His teacher says we need to have them read to us. “A book a day at least.” I have not been doing this. Judging by the other parents’ shifts and murmurs, I am not alone. We are all folded into the small desks with our knees bent up to our shoulders. Mrs. P smiles. “And one more request. Please, please teach your children to tie their own shoes.” Groans now. Giggles.
Tee and I look over the sign-up sheet for parent-teacher conferences in November. We are the only twosome negotiating for a time slot. At every other desk, it is just one mom or dad – mostly mom – checking the schedule. Divorce comes with a handful of unexpected side benefits. They’re pretty expensive and probably not worth what our son has to pay for them, so we guard them with our lives. Tee and I both attend every event. We used to argue over who gets to chaperone the school trip until we realized we could handle it together. We have already set a theme and divided up cake- and game-duties for a birthday party over a month away.
“Geez, I can’t get here at 12:30 on a weekday,” I say. All of the morning and afternoon appointments are filled. Tee and I have our calendars out. “There’s a unit meeting on Monday I can’t miss,” he says. Our negotiations are stalling the process for everyone. Another mom takes mercy on us and offers us her 8:15 slot. She stays at home mom and lives right near the school. She’s our new favorite person. Tee and I put up a symbolic fight for about three seconds before erasing her name and squeezing our two onto the blue line.
The teacher introduces the parents to the Spanish teacher and the weekly schedule. Then the bell rings for us just as it does for the kids. Parents scatter. Tee and I are alone in the hallway, engaged in the eternal yet forever interrupted conversation about raising our son. Other parents might be doing this at home with each other. Maybe they’re not doing this much at all. Tee and I talk. We talk in corridors, over phones, between meetings at work. Scraps and patches. We find compromises lightning fast now without even discussing the values beneath our positions. We are a million miles apart but right on the same page.
Some days.
One of the things I miss and don’t miss in the slightest is having Tee in my home and private space, thinking with me about raising our son. I don’t know what I’m doing 95% of the time. Now, I bumble around in isolation. I ache for another set of eyes while knowing my ex husband’s presence wouldn’t actually help. I don’t understand the way he sees. We have decided to be in complete agreement on all things practical and to cross our fingers that we won’t bump too hard against the Whys of our choices. There are walls between us that we still don’t know how to scale.
Tonight, in perfect alignment, we are the envy of our friends and neighbors.
“So, do you have him read to you?” I ask.
He smiles a little. “Nope. We still do our three books and sometimes he points out a word, but. . .” he shrugs.
“I guess we should start.” I’m thinking about the inevitable struggle with Bug. Like just about every other human on the planet, he resists change.
“One a night?” Tee asks.
I nod. “I’ll start tonight.”
Bug has already had his bath when I bang through the door. He and my mother are sitting on the sofa looking through a picture book about spies. Bug slumps off to the bathroom to brush his teeth while I hear the run-down of the evening. Good dinner, chip on his shoulder, won’t talk to her about anything. I don’t bother telling her again that this is his personality right now. His attitude hurts her feelings regardless. I saw the other truth, though. They had been leaning in together, close and quiet in the orange glow of the lamp. Maybe it was only three minutes. Maybe we have to take what we can get.
She heads out and I brace myself. “All right, kiddo. Bed.” No slush time tonight. I just know this shift in our routine is going to drag us down to first gear. My nights with my kid are precious but they are so very long. It’s been years since Goodnight Moon. These days, three books and three songs can fill an hour, easy. If Bug has to read? We’ll be bumping along on the shoulder, me craning my neck for the exit ramp. The dinner dishes are heaped in the sink, the lunches are not made, the dog has to be walked. . .
Clearly, Bug’s not the only one who dreads change.
Right here, right now. I tell myself.
“Okay, Buddy. Tonight, you get to read one of the books out loud to me.”
“I’ll start tomorrow,” he says.
“Tonight,” I say.
“Next week? Please? Wait! I know. I’ll start when I’m seven.”
“Baby, you practically are seven. And Mrs. P didn’t say to wait a day or a week or anything. She said now. You’re teacher said it, so even Mommy has to do it.”
Bug deflates. I read two from the pile then root through it again and pull out one of the shorter ones. It is from the library and neither of us has ever seen it before.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. What does the title say?”
“Oh, Mom! Come on.”
I point to the first word on the cover and wait.
“H-h-hondo. And. Fuh – what’s that?”
“Fay-buh—”
“Fabian?”
“Yep.”
“Hondo and Fabian,” he says.
