by Tina Traster
Janet asks Julia if she’d like to visit the classroom.
Julia sticks out her hand to be held.
Janet looks at me, checking to see if I want to come too.
I gesture for her to take Julia to the adjoining room without me.
Two minutes later, Janet returns on her own.
“That is some independent child,” she says.
“Yes,” I nod, realizing I live in The Twilight Zone.
“Well,” Janet says, clapping her hands together.
Before she can finish, I stand up.
“I think it’s okay for me to leave, yes? Her dad will pick her up at 6:00 PM.”
“Don’t worry. She’ll be fine,” she says.
She doesn’t have to tell me that. Julia will be fine. She will not miss me. I won’t miss her either.
On the way out, I hear a child wailing. As I walk back toward the elevator, I see a mother dressed in a business suit clutching her lanky, hysterical son who is blubbering so hard he’s hyperventilating. In between sobs he says, “No, Mommy! Don’t go! Don’t leave me!” The mother looks pained.
I skip past them and step onto the elevator.
I remember how hard it used to be to leave my mother’s side when I went to sleepaway camp and then to college. I had no problem integrating in social situations, but I ached for my mother’s assurances that everything would be all right. Right up through my divorce, my mother’s voice was a constant in my day. I never felt completely separated from her, the way I do now.
The fresh morning tingles. I head back to the apartment and prepare for a day of juggling responsibilities for our house purchase, our apartment sale, and our temporary rental in Ellenville. There is so much to be done.
A routine forms. Every morning I ride up the elevator with Julia. When the doors open she tears away from me like a Tasmanian Devil and disappears into the classroom. When I call out good-bye, she doesn’t wave. I ask the teachers how she is doing. They tell me she is a delight. She knows everyone’s name, and she’s extremely generous. Every evening Ricky walks through the door with her at 6:15 PM. He doesn’t understand why she’s so filthy. The smell of stale yogurt permeates her shirt. Her fingers and face are sooty with grime—she looks like an urchin.
“Why can’t they take her to the bathroom and clean her up?” he asks, annoyed.
“I’ve mentioned it,” I say. “They tell me she likes to explore on her knees.”
“They’ve got no interest in her,” he says.
“It’s true,” I say. “It’s a warehouse. They tell you what you want to hear. Their mission is to get through the day.”
Ricky sighs, and the conversation changes to real estate.
The last thing left to do is get our two cats into their carriers. Nothing remains in the apartment except scuffed walls, worn wooden floors, and strewn wrapping materials the movers left behind. Both of our cars are packed and waiting to be driven from the gate of this old life. Today we are heading for the Ellenville lake house where we will live for three and a half months. I have devised a grand plan. We will commute nearly two hours to Nyack each day. Julia will start a new nursery school. I have rented an office for work, and I’ll be managing the house renovation. Ricky will travel to the city and the surrounds for business. At the end of each day, we’ll head back to the mountains. On weekends, we will remain upstate but work on outfitting the house. I’ve given the contractor a Halloween deadline.
Ricky comes into the apartment and lifts a cat carrier in each hand.
“Where’s Julia?” I say.
“Julia, Julia,” Ricky bellows. Then I hear her voice in the hallway.
“Are you ready?” Ricky asks me.
“I need a minute. I’ll meet you downstairs. I’m going to follow you in the car. We’re taking the Palisades, right?”
He nods and disappears.
I go back into the bedroom. I want the memories, good and bad, to soak into my skin. It’s been seven years since I moved in, single with my dog, broken but hopeful, determined to teach myself to be strong and independent. So much has happened since that March day. I unpacked every box, filled every bookshelf, and hung every picture before I went to sleep that night.
