Something Happened (40 page)

I was infuriated. He knew the way home. It wasn’t far. The walk was uncomplicated. Many mornings we would let him lead us from the house to the boardwalk to the play group just to show him he could get there alone safely and then let him lead us back afterward to demonstrate to himself and us that he also knew how to return. The village was small, there were hardly any cars, it was impossible to get lost—if he did, he could always follow the boardwalk or ask somebody for directions. He knew that too. (We were always pressing him to ask people for directions when he was unsure, but he was afraid of strangers, even children his own age, and reluctant to talk to them. When he did, he mumbled inaudibly with lowered eyes, and whoever he asked always requested him sharply to repeat what he had just said.

“Do you know how to get there?” my wife and I would ask. “You know how. Are you sure you won’t get lost? Which way do you turn from here? Do you see you can’t get lost? Even if you turned here instead of there or a block later you would still wind up on the boardwalk or the main avenue. You can just follow the people or ask somebody if you do get lost. Will you get lost?”)

Yet he had gone only far enough to be almost out of sight of the play group area, where the few remaining counselors were languidly cleaning things up, and could go no farther. Even when he recognized us and saw us coming he did not move, as though even to budge one hair’s-width from that agonizing place he occupied would be to risk fainting away over some invisible precipice and swoon out of existence. He remained stationary on the pavement in that single spot on his tiny bare feet as though every bone in his ankles had already been crushed (I noticed then, I think, for the first time, how his feet pronate, how his arches are almost flat, and how large and sharp and close to the ground his ankle bones are) and even to continue standing there was excruciating
and unendurable. He couldn’t move and he couldn’t stay where he was. (He did not rush to us.) He howled. We were salvation, God, his only hope for life, but we had to go all the way to him in order to save him, while his gaping, glistening eyes fastened on us frantically. He would not (could not) take even one step toward us to assist in his own rescue and abbreviate his torment. (It was pitiful, pathetic, heartrending; and I fought back violent surges of anger and impatience and the feeling I might lose control and start berating him right then and there. I wanted to hit him. I felt he deserved it and felt I would have done so if he were older and bigger.) My wife quickened her pace and moved out ahead of me and I plucked at her elbow to hold her back.

“Don’t run!” I hissed at her. “You’ll scare him.”

But it was me he waited for, my presence and protection he needed, and he did not begin walking again until he had felt my hand and was able to grip it solidly. (I had the impression then, as I have now, that if we had turned away from him and gone back, or if, for some unavoidable reason, we had not come for him that day at all, he would have remained stranded unalterably on that same spot at which by invisible forces he had been brought to a stop, a tiny mark on the surface of the world no greater than the dimensions of his own naked footprints, until he had perished or collapsed from exposure, hunger, thirst, fear, or fatigue, or until some unnaturally concerned and curious lady or man had gone searching for a policeman to notify him that there was a small boy standing in one place on the sidewalk who had been crying there all day and night and was in danger of dying from starvation, fright, or loneliness. I had the feeling then, and I sometimes have it now, that he would have failed to survive without my wife and me, will not be able ever to exist without the two of us to sustain him, and he may have that feeling too. What will he do when we die? What will Derek do?)

“If you were swimming,” he asked me recently, “and thought you were going to drown, would you yell for the lifeguard and let everybody on the beach
see them save you? Or would you let yourself drown?”

I don’t know which I’d do. I do know, though, that I no longer go swimming in water over my head.

I would be embarrassed to yell for the lifeguard.

I would be embarrassed to call for a doctor at night if I was having a heart attack but wasn’t sure.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” I told him.

He clung to my hand and walked beside me gingerly with his head down, making each step he took on his bare feet a delicate, probing test. His chest panted, his ribs and breastbone heaving as though they might splinter and stab through his fine translucent skin.

“I don’t feel well,” he said. His tears dried slowly, staining. “I felt sick.”

“We’ll take your temperature. Do you feel sick?”

“I was afraid you were never coming for me.”

“If you really feel sick when we get back to the house we’ll call a doctor and have him fix you up, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“I didn’t feel well this morning either.”

