by Susan Perabo
But one afternoon the next year, when Claire went to collect Evan from school, the first-grade teacher pulled her aside in the main lobby and reported in a hushed voice that some of the other boys in class had been teasing Evan about his weight.
“His weight?” Claire shifted two-year-old Meredith to her other hip; Meredith was a squirrely toddler (squirrely but perfect!), rarely content to be in one position for more than about fifteen seconds. Claire knew if she put Meredith down in the school lobby, chaos would ensue. “What about his weight?”
It had never occurred to Claire that Evan’s weight might make him a target, because she had never considered him fat. She had seen plenty of fat kids in her exam rooms; most of them had a mouthful of cavities to go with their rolling stomachs. Evan was nothing like that. Evan was big, like Mark. He’d been a big baby and a big toddler and now he was a big six-year-old, more round than straight. It wasn’t his diet; it was his body type. Mark had looked the same in childhood photos, darling, thriving, not fat. Evan didn’t eat candy or drink soda and he was always running around and—
“One of the boys called him a porker,” the teacher whispered. She was a new teacher, no more than a year from undergrad, and she actually blushed when she said the word. It did sound obscene, Claire thought, especially coming out of the mouth of an adult, like it couldn’t help but have a sexual connotation, but the fact that it didn’t in this context made it seem somehow even more revolting. “Then it caught on and a few boys started doing it. Has he been upset at home?”
Claire put Meredith down but kept a firm grip on her hand. “When would he have been upset at home? When did this happen?”
The teacher smiled (a pity smile, Claire recognized) at the bouncing Evan, who was leaping from red square to black square on the lobby’s gleaming tiled floor, much to the amusement of his sister, who was attempting to twist her sweaty hand free from Claire’s fingers so that she could join her brother. “Ebben,” she said. She said this one thousand times every day. “Ebben. Ebben.” The halls were empty now and the slap of his sneakers echoed in the stairwells above.
“It started last week,” the teacher said. “I’ve spoken to the boys about it privately, but there’s one in particular who won’t let it drop.”
“Last week?” Claire said. She let Meredith go. It was like letting a puppy off a leash, her daughter around the corner and down a hallway and out of sight in seconds, Evan trailing behind. “It started last week and you’re just telling me now?”
“We try to let the kids work these things out on their own,” the teacher said, standing a little straighter. “If we involve the parents every time someone gets called a name . . . ” She trailed off, leaving Claire to assume the rest of the sentence, in which she and every other attentive parent in the world was tried and convicted. Claire realized that in the space of two minutes she had unwittingly become that kind of parent—and it wasn’t even fair; she’d asked only a single question, expressed in an entirely justifiable moment of surprise, and now she imagined she was flagged, probably forever, before she’d even had a chance to decide what kind of parent she wanted to be in this new world with these new rules.
“Really, I just wanted you to be aware,” the teacher said. “Generally we believe in awareness, not intervention.”
Hey, great motto! Claire thought. Students, teachers, parents, please take note: Awareness is now sufficient. An actual response is not necessary. Why act on what you know, when knowing is considered enough?
Meredith and Evan had wound their way back around to the front doors, so Claire took the opportunity for escape, muttered a thank-you to the teacher over her shoulder as she caught up with her children.
In the parking lot, in the minivan, she held out for about forty-five seconds before asking Evan about the situation.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He was sitting in a booster seat beside Meredith, who was strapped into her car seat and beaming at him, fresh off her puppy run, basking in the glorious light cast by her big brother. This was the way it always was, and Claire had tried to accept the fact that except for when Meredith was looking at Evan, for whom she had always saved her very best smiles, happy had never been Meredith’s default emotion. Baby Evan had usually had a smile on his face, but baby Meredith’s go-to expression had normally been one of consternation and/or suspicion. Creased forehead. Narrowed eyes. Pursed lips. It was if she were always waiting to be put down in her crib, anticipating it, whereas with Evan it had been a daily surprise: This place? Again?