I glance at the tiny bathroom, thinking how impossible it was to kneel by the tub and bathe Julia because most of the tub was lined up against the toilet. I walk slowly through the living room recalling how when I first bought the apartment and it was still empty, I’d come in the evening and sit in the middle of the floor and sketch plans for my furniture layout. How over the years so much more furniture was squeezed in to accommodate me plus husband plus child. I walk into Julia’s room, which was really only ever a glorified foyer and not the nursery a mom takes pride in, but Julia put her stamp on it. I notice a torn cover of an old picture book sticking out under the closet door. I take one final lap around the kitchen and stand at the window where I’ve spent my treasure working and worrying and making a spectacular life unfold. I toss a set of keys on the counter and break down sobbing. I pull tight the heavy door for the last time. Then I jiggle the taut door handle. The past is behind me.
By late summer, our new house has been stripped to the studs, every inch of obsolete infrastructure has been pulled out, and floors have been ripped up. There is a Dumpster on the property filled with old wood and a Porta-Potty for the crew working day and night. One day I’m at my temporary office working. Ricky calls.
“Listen, I think you might get upset when you get to the house,” he says. “They’ve taken off the roof. The house looks, I don’t know, vulnerable. I just wanted to warn you.”
I push aside my work and grab my car keys. I’m bracing myself for the shock. I swing into the driveway and clatter down the sloping path. I can see the gaping opening from the top of the driveway. Ricky is talking to the foreman. I stop midway and put my hands over my face. Ricky sprints over to me. Tears are streaming down my face.
“I warned you,” he says. “It will be okay.”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” I say. “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It’s like witnessing a birth.”
“What?” Ricky says, convinced I’ve lost my mind.
“This doesn’t upset me. It’s, like I said, watching a birth.”
There are these decisive moments in life when you know something has begun. I can’t say when that was with Julia—the video the orphanage sent? The first time we met her? The night we spirited her away? I don’t know. Seeing my house like this is one of those times.
On the drive up to Ellenville that night I see storm clouds gathering.
“What happens if it rains?” I ask.
“They’ll cover the house with a tarp.”
“Hmm.” The house is no longer just a thing. It’s become part of me.
“You know,” I say, “I know we’re not speaking to my parents and I’m happy to have it that way for now. But my dad would find this whole process fascinating.”
“And your mother would find every way to let you know you’ve made a big mistake,” he quips.
“So true.”
Every spare moment I have I work on the house. I lay out fifty paint chips across the floor and eliminate them one by one before deciding what color to paint a wall. I toil for hours on our dial-up computer, scrolling websites on bathroom sinks and lighting fixtures. We spend our weekends in the Catskills at kitchen-and-bathroom specialists, picking tiles and shades and appliances. Every day there’s one glitch or another, but I soldier through because I’m determined to keep the contractors on schedule. I find myself thinking about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. I wish I could do something more than send money, like adopt a dog or even go down there, but I’m bringing a dead house back to life.
One Saturday afternoon, we return from Home Depot. The fall chill is settling in.
“Let’s open the town,” I say to Ricky and Julia.
The town is a comprehensive set of wooden blocks that are tiny replicas
of houses and shops and public buildings. The set has mix-and-match roofs that remind me of the Beaux Arts architecture of the Upper West Side. There are plastic green trees and a yellow bus and red fire engine. Julia tears toward the cardboard box and rips at the plastic furiously. The pieces spill to the floor. I try to get her to play with me, but she wants to do her own thing. The blocks amuse her for less than ten minutes.
“Julia, wait. We’ve just started.” She drifts away.
I’m about to toss the blocks aside and move on to my heady to-do list, but I sit down again. I put roofs on houses and string houses into streets and make streets cross with other streets where pedestrians find the post office and the hospital and the school. Then I add plastic green trees near the buildings and school buses and fire engines along the roads.
“You’ve done a fine job, Mama,” Ricky says, standing behind me. “Julia, come look at the town Mama made.”
Eighteen
“Julia, hurrr-ry up, we’re waiting,” Ricky calls, his hands cupped over his mouth like a megaphone. “I see Betty. There she is. She’s waiting for you. C’mon.”
Betty is our ketchup-red SUV.
“Can you see her?” I ask with a scowl, squinting to scour the shaded woody trail we’ve been walking for the past hour.
“She’s playing her usual game,” Ricky says.
