Harmony (19 page)

“Show me your tits,” says Lincoln. “If you've got any.”

I say, “I don't, really,” which is really not the right thing to say, because it's like I'm joining in this conversation with him. Like maybe I'm acting like I like him or something. I should just turn around and go. But there's part of me that doesn't want to be rude, if you can believe I'm actually thinking that. And there's part of me that feels a little flattered, or at least like I'm
supposed
to feel flattered.

“I've seen 'em,” Ryan says. It's the first thing he's said since all of this started.

“You have not!” I yell. I'm furious at Ryan, suddenly, way madder than I am at Lincoln. I mean, it's easy; I
know
how to be mad at Ryan.

“Last week, when you were changing for free swim in the bathroom at the dining hall,” he said. I can see he's totally torn here. He almost sounds apologetic for a minute, but then he remembers he wants to be all tough to impress Lincoln. “You know how there's that lock that's a hook, and it doesn't always close all the way?”

“So how were they?” asks Lincoln.

Ryan looks back and forth between me and Lincoln, before saying “small” in a low voice that he doesn't think I can hear.

Lincoln practically collapses in fake laughter, bending over with his penis still in his hand. “Did you hear that?” he asks me. “He said they were small.”

“Yeah, I know. Just like I already said.”

“You know, Ryan's got a little mousie, too.” Lincoln says. “Go ahead, Ryan. Get it out. I bet Iris wants to see it.”

“I do not,” I say. My voice is quiet but vicious. I stare at Ryan, waiting to see what he's going to do. It's suddenly really important for me to know.

Ryan looks scared. Actually scared. He looks at me with his face almost crumbling, like he might cry. But what he says is, “Okay,” and he reaches for the snap on his shorts.

And no. No freaking way, no FUCKING way. I am not going to stand here and let Ryan show me his penis. “Fuck you,” I say to him. I lunge forward and shove him back into a tree. His head makes a big thunk against the wood. I hope it hurts.

I turn around, and then I'm running out of the woods, back to camp. I don't want to see anybody; I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't stop until I get to the door of our cabin, which I open and
close with a smash. My mom's in the kitchen, but I don't answer her when she asks me why I'm crying. I don't have a single thing to say.

I slam the door of our bedroom and lie down on the bed. It's quiet, except for the noises I'm making, which keep going for a while, no matter how hard I try to stop.

After a few minutes, Tilly comes into the room. She walks over to my bed and tries to give me a hug, but since I'm lying down, it turns into her practically lying on top of my back. It doesn't feel bad, though, that heavy weight pressing me into the soft mattress. It feels like she's getting between me and everything else in the whole giant, stupid world. It feels like she's my big sister, and she's protecting me.

This spring, it's clear that puberty has arrived, full force. Lately, you've had to remind Tilly (over and over again) not to rub herself idly through her pants. The concepts of “public” and “private” have always been difficult for her, especially as they relate to her body. But the stakes are higher here than picking her nose or lifting up her shirt to scratch her belly; somehow, you have to get it across to her that she
cannot
touch herself in front of other people.

“I don't like it,” she says to you one day. It takes you a minute to understand that she's talking about sexual arousal. “It's annoying; it kind of hurts, almost. It feels like I need to pee or something, but there's no way to make it go away. At least if I rub it, it doesn't feel as bad.”

You speak to her frankly about masturbation, you give her a few books to look through, and you tell her to spend some time alone in her room. A half hour later, she emerges, red-faced and pissed off. “I can't do it,” she says. She's almost in tears. “I don't know how to have an orgasm. It doesn't work. Can't you help me? Can't you show me or something?”

You close your eyes, take a breath. She's asking a genuine question.
She doesn't understand why you won't. You've just told her it's natural and normal; you told her everyone does it, and when she pressed further, you admitted that you do, too. From her perspective, here's what just happened: you told her she needs to learn a new skill, but she can't ask anyone to show her how it's done. From her perspective, you're being kind of a bitch. Add it to the long list of anecdotes you're never going to post on Facebook.

Josh, at least, is appropriately horrified.

“I mean, what are we supposed to do,” you ask him, “buy her a vibrator?”

He lets out a strangled groan, half fake, half real. “Stop it,” he says, covering his ears and making a face. “Good God.”

You sigh. It seemed natural that all the period stuff should fall to you, but there it was a lot clearer what the “right way” was.

“Well, okay, so what if she were a boy? What would we do then?”

