Only Children (34 page)

“Okay.” Big boy Byron, big feet forward! He marched on the shiny floor. Foot slaps.

The room was big. There were white hot dog lights way up. Like the big tunnel. Big tunnel to Grandma.

“How many eyes do you have, Byron?”

Big balloon head. One. Two. “Two. Like you.”

Smile. “How many ears do you have?”

“No ears,” Byron said. Cups on ears, his hands covered them. The hair tickled inside.

Bigger smile. “How many ears do you have?”

Dance, big boy. Tunnel sound. His hands were glue, his head a teacup. See my handle, see my spout. “No ears! No ears!”

“Sure you do, Byron. How many?”

Dance! He spun and spun and spun, covered ears, covered hair, hands stuck. “Can’t hear! No ears, no hears, no ears. No hair! Don’t have hair!”

“Let’s make a picture, Byron.” Balloon head floated down. “Draw a picture of your family. Here’s some paper. Want to pick out a crayon?”

She pushed him like a stroller. There was a yellow table. She smiles, but her voice frowns. He stood still. The crayon box was right in front. He looked at the balloon head.

Smile. “Pick out any color.”

“Draw!” he shouted. “Draw!” he shouted again. His voice came out like water from a faucet. Whoosh! He picked up a red crayon and danced it across. Broken red. Big X. “There!” he said, and pushed the paper, pushed the box, sliding off the table. “There!” he said.

The balloon head bobbed, up and down, no smile anymore. Just the frown.

“Where’s my mommy?” he asked. Balloon head was no fun.

T
HE DOOR
closed. Night. Good night moon. Luke fell. Down on the blanket, yellow and soft.

Mommy and Daddy went out into the glowing night.

He sucked hard and smelled the bakery of sleep, warm and pungent.

Listen. Grandpa’s voice. Rumble, rumble. Like Daddy—underground.

I’m alone!

I’m alone!

The room was dark and empty. Out—out—out in the glowing night.

He wanted to grow up, grow up huge out of the crib, out of the dark, big and bigger, to be in the day, to be in the day with Mommy and Daddy.

I’m alone!

I’m alone!

He cried. He cried. And heard a baby cry. And screamed.

There was a crying baby in the dark.

The rumble, the feet came, and scared him.

Press into the blanket and hide. Hide from the crying baby and rumble feet.

“Luke?” Grandpa brought the light, the hot light in, and with him, Daddy’s voice. “Luke? Can I read to you?”

“Yessss!” It hurt to talk. Water was everywhere.

Grandpa caught him. Luke went up, big and up, out of the dark and the crib, into the warm light.

Luke squeezed into the hot body, fell against the pillow chest, and rested.

There was no crying baby.

There was Luke and Grandpa.

Grandpa opened the book and read.

“ ‘In the great green room,’ ” Grandpa rumbled, thundered inside, “ ‘there was a telephone. And a red balloon.’ ”

Balloon in room. Luke laughed.

Grandpa looked at Luke. His face, his bright white face, got so big. Luke squeezed into the hot. “I love you, Luke,” Grandpa sang.

Grandpa glowed in the night. Safe and hot and big. Glowing in the night.

“What’s going on?” Grandma said, and with her came more light.

“We’re reading,” Grandpa said.

“Can I listen?” Grandma asked.

“Sure,” Grandpa said. “That’s all right, isn’t it, Luke?”

He sneaked into the warm, against the rising, falling chest. Grandma took his hand and held it—smooth and cool she was, calm and gentle.

Grandpa rumbled like the outside: “ ‘Good night moon. Good night room. Good night cow jumping over the moon. Good night air. Good night nobody.’ ”

Grandma kissed Luke’s forehead. Soft and cool. She left.

But Grandpa stayed and rumbled on, rumbled on, rumbled on. Luke put his ear to the thunder and the heat. In Grandpa’s white bright glow, Luke baked to sleep.

9

T
HE TESTER
looked at Diane with the dead eyes of a bureaucrat. Eyes without the possibility of appeal. “I don’t think he’s ready for this yet,” she said.

Byron hopped across the linoleum floor, slotting his feet in each black and white square as he moved, an unguided pawn in New York’s educational game.

“You should have him tested again in six months,” the tester continued, returning a form to Diane. The woman’s body was already half turned, ready to dismiss any complaint, or deflect any inquiry.

