Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  A huge smile crept over J.J.’s face as he put his hand on my son’s shoulder. “Interesting theory,” he said. “But of course I can’t tell you. You understand why, right?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” said my son, “it wouldn’t be fair,” and I could see by his defeated expression that this, above all, was why he had made the pilgrimage to LA, to ask the prophet himself about the mysteries of the island, and now he would have to leave as unsatisfied as when he arrived. This was as good a training for life, I thought, as anything else: to learn to accept a world of ambiguity, where mysteries refuse to reveal themselves, reality doesn’t live up to expectation, and hopes are often dashed. When Jacob’s lunch was handed to him in a Styrofoam container, as the meal was now officially over, he allowed himself to finally own his disappointment. “It’s cold,” he said sadly. “The chicken’s cold.”

  “Okay, you can come read the script now,” said a PA named Sean, who’d come to fetch us one morning as we made our way from the set.

  Jacob and I were wearing our regulation hard hats and safety goggles, each one numbered to correspond to our names, which we were required to put on whenever visiting the set inside the power plant. It was hard at first to figure out where the power plant ended and the set began, although every once in a while you’d turn a dark corner or climb a rickety staircase and run into a Starfleet crew member or an alien, and then you’d know.

  We’d both just taken a short break from our work to watch several takes of a scene involving a fiery explosion and lots of people running down hallways, but we had no idea who the characters were or how the scene fit into the story or why that enormous man was dressed up in the green, hairy, alien outfit that had him sweating so profusely.

  Sean escorted us to the on-set headquarters of Corporate Headquarters, a trailer in which a few rare copies of the script were kept locked and under twenty-four-hour surveillance in a metal safe. Handing us each a copy, after having us sign on a dotted line as proof of temporary receipt, Sean reminded us of the rules: no leaving the trailer with the script; no talking about the plot, characters, or details with anyone; no taking notes. Once we’d finished reading, we were to hand the scripts back to Sean, immediately, for re-interment.

  I don’t think I’m breaking any of those rules or the nondisclosure agreement by saying that I found the script entertaining, even if I didn’t catch all the references a true Trekkie would have. Unfortunately, the real world got in the way of my enjoyment of the fictional one when, halfway through reading the script, I got a phone call from the assistant principal at my daughter’s school, who was calling to tell me that she’d received word from another parent, who preferred to remain anonymous, that the new clique of friends my daughter had joined was too alpha.

  “Too alpha?” I said, wondering who the other parent could be and what event had motivated her call. “But what specifically has Sasha done? Was she mean to someone?”

  “No.”

  “Did she hurt someone?”

  “No.”

  “So wait,” I said, growing confused. “How would you like me to address this with her? What exactly should I say?”

  “You should tell her she has to be friends with everyone. She can’t have just three good friends.”

  Really? I thought. When I was growing up, I was the kind of kid who tried to be friends with everyone, which later in life I realized meant I was actually friends with no one. Sasha, on the other hand, has always had intensely close friendships with one or two children at a time. It is who she is and always has been—the unflappable Spock to her friends’ Kirk and McCoy—and it has largely served her well. I explained this, as best I could, to the assistant principal, as well as pointing out that this might not be the best time to stigmatize Sasha any further.

  “But the girl whose mother called feels left out of the group,” she said. I wondered whether the girl in question was Jane.3 After the lemming incident but before Sasha found her three new friends, Jane’s mother and I had tried to engineer a friendship between Sasha and Jane. But it hadn’t really taken, at least not from Sasha’s end. “How’s it going with Jane?” I’d said hopefully one time, and Sasha had just shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Sometimes we run out of stuff to talk about.”

  Sasha had recently had a sleepover with three new friends, and a few days later Jane’s mother, who’d invited Sasha to come to the theater with the two of them, had suddenly e-mailed to rescind the invitation.

