by Alan Rossi
Stefanie was cutting some of her chicken for Jack, Nathaniel noticed, and though he’d been aware of Jack asking for some chicken, he hadn’t actually been seeing what he was seeing because of his thinking, though now he saw it because the pieces of chicken seemed too big. Cut it a little smaller, Nathaniel said. Stefanie looked at him. They’re small enough. Jack do you want the pieces smaller? Nathaniel asked him. Jack looked between the two of them and Stefanie said, They don’t need to be smaller. They’re fine. Don’t be so controlling, I know what I’m doing. Nathaniel looked at her and tried to convey with his eyes that he wasn’t trying to be controlling. The boy took the pieces from her and began eating them without any trouble. Nathaniel saw, for a moment, that this was what it would be like: he would have one idea of how to care for Jack, Stefanie would have another, and they’d be at odds, the gap would only get bigger. In the same way that, when April claimed that she had seen her unborn son’s face in whatever astral-dreamscape the shaman had brought her to, the other teachers couldn’t help but laugh, already constructing stories for their spouses and friends, and she’d been at odds with them. In the same way that the Tammy woman thought she knew what was best for Jack, and now Nathaniel and Stefanie were at odds with her. Everyone was always thinking they knew the right way to live, Nathaniel thought, eating some of his potatoes. The other teachers at McComb Montessori thought they knew better than April what was the right way to live, that her way was strange, stupid, and this was what caused isolation. Nathaniel knew from Nicholas that April didn’t talk much with the other teachers, the shaman thing being one of the first stories she’d told after moving to the town. Nicholas had told him that all April had wanted from this journey with the shaman was to open up a calm, loving space for the child to come into because she was experiencing some anxiety about the pregnancy. This was what Nicholas had told Nathaniel on the phone, this was what Nicholas told Nathaniel that April wanted, a simple thing, and Nicholas said he knew the story had gotten around, and though he didn’t care, he cared that it was isolating April and making her feel like her worries weren’t real. She was thirty-six after all, and this was their first child. She and Nicholas hadn’t been able to get pregnant before, and now she was able to, and what might that mean? She was a little scared, sometimes more than a little, Nathaniel remembered Nicholas telling him, but how could you make that clear to people? You couldn’t. And so, Nicholas had explained, he knew that the story had gotten around town, and all he could hope was that when people gossiped about how she wouldn’t allow plastic toys in her house, how the family didn’t have television, how there was no internet connection on the property, how they grew and ate their own vegetables and built their own house, which they all probably thought was commendable and sustainable, but also a little wild, and how weird they all thought the shaman thing was, maybe they would also think, initially out of guilt and shame but then out of actual conviction, that she was just trying, you know. Like us all.
Jack asked to be excused, and Nathaniel looked at him. His plate was partially finished, and Nathaniel felt a small guilt for not paying attention while eating, not talking to Jack, but then Stefanie hadn’t either. Come here, Nathaniel said. Jack came over and grabbed Nathaniel’s pantleg. Ice cream? Nathaniel said. Jack smiled, and Nathaniel stood and picked him up. They had some dessert and by the time Stefanie put Jack to bed, and Nathaniel read him one more book, Nathaniel’s mind felt full of a cloud-like feeling, stuffed yet also empty, and when he got into bed he couldn’t remember falling asleep or thinking anything on the way to sleep which was what normally happened at home in their condo.
The next day was Thursday, the day before Tammy was supposed to arrive, another day of intermittent cloud and sun and rain, the temperatures very cold at night, in the high thirties. The cabin was warmed with wood burning from the two iron stoves, the insides of the stoves glowing and hot and sending out a smoky cedar smell, still cold in the early morning when Nathaniel made Jack pancakes from scratch and used the syrup that Nicholas harvested from the maple trees on his property, Nathaniel’s mind just beginning to orient, as it did every day, into rain-like, unremitting thought. While cleaning the dishes and pans from breakfast, Nathaniel observed Stefanie reading Jack a book, holding him on her lap, and he tried to assess the boy’s mood, if it was improved, if he was even the slightest bit happier, all while feeling the futility of the attempt. After reading, Jack followed Nathaniel around the house wherever he went – to do laundry, to put more wood in the stove, to make more coffee, and it felt good, doing nothing all morning except doing – and Nathaniel, at one point, walked into the bedroom on the pretense of folding a load of laundry, then ran to the other side of the bed and hid. Nathaniel then slowly raised his head over the edge of the bed, feigning looking around to see if anyone knew where he was hiding, caught Jack’s eyes, the boy’s thumb in his mouth, then ducked back down. When he did it again, Jack smiled at him. Nathaniel got up, ran past Jack out the bedroom door, ran down the hall, and hid behind the sofa in the family room. He heard Jack’s feet running clumsily behind him, padding nicely on the wood floor. Nathaniel again popped his head up, scanned, found Jack’s eyes, and the boy smiled again, his thumb still in his mouth, and Nathaniel again went running by the boy, hiding in the bathroom, again hearing the boy’s feet run after him. Nathaniel did the same scanning, found Jack’s eyes in the same way, but this time there was no smile. Nathaniel came out of the bathroom and ruffled the boy’s hair, something that felt right and an affectation, or maybe it was practice.
