by Heidi Pitlor
After more practice, Stephanie finally channeled Rescue Sitter’s volume and stature.
“That’s what I am talking about. You go, girl!” Amber shoved two fingers in her mouth and blew a deafening whistle. “Go mommy! Go mommy!”
Stephanie shrank back to her previous self and giggled into her hand.
When I had switched off the TV, Bertie had said, “I never had to be taught to raise my voice to Norm or anyone else. When did parents become so weak?”
“ ‘Weak?’ ” I said. Was she referring to me too? “How about ‘empathetic’? Or ‘compassionate’ ”?
“Weak,” she said. “Afraid. What are a few six-year-olds really going to do to you?”
Several answers immediately came to mind, but I said nothing.
Organizations like Girls Who Code and FearlesslyGirl demonstrate that we are finally learning to empower girls. But what of empowering ourselves? Some of us might still struggle when trying to assert authority in the face of our children. Speaking sternly and definitively may feel unnatural at first. But it is necessary to teach our boys that women deserve respect.
Of course, each of us must determine our own style of discipline. Positive reinforcement can work well for some children. The occasional bribe will not ruin your son.
I opted not to mention the efficacy of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. I thought about Cass’s separation anxiety; a child’s acting out so often stemmed from unmet physical needs like hunger or fatigue, or unmet emotional needs. I hated to teach a person that emotion was a bad thing. Especially boys. They got enough of this just living in the world.
And a gentler tone does not need to be a less effective one. We must experiment and rely on trial-and-error to learn what best suits us and our particular children.
I wanted to caution readers against believing that all discipline problems were solvable. Some might disappear with maturity, I could say. One never knew. Of course Lana’s book was meant to promote authority, not uncertainty.
The school years are a time of entering society with your child, a time of socialization and of making public and standing tall behind your decision to enroll him in ballet classes or to demand that he not pummel other boys even if another initiates the pummeling. ‘Boys will be boys’ is a phrase we have all heard. But it waives culpability for everything from violence to insensitivity, public and graphic discussion of sex to the abandonment of hygiene. Boys will be whatever we help them become.
I wrote with dumb hope, and looked around for Cass, but he had gone into the other room.
As parents, we have the chance to teach our boys that every person, no matter their race, gender, abilities, or class, has value. This message is, of course, more important now than ever. Simply because a bully is popular or famous hardly means that he is a good role model.
I knew enough not to tiptoe any closer to the president. My mandate had been to broaden Lana’s fan base, and maybe I had already written too much.
I heard a strange clunking sound, and went to see that Cass had made a stairway out of pillows and books and furniture and was now balancing a lamp at the top of a heap while attempting to grab onto the shade. “Hold up. Come with me,” I told him.
I helped him into his red snowsuit and Elmo hat, and we headed outside to the truck. Across the street, Jessica Garbella was shoveling the end of her driveway. She waved hello. “Where are you two off to?”
“The Mount,” I said, deciding as I spoke. “In Lenox. The Edith Wharton house.”
“Ooooh, I haven’t been there yet! I’m dying to see it.”
“It’s off-season and the house itself isn’t open. We’re just going to go play on the grounds for a while.”
Her face opened wide.
“Do you—do you want to come?”
She nodded eagerly.
In my truck on our way to Lenox, Jessica told us that Ron’s mother, who had a house near Ventford Hall, another Lenox mansion and museum, was now in Marco Island and driving Ron and her crazy with constant texts about his sister attending the Women’s March in Washington. “His mom’s afraid that there’s going to be a terrorist attack. I am turning off my phone right now,” she said, and reached in her pocket.
“God, inauguration was yesterday. I’ve been so buried in work that I’m losing track. And the Women’s March is today?” I had seen on Google Alert that Lana would be one of the speakers. The battle lines in our country were now etched in stone. What luck I’d had in getting to work with Lana, especially now. Route 20 appeared vacant before us, the tree branches limp with ice. I grew a little heartbroken at being so far from the fast-beating heart of this historic moment.
“I was surprised when Annika first told me she was going to D.C.,” Jessica said. “She’s a plastic surgeon, and not the good kind that does reconstructive work after mastectomies or injuries. She and her banker husband are Republicans. It’s like, ‘This isn’t your party, girlfriend.’ I really wanted to fly down to D.C. for it, but we have to go to a fundraiser for the Red Sox Foundation in Northampton tonight.”
I nodded, amazed by the sorts of people who lived in the Berkshires year-round now. I pulled my truck into the empty lot of the Mount, and we rode over the dirt and ice path down toward the road that led to the house.
“Oh my God, is that it?” Jessica said, when the estate came into view.
We trudged through the packed snow toward the white Carolean mansion that Wharton herself had designed after tiring of privileged Newport. She and her husband had lived here for ten years before they divorced and she moved to France. Snow covered the high roof and windowtops, and gave the stately house the look of a wedding cake presiding over the sprawling valley and woods.
“It’s incredible. Look at it! I loved The Age of Innocence. I loved the movie with Michelle Pfeiffer.”
“She wrote House of Mirth here, you know,” I said.
“Can you even imagine having this kind of money?”
