The whole trip, Noah’s been playing with the quarters I gave him for cleaning his room. Aaron thinks it’s cute. Our son loves money the way kids his age love dogs. There’s a tenderness. Aaron and I joke about this yuppie kindergartner supporting us in our old age, his identity crisis sending him not to Baba Ram Dass, with whom Aaron spent a post-college year, but to Harvard Business School. Speech, which came slow to Noah, decidedly later than to all my girlfriends’ children, still squeezes out like old glue, but he knows if ten Nintendos cost a thousand dollars, two thousand will buy twenty. This is what I remind myself as I think of Laura’s son calling her Laura at 15 months (he still does, though she admits to preferring Mom), as my son loses one of his coins into the mysterious inner reaches of the seat and starts sobbing like his feelings are hurt. “What do you want, Noah?” I say, though of course I know what he wants. “If you want me to help you with something, you could ask me.”
His grief goes on as if I hadn’t said anything. I wonder for the thousandth time if he’s hard of hearing, though he’s been tested. If I’ve gone crazy. Air blows through the car damp and hot enough to make you crazy, from Noah working the power windows. “Do you want me to look for your quarter, Noah? Try this: `Mom, could you help me find that quarter?’ Hey, and roll that up, will you?”
He looks at me with eyes wide open, wounded and hopeless like a refugee child. Hot wind whips his hair. When I was Noah’s age we called it polio wind, throbbing with germs, we had to go inside and lie down, but I unbuckle, turn. My jacket constricts me, and I take it off, still smoky, I notice, from Phyllis, our paralegal, who can’t think without a cigarette in her hand. I pull my blouse out of my skirt, stretch between the front bucket seats toward the crumb-dusty crotch of backseat and seatback. There’s a Lego block, chewed unusable. The plastic arm of a Ninja Turtle. I pull my skirt to my hips, kick off my shoes, hoist myself onto the floor in back, reach under both front seats and the mats. Noah’s breathing is calmer, an occasional flutter, soothed by my work on his behalf. “Aaron, could you pull over a minute? I think it fell between the seat and the door.”
“You’re nuts, Joanie.”
“I know that. Could you stop anyway?”
“It’s late,” he says. “I don’t want to start setting up in the dark.”
“Please, Aaron. We have flashlights. And Laura’s bringing the Coleman.”
“And if they’re late?”
“They left this morning! Come on, how long could it take?”
He doesn’t argue, but doesn’t stop either. Noah’s breath flutters with the push-pull of our argument. I’m not a winner of verbal arguments. In my firm I’m the least senior attorney, least able, I think sometimes, though onotherdaysIassessmore reasonably: My briefs are cogent, persuasive, for the most part. I do not go to trial.
Under pressure I lose every vestige of grace. Six years ago, in heavy labor with Noah not coming and not coming, I’m asking, please, for a C-section, and my ob-gyne, her strong hands on my arms, is going, “Push! Push!” and Aaron, who happens to be a pediatrician: “You can do it, honey!” And I don’t want to but I push; for Dr. Salzman and natural childbirth, for Aaron, weeping, I push. Then, in the course of the surgery, that I had anyway hours later because of Noah’s “brow presentation,” a position which, were I more spiritually inclined, I’d see as his karma–he must somehow learn to tuck his chin–Noah emerges with one side of his forehead bloody-swollen. Salzman looks neutral, as if this is one of a delivery’s many normal variants. But when Noah falls sweetly asleep on my shoulder, my first, last and only baby, I think of his soft infant skull under its fuzz of skin knocking and knocking against the closed doors of my pelvis, and my legs shake with the thought, though it might be the anesthetic, and I tell Salzman under my breath, If you hurt one of his perfect brain cells I’ll sue the living crap out of you, so help me God! But of course I haven’t. After all, I’d listened to her.
Now I open my purse, hand Noah a new quarter. He takes a breath, assessing the plea-bargain. “Thanks, Mom,” I say.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Aaron rolls his eyes. Hot wind blows the sweat off my face and makes more sweat, at the same time. But Noah’s face is so radiant I’m not sorry I gave in to him.
We arrive in the luminous purple of just after sunset. They’ve chosen well, a site more tree-lined than the others in this section, with a two-man tent to our right and no one to our left, minimal impedance to our enjoyment of the Wisconsin Park Bureau version of nature.
In the shadow of the raised trunk, amid the whine of mosquitoes, I put on jeans and a T-shirt. I fold my office clothes, their odors of smoke and deodorant, into a Jewel bag. Stretch my arms, take a breath of darkening air. It smells like grass, dirt, trees. Underlay of manure. I like the smell of manure. There’s a flash of the time before husband, child. Before puberty, maybe. The crack-open of possibility.
Over the picnic table hangs our friends’ Coleman, too bright for the twilight woods, bright as the light in a diner. You can see the seams of bathing suits as they dry down the sides of the tent, you see the terry burr of towels, their stripes in the gaslight supernaturally distinct, Martian-colored. At one end of the table a bottle of wine and a bottle of ketchup gleam coldly. I watch from the dark beyond, Jake seated under the lantern, pretending to read the newspaper. Or maybe he’s really reading it, precocious 6-year-old. His father Ernesto is building a fire inside the site’s metal ring. Maya, 3, hobbles toward him with a branch too big for her. Ernesto takes the branch, praises it elaborately, good daddy. A sweet-natured man, running to help Aaron with the gear, placing on his cheeks a pair of formal kisses from a system of manners that has always charmed me. Laura sets down a bucket to give Aaron a thin-armed hard hug. We’ve known Laura as long as anyone in Chicago that we’re still friends with, having met ten years ago in a Zen meditation group we’ve all discontinued. At times I think I admire her more than I like her, but I do like her. She’s smart, funny and frank. And beautiful in a New York way, noisy earrings and slim pants on long, long legs, wispy curls framing high cheekbones. She can be brusque; there’s an edge sometimes, especially with Ernesto. Her practice is shallow, Aaron said once, in the language of the time. Still she does Zazen every morning, 30 minutes facing the wall before leaving for her and Ernesto’s cafe, which offers occult books along with natural foods. Right now she pulls from the bucket ears of what must be organically grown corn, arranging them on the grill with mindless grace, no disjunction between what she thinks and what she does.
