by Nell Zink
“My baby,” he said, bear-hugging Pam with closed fists.
“Is the car legal?” she asked.
“I found valet parking at a restaurant. At least I think I did. Maybe it was just some guy in a vest stealing my car.”
They proceeded into the store, greeted Margie in a casual way, and went with minor jostling up the stairs.
When Pam opened the apartment door, Daniel was facing it with his hand protectively on Flora’s shoulder, and for a moment, she felt she was making a terrible mistake.
Flora dealt with the tension by yelling, “Grandma!” and flinging herself into Ginger’s arms, as if she’d been systematically prepared by a course of pro-family brainwashing to think grandmothers were Earth’s most beneficent beings. She snuggled and let herself be petted, instinctively opening her mouth like a baby bird.
It wasn’t Daniel’s doing; all he’d done was feed her a piece of toast and say that Pam’s parents were coming to take them out to dinner. She had picked it up at kindergarten. Most of the kids spent their nights being disciplined by harried New Yorkers and their days being spoiled by sweet old Chinese and southern ladies.
“That’s Grandpa,” Ginger said, pointing.
Edgar genuflected so that Flora could throw herself against his chest, humming with glee as if she were eating a giant cookie. “So nice to meet you,” he said, smoothing her hair.
Disengaging, she solemnly asked him, “How do you feel about dim sum?”
“That’s a New York thing,” Edgar said. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“I can eat eight,” Flora said.
“That’s impossible,” Ginger said.
“Les jeux sont faits,” Daniel said. “I guess we’re going out for dim sum. Nice to meet you.” He put out his hand to Edgar. “I’m Daniel Svoboda, and this is Flora.”
“You’re my favorite man in the world right now,” Ginger said, hugging Daniel on tiptoes while he shook Edgar’s hand. “I never thought I’d be this happy again.” She was crying soft tears that she called “tears of joy.”
GINGER HAD BEEN FEELING VERY MUCH IN CONTROL. BUT THE STRANGELY TRUSTING AND even disrespectful way Flora greeted her and Edgar—it was like coming home to a lonely dog—had unexpectedly reminded her that when Pam was that size, she had still been spanking her with hairbrushes and coat hangers. For major infractions, Edgar whipped her bare bottom with a belt. It always made her roar and squeal snotty tears like a baby, even though the belt barely grazed her and never left a mark. The hard part was holding her down to get a clear shot.
Ginger at the time had regarded Pam as a worthy adversary and her sorrow as suitable penance for the messes she made. Seeing Flora so puny and gullible made her aware of her past depravity. She sensed for the first time the depths of her subjection to a culture of violence. Prior to their meeting, she had been able to luxuriate to some extent on the moral high ground where Pam’s cruel defection stranded her. Flora’s self-evident vulnerability made her realize she’d been a fascist mom after all.
She felt an urgent need to be Flora’s fairy godmother. It was too late to grant her a childhood of the gentlest enchantment enveloped in flowers and birdsong, but with Pam’s approval, she bought her new bedclothes in blue flannel with a pattern of white sheep. Her current sheets and pillowcases had stiff yellowish stains that wouldn’t wash out. Pam and Daniel had carried on long, bemused conversations about what they could possibly be. (They were Duco Cement from a tube Flora found on the street and liked to sniff. Fortunately she left the cap off, and it dried out.)
The one act of truly petit-bourgeois despoliation they allowed Ginger was to escort Flora to FAO Schwarz to buy a doll. The two spent almost all day in Midtown, with detours to Rockefeller Center and the Russian Tea Room. They returned with a plush stuffed horse in chestnut brown, a foot tall, with yellow eyes and a white star on its forehead. Edgar named it “Secretariat.” Flora said the word over and over, as if it were a present comparable to the toy.
When Ginger got back to D.C., she went back into therapy.
SHE CAME UP ON THE TRAIN ONCE A MONTH OR SO, SOMETIMES WITH EDGAR, SOMETIMES without, continuing to stay in hotels. She always brought clover, picked in their backyard and packed in a sandwich bag. It had taken adamantine insistence to persuade her that her daughter’s family was not needy and that gifts of money would have been useless to them, whereas it made everyone happy to serve clover on a plate and summon Secretariat from his cardboard stall to share in a meal of flowers. Daniel had done Boy Scouts under a survivalist scoutmaster, so he knew that clover petals were nature’s candy.
