Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  ELEVEN

  Monsters Aren’t Friendly

  (1997)

  There he was, alone. That was the first thing Milly thought when she saw him, in the playroom of the Catholic boys’ home in Fort Greene where she’d agreed to meet her mother before lunch. There were other boys about twelve feet away, all of them black or brown, all of them four or five years old and involved in an elaborate game of toy-car smashup, but this boy whom Ava had standby guardianship over until he someday found a real home, whom Ava had said she wanted to check in on, lay alone on his stomach, on the bright orange carpet in the cheerful room full of sunlight and bright-colored pictures on the walls and primary-color beanbag chairs, and drew scary, hairy creatures with dark Crayolas on white craft paper. The first thing Milly noticed about him was his riot of glossy black curls.

  Milly and Ava knelt down beside him. “Emmy, this is Mateo,” Ava said. “Mateo, this is my daughter, Millicent.”

  “Hi, Mateo,” Milly said. “What are you drawing?”

  For several seconds, Mateo didn’t stop his work. Then he glanced up at them both quickly. “Monsters,” he said.

  “Oh, wow, monsters!” Ava exclaimed. Her nasal Queens accent pierced the room, Milly noticed. “What kind of monsters are those, Mateo? Are they friendly ones?”

  Mateo looked up at Ava and rolled his eyes, which made Milly giggle a bit inwardly. “No,” he said flatly. “Monsters aren’t friendly.”

  “Some monsters are!” Ava insisted. “What about the Cookie Monster?” God, Milly thought, her mother was being so loud. “You know who the Cookie Monster is, right?”

  Again—studiously, it seemed—Mateo let a few beats pass, colored a few more strokes, before looking up with his exquisitely bored brown eyes. “No,” he said.

  “We don’t have a TV in the house.”

  Milly and Ava looked up. It was Sister Ellen, who ran the house, a stocky, short-haired woman in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a Yankees cap. “It’s a good thing,” the nun added.

  “Not even for Sesame Street?” Ava asked. “You can’t deprive kids of Sesame Street!” She was half joking, Milly thought, but she also wasn’t—she was bossing. “Emmy, can you imagine if you hadn’t had Sesame Street? It’s the best babysitter!”

  “You can’t miss something you don’t know that you don’t have,” Sister Ellen said lightly. “When these guys get placed in foster homes, the TV thing is out of our hands, but as long as they’re here—” She broke off. “That’s a policy I set. I’d rather they read. Or play, like they’re doing now.”

  Amused, Milly watched her mother pretend to consider and respect this point of view. “Of course,” Ava said. “I just thought you might make an exception for Sesame Street.”

  “No exceptions,” Sister Ellen said.

  Chastened, Ava stood up and continued chatting with Sister Ellen. Milly turned back to Mateo. “Can I draw with you?” she asked him.

  “If you want,” he said, not looking up. He was, what, four? Five? Milly considered him for a second from her perch a foot or two above him. She couldn’t really see his face, just that mop of curly black hair. He wore an oversize Yankees T-shirt (in fact, Milly noticed, several of the boys did; Sister Ellen, in her staunch Yankees fandom, had worked out some charitable thing where the boys got visits from the players and free shirts and hats) and painters shorts and sneakers that looked like they were from Old Navy. She noticed his little chubby hand and how it held the crayon (raw sienna) masterfully, loosely. She reached for a blank piece of paper and the box of Crayolas.

  “Do you mind if I use burnt umber?” she asked him.

  “Nope.”

  She set to her drawing, plucking other colors from the box. She was delighted when she noticed he’d begun peeping over from his own drawing, with longer and longer glances.

  “There,” she said, holding up her work. “What do you think?”

  “What is it?” he said, not looking up.

  “It’s you holding hands with a friendly monster.” And that’s what she’d drawn: her best rendering of Mateo, dressed as he was in this moment, holding hands with and smiling alongside a big, smiling, fluffy, blue-and-yellow-colored creature, a New York streetscape sketched in behind them.

  He rolled his eyes at her piteously, as though she’d failed to comprehend him the first time. “Monsters aren’t friendly,” he said, then went back to his own drawing.

  “I figured I’d make up one that was. The world’s first friendly monster! That’s okay, right?”