We open the book. He reads the first line. Not a single stumble. He reads it just like any old reader would do it. I have to hold back the wave of Wow that surges up in me. If I don’t keep my cool, he won’t keep going. We turn the page. His voice rolls smooth right over the next line. Then the next. Hondo and his friend Fred are playing in the waves. Fabian the kitty is playing with the toilet paper. Bug is giggling. I use my fingers to cover parts of a long word and he pieces together “chicken.” Then, just like that, Hondo and Fabian are asleep. We close the book and I turn to Bug.
“You just read to me, baby. You just read a whole book!”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”
“Whatever your own self. I had no idea you could do that! Look how all your hard work and practicing is making it so you can really-for-real read.”
“Could you just sing please?”
My mother is right. He does have a chip on his shoulder tonight. It’s no different than just about all the 182 nights I have with my flinty boy. That’s not nearly enough squares on the calendar to waste any one of them on wishing he were different, wishing any of this were something else. I pull the pillows down behind us and curl into him. He pushes my hand off of his side and twists away.
“Old Mr. Johnson had troubles of his own.”
“Will you rub my back?” His little voice. His one concession to attachment. I lift his shirt and trace my nails down his spine. His muscles roll as he hums a little laugh.
“I’m really proud of you, baby,” I whisper. “You’ve worked really hard. It’s going to be so fun reading together.”
Bug doesn’t say anything. I pick up the song’s drifting thread.
“He had a yellow cat that wouldn’t leave his home. . .”
Category: Reading
Muscle Memory
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
– William Faulkner, Light in August
I could not finish the books. I couldn’t even really start them. Characters swam on the pages, darting away from coherence. Like minnows that scatter every time you step closer, the letters exploded away from any hint of meaning and reappeared further out and in a different configuration entirely.
It may have been the separation. My sister starting college. The hormones, the boys, the upending surges of adolescent depression. It could have been a misalignment in the stars or a bad batch of ink. In any event, Hemingway and Faulkner were not even nibbling on my line.
It was high school lit class and my mind could not penetrate the two assigned books for the second semester: The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises. Ambitious? Sure. But this was Montgomery County, Maryland where students were held to certain standards. If the professions of our 20-year reunion attendees were any indication, high expectations generally yielded the intended results.
By spring of our junior year, we had long since netted and dissected Baldwin, Bronte, and Shakespeare, so hooking these two should have been no great trial. Still, I could not make sense of them. Their language was barely identifiable as English. It was like trying to face Beowulf without Seamus Heaney in tow.
At sixteen, I was a poet already as well as a lifelong reader and writer. My amateur children’s stories were full-spectrum fantasies and my diaries oozing with odes to leaves and sky. Abandoning my bicycle at the break in the trees at the park, I’d walk alone into the woods with my ratty backpack flopping against my hips. As I crouched at the edge of the creek, the world would grow huge in its tiny pause. Whatever stained, curled journal I was filling at the time would open its pages to the sound of the gold-tipped ripple in the current. Sometimes a character would move from dormancy to gestation and maybe even to life. Like Wednesday, the girl who played a string of chimes made of spoons and had to find her way down from her mountaintop when her parents disappeared, leaving behind neither clue nor explanation.
When my hand was stiff from writing, I’d settle down there on the soft thigh of the water, open a battered copy of Sandburg or Gibran, and make my own self disappear.
It was misery not to be able to read those two books for class. Trigonometry and its indicipherable alphabet of tangents and arcs was bad but predictably so. Even having to re-take advanced algebra in summer school was tolerable compared to this strange illiteracy. Not to be able to read in my native tongue meant something worse than a few flitting minnows. I felt myself swimming towards them in steadily deepening water with lead weights strapped to my ankles. The further I plowed, the deeper I sank.
It was the season of sinking.
That spring, I left school for a few weeks. “Dropping out,” I called it, which it wasn’t. My world did not allow for disappearing. I was too suburban. Too amply resourced. Too loved. Absent parents reappaeared and began the frantic work scheduling appointments with teachers and school counselors. A nice child psychologist sat with me weekly in a cozy office as I stumbled around, dodging questions I didn’t know how to answer. The bewildering bureaucracy of the school figured out how to let me leave behind the toughest courses and only stay in the two I could manage — Latin and Social Studies — while still passing the whole of the year.
Then, my parents reconciled. We moved to Vermont. I cut loose my two millstones and swam for air. I never finished Trigonometry or William Faulkner.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Now, Hemingway is another story entirely. It only took me about a decade to nurse that wound and then get the hell over it. Anyone who hasn’t read Old Man and the Sea by about 25 shouldn’t be considered literate. In my case, two visits to Key West to visit that bougainvillea-draped villa and those six-toed cats made the man more a man and less a monolith. I’ve skipped on through For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms, and it was almost a non-event when the car slowed and I felt Brett pressing into me.
