Making Toast

by Roger Rosenblatt

  At Thanksgiving, which we celebrated at Dee and Howard’s home in Bethesda, Howard asked me to say grace. I said, “The best one can say about this family is that Amy might be pleased with us.”

  Then one afternoon, Ginny and I were waiting to meet John at Union Station. He was coming to spend the Christmas holiday with us. We were sitting in the car, looking for him. His train was a few minutes late. I felt a hand touch my right wrist—not softly, so that it might be mistaken for the flutter of a breeze on my sleeve, but definite, like a comforting pat one person might give another. I looked at Ginny to ascertain that she had not done it, but she was turned away from me, searching the crowd for John. I hoped to feel that touch again, but I did not. And I have not felt it since. It might have been a small spasm, an involuntary movement of my forearm. Something like a twitch.

  One night, as the children are about to go to sleep, Ginny finds Sammy lying on his back on the floor of Harris’s study. His arms are spread wide and his tongue sticks out of the side of his mouth. The day Amy died, Sammy was alone with her while Jessie went to get Harris. He tried to get Amy to breathe. He tried to open her eyes. “This is the way Mommy looked,” he says. “I’ll never forget it. She was so young, the youngest person ever to die.” Ginny says yes, Amy was very young and that she was a wonderful Mommy. Sammy gets up from the floor and goes to bed.

  Wendy’s parents, Rose and Bob, bring the children a book called Elf on the Shelf, and the seven-inch-high elf doll that accompanies it. The book explains that the elf will sit around the house, observing the children’s behavior, and report directly to Santa Claus. The elf is supposed to move to a different location and vantage point every night, so Harris, Ginny, and I give him a hand. He has a red pointed cap, spindly legs, and the squinched-up face of a sneak. I think him little better than a snitch. But Harris notes that since his arrival, the children’s behavior has been impeccable. He would like to extend the elf’s stay, but cannot think of a justification.

  On Christmas Day I help Jessie put up High School Musical stickers on the walls and closet doors of her room. The morning goes easier than it did last year. The news that nobody is buying anything in this season evidently has not reached the children of Clearwood Road. Besides the stickers, Jessie got books, a snow globe, a karaoke player, lots of clothes, and her own computer. Sammy, who does not regard clothes as gifts, got a remote control motorcycle and rider, a Mars Mission Lego set, Air Hogs remote control helicopters that terrorize everyone in the house, and, for the Wii, Mario Baseball and a Star Wars game, in which it is possible to make massive gains, and in a trice, to lose everything. The Wii is dazzlingly inventive, and in its own addictive way, it may also teach that disasters come and go, and there’s always another game. Both older children shared a basketball set-up consisting of a hoop, a stand, a backboard, and an automated scoreboard that registers points when someone hits a shot. Basketball has temporarily replaced soccer for Jessie as a Saturday activity, and Sammy plays too. They also shared Shrinky Dinks—decals to color and put in the toaster oven where they shrink and metamorphose into spiders and other animals. I am entrusted with the toaster-oven operation. Besides the Caterpillar dump truck James received, and the gas station, and the workbench, and the garage, he got his own toy toaster—“to make toast like you, Boppo,” he said.

  Except for the penetrating bray of The Wiggles, to which James has grown attached—“fruit salad, yummy yummy”—the day passes pleasantly. James dashes from project to project, like a driven painter skittering over a large canvas, hammering something in one part of the house, shifting something from one room to another. John plays Sorry with Jessie and tells Ginny it reminds him of Amy playing the same game with him when he was little. In the afternoon we all visit Harris’s sister, Beth, in her house on Capitol Hill. Beth, a headhunter in Washington, often takes Jessie and Sammy on excursions to her office. She combines the Christmas gathering with a fundraiser for the children of people in prisons by inviting guests to contribute to the cause. She does this so diffidently, half of us forget to make a donation. Beth has inherited her intelligent ardor for charitable projects from her parents. Howard and Dee spend much of the year helping out in Acadia National Park in Maine. Their Volvo station wagon bears the bumper sticker, “My other car is a bicycle.” I told them I am planning to make up a bumper sticker of my own that will read, “My other car is a bigger SUV.” They smiled charitably.

