Short People (9 page)

Lapage, Katrina u32.3691317

The nanny will hold her hand the whole ride up, whispering little tales about her own children’s tribulations, about times when they, too, have been kneecapped by crisis and forced to develop their neglected muscles: courage and bravery and suchlike things. The girl will sporadically listen—she’ll really try—but self-pity will break up her concentration. Sometimes she’ll catch a fragment and giggle or shiver, mistaking pop insights and motherly rhythms for big truths that could change her life. She’ll self-consciously repeat the words in her head and she’ll wish her mother were there to comfort her, but thinking again, she’ll thank God she’s not. She’ll wonder if the nanny’s noticed the coat of fur she’s begun to grow since her body began adapting to malnutrition; if anyone’s noticed, it would be her. From the driveway, the hospital will look like a fairy palace, even more magisterial than the beach house, and the opulence will make her flinch. She’ll tell the nanny to let her walk off the bus alone. She won’t have eaten all day. Nor the day before. Nor the day before that. Four days ago, she’ll have had exactly ten baby carrots—prepeeled and washed and sealed in plastic for freshness—and, after an hour of picking the sugared raisins and figs out, half a cup of dry granola washed down with a two-liter bottle of spring water. Now, as she stands, she’ll be so weak that her legs will shake underneath her stick figure. She won’t have had a bowel movement in over a week. Her stomach will begin to tighten with fear, it will shout and kick and protest. Her intestines will soon join in, as if they’ve been hoarding what little they’ve received throughout her war of attrition and are now finally angry enough to strike back. The liquid will splatter and stain the back of the sundress she bought special to boost her ego today. As she melts and sinks into the striated walkway, she’ll wonder if this is how the nanny’s children felt, and she’ll know that her mother should be here to see it.

I. Problems Breed Problems

Eventually, after the children had long ago stopped speaking to them; after the children had in fact ransacked and decimated their home in ways that, except for the physical evidence, would never have seemed possible; after Mom and Dad realized that perhaps they had indeed been oh-so-slightly “too permissive” right from the get-go when they had allowed the children to pick their own daily wardrobes, even if it meant that polyester smiley-face shirts would be worn with pin-striped woolen pants just often enough and just late enough in the early spring to force an extra bath, with all the kicking and screaming this entailed, into the children’s weekly ritual; after both children had actually gone on bath protest, patiently feigning attention to the endless drone of reasonings—the your-friends-won’t-want-to-be-around-yous and the it’s-unsanitary-you-could-get-sick-like-that-guy-on-the-streets— but remaining steadfast and assured in the knowledge that spankings were not in the offing, that they would be allowed to sink further and further into their glorious grime, to revel, as children do, in the pungent starch of filth; after the children had concluded that clothes were really a burden they’d rather do without altogether and periodically begun streaking the backyard after the baths that they couldn’t
always
escape; after they’d brashly defied their parents’ pacifist ideals by fashioning guns from their thumbs and forefingers and playing drive-by-shooting, a game that usually ended with seven-year-old Denali thrashing her five-year-old brother, Zack, with a switch pulled from the willow in the front yard; after the kids had been expelled from school for biting and been put in, then pulled from, therapy because they wouldn’t utter a word to the scary bald man; after they’d also begun to destroy things, to set the kitchen and each other’s beds on fire along with the obligatory living-room curtains; after even Dulcinea, the purebred, obedience-class-cum-laude black Lab had rebelled, leaving mounds of shit to harden and gradually turn white and crumbly on every carpet in the house—and there’s more, but I’ll get to that later—after all of this and the accompanying self-hatred, which had grown so acute that they could no longer dodge the word “failure,” Mom and Dad finally gave up.

They called Social Services on themselves.

Behind the closed door to their bedroom, Dad stood over the bedside table, trembling, trying to control the burning sensation in his head, the tingle of thoughts moving faster than his brain could process them.

Mom rummaged through the white pages’ blue pages. Her fingers shook, ripped and fluttered the thin paper. Her nerves were frenetic and she was afraid, but she did what he asked. She found the ten digits that Dad was demanding and read them aloud.

Dad’s fingers shook, too, as he pressed the buttons—it took four attempts before he got the number right.

Only then, as the phone rang five, ten, fifteen, twenty times in some massive building in downtown D.C., did he realize that this was a last resort, the end of his coveted self-delusion. He grappled with the moral weight of his actions for the first time since that summer in Alaska, canning salmon and struggling with what seemed at the time an impossible, frightening task: growing up, making life-defining decisions. Climbing Mount McKinley had taught him the importance of finding the right footholds. One wrong step was all it took to tumble, and it’s not like you got a second chance. He’d played things relatively safe, sticking to the easier, low-lying trails. Even then his guide had to talk him through some of the rough patches, but still, there was a harsh, muscular nobility to the act of climbing a mountain, exhilarating and simple. He’d made this the bedrock of his future life. By sheer force of will, he’d sequestered his family high above the worst that was out there—and the worst was everywhere. It wasn’t his fault that the worst had crept higher and higher with time. Since Alaska, he’d never stopped watching his feet, so how could he have taken such a wrong step?

