by Ali Benjamin
Ethan steals a quick glance at the iPad, just to check on what Alex was doing. Not porn, thank goodness. Instead, it’s open to a fan site for Wicked, the Broadway musical. Her latest obsession.
Alex sits up. “So, Daddy. Do you think the song that Mommy’s group was listening to is transphobic?”
“Transphobic?” Ethan frowns. “It’s definitely inappropriate. Definitely not for kids. But how exactly would it be—”
“It was about vaginas. Not all women have vaginas, Daddy. Some women have penises. Duh.”
Sometimes Ethan gets this feeling: like he’s lost his grip on some critical thing, accidentally untethered himself from the world’s orbit. Now he finds himself in some new galaxy, everything he once took for granted faded to a distant fleck.
“Right,” he says. “That’s a good point. Alex, how do you know about transphobia?”
“Everyone knows about transphobia, Daddy. Plus, they teach us about it at school.”
The Rainbow Seed School had gone decades without any sort of sex-ed programming. That is, until Zo got some sort of bee in her bonnet about the whole thing. She raised money to bring what she called a “whole-health curriculum” to the school, an effort that wasn’t entirely without controversy. There had been a series of meetings, Zo versus what she called the ostrich moms, the ones who, as she described it, believed that “jamming their heads into the ground is a viable alternative to informed reality.” Zo had emerged victorious, as Ethan had known all along she would, and for six weeks last year, a sexuality educator had stood in front of the kids speaking frankly not just about anatomy and the mechanics of reproduction, but also—he learned only later—about the realities of pornography, about blow jobs and masturbation, with such apparent frankness that Alex had no reservations raising these topics as dinner-table conversation.
“But actually,” Alex says now. “Don’t you think ‘vagina’ is a great word? Just listen to it.” She draws the word out slowly. “Vaginaaaaa. Vagiiiiina. If I ever have a daughter, I want to name her Vagina.”
Ethan coughs. “Well, I suspect you’ll change your mind by the time you’re old enough to—”
But apparently Alex isn’t interested in his prediction, because she talks right over him. “Mommy says that one of these days she’s going to let me pick the song at the end of the meeting. I know exactly what I’ll pick, too. Can you guess? I’ll bet you can guess.” She lifts her chin and begins belting out into the darkness, “I think I’ll tryyyy…Defyyyyying gravity….”
Alex’s life has been a string of fixations, a fact that has long driven Ethan and Zo bonkers. There are, after all, only so many times one can watch the same Phineas and Ferb episodes, or listen to Taylor Swift’s country phase, or hear Nancy cartoons read aloud frame-by-frame. Everything—literally everything, save perhaps the Hamilton soundtrack—wears thin after six months of nonstop play.
Except not, apparently, for Alex.
“Tell them, IIIIII’m defyyyyying gravity!” She holds her hands out, wide, as if she’s about to take flight.
From downstairs comes Zo’s voice: “Alex. BED.”
Okay, first of all, Alex is in bed, no thanks to Zo or her ski-mask dancing friends. Ethan’s the one who’s here right now, getting their kid settled. Besides, Zo of all people should know that there’s no stopping Alex when she gets this way, all stream-of-consciousness and random blurting.
“Daddy, did you know that the guy who plays Fiero in Wicked—Fiero’s the Scarecrow, he falls in love with Elphaba—is named Norbert Butz? That’s funny. Butz. Norbert Butz. Also, what was Mommy’s group meeting about tonight? Because they said the F-word a lot.”
Two years ago, as the presidential campaign took some uncomfortable turns, Alex’s school sent home a notice called “Talking to Children About Difficult Subjects in Current Events.” Their instructions: answer your child’s questions honestly, but avoid giving more detail than necessary. Ethan tries that now. “Well…the president appointed a judge to serve on the Supreme Court. Which the president is supposed to do, that’s part of checks and balances, remember we talked about those? But someone the judge knew a long time ago says he once…um…did something bad.”