As for Faulkner? Like one of those word-tangling, wave-making madmen upon whom I tended to glom my attention, he blew my mind before I saw it coming. He left me to flail at the riverbottom and then he swam off with the rope. I suppose I actually left him, but the net effect was the same. I couldn’t face his language without remembering the feel of both the ascent and the fall.
For two dozen years, his words have not been able to penetrate my protective resistance. Twice I’ve tried to let him back in. Something seized up in me both times. It was as if those full-grown fish were just an illusion, a school forming the shape of some coherent and sensible being. Each time, even as I’ve hooked and subdued Thackery and Austen and Whitman and Rushdie, Faulkner’s words split apart from their meaning at the exact moment I inched close enough to touch them. They scattered and left me blinking and grasping and kicking for the surface.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
Then I move into this new home. It is the first I’ve ever owned, the first I’ve ever understood I could claim. I bring in the few boxes of books that survived the purge brought on by the final contraction. In one is a yellowed copy of Light in August. It takes it place in familiar if diminished company against a new wall. A few weeks in, after the pictures are hung and the dishes stacked away, I have a quiet nothing night. It is August. The days are still long. Boredom, another long-forgotten friend, scratches at the door.
Faulkner couldn’t care less if I choose him or Ursuala LeGuin to the right, Edward Abbey to the left. The traffic swooshes along I-66 outside my window. The dog sighs in her curl by the door. The fan hums. A story lives and not, like Schrodinger’s cat, inside the pages.
And memory knows this; twenty years later, memory is still to believe On this day I became a man.
I walk to the edge and step in. The water is warmer than I remember. The bottom, not so far down. Fish swim in smooth, fat arcs just below the surface. They are the color of tar and rust. Streaks of dusk flash against them. One slips against my ankle and lets me bend low to feel with eyes and skin the shape of its pulse. It pushes folds of water up and up my calf, my shin, my thigh, its alien muscle calls me in.
Night comes eventually. I swim out to him. He still does not bother with the rope. I don’t bother reaching for it. The low light is plenty. My arms, enough.
Book Lovers
Each with his favored arm
made his foray
scorning confections and only sometimes opening a hand
dusted with the crushed stamen
of a hothouse orchid. Walt came bearing small sprouts
at least before his straight-up offer of crotch and vine
while against my throat, Edgar licked
glossed feather. I choked down Eliot’s ragged claws and talk
of Michelangelo, glancing against the vorpal snicker
Carroll carried unsheathed. The graze bared
blood beat and Baldwin fire going the way I dared not ache.
I had barely found my feet and certainly not my sense
when, whispering, Kazuo led me to a corner of the room
I’d never seen and there, Salman with a slow grin
esta-esta-estuttered open his voice in song.
Asea
One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water; and later, lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt akin to it all.
There is no walking away. Not this time, not ever. It astounds me that he still behaves as if I am truly leaving, his face opening up in fear, his body chasing after the warmth of mine.
“You can’t hit, buddy,” I say in a quiet voice. I hug him gently and walk with him back to the bed. I keep my hands off of his body, trying now to guide with word and deed. Trying to practice what I preach. It is not so easy to stay good. We slip-slide up this steep learning curve together. I understand that some of his intensity is just being Bug at six. Some of it, I’m ashamed to admit, is me.
I keep my voice gentle as the tears press against his. “You have to use words instead of hitting when you want something to be different.”
“It wasn’t really hitting,” he says, crawling back into the bed. “Hitting is like with a fist.”
“You’re right that it wasn’t hard hitting, but it was still hitting instead of talking about your feelings. You cannot hit.” I pull the covers up over him.
“Can’t you just read one more book?” He asks. His eyes are wide and frightened. I understand his worry. We never deviate from our bedtime routine. This choice rattles me, too.
“No. I’m sorry. You hit me, so no more stories.”
“Can’t you just turn on one more light?”
“It’s bedtime.”
His face is quivering. I crawl in next to him. “I’ll sing you one song,” I say. “First, can you tell me what you were feeling before you hit me?”
Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.
For a long moment, he is quiet. Then, “I didn’t like what you were doing.”
I knew the instant everything turned for him. We had reached the page where the little mouse is bobbing in the water, possibly about to drown. His boat is bowled away in the wind. Amos frets about what he should do and what big fish might be coming for him. I had asked Bug about Amos. “Does that face look worried? How would you feel?” When I stepped out of the story long enough to wonder at the fears of the waterlogged mouse, Bug turned on me. His face tightened, he scowled, he hit me. Twice.
That’s when I closed the book. I stood and turned out the lights. “No hitting. Time for bed.”