  “Well, I feel bad for the girl, whoever she is,” I said—having more than once been that girl myself, I could feel her pain—“but I can’t force my daughter to be friends with anyone or everyone. Besides, not to get too philosophical here or anything, but isn’t that just the human condition? To feel a part of some groups and left out from others?” You were either alien or human, a survivor of Oceanic Flight 815 or an Other, a Montague or a Capulet, and sure, you could cross over from one group to the other or have pieces of both—Vulcan and human, say—within you, but at some point you had to choose your friends and your place in the universe, and no amount of outside meddling, however well intentioned, could change that. “Look,” I continued, “the fact that my daughter has any friends at all, after last year’s debacle, is a huge leap.” I told the assistant principal about our thwarted vacation the previous summer, how I’d told Sasha she could bring along any girl she wanted to keep her company, but she hadn’t been able to come up with a single name.

  “Just tell her she has to be friends with everyone,” the assistant principal repeated, and I started wondering if it was even possible for every child in the fifth grade to be friends with every other child in the class. I’ve never known a fifth grade in which this was true, but then again, civilization is advancing: when I was a child, it was inconceivable for the Soviet Union to ever befriend the United States, but then Yeltsin stood on a tank, and I married a Russian.

  I made one last-ditch effort to procure a name, because Sasha, though herself quite Vulcan, does actually have empathy for those more human. When she “broke up” with her “boyfriend”—I put quotes around these terms because I’m not sure one can actually call two ten-year-olds text messaging each other dating—the boy’s father called two weeks later, appropriately apologetic, to explain that his son was in a bad way, and could Sasha please find it in her heart to sit with him at lunch just one more time? My daughter, uncharacteristically, wept with guilt and dutifully joined the boy at his lunch table the next day.

  But the reunion, imposed as it was from above, was short-lived. A day later, she was back at her table, he was back at his, and today they no longer share bags of potato chips let alone shorthand intimacies (wassup? idk, u?) over their handheld communicators. This makes me sad—I adore that boy and his poet’s raw heart—but just because I love him and admired the sensitive way his father handled the situation, parent to parent, instead of anonymous parent to school administrator, I could no more force my daughter to love him than Capulet could force Paris upon Juliet.

  “Okay, Jacob, it’s time to get Vulcanized!” said the PA who came to fetch him from the school trailer. It was two days before Jacob was set to shoot his scene, and J.J. wanted to see how he looked in full makeup.

  “I just wanted you to know they’re saying they have to shave off half of Jacob’s eyebrows to make him look like Spock,” Jacob’s agent, Mara, had warned us, before we’d agreed to take the part. She was concerned that this would hurt his chances of future employment.

  “That’s okay,” I’d said. “He just won’t go out on any auditions for a while, that’s all.” I was actually relieved at the thought of a little shaved-eyebrow-induced hiatus. Jacob had just started going to and from auditions on his own, but all the administrative work—reading the scripts, printing out sides, running his lines, poring over the fine print of his contracts—still fell squarely on my shoulders. And with my own work now in overdrive, a newly bipedal baby, a real adolescent Vulcan and a fake one, I relished the idea of a b
reak from at least one of my captain’s duties.

  When I told Jacob about the eyebrows, however, he lost it. “That’s it,” he said. “Forget it. I’m not shaving my eyebrows.”

  “Half your eyebrows,” I reminded him.

  “Whatever. I’ll look like a freak!” Try to remember, if you will, what it felt like to be in seventh grade, with all the bodies around you suddenly mutating before your eyes. Now try to imagine walking into class with half an eyebrow.

  “Fine, I’ll tell Mara you’ll pass on the part.”

  But a few hours later, just as I was getting ready to call Ja-cob’s agent to turn down the role, he changed his mind. “It is J.J. Abrams, so I guess I can deal with the eyebrow thing,” he said, as if he were Abraham accepting his duty to bind Isaac. Which was another reason why not getting an answer to his Lost question must have been a bit of a blow. Here he was, ready to slay his firstborn son—or at least shave off his eyebrows—to show his devotion to the Almighty, and He couldn’t give Jacob a crumb.