Good. That was good. That’s the story, more or less, the broad outline anyway, told delicately, in a kid-friendly way.
“Oh.” Alex’s voice is matter-of-fact. “You mean that lady he raped.”
“Uh…not exactly, he…tried. Maybe. I don’t know.” Ethan feels like he should explain about innocent-until-proven-guilty, about due process, but then he thinks about all of the women in the Capitol Rotunda, those Believe Women signs he’s been seeing everywhere, all the stories that have come out, one after another, over the last few years. He thinks about Zo, and the witches, and he doesn’t know what to tell Alex. What is the right thing to say about a very real crime that almost always comes down to one person’s word against another’s?
“Probably,” he finally says. “These…are difficult cases.”
But Alex is already moving on. “Also, Daddy, guess what? Idina Menzel—she plays Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West—missed her final Broadway performance because she fell through a trapdoor onstage. But get this: the lady who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie version of the Wizard of Oz also got hurt during filming, so some people say there’s a curse on that character. Still, I’d take the part if I could. I’d be, like, super freaked-out, but I’d totally do it, oh, and you know what else? This is so cool: sometimes NASA wakes up astronauts by playing ‘Defying Gravity.’ They play that song all the way in outer space!”
“Okay, well, we can talk about that tomorrow. Right now, though, it’s time to sleep.”
He pats the pillow, and Alex falls backward onto it, hard. He smooths down her hair, kisses her on the temple. “Good night, Norbert Butz,” he whispers.
A mistake. Alex pops right back up again. “No, I’m Elphaba,” Alex says. “She’s wicked, and she’s the only one who gets to fly, oh, and ohmygod Daddy! I forgot to tell you the most important thing! They’re making a movie of Wicked! It’s not going to come out for three years, but Daddy, we have to see it on the night it’s released, okay? Promise me, Daddy, okay? You have to promise. Do you think Idina Menzel will play Elphaba, because I can’t imagine another Elphaba, and…”
And on and on she goes, not even taking a breath.
Forget the Burglarettes. What he should write is a how-to book: How to Not Lose Your Mind. How to Live with a Hyperactive Child Who Drives You Frigging Bananas. How to Put Your Kid to Bed or Die Trying, Because Seriously: Some Nights It Feels like It Might Actually Kill You.
* * *
—
Alex was a challenge from the moment she arrived shrieking in the world. A colicky infant, she slept badly, couldn’t suckle, ate tepidly, grew too slowly. That last bit earned her a failure-to-thrive diagnosis, complete with a bunch of VNA home visits. The nurses reassured them: Things will get easier as soon as your daughter starts putting on weight.
The nurses were wrong.
As she grew, Alex proved sensitive to the mildest changes in temperature, to low-level noise, to the feel of particular blankets against her skin. She hated baths, diaper changes, being set down even for a few moments…and she was always awake.
Ethan and Zo tried everything to help her sleep. They tried Ferberizing and co-sleeping. They watched those Happiest Baby on the Block videos, wrapped Alex like a human burrito. They took turns staying up with her into the night, shushing her and swaying as she screamed. They tried feeding schedules, nurse-on-demand, skin-to-skin marathons, white-noise machines, some Putumayo lullaby CD that one of the parents in their birthing class swore had some kind of magical soporific powers and was truly the only thing a baby really needs to fall asleep.
Alex got older: three months, then six months, then a year, and as she grew, the list of thin
gs that made it impossible for her to exist peacefully in this world expanded exponentially. By the time Alex was a toddler, she couldn’t bear clothing tags, the feel of denim, synthetic fabrics, hats, barrettes, elastic socks. She raged at camera flashes, other children’s cries, scented shampoos, cheap baby wipes. Night lights. Total darkness. Bright sun.