“I don’t know what you’re so scared about. You couldn’t get lost coming back to the house even if you tried.”

“I knew you’d think I was making it up.”

He didn’t go back to play group the following morning. He didn’t want to and we didn’t make him. (He adored us for allowing him to stay at home.) He never went back.

“Don’t you want to go back there at all?” I asked at breakfast on Sunday.

“He doesn’t.”

We let it drop.

But after that he had little to do. He had no other kids to play with, no more friends. He spent much of each day on the beach with us, sifting sand. And saying nearly nothing. He wanted to remain indoors a great deal. He read picture books and built lots of models of cars, planes, and aircraft carriers that he took no pride in completing and no joy in preserving. He had no interest in anything. He reread comic books and stared torpidly and sporadically at the television set. He offered to help my wife with the housework.
(This made her nervous.) His attention span was nil; he could not concentrate for long on any of the jigsaw puzzles we bought him. He seemed forgetful. He glued himself to us and went with us almost everywhere, holding on. He did not want to go into town but did not want to be left behind.

(“Must you both go?” he would ask despondently.)

He did not want to be left alone and tried to remain with one or both of us always, except at bedtime, when he had to go off into his own room in a different part of the house (and even then he would awake very early each morning—sometimes he awoke in the middle of the night—and ease into the doorway of our bedroom just to assure himself that we were still there and breathing. He remained there persistently, making enough soft noises to disturb one or the other of us.

“What is it?” my wife or I would demand in an exasperated groan. “What do you want?”

“Breakfast,” he would lie, if it was already light.

It was spooky. I sometimes had the feeling he never slept at all but merely pretended to and lay awake in his bed watching the window and counting the minutes until he could bear his solitude no longer and felt it was safer to come in to us). He exuded always an air of abject apology, even as he loitered about the kitchen and handed my wife things to help her with the cooking and dishwashing. (My wife had a fear that he would begin wearing her aprons and then other articles of her clothing. What would we do if he turned into a transvestite? And so did I. I pretended to be eager to teach him how to play chess, in order to distract him from my wife and help the time pass, and he pretended to be eager to learn. But neither one of us was really interested, and we soon stopped, even though we could not think of much else for him to do.) It was useless and cruel to urge him to go out and play. There was no one he could play with. He did not want to be with, talk to, be seen by, or even look at any of the boys and girls from the play group, not even any of those he used to hail with glee and point out proudly as his friends. Whenever he walked with us someplace and
any came into view, nodding, waving, grinning, or calling hello to him by name, he stiffened and turned his gaze away in angry resolution, offering no response. And soon, no more of them did. They were no longer his friends. It was eerie. It was as though he had never met any of them. He continued to stiffen anyway, tensely and wrathfully, each time we walked and he saw any of them, as though expecting something he loathed to happen. Nothing did. I was angry too and wanted often to slam him on the arm with my fist and shove him toward them roughly with a command to begin playing with them again and have fun.

It was an agony for all of us.

