Portable Childhoods Read online

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Andrew’s eyes blurred with tears. He took two Bud Lites from the cooler, pulling the pop-tops back. Beer, because Tommy liked the way the bubbles tickled, liked to drink what TV men did. Beer because it would mask the taste of the tablets Andrew dropped in, one by one, all twenty-six.

  “Drink up, Buddy,” he said, climbing slowly up onto the bank. He handed Tom a can.

  In the tall grass around them, fireflies began to rise in the twilight, twinkling yellow-green.

  “Look. Fairies.” Andrew’s voice cracked. “Can you count the fairies for me, Tommy? Can you count out loud?”

  At thirty-six, Tommy’s head began to droop. At forty-one the empty beer can tumbled to the ground.

  “Oh.” Tommy’s eyes opened wide, his face creased into a wide grin. He cupped both hands around a secret, fragile cargo for just a moment, then slid boneless down the willow.

  Andrew settled next to him, hugged him tight, and drank the second bitter beer. He kissed his son’s cheek one last time and lay the string of dragonflies on Tommy’s wrist, bright against the pale, soft flesh.

  “Sweet dreams,” he whispered, and he closed his eyes.

  Portable Childhoods

  “That girl I once was? I thought I’d left her behind, but discover that she travels always with me, both baggage and treasure chest.”

  —w. M. Janeway

  1 Knuckles

  THE FIRST TIME I saw the child, she was bright red and covered with the pastry cream that no one but the mother and the folks at the hospital ever get to see. She was squalling her lungs out, and I was too tired to be anything but relieved that she was finally out and okay and that my labor was over.

  Looking at her now, sitting at the kitchen table, doing her math homework, the edge of her tongue peeking out of the left side of her mouth as she tries to concentrate, it’s hard to believe that I could once carry her like a football in the crook of my arm, that I once spent a whole morning marveling that she had knuckles.

  Knuckles.

  I never thought about her knuckles before she was born. Her hands, yes, and those only in the abstract. But there they were, tiny hands with tiny knuckles. How did I know how to grow knuckles? Much less how to put them together in the right way so that her little fist could open and close so tightly around my enormous finger?

  She had bright blue eyes then, now darkened to a greenish hazel, and hair that was auburn, almost reddish; unless she’s in the bright sun for a few hours, it masquerades as brown these days.

  She looks up to catch me staring at her. “Why are you looking at me goofy?”

  “I was thinking about the day you were born, and how tiny you were, and what a miracle it was that this person came from me.”

  “Oh.”

  No interest at all this afternoon. A few years ago, she went through a phase of endless curiosity about her own beginnings. We looked at baby pictures, some blurry, haphazard videos, a few tiny clothes I keep in the cedar chest, just to remember. But today, this almost-nine-year old is much more interested in fractions than in my nostalgia for an infant she never knew.

  It strikes me as so odd that she never knew the baby, my baby, who somehow became her. I know both of them so well. It’s too abstract a thought, too convoluted and philosophical. I get up to start chopping vegetables for dinner.

  A neighbor with a green thumb booned me with zucchini and tomatoes and some fresh peas that I’m going to turn into something with pasta. I cut off the ends of the zukes and start chopping them into a coarse dice. It’s a rhythmic, unconscious motion, and as my hands work, my mind wanders over to peer at the child and think about the baby.

  One and the same. Entirely different. Those first days she seemed so fragile, and I marveled at her strength. Tight-gripping fingers, strong sucking on my pinkie. Great mouth muscles. But that’s what she was built for, at that particular time.

  My mother, I’ve been told, didn’t see me until I was several hours old. She’d had “twilight sleep” for the birth, and so wasn’t really there when I was born. Times were different then, I’ve also been told. But I can’t imagine missing that moment. By the time I saw my mother, felt her arms around me, I’d been bathed and poked and prodded and dressed by strangers. In moments when I feel depressed and disconnected, those first hours loom like Calvinist predestination. How could I ever hope to connect with anyone when my first experience involved being passed from hand to hand by professional, competent strangers?