  He didn’t bother to answer this. Milly sat there and looked at the top of his head. Then she looked at his picture. She could see his skill. She knew he had looked at pictures in books and instinctively knew how to recreate lines. She gave up trying to engage him and just watched him draw. Coolly, he didn’t acknowledge her once, though he certainly had to know she was still there.

  Her mother and Sister Ellen came back in the room. Milly stood.

  “So you’re an artist, your mother tells me,” Sister Ellen said. Milly was starting to see why her mother and Sister Ellen had ended up working so closely together the past few years. They were both bossy, blunt women who probably got things done very quickly.

  “I am,” Milly said.

  “She just started teaching at LaGuardia High School,” Ava said. It annoyed Milly slightly that her mother had seemed more impressed by Milly’s getting this job than any piece of art Milly had ever created. “That’s one of the best arts high schools in the city. And her boyfriend teaches at Art and Design High School.”

  Sister Ellen seemed wholly unimpressed by this and cut to the chase. “The two of you could come out here Saturday afternoons and do art with the boys,” she said. “You could bring your artist friends. You could rotate.”

  Milly glanced at Ava, who stood slightly behind Sister Ellen, smiling amusedly, wondering how Milly would handle the nun’s bossiness.

  “It’s our day off,” Milly protested feebly. “But, I mean—”

  “Well, you could come Sundays, then, after you’ve had a day off,” Sister Ellen pressed on agreeably. “Just for a few hours.” She gestured around at the boys. “They’re always here.”

  Milly glanced at Ava, who shrugged slightly, as though to say, Don’t ask me, it’s up to you. Then Milly looked down at Mateo, at the top of his head and the chubby fingers holding the crayon.

  “Of course we’ll come,” Milly said. She pulled her little black notebook and a pen from her bag, handed them to Sister Ellen. “Write your number here and I’ll call and we’ll arrange it.”

  The nun took the little book and pen, looking quietly pleased with herself. “You won’t consider it work,” she said as she jotted in it.

  Milly knelt down again and, in a flash, scratched the curly black head. “I’ll come back and we’ll draw more monsters together?”

  He looked up at her, as though he was indulging her. “Sure, okay,” he said. “But I hate to tell you, there aren’t any friendly monsters.”

  “Are you absolutely sure about that?” Milly asked.

  He took a big breath, as though he was about to answer but then stopped to consider the question. “I’m pretty sure,” he said, nodding his head for emphasis.

  Milly and Ava went to a Jamaican restaurant, got out of the stifling Labor Day–weekend heat into the A/C and ordered mint lemonade and jerk-chicken sandwiches. “You wanted to go there today just to see, um, Mateo?” Milly asked her mother.

  Ava, her mouth full, shook her head. “We’re talking about replacement of a few of the boys back with their moms,” she finally said, dabbing at the corners of her mouth in a ladylike way with her napkin—an affectation Milly found funny and strangely touching.

  “Are you serious?” Milly said. “Because of the new HIV drugs?”

  Ava nodded. “Yep. That’s what everyone’s calling Lazarus syndrome. Peo
ple are starting to live again. It’s a total mindfuck. And now they gotta figure out their lives. But it means, for a few of the moms, they want to try to raise their kids again. They’re not afraid they’re gonna die on their kids any time soon. So for some of them, we’re working on finding a group home where they can raise their kids together.”

  “That is amazing,” Milly said. “Whoever would have thought . . .” Words failed her.

  “That people would finally stop dying?” Ava asked. “Not me! Fifteen years of death, death, death, then the people lucky enough to make it this far start getting better, stop looking like cadavers. Now they have to figure out how to pay their credit-card bills.”

  Milly looked at Ava’s face: lined. Dark circles under the eyes. Hair gone gray and a middle gone thicker, as had her dad’s, even though Ava still called Sam her Elliott Gould and he dutifully still called her his Marisa Berenson. Seventeen years of drugs for Ava as well—drugs of a different kind: “My head meds,” Ava called them. And about a dozen awards since she’d started Judith House in 1990, including from the White House. The write-ups in the Times, New York magazine, Essence; the 20/20 segment; the Vogue thing where they’d styled her and put her in a Donna Karan gown alongside a half-dozen other “contemporary warrior women.”