“Honey—” she said to her son.
“Really, don’t worry about it,” he said again. He was playing a handheld video game—a car-only treat—and he didn’t even bother to look up from the screen.
“Of course I’m going to worry about it,” she said, watching him in the rearview mirror. “It’s not nice. Does it make you feel bad?”
“Yeah,” he said absently, still not raising his head. “But it’s okay.”
The game beeped and buzzed. Did he even know what he was saying? Was he even part of this conversation? He adored his electronic games. If they’d let him, he might have played all day. But they didn’t let him, of course. He exercised regularly. He played baseball with the neighborhood kids practically every afternoon. He was an active child. A porker? Ha. Hardly. She’d show those kids a porker. She’d seen a kid in the grocery store last week stuffing his face with free samples while his mother (incidentally, also a porker) stood by and watched with a big fat smile on her face. She’d bring that kid in for fat show-and-tell. “You want to see a real porker?” she’d ask the class.
She was going thirty-eight miles per hour in a school zone. Okay, Jesus. Jesus, what was wrong with her? She took a breath, eased off the accelerator. She was shocked by her own capacity for cruelty—the little boy in the grocery store had a name, a story, she reminded herself. She was ashamed, and didn’t even know where the rage had come from, so suddenly. Of course it wasn’t the fact that Evan was not really a porker that made the bullying unacceptable. It was terrible to call someone fat if they were actually fat. And yet to call someone fat who wasn’t . . . she somehow couldn’t get past this particular element of the injustice. It just seemed wrong on a whole other level.
“Evan,” she said. “It’s not okay, honey. It’s not okay at all. It’s mean and awful to call people names. I think I should talk to someone about it.”
“What? No!” he exclaimed, horrified enough to look up from his game and meet her eyes in the mirror. “Don’t worry about it, okay? There’s nothing you can do!”
Full stop. It was a good thing, perhaps, that their eyes only met in the mirror, that it was only his reflection that spoke, that she was not looking into her child’s face directly when he said this. Her eyes slipped back to the street in front of her just as something crawled over her skin, something unfamiliar, something slimy and cold that surely belonged at the bottom of the ocean. In less than a second it had her covered from head to toe, and then it started squeezing. So this was the world that existed for her six-year-old son. This was it. A place where things could make him feel bad and absolutely nothing could be done about it. A place where she was powerless to protect him. At six he had somehow already reached the conclusion, independently, somewhere within the walls of that elementary school—that elementary school where he had whistled just last year!—while she at home and at the office had cheerfully and blindly persisted in her belief that she had at least a modicum of control over the things in the world that could harm him. She wasn’t a fool, but really, was a modicum too much to ask?
Meredith was clamoring for his attention. He was looking at his game. The game had swallowed him. Meredith was dying for attention—“Ebben, Ebben, Ebben,” frantically, smacking her hand on the side of her car seat. A group of kids darted out from behind some parked cars and Claire braked hard, probably harder than she needed to, and she and Evan and Meredith lurched forward. “Sorry!” one of the kids yelled, looking
back guiltily, but another was laughing. A dog was barking in a nearby yard.
“Ebben! Ebben! Ebben!” Meredith insisted.
“Evan, for god’s sake, acknowledge your sister!” Claire shouted.
•
In all the ways that Claire knew mattered most, she had lived a charmed life. She was fortunate, and she’d been taught from a young age to appreciate that good fortune. She was not one who went blithely through childhood and adolescence taking everything for granted, forgetting that it was a luxury to have three square meals and a room of her own and a shiny bicycle in the garage. She was an only child, and her parents—who had both been in their mid thirties when she was born—had constructed their middle age around her. They were both teachers—her father taught high school English, her mother middle school social studies—until Claire was born, and then her mother left full-time work and became a substitute teacher so that she could be a full-time mother. Home had always been a safe zone. And if her father occasionally drank too much, and if her mother sunk low and occasionally spent the morning in bed after Claire left for school, it was all forgiven and forgotten between them when she walked through the door in the afternoon.
