“Jail?” my father asks.
“Jell-O,” Blaze says.
“I’ve got the CD,” Maya says.
“I’ve got a cave and a vacuum cleaner,” Blaze says. “The cave trades with the zebra.” He exchanges one of his chips for one of Lavander’s.
“Hey,” Bo says, “I want the metal iron. I’m trading my Jell-O for a metal iron.”
“I’m not trading,” Blaze says. “You have to steal it.”
“A steal! Excellent,” Bo says.
It goes on like this for a few minutes, all of us trading, stealing and exchanging the plain green chips, enchanted by the fact that we’re able to play this game that, for all intents and purposes, makes no sense at all. Finally, Blaze says, “All right, everybody has to add up their points.” While we’re all trying to come up with a number that might work, my father yells triumphantly, “I’ve got it! I win!”
“He wins!” we all cheer and break into hysterical laughter. We laugh so hard it takes several minutes to calm down enough to talk.
“That’s a good game, Blaze,” my mother says, wiping tears from her eyes. “What’s it called?”
“Card Gazetteer,” he says without hesitation and this sends us off into fresh gales. Blaze is glowing and wants to play again. It’s the first game we’ve played for many years that hasn’t ended in a row.
After the second game (which follows much the same pattern as the first), we break it up. Maya and my mother go to the kitchen to make coffee and tea.
“Blaze is so creative,” I tell my father. “Look at that game. He just came up with that off the top of his head. And we all managed to play it.”
“We could play it because we know him,” my father says.
“But isn’t that the essence of creativity?” I ask. “It’s not because we all know him but because we’re all willing. That’s how a game gets made—somebody thinks up a premise and rules and then you just play.”
“Yes, but it would be difficult for anybody else to play that game with him, that’s what I’m saying,” my father tells me. “Like somebody his own age, for example.”
“So, does it make us weird because we can play his game?” I ask.
“What do you think?” my father says and shrugs.
“Maybe we should tell them about this game at the next IEP meeting,” I tell him. “Then they’d really think we were all crazy.”
By the time that Blaze finished first grade, I was convinced that his school problems were a thing of the past. I believed that he had finally “straightened out,” to use my father’s words, and that, despite his differences, he would be able to integrate into a regular classroom. He had been taking growth hormone for several months and was starting to catch up to his peers in height. Even better, he had been very healthy for a whole year, with no asthma attacks or frantic visits to the ER. Academically, he had kept up with his class and had even excelled in some areas. It was difficult to argue with this success, so at our last meeting of that school year, the IEP team decided to enroll him in a regular-education second grade classroom and use Sally’s special-ed class as a backup plan if that was needed.
That summer, Blaze spent every day swimming. He was never happier than when he was submerged in water, whether it was in the ocean or our condo community’s swimming pool. He called the latter “the jewelry pool” because of the way the light sparkled off the blue water. I lay on a chaise near the water’s edge and read books, newspapers, and magazines while I kept an eye on him, feeling chewed up and tired after a night spent running around the restaurant where I worked. I was ready for a change, I decided, and it had been a long time coming.
I had been waiting on tables for half my life and I was sick of my identity as a waitress–single mother. I was already thirty-three and felt that I had nothing to show for myself, except for the ability to survive comfortably. I’d spent a good portion of the last few years in one predicament or another with Blaze, whether these were physical or school related. Now that these crises had passed, I discovered a big void in my personal life. I didn’t want to end up becoming “Alice”: an old waitress, soaking my feet and wisecracking with my son, waiting for some man to come and rescue me. (And even if I had wanted such a scenario, I had serious doubts that it would ever pan out quite that way for me, anyway.)
One of the side jobs I had during this period was a position as a reader for a well-known literary agent. When one of her employees left to get married that summer I took over the position in her office. It was the first time in my life that I’d worked full-time with the rest of the working world. I loved the job and immersed myself in it fully. I spent much less time with Blaze and throughout August, Maya took my spot beside the pool. When school started in September, she agreed to pick Blaze up when she was at home, which was most of the week. For the other days, I enrolled him in an after-school child care program. Even then, I didn’t pick him up, though. It was Maya who brought him home before I got there. We all saw much less of each other, but I was convinced it was all right. This was what everyone else did, wasn’t it?
Second grade began inauspiciously. Because I wouldn’t be able to pick Blaze up from school anymore, I made it a point to meet with his new teacher, Kimmi, on the first day and ask her if it was possible to set up some sort of schedule to talk every week so that I’d know how Blaze was faring. Kimmi was very busy sorting pencils and arranging kitty stickers and seemed a little baffled as to why I would want to talk to her personally on a regular basis.
“He had such a great year in first grade,” I told her. “I really think he can do well again but I want to make sure that if there are any problems, I know about them right away and then I can work on it with him.”
“Uh-huh,” Kimmi said.
“I used to talk to Ms. Lamb every day,” I continued, “because I came to pick Blaze up. But I’m working at a different job now and I can’t be here when school gets out, but I think it’s important…” I trailed off.