  I put the chopped zucchini into a bowl and pour myself a glass of wine, stealing a look at the child, who is paying no attention. Eventually, she too was poked and prodded by similar strangers; that’s what they do. But not until she’d lain on my chest, both of us naked and clammy and crying. I cupped her butt in my hand and kissed the top of her head and we stayed there like that, flesh to flesh, until the nurse took her a few feet away to get her measurements.

  I read in the paper about babies who are found abandoned in cardboard boxes or dumpsters, wrapped in a blanket but left to depend on the kindness of strangers, or die. I read about the children who abandoned their baby behind the hotel room where he was born, or the girl who left her newborn in the trash in the ladies room and went back to the prom, hoping no one would notice. I know those babies were not wanted or planned; they were impediments to a happy life, not the cornerstone of one. But I cannot imagine meeting my newborn child and abandoning her.

  Okay. Truth. When she was teething, there were weeks when I got no sleep and walked around like a zombie, holding my screaming darling and praying for her to just shut up for half an hour. At those times, I did think seriously about trying to rent her out. I thought longingly of nannies and the great convenience of having a clean, sleepy, well-fed baby come to visit me as I lay on the chaise, wearing my pink satin quilted bed-jacket. I would coo at her for a few minutes and then hand her back to Nurse and return to my novel. It was tempting.

  But not part of the deal. For every knuckle-admiring, blissful morning spent with the cherubic outpouring of my loins, there were two more with the squalling child who had an ear infection, bad diaper rash, or a dozen other minor ailments that could only be communicated through loud, frustrated, pain-ridden rage. Inarticulate, language-less, yet so expressive.

  I look over at the child again, and ask, “How many more problems do you have?” I’m thinking of her homework, although my brain registers the double meaning.

  She looks at the xeroxed handout. “One that I’m doing now, one that I haven’t done yet, and one that I’m kinda stuck on.”

  “How ’bout you finish the one you’re on and make a salad for us? I’ll help you with the stuck one after dinner, if you want.”

  She bites her lip in thought, then nods. “Do we have any photons?”

  It’s what she calls croutons. I laughed for ten minutes the first time it came out of her mouth. She was about five. Now sometimes at the grocery, I have to stop myself from asking a clerk what aisle the photons are on, pause long enough to remember they have another name.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s a box in the cupboard. If not, write them on the list.”

  She nods again and goes back to her fractions. After a minute she puts down the pencil, gathers up the scratch paper, and moves everything over to “her” section of the counter. She looks in the cupboard. “Nope, we’re out.”

  She walks over to the little chalkboard by the fridge. As she passes, I reach out and take her wrist, lifting her knuckles to my lips, and kiss them gently.

  She gives me a startled, slightly annoyed look, and reclaims her hand. “You know, sometimes you’re a little strange,” she says, and prints PHotons at the bottom of the list.

  2 St. Elmo

  It is the feast day of St. Elmo, the child informs me. We are not Catholic. We’re not really anything, belong to no church or synagogue or mosque or coven or prayer group. When she asks, we talk about god or religion, but I don’t bring it up. She knows that I
have a sort of altar in my room. I don’t pray in front of it, but I keep little talismans—a silver dollar from the year I was born, a fire opal in matrix, a tiny dried blowfish—on its too-dusty shelf.

  In my office, on another dusty shelf, there are many reference books. As a writer, I need to know odd facts. One of the books is the Penguin Dictionary of Saints. The child was in one of her Joan of Arc moods the other night and asked if she could look at it. The Dictionary of Saints is far more disturbing and violent than the Brothers Grimm, or even The Godfather. The saints were tortured, in hideous—although imaginative—ways. But I let her. She’s not prone to nightmares, and we’ve talked about how it’s better not to share some things with kids on the playground.

  She asks me if St. Elmo is related to the orange guy on Sesame Street, and I tell her I don’t think so. Elmo’s other name is Erasmus, she explains, but that’s dorky. Elmo is cool. She likes to say the name Elmo.

