I get the mail, put off making my slow way up the stairs. The fancy preschool still sends us the newsletter. This one features a list of the top ten fears reported by their students. Darkness doesn’t make the cut. Blood, sharks, and loneliness are 8, 9, and 10.
When I come in, the dog is sleeping under the table. Eli is folding a piece of plain white paper. “Don’t look,” he says. “I’m inventing this. No one will ever know what I have done except me.”
I don’t look. I put out kibble and water, peer openheartedly into the fridge. The window is open. It’s nice out. The pigeons aren’t on the fire escape. There are some pots left over from the tomato experiment. “Whoosh,” my son says.
My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.
* * *
…
“Do you want a snack?” she asks me. I hesitate because Catherine works in advertising. She met my brother when he signed up to be in a focus group for her agency. A hundred dollars cash was the pay. The assignment was to brainstorm names for a new deodorant aimed at children under ten. The Stink of Angels was his contribution.
I still can’t quite believe they’re a couple, but on their first date, they both ordered club soda. Twelve Steppers call it the Thirteenth Step. She used to do a little coke. He was all about the pills.
I tell Catherine I’m just going to wait for dinner. Later, I cruise by her desk and, sure enough, there’s a folder there.
Potato Chips: Ambitious, successful, high achiever
Nuts: Easygoing, empathetic, understanding
Popcorn: Takes charge, smart, self-confident
I head into the living room and there is Ben, blithely eating cashews.
* * *
…
Sunday morning. The dog has found a baby bunny in the grass. She closed her mouth around it once, then released it. Now we are trying to save it. Someone at the community garden has given us a box lined with a soft cloth. But it is trembling violently. There is no blood anywhere, but there are small indents in the fur that show where her teeth have been. We try to put it back in the garden but it has already died. Of fright, I think.
That night, Eli calls to us hysterically from the kitchen. There’s a mouse skull under the sink, he says. I give Ben a dark look. We are killing them secretly, I thought. Heavily, he rises to go in there. He gets down on his knees to look under the sink. But it is only a knob of ginger and we are saved.
* * *
…
I don’t know what to do about this car service man. He told me business is down; no one is calling anymore. He had to let all his drivers go and is down to one car. He sleeps at work now so as to never miss a call. His wife has said she is going to leave him.
Mr. Jimmy. That’s the name on the card he gave me. I try to use only his service now, not the better, faster one. Sometimes when I call his voice is groggy. He says always that he will be there in seven minutes, but it is much longer now.
I used to take a car service only if I was going to be late, but now I find I am building in double the amount of travel time. A bus would be the same or faster. Also, I could afford it. But what if I am the only customer he has left?
I’m late for the lecture now. And I was wrong about which building it’s in. By the time I get there, Sylvia is almost through speaking. There’s a big crowd. Behind her is a graph shaped like a hockey stick.
“What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances,” she says. She pulls up a slide of people having a picnic by a lake. Blue skies, green trees, white people.
“Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and you continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous.”
The moderator makes a gesture to show it is time to wrap up. A line of men is forming behind the microphone. “I have both a question and a comment,” they say. A young woman stands up to wait in line. I watch as she inches forward. Finally, she makes it to the front to ask her question.
“How do you maintain your optimism?”
I can’t get to Sylvia afterward. There are too many people. I walk to the subway, trying to think about the world.
Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?
* * *
…
For almost two years, I have managed not to run into this mother from the old preschool. At times, it takes some doing. I definitely have to be eagle-eyed if I venture into the fancy bakery or the co-op. Her name is Nicola and her son’s name, inexplicably, is Kasper.
She had this way that she would talk about our zoned elementary school, in one breath praising the immigrant kids who went there and in the next talking about the tutors she’d hired to get her son out of it. Strivers, she called them. Like they were all cleaning chimneys or selling papers hot off the press.
Nicola used to carry flash cards with her, and she’d greet her son at pickup with a snack that she said the name of in another language. Pomme. Banane.
Eli was enamored with her. He wanted me to wear nicer clothes. He wanted me to teach him the foreign names of fruit. One day I brought him an orange (in French: orange). I told him he could take the test if he wanted, but that there would be, of course, no pricey tutors.
A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person.
He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.
* * *
…
I finally tried the meditation class. My knee was hurting so I sat on a chair. The mostly enlightened woman was there on a cushion. I’d wondered what happened to her. At the end, she asked Margot a question or what she seemed to think was a question.
“I have been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in the melted ego world. But I find I have trouble coming back to the differentiated world, the one you were just talking about where you have to wash the dishes and take out the garbage.”
She was very pregnant, six months maybe. Oh, don’t worry, I thought, the differentiated world is coming for your ass.
* * *
…
As it turned out, Eli did fine on that test. Not well enough for the citywide schools, but well enough to be placed in something the district called EAGLE. (They never said what it stood for, but who cares, because, duh, eagles soar!) For Nicola, though, all of this was the culmination of a year’s work. I remember how she came in beaming the day after the results. We’ve had quite a week, she told me. We’ve just learned that Kasper is gifted and talented.