Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  “I wish you could,” I said.

  “Something to drink?”

  “Oh, a drink. A drink would help.”

  By the time I found a place on the deck, the kids had already forgotten about me, except for Violet, who was not yet swimming independently and waited by the side of the pool, jumping up and down. “Swim with me, Mommy. Mommy, swim with me. Swim now.”

  I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t so much a pool for swimming. “I’m not sure Mommy can fit in this pool,” I said.

  “Just fit. Just fit. Mommy fit. Swim, swim,” she beckoned. “Swim to me now.”

  And so I swam. I climbed in and stood in the middle of the tank as my little girl glided toward me, away from me, toward me again, back and forth, laughing, squealing. I stood there and watched my children occupy the pool. I watched the childless people trying to ignore us, not quite but almost containing their annoyance at having to share this obviously adult-intended space with five humans under ten. I felt a little sad when I considered the fact that there had to be so much emotional and psychological distance between us, the child-ed and the child-less, that we were all cordoned off in our own lonely worlds. And I felt relief when I saw the French couple, at least one of whom I suspected was a notable film actor—squeeze their baby’s arms into a pair of blue floaties. Thank goodness, I thought. One more parent in the pool. Only I was wrong. Neither parent intended to swim. Instead, they plopped their infant into the water, watching from the side as it bobbled and waddled and drifted out of reach.

  Oh my God, I thought. What the fuck? I could see the tragedy unfolding. I could see the headline: FRENCH BABY DROWNS AMID POSH SOHO ROOF PARTY; FABULOUSLY HIP SPECTATORS LOOK ON, DO NOTHING. I pushed myself out of the pool, grabbed my cell phone, and began recording this poor child left on its own in the water.

  No, kidding.

  What I did was I reached out and steadied the baby, along with my own daughter, though the French parents assured me again and again, ce n’est pas necessaire. I’m sure they were right. I’m sure it wasn’t necessaire. I’m sure that in France, the magical land where women don’t get fat and college is free, babies somehow teach themselves to swim without adult supervision. Sink or swim, their parents say to them (in French), and of course they choose swim.

  How I envied them at that moment. How badly I wanted to climb out of the pool, order myself a twenty-dollar mojito, grab a novel out of my canvas sack, and live my adult life while my daughter and this strangely buoyant French baby made their own way in the world. But of course I couldn’t. I simply didn’t have it in me to let go like that, to look away, to feel so unburdened, so unafraid. The French couple rubbed tanning oil on each other’s well-toned shoulders. The music played louder. The alcohol flowed. And I stood amid it all, a size twelve mama fish treading water in the middle of her school of swirling bodies. I was what I was—an anxious American mother. I might have spent two years thinking about the destructive ways that fear informs our parenting in this country, but that didn’t mean I could now escape it. But maybe that was okay. Maybe we all are what we are, and that’s okay. And besides, Pete would come looking for us sooner or later, and then I’d be able to shout over the music and the squealing children and the sophisticated chatter those words that every partnered parent delights in shouting: “Your turn!”

  But not quite yet. For the moment, it was my turn. I was on. I was in it.

  * * *

  It might not have been a vacation, but it turned out to be a great trip. New York City, I decided, is like Disney World for people who would never go to Disney World. At Felix’s request, we rode every subway line on the island. We went to the museums and played in the parks. We ate bagels on the Lower East Side and took the ferry to the marvelously emptied Governors Island. We visited museums and hung out with friends, and Pete got to spend an hour in the Strand, his favorite bookstore in the world, and remember what it was like when he used to have time to read. We did everything and went everywhere and then, on our very last day in the city, I sent a message to Lenore Skenazy, a lifelong New Yorker and faithful friend, and asked if she’d have time to grab a coffee or a drink.

  “Make it a cookie and you’re on,” she replied.

  We arranged to meet at a café near midtown. Only as I stepped inside did I realize it was run by and for the benefit of former convicts. A man in a polo shirt served us a brownie the size of a Bible, and then informed us that it was buy-one-get-one-free hour and served us a second. We paid for it and put our spare change in a box to support the human beings who, for reasons that are not always valid or clear, have spent years of their lives locked in cages in the maze of the correctional-industrial complex. Then we sat down to talk.