The Svobodas didn’t go to Washington. Pam saw no reason to leave New York except on work assignments. Her youthful declaration of internecine war had never been superseded by a peace treaty. She had run away for reasons she still found valid. She accepted her parents’ apologies because she’d had her revenge, eleven years of it. She willingly granted them Flora. Flora was a different person, new to them—obviously—and impressionable, even by the standards of little kids. Maintaining superficial harmony for her sake was so unselfish, it felt like love.
Ginger and Edgar, for their part, were terrified of Pam. The truce was too recent. The stakes were too high. One false move might lead to rejection and loss. They tiptoed around Pam, careful not to cross her. They performed tasks they found surreal: breakfasting on Krispy Kremes behind blackout curtains and a padlock, surrendering Flora to her louche mooncalf babysitter for walks that left her too tired to eat. No matter how the child’s upbringing shocked them, they voiced no criticism, as though Pam had become the patriarch that Edgar no longer was.
FLORA WOKE UP MOLTO EXCITED ABOUT THE FIRST DAY OF FIRST GRADE AT P.S. THIRTY-TWO. Daniel, Pam, and Joe brought her to the towering steel gate. She tore herself loose and raced off to a group of her friends from kindergarten who were standing in a circle on the asphalt, comparing backpacks.
When Pam picked her up at the end of the day, she didn’t look quite so happy. Flora held Pam’s hand as they walked home and sat dolefully in front of her plate of cookies, obviously troubled.
There were a number of kids in the class whom she had not encountered before. Pam bit back the impulse to suggest she make new friends. Flora knew all that; she had acquired two new best friends within a week of starting kindergarten. She said hesitantly, “I don’t think Vanu even went to kindergarten.”
“Why’s that?”
“He doesn’t know stuff. He doesn’t know the alphabet. He hits everybody.”
“Did he hit you?”
“No. Just Julie.”
The next morning, after leaving Flora with her friends in the schoolyard, Pam continued inside to chat with the teacher, Ms. Shahrokhshahi. She sat at her desk, with a French manicure and long dark hair in a ponytail, looking at a math teacher’s manual with much the same expression that Flora had used on the cookies. Pam introduced herself as Flora’s mom.
“You can call me Ms. S.,” the teacher said. “I adore your daughter.”
“Me too. I wanted to ask you about some kid named Vanu she says hits everybody.”
Ms. S. rolled her eyes. “If he’s been in school before, I’m a monkey’s uncle. He can’t sit still unless I’m literally touching him, standing by his desk, touching his shoulder. I’ve got to get him out of my classroom.”
“Does he belong in special ed?”
“He belongs in kindergarten. I think he’s five and big for his age. He comes up to my shoulders.”
PAM SAW MS. S. AGAIN AT PARENT-TEACHER NIGHT. THERE WERE ONLY TWO OTHER moms and a dad from Flora’s class, so they had time to talk. “I adore Flora,” Ms. S. said again.
“She’s tops,” Pam said. “How’s little Vanu?”
“He calls me Ms. Ass and pats me on it. But I’m not allowed to get more than five feet from him, or he heads for the window. It’s first grade. I’m in loco parentis. I’m going crazy.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Like what?”
“Is he hyperactive? They have Ritalin for that.”
“I take that back; I’m not in loco parentis. I’m at the mercy of his parents. Des Hernandez—he teaches fifth grade—said the older sister pretended to be a cat until she was fourteen. Their mother has a strong cat preference.”
“So the family has mental health issues.”
“If you see drugs as a mental health issue. Des says she hurt her knee working for the Ice Capades, like, twenty years ago. She’s on disability and addicted to some kind of pain medication.”
“So get Vanu some Medicaid-sponsored Ritalin.”
“She’d sell it to buy cat food.”
“Maybe he’s hungry.”
“Have you seen him? Phew.”
“It’s not really my business.”
“I wish I knew whether it was my business.” Ms. S. sighed. “I’m supposed to be teaching, and all I do is micromanage his moods.”
“Special ed,” Pam said.
