We leave for the playground early in the morning, the boy
and the girl and I. They’ve been up since 6:20, running around the house,
crumpling papers and pulling one another’s hair. They awake so early that I’ve
started to go to bed at ten or so to try and compensate. In some ways it works,
I’m less irritable in the morning, preparing them breakfast and busying myself
with the dishes or checking of e-mail. But it’s complicated. I’ve sheared off
the hours between 10:30 and midnight that used to be my own. The only part of
the day that was truly mine, and though I am sociable, chatty, and enjoy
company, I am also fiercely attached to my time alone, or rather, fiercely
attached to the idea of my time alone, which I often fritter away by checking
e-mail, reading sports blogs or otherwise distracting myself from the task, if
task is what it is, of being alone. And what I mean by being alone is sitting
down and writing, trying to make sense of the day or life, or myself.
I was
in no mood to be touched, still dazed from the night of sleep, slouching on the
couch, legs extended out in front of me while they are eating breakfast. I’m
doing nothing, which is rare. I just want a moment of quiet before the day
begins. I’ve been wearing sandals lately, and my toe nails are cut unevenly,
and I’m thinking that my feet are not particularly nice looking: though
aesthetics is an interesting matter, a bit of personal preference mixed in with
a large dose of societal pressure. Are feet ugly? After a moment the girl is sticking
her elbow into my ribs and asking me something, which I answer perfunctorily, which
is how I often answer her, without really listening, responding almost monosyllabically
because she is an avid talker, and I find myself often worn out with it before
the day has even started, but I also wonder if she’ll be in therapy someday, or
writing her own memoir, reflecting on the fact that her father was there but
didn’t pay much attention to her, and so I feel bad about it and occasionally
put on bracelets or sit around in the dirt with her because that’s what parents
are either doing or supposed to do. I need a drink.
And
then the little boy is up sitting next to me as well, and he says, “I love you,”
and I recoil a bit as his head grazes my chin, a boxer’s blow. They are both
sitting next to me telling me that they love me, and I want them anywhere but
here. This is not a constant state, I should say. Often, most often, what I
want from my children is for them to run to me (I take a break to talk about
the intricacies of a Strawberry Shortcake episode where Plum holds a grudge,
but I tell the girl that it is not good to hold a grudge, and that I have a
secret for her, which is that I love her, and she hugs me, and we talk about
the back and forth of the holes in the dance floor and Plum because I want her
to know that I love her) and to hug me. Sometimes I will want to build tracks
or throw a ball but most often I just want them to hug me and then go on about their
business and for me to go on about my adult business. This is an ineffective
arrangement as their business is intimately woven into mine, such that I
thought, for the hundredth time that we need to get a lock on our bathroom door
as the girl walked in behind me and started talking about her crumpled map as I
stood and peed.
We
plant some tomato plants first, making small holes in the yard. I get out three
shovels, so everyone can help, and when we are almost done I notice that one of
them has sheared off the geranium. I’m frustrated and short with them both, but
the boy keeps saying that it wasn’t Sadie, it was him, but he’s not sad, nor is
he taking ownership; He’s just a two year old reporting the facts while I
command them to get down to the grass and start digging holes for blackberry
seeds while they look at me with a small kind of hurt for a moment, wondering
why I’m so angry. Many mornings are like this, a delicate balance of
frustration and play.
At the
playground, a young nanny, skinny, European looking, is texting on her phone
while a child plays on the motorcycle, his wild hair swinging in the wind as he
bounces back and forth. After a moment, I watch her approaching the child,
phone lifted, and I hear her saying something in Russian or French or something
with the phone held in front of her, and I realize that she’s talking to someone,
a mother, a father, a sister, and showing them the child.
The playground is small and bordered by trees, oaks and
maples whose leaves somehow never seem to fall. The place is dotted by black
iron benches, where nanny’s and parents leave their various items, hats, sun
screen, drinks, snacks, changing mats, while they walk around after the
children if they’re good, or, if they’re like me, where they sit idly hoping
that nothing goes wrong. We come here as opposed to the larger playground with
the splash park because the girl says she likes the twirly slide, a bright
yellow moderately high slide that turns on itself once or twice, children
sliding down almost aggressively slowly. On the far end of the park is a small
open field, bordered by the same trees where flocks of small grey birds gather
to peck at worms, occasionally disappearing into those trees when a child runs
past, creating a brief and beautiful silhouette reminiscent of falling leaves
against the backdrop of blue sky and small clouds blowing thinly across the
sky. For a while, a man with a cat used to come to the park, sit quietly, and
let him out of a carrier to walk and play amongst the children. Some parents
would warn their children away, while the black cat with a white belly rolled
around on the mulch begging to be petted. “He might have rabies.” I haven’t
seen him these past two weeks though, and I suppose he and the cat might have
moved on as we all move on in time.
The girl loves people
and after collecting a few snacks, she heads straight for the nanny, badgering
her with questions, and the boy stays with me, eating snacks, before wandering
off as well, and I read a book on a bench while my children pester this woman
who is being paid to take care of someone else’s child. I feel guilty about it
but not guilty enough to stop reading the book. I glance up occasionally,
observing the girl drawing the woman’s attention, telling her to play this game
or that while the woman tries to watch her two year old. Soon enough, the woman
is leaving, and I assume it’s because she’s been battered enough by the chatter
of the girl, who needs and needs and needs.
