by Laura Zigman
“God.” Annoyed, he starts to loudly chop the cucumber even though it’s just supposed to be sliced. “So did you at least make everyone wear bird merch?” he says, changing the subject.
I tell him that I wore my hat but didn’t bring any T-shirts from the endless stash of giant cardboard boxes in the basement. Then I shrug like I don’t care, even though I care more than I thought I would, more than I want to admit. “Which was a good thing, since there was some kind of emergency in the middle school building and someone came running in to get Mr. Noah at the exact moment I was supposed to start talking.”
“Someone replenished the soy milk but forgot the almond milk?”
I try to laugh, then change the subject to an even tougher one. “I saw Glenn today.”
Despite my halfhearted attempt to sound upbeat, Gary stares at me. “Is she okay?”
“Not really.”
“I thought the chemo was working.”
“I don’t think it is. She looks worse. She looks worse every time I see her.”
He puts the knife and the cucumber down. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”
We have: five years ago with my mother, then three years ago with my father. Each time we’d try to find signs of improvement—however minor, however incremental—that didn’t exist—until the end, which was, sadly, the only improvement.
“Does she know?”
“Of course she knows.” I tell him about our coffee date: the people she scared off, how badly she felt afterward, the way she begged for distraction. Then I tell him about her request that we host the People Puppets. Which feels like a final request. Gary walks over to me, buries both hands inside the sling in the dog’s thick fur, the closest we get now to hugging or touching. “We can’t say no,” I say.
“Of course we can’t. Which she knows. God, she’s such an asshole,” he whispers, because if he didn’t he would start to cry. And I haven’t even told him the part about agreeing to take Lucy. He shakes his head. “I still can’t believe this is happening.”
I paw at the dog now, too. I can’t believe it either.
“How long?” he asks.
I lean my back against the counter and put my hands on my hips, feeling the flesh folding over the top of my jeans, beyond the sling. Normally I’d grab it and curse it, but thinking of Glenn in her bed right now, with all her rapidly dividing cells and her not-long-for-this world eyes, I feel lucky to have it. “Three months—maybe six?” But I’m lying. I’m actually thinking a month, two if we’re lucky. I remember my parents, how they compared at those time markers—their weight, their stamina, their appetite, their will to live—and I sense that she is further along than we think—but I don’t want to upset Gary, so I backtrack: “I’m probably overreacting. She was probably just tired.”
He takes a deep breath, holds it, lets it out slowly—one of the calming exercises he’s learned to control some of the physical symptoms of his anxiety. When he reaches into the sling one last time to pat the dog on the head, he reaches out to pet me on the head, too. Which, like most things about our relationship, is totally weird but somehow not weird at all. It’s at that moment that I notice Teddy lurking just outside the kitchen—he has an uncanny ability to pick up on when we’re having an important conversation; to sense when we’re trying to keep something from him.
“What’s wrong with Glennie?” he asks me, moving into the kitchen from the shadows and staring at the vegetables we’re chopping, knowing he won’t eat them. Glenn is the fun aunt he never officially had, the one who gave him extravagant gifts—huge stuffed animals, paints and easels, giant LEGO sets—and, after my parents were gone, went to every school performance and concert at Morningside Montessori, including the African drumming and improv Inhabitancies, and even the little pre-Thanksgiving and pre-Solstice classroom celebrations.
“She’s sick. But you know that.”
“So why were you talking about her?”
“Because I just saw her. We met for coffee today and I was telling her about going to your school the other day, how my presentation got interrupted, and how they’re looking for families to host People Puppets. She thinks it would be fun for us to host them. Like we’d get some good stories out of it that would be fun for her to hear.” I smile broadly, desperately. “If Daddy agrees.”
“Of course I agree. I’m a brave bear,” Gary says, nodding, taking another deep breath, convincing himself. “And so is Glenn. She’s a very very brave bear.”
“Would she come over and visit if they were here?”
I shrug. “I hope so!” I shrug again. “She’ll probably feel a little better next week. Or the week after. We’ll just have to see!” My voice cracks but I cough over it, then wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Stupid onion!”