“What century are you from? If he had Tourette’s, they’d still put him in my class. It would be a learning experience for the kids. Big dick cocksucker cock! Fuck Ms. Ass!”
“You sound kind of traumatized.”
“You could be right.”
TWO WEEKS LATER THERE WAS A SCHOOL-WIDE BROUHAHA ABOUT MS. SHAHROKHSHAHI. Flora’s version was that Vanu had wanted to get up out of his seat and go to the window. Ms. S., who was standing by him as usual, had tightened her grip on his shoulder and asked him to stay in his seat. They argued, as usual. Then Vanu—this was the unusual part—stood up and kicked her in the shin. Her hand on his shoulder made him lose his balance, and he fell down backward, bumping his head on a desk.
Vanu told a different story. There were no witnesses, just a bunch of six-year-olds; it was he said, she said, like any assault that takes place in a closed room. The physical evidence pointed to the grave culpability of Ms. S. There was a bump on Vanu’s head. The examination by a school-appointed physician turned up all sorts of interesting scars and bruises on Vanu, some of them recent enough to be pinned on Ms. S., who was placed on suspension, barred from the school grounds, and fired a week later. It being her first job after student teaching, she didn’t have the seniority to be assigned a spot on a couch somewhere in an administrative building.
Pam tried to get her phone number from the school—she had liked her—so she could drop by, or call and console her, but the appealing Ms. S. was gone from her life forever.
THE NEW TEACHER WAS NAMED MR. MILEWSKI. HE FELT HE WAS UNDER NO OBLIGATION to teach the kids anything, since he was a substitute, marking time until a replacement for Ms. S. could be found. He carried on long debates with Vanu, paying no attention to any other child.
Flora began taking books to school. As a city kid, she knew how to tune out noise. It wasn’t a skill; it was automatic. She’d never been on a camping trip to the woods outside town or anywhere that didn’t have a roaring sound in the background—not even the planetarium. To enjoy herself in class, all she had to do was ignore Mr. Milewski and Vanu the way she ignored most things, most of the time.
That was the key difference between her and Vanu: he cared about what went on around him. In the world’s most exciting city, he was drawn to the window. Flora was an introvert. In a more just world, he would have been allowed to move and play. She was far better suited to a Romanian-orphanage-style environment of superficially ordered neglect.
To Pam, she seemed happier. She had the best of both worlds, socializing at lunch and recess while enjoying the benefits of homeschooling. Her curriculum, chosen from the shelves of the public library, consisted of cheap nonfiction chapter books with minimal illustration. Many were paperbacks from the seventies with plastic-coated library bindings. The information wasn’t up-to-date, but then again, it was first grade. The exact lineage of the human species was less important than knowing it had evolved. They saved math for after school. Cookies were good for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.
Week by week, Flora seemed to mature, becoming more focused and able to concentrate for longer periods. It was a little disturbing to Pam that the school was doing such a good job all of a sudden.
She went to see Mr. Milewski on parent-teacher night. He praised “the shy, retiring bookworm” Flora and emitted hail-fellow-well-met chuckles about his “problem child” Vanu, who was “too big for his britches” and deserved “fifty lashes with a wet noodle.” He obviously preferred boys to girls. By being larger and more aggressive than the other kids, Vanu had a leg up in terms of masculinity. Mr. Milewski was not nearly old enough to be talking like Howdy Doody, in Pam’s opinion. He was one of those men who start balding at twenty, raised in an era when young people were maximizing hair, and had been taken for his own father all his life. There was a creepiness to his affection for Vanu, but on the other hand, it reassured her that his neglect of Flora was a good thing.
IN SECOND GRADE, FLORA WAS CONSIDERED OLD ENOUGH FOR AFTER-SCHOOL ACTIVITIES. She chose basketball on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Music lacked the glamour of unfamiliarity. Art, drama, and dance were distant rumors. Tutus on Halloween were all she knew of ballet. But she had been watching cool strangers play basketball since the day she was born. She hoped to impress people in the park. Her parents were fine with it, since watching her try to sink layups was frankly hilarious.
