Martin was home early, not at the hospital late, not in some distant country, and when he walked in the door, Fancy said, “We’re having steaks and baked potatoes.”
An hour later, Eric was in his high chair, already fed, with a plastic bowl of cereal to play with, and everyone took their seats as Martin came in bearing a bottle of red wine. “Fancy, let’s toast your father,” he said, and Fancy brushed a tear from her eye.
The bottle was opened, wineglasses filled, and Martin lifted his glass. “I never met your father, but you’re a treasure, and he must have been one too.” Fancy said, “He was. Thank you. This means so much to me.”
“Fancy,” Daniel said then, “what happened after they buried your father in the ground? After the dirt hit the coffin? Did flowers grow fast?”
Fancy ruffled his hair and said, “So here’s what happened. Down in the ground my father went, the coffin this big old pine thing, huge because my dad was seven feet tall, where I get my own height from. There were prayers and poems and people sniffled and cried, and when it was over, my mom said, ‘Fancy, are you coming home now, we’ve got lots of people coming to mourn.’ And I said, ‘Not yet, I’ve got to go to Dad’s favorite place,’ and my mom understood, and off I went to the bridge, where he used to cast his fishing line on Sunday mornings at dawn, and I stood there, and the hours passed, and the sun grew hotter, and I waited and waited, and then all of a sudden, one fish, then a second, then a third, came flying out of the river, arcing over me, their fins flat out, their gills flapping, until they landed back in the water and swam away.”
Daniel’s eyes were huge, and he said, “That’s a great story, Fancy.”
And Martin said, “It is. That kind of stellar experience, being a part of an experience cherished by another, is what I see when I operate on people’s eyes, their profound and genuine dreams, the wishes they have for their lives, if their sight is returned.”
Daniel stared at his father, then said to Joan, “Does everyone in the whole world tell stories?” There was a fillip of concern in his voice, a fear perhaps tied to Fancy’s father’s grave, the sound of dirt hitting the coffin.
“Lots of people do. A story requires two things: a great story to tell and the bravery to tell it,” Joan said.
Daniel cut into his meat, sawed a bit off, put it in his mouth, chewed, nodded, then said, “Oh.”
“You are brave enough,” Joan said, wanting to allay his concern, but she sensed that Daniel feared something that might be more awful than death or looking into the depths of someone’s eyes: that perhaps the world was overrun by storytellers better than he.
* * *
“Book, book, book,” Eric yelled, and Joan heard Daniel yell back, “Get away, that’s mine. Don’t be a pest.” Since turning eight, Daniel was not only writing, but also climbing what he called his ladder to literature, a plain metal ladder he dragged in from the garage, warned about using without the steadying hand of either Joan or Fancy.
That first time he climbed up, Joan found his perfect little toes gripped around the top rung like pale commas, his hands pulling down big, heavy books. “Mom, I want to read the good stuff on my own,” he said, and she understood, she had been just like him at the same age.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Kozinski’s The Painted Bird, he read each of those books and dozens more, drawn to the Russians, to a Romanian, to love and war and infidelity, to the Soviet police state and terminal illness, to tales of cruel acts and heroic escapes. The suggestion Martin had once made—that Daniel read books geared for children his own age—had been roundly rejected by Joan, a child-rearing debate she had won. “It just makes me sort of sad,” Martin had said. “I don’t want him losing his innocence so soon.”
“That ship seems to have sailed,” Joan replied, and Daniel read whatever he wanted.
Once, The Happy Hooker was among the books he pulled down. “Mom,” he yelled out, and when Joan came into the living room, Daniel was staring at the cover, the salacious book a dead golden bird in her son’s small, outstretched hands, and she was disturbed to find herself thinking of the way the hooker had screwed her brother-in-law, then allowed herself to be penetrated by the stubby red penis of the brother-in-law’s German shepherd.