Kimmi had long hair the color of butter and large, round eyes that stared at me with a total lack of irony. To be honest, I didn’t see much else in those eyes, either, but it was the absence of irony that bothered me the most. Nothing to be done, I thought. You can’t exactly complain about a teacher because she’s not ironic enough.
“I could call you at home,” Kimmi said as if she’d suddenly come up with a cure for cancer. “If that would work for you.”
“That would be fabulous,” I said. “Maybe every Tuesday or Wednesday—something like that?”
“Sure,” Kimmi said, showing me her lovely white teeth.
Kimmi and Blaze were a bad match from the very beginning. At home, he complained that he didn’t like her but, when pressed, wouldn’t or couldn’t say why. He absolutely hated sitting cross-legged on the floor at the beginning of the day when Kimmi did “circle activities” with the class. Each child had a masking tape strip marked with his or her name that they were required to sit on for the duration of these morning activities. As if she were echoing the complaints from kindergarten, Kimmi reported that Blaze did everything to wiggle, squirm, and finagle his way off his name square and out of the circle every morning.
“He’s really having difficulty attending,” she said. “I think that the activities we’re doing now may be too difficult for him.”
Blaze was attending, it turned out, just not to what Kimmi was saying. He reported on what each child in the circle looked like, what noises they made, whether anybody cried, laughed, or was sent to a time-out.
“Guess what?” he told me excitedly one day. “Lee threw up today in class.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” I said. “Didn’t he make it to the nurse’s office?”
“No, Mom,” Blaze said, “he threw up on his name.”
True to her word, Kimmi called me every Tuesday night. Blaze was having a hard time with math, she said. His reading comprehension wasn’t very good. He left the circle and she couldn’t get him to come back. After
a few of these calls, it became apparent that she was calling me simply because she had told me she would. Our conversations were punctuated by long, awkward silences. I felt her annoyance and unspoken frustration. I also felt that she was an idiot. She had not one positive comment to make and not one suggestion as to how to reach Blaze.
“I’m a little concerned about his language,” she said one Tuesday night after we’d exchanged the obligatory greetings.
“What kind of language?” I asked her.
“Well, he says things like, ‘the floor hurts my feet.’ I don’t really understand what he’s trying to say there.”
“He’s saying that the hard floor hurts his ankles. You know when you sit them in the circle? He doesn’t like that, the ground is hard on his ankles. He’s grown four inches in the last eight or nine months, sometimes his joints hurt from all that stretching.”
“Oh, uh-huh,” Kimmi said, sounding entirely unconvinced.
“He’s really anxious about the fire drills,” Kimmi went on. “I don’t really know what to do when he gets upset about them. He seems to know when we’re having them. I think he reads my schedule of events that I keep on my desk.”
Hmm, I thought, the old reading comprehension can’t be that bad if he can figure out where she keeps her schedule, then sneak a peek at it and commit the contents to memory. “He’s very sensitive to loud noises,” I told her. “He’s been freaked out by the fire drills since kindergarten. Sally’s had a lot experience with this; maybe you could ask her about it?”
“Yes, that would be a good idea,” she agreed. There was a long pause. I had the feeling that this would probably be the last telephone conversation I’d have with Kimmi.
“I’m not really sure what’s going on with him,” she said, finally. “I think he might need more support.”
“What kind of support?” I asked her.
“Well, you know, Sally has such a great program. Perhaps it would be better if Blaze spent the academic portion of his day in her class. She can provide so much more structure and support than I can in my class. You know, I have so many children in the class, it’s difficult to give one-on-one—”
“Send him back to special ed? Is that what you mean?” I asked her. I didn’t want to hear another diatribe about how many damn children were in her damn class and how she couldn’t give personal attention to any of them, let alone a kid, my kid, who required so much damned attention.
“Just for the morning,” Kimmi said. “In the afternoon, he could join my class for their rotations through music and art.”
“Should I talk to Sally and Dr. Roberts about this?” I asked her.
“Oh, I’ve already brought it up and they think it would be a good idea.”
Really, I thought, you don’t say.
A few weeks later, at the next IEP meeting, Kimmi brought up Blaze’s inappropriate language and, again, I explained what it was that he meant. I thought I detected a note of “I told you so” in the decision to send Blaze back to special ed, but I tried not to be paranoid. Everybody wanted what was best for Blaze, I told myself, but it was becoming less clear to me what that was.
With Blaze back in Sally’s class, I let myself drift away from school issues. My job occupied almost all of the available space in my brain, so this was no big feat. Blaze had run off the beaten path before and had managed to get himself together, so I had every reason to believe that he would pull himself together again. Even Sally told me that, in her opinion, Blaze operated on a cyclical basis. This boy was seasonal and now we were having a bit of winter. At home, his language was anything but “inappropriate.” He had started composing songs, accompanying himself by strumming along on a little thrift-store guitar. The sound of the guitar was fairly dissonant with no chords or changes, but it was obvious that he could hear the music in his head. Each song had verse, chorus, and bridge. In the evenings, instead of working on his homework, which had become anathema to him, he would regale me with, “Listen to this, Mom, it’s a new song from my latest album.” I listened, occasionally scribbling down the lyrics on whatever scrap of paper was handy.