It was the worst summer I ever spent. None of us knew what to do. My wife and I were all he had, and we were not so sure we liked him anymore, although, we never said exactly that. Derek was still a baby in a crib. We didn’t know about him yet. And my daughter was away at camp that year for the first time, where she was having a lonely and miserable time of it too, if we could believe her, because all the other girls had been there before and fell easily into cliques, while she was left a friendless outsider. Or so she maintained to us in her letters. We didn’t believe her. She wanted to come home: in every letter, she wrote that she wanted to come home; sometimes she wrote
only
to tell us she wanted to come home. We didn’t believe her. Some children don’t write home enough; ours wrote
too much
, three or four, five times a week, and our spirits sank every time we saw another letter from her. We did not know whether to believe her or not. We thought she was telling us such things solely to make us unhappy. Even at so early an age she was crafty enough to feign crisis and despair just to afflict us with indecision and guilt. She knew how to hurt. From what we were able to learn from other parents with children at the same camp, she seemed to be having no worse a time of it than normal. I wondered why she wrote so often if she had nothing else to say. I did not want to go see her on visiting day. I didn’t miss her—I didn’t have a chance to, with those damn letters. What for? It meant a long
drive on a hot day, a reunion filled with accusations and dejection, another wasted weekend. When we got there, though, she seemed all right and genuinely glad we had come. She behaved as though she had missed us, which was a thing that had not occurred to me and which she had not once, I am sure, put into her letters. Under an elm tree, where no one else could hear us, I asked her point-blank if she wanted me to take her back with us. I even offered to invent some face-saving explanation: my mother was seriously ill, which was true. She said no and seemed to have many smiling friends and sang the camp songs lustily along with the rest of them. She lost the color war. Later, she was to charge that I had bullied her into saying no, and I imagined I saw tears in her eyes and felt a lump in her throat as we drove off for the rest of the summer and she stood at the roadside staring after us with a somber, unmoving face, refusing stolidly to wave good-bye. And those same urgent, whimpering, peremptory letters insisting we bring her home began again and continued in a ceaseless stream. Why, we wondered, although we never lamented it to each other in precisely these words, couldn’t she leave us alone, why could she not have the decency to leave us in peace now that we had gone to so much trouble and considerable expense to get her out of our way for eight weeks? She wrote letters to our boy marked
PERSONAL
in which she pleaded with him—and lavishly promised him things, including to be kinder and more generous with him in the future forever—to do everything he could to get us to let her come home because she was so miserable away from us, at a time when he himself was so downtrodden with sorrow over his own suffering that he could scarcely muster the courage to speak to us about anything at all. Most of his talk with us was monosyllabic replies to questions, mumbled in undertones. One would think she enjoyed being with us, had been satisfied in our company in the past, which was not true. All our summers have been bad. And most of our Sundays. And still are. How I dread those three- and four-day weekends. I wish my wife and I played tennis or enjoyed going
on boats for sailing or fishing. But I don’t; I don’t even enjoy people who do. I don’t enjoy anything anymore. I didn’t know how to explain to my boy just what the hell was going on with my daughter each time he received another letter from her declaring she was miserable and begging him to beg us to allow her to come home.

“Why won’t you let her?” he would inquire with extreme reserve.

“I’m not stopping her.”

I didn’t
know
what was going on.

“Do you want to come?” I told her by telephone. “Pack up and come. I’ll drive up for you now.”

“No.”

I did know that she was persecuting me. She could indeed have been homesick and unhappy; but she was also using that unhappiness with cool detachment and calculation to upset and oppress us all—as she persecutes me deliberately that same way still, I feel—and that was how we passed the time.

Somehow the time passed; it must have passed very slowly for him. (He liked playing baseball then—and enjoyed being good at it. He loved catching flies and getting hits and scooting around the bases. Now he had nobody to play with.) Somehow, the time always passes (doesn’t it, with no help from us and in spite of anything that is going on, as it passes for me now at the company, as it passed ultimately for my much younger daughter then away at camp, and passes now uneventfully for my wife at home with the help of a sneaky and avenging slurp from the wine bottle every half hour or so during the morning and afternoon and an energetic bang in the box from me at night one or two times a week or so if I come home and feel up to it, and as it passed for my poor old mother when she was bedridden with arthritis and painful, cramping limbs and joints and stricken speechless by her brain spasms and just about all she had left to her, for that last, little while, was a consciousness that understood dismally how little she had left. All she had left was me. Yet, she held on, clawed fingers and all, even in those final comas, she held on stubbornly and willfully for dear life,
ha, ha, but her kidneys failed her treacherously, it was a stealthy, unsuspected betrayal from underneath, and in the end, ha, ha, she died, crying for her mother, moaning “Ma! Ma! Ma!” in a drone that was clear and loud although the doctor said she felt no pain and did not know what was happening. How did
he
know? Then I could bury her. At last I could bury her, although she had died about sixteen months before. I had a mother once who died sixteen months before she was buried. At least as far as I was concerned. My sister lives far away with diabetes and other family problems of her own and didn’t come to the funeral. I didn’t want her to and told her it wasn’t necessary. I would handle and pay for everything. We aren’t close. I wasn’t close to my mother. I was mad at her.