“You were the glue,” her mother told her a couple of months before she died. “You have always been the glue.”
Claire wasn’t sure how she felt about this. “Glue” in the sense of simply being a force that tightly bonds, or “glue” in the sense of the necessary element in fixing something broken? It seemed too late to ask her mother this question, unfair to bring up something, anything, that couldn’t be satisfactorily resolved in a half an hour. That went against all the unwritten conventions of conversing with the dying. No one wanted to end on a sour note. The final days lingered on for months; every conversation might have been their last conversation but wasn’t. Until it finally was.
It was cancer that killed her mother, when Claire was twenty-seven, before Evan and Meredith were born. It was the same year her marriage ran into trouble (she knew this was unfairly euphemistic, designed to not assign blame, where in truth the only one to blame was herself), so all those emotions were tangled up together. Her father remarried quickly, just over a year after her mother died, and she recalled being struck by the injustice of this, that a replacement wife could be attained so quickly and with relative ease, while a replacement mother was not even an option. Of course she knew this wasn’t fair and that her mother was irreplaceable as a person, as a proper noun, but she clearly wasn’t irreplaceable as a common noun—her father once again had a wife, whereas she would never again have a mother.
•
She kept her promise to little Evan. She did not call the first grade teacher and demand names. She did not deluge the principal with frantic emails, in part to prove to them that they had been wrong about her, but also because she genuinely believed that to intervene—at that level—would only make Evan’s life worse. She very much did not want him to be the porker who, by the way, needed his mommy to helicopter in and fight his battles for him. But she was ill with fear every time she dropped him off in front of that two-story brick building with the sloping lawn. A few months before the place had seemed warm and welcoming and full of light, and now it was as if she were pitching him headlong into a jungle whose predators she could not even begin to imagine. And he—her sweet and beautiful Evan, who had been the center of her world, her only child for so long—was defenseless against them. She began to look at all the other children in his class with suspicion. That little blonde with the shirts that said “Daddy’s Girl” and “Princess in Training.” The lanky kid, tall as a fourth-grader, who flung himself down the front stairs, limbs flailing. The redhead with the Eagles backpack who always ignored, and then sneered at, the crossing guard.
“Who’s that?” she’d asked Evan one day, a couple weeks after the porker incident, as they were driving home from school.
“Logan Boone,” he’d mumbled. “He gets his name on the board every day.”
“For what?”
“Name-calling,” Evan said.
She watched seven-year-old Logan Boone swagger down the sidewalk, his backpack slung loosely around one shoulder. Even his gait was reckless, thoughtless; he shared the sidewalk with no one, perhaps not out of malice, she thought, but worse, out of the belief that his space was the only space that mattered. Wasn’t that the very definition of a sociopath? He could imagine the world through no eyes but his own. And he believed himself invincible, Claire was sure of it. So his name was on the board. So what? Big deal! It would not give him a moment of pause, not sneery Logan Boone. Of course he was the one who had first called Evan the name. She was right beside him now in the minivan, and she had the urge to roll down her window and shout something obscene at him. “Hey, you piece of shit!” she would shout. Wait—no. “Asshole, bastard, piece of shit!” It felt good to even think the words, a rush of adrenaline, a moment of euphoria, a parental climax. He was not so powerful, this cruel ignorant child, this ugly boy who didn’t deserve to stand beside her son, never mind—
God, what was wrong with her? She was losing her mind. I am losing my mind, she said to herself in her head, because she knew that if she really had been losing her mind, she wouldn’t be able to have the thought with such clarity . . . although she had never really been sure this was true. But the rage she felt for him was immense: god, that sneer. She thought of the phrase “wipe that look off your face,” and understood it completely for the first time. She wanted to leap out of the car and wipe that look off his face with her fingernails. But she was helpless. He couldn’t have been any uglier, this boy now receding in her side-view mirror, receding back into the place where he could do anything he wanted, where she could not touch him.