“Can I read this one too?” he asked, and Joan said, “Of course, but only when your baby teeth are so long gone you will have no memory of them, and you live on your own, far away from Daddy and me.” Clutching the sex book against his chest, Daniel said, “But why would I ever live far away from you and Daddy?” She gathered him up into a tight hug and gently removed the book from his grip. That night she handed it back to Martin to hide well.
One afternoon, when she was feeding Eric in the kitchen, Daniel pulled up a chair and said, “I think we should talk about the books I’m reading,” and in the late afternoons, when he was home from school, and Eric was napping, and Fancy was in the kitchen preparing dinner, Joan and Daniel sat in the living room, or ran across the grass, up and over the knoll, to their special glen where they stretched out on a blanket and talked about what he was reading, what he liked or disliked, if anything had scared him. Sometimes they brought their books and mother and son read silently side by side, lifting their heads occasionally to determine the shifting shapes of the clouds.
From the start, Daniel did a curious thing each time he finished a book. Before returning it to its place on the living-room shelves, he crossed out Joan’s name on the flyleaf and wrote in his own. When she asked him why, he said, “I’m taking possession, Mom,” and she laughed because even at such a young age he needed to leave a piece of himself behind, in the work of others, with his own work. Exactly like her, or rather, exactly like the way she had been.
9
From his birth, Eric was like that nursery rhyme: when he was good, he was very, very good, and when he was bad, he was horrid. All that was missing was the little curl right in the middle of his forehead. His hair was as black as Joan’s, but the same texture as Martin’s, straight as a pasture of reeds, not a curl to be found.
When the daughters of the former Pregnant Six came over for playdates with Daniel, it was Eric who absorbed their attention, whom they insisted on mothering, ordering Daniel around in supercilious tones—“Bring me his blanket,” or “He needs a new bottle, make sure you warm it up right”—while Eric cooed in their arms, wrapped long blond or brunette or pale red hair around his chubby fingers. He was angelic with the girls, never screamed when he was their make-believe baby. But with his own mother he screamed, jags that lasted for hours when he wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, or wet, or dirty, or ill, or hurting, or teething, and Joan couldn’t figure out if it was because the world seemed to him a frightening place, or if it was simpler than that—mere frustration that he could not yet make himself understood. When he would finally lock his lips together, the silence itself rang, as if a bomb had decimated all the sounds in the world, leaving nothing behind.
Daniel was usually a good sport and played the game of happy family while Joan and some combination of Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa watched a version of the future unfold. But sometimes, when he grew tired of heeding commands, he disappeared, and Joan would find him in his room, at his white desk, a notebook in front of him, a pen in his hand. During one of those afternoons, he started a story about Henry refusing the kind offer of another squirrel family to join them. “Come be with us,” the mother squirrel said. She was fat and round and her fur was brown. “No, I’m not interested in having any brothers and sisters, not anymore. Being on my own is much better.” Joan silently agreed.
When the weather was nice, the women sat outside at Joan’s old writing desk. Purchased in a secondhand store for twenty-five dollars when she was eighteen and new to New York, there was no longer room for it in the house, but she had not wanted to set it out on the curb, dumped into a garbage truck. It hurt her to use the table this way, on which she had written so much, now stained from sweating g
lasses of iced tea and wine and gin and tonics and soda cans, but at least she could sit at it, her bare toes kicking at the cool grass she and Fancy had planted. Listening to the women’s delight with how their eldest daughters so naturally cared for Eric, Joan would wish just one little girl would refuse to hold him, would say she had different dreams for herself, did not want to waste her time learning how to mother, that it was a skill she would have no use for. But such was unlikely, for as smart as Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa were, they were vocal about their maternal fulfillment, their satisfaction in having children, “Even better than we imagined it would be,” they frequently said, in earshot of their daughters. “Don’t you think so, Joan?” they asked her, and although Joan smiled, never did she nod her assent.
Once, her life had been completely fulfilled by a different kind of striving, that did not involve watching children interact and hearing ecstatic mothers describe their crushes with motherhood.