Teddy is still looking at me like I’m telling him there is a Santa Claus: like he wants to believe but knows he shouldn’t.
“Is she gonna die, too?”
* * *
Long before the sling, during the fall before my mother got sick, when the universe of our tiny immediate family was still in perfect alignment and I was the sun of Teddy’s world, we got into a new routine: once a week or so, after school pickup, I’d take him to Costco for a snack: a churro or a slice of pizza or some ridiculous thing they called a chicken bake (chicken, cheese, bacon bits, all wrapped up in a cheese-covered crust). Costco was right off the highway that connected school to home, and it seemed as good a place as any to kill that strange and slightly sad gap in time between after-school and going-home, especially as the fall would wear on and it got colder and darker earlier and earlier.
We didn’t go to Costco every day: most pre-sling days I’d take the dog for a walk; some days Teddy would have a playdate or stay a few hours at the after-school program, building forts in the woods behind the school or shooting baskets in the all-purpose room that’s kind of a gym but isn’t really or playing made-up card games with the younger kids, imagining that they were all his siblings. Other days we’d just come home and he’d play outside if the kids on the street were there or he’d watch TV and I’d make him a snack—a little frozen pizza or some macaroni and cheese from a box or a bowl of ramen noodles, torn from the plastic package, the bowl on a saucer with a napkin underneath to catch the spills. But for a few months we’d gone to Costco on a pretty regular basis, and while it wasn’t something I bragged about on social media, since his churro or slice of pizza or chicken bake didn’t come with a side of organic broccoli or a soccer practice or a French horn lesson, it was something he liked to do—with me—and so, we’d do it.
I loved taking Teddy to Costco and sitting and eating and talking at a white indoor picnic bench with a red plastic umbrella under all that unnatural artificial turkey-neck-revealing fluorescent light. It was my guilty pleasure, what I looked forward to most every week. Because even then, years before it happened, I knew that there would come a time when I’d be begging him to do things like that. Being a child’s primary focus is temporary, fleeting; I knew that the aperture was closing, that the light on me would eventually dim and I’d be replaced with friends.
Once he’d decide what to order, I’d pay for it, then he’d find a table and get the napkins while I waited for the food and got the little cups for free water. Life is made up of tiny rituals, and those were ours, the ones I loved most, especially the part when I would find him and set the food on the table and sit down across from him. While I watched him eat, we’d talk about his day, my day, his friends, my friends; we’d talk about which we liked better, plain pizza or pepperoni, churros or fried dough, the Stones or the Beatles; and while the questions and answers would vary, the feel of our Costco trips was always the same: it was special time. Joy is joy, no matter where you find it or what you’re doing, and those afternoons at Costco, sitting together under all that harsh light, was our version of special time.
As my mother began dying that winter, we even made a friend there: a big white-haire
d old man who always wore an L.L.Bean field coat and wide-wale corduroys, and who would often appear in the snack area at the same time we did. He cut such an unusual figure and had such an otherworldly presence when we’d talk that I started to wonder if Virgilius—that was actually his name—was real or if he was instead some sort of apparition, a phantom, a ghost, sent to teach me something I didn’t know I needed to learn. Natural or supernatural, by early spring as my mother continued her decline, we stopped seeing Virgilius at the snack bar. The emptiness I felt at the unexplained absence of a virtual stranger made me almost wish we’d never met him. There was only so much loss I could brace for.
Teddy would finish his churro or his slice, or both, and then we’d do a fake-shop: I’d use my expired membership card to enter the warehouse area and walk around without buying anything. We were trying to save money, and not renewing our old membership seemed like a smart thing, as did walking up and down the aisles and looking at all the shiny stuff we knew we weren’t going to buy: flat-screen TVs and video game systems, keyboards and guitars, toaster ovens and vacuum cleaners, giant slabs of meat and huge boxes of cereal. Not even a weirdly packaged DVD of the first season of There’s a Bird on Your Head that Teddy once found and held up to his face until I took his picture with my old BlackBerry, back when he would still let me do things like that. After a complete circuit through the store we’d leave, slipping out through an empty register aisle, past the snack area where we’d started, toward the automatic sliding doors into the cold and out to the car, looking one last time for Virgilius.