“What happened?” Diane asked anyway.

“He doesn’t want to answer any questions.”

“No! No! No!” Byron sang, hopping his way on the squares. “No, no, no!” he chanted.

This brought a smile to the tester’s face. “Don’t worry. That’s very common with bright two-year-olds. Give him another six months.” And now, having expended the full supply of her goodwill, the tester did show her back to Diane.

Diane would have liked to have the woman arrested. She wished she could say anything, anything at all, to disrupt the tester’s control and self-confidence. “I was thinking of enrolling him in Suzuki violin,” Diane said abruptly.

“I would wait on that too,” the woman said, and then gestured at another anxious parent.

“No!” Byron hopped on one square. “No!” Byron hopped on another square. Then back and forth, rocking and chanting. Diane noticed the stares of the other adults, followed quickly by averted eyes, and felt her red-hot rage at this humiliation. She had come to test Byron’s IQ early, just in case he needed tutoring. Obviously he would.

“Come on!” she yelled at Byron, and grabbed his squirmy hand. Byron’s body instantly went limp, the weight pulling down on her hand. “Stop it!” she yelled.

She felt her brain levitate and separate from her body, and she saw this foreign Diane’s behavior: a privileged, aggressive woman furious at her child for not being perfect.

But that wasn’t Diane, not the real Diane. She loved Byron. He was the embodiment of vigor and energy and courage, everything she admired and wanted. Byron was Diane at her best. There were times when she looked at his beautiful naked body, the perfect muscular miniature, legs flexing as he climbed on tables, chairs, beds, closet shelves, kitchen sinks, refrigerators (no mountain too high, no cliff too sheer), and she rushed to grab him and kiss the hard loaves of his buttocks, the soft swelling of his belly, the sweet wrinkles of his neck and felt she would be happy forever, permanently, invulnerably proud of the achievement of Byron’s existence.

It wasn’t that she wanted Byron to be the best: he
was
the best.

When Diane watched her brave son master things so easily— walking sooner than others, talking sooner, climbing sooner, becoming toilet-trained in a day, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, fearless of adults, shaking his mass of sandy curls, his wide mouth stretched in an impish smile, brown eyes glistening, hungry to swallow the world and make it his—and then looked at grown men— men like her husband, conservative, worried they wouldn’t please, lazy in the face of knowledge, unable to care for themselves, their hair crushed and dulled, their asses bloated, their eyes corrupted by fear, their mouths cautiously pursed—she wanted to know what had happened, and what terrible thing could happen to her Byron.

She thought she knew: soft mothers, envious fathers, brain-dead teachers, lazy friends, a culture of television, status, and possessions.

She wanted Byron to get into Hunter, into a school of hungry kids, poor kids who not only wanted what the other fellow had but whose parents couldn’t buy it for them. She had persuaded Peter to move the television into his study, hidden by a cabinet, out of sight and access. She had disposed of the crib when Byron was fifteen months, and following her pediatrician’s advice, when Byron was two, she showed him that the shit in his diaper belonged in the toilet.

“See?” she said, holding the turd (in its diaper cocoon) above the bowl. “It goes in here.” He got the message right away and was trained. Except at night. He couldn’t hold his pee in that long. But during the day he would often just go off to the bathroom, lower his own pants, and do his business without fuss.

Of course, people would laugh if they knew she felt intense pride about such simple things. The articles in the
Times
and
New York Magazine
whined about children being pushed. It was fear, that’s all, Diane believed, fear by her generation that the sloppy educations, the diluted culture, the spoiled, dependent childhoods, the values of acquisition, all of it, if it were thrown out, would produce superior people, better than themselves, smarter, surer, and with an elegant, discerning taste. She wanted a son who was afraid of nothing and no one. She wanted a responsible, self-sufficient, educated, and strong man to flower in the corrupt soil of New York, to defy the tradition of neurotic, self-absorbed, veneer-educated, spoiled middle-class kids that, more or less, described herself, her husband, and all their friends.

So she was angry at Byron’s failure to take the IQ test. She tried not to be. She pulled him out onto the street, and reminded herself that she had taken him to it at the early age of two and two months precisely because she wanted him to have several cracks at it, that this fiasco was merely a preliminary hearing, not the trial.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” Byron said, speaking in triplicate, a maddening habit he often fell into. “Ice cream. My ice cream.”

