Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  “Look who’s here, Cody.” Alison signed the letter D at her forehead. “It’s Dad.”

  Charles arrived, on cue, and ventured a small smile. “Hi, Cody.”

  A globule of pudding slid off Cody’s spoon, hit his solar plexus—splat!—and started to migrate, sluglike, down the front of his bib. When Alison reached toward him with her napkin, he grunted and shrugged his chest into concavity, away from her hand. She immediately pulled back. Cody scooped up another spoonful and slammed it sideways against his mouth.

  “Wow,” Charles said, trying to imitate the playful tone Alison had been using, “somebody really likes his dessert.”

  “Your dad is talking to you, Cody,” Alison said. “Cody Larson Marlow.”

  Cody moaned and bowed low to the surface of his tray, briefly submersing the tip of his nose in his pudding cup. Then, in a wide-ranging motion, he swept his head up and back: a startled horse carving an arc through space, mane tossing, whites of eyes exposed, assessing quickly and efficiently the possible presence of a predator.

  At the end of this movement, Cody froze, body torqued, vacant eyes aimed toward the door leading to the backyard, as if he were longing to escape into the black, drenched night.

  Bettina was making the rounds, moving among the diners, helping those who needed help.

  Noticing that Cody had made a mess, she said cheerily, “Here, Cody, let’s get you a new bib,” and before Charles or Alison could stop her, she had her hands on the bare skin of his neck, his shoulders, and Charles thought, No, no, she hasn’t been told, how can they not have told her, she doesn’t know.

  For one moment, there was a subtle undulation in Cody’s face, the effect of an idly drifting cottonwood tuft landing on a perfectly unperturbed pool.

  And then: thrashing, screaming, the sudden stench of loosed bowels, Cody reaching into the back of his pants, smearing face, hair, body with feces; Bettina backed away in horror and confusion as Charles and Alison tried to restrain him.

  Among the other children, a cacophony arose: empathetic moans, giggles, gibbering incomprehensibilities; a wordless, savage wilderness expressing extremes of terror and jubilation.

  “Didn’t anyone tell her?” Alison was shouting, furious. “Damn it, I cannot believe that no one told her! He cannot, cannot, cannot be touched on his scars!”

  •♦•

  It is an odd but demonstrable truth that there are times in Earth’s history when a shadow falls over the planet. (Charles always thought of the blackness enveloping Earth in A Wrinkle in Time, a book that is for many young girls—as it was for Emmy—an early favorite.)

  The shadow manifests in large-scale devastation and suffering: environmental, cultural, political; earthquakes, fires, tsunamis; the rape and mutilation of innocents; acts of genocide; acts of terrorism. And although sometimes these catastrophes are glimpsed from a distance and our sympathies extend no further than writing a check, often the shadow falls on us in a personal way. The darkness finds us at home; personal suffering occurs in tandem with the larger tragedy and is forever after associated with it.

  It was in the wake of 9/11. Alison especially had been devastated—she had enduring connections with many people in Manhattan and lost two dear friends in the Towers.

  Charles didn’t know how to reach her. His connection to the event was less direct than Alison’s, and at times he felt that perhaps she resented him for that. But it was also that distance that allowed him to keep functioning when she could not.

  Alison spent the rest of September on the living-room sofa in a kind of coma, unable to extricate herself from the nonstop television and radio coverage even though the effects were basically those of an inexorable wasting disease.

  Charles brought her tea and broth, the only nourishment she would take for days on end. She occasionally accepted some partially ground uncooked ramen noodles from Cody. But during those few weeks, her ongoing obsession with curing Cody’s autism became completely supplanted by her grief over the state of the planet.

  Charles couldn’t convince her to go with him and the children to the Seattle Center memorial. They brought flowers and herbs from the garden: asters and mums, rosemary boughs for remembrance, and sprigs of fennel, which Cody loved picking and carrying about, brushing the feathery fronds across his cheeks. It was eerie: thousands of people gathered in silence around the fountain. Cody’s muteness that day was a kind of blessing; for once, his inability to speak was not stigmatizing or isolating—he was just one more citizen of a world that had been stunned into a voiceless, impotent grief.