Ethan and Zo did what they could: ordered organic cotton clothing from Hanna Andersson, tinted their car windows, drove two hours each way to Springfield to work with a $200/hour sensory integration coach. They installed dimmers in their light switches, spoke in whispers, tiptoed around their own home like cartoon burglars mid-heist. They hissed at Hypatia when she barked, and at each other every time a wayward utensil clattered to the floor. And all the while, they endured an endless stream of advice from fellow parents who happened to have hit the Easy Kid Jackpot and took their winnings as proof that they knew everything.
A year went by, then four more, and with each new milestone, Alex found a new way to challenge their best intentions. Then came kindergarten.
From the start, Alex despised school: the transitions between classes, the noise of the lunchroom, the fluorescent lights, all that tedious sitting still! One afternoon, she came home with an abrasion on her forehead, angry and raw; Alex had apparently found circle time so excruciatingly dull that she’d rubbed her face back and forth on the carpet until she’d worn away her derma entirely.
The irony of the whole thing? For all Alex’s inability to process the world around her, she was perennially unable to keep her own volume, her own energy level, her own awareness-of-self, in check. As she grew, Alex became a loud talker, an interrupter, an impulsive blurter of anything and everything that popped into her head.
While some of her sensory issues had diminished in recent years, her volume issues hadn’t. Then two years ago, she discovered musical theater, and that’s when things really got loud. Now here she is, babbling away about some elixir that Elphaba’s mother drank while pregnant, wondering if the potion that turned her green was the same thing that allowed her to fly, and how exactly did Elphaba fly, anyway?
“Well, for starters,” Ethan says, “she probably had a good night’s sleep…”
“Daddy. I’m serious. How would someone fly? I mean in real life.”
“Alex, people can’t fly. You know that.”
“Okay, but that’s what they say about bumblebees, isn’t it? And yet they can fly. So maybe the same thing is true for witches.”
“You’re in sixth grade, Alex.” His frustration is mounting. “You know that witches aren’t real. Now, once and for all, good night.”
“Wait! Hold on! I just realized something, Daddy: if you say good morning, or good afternoon, or good evening, you’re saying hello. But if you say good night, you’re saying goodbye.”
His voice is tight: “Good. Night.”
“Good evening, Daddy.” And then: “Good afternoon? Good morning?”
Ethan can feel it coming now: his patience bending, bending until it breaks. At which point, he will yell, and Zo will hear, and then Zo will come upstairs and add her own yelling to his. Alex will cry, and everyone will feel crummy, and tomorrow they’ll start the whole thing over again.
Except tonight, Ethan is saved, mercifully, by a rap on the door. Maddy peeks into the room, grins at Alex. “Hey, girl.” Maddy enters, sits on the foot of Alex’s bed. “You having trouble falling asleep?”
“I hate sleeping,” Alex declares, before telling Maddy the thing about the NASA astronauts, repeating more or less the exact same sentence structure as she just used with Ethan.
“Cool!” Maddy says. “You know, I heard an interesting fact, too. About witches, actually.”
Alex raises her eyebrows.
“So you know how Massachusetts was once filled with witches?”
Alex nods.
“Well, guess how they figured out which girls were transforming into witches?” Maddy pauses, glances over one shoulder, then the other, like she’s about to reveal top-secret information. She lowers her voice to a near-whisper and leans in. “Girls would start dreaming the same thing. All over the village. The exact same dream.”
Is Maddy making this up? Ethan doesn’t even care. Alex is spellbound, and no one is yelling, and see, this is what Zo doesn’t understand about Maddy. In some ways, Maddy’s not the best babysitter, certainly not the most responsible—she does sometimes forget to pick up Alex, she does ignore phone calls, and several times, he and Zo came home late to find their daughter plopped in front of reality TV, hand at the bottom of a bag of chips, the carefully prepared, nutritionally balanced dinner they’d left still untouched on the counter.
But Maddy’s good with Alex. Kind of a natural, actually.