  When I was growing up, there was a St. Erasmus High School, a boys’ school, in a nearby city. It showed up on the sports page or on TV when their basketball or football teams did especially well. Both the child and I agree that we’d rather have letter jackets that said elMo across the back.

  “St. Elmo is mostly known for St. Elmo’s fire,” the child reads me from the book. “He’s the patron saint of sailors because he died by having his intestines wound out of his body on a windlass.” She looks at me questioningly and I point her toward the dictionary. She comes back making a face. “It’s a gross way to die,” she says. “Like winding up the hose on that reel by the back door, except it’s your guts.” I worry sometimes that the Committee on Sound Parenting is going to find out about these breakfast chats the child and I have.

  She turns to the back of the book, where all the feast days are listed. Her birthday was yesterday, June first. She is now nine. Her saints are Justin, who was boring and pious and was merely beheaded, and Pamphilus, who was also boring and beheaded, but has a more interesting name. She sighs when she reads me these pathetic choices, like having to choose between liver and turnips.

  I tell her that since we’re not Catholic, she doesn’t have to have a saint at all, that she’s not stuck with Justin and Pamphilus. But she likes the idea of her own personal saint, at least this birthday.

  “Why couldn’t I have been born a day later?” she asks. “Then I could have had Elmo.”

  I start to tell her I’m sorry, that June first wasn’t really my decision. Entirely her choice at that point. But she gets that glazed look on her face and I can tell that she’s hearing sounds, but nothing’s getting through. Blah, blah, blah.

  Then I have an idea. “Will you get me the phone book?”

  She looks startled and baffled, begins to ask why, then just shrugs. “White or yellow?”

  “White.”

  When she returns, I flip to the front of the book, where all the odd useful information is, and look up how to call foreign countries. I don’t want phone numbers or country codes, just the time zones.

  “Look,” I say after a minute, “Who’s in charge of all this saint stuff?”

  She thinks for a moment. “The pope guy, I guess.”

  “Excellent.” I smile at that. The pope guy. “And where does the pope guy live?”

  “In Italy, I think. That city that’s sort of a country.”

  “The Vatican. Bingo.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. “So?”

  “So you were born in California, on June first, at seven o’clock at night.”

  Eyes narrow even more. What a pain I am. “I know that.”

  “But…” I let the ‘but’ dangle in the air just long enough for her to be curious. “But at the Vatican, it was already the middle of the night. Or very early in the morning. The morning of June second.”

  The child looks puzzled for a minute, then brightens. “So I can have St. Elmo! Because where the pope guy lives, I was born on June second, and he’d say (she lowers her voice to a stately growl) ‘This child comes into the world on the feast day of the blessed Elmo.’”

  I burst out laughing. “Exactly. So Happy St. Elmo’s Day.”

  She smiles and hugs me then, and asks if we can have fish sticks for dinner—in honor of St. Elmo, the patron of sailors and kids who dote on great odd names.

  3 Shuffling

  It’s cold and foggy outside. Typical for San Francisco, but not a good combination for a summer Saturday. The child was cheered by the comics, briefly, but fell into a funk after I made her put her breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.

  “Now what can I do?”

  I refrain, with great restraint, from pointing out that her room is filled with books, craft stuff, a computer, and enough puzzles and games and other oddments to keep any good Victorian child occupied through a blizzard-filled winter. I say none of that, because I hear it in my head in my mother’s voice, and that’s usually an omen.

  “The Giants game is on at noon. They’re playing the Rockies.”

  This appears to be marginally uplifting. She looks at the clock. “It’s only nine-thirty. What can I do until then?” This is a whine, a genuine, high-pitched whine, not my favorite tone in the child’s repertoire. She doesn’t choose to practice it often, but it is her tone of choice this morning. And I’m not really up for it.

  I’m doing the Jumble and the crossword, avoiding the laundry and a manuscript that I need to copyedit. I don’t have to finish it today, but I do need to make a dent in it for a couple of hours. I was eyeing the Giants game as my break, my reward, but that won’t happen unless I can shut myself up in my office in the next half hour.