  The bar mitzvah boy in J.J. must have sensed this, because a few weeks later a package showed up at our apartment, containing a huge box of Lost action figures signed by both him and Damon Lindelof. It wasn’t insider knowledge about the motivations of Others, but it was definitely something Jacob could share with his friends.

  “You sure you’re ready for this?” I said to him as the PA led us to the hair and makeup trailer for the final transformation from seventh-grade kid to Vulcan messiah.

  “No,” said Jacob, “but let’s get it over with before I chicken out.”

  Four hours later, his honey-brown hair had been dyed a deep black and pruned into a severe helmet. His outer eyebrows were shaved off and restructured, one spirit-gummed follicle at a time, to rise up at the temples. His ears were augmented with the Vulcan points that had just arrived from the fx studio. “How do you feel?” said J.J.

  Jacob stared at his new face in the mirror, raising his new eyebrows up and down, turning his neck back and forth to get a better view of his ears. “Like Spock,” he said, smiling.

  The day of the shoot itself, at a church on the outskirts of town, the producers weren’t taking any chances. No one in costume was allowed outside, where paparazzi lenses were harder to protect against because of the church’s perch amid rolling hills, providing clear vantage points from nearly 360 degrees. Every time Jacob had to be brought to the set or taken to one of the food and snack tables, a “pope mobile”—a golf cart with black curtains blocking each side—showed up to escort him. Even the path from the pope mobile to the church was carefully hidden from view by white tenting constructed over it.

  The church itself, however, was enclosed almost entirely in glass, so photos of Zach Quinto in full costume appeared on the Web the next day, but it was a minor victory for Paramount that not a single paparazzi image of either Jacob or Winona Ryder, who played his mother, or Ben Cross, who played Spock’s father, showed up on a blog.

  The scene they were shooting that day was the one immediately following a fight scene Jacob would shoot in a month’s time, in those aforementioned bowls, when my father would return with him to LA. Because films are often shot out of sequence, the events of that future/past scene meant that Jacob, the day I was there, had to be made up to look as if his eyes and lips were bruised and bloodied from a school yard brawl.

  It’s a pivotal scene, both in the film and in the young Spock’s life, when the half-Vulcan, half-human boy has to decide who he is and where he belongs. I can’t tell you which identity he ultimately chooses—though any half-serious Trekkie could—but I can say I remembered thinking at the time, when I saw the green Vulcan blood caked around my son’s lips, that Hollywood sure loves to paint school yard scuffles in dramatic brushstrokes. I’d never actually seen a kid come home bloodied and bruised from an altercation on the playground, despite the film industry’s frequent use of the trope.

  The next morning I received another call from my daughter’s school. There’d been a fight on the playground. Sasha’s nose was bleeding. Profusely.

  “What?” I said. Never mind the odd synchronicity between fiction and reality. This was a girl who had always hated the idea of violence, who’d never once hit anyone, including her brother.

  According to what I could piece together over the phone, Sasha had been defending the honor of one of the girls outside her clique, someone she knew well enough but not well, whom one of the boys—a member of Sasha’s clique—had threatened to unmask as having a crush on another boy. Before the boy could reveal this information to the crush, Sasha urged him not to. When he decided to run off and tell the crush anyway, the girl in question told Sasha to slap him. Which stupidly she did. The boy retaliated with either a punch to the nose or a dodgeball to the face, accounts differ. The school retaliated by taking away recess privileges for a week from both Sasha and the slapped boy, but not from the girl who instigated the fight.

  “It’s one thing to tell someone to slap a kid,” said the assistant principal, “and another to actually do it.” Fair enough, I thought, even though the real world doesn’t work that way. Telling someone else to shoot your husband for, say, neglecting to answer his cell phone will still get you forty years to life. Plus if Sasha had been the one to tell the girl to slap the boy, she would have been punished along with the other two, no question. That’s the risk she runs, I’ve told her many times, by choosing to be a part of a group: the group’s reputation, whether deserved or not, will always reflect positively or negatively upon her individually.