It always came as a shock to her then, that she was no different from any of them: a formerly famous writer now a stay-at-home mother, taking a yoga class two towns over twice a week, reading to Daniel, listening to his stories, trying to find a way in with Eric, a four-day weekend twice a year with Annabelle Iger in New York, happily hearing her rail against marriage, against children. Joan’s failure to produce the first novel demonstrated, Iger said, the norm’s destructive, debilitating effects. The way Iger held Martin wholly responsible would give Joan a sense of malevolent glee.
One cold afternoon, when the daughters of Augusta, Teresa, and Dawn were playing their usual game with Eric and Daniel in the nursery, and the women were in Joan’s kitchen, cups filled with hot coffee, plates filling up with slices of Reine de Saba, the chocolate almond cake Dawn was testing on them before offering it at Boulangerie de Rhome, the news of the day was that, in Vermont, a social worker was shot to death with a rifle by a mother fearing she would lose custody of her children. Meg and Teresa pressed their hands to their mouths, as Dawn said, “I’d do the same thing, shoot anyone who tried to take my kids from me.” Joan nearly said aloud what she was thinking: she loved Daniel, she did love Eric, but sequential hours at a desk of her own, in a room of her own, with the ideas, or at least one idea, flowing, having a brief respite from custody, from mothering, from Daniel’s after-school questions about everything, from Eric’s screams, would not be half-bad.
* * *
At two, Eric’s first word was not Mommy, Daddy, Daniel, Fancy, grass, bath, or candy, or any variation thereof, but no. And it was not a general no. It took Joan and Fancy several days to understand what Eric was trying to refuse, and even Daniel, who could decipher Eric’s grunts and waving hands easily, was confused.
No meant no more reading to Eric at bedtime, no more big books, no more children’s books, no reading at all, refusing that which was essential to Joan. However, if promised a red lollipop, he would listen to a story of Daniel’s. He seemed to like the little gray squirrel, but the lollipop had to be in sight at all times, otherwise he stuffed his little fingers into his little ears and turned his face to the starry blue wall.
If the color blue, among other things, encouraged efficiency and communication, then Eric excelled at combining those two traits, efficiently communicating his needs and his wants without linguistic prowess.
No more reading came first, then No diaper. “No diaper,” Eric said to Joan when she was changing him one morning. “No diaper,” he said to Fancy that same day, when she was doing the same thing. He tugged at the diaper, pushed it down, figured out how to get one leg free, then the other, then ran through the house naked from the waist down, his chunky little ass so low to the ground.
“He’s done with diapers,” Daniel said to Joan.
“I get that, love, but he’s only two. Barely potty-trained. He’s not ready to make that decision for himself,” and Joan diapered Eric again.
“No diaper,” Eric yelled in the middle of the night, abandoning sleeping straight through, a trick only recently mastered, until his demand was honored. It was three in the morning, and everyone was gathered around his crib. Martin said, “He knows his own mind. So let’s try underpants. Maybe he’s telling us he knows more than we do.”
Apparently he did, and Joan thought his name was proving itself—he was ruling his own world, setting the guidelines by which he was willing to live. Superheroes ran across his bottom from then on. Somehow, he had trained himself.
The week Eric left diapers behind, Daniel said, “How old was I when I stopped wearing diapers?” Joan thought, then said, “Almost three. Right, Fancy?” And Fancy nodded. “So does that mean Eric is smarter than me?” The corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes, too, were drooping like some old hunting dog, like the oldest hunting dog in the world. “Of course not,” Joan said. “Everyone lives their life on a different schedule. Eric is early in this area, you were right on time.”
* * *
Eric was, however, very slow to talk. He gathered up one word at a time, then ran with that word as if it were a kite on the end of a long rope. At three, his favorite word was sandbox. Led to the sandbox, he would spend happy hours alone building battlements, bridges made of fallen branches and twigs, forts with his own shirt and pants, holes filled with water from the hose that he figured out how to uncoil and turn on. Usually, he did not destroy what he created.