“So here’s what I’m thinking.” Maddy’s voice is conspiratorial. “I think you should put your head on your pillow, and I should go into my room and put my head on my pillow, and then we should both just…let sleep come. Tomorrow when we wake up, we’ll compare dreams.”
“You think we’ll dream the same thing?” Alex asks. Ethan can tell she wants to believe this, wants to believe that witches are real, and that she might yet become one, and that it could be this simple, as easy as closing your eyes.
God, he forgets sometimes: eleven years old is still so young.
“I don’t know. But if we do…” Maddy pauses dramatically. “Then we’ll know.”
Maddy meets Ethan’s eye, gives him a tiny shrug. Like, Okay, maybe it won’t work, but what’s the worst that could happen? And just like that, Ethan’s ever-wired, never-tired daughter closes her eyes and starts taking long, slow breaths like she’s willing herself to sleep.
* * *
—
Out in the hallway, Alex’s door finally closed, Ethan whispers to Maddy, “Thank you.”
“Kinda genius, right?”
“Amazing, actually.” Ethan looks down, shakes his head. “I don’t know why it’s still so hard to get her to sleep. Maybe it’s her medicine, maybe we need to have it adjusted. I just wish she could settle—”
“Hey, Ethan?” Maddy places a hand on his arm. “You worry too much. You know that, right?”
He doesn’t know that, not at all. What is the exact right amount of worry? Light without being negligent, serious without being burdensome? He’s never known, and having a kid like Alex doesn’t make it any easier.
Maddy seems to read his thoughts. “Alex is fine.” There’s no joking now. This is as earnest as it gets. “Alex is great.” She gives his arm a tiny squeeze, and just like that, it’s all true: Alex is great. Everything is okay after all. It’s good enough, he’s good enough. Maddy’s saying it has made it so.
Something passes between them, silent, unnamed.
“Well,” Maddy finally says. She removes her hand. “So…good night, I guess.” She slips into the guest room, the one right next to Alex’s. There’s nothing left for Ethan but to head downstairs to the master bedroom, to his wife.
Behind him, Maddy closes the door so gently it doesn’t make a sound.
Zo stands motionless before the new sofa, her eyes fixed straight ahead, as if she’s having a stare-down with a phantom. She’s holding her phone, and through the speaker, an automated voice asks, Do you want to talk about a recent order? Or something else?
“Something else,” Zo tells the voice.
Ethan knows without asking that Zo’s called the customer-service line of a major brand, some corporation that’s fucked up somehow. Maybe they did business with the NRA, or with some totally ordinary-sounding nonprofit that turned out to mask a virulently homophobic hate group. Or who knows: perhaps the company just advertised on the wrong television show, some cable news outlet whose host said something terrible, or at least clumsily, and someone tweeted it, and now the company’s 1-800 number is fielding furious calls from all over the
country.
Okay, says the automated voice. I can help you with that.
Ethan moves toward their bedroom, but Zo stops him. “Ethan, wait.”
If you want to speak with a customer representative, say, “Speak with a representative.” If you want something else, say, “Something else.”
“Speak with a representative,” Zo says to her phone, at the same moment Ethan asks, “What’s up?”
I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that, the automated voice says. If you want to speak with a customer representative, say, “Speak with a representative.” If you want something else, say, “Something else.”
Zo leans in to her phone. “SPEAK WITH A REPRESENTATIVE.”
Okay, then, says the voice. I’ll connect you to a customer representative. Some kind of godawful New Age music starts piping through the speaker.
“Ethan, what do you think of this sofa?” Zo asks.
“It’s…nice,” Ethan says. He pauses, then adds, “The old sofa was nice too.”
“But what color would you say it is?” Zo asks.
“It’s gray. Like the old sofa.”
Zo frowns. Wrong answer. “You don’t think it’s blue?”
This new sofa, like the old sofa, is most definitely gray. The sofa is gray, the walls are gray, the carpet is gray, their lives are gray. They’re trapped inside a black-and-white photograph, that’s what they are.