His face felt hard and brittle now, tight around his fear. But, no, this was the right thing to do. A man can only do so much when it comes to protecting his family from the degraded society outside his home. There’s no shame in crying for help, right?

Mom, the tears swelling and receding like gills, stared at him.

On the twenty-fourth ring, just as Dad was about to hang up in relief, there was a click, an electronic pause, and then the sliding latch of connection. He braced himself. “Hello? Hello, is this Social Services? I’m trying to reach . . . what’s it, uh, the department for families in crisis.”

Families in crisis. Mom winced. The tears seemed to pour not only from her eyes but also from her arms and her legs and her chest and the base of her spine—from her every pore. She felt like a sponge, wet all over. Gazing at the odd patterns years of chipping had made in the varnished wood of the footboard, she tried to lose herself in the blurry shapes. They could be kittens and flowers and swans—happy things, only happy things. No children, no neighbors, no husbands. But she couldn’t stop the shapes from shifting, mutating into darker objects, nameless and dangerous.

Dad patted her on the head and ran his fingers through her hair. He’d been routed to voicemail. As Mom struggled to get away from him, he pressed the button that promised to summon a real person.

Then he was on hold, the computerized voice on the other end replaced by static and classical music.

During those three months in Alaska, Dad had decided that, if he ever had children, he’d raise his kids to emulate the best in human nature, teach them to distinguish between the base and the lofty. Among the many decisions he and his wife had made while she was pregnant with their first child was that they would keep the house television-free. This was Dad’s idea, and it was not their only piety. They also banned music unless it was classical or prefusion jazz; junk food of any kind; most types of toys, boy-toys that glorified violence and girl-toys that might teach their daughter to emulate constraining female stereotypes (leaving Legos, Tinker Toys and, with any luck, the children’s imaginations). Swearing, of course, was banned even for the adults. To make up for all this severity, the family did things together that other people didn’t do. They read
The Odyssey
and
The Lord of the Rings
out loud before bedtime. They told stories around the kitchen table, adding one sentence at a time onto what the person next to them said. On Friday nights they played parlor games—charades, for instance—or the children acted out fairy tales, performed elaborate shadow-puppet shows through a sheet tacked across the hallway. They went to operas and the ballet, to museums where the children, when they were younger, had picked out their favorite paintings so they could learn more about the artists. They took walks just for fun and they knew the names of flowers and birds. The hope was that, by surrounding them with great art and literature, with examples of the heights the human spirit could obtain, and hugging them twice a day like the bumper sticker prescribed, the children would grow into moral, well-rounded adults. These positive alternatives to what Dad called “the black hole that’s popped up to replace our culture” had begun to disappear over the past few years as the children had made it more and more clear that they would rather sit and do nothing than learn about the world. But it was important that they’d started out with this grounding in something more valuable than product placement, sex and violence.

One of the incidental perks of all this was that on Saturdays, with no cartoons to inspire them out of their beds, the children slept late. Saturday mornings were his. All that existed was him and his wife and their bed and the sunrise and their naked bodies. Dad looked forward all week to Saturday morning. Today, he had woken at five-thirty. Kat was still asleep. Her slightly open mouth flecked with wet spit, her dishwater hair, her fleshy forehead that rippled and quivered as if her dreams were struggling to break free—this was all so familiar yet still as mysterious as on the first night they’d slept side by side. He ran his finger over the ripples, pushing them smooth, and she smiled but didn’t wake up. He let his finger trail around her eye socket, lazily following the line of her crooked nose. When he reached the slight bump in the bone, he massaged it. The history of her life, her whole personality, seemed to be lodged in this shattered bone. It always got to him. He leaned in and grazed the bump with his lips, letting his mouth linger so he could feel the bone push against him. Sometimes she woke when he kissed her on Saturdays, opening her eyes partway and sleepily smiling as if she’d been waiting all night for this kiss; but today she batted her hand against his face and snuggled her head deeper into her pillow. He wondered what miseries the children had put her through while he was at work this week. He brushed her cheek with the back of his finger and kissed her nose again. Nothing. He kissed her forehead, her lips. He was happy not to wake her.

Pulling back to look at her again, he wondered how she would react if she knew how unworthy of her he felt. It would probably annoy her. He repeated the kisses. It always felt good to kiss his wife, but it felt that much better when she was asleep. He was free to adore her openly; when she was awake, her embarrassment— and the discomfort and shame that this brought out in him—had a way of damping his feelings. He couldn’t flaunt the depths of his worship; it was this worship that made her queasy.