Sometimes Teddy would ask me if I thought we didn’t see him anymore because he was sick and dying, too, and unlike some of the other questions he’d ask me then—What kind of cancer does Bubbie have? Why does she sleep all the time now? How come she isn’t fat anymore? Is she going to die?—I didn’t have an answer for him. All I knew was that his absence was proof that people stayed with you for the rest of your life no matter when you stopped seeing them or when their body disappeared from your world.
Just as we’d go through the sliding doors and my face would hit the rush of cold air, just when I’d feel myself slipping away into the familiar comfort of that dissociative state, away from remembering that my mother was dying, Teddy would take my hand on the way to the car, and bring me back. We were buddies on a field trip, going somewhere on the other side of the glass together.
The Secret Pooper
On the way to school the next morning, I plan on telling Grace that we want to be a People Puppets host family. I’m leaning out the window, staring at an addition to a house that seems to have sprouted up overnight, which is when Teddy pokes me on the arm.
“Someone’s been pooping at school.”
“Well, I should hope so,” I say, distracted by a monstrous three-story turret-like-silo jutting out of the left side of a blue-black Gorey-esque Victorian. “That’s what bathrooms are for. And it’s bad to hold it in every day, by the way, if that’s what you’re still doing. There’s no shame in doing your business at school if you have to. Everybody poops.” I wonder if I’ll ever pass up an opportunity to bore him with a teaching moment.
“No, Mom. They didn’t poop in the bathroom. They pooped in the hallway in front of the bathroom. Like on the floor.”
I turn to him. “On the floor?” He nods. I’m certain that I’ve missed something. “Start again.”
He does—and this time he describes, in a fair amount of detail, how the first incident started when Ms. Grace, as the students call her, ran into the classroom, wild-eyed and almost in tears and yelping in a high-pitched squeal to Mr. Noah: “Oh my God! There’s something you need to see right away!”
The middle-schoolers—all ten or eleven of them, gangly and awkward and barely coordinated—somehow rushed into the hallway before Mr. Noah could get in front of the troubling tableau and block their view of it: “it” being a perfect pile of poop, much like the ubiquitous cartoonish emoji: tiered, piled high, deep brown. Grace squealed in horror again, as did Mr. Noah, before they managed to corral the students back to the classroom and call the janitor, Ms. JoJo, to remove the mess. The teachers—rattled, whispering in the corner—could then be overheard assessing the possibility that the excrement had been produced by a dog that had somehow entered the building, done its business, and then let itself out—all without being seen or heard. But the “dog theory” was debunked as quickly as it had been suggested, since both teachers, who had several dogs between them, knew, as did their pet-owning students, that there was a clear difference between animal poop and human poop. No one who had ever picked up after the family dog in the backyard or on a walk in the woods would mistake what they’d seen on the buffed wood floor of the second-floor school hallway for anything other than what it was: people poop.
The second time was the morning of my presentation. The students and Mr. Noah were already in the multipurpose room when Grace, who had lagged behind the others to prepare a handout for a pre-Inhabitancy PowerPoint presentation—“Puppetry Through the Ages”—came upon the pile of feces in a slightly different spot—this time, on the floor inside the unisex bathroom: outside the stalls and in front of the row of sinks. Later that day, the students were questioned, one by one, in the science lab adjoining the main middle school classroom, by the teachers who tag-teamed, continually checking the hallway for another pile of poop.
“What do you mean you were questioned?”
“They asked each of us if we were the Pooper.”
“Flat out. Like, straight out. As in, ‘Are you the one who pooped on the floor on purpose?’” Teddy nods. “And when you said no, what happened?”
“They asked us if we had seen anything weird, if we had any idea who was doing it.”
“And had you seen anything weird?”
“No.”