•
“Some kids are just assholes,” had been Mark’s predictable response, when she’d told him she’d positively identified the “porker” culprit. “Wasn’t anybody ever mean to you?”
“Not in first grade,” she said. “They’re not supposed to be horrible to each other already. Isn’t that what middle school’s for?”
“It’s a different world,” Mark said, shrugging. “Everything’s changed. Our kids are going to have cell phones when they’re ten.”
“Our kids are not going to have cell phones when they’re ten. Absolutely not.”
“All I’m saying is that everything happens sooner,” Mark said. “The clock’s sped up. But maybe that means it’ll be over sooner, too. Maybe by the time they’re fifteen they’ve already lived through all the crap we had to deal with until we were nineteen.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I don’t know,” he’d said. “We can hope.”
He could hope, that was the thing. Mark could always hope. It was a permanent condition, like freckles, or lupus. Mr. Glass Half-Full, she sometimes called him, though they both knew that 90 percent of the time she did not mean it as a term of endearment. Everyone loved Mark. And why not? He was lovable. What you saw was what you got. Nothing lurked under the surface. She knew some people thought he was a phony—her own mother had thought that for a long time—that his endless chattering away to patients was an act, his friendliness to strangers insincere. But it was all maddeningly genuine, every bit of it. Blessed with impeccable chemical balance, Mark took pleasure in things without questioning why he was taking pleasure in them.
On weekends, when the kids were little, she and Mark would have their friends over, other couples with young children, and the men would set up Mark’s movie projector and sit in lounge chairs in the backyard, drinking beer and watching James Bond movies on the side of the garden shed, while the women sat on the patio talking about their babies and their jobs and complaining about those men in the lounge chairs.
And inevitably one of the women (they were all divorced now, every single one of those couples, a 100-percent divorce rate among those early friends) would say, “But then there’s Mark.” This was always followed by resigned sighs, t
hen several minutes of tipsy, joking-not-joking envy, and then finally a group PowerPoint-presentation-minus-slides detailing several Great Things About Mark. (He separates whites and colors! He took the kids to the doctor without her! He compliments her new haircut!) And later, after the friends had all left, Claire would look at him through their eyes, swept up in his star power, thrilled anew that she possessed him, and the night would inevitably end with them wrapped together in bed and him saying, “We should definitely have those people over more often.”
So he was great, yes. In all sorts of ways. But his fathering motto—“We can hope!”—had never been much help, and in fact was becoming increasingly useless with every passing year. It was, to Claire, once the wolves were at the door, nothing short of infuriating.
Would her mother have been useful then, after the honeymoon period of Evan whistling and baby Meredith beaming at, utterly entranced by, her whistling brother? Would her mother have had wisdom to impart? Her mother had always had an uncanny, sturdy sense of perspective—not a judgment that diminished you for what you were feeling, but just the right questions to rack the world into a clearer focus long enough for you to see your issue in its proper place.
Sometimes she tried to conjure up her mother and imagine what she would say—certainly she would not applaud Claire’s hysterical rage. But Claire did not have her mother’s gift for perspective, and so she couldn’t re-create what her mother would say—or at least not how she would say it—and bring herself any clarity or relief. Her mother had become a shadowy figure to her, by then almost a decade gone; the list of things her mother had missed was as long as the list of things she had not missed, and the listing was too sad, the conjuring not only unhelpful but also depressing, so Claire put those thoughts aside.
She had to focus on her children. She had to change the game. She had been spoiled by her own happiness, by Evan’s happiness, by the family’s happiness, allowed herself to believe that raising children would be more pleasure than pain. She had simply been going along, foolishly thinking she understood the rules. She and Mark had provided for the children. They had a lovely home and roomy van and a reliable second car. They watched movies and played games and sang songs, and her heart was full and she had imagined that this would suffice, but she had not counted on the world. How could she have forgotten about the world? Was she so stupid? So naive?