By that he means she’s hanging back thirty feet on the trail or hiding behind a wide tree or pretending she has a pebble in her shoe. This is what she does. Every time. Anything to control the pace and manipulate the mood of a family outing. We’ve been taking long walks with Julia since she was two. At three and a half, she’s capable of hiking five forested, hilly miles. Her legs are solid slabs of muscle. She’s a jaguar, built for endurance. She could be the world’s tiniest Olympic athlete. We call her Bam Bam. She never breaks a sweat. On a long trek, she doesn’t complain about fatigue; she doesn’t raise her arms and whine “Hold me.” What she does is stall and tarry and hide because it makes her feel powerful. Going along is out of the question. Harmony is abhorrent. No exceptions.
We’ve tried to encourage her to walk alongside us by playing word games or educating her about this bird or that berry. We bring apples and say, “We’ll eat them in twenty minutes,” hoping to dangle the proverbial carrot. Ricky says we should try donuts. And he’s probably right—I’ve seen the mothers who use sugar as their prime weapon. We grasp her hand, but she eludes us, Jell-O sliding through my fist. We sing. She won’t. She either runs far ahead or lags far behind. Her tactics frustrate Ricky. I beg him to stay patient.
“Why?” he says. “She makes this so unpleasant. What’s the point?”
“Think of it as a long-term investment,” I say. “It’s painful now, but one day this will be second nature to her. It’s something we can always do together as a family. Hiking is a ritual she’ll seek comfort in because she’ll associate it with something she’s always done.” Ricky is skeptical but willing to persist.
My mother never walked through the woods. She has never laced up a pair of hiking boots or climbed a steep trail to a plateau where the whole wide world is there for you to feast on. My family didn’t spend time together outdoors. We didn’t hike or camp or swim in lakes. My mother was a city girl, at home among concrete and chaos. My father was a hybrid. He spent his teen and adult years in Brooklyn, but as a young boy he was raised among immigrant farmers in northern Connecticut. Married to my strong-willed mother, who once said, “If you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all,” his intense desire for the natural world had to be sated with exotic images from National Geographic and from Animal Kingdom flickering on a thirteen-inch television on his bedroom dresser. Lucky for me, I got to go to sleepaway camp in the Catskill Mountains for a decade. I learned that the woods are the finest retreat when my heart is confused.
Ricky is tapping his muddy boot. Julia is dragging her feet; she’s wearing a smirk that says, Look how clever I am for making you wait.
“Maybe we should duck behind that tree—give her a taste of her own medicine,” I say. “If we disappear out of sight, maybe she’ll get a good scare.”
“I doubt it,” Ricky says.
“You’re probably right. Either she’s too smart for us, or she wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if we disappeared.”
Suddenly Julia sprints toward us. When she catches up, she doesn’t stop. She slices by like an airborne razor boat skimming a lake.
“Juliiiaaaaa, stop!” Ricky yells.
She’s hurtling over a green mound toward the parking lot.
She won’t slow down. She won’t acknowledge Ricky’s pleas.
He scoots after her. After a couple of minutes, he gains a lead. And with plain intention, he sticks his boot in front of her shins and she topples forward onto the grass. I’m ten feet behind, but I see the whole thing. I’m stunned. Before I close in on them, I spot a man with a wild-eyed look clamoring up the knoll from the other direction, his arms winding like windmills. Julia is splayed on the ground, crying. Ricky lifts her up, brushing dirt off her knees.
The stranger is apoplectic.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he shouts. “I saw what you did. She’s only a little girl. Are you crazy?”
“Mind your business,” Ricky barks back.
The guy continues yelling and shaking his head as he turns around and walks back to where he came from.
Julia is shell-shocked, but she’s stopped crying. She’s not hurt.
“Are you all right?” I say to Ricky. “Is she okay? What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” he says, looking dazed and ashamed. “I lost it. I saw her heading to the parking …”
“I understand,” I say, stroking his arm. “She drives us to extremes.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, looking ashen.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” I say. “I thought that man was going to slug you.”
“He’s an asshole.” Ricky pauses. “Thing is, it’s assholes like that who call the police. Before you know it you’ve got social services in your house. Nobody understands what we’re dealing with.”