“If she were a boy, I don't think she'd be having this problem.” He shrugs. “Or if she did . . . it's a lot easier to explain using metaphors and crude hand gestures.”

In the end, you say fuck it and you order her a damn vibrator. You find a few educational websites and YouTube videos, and you walk her through it without actually . . . walking her through it. Eventually, she gets it and you all move on to the next step. Which is apparently learning not to tell your family about your orgasms at the dinner table.

 • • • 

Introducing Scott to Josh is weird; you can't shake the feeling that you're introducing your husband to the man you're having an affair with. Which is not an image you want to dwell on; there's nothing even vaguely sexual in the vibe you get from Scott, or the interactions you've had with him. But there's something illicit about the way you've slid him into your lives, sideways: dressing up a little bit to go to his evening seminars, while Josh takes over homework and
bedtime duties; engaging in a private email correspondence with him; inviting him over to the house when the children are at school.

Probably, Josh would be less threatened by the guy if you
were
sleeping with him. He's suspicious of Scott's motives, dismissive of his credentials, and resentful about the four hundred dollars per session you're paying him for his time. He's also twenty minutes late getting home from work on the night of the meeting, which is fine, because you suspected that something like this might happen, and you told him the wrong time deliberately. You've picked up a few tricks over the years.

Truthfully, though, this isn't much of a battle. He knows as well as you that you both need help. He knows that the older Tilly gets, the less time you have before she's expected to manage on her own.

The two of you disagreed about how to present Scott to the kids, and you've settled on introducing him as “a teacher who likes talking to kids.” Which you think actually sounds creepier than just calling him “a friend of Mommy and Daddy's,” but whatever.

The kids don't really care what you call him, though. Tilly, in particular, is excited to meet him, excited that you're bringing someone new into her life. This is one of Tilly's many wonderful traits: the enthusiasm with which she greets every new endeavor. Wonderful, but sometimes heartbreaking, because you can never be sure how she'll be received in return.

“Hi, Scott,” says Tilly, before he's even got his coat off. “Do you know what the tallest statue in the world is?”

This is her thing, lately, her “special interest”: that seems to be the polite term that everyone's agreed on. “All-consuming obsession” would be closer to the truth. She's pretty much always had one. Before big statues, it was Greek mythology, and before that, dolphins.

In fact, you're pretty sure that Scott
does
know what the tallest statue is, since he's been briefed on Tilly's interests, but he doesn't give it away. “Huh,” he says. “Good question. I'm afraid I don't know.”

He's barely finished speaking before Tilly's filling him in. “It's the Spring Temple Buddha, in the Zhaocun township of Lushan County, Henan, China. They started building it in 1997, and it wasn't finished until 2008. It's 420 feet tall, but if you count the base, which I don't, it's 502 feet. The next tallest one is the Motherland Calls, in Volgograd, Russia, which is 279 feet, but that includes the sword she's holding over her head. The statue itself, from head to toe, is 171 feet.”

“Wow,” says Scott. You put a hand on Tilly's arm to remind her to give him a chance to talk. “That's really interesting. I think the tallest statue I've ever seen in person is the Statue of Liberty. How tall is that one?”

“Well, actually, most people consider the Statue of Liberty the second tallest statue in the world, but that's only if you count from the bottom of the pedestal to the top of her torch, which is 305 feet. But if you just count how tall the statue would be if she climbed down from the base and went walking down the street or something, she'd only be 151 feet tall.”

You watch her chatter away, pacing around the living room as she talks. You think,
She is my life
, and it is of course both true and not. The day after she was born, it occurred to you that all of the categories had changed now. When you filled out medical paperwork related to the baby, everyone had slid forward a peg: “parents” meant you, “grandparents” meant your own parents and Josh's. For a brief, dark time—approximately the first week of her life—you couldn't escape the feeling that you were one step nearer to death. And all because of this tiny, eight-pound creature.

The plan tonight is that Scott will spend about an hour observing the kids, and then he'll spend some time talking to Josh alone. Later in the week, he'll write up a report and then meet with the two of you to discuss it.

Tilly has brought out her “statue notes” now, for Scott to look at: a spiral-bound notebook where she's recorded all of the research
she's done on this new topic. As if the passion she feels, the giddy infatuation these structures inspire in her, can be summed up by a list of relative heights and dates of completion. Such depth of feeling. When she talks about it to you (or to anyone else), you can see how much she wants to convince you that this information is worth your time. To make you see the beauty that she sees.