  Eventually, Charles managed to get Alison out of the house, driving her to an aikido class. She was resistant at first, but reconnecting with aikido was what finally filled the hole and brought her back. He thought, briefly, of joining her, that perhaps he should make another effort to learn to fall, but he knew from experience that when going through hell, Alison preferred to go alone.

  By mid-October, she’d started an intensive six-week teacher-training program and was gone five nights a week and from ten until five on Saturdays and Sundays. It was hard, being essentially a single parent during that time, but Charles truly felt that it was saving Alison’s life.

  On weeknights, Alison’s classes went until nine, sometimes later. It was especially late when she came home that particular night, almost eleven.

  Emmy was asleep. Charles and Cody were in Cody’s room. Charles was on Cody’s bed, reading; Cody was sitting cross-legged on the floor, grinding, showing no sign of being the least bit tired and resisting any effort to get him under the covers. Charles thought perhaps Cody wanted his mother to put him to bed. He’d seen little enough of her the past few weeks.

  Usually Ali came home animated, keyed up, quickened in body and spirit, but tonight, all the typical sounds of her homecoming—the opening of the front door, keys dropping on the table, briefcase and gym bag hitting the floor, coat being hung in the closet, footsteps coming up the stairs—were separated by long pauses, as if she were moving very slowly, laden with some enormously heavy cargo.

  “I saw Cody’s light on from outside,” she said, appearing in the doorway. “I can’t believe you’re still up.”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. Just tired.”

  “Look, Cody,” Charles said. “It’s Mom.”

  “Hi, Cody. How are you, sweetheart?”

  Cody grunted, signed Hi, Mom without looking up, and continued grinding.

  Alison leaned against the doorjamb and slipped off her shoes. She went straight from work to the dojo, changed into her gi, and then put her business suit and heels back on after class, so she was wearing a business suit and heels. Now that she was finally off the sofa and back in the world, her stamina was astonishing. Charles couldn’t fathom how she managed these thirteen-hour days.

  “So,” she said. “What have you guys been doing?”

  “Not much. Just hanging. We made pesto for dinner, didn’t we, Cody? Watched a video … read … you know, the usual.”

  “Has he had his bath?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he brush his teeth?”

  “Yes, Alison. We’ve got the routine down.”

  “Hey, Cody.” She squatted and signed her greeting this time. “Have you been having fun with Dad?”

  Cody reached for another package of noodles. Alison grabbed it and hid it behind her back before he could get to it.

  “Cody, look at me. What have you and Dad been doing?”

  “Mom’s talking to you, son. Can you take a break?”

  Alison handed off the package of noodles to Charles; she then tried to take Cody’s mortar and pestle, but he let out a screech and clutched them fast.

  The two of them tussled for a while, their respective energies stubborn, straight-lined, rigid, in unassailable collision.

  Alison gave up. Cody went back to grinding.

  “Goddamn it, Charles.” Alison stood, stomped to the hall closet, returned with a whiskbroom and dus
tpan, and made a show of sweeping up the noodles that had spilled during their struggle.

  “What? What’s the matter? Here, I’ll get that.”

  “Don’t bother. Come on, Cody. Say good night to Dad. Mom will put you to bed.”

  Alison reached for him. Cody started to protest, a series of short, aggressive, staccato caws, like a Steller’s jay protecting a brood of nestlings.

  “Good night, Cody.” Charles snapped up the noodles and the mortar and pestle while Cody was distracted. “I love you, son. See you in the morning.”

