Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  About an hour before it’s time to pick Teddy up from school and before Gary gets home from work, I take Charlotte off, hide the sling in the middle drawer, and bring her out to do all the things a normal dog should be allowed to do in the course of a normal dog-day—including a long walk—slingless, on and off the leash, in the neighborhood or around the reservoir that we drive to, where she gets to play and socialize with other dogs. Once home, she finds a place to nap on the floor or on the bed or on the couch before I leave. The afternoons and evenings pass easily, usually—laundry, cooking, a little more content-generation distracting me from missing the weight around my neck, against my hip, balancing my laptop next to that warm cotton sack of dog fur.

  Eventually, though, the hours in between sling-time drag, and I find myself wanting, then needing, to wear the dog like a baby all the time. Who wouldn’t? But need leads to impulsivity, and impulsivity is how accidents happen.

  * * *

  It doesn’t take long for my secret to get discovered. A few weeks after I start wearing the dog, right after school starts, I get sloppy and lose track of time. I forget that every third Tuesday Gary leaves work as a part-time snackologist at a large communal work space near MIT—managing the infinite selection of organic non-GMO snacks and beverages for the hordes of startup teams and independent contractors half our age paying for daily shared office space—and races home, eager to do a few one-hits out the upstairs bathroom window hours before Teddy gets back from school and while I am usually still out running errands. That September afternoon, as I lumber from refrigerator to sink with the sling, fixing myself and the dog a little snack—cheddar cheese cubes and a few stale Fritos, our favorite—Gary suddenly appears in the kitchen. Tall and rangy and fit, he is wearing his mandatory company black fleece zip-up vest with the WORK IT TOGETHER (WIT) logo over the left breast, black jeans, and black T-shirt, a uniform he hates. With his still-full head of longish salt-and-pepper hair and rimless round Lennon glasses, he looks like an architect or designer, not an underemployed former musician trying to fit into a new corporate culture to help make ends meet.

  When I see him I stop short. How will I explain why our dog’s slender pointy-snouted head is poking out of a diaper across my chest? I look down at the sling as if I’m as surprised as Gary to find it hanging there. “I was just cleaning out the basement,” I say, implying the basement cleaning was today, not almost a month earlier. I reach into the bag for another handful of corn chips but don’t eat them. I hadn’t planned on being discovered. I don’t have my story down yet. But as freaked out as I am, I’m actually relieved. It’s time. I’m tired of having a secret, of having to pretend that everything’s fine. This is who I am now in middle age—lost and confused and shifting constantly between my own world and the real world. If the dog is helping me survive these dark days, then good for me. I shouldn’t be ashamed. In fact, I should be applauded for finding a harmless, nonalcoholic, nonnarcotic, noncannabinoid solution to my pain. (Right?)

  Gary leans forward an inch or two, waiting for the rest of my explanation, which is not forthcoming. “And . . . the sling just jumped out and demanded to be worn?” He looks at me like I could not possibly be weirder, like I have a bird on my head.

  I slip a corn chip into the sling, then nod at him above the sound of the dog’s crunching, a sound I love almost as much as I love the sound of Teddy crunching Cheez-Its or Goldfish. “Actually, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”

  His eyes dart over to the freezer. “You didn’t eat any cookies, did you?”

  “Pot cookies?” Sensing an opening, an opportunity to divert attention from my sling-problem to his pot-smoking problem, which started innocently enough a few years ago as a medically prescribed solution for extreme anxiety but has, in the past few months, gotten completely out of hand, I shake my head slowly. “Seriously. You can’t keep pot cookies around: we have an actual teenager in the house.”

  He opens the freezer, finds what he’s looking for—a small tinfoil square in a nondescript Ziploc bag marked DOGGIE SNACKS—then leans back against the counter. He looks at the dog and then at me, his relief at finding his stash safe already turning to disappointment: If pot cookies aren’t the reason for my bizarre behavior, then what is?

  “So, how long have you been carrying her around like a baby?”

  I’m about to lie but again, we’re so beyond that now that I can’t come up with a reason why I should bother. We’re separated. Sort of. Technically. None of this is his business. I have nothing to lose. In fact, the more estranged we are, the easier it will be when we can afford to actually split up.

  “A few days. A week. Maybe more. Does it matter?”

  “Wow,” he says, then shakes his head. “That’s sad.”

  I straighten, feel my chin jut out and up. I might be an increasingly strange, increasingly invisible middle-aged woman, hiding an ever-expanding perimenopausal body in boxy sweaters and boyfriend jeans, but clearly I’m not the only one who is struggling. “Said the dude who vapes one-hits out the window and eats pot cookies.”

  “They’re called edibles now,” he says, patting the dog’s head inside the sling and then, with affection, mine, too, on his way to the basement.

  * * *

  Wearing the dog is ridiculous. An act of desperation. I know this. I know that the strain of a twenty-pound animal hanging around my neck in a cloth sling, no matter how well constructed or convincingly it guarantees to “distribute weight and swing evenly on the shoulder, back, and hip,” isn’t good for me, physically or mentally; I know that it will become a bad habit I’ll come to love and then have to give up, like cigarettes, like falling for a married man. No good will ever come from this; this will never end well. Going in, I know I’m doomed.