  “Ava, don’t you get burned out?”

  Ava considered a moment. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I weren’t doing this,” she said. “The one thing I’m proud of in life is I left that fucking bureaucracy and actually managed to help people.”

  Milly looked down at her sandwich, stung by the words. She could feel tears welling, though she wanted to be more adult than that.

  “Oh, honey,” Ava clucked. Milly wanted to feel her mother’s hand on her own, but Ava didn’t put it there. “You know what I mean. I meant in my career. Of course I’m proud of you.”

  That couldn’t have felt more cursory, as far as Milly was concerned. Milly dropped her voice. “You know, I turned out okay, Ava. I hold my life together. I have a steady job. I have a good relationship.”

  “I love Jared!” Ava interjected.

  “I know you do,” Milly said. Ava certainly loved Jared. Partly, Milly knew, because Jared came from the kind of old-money German Jew family Ava had always wanted to be from. WASPy Jews, instead of Ava’s shtetl stock.

  “And you know I’m proud of you,” Ava said. But, Milly thought, she sounded irritated at even having to say it aloud. Milly knew it was time to get off this subject—it would just take her down a wormhole of bad feelings.

  “I’m proud of you, too,” she told Ava.

  “That’s sweet,” Ava said.

  They fell into several seconds of awkward silence. Milly thought about her own pills, the antidepressant she’d been taking. Wellbutrin. After several months, Jared had said to her, “Something’s wrong, Millipede, you have to face it. And going on a mild-to-moderate med for your mild-to-moderate depression—mild to moderate, like the doctor said—does not mean you’re going to go down the same road as your mother. But you can’t stop ignoring that you have depression. You feel it every day, and so do I.”

  So Milly had gone on Wellbutrin. And—it had helped? She was fairly certain she felt somewhat less . . . what? Sad? That sense that it would all never be quite right, that that shadow of dread would always be there, flickering, sometimes rising up forcefully and forcing her down into the bed, into a book for hours as though it were something she could physically crawl into and close around herself, or out of the stifling sadness of the apartment and into the East Village for those long, long walks, just trying to figure it out, to think her way out of that vapor-like sadness. And sometimes the tears that would come out of nowhere on those briskly paced walks, Milly not even really caring who saw her crying quietly.

  She wanted so badly to tell her mother about it. But she wouldn’t let herself. It was just too awful, the implicit accusatory nature of it—Look what you’ve given to me! That she and her mother might share this awful monster, this mindbeast that plagued women and made them crazy, made them major hassles for the people in their lives—neurotic Jewish women!—was far more than Milly could deal with. So, as they sat there in awkward silence, Milly did what she’d learned to do her whole life: look outward to other people and what was plaguing them.

  “So this cutie, Mateo,” she asked, “does he know about his mother?”

  Ava’s own eyes lit up; she, too, was clearly relieved that they were moving on, talking about other people and their problems.

  “I don’t think he really knows yet,” Ava said. “Ysabel had him for only about a year before she went into St. Vincent’s for the last time, when Mateo went to Ellen’s house. My God.” Ava sighed. “That she went through with that pregnancy and that he came out normal and alive. That’s a miracle.”

  “Did she consider”—Milly paused a moment—“having an abortion?”

  “She couldn’t,” Ava said—then, portentously, “Catholicism. Even though her family mostly cut her off when they found out she had AIDS and didn’t want to see her. She couldn’t bear asking them to raise him, so she asked me to sign papers to be his legal standby guardian until he found the right home.”

  “Who was the dad?”

  Ava laughed bitterly. “She didn’t know. She disappeared and went sexually cuckoo for a while. She was gussying herself up and going to clubs and not even telling guys she was positive. A few months after that, she got sick enough to qualify to come live in the house when a bed opened. And a few weeks after that, she finds out she’s pregnant. So that’s when we got her on AZT and—well, voilà,” Ava said, gesturing back in the direction of the group home and meaning Mateo. “That’s why the kid was born HIV-negative.”

  “Mmm,” Milly said, still thinking about the little boy they’d just left behind with his crayons. “Why don’t you just adopt him? You have room.”