  More than ten years had passed since Lenore had been called the worst mother in America for having let her nine-year-old ride alone on the subway. It had been more than three years since my own arrest. And yet, to both of us, the time seemed to have passed in the space of a nap.

  Lenore marveled at the fact that her youngest son had just left for college, then told me, with more melancholy in her voice than I’d heard before, that the loneliness she felt at his departure had caught her off guard. She laughed a little when she spoke of it. “I miss him so much,” she said, “that a couple of weeks after he left, I signed up to have a foreign exchange student live in our house. I have this nice girl from Haifa living down the hall now. Some people take up a hobby when their kids leave; I take in an Israeli.” She sighed. “It’s good. It’s all good, but I still miss them.”

  “Sentimental words for a neglectful mother,” I said.

  “I know. Ha. Well, so it goes. How are you?”

  I told her about Pete and the kids, about our vacation in New York, all we’d done and seen. I told her about their summers, their new teachers, their friends.

  “And how about the book?” she asked. “It’s almost done?”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been feeling discouraged lately.”

  She broke the second brownie in half, offered me a piece.

  “You know, I have to admit, Lenore. I’m discouraged about the state of parenthood in this country. I’m not optimistic. Sometimes I think things are changing, or that they’re going to change, but most of the time … I don’t know. A few weeks ago, I was at Felix’s third-grade orientation. It was right after Labor Day, and I could tell that everyone there was as exhausted from the summer schedule as I was. One friend of mine, a working mother, was bragging about the herculean feat of getting her son enrolled in some kind of camp or program every single day of the twelve-week vacation. And I started thinking how crazy it all is, that probably 90 percent of the people in the room had spent upward of four figures to have their kid in this camp or that camp or this program or that program. All that money. All that driving. It seemed crazy. And I thought about the fact that all I really wanted for my kids over the summer was for them to have a break from the structure of the classroom. To hang out, to run around, go swimming, ride their bikes. Maybe, if they’re feeling particularly ambitious, make a lemonade stand or climb a fucking tree. I kept thinking, how can that be so hard, to let them do that? And so I turn to these three women, friends of mine, and I suggest that next summer, at least for a few weeks, we save time and money and do some kind of hands-off, independence camp. Like one day my house is the home base. I’m not going to be organizing the kids, but I’ll be in the house. I’ll be there, working from home, and they can go do whatever in the neighborhood. They’ll have a radius they can stay in, but they can go to the park, go to the whatever, just do their own thing. These women are my friends. I mean, I like them. I’m friendly with them. They’re smart and generally open-minded women, and I’m telling you, Lenore, they’re looking at me like I’m nuts.”

  “Are they looking at you like you’re nuts or are they looking at you like they’re judging you?”

  “A little of both, I guess. And they say to me, ‘Kim, you can’t
let them go to the park by themselves. You just can’t.’ But why? Why the hell not? Do you think they’re going to arrest us all? I say this, Lenore, and they are looking at me like I’m suggesting launching our kids to the moon.”

  She doesn’t look surprised. She looks undaunted, leans in a little, dunks her brownie in her coffee. “All right, I get it. But don’t be discouraged. You know, these panics take hold, and they don’t just dissipate overnight. But that doesn’t mean you should give up. Here is what you’re going to do.”

  I leaned forward. I wanted to know.

  “I’ve told you my theory of yuppie jujitsu?”

  “Of what?”

  “Yuppie jujitsu. I know, I know. ‘Yuppie’ is an old word, but I’m old, so there you go. Yuppie jujitsu is my name for using their own strategy against them. So this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to go back to these women—and as afraid as they are of letting their kids go to the park, you have to make them more afraid of not sending their kids to the park. You’re going to say to them, ‘Listen, if you don’t send your kids to the park and they don’t break their foot and have to get home on their bike by themselves, they will never get into an Ivy League school; they’ll never run a corporation; they will never earn a Fulbright or find a cure for cancer or have their own hit series on HBO or run for Congress. They’ll be fat, they’ll be lonely, they’ll be sad, they’ll be depressed and anxious and lost, and they won’t be the entrepreneurs or the problem-solvers of the next generation, and they won’t have a chance to access any of those skills or feelings of basic self-worth that they need in life, because guess what—you can’t give those things to kids. As much as we want to, we can’t do it. They have to develop them for themselves. They have to try and fail and be scared and push through and bounce back and fail again and feel lost and then find their way home.”