“So as far as you know, some kid has somehow managed to drop their pants,” I say, mindfully using a gender-neutral pronoun, “and poop instantaneously—and very very quickly—leaving the scene before anyone sees them.”
When he shrugs, I shake my head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I believe you. I’m just not sure I believe that it’s happening the way it seems.” Instead of explaining what I mean—I’m not even sure I know what I mean beyond having a nagging suspicion that something about this story isn’t making sense. How does someone, outside a full classroom the first time, and down the hall from an entire schoolful of people gathered for an assembly the second time, poop on the floor that quickly—on command, essentially—without being seen? I focus on the fact that this secret pooper has been on the loose at the school for almost a week and no one has notified the parents. Which is maddening and strange, since the school usually finds any and every excuse to communicate operational minutiae to parents via email and voicemail (“Please note: the refrigerator in the teachers’ room is being replaced this week with one that has a bigger capacity but a much higher energy-efficiency rating!” “New entrance mats for foot-wiping have now been installed! Children from homes that still use commercial salt and sand mixtures [and who should really switch to environmentally friendly nontoxic compounds . . .] please wipe well before entering the school!”) So why the sudden radio silence, now that one of the middle-schoolers is a probable sociopath?
“The bottom line is that the school should have told the parents.”
“But I told you.”
“But you’re a kid.”
“But now you know. Isn’t that what matters?”
“Yes, but what also matters is that the adults do the right thing.” Finally past the giant addition, weaving around the usual mess of tow trucks and backhoes and pool diggers—Pool diggers? In Cambridge?—but there’s no time for house ogling today. “They’re the grown-ups. They’re supposed to tell us about any kind of dangerous situation.”
“Dangerous? It’s just poop.”
I can see a flash of
fear in Teddy’s eyes, even under the hair that crosses his nose, how he starts to fidget with the zipper on his hooded sweatshirt. Great. I’ve leaked my fear and distrust of life and sparked his, just like my parents did to me. Have I learned nothing about how to pretend I have faith and hope in humanity so that I don’t incite and escalate my child’s imagination about all the dormant evil lurking in the world? “You’re right,” I say, trying for a calming clinical tone. “I’m being ridiculous. It is just poop.” And then, of course, because I can’t help myself, I add: “But sometimes disturbing behavior is a symptom of something else.”
“Like what?”
“Sadness. Loneliness. Being deeply troubled.” I look down at the sling and realize that I should probably either use myself as an example of the connection between feelings and behavior manifesting in some kind of outward sign or metaphor—I’m sad, therefore I wear my dog—or stop talking so he doesn’t make the damning connection himself. “Sometimes the things we do are clues to how we’re really feeling. So, like, if someone poops like this, on the floor, at school, it probably means they’re unhappy. Or angry. Or maybe they’re unhappy and angry at school, since that’s where they’re doing the pooping.” I pause to think. “Unless they’re also pooping on the floor at home, which would mean they’re unhappy there, too.”
Teddy is now running the zipper of his sweatshirt up and down in short frantic spurts. “Maybe it’s not a kid who’s doing it.”
I pull into the school lot, push the gearshift into park, and turn to him. It hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t. But now that he’s mentioned it: maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s a grown-up, a pissed off teacher, a disgruntled employee. “When the poop was discovered, were both teachers in the classroom?”
He thinks for a minute. “The first time, Mr. Noah was teaching and Ms. Grace was on her way into the classroom. And the second time was when we were all downstairs for your thing.”
“So Ms. Grace found the poop both times.” That’s like finding a body. Once is possible; but twice? Isn’t that too much of a coincidence? Or maybe it is entirely a coincidence. Teachers probably get their anger out in different, less creepy ways—refusing to give extra help after school when asked for it; grading down; being shitty to kids they don’t like. Little power-grabs and shame-fests. Could it be that Morningside Montessori is harboring a teacher with a serious grudge against the school? Doubtful. No, my money is on a student—a boy, I’m sorry to say—someone who is troubled at home or maybe the product of an unpleasant divorce, a boy for whom the daily annoyance of school feels like the last straw.