  As Charles went down to the kitchen, he heard more noises of protest from Cody—for a kid who didn’t speak, he had an amazing range of sounds when it came to expressing objection: screeching, barking, keening, yawping, howling (thank God that Emmy had proven herself since birth to be a sound sleeper)—but by the time Charles removed all the necessary childproofing locks, lit the gas stove, put on the kettle for Alison’s tea, and spooned the leftover gluten-free pasta and pesto into a saucepan to heat, all was quiet.

  The storybook-cottage kitchen had, by this time, been scaled down to something resembling the interior of a typical home in a Plymouth Rock reenactment village: at the center, a big unadorned wood table; countertops bare of appliances, bare of anything, for that matter; what few bits of crockery had survived years of tantrums and accidents were locked up, ditto the flatware and knives; no glassware whatsoever, and not a microwave or BPA-containing plastic item in sight.

  In the years since Cody’s diagnosis, Alison had spent much of her downtime investigating various theories concerning possible causes of autism, many of which were related to diet, nutrition, and environmental toxins. Charles frequently arrived in the kitchen in the morning to find a stack of highlighted articles she’d printed out from the Internet sometime in the wee hours.

  The day after Alison read about how microwaving distorts and deforms the molecules of whatever substance is subjected to it (as proof of this, a woman had died after receiving a transfusion of microwaved blood in 1991), Charles came home to find the microwave sitting outside on the curb with a FREE sign.

  The evening after they’d spent one date night in the City Prana auditorium watching Bag It!, a documentary that the Environmental Studies Department had made schoolwide required viewing, she jettisoned every plastic food container in the house.

  You never know what’s going to make a difference, she always said. It could be the smallest change, one little thing that seems completely insignificant, but the one little thing that’s going to make him better.

  Alison came downstairs. Charles knew she was irritated about Cody being up so late but he didn’t feel like getting into it. She wasn’t the only one who was tired.

  “Cody in bed?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How was class?”

  “Fine.”

  Charles stirred the pasta. “This will be ready in a couple of minutes.”

  Alison pulled a bottle of wine off the rack, uncorked it, and filled a coffee mug.

  “So, are you going to tell me how long?” she said.

  “How long what?”

  “How long you’ve been letting him stim?”

  “What do you mean? The grinding thing?”

  “The grinding thing.” She firmed her mouth and took a swig of wine. “Yes, Charles, the grinding thing. Jesus.”

  “All right, Alison, so I didn’t set the timer. Christ. Is that why you’re so upset? He’s happy, or he was until you got home and started programming him.”

  The pasta was starting to stick. Charles added water from the kettle and stirred.

  Alison topped off her mug and began to pace.

  “I don’t understand why it’s so hard for you to comply with the rules. We talk about this, all of this, all the time. We have conversations, over and over again. What is it with you? Is this your way of punishing me?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how I do this one thing, this one fucking thing for myself, going to aikido, and—”

  “This one thing? Alison, it’s taking up all your free time, and that’s fine, I’m happy to support you if it helps you out of that black place you were in after—”

  “Oh, great. Here we go, how happy you are to support me, how much you’re giving up so I can do this, how perfectly okay it is that you’re doing all the child care, all by yourself, blah-blah-blah. It’s not called child care when they’re your kids, Charles; it’s called parenting, and you signed up for it. This teacher training will be over in two weeks. Two weeks! It’s not as though I haven’t carried the load for you now and then. It’s not as though I haven’t logged just as many hours with him, but at least I stay present, I keep him engaged, I don’t just let him stim for hours on end.”

  “He did not stim for hours on end, Alison! Jesus! He was just having trouble winding down, and it helps him, what the hell is wrong with that? Christ, how many nights do you play computer solitaire until two in the morning? How many nights do you cruise the Web, looking for … who the hell knows?”

  The teakettle was starting to whistle. Charles turned down the flame.

  “Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t make this about me. We’re talking about Cody.” She poured another mugful of wine and muttered, “I just don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to trust you.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “How you are supposed to trust me?”

  Alison snatched up the wine bottle and the coffee mug and marched out of the kitchen, but Charles followed her, waylaying her at the base of the stairs.