  But there is the loneliness. The aloneness. How I startle awake in the dark, panicked, full of dread, floating on the night sea on a tiny raft surrounded by all that vast blackness. I see myself from above. The light from the moon guides me nowhere. I’m connected to nothing and no one, lost, and certain only that I’m destined to die broke and alone from one of the swift lethal cancers that took my parents in their later years, without getting another chance to turn things around. Even before Gary starts sleeping in the snoring room, when the marriage already feels like a suffocation, his florid debilitating anxiety disorder having turned my desire into maternal concern years ago, I wake like that, worried about the short run, the now, the present: How will I get from this moment to that moment? Where is the vine that will swing me to the other side?

  My vine, as it happens, has appeared in the form of a sling. All I can do is hope that it is strong enough to hold me.

  Driving Teddy

  It’s six minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong, and of course we’re late. I hustle Teddy—almost taller than me, a bedhead of brown curls, and giant sneakers still untied—into the car on this sharply bright October morning, then tear down the street, looking like a Jules Feiffer sketch of modern frantic parenthood with my giant hair and furrowed worry-brow behind the wheel. I’m going to have to explain and apologize to Mr. Noah and his aggressively annoying Montessori man bun that it’s my fault, not Teddy’s, for being tardy on this day, especially on this day. The school seemed perfect for Teddy when he’d started in second grade after a few disastrous years at the nearby public school, but a month into seventh grade—in their newly formed middle school, only in its second year with none of the kinks worked out—it doesn’t seem to be the best place for him now.

  Even though we’re late, I can’t help indulging in my daily habit on the drive to school: the Inventory of Other Houses, when I ogle all the well-maintained homes along our route that belong to other people. Ours, the one that the Bird book and series bought but can barely maintain, with its peeling shingles and broken gutters, is becoming the shabbiest on the block.

  Five minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

  When Gary and I fi
rst moved to Cambridge, still in our late thirties with Teddy about to be born, full of stupid youthful optimism, fantasies of block parties and progressive dinners and neighborhood yard sales played in my head. I wanted community, and connection, and a sense of belonging. I wanted to carve pumpkins and drink eggnog and complain about shoveling snow, then extol the virtues of the miraculous New England spring—daffodils and tulips and those tiny blue flowers I’d always loved but had never known the name of pushing up through the barely thawed earth—with everyone. Not anymore. That openness is long gone. I’ve moved from outgoing young mother and children’s book writer to invisible middle-aged content-generator and dog-wearer. An irreversible trajectory, I’m sure of it. If only I could have squeezed out another book before writer’s block set in, Gary and I would have enough money to separate like normal couples instead of having to live in the same house and pretend for Teddy’s sake.

  Four minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

  I look at Teddy sitting next to me in the front passenger seat—because he is old enough to sit there now—I can’t remember the last time he sat in the back—and wonder again as I so often have since the transparency of childhood and boyhood gave way to this—this brutal teenage opacity—what he is thinking. I don’t ask anymore and he never tells me. My eyes leave the road for a second or two to search the flat surface of his profile, but it’s like a stone skimming water. He gives up nothing. Every day I try to square the fact that I don’t know, can’t know, will never again know everything crossing his mind the minute it crosses it the way I used to because he used to tell me—trains, dinosaurs, baseball, LEGOs, skateboards, chicken, pizza, chips—but doesn’t anymore. Sometimes even the dog isn’t enough to keep those molecules from coming apart.

  Three minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

  Steering around parked cars and oncoming traffic, the inventory continues: I compare shingles and shutters and lawns and fences to our disintegrating ones. That morning I’m especially tweaked by an ever-expanding three-story addition going up in the back of an already massive turreted single-family Victorian. I brake and lift my sunglasses in an exaggerated slow-motion drive-by of shock and awe, watching the workmen come in and out of their parked trucks with windows and casings and boxes of tiles and long planks of lumber. So much wood; so many trees sacrificed for state-of-the-art kitchens and mudrooms and laundry rooms and separate marital snoring rooms. If we weren’t so late already, I would probably lean out the window and take a photo, then post it with a snarky caption on one or all of my social media accounts. I’m sure that the people moving in, whoever they are, still sleep in the same room, in the same bed; still earn livings and have savings; still plan for the future the way normal people do, though I know that my childish presumptions could be wrong: you never know what peoples’ lives are really like.

  Two minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

  I force myself to stop the inventory and focus instead on our destination: I tell myself that it’s just middle school, just seventh grade, taught by a leftover hippie dude full of childlike wonder who spends too much time sculpting his facial hair. But it’s the day I’m scheduled to talk to Teddy’s class about writing, answering some of Mr. Noah’s questions about what it’s like to make books (fun to write and draw them; less fun to publish and promote them): how cool it was to have an animated series based on one of my books (extremely cool); how old I was when I first started writing anything (sixth grade); what my favorite color, food, and animal is (black, coffee, dogs).