“Deadland” was one such song. “It takes three tickets to get to Deadland,” he sang. “When you’re in Deadland you can never get out. Deadland, Deadland, Deadland.”
“Who’s in Deadland?” I asked him.
“Oh, just some people go there,” he told me. “Like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon and Marvin Gaye.”
“Is it a nice place?” I asked. “Peaceful?”
“No,” he said decisively. “It smells really bad there.”
I preferred his song, “We All Shine Upon the Night,” which described looking at the moon in a dark bedroom. Other songs captured some of the anxiety he felt at school. “Catch the Broken Timer,” for example, described sitting in a chair waiting for the timer a teacher had set to go off and pierce the silence with its buzzing:
“I asked the teacher when it was going to go off and she said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to go off’—Catch the broken timer, catch the broken timer, I’m running away…”
I thought about telling Dr. Roberts about these songs, but I stopped myself. I remembered, only too well, that first day of kindergarten when everything I believed was unique and wonderful about Blaze became an indication of a troubled mind. Nor did I tell Dr. Roberts, or even Sally, about Blaze’s new fear, butterflies, which had intensified and become a major phobia.
The butterfly problem started at the same time Blaze entered second grade. Thankfully, there weren’t a large number of butterflies out and about in the fall and winter and Blaze was able to keep his fears largely at bay. But in the spring, there was a butterfly explosion and they were everywhere, flitting gold, orange, white, and red from the agapanthus to the honeysuckle and jasmine. Blaze put his hands over his ears and shrieked when he saw them, even when they were several feet away. If a butterfly flew too close to him, he’d go into a rigid terror and run in the opposite direction, even if that direction was into traffic. I tried everything I could think of to allay his fear; first admonishing him, then gently explaining that there was nothing to be afraid of, then, on our weekend walks, avoiding whole areas where butterflies were known to cluster. The butterfly issue became an endless topic of conversation between us.
“Butterflies are beautiful,” I told him. “And they couldn’t possibly hurt you. Look how fragile they are—they’re the most fragile creatures on earth.”
“No, no,” he answered. “They’ll bite me.”
“They can’t bite, they don’t have any teeth.”
“They don’t? Are you sure?”
“They don’t even have mouths.”
“Yes, they do.”
“No they don’t. They just drink nectar from the flowers.”
“I don’t like the way they fly.”
“Why not? They just go from flower to flower. They’re not at all interested in you. You are a big, scary human and they have thin, delicate wings. Blaze, of all the insects in the world, butterflies are the most harmless, the most beautiful.”
“They are not!” he insisted. “I don’t want to look at them. Why do they have to exist? I hate butterflies!”
There was nothing I could say and no explanation I could give to relieve his dread. I couldn’t comprehend it. That same spring, Blaze was stung twice at school, once by a bee and once by a yellow jacket. He had been stung only because he leapt into a bank of clover during recess to avoid any contact at all with butterflies on the playground. These stings didn’t bother him in the slightest; in fact, he took pride in remaining stoic while the school nurse applied salve to his finger. When she called me at work to let me know about the sting (“Just in case he has some kind of allergic reaction”), Blaze got on the phone and proclaimed, “Mom, I got stung,” as if it were the very definition of cool.
The demystification of bee stings had no effect on Blaze’s fear of butterflies and, as the weeks went by, that fear only grew deeper.
“I can’t deal with this butterfly thing,” I told him, finally. “You’re going to have to get over it. What is it about butterflies? Just tell me.”
“Mom,” he said miserably, looking right into my eyes, “you just can’t understand.”
I realized then that I really couldn’t understand, that there was something about the butterflies, something about Blaze himself, that had its genesis so deep inside him that there was no way he could explain it to me and it was, perhaps, something that defied explanation in a traditional, verbal sense. I thought about the symbolic meanings of butterflies; transformation, transfiguration, the emergence of self from the chrysalis. In every movement, butterflies represented the fragility and beauty of life. On a more practical level, the flight of the butterfly was erratic, flitting this way and that. There was no way of predicting its exact direction. I could see how that could frighten Blaze, how, if I thought about it long enough, it could even frighten me. I wasn’t going to come to an understanding greater than this, I realized, and, like Blaze it wasn’t something I could find words for. It was nothing I could make clear for his teachers or anyone else who puzzled over such an odd phobia. We all have our butterflies in one form or other, I thought. I could only hope that Blaze would, in time, learn to conquer his.
Spring drifted into summer and then into fall again. For me, the seasons were marked mostly by Blaze’s school schedule. Southern California had none of the pomp and flourish of the changing seasons elsewhere. It was warm, then hot, then not as hot. Occasionally, it was rainy and cool. I was glad when second grade came to an end and expected that the next would be a better year for Blaze.
I was busier than I’d ever been. Representing the agency I worked for, I traveled to several writer’s conferences. I spoke in public about the function of a literary agency and what writers could do to improve their chances of getting published. I wrote notes for my talks. I bought a briefcase. At night, I read proposals and manuscripts. I spent my thirty-fourth birthday in Chicago at an international book fair, discussing foreign rights with people from all over the world. I’d never been to a book fair before. I’d never even been to Chicago.
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