The French flower garden, in season a rainbow of lilies and phlox and hydrangea, was now a rumpled blanket of white. Jessica, Cass, and I wandered between the lindens toward the Italian Garden, its fountain now a still pool of ice. Cass moved to step onto the frozen water, but I pulled him back. We continued out through the snow and along a slick, narrow path toward the sugary woods. Cass lay down on the powder and made a snow angel. “Come on, you make one too!” he said, and both Jessica and I got down, lay on our backs, and made smudgy larger shapes on either side of his as if we were his angel parents. When we stood again, he set stones on all three of them for eyes.
“Perfect!” Jessica said. She brushed off the back of her jeans. “We’re trying, you know, Ron and I. To have a baby. We’ve been trying for years. I’ve gone through four rounds of in vitro—and I’ve taken every herb and supplement known to womankind, I swear. I’ve practiced every fertility asana. I’ve tried meditation, acupuncture, massage,” she said as if to head off any suggestions from me, suggestions she must have heard numerous times. “I carried a baby to three months last year, but then I lost it.”
“God. I’m so sorry. That sounds miserable.” I was surprised by what she had just said and the fact that she had said it. I thought of the times I had seen her doing yoga through her window, and wondered if what I had previously thought was cobra pose was in fact a kind of fertility pose.
“If everyone else in the world didn’t have a child, it wouldn’t be so hard.”
“Is Cass, is this too much—?”
“No, I just meant in general. It’s like every twenty-one-year-old who still lives with her parents and every junkie single mom in Western Mass pops out babies without even trying.” She took off her snow hat and shook out her curls. Something inside me reoriented. “My therapist had me make what she calls a ‘grace box.’ It’s a little corny. But every day, I’m supposed to write down on a piece of paper something that I’m thankful for. I’ve actually been doing it for over a year now.”
“Does it make you feel better?”
<
br /> “Well, it doesn’t make me feel any worse.” She sighed and looked over at Cass. “Let’s say something we’re thankful for. All three of us!”
“Right now?” I said.
“Right now. I’ll start. I’m thankful that you guys brought me to this amazing place and that I can breathe the same air that Edith Wharton once did!”
“Nice,” I said. I thought that I was thankful to have Cass. Of course this was not the moment for that sentiment, so I blurted out the next thing that came to mind: “I guess I’m thankful to have a truck.”
She cocked her head quizzically.
“I’ve always wanted one. It’s really handy for the landscaping work I do. It’s kind of silly, I don’t know. Anyway. Cass, what do you feel glad about?”
We had followed him back to the Italian garden, and now he was trying to balance on an icy façade. He shrugged.
“What makes you want to say ‘thank you’?” she pressed him.
“They actually had to make a collage about gratitude for Thanksgiving in preschool,” I told her. “His had a picture of a pilgrim, a turkey, and a cornucopia. I think it was more about cutting with scissors and using paste than gratitude, really. He’s kind of young for that concept.”
“Honey, you have to be thankful for something,” Jessica said to him.
“But I’m not,” he said.
“He suffers from what I call Extreme Honesty Syndrome,” I said.
“Ah.”
I wanted to hear more about her infertility, and tell her I knew what it felt like when it seemed the whole world had something you did not. But I also didn’t want to dwell on a topic that she had chosen to leave behind.
We wandered the grounds and sang “Frère Jacques” and “You Are My Sunshine” and “The Wheels on the Bus.” We played hide-and-seek in the rock garden and headed toward the dolphin fountain. Cass reached for her hand as he balanced on the side of the fountain, and she said, “Got you! Should we see how fast we can walk on this thing together?” She would make a good mother someday.
We headed back to the truck, and my phone rang just as I pulled my seatbelt across my chest. I considered not answering, but then I saw that it was Kurt.
“I have a question,” he said after I picked up.
“All right.”
“Do you want me to come back?”
I turned on the radio in the truck. “I thought you were going to be back by now.” Every now and then over the past week, I indulged a brief, maybe petty fantasy of refusing to take him in when he returned, or telling him that I had met someone else and that he had missed his chance.
Jessica looked over at me. I mouthed, “Sorry.”
“Okay,” Kurt said. “I’ll be more straightforward. Sometimes it’s hard for me to figure out exactly what you want.”
“You know that I could really use your help here.” With Jessica and Cass in the truck, I tried to speak softly and keep things brief. I reminded him how hard it was to find enough time to work, especially given my expedited schedule. “I can’t exactly leave Cass home alone,” I told him and shifted into drive.
“I hear what it is that you need, Allie. But what do you want?”
“It’s not a good time right now to talk,” I said. “And I’m not in that headspace. I can’t be—I don’t exactly have that luxury.”
“Well, I was thinking of coming back in about a week. Would that work?”
“Sure,” I said.
Jessica pulled her own phone from her jacket pocket.
“Why is this on me,” he said, “to say that I want to be with you? I’d like to know that some of this comes from you, too.”
“You were the one to leave. You’ve been gone for almost two months now. Come back if you want to come back,” I said. “Just don’t ask me to beg you.”
We said a strained goodbye and I hung up.
Cass said, “Was that Kurt?”
I nodded.