  “Me?” Ava hooted. “With my schedule? Why don’t you?”

  After lunch, Ava went back to the East Village and Milly got on the LIRR in Brooklyn and took the train out to Jared’s family’s house in Montauk. This was a yearly Labor Day–weekend ritual.

  “Are you okay from your day with Ava?” Jared asked her, kissing her, when he picked her up at the train station. Jared looked handsome, she thought, with his fresh flush of tan. He’d come out here the previous day.

  “It was fine,” Milly said. She didn’t want to bore Jared with a recitation of all the usual feelings she had after seeing her mother. “She took me to a foster home in Fort Greene. Oh my God, Jared!” She put a hand on his arm as he drove. “I wish you could see this little boy who was there, Mateo. He’s four and he’s such a talented drawer. He was drawing these really scary, mean-looking monsters, so I got down on the floor with him and drew him a friendly monster, and when I told him that, he just gave me this heartbreaking, deadpan look and said, ‘Monsters aren’t friendly.’”

  Jared chuckled distractedly, negotiating a curve. “The kid’s right. Monsters aren’t friendly. They wouldn’t be monsters if they were, and we’re just doing kids a disservice telling them that there are friendly monsters, like the Cookie Monster.”

  “That’s exactly what Ava told him! She was indignant that the nun who runs the house—who, by the way, is a total butch lesbian—that she wouldn’t let the kids watch TV, even Sesame Street.”

  “Well, you know something?” Jared said, slightly cutting her off. “Monsters are monsters. AIDS and mental illness are AIDS and mental illness. They’re not cuddly.”

  This took Milly aback. “Mental illness? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He glanced at her. Milly sensed he was dismayed by what he’d just said.

  “I’m just saying,” he said, “any disease—AIDS, mental illness, cancer, Parkinson’s, Lyme like my sister has—we’re better off just calling them what they are and dealing with them and not puttin
g a cuddly name on them.”

  Milly was silent. She really didn’t know what to make of that. Instead, she wondered what Mateo was doing at that moment. Did he ever play with the other boys?

  “Well, I have something to tell you,” she at last said to Jared. “Sister Ellen—that’s the butch nun who runs the boys’ home—she kind of strong-armed me into saying that you and I would come out weekend afternoons and make art with the boys.”

  “Oh, she did?” Jared laughed. “To Brooklyn?”

  “It’s not that far out in Brooklyn. Just the Q to Atlantic/Pacific.”

  “We go to the studio on weekends and make our own art.”

  “I only go Sundays anyway.”

  Jared glanced at her sidelong but said no more.

  Twenty minutes later, they were on the big porch overlooking the beach with Jared’s family, drinking rosé, while Jared’s dad put burgers on the grill for them. They put on sweatshirts and jeans for the annual beach bonfire with the same group of neighbors Jared had spent Labor Day with since he was eleven, then came back up to the house around midnight and had sex for the first time in two weeks in the twin bed Jared had spent childhood summers in. The room smelled and sounded like the ocean, and Milly was blessed to feel safe and protected in Jared’s honey-fur arms as he fell asleep and, moreover, to acknowledge she felt that way for once.

  In the morning, when she woke alone in the bed, she pulled herself together and went downstairs for coffee, to find Jared and his family watching CNN.

  “Princess Di died,” Jared’s mother, a good-looking woman with a silver-blond bob who’d run the same hunger nonprofit the last twelve years, said as Milly came in. “Last night in a horrible car crash in a tunnel in Paris.”

  “Oh, that’s horrible!” Milly exclaimed. “Her poor sons!”

  They ate breakfast in a disjointed way in front of the TV, each of them retreating to the kitchen to get coffee or a bowl of cereal, then coming back to the drama on CNN. Eventually they pulled towels and umbrellas together and went down to the beach. But the death, and the allegations swirling around it that it might have been murder, followed them down there like a strange pall. It was strange in that Diana may as well have been a fictional character to them; no one among them could think of anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone who’d known her, or even once met her. Milly kept thinking of the two sweet boys being left with their horrible, cold father and their grandmother, the Queen. And this merged back into thoughts of Mateo and what he might be doing at any given hour of the many long hours in the boys’ home.