Now, I say, “Baby, if you don’t like something a person is doing, you have to say something. Say, ‘Please stop. I don’t like that.’ Maybe they’ll stop or maybe they won’t, but you can’t hit. You have to figure out other ways to deal with your feelings.”
Bug scrunches down under his Dora blanket.
“Can’t I just have one more book?”
This kills me. It is our one precious sliver of Us every night we are together, this ritual of reading. Three books, three songs. Today we only made it through one book and part of a second, and now we have to call it quits.
The kiddo has been struggling at school the past few weeks. Twisting a classmate’s arm, disrupting, ignoring the teachers. Notes have come home. Red days on the calendar. Something is amiss, and I ache to help him. I have no idea what I am doing. I hate that sometimes I have to sacrifice our sweetest gift so that he can learn to check this behavior. I hate it more that I have no idea if this is the right approach, and if I might be risking our very bond by holding this line.
Morning came, as it always does. He was getting terribly tired. He was a very small, very cold, very wet and worried mouse. There was still nothing in sight but the empty sea. Then, as if things weren’t bad enough, it began to rain.
“Just one more? Please?”
I stroke his hair. “No more books, sweetie. One song, though. We always need a song.” I begin to sing.
Baby beluga in the deep blue sea
As the tune drifts around use, I rub my boy’s belly and stroke his arm. After a moment, he shakes me off and turns away. His lip is pooked out. “Please stop touching me,” he says to the wall. I remove my hand and finish singing to his shoulders, his spine.
As he was asking himself these dreadful questions, a huge head burst through the surface of the water and loomed up over him. It was a whale. “What sort of fish are you?” the whale asked. “You must be one of a kind!”
When I finish the song, I lay with him for a moment. I tell him about our morning, about how we will need to leave extra early so I can go to the dentist to have him put on a crown. When I had the root canal in November, Bug came with me and watched. Now, he turns back towards me, suddenly fascinated with the topic. We talk about enamel, roots, and how teeth draw nourishment from below the surface the way trees do. How the crown is like armor to keep the tooth from breaking.
“Is it metal? Or liquid?” He asks. “Will he, like, pour it on?” He gestures the fluid cascade. My mouth, the waterfall. The meteor shower.
“I’ll let you know when I get home tomorrow. For now, though, you should get some rest. We have an early morning ahead of us.” He pulls the blanket up over himself. I keep my hands behind me, stilling the urge to tuck and fuss. It is hard, this lesson in boundaries. He is forever my flesh, it seems. I can still feel his feet seeking purchase against the walls of me.
Amos said he’d had enough adventure to last him a while. He wanted only to get back home and hoped the whale wouldn’t mind going out of his way to take him there.
“You know what, Bug?” I say. “I am so pleased that you asked me with your words not to touch you a few minutes ago. It really worked. I think that choice deserves another song.”
Bug ooches around and smiles. I open up my voice.
The wind is in from Africa. Last night, I couldn’t sleep.
My boy presses sideways against me. “Can I cuddle?” I whisper. He nods and turns a little more into my body. I put my arm around him and he folds himself to me. I sing the song and he breathes quietly, his gaze softening, his eyelids drooping. He lets me drop a kiss on his cheek.
What a relief to be so safe, so secure again! Amos lay down in the sun, and being worn to a frazzle, he was soon asleep.
—
Excerpts from Amos & Boris, by William Steig. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York: 1971.
Sixth Scents
There was once an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day, his horse ran away. Upon hearing this, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck” they said sympathetically.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses.
“Such good luck!” the neighbors explained.
“Maybe,” replied the farmer.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. Again, the neighbors came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“Such bad luck,” they said.
“Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army to fight in a war. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by.
“Such good luck!” cried the neighbors.
“Maybe,” said the farmer.
Taken Literally
Learning can be effortless, continual, permanent – and also pleasant. . . We can learn without effort if we are interested in what we are doing (or in what someone else is doing), free from confusion, and given assistance when we seek it.
Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting
We are halfway through Year Three. Sirius black is on the loose, Dementors are terrorizing the countryside, and Crookshanks has it in for Scabbers. In a parallel universe, Bug’s Halloween costume is already assembled. About once a week, he pulls the cloak from its hanger and tries on his glasses, just to make sure everything still fits.
In the evenings, my mother and I bustle around the kitchen preparing dinner while Bug snaps Legos into intricate models at the table. Chattering about the latest excitement at Hogwarts usually compels my boy to spare some focus for the conversation. In the middle of a recent re-cap of the previous night’s chapter, mother asks, “I just wonder when he is going to start reading.” Continue reading “Taken Literally”
Shannon E. Williams 