  “Because these are the things that make us feel worthy and capable, the things that make us feel like people?”

  “Yes. So you call it Independence Camp. You call it Character-Building Camp. And you tell people that if we don’t start doing this, our kids are going to be in big, big trouble. I don’t really believe this, by the way. I think that in the end, things have a way of working out. Or not. I don’t really think we have that much control over anything. But don’t say that. Not if you want things to change. You have to scare them out of their fear. You have to scare them into being reasonable and rational human beings.”

  “Fight fear with fear. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Not because we want to, but because we have to. Because fear seems to be the only thing that works.”

  * * *

  The next day, we packed our bags and headed to Newark. It’s true what Pete had said about there being no more vacations when you have kids. After a few days away, I was more exhausted than ever. I needed a vacation to recover from the vacation. And yet, despite the usual fatigue, I also felt strangely invigorated as we left the city behind. All the way under the Hudson and across the Meadowlands, I found myself thinking about Lenore, about Julie, about the other mothers I’d met and talked to, about the sociologists and psychologists and writers and thinkers who were working so hard to figure out where we are as a country, as a culture, as parents and partners and thinking-feeling beings, about how we have gotten to this place of pervasive and insurmountable fear and where we are headed. As my kids bickered and the traffic thickened and my husband checked sports scores on his phone, I found my mind wandering, then landing on a line of prose by Adrienne Rich, the radical, feminist, lesbian activist poet who, before she had children, was just a nice Jewish girl with a bad case of nerves. In her book of nonfiction, she wrote, “I was radicalized by motherhood.” It had seemed a counterintuitive notion when I read it in college. I associated radicalism with youth. Motherhood happened from a place of safety and caution. Now, rereading, it made perfect sense. After all, I thought, writing is rebellion. Art takes place when we’re unable to accept the boundaries we inherit, when we’re compelled to reimagine or reinvent what others are willing or even eager to receive. What territory could be more fertile for reinvention than the rigid and oppressive institution of motherhood?

  As we pushed onto the freeway, I reached inside my purse and took out my prescription bottle of lorazepam, my old preflight standby. I poured a dusty pill into my hand, turned it over, then put it back in the bottle. A while back, Pete had bought me a fear-of-flying app that was supposed to help with aerophobia. I decided to give it a try, to fly without sedation for the first time in almost a decade.

  We arrived at the airport ninety minutes before our scheduled flight time, but we still felt rushed. There was the usual snaking line, the usual display of security theater, the dumping of water, the removing of shoes, the unloosing of belts, the collapsing of strollers, and the resigned acceptance of pat-downs and scans—all these things meant to protect us from those who would do us harm, all of us pretending to believe that this was all it would take. Once we were seated on the plane, I opened the fear-of-flying app on my phone and typed in the date and flight number. Already, my hands were trembling, my skin clammy, my heartbeat accelerating, and a familiar cramping sensation settling in my gut.

  “Hello, Kim,” the app said to me as I tightened my seat belt.

  Hello, machine, I thought.

  The app began by telling me a little bit about myself. “Fear of flying (aerophobia) is a very common phenomenon. A flight is a severe psychological problem for every third person in the world. The fear arises in people prone to anxiety and suspiciousness. It also arises in people who have problems in trusting other people and mechanisms. Sound familiar?”

  Are you kidding? I thought. Have you ever looked around? Read the internet? Watched the news? You’re a piece of software, for God’s sake—you must get the same updates I do. How could anyone trust other people or the mechanisms they create? In fact, I couldn’t trust anyone who trusted anyone.

  “The main cause of fear of flying,” the app continued, “is genetics and upbringing. It’s most common in the children of anxious parents.”

  Right, I thought. Well, I didn’t need an app to tell me that.

  “In many cases, aerophobia is just a side effect of perfectionism.”

  I don’t know, I thought as our plane pushed back from the runway. I’d never considered myself a perfectionist, but I supposed I could see his point.