  In the early evening, John, Harris, Ginny, and I sit down to dinner. Harris looks tired, me too. No one says anything about Amy’s absence but the conversation feels choppy. I hear Bubbies in the next room repeatedly playing a Hannah Montana CD on the karaoke. He plays “I Can’t Wait to See You Again.”

  Sammy’s enthrallment with the Empire State Building began when Ginny and I took him on his special trip to New York, and he saw the building for the first time as we approached the Holland Tunnel. “What’s the second tallest building?” he asked. He could make out a portion of the Chrysler Building just behind the Empire State.

  “Did you know that a gorilla once climbed to the top of the Empire State Building?” I said. “No way!” he said. Once I had mentioned King Kong, I had to get the DVD of the original 1933 version for him, which was presented as a post-Christmas gift. One afternoon, we watched it—Sammy, Jessie, and I. James and Ligaya came and went. I was a little anxious about certain scenes I remembered, such as King Kong casually grabbing a woman out of her apartment-house bedroom and tossing her to the street. I wasn’t sure that the children would find beauty in the beast. But I figured that the size of the ape would predominate, which it did. Jessie could take everything but the bleeding of the dinosaurs. At the sight of the oozing black blood, she hid herself under a throw. Sammy loved it all, especially when King Kong pounded his chest in victory. And the climb of the Empire State Building was as good as advertised. James observed that King Kong was “really big.”

  In the 1970s, there were at least two revival houses in Washington that showed movies like King Kong. On the weekends, Ginny and I used to take Carl and Amy to the Biograph and the Key to watch the Hope and Crosby “Road” pictures, and the Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes pictures (the source of their Halloween donnybrook), and Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps. Amy’s favorite was The Philadelphia Story. It was not much easier to sell our kids on black-and-white movies than it was to explain them to Sammy and Jessie, but once in, they embraced King Kong. “Why does he take the lady away with him?” Sammy asked. I told him he wants to marry her. “What do you think of King Kong?” I asked. “He’s mean, but he’s kind, too,” he said.

  Jessie’s unpanicky and reasonable reaction to King Kong suggested that, while retaining her unflagging optimism, she is beginning to accept the existence of terrifying things. A couple of years ago, Amy’s friend Betsy Mencher asked if she and her husband Andy could take Jessie with them and their daughter Julia, who is Jessie’s age, to a community theater production of Beauty and the Beast. As always, Jessie was excited. But Amy predicted that she would have a very hard time with the Beast. Jessie could not deal with anything menacing or evil.

  “How well Amy knew her children,” Betsy told me. The slightly ominous introductory music to the production had barely started when Jessie became alarmed, and within a few minutes she was crying. “I got her out of that theater as fast as possible,” said Betsy. “And we went to McDonald’s.”

  Amy knew Betsy well too. When the two friends had graduated from college, Betsy’s latest boyfriend had just broken up with her. She would come over to our New York apartment every day, so that Amy could tell her the boy was worthless, and Betsy could do a lot better, and other customary assurances. Adding comfort food to comforting, Amy would serve Betsy her little brother John’s mac n’ cheese, which came in the shape of dinosaurs. Years later, on a visit to Amy’s home in Bethesda, Betsy came across dinosaur-shaped mac n’ cheese in the pantry. She asked why it was there. “To comfort my children when they�
��re in a sad or pathetic state,” Amy said.

  I can hear her saying that. She often had the voice of a comic with a clipped delivery, even when she was saying things that weren’t funny. As with any serious-minded comedian, you could pick up traces of tragedy in the most light-hearted story, and when she said something hilarious, her voice hit just the right notes. The family was at the dinner table in Quogue, kidding Harris about sleeping on the floor during a golfing trip to Hawaii. “Harris Makes Do in Hawaii,” said Amy, as if stating a title in a series of children’s books. She laughed, Harris laughed, everyone laughed.