After putting Jack down for his nap, a more normal nap time, Nathaniel waited on the porch and then, after a few minutes of thinking about what he had to do when he got back home – the cat litter, vacuuming, calling in to work – he watched his father’s car drive up the dirt road toward the house. Nathaniel looked at his watch and thought that his father of course arrived almost exactly on time, his arrival coordinated to occur, like the phone calls of the previous day, during Jack’s nap around two which could last forty-five minutes to an hour or two, depending, and was of course perfectly executed by his father. It was warmer outside, though wet. The rain system had gotten trapped in the mountains on the way to the Atlantic, Nathaniel had read on his cell phone. Nathaniel watched his father shake out his coat on the porch, take off his shoes, and enter the cabin, all without addressing Nathaniel, so that Nathaniel followed behind, saying internally in a sarcastic voice, Hi Dad, how’re you? Oh, I’m good. Good to hear. His father sat on the family room sofa, got out a little green notebook and pen, and immediately asked Nathaniel what exactly had been said on the phone, the pen poised in his right hand for note taking. Nathaniel told him he didn’t need to take notes and his father replied that if they really wanted his help, this was how he helped, so please tell him what had happened because this woman was going to be here tomorrow. Nathaniel looked at Stefanie, who’d joined them, then began recounting the phone call. He told his father that luckily he and Stefanie had thought to record the call, so his father could listen to it if he wanted. The woman, Nicholas’s mother-in-law, Tammy, had used racist language, and Nathaniel, already sidetracked, said that maybe that was something they could use in court, if it went there, which he hoped it wouldn’t, but it seemed like it might, this woman, she’s pretty determined, she called Stefanie ‘Chiquita Banana,’ she told me to have the boy packed and ready, like she’s going to show up, pick up the kid, and then disappear into middle America. His father stopped writing and said, Chiquita Banana. Do they still make those? Nathaniel said that that was sort of beside the point, the point was, shit, he’d lost his train of thought here, what was the point he was trying to make about the phone call, he asked Stefanie. She was standing in the kitchen, which was directly next to the family room, and now stepped into the family room and said the point was that this Tammy person was not who April or Nicholas had wanted to be Jack’s guardian.
She said to Nathaniel’s father that she personally knew from April that Ap
ril would not want Jack with her mother. Nathaniel’s father was now intermittently writing notes and also looking through nearby boxes that Nathaniel had pulled down from Nicholas’s attic, presumably looking for the will. He asked how Stefanie knew that April didn’t want Jack with this Tammy person. Nathaniel watched his father adjust his reading glasses on his face and poise the pen over the notebook. He observed Stefanie watch him slump back in his chair, and he tried to indicate to her how grateful he was. Stefanie said that April routinely complained about her mother, confiding in Stefanie more than once that her mother was a cynical, bitter person, and it had made April very sad that this was the case, that she couldn’t talk to her mother without hearing something negative about the world, something vaguely racist, or something negative about the way she and Nicholas were raising Jack. Like, Stefanie said, when Jack was first born, she remembered April telling her this, it was so clear, she remembered that April told her that her mother came to visit and she didn’t hold the baby, didn’t change the baby, didn’t even interact with him at all because April had told her mother that she and Nicholas were co-sleeping with the child, and her mother said that if that was really the choice they were making here, the mother didn’t want to get too close to the kid only to lose him in a month’s time when he suffocated in his sleep. She’d be glad to help out around the house, but she wasn’t going to form a connection with a death sentence, Stefanie explained April had told her. April’s mother had actually left the next day and said when the kid was sleeping in its crib then she’d come back, but until then, April and Nicholas would have to fend for themselves because she wasn’t going to have a hand in putting a newborn in such a dangerous situation, basically a death trap, and that if the kid lived, it’d be through luck alone. I mean, that was the first week Jack was here, Stefanie said to Nathaniel’s father who was writing notes in his notepad. Nathaniel watched his father, who was nodding his head in a lawyerly manner, such a practiced affectation that Nathaniel could only barely discern the grief beneath his father’s poise. When Jack was a toddler and sleeping in his crib, Stefanie said, her mother visited again. This was just the second time since Jack was born, Stefanie explained. The second time. Got it, the father said. Second time. Okay, Stefanie