  “The perfectionist isn’t comforted by reassuring statistics about the relative safety of air travel, the relative safety of public spaces, the relative safety of life itself. You, and other perfectionists like you, want things to be purely good, perfectly safe. You long for a certainty that doesn’t exist in our universe, an assurance that no plane will ever crash, no child will ever die, no unfathomable tragedy will occur on your watch.”

  And what the hell is wrong with that? Doesn’t everyone want those things?

  The app tried to change the subject. “Conditions today are partly cloudy. Under partly cloudy conditions, the atmosphere is usually nonturbulent. In the case of no cumulus clouds. And today, we have exactly such a day—no cumulus clouds in the sky. We’ll enter the clouds approximately fifty-five seconds after takeoff.”

  Wait, I demanded. Who cares about the clouds? Answer my question.

  “Of course everyone wants those things, Kim. But most people accept that we can’t have them, that perfection of that sort isn’t possible.”

  I regretted not taking my lorazepam. I decided I should have taken three. Now it was too late. I looked out the window as we came to a stop before the runway, idled, then began our awful acceleration toward lift.

  “Moderate wind for today’s takeoff,” said the machine. “The interesting fact is that the surface wind is always several times weaker than the high-level wind. But we don’t feel it near the ground during takeoffs and landings.”

  Who gives a shit about surface wind? Oh, I hate you, machine. God, I want off, out. I want my f
eet on the ground where they belong. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. We aren’t meant to do this. Oh, God, no. I don’t want to die. Please, please, someone, help.

  “Pull yourself together, Kim. Takeoff is an unpleasant moment for most anxious passengers. Control yourself, not the airplane.”

  Control myself? Really? That’s your advice? I want my fucking three dollars back if that’s your advice.

  We surged. The engines roared, hurling us forward, faster and faster by the second. We tilted upward, lifted off. The belly of the bird groaned, sagged, then rose. We rose and banked, climbed and trembled through the thinning air, the lit-up clouds, the loosening atmosphere, all of us safe inside our pressurized metal tube. Without my consent, the ground pulled away from us like a yo-yo on a string. The familiar world became unfamiliar, less real, everything compressed into a model of itself. And then it was gone. I could hardly see it, and so it was gone. We were in the air, soaring smoothly, and I could breathe.

  “Feel better, Kim?”

  A little. But I still want you to answer my question. Is it wrong to want perfection from our world, our families, our children? Is it wrong to want control? Is it wrong to be afraid?

  In my mind, the app sighed. It placed its disembodied hand on my shoulder. It was a patient app, but I was testing its patience. “It’s not wrong, Kim. Fear is neither wrong nor right. It is what it is. But in the end, it can’t give us the thing we most desire. It can’t give us control. Nothing can. The control it offers is an illusion, a temporary distraction from the immutable fact that we’re human, mortal, imperfect, and imperiled. There’s no escape from that. Not for us and not for our kids. But when we accept it, there’s a certain kind of freedom.”

  I picked up my phone, strange object that with each year felt less like an object, more like a part of myself, my mind. I felt like I was beginning to understand, like it had given me all there was to give, and so I held down the power button and shut it off. I put it in my purse, leaned back in my seat as much as the seat would let me, breathed deeply and slowly. The ascent had been bumpy but now we flew smooth. My mind emptied, then seemed to settle in a place of calm. I understood we were moving through the atmosphere at five hundred miles per hour, but my senses felt only stillness. We broke through the low cover of clouds as predicted. The sun spilled across the sea of white, the eddies of condensation. It glinted against our sheer metal wings as we angled skyward, faster, up, up and away, like it or not. Felix was sitting beside me in the window seat, and he, for one, loved the experience of flying. I’d asked him before taking off if he wanted the iPad so he could watch a movie, play a game. “No thanks,” he said. “I just want to look out the window.” And so he did. He looked out as I looked at him, the light on his face, in his hair, his eyes bright with nothing but the present moment, the joy of an experience that for me had come to seem dreadful and mundane. Across the aisle, Violet leaned on her father, stroked the matted fur of her pink bunny against her cheek, sucked her thumb. My precious ones. My small animals.