“You’re right. Nobody does. It’s not your fault. Grab her hand. Let’s go.”
We are in the car heading back to Ellenville. Julia is merrily humming “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” The sun sags low in the sky. Parched leaves dangle languidly from naked tree branches. The last of the season, the ones that have endured. Ricky is staring ahead, concentrating on the road. He’s quiet. For the first two years after we brought Julia home, I thought I was the only one in the world who experienced difficulties with her, that I’d made a mistake, that motherhood and I weren’t meant to be. I told myself the problem is that she’s not really mine and I had overestimated my ability to love and bond with a child who’s not my flesh. Shame grew every day. Ricky’s patience and tenderness with Julia offered some solace.
Then Julia had a nanny and subsequently she has started nursery school. A different picture started to emerge. Other adults found her difficult to manage. They had trouble hiding their exasperation. I recognized the forced smiles, the tiny blow of the lips that made a wisp of hair move. I knew the code phrases: She certainly has a lot of energy. She’s quite a fireball. Does she ever tire?
But only in the last year have I seen Ricky become aggravated with her behavior. She’s just as unresponsive to him as she is to me. He’s described her as “feral”—which is a perfect description for a child who seems to need no one.
In late July, when we temporarily relocated to Ellenville, I enrolled Julia in a nursery school six miles from the house we will live in soon. She’s been there for three months, and it’s not going well. I am often told she has trouble participating in circle time. She’s been given several time-outs alone in the kitchen because she’s disruptive in the dining room. The head mistress of the nursery school thinks it might be because I pack Julia’s lunch for her every day. I don’t bother to say, I’ve walked thro
ugh your kitchen and I’m not interested in feeding Julia the high-fructose, chemical-laden crap you serve. It seems caretakers in institutions presume a child’s difficult behavior is traceable to something the parents are doing. When Ricky drops Julia off in the morning, she clatters off without saying good-bye. When he or I pick her up, she is hiding under a desk, alone, filthy, and wild-eyed. Neutral at best about our arrival. There’s an expression of relief on the teacher’s face when we leave.
I can’t put my finger on why this school is especially bad for Julia—worse than other group environments she’s been in. Is it the transition from the city to the suburbs? Is it that the school is cheerless, cave-like, and somber? The rooms are underground. The lighting is poor. Even the backyard playground equipment is threadbare. Ricky thinks it’s because the school doesn’t hire trained professionals. “They hire on the cheap,” he says, adding that Jocelyn, one of the two teachers, is essentially a babysitter. Julia, he says, has learned to “chew her up and spit her out.” As she does with any adult who is yielding and soft.
One day while lamenting the nursery school situation, Ricky says, “You know, there’s a pair of twins—well not really twins, brothers, who are a real handful also.”
“Really?” I say.
“Yeah, Timmy and Kenny. Apparently they are both adopted from Russia. And I’ve heard through the grapevine they are a nightmare.”
“Have you seen them?” I ask.
“I have. And here’s the weird thing. They remind me of Julia. Same manic energy. Same faraway look in their eyes. Same craziness. When they see their dad at the end of the day they take turns saying, ‘Hi Daddy, hi Daddy, hi Daddy, hi Daddy,’ over and over. You know, the way Julia does.”
“Wow,” I say, contemplating the rare opportunity to meet someone who may know how I feel. “The next time we pick her up together, show me the brothers.”
“I will.”
Morning temperatures in Ellenville plunge into the forties, though it’s early October. The charming lake cottage is not so charming in winter’s grip. We keep losing electricity, one time for a three-day spell. The utility company is in no rush to restore power to a desolate mountain road lined with summer bungalows. Yesterday we raided our rented storage room near our new house for sweaters and corduroy pants. Seeing our belongings for the first time in three months made me yearn to get our house finished and to move in. I spend every waking moment cracking the whip on painters, plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. Julia’s unhappy days at nursery school loop through my mind and press on my heart. I need to find another school, but I must focus first on getting us settled.