  One minute to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

  I know Teddy had hoped I’d cancel, that something else would come up at the very last second the way it used to when he was small—the calls from my mother when she was out of pain medication; from my father when he mixed up night and day again; when it was time for hospice for both of them. He’d gotten used to plans changing suddenly; from the bottom dropping out; from occasionally being picked up by someone else’s parents and eating at another family’s dinner table. He’d always looked so pained when I’d had to leave him, which wasn’t actually that often, since I took him almost everywhere with me, like I do now with the dog—and since working from home allowed us to spend a lot of time together. Then at some point he came to like it: being somewhere else. The relief of it. I think of all that he’d seen those years before he was even ten: the hospital beds, the infusion rooms, the home nurses coming and going from my parents’ house while I tried to distract him with bigger and bigger LEGO sets—and I wish again that we could get a do-over for that whole phase of his life. I barely remember going to the children’s museum or the science museum with him those years, but I can remember every hospital cafeteria and which one had the best chicken nuggets or chicken patty sandwiches as if it were yesterday. It hardly seems fair, so much precious time lost.

  One minute past morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

  “I know. You’re dying that I’m coming in today,” I say, elbowing him. I keep my eyes on the road, desperate for the laugh track from the old days of his boyhood, but as always now there is just silence, then a protracted sigh with a word at the end:

  “Mommmmm.”

  I push past the awkwardness, even though I know that trying too hard and showing my desperation to stay relevant will only make things worse. “But that’s the deal with your school: parents help out.” His eye-roll doesn’t stop me. “It’s a cooperative independent school”—I say the words slowly, because I can’t take my hands off the wheel to pump my usual air quotes—“so when a teacher asks you to come in and teach their class for them because they’re too lazy to,” I add, unable to stop myself from editorializing, “you’re not supposed to say no.”

  “Mr. Noah isn’t too lazy to teach.”

  I forget how loyal he is, how kind and generous to others he’s always been. He’s never had a mean bone in his body, and Gary and I have always marveled at how much better and more evolved a person he is than we are; how different he is from us. Was it the luck of genetics and biology? More engaged parenting than we’d had? Conscious differentiation on his part? Gary always says that we could learn from him, but we never do, instead just blurting things out without thinking. Like now.

  “You’re right. It’s not laziness. He just needs extra time to manscape his goatee.”

  “Mom. Stop.” He looks at me finally. He is all Gary, with his perfect ears and straight nose and blue eyes, though I know the lips and chin and, sadly, the crowded teeth, which will need straightening, are mine. “You don’t have to come, you know. Jackson’s mom and Gavin’s mom and Robert’s mom couldn’t come. I can just say you’re too busy. It’s no big deal.” He looks out the window again, away from me to somewhere else.

  I blink and feel the sudden sting of tears. “But I want to come.” The sentence is a repentant whisper that leaves me confused: Why, when I miss my little boy so much, am I pushing away what’s left of him? “Dude. I was just kidding.” I’m begging now. Like plate tectonics, something inside me is finally cracking and shifting. Melting. “I want to come. I really do.”

  He shrugs. “Are you bringing the dog?”

  “I have to,” I say, as if I’m explaining why I have to drag an oxygen machine in with me, that my survival depends on it. “It’ll be worse if I don’t bring her.” I look down at my lap, in the space between my body and the steering wheel and the harness strap of the seat belt, and see the top of the dog’s head inside the sling. It’s then that I notice all the dog hair on my black sweater and wish I’d thought to run a lint brush over myself before leaving the house on such an important morning.

  “It’s worse for me if you do.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But I can’t help it right now.”

  He shrugs again—whatever—and just like that we’re finally at the school, pulling into the no-parking zone and leaving the car in front of the MORNINGSIDE MO
NTESSORI: WHERE PEACE RULES mosaic sign, the one we helped make one chilly late-October afternoon during the school’s annual Harvest Day, when Teddy still sat in the backseat and had long drummer hair and wore Led Zeppelin T-shirts and kissed me hello and goodbye without restraint or shame.

  And then, as if we aren’t three minutes late for morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong, I take my hands off the wheel and touch his head, the one without a bird on it, and then his hair, pretending to fix it. To my astonishment he lets me and doesn’t pull away, and for a brief moment before we leave the car and race into the school where I know I will embarrass him terribly, we are who we used to be, before the world as we knew it changed.

  Morning Meeting

  In the school’s multipurpose multiage room, Mr. Noah’s voice, very community-theater-director, rises above the low roar of the hundred or so K-6 children burning through the unrefined-sugar highs of their organic breakfasts. As head of school, in layers of flowy cotton and wool and his man bun affixed to the top of his head with a single black lacquered chopstick, he moves through the crowd, which includes the handful of middle-schoolers—fewer than fifteen teens who have decided to stay for the school’s brand-new seventh and eighth grades instead of switching to a different private school or going back into the public school system. Passing them, he stops to play Kissinger to two boys from the lower school, probably seven years old, or eight, who are fighting over a fuzzy mallet in front of a big bronze disc suspended from the ceiling from what looks like macramé pulleys. There is pushing, shoving, and fierce fleece-hoodie pulling.