Savage Park : A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die (9780544303294)

by Fusselman, Amy

  I was surprised when she told me this was what she was writing; it seemed impossible that she was truly of two minds over what I thought of as a teeny-tiny intervention and even more impossible that she was going to the trouble to document this uncertainty on paper, in longhand. The whole process seemed so . . . ancient.

  And yet, bulldozing a space, padding and disinfecting it, and then congratulating ourselves on how we can sit back with our handhelds and leave our babies and children alone to “explore” is just one approach. It has its drawbacks, however, including the fact that babies and children, who quickly become young adults, do not learn how to take risks in space, something that ultimately makes them less safe in space, not more.

  Allowing babies, children, and young adults to spend as much time as possible with the lowest level of interference in the highest-quality environment we can provide for them—that is, an environment that we have not engineered ourselves and do not completely control, an environment we don’t fully understand, an environment that includes devils and angels and accidents and trees and swings and lunch—this is another approach. It also has drawbacks, the major ones being the pain of our own uncertainty and vulnerability, the process of making peace with the unknown, and the requirement that a noninterfering adult Be Here Now.

  But it would be worth it, if we could do this. Americans, I beseech you, it is not as impossible as it seems. We may have an ocean on the east and west, we may have our borders on the north and south, but we are not an island; we are in the world. There is no escaping it: we have been born, we are going to die.

  Americans, I beg you: Recognize! We are already in Savage Park!

  5

  More

  | 1 |

  When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, I thought of Yelena increasingly and was relieved when she e-mailed to say that she had made it to the airport with Chuck, Gen, and the baby and that they were camping out there overnight with the intention of getting on the next flight to New York and staying for a couple of weeks with Yelena’s parents, who lived on the Upper West Side.

  She e-mailed: I packed one tiny carry-on for all of us. would you happen to have some spare big-boy clothes we could borrow for three weeks?? . . . we are camping out at the airport tonight and barring any further disasters boarding a plane tomorrow . . . whew . . .

  Adults hanging out, Hanegi PlayparkKOJI TAKIGUCHI

  I e-mailed Noriko too, for the first time since her wedding in December, to say that I was thinking of her, and I learned that she and her new husband were in Nagano, which is in the middle of the country, west of Tokyo. Her baby was due March 12, one day after the earthquake hit. It was March 16 when I heard from her. No labor yet.

  Because of the earthquake, the baby is staying in, she wrote.

  | 2 |

  During my week with Noriko, I had only about three hours when I was entirely on my own. I told her one day when we were at the playpark that I had to go and buy my boys some toys, because I had promised them I would. If I don’t bring them toys when I come home, they will kill me, I said.

  Noriko looked at me with narrowed eyes. People don’t bandy about the word kill in her circles.

  “Not really,” I said apologetically.

  She let me go. I was headed to a toy store I had been to with the boys when we were guests of Yelena a year earlier. It was a completely delightful five-floor toy emporium called Kiddyland on a tony Tokyo shopping street, the Omotesando.

  I ran from the playpark to the train and promptly got lost. I wandered around the wrong neighborhood asking hipsters to help me get back on track. It was the day before I was going to go home and I was simultaneously so excited about my freedom and so terrified of my freedom that I could barely act; I wanted to do so many things that I didn’t know what to do, and after I spent half my time getting lost, I did not have time, in the end, to do anything but what I was supposed to do, which was buy toys for King and Mick, some candy for visitors to the playpark, and a gift for Noriko.

  I finally walked through the familiar red doors of Kiddyland and ran to the basement, where I knew the toy vehicles were, and bought trucks and trains for the boys. It took me a while and I was panicking about time when I realized I still needed to get Noriko a gift.

  I went back up to the ground floor and looked around; that’s where they kept the seasonal items, which, as it was mid-November, were just starting to be Christmas-y. It’s also where they displayed the impulse buys, the toys that do the most moving and quacking, similar to what you will see in New York City when you walk past a closet-size “store” that sells T-shirts and see, sitting on the sidewalk, some battery-powered, plastic frogs splashing in a Tupperware container.

  I was drawn to a pyramid of moving, plastic toys; they were little, round, friendly, big-headed creatures, solar-powered, with huge, painted-on smiles. They sat and bobbed their heads ecstatically from side to side as the sun shone. They came in many bright colors. I grabbed a neon-green one for Noriko. This would be the equivalent of a visitor to New York City buying her hostess a magnet of the Empire State Building.

  We ate breakfast together in her tiny apartment the next morning, having taken the small low, circular table reserved for eating from where we stored it flat against a wall after each meal and on which she placed the most excellent food, hot off what was essentially a camp stove, along with fresh produce she kept in a dorm fridge. I gave her the smiling, plastic, bobbing green thing and watched her, for just a second, look totally horrified before she put her smile back on for me.