* * *
If blue fostered intelligence, then Joan had her doubts, both about the efficacy of colors employed this way, and about Eric. At four, his mouth was a receptacle for items other than food—bobby pins, pennies, paperclips, buttons, crayons, the sundered hoof of Fancy’s stuffed giraffe. At four and a half, he began eating sand, clumps of dirt, chewy leaves, flowers plucked from the gardens, his baby teeth masticating it all. At nearly five, he was also sucking on pebbles, mashing pen caps of cheap ballpoints down, like some steel-toothed machine, until he bit through the plastic. It was as if his refusal to breastfeed had manifested into an unquenchable oral fixation. Martin issued his professional determination that it was a phase he would outgrow.
But when Fancy found a sliver of bark between his front teeth, his tongue green from leaves, teeth marks scratching the surface of a rock he had in his pocket, she brought her concerns to Joan, and Joan couldn’t keep herself from yelling at Eric. “Why are you eating all this crazy stuff?” and Eric, calm with that irritating half-smile on his lips, said, “I just like how it feels in my mouth.” She left Fancy with Eric outside on the swings and went inside, to a living-room shelf where she found Martin’s Diseases and Disorders and searched its pages for a disorder that might explain why he was stuffing strange things down his gullet, if it indicated some kind of mental disturbance, and there it was:
Pica (/'pakә/ py-kә): the persistent eating of nonnutritive substances like paper, clay, metal, chalk, soil, glass, sand, ice, starch. Probably a behavior pattern driven by multiple factors. Some recent evidence supports including pica with the obsessive-compulsive spectrum of disorders. There are several theoretical approaches that attempt to explain the etiology:
Nutritional theories attribute pica to specific deficiencies of minerals, such as iron and zinc.
The sensory and psychological theories center on the finding that many patients with pica say that they just enjoy the taste, texture, and smell of the item they are eating.
A neuropsychiatric theory is supported by evidence that certain brain lesions in laboratory animals have been associated with abnormal eating behaviors, and it is postulated that pica might be associated with certain patterns of brain disorder in humans.
Psychosocial theories surrounding pica have described an association with family stress.
Addiction or addictive behavior has also been suggested as one possible explanation for pica behavior in some patients.
Treatment: Education about nutrition. Psychological counseling. Behavioral interventions for children with developmental disabilities. Closer supervision of children
during play. Child-proof homes and play environments.
Eric didn’t seem to have developmental difficulties, or an obsessive-compulsive disorder, the sandbox was regularly raked, there was no lead paint in the house, none, as far as she knew, in the dirt. He was the youngest member of a loving family, and chewed a children’s multivitamin every single day. What stress could he have?
That night, Joan showed Martin the pica entry and said, “I think our youngest son might be suffering from this.”
They had a heart-to-heart with Eric in the living room. Martin on the couch, Eric on the ottoman, Joan in the comfortable armchair some distance away. Triangles were the only thing she remembered from junior high geometry, and if a line were drawn from Martin to Eric, Eric to Joan, Joan to Martin, they were the three points of an obtuse triangle, and she, way out there, was the longest side, the point at the end of ninety degrees.
“Eric, do you feel compelled—is something making you eat dirt, sand, pebbles, leaves, twigs, sticks, stones, grass, and anything else that people don’t usually eat? Something inside that’s telling you to eat those things? Voices, or just a hunger you can’t explain to yourself?” Martin asked.
“No,” Eric said.
“No what?” Martin asked.
“I don’t hear voices and I eat real food when I’m hungry.” It wasn’t an explanation, but it was something.
“Will you stop eating dirt, sand, pebbles, leaves, twigs, sticks, stones, grass, and anything else you know doesn’t belong in your mouth?” Joan was impressed Martin could reel everything off twice in the same order, although surely he did the same thing, with medical terms, in the operating room.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 12