However, as the woman is leaving, I notice that she’s
chatting with the girl, responding and laughing. As she gets close to me I
realize she’s older than I thought, though younger than me, she says, “She’s
adorable. I have a four and half year-old and they are so similar.” And I hear
her telling the girl that she should come over and play sometime, and we make
idle chatter, and my son says goodbye and she calls him sweetie, and we talk
about the mosquitoes and the bug spray and the sweltering summers, and I am
pleased because I like people exactly like her. She is easy with the children,
pleased by their chatter and not eager to escape it. She is not, as I am so
often, enduring it. For enduring it is often or sometimes all that I am doing,
and I don’t know how to change it or fix it, this desire to endure as opposed
to live in it. The strange thing is how much I love watching and being around people
who aren’t enduring, who are participating, or seeming to participate in this
essential human function. I find myself slightly sad when the mother is gone, taking
with her the patience and enjoyment of their little stories and asides, which I
am able to drum up, though not consistently enough to feel as though I’m doing
anything right.
After that, another girl arrives, this time an actual nanny.
And the girl chats her up, entices her to play in the beach, which is a pile of
dirt where she tosses leaves and sticks. And though the nanny plays with her a
bit, indulges her a bit, it’s clear that she doesn’t enjoy it. She watches the
boy she’s taking care of very closely and carefully. I’d hire her to take care
of my own children, but she doesn’t love them or it. She is enduring it. And I
resent her for it. I want her to play with the girl, to enjoy her idle chatter,
to marvel at how deep the boy’s voice is when he’s slamming away on the
motorcycle, his orange curly hair, sweat stained at the back because I love
them. But she doesn’t, and so we sit near each other, the children between us,
my back up against the fence post, watching the children play, occasionally
agreeing to be a life guard or taking a stick from the two year old she is
watching, both of us enduring.
In seventh grade my first class is with Mr. Corey, and it’s
called Quest, which is about leadership and cooperation and developing team
building habits. The hallways are all black asphalt, the buildings low slung
and a uniform grey. The asphalt is hot in August, where I live in Chico, a small
college town in the valley of Northern California where my parents met during
or after college and where I’ve lived since I was two. The classroom feels like
a portable, then the rage as schools were beginning to cut costs and increase
class size, unpleasant structures on wheels, which replicated in their lack of
aesthetic beauty and attention to detail the very emptiness of school itself,
the lack of imagination in texts, in structure, in understanding of what
children wanted or desired, though these aren’t questions or comparison that I
would have made myself at the time.
I’d been very successful in elementary school after a rough
patch in kindergarten. I had rather quickly came to understand that performing
well in class was a good way of getting positive attention from adults. And,
like many children, I understood positive attention from adults to be an
essential part of childhood. I was always obedient to pre-inscribed structures.
Once I’d learned to navigate a classroom, I excelled at it, reading books
faster than everyone else in my small pond of an elementary school, never
missing a homework assignment and doing everything that was asked of me in the
classroom. This acceptance of authority based structures was and is both a
blessing and a curse. However, as a child, it served me well and often made me
the special or preferred student of my teachers.
Mr Corey was in his late fifties when I had him in class. He
had large, coke bottle glasses, and the broad shoulders and carriage of a high
school football player. He kept a large skull of what I now recognize as a
bull, horns intact, but which he called, for reasons which escape me, a
ubangarang. This skull, which caused him to yell, “Ubangarang” was but one of
the many problems in the classroom. The kids in the class, for the first time
that I’d ever seen, didn’t care what he had to say or teach, such that he spent
most of every class period speaking in his deep and loud voice, asking kids to
quiet down, while they talked behind his back, laughed, threw airplanes and
generally behaved as if he wasn’t there at all.
We were seated on stools in the classroom, around long,
desks, shaped like cells, with black tops and a water faucet in the middle in
case of eye injury. The windows were narrow, long, and located at about eight
feet, a fact that I’ve never come to terms with or understood, was it to keep
kids from opening it, from jumping out from the first story? It was a chemistry classroom because in addition
to Quest we were learning some sort of science, the facts of which, remind
obscure to me to this day. I was thin shouldered, red cheeked, and shy. I still
parted my hair on the side in an era when people began to grow it long and part
it down the middle. Everything about seventh grade confused me.
The things that I remember most acutely about the classroom
were, as is normal for me, people. The class, for it was my first class in
seventh grade, must have consisted of roughly 25 to 28 students. However, I
remember only two of them Mario and Gail. I remember Mario, white t-shirt,
thick gold chain around his neck and a black hat, turned sideways because he
was a smart ass, and it was clear from the get go that he didn’t give a crap
what Mr. Corey said. I had experienced students who pretended not to care what
a teacher said in elementary school, but they were inevitably broken, or forced
to keep it to themselves after being slowly broken in or down by the teacher. What
I couldn’t believe is that from the first day of class, was that Mario didn’t
care, and there was nothing Mr. Corey could to or say to convince him to be
quiet, listen, or learn anything. I, who had always been such a good and
obedient student, watched him with a rapt fascination as one might watch a
cheetah stalking about in its cage at a zoo, wondering what precisely the
animal was up to.
Gail was short, and she was wearing a baggy grey shirt. She
slouched forward in the stools, her blond curly hair partially obscuring her
face. But when she looked up, she had the eyes of a Siberian husky, violently
blue. She sat at the desk directly opposite mine in the classroom, across from
Mario, who spent a good deal of his time talking to her, trying to draw her
out. She was quiet most of the time and laughed occasionally. Over the course
of the semester or year that I spent in that classroom I couldn’t have spoken
to her more than twice. And yet, if I’m to conjure up a memory of that room,
there she is, sitting there in a large grey sweatshirt with those piercing eyes
thinking whatever the hell it was she was thinking, certainly not of me.
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