said, so I guess what happened was after April’s mother put a regular diaper on Jack, from a pack she had brought as a gift, April asked her mother to please use cloth diapers next time – you know Nicholas and April. Ecologically mindful. So April said this, very politely, showed her mother where the cloth diapers were, how to use them, etc, and then she guided her mother through the house, showed her the toys Nicholas had carved out of wood, the quilts she herself had made, the crib Nicholas had built, the cloth diapers, the balms she’d learned to make at her holistic healing class, picture frames she’d made with old pieces of metal and wood, and all kinds of stuff, and her mother stopped at one point, I guess, and just looked at her. Gave her this stare, is what April told me. And then walked out of the house. She came back an hour later with her SUV filled and like five hundred dollars of plastic toys and Pampers and a tub and wipes and plastic spoons and bowls and sippy cups and all kinds of shit, all of this stuff that Nicholas and April were completely against, and the mother said to April: you’re teaching him to think he’s better than everyone else. Well, he’s not, and you’re not either. This is the country you live in, and you’re teaching him that other kids are doing something wrong and he’s doing something right. This woman told April that April was going to mess up Jack in every imaginable way.
Nathaniel watched his father stop writing and, putting his notebook down and pulling a stack of folders from a box, carelessly leaf through the papers inside, and then toss the folders back into the box. He said, That can’t have really happened, right? He looked at Nathaniel. Nathaniel shrugged, feeling grateful to not be talking, to be fully listening. He felt pulled out of himself by Stefanie’s words, which was what she did for him, over and over, and momentarily, feeling again the presence of Nicholas’s absence from the world, he felt a sort of gratitude. He wanted to tell Nicholas thank you, though he didn’t know what for, in the same way he wanted to tell Stefanie thank you. He closed his eyes, as though searching for the source of this thank you that had suddenly arisen in him. He opened his eyes and saw out the window that more rain had begun. He heard it sweeping spattery gusts onto the tin roof. Nathaniel, watching his father stand, crossed his legs in the desk chair his brother had made, and though he’d never heard the particular information that Stefanie had related, he told his father that it was definitely true, this Tammy woman was really rooted in her ideas of what being a good American was, and she really thought that meant going to Toys ‘R’ Us or wherever. Still though, Nathaniel said to both his father and to Stefanie, wanting to sort of aid her, they shouldn’t be completely unfair here, and that it might be a helpful tack to attempt some flattery or praise in order to appease her – for instance, Nicholas had told him many times that the mother-in-law also said that the baby was lovely, and posted pictures of him on Facebook where she was definitely a proud grandmother, and, Nathaniel remembered, April said that she did eventually apologize about all the toys, which Nicholas accepted in a way only Nicholas could, thanking her for the gifts and, after she left, donating all of it to charity. But apparently she did apologize for acting the way she did, Nathaniel said. Nicholas told me that she had told April that she just wanted her grandchild to fit in and be liked and not be viewed as some backwoods weirdo and to please keep that in mind and let the kid have some normal toys and normal books and normal everything. Nathaniel said that maybe they could use that when talking to her, like show that he and Stefanie weren’t as, you know, far out as Nicholas and April. Maybe we could invite her to our place? Make her feel like she has a hand in this? Nathaniel took a contemplative pause, though he already knew what he was going to say, and then he said he thought it was important that they approached the situation in as even-handed a manner as they could, which was what he imagined Nicholas might say in a similar situation, and then he continued by saying that, on the other hand, maybe he was wrong and such a tack wouldn’t work. After all, he did remember when April had first gotten pregnant and all the drama that had attended that event. According to Nicholas, he said, April’s mother told her to end the pregnancy, so that’s something we could use as well. Nathaniel’s father pulled his phone from his pocket, read a text message, sent a text back, and then shook his head, said that he was sorry to cut the trip short, but that was all he could do today, he had to get groceries for Nathaniel’s mother. Thank you, he said, he’d call tomorrow, he really had no idea, now, what to do, but he’d think about all this. He closed his notepad, hugged them both, listened at the hallway for Jack, as though saying goodbye through telepathy, then told them good luck with Tammy and stepped out of the house and put on his shoes and coat and went walking down the stone path toward his car.