripting a TV movie about a violent harridan who flew into fits of blind dudgeon during which she was endowed with superhuman strength, I’d have had her young boy tiptoeing around the house, shooting her tremulous grins, offering up desperate gestures of appeasement, and just in general shuffling, cowering, and yes-massa-ing about the place, anything to keep from taking impromptu trips across whole rooms of their home without his feet ever touching the floor.
So much for the movies.
I
tiptoed.
My
grins quivered.
I
shuffled and cowered as if auditioning for a minstrel show.
Because let’s talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does what we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm.
Yet Kevin’s white cast became a blazing emblem, not of what I could do to him, but of what I could not. In resorting to the ultimate power, I had robbed myself of it. Since I could not be trusted to use force in moderation, I was stuck with an impotent arsenal, useless overkill, like a stockpile of nuclear weapons. He knew full well that I would never lay a hand on him again.
So in case you worry that in 1989 I became a convert to Neanderthal brutality, all that wholeness and realness and immediacy that I discovered in using Kevin for a shot put evaporated in a New York minute. I remember feeling physically shorter. My posture deteriorated. My voice went wispy. To Kevin, I couched my every request as an optional suggestion:
Honey, would you like to get in the car? You wouldn’t mind terribly if we went to the store? Maybe it would be a good idea if you didn’t pick the crust from the middle of Mommer’s freshly baked pie.
As for the lessons he found such an insult, I returned to the Montessori method.
At first, he put me through a variety of paces, as if training a performing bear. He would demand something time-consuming for his lunch, like homemade pizza, and after I’d spent the morning kneading dough and simmering sauce he’d pick two pieces of pepperoni off his slices and then fold the remains into a glutinous baseball to pitch to the sink. Then he tired of Mother-as-plaything as quickly as he did of his other toys, which I guess made me lucky.