Following Ezra (8 page)

Dawn follows Ezra to the sandbox.

“You know what?” she says. “I know you’re feeling a little bit scared of that dinosaur and maybe you’re feeling kind of scared because you’re in a new school. So I’m going to sit out here with you for a little while, and then you tell me when you’re ready to go in and meet the kids.”

Ezra doesn’t answer. He’s pushing a truck through the sand. I peek through the doorway of the Hungry Caterpillar classroom, where the teachers are trying to hush the children, who sit down in a circle in their parents’ laps. One of the teachers begins talking to the group. She’s teaching a song, and the kids repeat the verses after her. The sounds waft out the door and window and into the quiet courtyard where Shawn and I are standing, looking over at Ezra sitting in the sandbox with Dawn. I feel torn. Should we go into the classroom with the other kids and parents? Should we stay with Ezra? Dawn can see me looking back and forth.

“We’ll be okay, Mom and Dad,” Dawn says. “We’re going to go in pretty soon.”

I shrug and offer a half grin. We both lean over and give Ezra kisses.

“Be good, Ez,” I tell him. “It looks really fun in there.”

On our way to the parking lot, I see a mom I don’t know emerging from a classroom, eyes red from the type of bittersweet tears mothers cry on the first day of school, at the end of a long summer of togetherness.

In the early afternoon, my office phone rings. It’s Shawn.

“He never went in,” she says.

“What?”

“He wouldn’t even go into the classroom. He stayed in the sandbox, and then Dawn took him to her office to play.”

“Why didn’t she tell him he
had
to go in?” I ask.

“She wants to honor him.”

“Honor him?”

“I think she wants it to be his decision.”

“Did you tell her that could take forever?”

I learn later what happened: Ezra mostly spent his first day at the new school lingering in the sandbox. When the children in his class spilled out into the yard for recess, he stayed put. The boys and girls climbed on the colorful plastic play structures and grabbed for sand toys and chased one another, squealing, in circles around the handful of trees. Amid it all, Ezra barely took notice, walking his compact circles and talking to himself. When the teachers lined up the children to return to the Hungry Caterpillar room, Dawn tried leading Ezra inside, but he planted his feet firmly: Not going; staying here.

The pattern continues the next day. And the next. I drop off Ezra on my way to work. Dawn meets him at the entrance, with her big smile and booming voice. I wonder all morning what’s happening. Shawn phones in the afternoon.

“Oh, my God,” she says. “He still won’t go in.”

I am starting to wonder about the wisdom of this plan.

“If we want a babysitter to watch him play in the sand,” I say, only half joking, “we can do that at home and save the commute.”

Dawn, for her part, shows no hint of impatience.

“We’re going to have a great day, Dad,” she says each morning, when I drop him off.

She reports progress, albeit incremental. Ezra is beginning to show more interest in the other children—or at least to acknowledge that there
are
other children. When they go inside after playground time, he lingers near the door and peeks in the windows. The children are curious about him too. One morning, a little blond, blue-eyed girl named Hillary approaches and joins Ezra and Dawn, who draws her into conversation. She sits in the sand with Ezra. They don’t talk. When the children line up to go inside, Hillary hesitates and looks at Ezra.

“Come on, Ezra,” Dawn says. “Let’s follow our friend Hillary!”

He won’t. He lets her go, barely looking up as Hillary crosses the yard, glancing back occasionally at the solitary boy in the sand.

“Wanna go?” Dawn urges.

“Dinosaur,” Ezra responds.

The next day, a breakthrough. When it’s time to return to the classroom, Ezra follows Hillary, at first warily, stepping from the courtyard into the Hungry Caterpillar room like an astronaut stepping cautiously from the lunar capsule onto the surface of the moon. Eyes wide with awe and trepidation, he paces through the room, weaving among the children and scanning the shelves, examining the books, the bins of blocks and stuffed animals, and surveying the floor, with its cushions and beanbag chairs. With hands planted on his ears, he makes his way to a place on the rug, where the children are gathering in a circle and he sits down, with Dawn just behind him.

“Let’s all welcome Ezra,” says one of the teachers.

Ezra doesn’t look up, except occasionally, to check on the green dinosaur and make sure it’s not going to attack.