  And I realized, looking around, that my little green smiling man was probably the only piece of plastic in her entire apartment, which was furnished, with utmost simplicity, with the necessities of life and mementos from friends. Two white T-shirts from play conferences, each signed in black Sharpie by at least twenty people, hung on her wall on simple wire hangers with all the quiet authority of a pair of Cy Twomblys. They were the main décor of her home.

  I tried to apologize for my poor choice, but it was too late. The gift was given.

  We ate together in silence, enduring each other like sisters.

  | 3 |

  The latest news report offered a UN group’s tracking of the probable course of the radiation plume from Japan: it should hit Southern California by Friday, the paper said.

  Japan is here, it seems. Yelena and the boys made it to the city and came over to our place. It was nice, as if she were a neighbor. King and Mick and Chuck and Gen played like old friends, shooting one another with toy guns. I met the new baby, Aevi.

  Coincidentally, my friend Bill Burke was in town from Boston and dropped by with his giant black German shepherd, Omar, who is named for the character on the TV show The Wire. Bill is a photographer of Vietnam/guns/motorcycles/snakes/weirdoes/himself. His 1987 book I Want to Take Picture is well known in photography circles.

  He is working on a new series of photos called Destrukto. They are very large images of objects being shot with a gun. A can of Yoo-hoo, for instance, set against a black-and-white-tile background, is seen spinning, liquid spewing, at the moment the bullet is shredding it. It’s Gilbert and George meet Apocalypse Now.

  This was more people than I had had in my apartment at once in a long time, and I tried to take pictures myself, but the batteries in my digital camera were running low, and I couldn’t see what I was aiming at through the screen of the viewfinder. Despite my restarting the camera repeatedly, it remained black. I kept looking at the screen anyway, out of habit, long after I recognized that the batteries were low, as if this situation were going to change, as if the screen were somehow going to come back to life and help me see what I was shooting at.

  I was nearing the point of throwing the camera down in disgust and not even trying to take pictures at all when I thought: Just let go. Just let the camera take the picture on its own.

  | 4 |

  I got an e-mail from Noriko’s husband, Haruki, on Monday. Yelena was also cc’d on it. Noriko h
ad her baby, a girl named Nico, on March 21.

  Great mother already, Haruki wrote about Noriko.

  He put some photos on his Facebook page. Peering at the screen, I saw that Noriko had had a home birth. I could see a signature-strewn T-shirt on a hanger on the wall, as it had been in her old apartment. There were two midwives there, hovering near her in gloves and masks. In one image, Noriko nurses the baby in bed as Haruki kneels, right hand holding the scissors open, about to cut the cord.

  | 5 |

  March 24, I got another e-mail from Haruki.

  Nico died in her sleep after just two days alive; they didn’t know why.

  They were having a prayer service at 2:00 p.m. and wanted everyone to join them.

  I texted Yelena immediately. We were both sick with the news.

  Aevi

  When is 2:00 p.m. there? I asked.

  Either 1:00 p.m. today or 1:00 a.m. last night, she wrote. But I don’t think it matters.

  | 6 |

  To play, you do not need a particular object or game or even a playground; you need only an assent, a grateful and glad yes.

  Granting this yes, to and for ourselves, in every environment, even awful ones, is one of the most liberating things humans can do.

  I am thinking of this idea this winter. It’s still winter, even though it’s the end of March. I am still wearing the puffy uniform—down coat, corduroys, hat, boots—that I first donned in November. I think it has adhered to my skin.

  I shepherd the boys to school on the subway and then I shepherd them home on the subway, in the cold and snow and wind, twice a day, back and forth, back and forth.

  It’s like we are moving so much we aren’t moving; we are poised here, totally still.

  Lately, on the train ride, I let the boys eat Tic-Tacs, which I didn’t let them do at the beginning of the school year. I broke down in February. We buy them now at the newsstand at the Forty-Second Street station, where we change trains.

  After we buy a box for them to share, they sit on the train and talk about the colors and flavors and the fact that Katie calls Tic-Tacs tactics.

  As long as I hear their voices and the box shaking like a maraca, I feel free to sit there on the hard, gray seat with them, tip my head back, and close my eyes.

  PART II

  6

  SSOF

  | 1 |

  Katie is on a roll where she is getting up every day at 5:30 a.m. We have this quiet time together each morning, while the boys and Frank are sleeping.

  “Do you know Noriko?” Katie asks me one morning, a few days after Noriko’s baby’s death.

  I carry her to the kitchen to set her on the counter while I start the coffee.

  “Yes,” I say. I assume she has heard me mention Noriko’s name.

  “Noriko is sad,” she says.

  “I know,” I say, pouring the coffee grounds into the press.

  “Do you know Noriko’s baby?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, eyeing her.

  “Noriko’s baby went into the air,” she says.

  I put the bag of coffee down to look at her. She is not getting this language from me.

  “And then what happened?” I ask her.