She had promised him some before they went to the test, a simple reward for being good. “You’re going to meet a woman and play with her for a while. If you’re nice, you can have some ice cream afterwards.” That’s what she had said. It had never occurred to her that Byron might balk completely and thereby call into question whether this treat should be granted. Even if he had done poorly, although Diane wouldn’t know that for many weeks until the test results were sent to Byron’s pre-nursery play group, she had meant to give him the treat, to suggest the fact, possibly untrue in this society, that good work was rewarded. But should she compensate him for utter failure? Was that something she wanted to encourage?

Keep your promises, advised one book.

If you make a reward conditional, keep to the conditions, admonished another.

Which had she made? And did Byron know the difference? What did “if you’re nice” mean? Maybe he thought he had been nice. But he hadn’t been. That much needed to be made clear.

“Ice cream, ice cream, ice cream,” Byron said.

“No,” she mumbled, not out of fear at his reaction but afraid of her anger.

“I want ice cream, I want ice cream, I want ice cream.”

“Don’t say that over and over. You only have to say things once.”

His face closed, like a door shutting out light and noise. His eyes dulled, his body went stiff, his mouth tightened, and he raised his shoulders, retracting his neck. “You said I have ice cream after.”

“If you were nice to the lady. I mean, to the woman. If you were nice to the woman, I would give you—”

“I was, I was, I—”

“Byron!”

“Oh!” he grumbled, and tossed her hand back, a gift refused. He stomped off, lifting his feet and slapping them down, a comical exaggeration of a manly huff. When he reached the curb, Byron turned back to her, put his chubby hands on his swaying, elastic hips, and compressed his fair eyebrows so that the subtle undergrowth of black hairs darkened his brow. Angry, he looked more like Diane. “I want ice cream!” he trumpeted.

A passing man laughed. “So do I,” he said, and moved on.

She felt the lava bubble below and push against her crust. Stay calm, she warned herself. She decided to ignore him for the moment, keep the refusal silent, fearful that articulation would become rage. Diane hailed a taxi and moved to its door. “Come on,” she said.

Byron looked at her, his head upturned. The curls of his sandy hair were innocent and beautiful. His lean torso—she could picture the washing board of his ribs ripple as he stretched—sat uncertainly on his bowed legs.

“He’s so adorable,” Diane could hear her mother, Lily, say.

“Come on!” she shouted, her hot core steaming through.

Byron sat down on the sidewalk. He crossed his legs underneath him, closed his eyes, and put his hands over his ears.

“What’s the story?” the cabdriver said.

“Start your meter,” Diane said. “I’ll get him.” As she moved toward her little Buddha, the crust cracked, nothing could stop the rage flowing up through the faults in her hardened pride. “Byron! Get up! Get up right now!”

He shook his head and made the curls dance. Everything was black for a moment, her head filled with the smoke. She found herself carrying Byron, a dangerous thrashing fish, in her arms. His feet, his hands, kicked and slapped her. There were blows to her face and stomach, and her ears were scraped by the coarse edge of his screams. They were right in front of the testing facility, around them people were watching, but she felt great relief at dropping the pretense of calm about her disappointment.

She hurled him into the taxi’s back seat, a final statement of her power, her strength. He landed awkwardly and bounced off the upholstery, falling to the car floor. She got in, told the driver the address, and left Byron hunched down there, holding the side of his face that had hit the floor. She ignored the cries, no longer willful yells, but pathetic and tearful. She left him alone, sitting rigidly. She left him to cry without her comforting arms—without her love.

O
NCE ERIC
was in his chair, sipping his hot coffee, surrounded by the sounds of Joe’s rustling newspaper, Sammy’s nervous leg flexing the leather of his seat, the secretaries sorting and carrying account statements and confirmation orders, once Eric could feel he had safely arrived at work, had made it through another weekend of being Daddy, he felt whole. His puffy eyes were mesmerized by the frozen numbers of Friday’s closing prices. He listened to the faint pillowed whoosh of distant cars. He sipped more of the coffee and nestled his tired back (he had carried Luke on his shoulders for hours over the weekend) into the crannies of the chair’s cushions, and felt at home.