CHAPTER FOUR

We learn to live with a child who rarely chooses to converse. Then we begin to encounter a new challenge: Ezra starts communicating.

Shawn and I have grown accustomed to the spacey stares, the questions ignored or mindlessly repeated, and the way Ezra flees any attempt to engage him. We hope and dream for the day our son will begin to open up, to show an interest in reaching out to the world. What we haven’t anticipated is what that will mean.

One Saturday morning, I get the answer.

It happens when Ezra is seven, in our neighborhood, which is heavily populated by observant Jews who walk to synagogue on the Sabbath. On any given Saturday morning, a steady stream of pedestrians—nicely dressed, men in yarmulkes, women in long skirts—passes by on the sidewalk in front of our home. We’re not Orthodox, but we do observe the Sabbath, and most Saturday mornings, we walk to our synagogue, a little more than a mile away. One Shabbat, I am leaving the house with our three sons at the very moment a neighbor is walking by. Ezra has never met Charlie—I don’t know him well myself—but my son immediately notices something about him.

“Why are you so
fat
?” he asks.

Embarrassed, I pretend I didn’t hear, and then begin trying to manufacture some small talk about something—
anything
—when Ezra interrupts me, undeterred.

“How did you get so
fat
?” he asks.

Eight thirty on a Saturday morning, and I already have a mess to clean up.

Charlie, a gentle, pleasant man who is indeed on the rotund side, pauses, flummoxed, to contemplate an answer. “I dunno,” he says, forcing a smile and patting his belly like a department store Santa. “I . . . I guess I just always liked eating when I was a kid.”

Despite my eagerness to flee—preferably to another continent or planet—Charlie is walking the same direction we are. As we stroll past the first few houses, I make every effort to wedge my body between Charlie and Ezra, trying to distract Charlie and head off disaster with idle conversation about the weather, the news headlines, Charlie’s children—anything. When it appears that Ezra is about to open his mouth, I shoot him a stern look. Too subtle a hint, apparently, for Ezra.

“Homer Simpson is fat,” Ezra says, keeping up his chatter at a volume loud enough to be heard in neighboring states. “Homer Simpson eats a lot of doughnuts.”

“Huh?” asks Charlie.

“Ezra!” I plead.
“Stop!”

“Elephants are fat. Hippos are fat. Pandas are
a little bit
fat.”

I stop, kneel on one knee, firmly grab my son’s narrow shoulders, draw my face as close as I can to his, and say two words.

“Just . . .
stop
!”

Ami and Noam are behind us, and I can see Ami rolling his eyes and shaking his head. We keep walking, and I try to converse with Charlie, letting the three boys fall behind by a few feet. I hear Ezra continue his chatter—diligently injecting the word
fat
every few seconds—and I desperately endeavor to keep up a conversation with Charlie so he won’t hear. After two blocks of this, Charlie is turning onto a side street. Lying, I tell him we are headed in a different direction, and we say good-bye and continue walking—until Charlie disappears from view and I tell Ezra to sit down on the sidewalk while the other boys wait a few feet away.

“Are you
mad
?” he says, a smile on his face. I recognize his involuntary response to being reprimanded. He always smiles, sometimes giggles. It’s how he reacts to this kind of confrontation. It makes it more difficult to confront him—his smile makes me feel like laughing myself—but I have to do it.

“I’m
very
angry,” I tell him. “Ezra, you don’t talk to people like that. That’s
not okay
. You shouldn’t talk about people’s bodies.”

He looks down, still grinning slightly. I’m having difficulty judging whether he is actually amused, or just doesn’t know how to react.

“Do you understand why?”

“Why?”

I tell him: it makes people feel uncomfortable. It hurts their feelings. It’s not polite. People just don’t do it.

He looks at me. Silence.

“Ezra,” I say, “listen to me. If we’re walking, and you see somebody, you don’t tell them they’re fat.”

“Okay! All right!”

“Do you know what you should say to them?”

“What?”