And what you want, the
only
thing you really want—from Scott, from this consultation, from all of the therapists and special-ed teachers and therapeutic service providers who are doing their best to help you—is to preserve this child's enthusiasm and charm, even as you teach her that she can't always have everyone's attention, that grabbing strangers' arms and insisting they talk about statues isn't exactly the right way to live among the people of the world.

Scott never did ask you to give him an answer about happiness and purpose, but you wonder if maybe the question itself was its own exercise. How is it that we ever manage to forget how brief and fragile our lives are? The time will come when your body will stop working. Your mind—now in constant movement, containing vast galaxies—will no longer think. Of course, you know this; you, as much as anyone else, are subject to those brief, terrifying moments of clarity. Bright bursts of anxiety, blooming and swelling.

But is that all you're supposed to do with that knowledge—fear it? Or are you supposed to hold on to it, use it to figure out how you want to move through the world?

Happiness, as it exists in the wild—as opposed to those artificially constructed moments like weddings and birthday parties, where it's gathered into careful piles—is not smooth. Happiness in the real world is mostly just resilience and a willingness to arch oneself toward optimism. To believe that people are more good than bad. To believe that the waves carrying you are neither friendly nor malicious, and to know that you're less likely to drown if you stop struggling against them.

While Scott hangs out with the kids, you and Josh sit in the next room and look over brightly colored handouts. The one you're holding is about the effect of pesticides and other environmental toxins.

So many things to worry about. Which ones do you decide to fight? Last summer, small yellow signs began appearing on lawns all over your neighborhood: “This yard treated by the Mosquito Experts! Keep children and pets off grass for 24 hours.” You looked it up on their website, to see exactly what they were using and how safe it was; the phrase they used was “low mammalian toxicity.” It didn't reassure you much, but you liked the wording. Think of your children as the mammals they are: slippery seals, wide-eyed monkeys. Curious and mischievous, embodying your dearest hopes.

In the end, you hired the Mosquito Experts, too. Because you're a good neighbor, and because a yard infested with mosquitoes carries its own hazards. And anyway, “natural” doesn't necessarily mean harmless—what makes us imagine that it does? Arsenic and deadly nightshade, hurricanes and tsunamis and poisonous scorpions—all one hundred percent natural. Water alone can probably kill you ten different ways.

Tilly's still talking on and on to Scott; you can almost move your lips along with her. You've learned more about giant statues than you ever imagined you would. You know that the Colossus of Rhodes was toppled by an earthquake. It broke first at the knees. It stood in place, whole and intact, for a mere fifty-six years, but the ruins lay where they fell for nearly a millennium. “Even lying on the ground, it is a marvel,” wrote Pliny the Elder. “Few people can make their arms meet round the thumb of the figure.”

But “the truth” is not something that exists in a vacuum, static and unchanging. For hundreds of years, people believed that before the earthquake, the Colossus of Rhodes stood astride the entrance of a harbor, with one foot on each side of the water. The statue is depicted in this pose in artwork and illustrations; Shakespeare wrote about it this way, and so did Emma Lazarus, in the poem that
would be affixed to the Statue of Liberty on a bronze plaque. But modern scholars agree that this is nonsense. It's a mechanical and logistical impossibility. As nice a picture as it makes, no ship ever sailed between those bronze legs.

There is currently no cure for autism; there is no universally agreed-upon treatment plan. Whether we should aim to “cure” it at all is a matter of some debate. But no one can say what will be true about autism in a thousand years, or a hundred, or twenty. Anything that is built can topple. Anything written can be revised.

Josh has set the timer on his phone for an hour, and when the table you're sitting at begins to vibrate, you get up and follow him into the other room.

Scott and the girls are sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. They've all got paper and crayons; they're drawing (they are excited to explain to you) their own giant statues. Iris has created a monument to bunnies; Scott has drawn a monument to roller coasters. And Tilly, in true Tilly fashion, has designed a monument to monuments. On a hillside, a thousand feet high, a dozen statues stacked one on top of the other. And she's glowing like she's never been happier.

This is, you believe, the instant when Josh decides that he approves of Scott. It's not that Scott has done anything particularly amazing; this is an activity that any teacher might come up with, or any good babysitter. But he's paying attention to your girls, meeting them at their level. Listening to what they have to say.

People who have parenting philosophies
, Josh used to say,
have too much time on their hands
. He used to say,
I know what works and what doesn't. I know my kids better than anyone
.

Now he sits down on the floor, between Tilly and Iris. He slides over a piece of paper and picks up a red crayon.

“My turn,” he says. “Make some space for me, too.”