  I would decide to ground Sasha for the month, to express my displeasure with her actions, but part of me couldn’t help sympathizing with her. She’d been warned, by the assistant principal, that she had to be friends with everyone. Being friends with everyone meant being ready to defend everyone’s honor. Which was impossible, since somebody’s honor was always being challenged, a priori, by someone else’s. Didn’t you have to, at some point, like Adolescent Spock, choose sides? Isn’t that what growing up meant, to figure out who you were and what you believed in, who your allies were and where you felt most at home?

  There are times when even a Vulcan is forced to use his nerve pinch, and lacking such an option, Sasha had chosen a less-than-optimal substitute. Slapping a kid was wrong, no doubt, but the revelation of a secret crush would be like breaking the Prime Directive, the guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets, which states that there can be no interference within the narrative arc of a civilization. And if thwarting the possible love between two fifth graders—or, for that matter, trying to socially engineer the lives of one’s offspring—does not count as interfering in the narrative arc of a civilization, I don’t know what does.

  I asked the assistant principal to put my daughter on the phone. “Come home,” she said, plaintively, her Vulcan cool completely shattered. “I need you.”

  A captain can only stay away for so long, I realized, before the ship starts to implode. Her crew needs her if they are to boldly go not only where no man has gone before, but to go where every man, woman, and child has gone before and lived to tell. Life on Earth can be hard for an adolescent Vulcan. Especially for one who’s half-human. “I know, sweetie,” I said. “I’m coming home.”

  Big Chills

  The Big Chill soundtrack was all the rage in my freshman dorm, which means I often find myself reminiscing about 1984 whenever I hear the Temptations, even though “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” came out in 1966, the year I was born. While this doesn’t say much for the music of my own college years—Frankie Goes to Hollywood, anyone?—it does say something about the way my generation co-opts its nostalgia, à la carte, from others.

  Sometimes we even co-opt the very co-option of our nostalgia, hosting “Big Chill” weekends with our college roommates, reuniting not because one of us has died or committed suicide, as in the movie, but because we’re trying to mimic that same sense of warmth and well-being in the bosom of old friends we experienc
ed vicariously while watching the film, back when we were young and naive and hanging around our freshman dorm rooms listening to Procul Harum, wondering which of these people will I be dancing around the kitchen doing the dishes with at my Big Chill weekend?

  For me that bosom ended up being a group of seven women, who were all either roommates or blockmates (as rooming groups who wanted to live near one another were called) during our sophomore and junior years at Harvard. Actually, four of them continued being roommates their senior year as well, after two of them took the semester off and I was banished from the smaller group, which was why I was surprised to receive the e-mail announcing our first reunion weekend, ten years after graduation. This reunion (and the invitation to it) took place back in 1998, when e-mail was just gaining speed—albeit slowly, over scratchy modem phone lines; at the time, I still shared an e-mail address with my husband. “Your college roommates are hosting a Big Chill weekend,” my husband said, reading the subject header.

  “And they invited me?”

  He checked the body of the e-mail to make sure. “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Hmm,” I said, feeling the sting of that earlier rejection as if no time had passed at all. As if my husband and children were just visitors in my world and I was still the odd woman out, shivering in the cold.

  “Are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  For several weeks, I tortured myself over this decision, going back and forth, back and forth, until finally, in the craziest flame of an e-mail I have ever written, before or since, I took some of them to task, eleven years after the fact, for throwing me to the wolves way back when, saying, in essence, that I’d no sooner attend their Big Chill weekend than I would dive headfirst into molten lava. Or some such nonsense.

  The group of girls—we called ourselves women back then, though we were barely out of training bras—originally formed the way most groups do: haphazardly and by dint of association. Clara4 was my conduit. We’d met during our senior year of high school, when both of us were visiting the college after receiving our letters of acceptance. Clara hailed from the Midwest, one of those statuesque and stunning, Ayn-Rand-reading moody Catholic girls who inspire poetry and the kind of reckless behavior that her family’s invention, the Breathalyzer, was meant to temper.