Careful not to wake her, he shifted under the blanket, pulling it, a little bit at a time, onto his side of the bed, until she was, almost accidentally, exposed. Now he could gaze at her shoulders, her collarbone. Now he could drink in her breasts. When the children were born, he’d marveled at her breasts and the milk that leaked from them, nursing so much himself that they’d joked about putting the kids on formula. He jumped from mole to mole— together they looked like Cassiopeia—down her stomach until he reached her belly button; it was unusual, another beautiful imperfection, neither an inny nor an outty, but sort of both; it started in and then popped back out, an actual button that he could never resist kissing. His lips crawled over her rib cage and into the softer regions that led toward her abdomen; they left circles of snail trail over her stretch marks and dripped down the weight she had gained and not lost after childbirth. From this close angle, her body had so much variety, rises and falls and changes in color that surprised him the way a mountain surprises—so much more rugged and less uniform from the trail than it looks from a distance. He was falling into a romantic trance.

She twisted and swatted the air, and he stiffened. Don’t get too carried away, he thought, leaning back again to give her room. She burrowed her head in her pillow and started to snore. Her personal space seemed to be a tactile thing; he could almost trace the perimeter—far beyond the confines of her physical body—of her being. He wanted to crawl inside this space, to stay here until he was nothing but an extension of her. He kissed her on the forehead again, and as fluidly as possible, he slid on top of her and let his weight sink over her body. He hoped, if she woke up, that she wouldn’t think he was trying to invade and conquer. He wondered: How do you explain to the woman you love that there’s nothing you want to take from her, that you just want to live inside of her space? How do you explain that it’s not her but you that you want to get rid of? To say as much is to sound like you’re rationalizing.

Catching the rhythm of her breath, he held his own and waited for the downbeat so he could join hers in unison. The two of them were one, their lives one life. He was the violinist and she the conductor, her breath the baton directing him toward a beauty beyond his comprehension. But when she twitched her nose, he lost the image. Then they were merely two people in a sagging bed, and he was slightly shocked—a shock quickly neutralized by embarrassment, then killed with a mischievous smirk—to realize that he’d been humping her hip. She sneezed and fumbled at her nose with her knuckles. She was still mostly asleep, and as she struggled groggily under his weight her legs seemed to spread and make room for his body. He imagined she must be having good dreams, soft-focus Harlequin dreams in which the two of them spun through pink clouds. Asleep, with the morning light dappling her skin with gold dust, she seemed an entire world—one free from sadness and pain—and he was the luckiest man alive not only to see this, but also to recognize it. He laid his head on her breast and listened to her heart—
bum-ba, ba-bum-ba, ba-bum-ba
—and he wriggled his hand down and pushed himself into her.

Dad hung up and stared at the phone. “You’d think they could hire somebody to—”

His wife spun and stared, wild-eyed as he spoke to her. He tried to hold her hand, but she snatched it away and wrapped her arms around the comforter like it was a lover. Her legs had a nervous bounce to them, and wanting to be strong for her, Dad reached out to smooth her hair. She kicked at him, pushing away across the mattress. She was frantic, just instinct and fear. Her body inched back and back—“Get away. Don’t touch me”—until finally she toppled onto the floor.

“What’s . . . Kat, no, it’s okay. I’ll try them again. We’ll . . . we’ll get through this.”

Mom muttered and swore and chewed on her tongue. She lay on the floor and scowled. Dad leaned over to see if she was okay, hoping for maybe eye contact, a brief heavy moment in which she could linger, feel safe, breathe deeply and maybe calm down. But as his head crested the edge of the bed, she spit at him—the saliva arching slowly, fighting gravity, lingering for a half second in the air before turning back to splatter on her chin. She rolled under the bed and began to sob.

Not today, Kat,
Dad thought. He didn’t say it, though. Instead, he bit his lip and hit redial.

When caught in an untenable situation—and sometimes all this took was rain on a day that was forecast for sun—Mom retreated inside herself toward the moony landscape, equal parts memory, self-mythology and a recklessly free-associative imagination, that she cultivated there. It helped her cope or, at any rate, helped her escape, and since childhood she’d spent a lot of time in this place, hiding from the dense, uncontrollable downturns in her life. Big Symbol Land. She could gaze back across the border and discern shades of meaning that compounded into poignant, epiphanic truths, though these truths were foggy and damp and generally inexplicable to those of us on the other side. Long before she’d met Dad, she had been hospitalized and forcibly taught that the proxy world in which she hid was more dangerous than any catastrophe the real world might throw her way, and since then she’d tried— one day at a time—to stay sane. She still had trouble defining the boundary between healthy contemplation and Big Symbol Land, though; there was no dotted line on the ground, no posted sign saying YOU ARE NOW LEAVING REALITY. The topography changed in mind-bogglingly subtle ways that were hard to notice until it was too late; she suspected, sometimes bitterly, that the boundary existed only in textbooks and on doctors’ clipboards. Her way of looking at life wasn’t worse—measurably,
objectively
worse—than anyone else’s. How could it be? To make judgments about someone’s sanity was a subjective act in and of itself. These doctors whose opinions her husband respected with such grave seriousness couldn’t prove anything. In
her
opinion, she could do brilliant things with a mind that worked the way hers did. All she lacked was a context in which it might be allowed to run free.