She was old enough to shoot hoops by herself, within view of whoever was minding the store. It might be her parents, if she was shooting hoops; they knew how to work the register, and when Flora was in the park they sometimes volunteered, to give Victor and Margie a little time off. The landlords had no children of their own. They invested a lot of hours in Flora without paying her much direct attention. They conspired to give her Tootsie Rolls and sugared sodas and tell her parents she had eaten an apple and drunk white milk, but not every day. They knew that on afternoons when she was a latchkey kid, if Joe (or occasionally Ginger and/or Edgar) didn’t come to pick her up, her strict parents would be home by five thirty, right around the time the big boys took over the basketball courts.
JOE TOOK HER OUT WALKING, WHEN HE HAD TIME. BEING A ROCK STAR WAS NOT A DAY job, and even if it had been, he wouldn’t have given up his walks. He still made new friends every day. Unless they were stationary, like clerks and homeless people, or refused to be shaken loose, like Pam and Daniel, they were soon neglected, but never forgotten entirely. Flora stood by while he queried psychotics about their sores and frozen dessert vendors about their flavors in the same tone of disinterested fascination, oblivious to class boundaries, adding no boundaries of his own.
He was hopeless at cash registers and one-on-one, but he ordered a video segment of her team bouncing basketballs in time to his song “Nitchpakroyd.” Where they weren’t in rhythm, they could be corrected in postproduction.
His follow-up record came out with three videos, a lot of press, and a plan for a major tour. It was entitled Viscosity. The success of Coronation had given him a measure of artistic control, and as he told Daktari, he liked to say “viscosity.” If he was going to be saying a word over and over in interviews, he might as well pick one he liked. That was also how he came up with the singles: “Foursome,” “Noodle Bleach”—both fun to say, while the latter could be understood as a play on “nude beach,” at least by twelve-year-olds—and “Nitchpakroyd,” to which the lyrics were mostly “Nitchpakroyd like an android!” It could be taken (in the context of the video) to imply precocious excellence in basketball or something to do with race, pedophilia, emotional detachment, or drugs. Nobody knew, too many people cared, and Joe never gave it any thought. The sound of Viscosity was melodic and a tad heroic, with overdubbed odd noises. The multiple bass tracks remained. He saw them as his trademark, and everyone indulged him, because the sound did well live.
In due time, he set off again on a three-month tour with Gwen. It wasn’t an around-the-world tour, though the press materials called it that. Going west, he only skimmed East Asia before return
ing to California, and he never got as far as eastern Europe heading east. But it was still a lot of dates. None of them were in football stadiums, but several were in basketball arenas.
Daktari had coached and encouraged him to be a more dynamic performer. He strode around the stage in three different costumes in the course of two hours, sometimes handing off his bass to a roadie so he could concentrate on singing. The instruments and mics were wireless, so there was no danger he would trip.
He had two female backup singers. After ten shows, they were hoarse and their voices had to be put on playback as a precaution. He gave them the night off in Nagoya and asked the male instrumentalists to lip-synch their parts. That went over so well that Daktari gave him the green light to do it during a song called “Wet Pot” for the rest of the tour.
DANIEL STUDIED THE TOUR ITINERARY CLOSELY. HE WOULD HAVE LOVED TO GO IN Gwen’s place, or as Joe’s manager, or a member of his entourage, or even a fly on the wall. The hotel names reawakened youthful fantasies of decadence without debasement. In two cities Joe would be conveyed to them by helicopter. Daniel’s inability to share in the spoils of rock stardom made him think dark thoughts about fatherhood. But it wasn’t an outcome anyone could have predicted—that his babysitter would make the big time, rendering it impossible for him to leave his child alone—and he accepted it as his fate.
SLOWLY THE TWENTIETH CENTURY GROUND TO A HALT. THE MAW OF THE WORLD WAS choked with too many things. The tech community saw salvation in the abandonment of things, which would be replaced by information. Information was imagined as helpful knowledge, the kind librarians provide at the reference desk. The internet was conceived of as a gigantic library. The world’s naïveté was grotesque.
The final significant event of the 1990s, at least on Chrystie Street, was that Victor and Margie bought a thousand shares of Amazon stock. When the bubble burst in March 2000, they took an $80,000 loss of their own free will as if they could punish the company by divesting. They raised Daniel’s rent to $800, an increase of 100 percent. It would bring them an extra $80,000 over seventeen years. He didn’t fight it.