  “No,” he said, taking her by the arm and leading her down to the laundry room. He struggled to keep his voice under control so as not to wake Cody. “You do not get to walk away from this conversation. I don’t care how late it is or how tired you are.”

  “I just want a straight answer. How long did you let him sit there and stim?”

  “Why can’t you just accept him the way he is?”

  “How can you even say that? Accept him the way he is? The way he is is sick Charles. He’s sick. Would you accept him the way he is if he had cancer? Would you just shrug your shoulders and say, Oh, well, what the fuck, it’s just the way things are.”

  “It’s not the same, Alison.”

  “It is the same, Charles. It’s always the same with you, the same old bullshit. You might as well still be a pothead bartender working at the country club, coasting along, not a care in the world. Floating. Just floating. Don’t you ever feel the need to steer your life, for God’s sake? Don’t you ever want to once, just once, take charge of something? Life is just one big fucking surrender for you, and I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore. Cody needs us to fight for him. Where the hell is your fight?”

  “I work just as hard as you do with him.”

  “Really? Really? All I see is you sitting around reading while he tears up his magazines and smashes noodles. You call that working with him?”

  “Everything doesn’t have to be so goddamn hard for him all the time, Alison. Why can’t he have some downtime like everybody else? Why can’t he just spend time doing things that make him happy?”

  “And that’s really it, isn’t it? Because as long as he’s happy—in other words, sitting in a corner with his version of a pacifier jammed in his mouth—he’s manageable, he causes no problems. Of course, he never grows, he never learns, he never advances. But then, that’s the way you are. You just want him to be a mirror of you: no cares, no challenges, just hours and hours of solitude and—”

  “Fuck you. You are so spoiled.”

  “What?”

  “If you weren’t constantly asking Daddy for this or for that, we’d actually have to handle this on our own, together, instead of you always bringing in some new specialist, spending money on some new bogus miracle cure—”

  “Wait. Quiet.”

  “What? I do
n’t get to speak?”

  “No, wait. Do you smell something?”

  The smoke detector went off.

  “Did you—” Alison said, suddenly sober, her face ashen. “The stove.”

  “Oh God. Oh no …”

  They rushed up the stairs to find Cody in the kitchen, standing in front of the lit stove, holding the teakettle, his pajama top in flames, his mouth open in a silent scream.

  Had he heard them fighting? The savagery in their voices? Had he been hoping to comfort his mother, as he’d seen Charles do, by bringing her a cup of tea? Or had he been trying to comfort himself, coming to look for his mortar and pestle, his noodles?

  They would never know. Never. Only this: their son would wear a hair shirt of burn scars for the rest of his life.

  •♦•

  The two male caregivers intervened and started trying to restrain Cody. Raisa and Tami dealt with the others, calming them, keeping them in their seats; Bettina stood in shocked stillness and kept repeating, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, until Raisa barked at her to fetch some towels. Charles cleared the remains of Cody’s dinner.

  “Can you get home?” Alison asked. “Call a cab or something?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll call you later.” She followed Ben and Malachi as they carried Cody, still thrashing and screaming, toward the bathroom.

  Not yet ready to leave, Charles filled a bucket with soap and water, located a scrub brush, and went to work on the carpet. Beneath the sounds of Cody’s screams and moans was the steady, low-pitched obbligato of Alison’s voice trying to soothe him.

  Charles felt a light touch on his shoulder. “Leave that, Mr. Marlow,” Raisa said. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been scrubbing, but the TV trays were gone and the other children were quieted now and watching a video. Bettina had returned with the towels; Tami was loading the dishwasher. “You go on. It’s okay. We take care of it.”

  Outside, the temperature had dropped and the rain had turned to sleet: a spate of sharpened quills. He could have gone back in for a coat, an umbrella, but he didn’t. He walked. It was only a few miles.

  When he got home, he was shivering, soaked to the bone.