  Odd that I seem to know Amy more completely in death than I did when she was alive. I do not know her any better (I doubt that I could know her any better), but there was so much to her life that I was unaware of until now, when I speak with her friends and colleagues and learn of this sound decision or of that small gesture of thoughtfulness. Jean Mullen, Amy’s former chief resident, told me that she and Amy happened to have the same set of dishes, and complained of the too-shallow soup bowls. Jean said, “Amy showed up at my door one day, carrying new deep soup bowls for both of us.” One sees many good qualities in one’s children as they grow into likeable adults, but their stature may remain obscured, because stature is most often measured at a distance. The distance of death reveals Amy’s stature to me. My daughter mattered to the histories of others. Knowing that did not prevent my eyes from welling up with tears for no apparent reason in Ledo’s Pizza the other day. But it is something.

  Carl, Wendy, and the boys come over on a Sunday, and we drive to the Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport. Harris stays home to catch up on work. The museum is a reduced version of the one at the Smithsonian downtown, but easier for us to reach, and, we hope, less crowded. It is crowded enough, and it has a lot for the kids—biplanes, old airliners, stealth bombers, and rides that simulate space capsules and churn the stomach. Sammy spies a concession stand where everything, from the flimsiest keychain to a large model of a rocket ship, seems to be priced at $26. “Will you get this for me, Boppo?” He indicates the rocket ship. I choose this as my moment to impose limits. He has so much already. Over the summer, in Long Island, when we visited the aquarium in Riverhead, he asked for a stuffed gray-and-white shark, which I bought without hesitation. Here and now, however, I have decided to draw the line.

  He takes the rocket and holds it in the air to suggest how wonderful it is. I hold my ground. “You don’t need it, Sammy,” I say. “Besides, don’t we have something like it at home?” He says, “But I want it, Boppo.” I tell him, “Not today. Let’s look at the old planes.” He gives the rocket a swoop with his hand. Carl approaches us. “What’s that, Sam?” he says. “It’s this great rocket,” says Sammy. “Want it?” asks his uncle. And before I can intervene, Carl has shelled out the $26. That evening, I report this moral defeat to Harris. “Frustrating. Isn’t it?” he says, looking me straight in the eye.

  Ligaya falls on the ice. A concussion keeps her home in bed for the first part of the week. When she returns, James runs to her. She holds him as he clings to her head, examines and reexamines her face, and rests on her shoulder. For a full two minutes he does not let go. She has been away only three days. Ginny and I share a glance of apprehension. In April and May, Ligaya is scheduled to return to the Philippines to visit her family. She plans to be away six weeks. I threaten to have her passport revoked.

  Andrew’s sixth birthday party is held at Laser Nation, in Sterling, Virginia. Jessie and Sammy are excited. James goes, too, but he is too little to shoot other children or be shot. At Laser Nation, the kids are armed with laser guns, which are attached to thick vests that light up when registering hits. The kids hunt each other down in a dark catacomb with pipes and gray and black walls. It looks like the interior of a submarine. The wood is painted to look like steel. Red, orange, blue, and yellow teams, designated by the lights they wear, move about the maze after the children have received instructions in the Briefing Room: No running, no physical contact, no unsportsmanlike conduct. Graeme, one of the participating fathers, who is from Australia, says, “No unsportsmanlike conduct? That discriminates against Australians.”

  This is how children’s birthday parties are done these days, though not all occur in warlike surroundings. Last year, Jessie had her party at Dave and Buster’s, a sort of junior casino, where kids play interactive games, and Sammy had his birthday at Little Gym, where the kids jump and tumble on mats. The advantage of such places is that there is no cleanup for parents, and the staff runs the show. I find them weird but harmless, though Laser Nation may be pushing it.

  I play with Bubbies, then leave him with Harris as I move to the video game area where Caitlin collars me and pushes me around a while, before I carefully deliver her to her mother’s care. The video games include “Extreme Hunting” and “Virtual Cop.” Never having tried one, I play “Virtual Cop.” I draw the blue plastic automatic from its holder, and knock off every bad guy who pops up on the screen. I take to this. My score is “Excellent.” A sign appears: “When all life is lost, the game is over.”