“Just say, ‘Shabbat shalom,’” I say, suggesting the traditional Sabbath greeting—the way Jewish people encountering one another in synagogue or on the streets of our neighborhood greet one another. “That’s all. ‘Hi, Charlie. Shabbat shalom.’ You shake hands, like this”—I grab his limp right hand in mine, offering a firm shake to demonstrate how to do—“and that’s it. ‘Hi, Charlie, Shabbat shalom!’”

“Okay!”

I seem to be getting through. I have learned that sometimes it requires raising my voice just to get his attention.

“Let’s practice.”

“No.”

“Pretend I’m Charlie and you see me. ‘Hi, Ezra!’ What do you say?”

He is silent.

I wait. “What do you say to Charlie?”

“Shabbat shalom,” he says.

“And what about your hand?”

He takes my hand and shakes, looking downward.

“Will you remember that?”

“Yes, can we go now?”

On our twenty-minute walk to synagogue, I pause every few minutes to repeat that question, each time forcefully making my point:
That’s not how we talk to people. It hurts their feelings.
I figure that if I repeat it enough, and forcefully enough, I can jar his brain and maybe help Ezra to interrupt his impulse to say the first thing that comes to mind—particularly when he sees anyone who looks a little bit unusual. I don’t know whether I am making myself understood, but soon I have an opportunity to find out.

Late that same afternoon, Shawn and I are strolling in the neighborhood with the boys when we cross paths with some friends who are chatting with another couple we have never met. As it happens, the man—sixty or so, in a white shirt and glasses, hands in his trouser pockets—is a bit on the heavy side.

Without warning, Ezra slips away from us and approaches the husband. I feel rising anxiety as he zeroes in.

“Ezra . . .” I start to say. Too late.

“What’s your name?” Ezra asks him.

“My name’s Jerry,” he says, smiling warily.

“Can you take your hands out of your pockets?” Ezra asks.

Jerry, raising an eyebrow, does. Ezra shakes his hand.

“Shabbat shalom,” Ezra says.

“Shabbat shalom,” Jerry answers.

I’m flushed with a surge of delight—in my son and in my own ability to get through to him, to teach him. I feel a profound sense that anything can be accomplished. Then Ezra, still inches from Jerry, quickly turns around, grins, and looks directly at me.

“See?” he says excitedly, almost shouting with pride. “I didn’t say he was
fat
!”

What happens after that is a blur. I do recall a nauseous feeling, a quiet walk home, and the dismal sense that we might never get this right—that raising a child with no intuitive social instinct will be endlessly treacherous, a minefield with unseen disasters lurking everywhere. I have spent the entire morning trying to teach my son a lesson he has completely missed. How, I wonder, will we ever get through?

 

 

That night I call a friend who is the mother of an older boy with autism, and recount how my son has managed to insult not one but two fat guys in a single day. She chuckles—clearly she has endured such encounters herself—and then offers advice.

“Our children are concrete thinkers,” she explains. “We need to help them to draw connections between specific experiences and general rules.” Use this mishap, she suggests, to teach Ezra a more universal idea: that it’s not polite to talk
about
other people’s bodies, even if you’re not talking directly
to
the people.

It sounds like a good plan, and I can say those words to Ezra, but I don’t feel that I have the ability to make him understand. Besides, even with our greatest efforts to impart that wisdom, Ezra seems fascinated and drawn to variations in the human physique. Uncensored, he obsessively points out and comments on not just overweight people, but a laundry list of oddities: men’s bald scalps, birthmarks on faces, deformed limbs, people in wheelchairs, tattoos, and facial piercings. Like Superman—or a paparazzo—he has an uncanny ability to spot these things from across crowded rooms, up long airplane aisles, in supermarkets from three cash registers away, and through lanes of traffic on busy urban streets. He seems so incapable of withholding comment that his brother Ami develops a sixth sense, his own detector for spotting such people and then steering Ezra out of the way. Waiting at a crosswalk beside his brother, Ami, eagle-eyed, will notice a homeless man in a wheelchair approaching and block Ezra’s view with his own body, smiling as he tries to offer distraction.

In a crowded building lobby, I watch Ezra rush up to an elderly woman with a port-wine stain covering half her face. I cringe as Ezra cranes his neck, finally pressing his own face right up to the woman’s to get a gander, and dread what he might say.