  This requires the child to be self-sufficient and play nicely by herself for a while, and she’s not on the program. Her arms are crossed over her chest and her lower lip is sticking out in a not-quite scowl. She’s in a seriously pissy mood.

  I sigh and try to figure out a plan that will work for both of us.

  “Tell you what. I’ll put a load in the washer,” I say, feeling mildly virtuous that something practical’s going to get done on my end. “And after it’s going, I’ll teach you how to shuffle. Then you can practice while I get some work done, and we can play a little poker during the ball game. Bring me your sheets.”

  She brightens at the word shuffle. It’s a skill she’s been bugging me to teach her for a couple of weeks. Until very recently, her hands have been just a bit too small to get a good grip on the deck.

  “Okay,” she says. She comes back with her arms full of dinosaur sheets and a scowl-ette on her face. She’s realized that giving me her sheets means she has to remake her bed, which she hates. I’ve told her that it would be much easier if it wasn’t in the corner, but she likes sleeping sheltered on two sides.

  She plops the sheets onto the top of the laundry basket with a “see what I have to put up with?” look. Right now she’s not my favorite human. I stifle the urge to just turn around, go into my office, shut the door, and let her stew in it. But one of us needs to try to be pleasant. I guess that would be me.

  “Thanks. I’ll take these downstairs while you go and get an old deck from the drawer in the living room.”

  “Why can’t we use the kitchen deck?”

  “You want a deck that’s pretty broke in to learn to shuffle, Tex.”

  That stops her in her tracks. She wasn’t expecting Tex. She looks at me in confusion for a minute, and then regroups.

  “Well, then, I reckon that’s a good idea, Slim,” she drawls, and goes off to get the cards.

  I’m relieved. Tex was my last resort. Tex and Slim have a much better chance at not yelling at each other this morning than we do. Maybe it’ll take some of the edge off. Tex never whines.

  Once the washing machine is gurgling and whirring, I take my now-lukewarm cup of tea and sit down at the table where the child is waiting. I pick up the deck and give it a good, whiffling shuffle, with a show-off bridge at the end. “You ready, Tex?”

  “Yup.”

 
I shuffle a few times, slowing it down, watching what my hands are doing before I say anything. It’s such an unconscious, automatic thing, shuffling a deck of cards. A skill my body has had for so long that that I’m not sure I can explain it in words. It’s like tying my shoes. I don’t really pay attention; I’m not aware of the individual motions involved. It’s just one fluid, instant action.

  Loop, loop, pull—my shoes are tied. Cut, interlock, whiffle—and the deck is shuffled.

  I break the motion apart into steps, walk her through it as much as I can. A few dozen slow-mo shuffles. Not all of them are successful. I tell her that’s okay, see, even I can’t do it every time. After about ten minutes, my fingers are cramping and I hand her the deck.

  She grips it so tightly her knuckles whiten. The cut is easy. Now her face is pure concentration: furrowed brow, tip of her tongue visible as she tries to align the edges of the cards just right so they will riffle instead of merging into solid hunks.

  The first few tries are just hunks. And then she does a real riffle and the cards all fall back neatly into place, reordered. She smiles. That’s a good thing to see this morning.

  We trade back and forth for another fifteen minutes, until she’s got it, pretty much. Not every time, but enough that she’s not too frustrated.

  “Okay, now shuffle and deal a couple of hands,” I tell her.

  She handles the deal with the same concentration, trying to get enough loft under the pasteboards so that they sail across the table to me, but not so much that they skitter off onto the floor.

  “Can we play for real now?” she asks, after pretend-dealing half a dozen hands.

  “Nope. Now you get some practice time with nobody watching over your shoulder, and I’m going to go into my office and work for a while.” I look at the clock. Remarkably, it’s just after 10:00. “I’m going to work until noon, then we can play while the game’s on. Okay?”

  She nods, cuts the cards without looking at them. “I guess so.”

  When I emerge from my office, thirty copy-edited pages later, the kitchen floor is littered with cards, scattered like a game of 52-pickup or a Three Stooges Flying Shuffle Explosion.