  She thinks. “And then the baby flew away,” she says.

  I better follow this as far as I can, I think.

  “And then what happened?”

  She eats a raisin.

  “I don’t know,” she says finally.

  The water boils. I pour it on the grounds.

  Reading the news about the power plant in Japan feels like watching a terrifying Rube Goldberg–like contraption unfold in its slow-motion, clunky pattern toward an unthinkable end. I should probably stop watching, but I can’t.

  Yelena was supposed to come over with the boys again today but Gen is sick and she decided to stay put at her mom’s. I am waiting to see if there is another time we can get together before her flight back to Tokyo. When I saw her last, she told me her mom had begged her to leave the three grandkids with her on the Upper West Side. She was trying to convince Yelena that Yelena should go back to Japan—she has a teaching job at a university there—without them.

  I said I understood her mom’s point; I don’t know if I would take three young kids to Tokyo right now.

  But I also understood Yelena’s point; oh yes, I did. She wanted to be with her kids in her own space.

  | 2 |

  A year and a half after I visited her, Noriko came to New York. She stopped here and stayed with us for a couple of days as part of a longer jaunt across the United States. She had never been to New York before.

  It was spring when she came, and the weather was just starting to turn. The boys were still in school. Noriko and I spent most of her time here walking around. She wanted to see Ground Zero, so that was one of the first places we went.

  I stood with her at the viewing area in the World Financial Center. A busload of American tourists had just arrived and were swarming around us, asking one another loudly where the Starbucks was.

  Noriko stood so close to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows that her nose was touching the glass. She stood there silently. I saw that her face was wet with tears.

  I stepped back to give her privacy. The bus riders were like ions pinging around us, shouting out random names of coffee drinks.

  Finally, after ten minutes, Noriko mopped her face with her bandanna, shoved her bandanna back in her pocket, and turned to me.

  “Shall we go?” I asked softly.

  We walked along the path by the Hudson River slowly, like old women, stopping to admire the buds on the trees.

  | 3 |

  It’s been a week since Noriko’s baby died. I e-mailed her three times over the last five days, which I know may be too frequently, but I can’t stop myself.

  I am thinking of you, I am so sorry, I hope you are doing all right. I write these words.

  Days pass.

  | 4 |

  Mick is playing a new game on the walk home from the subway station. He is very aware of movement and symmetry—he is wired like a dancer, I think, though he wants to be in the NFL—and it does not surprise me when he explains that the idea of the game is that as you walk along the right side of the sidewalk in one direction, you must be aware of the person who is coming toward you on your left; when the person is at the point where he is directly beside you, you have to make sure that your foot does not touch the ground at the same time his does; you cannot mirror his step. You ensure this by jumping.

  When you walk down the street with Mick, then, on the way home from school, you watch him watch the approach of other people very carefully, and then when someone is beside him, you watch him leap, seemingly ecstatically, into the air. In fact, he is not ecstatic; he is trying not to die. Because the idea in this game is that if you step along the same line that the other person is stepping on—if you mirror him in his step—you will die. So when that person is directly beside you, moving in the opposite direction, you must make sure you are in the air.

  This game—which looks like Mick leaping happily and randomly down the fairly industrial block our home is on—is called, naturally, war.

  I don’t think Mick has explained the rules of this game to King even though King is always with us when we do this walk. This is fine, because King is busy with his own game. We get to the spot on our block just past the security camera—I wouldn’t even have seen the security camera perched like a gargoyle above the office-building entrance if King hadn’t pointed it out—and once we are just past it, he asks me to “release” him, which means count backward from five and say “Blastoff!,” because the moment he passes the security camera’s gaze, he transforms into a long-range cruise missile, and—after blastoff—he runs all the way home, so far ahead of Mick and me that I have to hop up and down to make sure I still see his blue hat bobbing along the sidewalk, since Mick, who is very busy in his leaping/defying-death alongside strangers, cannot be rushed.

  |
5 |

  Today Katie spends a full minute jumping on her trampoline exclaiming in a grief-stricken voice, “I had a baby! Now I have nothing!”

  | 6 |

  In the time since Mick, King, Frank, and I first visited Yelena in Tokyo—it’s been five years now—I wouldn’t say I have done a spectacular job of providing any particularly Hanegi Playpark–ian experience for my boys here in New York. The boys are seven and nine now, and they hammer and do home repair occasionally with Frank. We grow flowers and vegetables on our terrace amid the truck exhaust. I let them jump on the couch cushions. They play the piano more or less reluctantly. That’s about it.

  What I have done, I hope, is try to keep this idea of Play Freely at Your Own Risk in mind as much as possible and try to communicate to the boys that playing is not what we are here for, necessarily, or even what we are doing here, but how we are here.

  I don’t know if I am having much success. King has started homework this year and despite my theories, play, for him, is not a state of consciousness. It is not really an action either, though. It is more a way of saying “freedom.”