  Having shot as many people as they could, Jessie, Sammy, the birthday boy, and fifteen other children lay down their arms and eat birthday cake. Bubbies joins the bigger kids, and though his head is barely visible above the top of the long table, he looks and listens and shows no sign that he feels out of place in the company of elders. Jessie meets Ella, the daughter of the Australian, Graeme. Ella is not quite six. “I hear an accent,” says Jessie. “Are you from France?” Ella says, “If I were from France, I would be speaking French.”

  Jessie’s to-do list, pinned to the music stand on the keyboard. There are boxes to be checked:

  GET DRESSED

  BRUSH TEETH

  BRUSH HAIR

  MAKE BED

  CLEAR DISHES AFTER MEALS

  While I am away one day, Harris calls to report that James has scribbled all over the sectional with a Magic Marker, and that he has been banished to his room.

  “Does he have an attorney?” I ask. Like most doctors, Harris hates lawyers.

  “He’s already been convicted and sentenced,” he says.

  “Without due process?” I ask. “I think I’ll take it upon myself to represent him in the appeal. This case will be a cinch. You can prepare yourself for a nasty civil suit as well.”

  “Don’t bother. We have witnesses,” he says.

  “Minors?” I ask. “Are there any fingerprints on the Magic Marker? Has he confessed?”

  “In a way,” says Harris. “But he does not yet acknowledge the magnitude of his crime.”

  “Then why,” I ask, “was he tried as an adult? Which reminds me: Has he been given his one telephone call?”

  “Yes,” says Harris. “He’s going to call you.”

  Long ago, I abandoned all hope that I would ever learn anything new again—too few remaining brain cells. Now, thanks to the reading I do with Sammy before bedtime, I teem with information about trucks, boats, planes, cranes, and drilling equipment. Last night, after Sammy and I had discussed the comparative strengths of stabilizers and forklifts, I lay down for a while with Jessie. Ginny had finished two chapters of James and the Giant Peach with her, and Harris was in with James. Jessie was ready to pick up another book—Harold and the Purple Crayon—which she read to me.

  “Harold creates his own world,” said Jessie. “Like writers,” I said. Jessie has variously wanted to be a writer, a doctor, a fashion model, and an orchestra conductor. “If you decide to become a writer, Jess, you can create anything you like—friends, princesses, monsters…” “New worlds, too,” she said. “New planets.” I said, “Harold not only creates his own world, he lives in it. That’s like writers, too. Another way of saying it is that writers inhabit their own worlds.” Jessie said, “Inhabit. Let’s make that tomorrow’s Word for the Morning.” I said, “Let’s do that.”

  We continued talking about all that a writer can create, like Harold. I said that s
ometimes, when one creates, one does not find what one is looking for right away, and so must keep creating until it appears. He may even have created it before, but lost it, and now must imagine it again. “Like Harold’s window,” said Jessie. With his crayon, Harold draws first one window, then two, and then an entire city of windows in an effort to discover the window he lost. “Exactly like Harold’s window,” I said.

  Sammy says he wants to be a scuba diver when he grows up, but he also has a bent for inventing. He would like to make a device that sits on top of a helmet and allows people to see invisible things. “Like ultraviolet rays,” he says. “And Mommy.” I get him some books about Thomas Edison, in whom he expressed interest when I mentioned some of Edison’s inventions. One night we huddle over a book about Edison’s early years. Sammy is most impressed by the fact that Edison’s hair turned white when he was only twenty-three. Reading to him about the telegraph and the phonograph, I try to make the ancient instruments intelligible to him. I read ahead on a page and learn that Edison’s wife died when he was thirty-seven, leaving him with three small children. I hesitate, then read the passage to Sammy. He listens thoughtfully but says nothing.

  On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Jessie is the first of the children to come down to breakfast. “I had the most wonderful dream,” she says. “I dreamed that Mommy was alive and that she was having a baby girl.” I tell her that after my father died, I used to dream that he was alive, too.