“Why were you so mean to him? Is he coming home?”
Jessica looked up from her phone. “Allie, you did the right thing. He can’t just take off on his own family whenever he wants. It’s not fair to you or Cass.”
“Thanks.” I could hardly lay out everything that she did not know about us without joining the ranks of the irresponsible people who were easily impregnated.
When we reached her driveway, she said goodbye and hopped out of the truck. She looked different to me now, maybe more sharply drawn. I said, “I’m glad you came with us.”
She blew us kisses and trotted inside her house.
Back at home, I turned on Caillou for Cass. Prolonged active time outdoors with your child was a form of money in the bank for overextended parents, at least for me. I checked Lana’s Twitter page for mentions of the Women’s March. She had not posted anything yet, but I found plenty of other photos and videos, footage taken of the rivers of people filling the National Mall in Washington, Fifth Avenue in New York, but also smaller demonstrations in Alaska and South Carolina, and others in Budapest, Kolkata, Lima. It was unlike anything I had ever seen, so many hand-knit pink hats and clever signs, all those women, all those people, men and children and people of all kinds, the millions who wanted better things for women and had made their outrage into an explosive, breathtaking, harmonious global event. I filled with something that I can only describe as the opposite of loneliness. I could not look away from my computer screen: the handmade cardboard signs in Tbilisi, girls and their mothers bundled against a storm in Fairbanks, the Eiffel Tower obscured by thousands of kindred spirits. I set my hand on my pulsing heart.
“Cass,” I said. “Come here. I want you to see this.”
Chapter Fourteen
The facsimile of truth is created with an abundance of details. I considered who might have grounds to protest my inventions—Gin, who had expressly told me to pad what little I had? The publisher? Colin? Lana obviously had no qualms. And who would even fact-check the manuscript? Authors—or in my case, ghostwriters—were required to be their own fact-checkers. Norton? Norton’s friends? Their parents? I threw in enough vague mentions of other kids that surely some of them would see themselves in these pages. From experience I knew that people found themselves in books whether they were there or not.
I invented a friend for Norton, a sweet, bespectacled kid “whom I’ll call Zach, to protect his privacy.” Zach had a dream of becoming a fashion designer. His parents, a lesbian and a transgender woman, helped him start a line of clothing made from their neighbors’ kids’ clothes that no longer fit them. Clothes for Fashion-Forward Bros, the line was called, and his parents—along with Lana, who took him and Norton a few times a year to Broadway shows—encouraged him to donate the proceeds to homeless shelters.
But it was too much. I cut the Broadway shows and homeless shelters. I cut the recycled clothing part. What about the lesbian and transgender woman? The country was what it was, post-election—roughly one-half cheering for boys like Zach, the other half apparently scraping backward for its days-of-yore white male power. I reluctantly made Zach’s parents heterosexual teachers and his father the coach of his Little League team. I called the boy’s clothing line simply Clothes for Bros.
Although it had lost a certain significant something, I did think it would pass muster.
“I’m lonely.” Cass had appeared beside me.
I melted. “I’m so glad you can articulate that.”
He kicked a leg of my chair.
“Not every boy is as articulate as you are—I mean as able to put words to feelings. What do you love, Cass? What do you love to do?” It was a question I had never asked him.
“I don’t know. I guess watch TV.”
“What else?”
“Nothing.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. He flopped onto the floor and began to slither around.
“Are you being a snake? You like pretending to be animals. You love being outside,” I told him.
“No, you do. You alw
ays make me go outside.”
This was true. What child hated being outside? “You’re good at art,” I tried. “You are an incredible artist. You draw these beautiful pictures, some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
He slithered into the next room and began to build a fort out of the couch cushions and his sleeping bag.
I followed him and said, “See, you like to build things.”
“Can you play with me?”
Every time, the question punched my heart. He should have had a sibling, a friend, more preschool, a pet, an imaginary friend, anything in addition to only me. “Let’s go outside. You were right—I’m the one who loves the outdoors, but maybe I can do better at showing you why. We’ll make a snowman, okay?”
The old snow that covered the front yard was dry, but we did the best we could, scooping with our hands and packing and shaping the snow into a lumpy mass, a hillock really, rather than three neatly stacked snowballs. Cass gave him bottle caps for eyes, and I stuck a carrot where his nose should be.
“You know what I’m most thankful for? You, Sweetie.”
Cass nodded, perhaps unsure how to respond, and went to find crayons for a mouth. He headed back to the house, saying, “He needs a pipe.” He stepped inside and returned with my favorite blown-glass bowl, a gift from Kurt soon after we met. Cass stuck it in the snow just above the crayon mouth. “Let’s skip the pipe,” I said and reached for my bowl.
“What should his name be?” I asked Cass when we were done.
“Daddy.”
“Oh,” I said, swallowing hard. “Okay. Anything else we should put on him?”
Cass went inside once more, found a long scarf of mine and wound it out around the bottom of the snowman. It appeared as if a very large blobfish had fallen onto the lawn.
“I think he looks good,” I said. There was something endearing about our very imperfect snowman. “Listen, honey. I’m sorry you don’t have a dad.”
“It’s all right.”