Ernesto and Aaron begin to set up our tent. Laura looks around for something;me,ofcourse.I should join them, I think. What is this hanging back? But I’m watching as through a window Noah dancing around Jake at the picnic table. Noah peers at what Jake’s reading, jumps back, seemingly electrified by the close presence of this child who in the past has been disdainful and at times downright rude to him. Noah isn’t thinking of this as he plants himself behind the older boy, puts his hands over Jake’s eyes. Guess who? I look up at the sky turning black, not wanting to see Jake pulling away with an annoyed flick of the head. Jake finding a seat at the other end of the site from this strange boy, this little jerk (Jake’s term) who doesn’t seem to know what a 6-year-old–1st grader come fall–is supposed to know. Jake is only six months older but has a strong clear will, his declarations as assured as a pre-teen’s. Sometimes he makes fun of Noah’s slow speech, repeating some phrase of Noah’s in the same cadence and inflection with no rebuke from Laura, who believes in noninterfer- ence. I say to myself, if Jake is rude to Noah once more, I’m packing us in the wagon back to Chicago, I don’t care what time it is.
Jake sits still with Noah’s hands over his eyes. His mouth moves as if he’s asking a question. Guessing who? Playing Noah’s game?
It isn’t a baby game, it’s a fine game, worthy of 1st grade. When Noah releases him, Jake looks at him straight on, as at a respected contemporary. Nods are exchanged. Noah grins. The boys start walking together toward the road. “Hey!” I cry, “where do you think you’re all going?”
Noah looks at me as if he hasn’t the faintest idea who I am. Jake says, “We’re going to the camp store. It’s just past the turn.”
I wish it was Noah who spoke so politely and fluently, but I’m warmed by their comradery. “Have a good one,” I say, stepping into the circle of light to greet my friends.
For a while it’s simple pleasure, woods, crickets, the sticky heat of the day rising up and away. Marinated tuna steaks hiss on the cooler sides of the grill. If smoke hits your eyes you turn till you hit downwind. Sometimes the smoke dances you round and round the cookfire, as if it’s got your number, but the paranoia feels benign, like teasing. “This is so Zen!” I cry. Everyone laughs.
Turning a slab of tuna, Laura says, “Governing a state is like grilling a small fish, Lao Tzu said that.”
“Boiling a fish,” Aaron says.
“Wasn’t that Machiavelli?” I ask giddily.
“Lao Tzu was fine cook,” Ernesto says, exaggerating his accent. People laugh.
AaronrecitesaZenpoem: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing/ Spring comes and the grass grows by itself.”
There are long, comfortable pauses between comments.
When the boys return from the store Jake’s walking fast with Noah scurrying behind like a page. Noah’s face is glowing, though, as his trot ends by the campfire. He has bought a Blow Pop, his favorite this season, a sucker with a core of bubble gum. He unwraps it, plants it in his mouth, kneels by the fire. I can’t see his face but his bent head and hunched shoulders radiate intensity, baby Moses crawling over pharaoh’s straw mat toward the choice that means life or early death. I approach slowly, so as not to startle him. Then I see: His hand is burning. There’s a flame. He gazes unblinking, his face the color of fire. “Noah!”
My voice is so thin I’m not sure I actually spoke. I rush to my son. It’s not his hand on fire but the Blow Pop wrapper he’s holding, burning in a supernaturally even line of flame. “Noah, drop that!”
The paper, burning, floats to the ground. Noah’s face registers simple amazement. Then his chin crumples. His sucker fell too. Before I can stop him he’s reaching into the fire. His wail careens up, bone shocking in the flickering wind. I try to hold him but I’m caught between that and the impulse to run for ice, and I can’t move at all. I’m seized up. It’s like a dream in which the killer or avalanche is coming, getting larger out the corner of your eye, and your legs freeze. As if from the top of a hill I stare down at my son with his hand in his mouth. He screams at the fire.
Laura hurries over with a wet rag. Aaron brings the flashlight. The pads of two of Noah’s fingers have begun to turn white, but his tears are for the ashy Blow Pop. Shaking with relief, I run for the First Aid, uncap the ointment. Apply nervously more than is needed. Aaron cuts the gauze with the little scissors from his Swiss Army knife, binds Noah’s fingers. He tosses Noah into the air, sets him down. Noah wants a new Blow Pop but the store has closed now. With Aaron’s knife and a spatula I retrieve what’s left of the sucker. “I’ll rinse it off for you.”
“New chapter,” Aaron says. “Time to move on.”
Noah looks from me to Aaron and back again, shifting between what I feelasthemuckofmyover- anxiousness and the falseness of Aaron’s cheer. Seated on the cooler, Jake rips open a corner of his own snack, a packet of something that comes with a tiny spoon. Noah chooses Jake–not walking but gliding, eliding, as if drawn by a power beyond will. He gravitates. “Could I have some?” he asks in the polite, well-modulated voice of a child you don’t have to worry about.
“Say please, Noah,” I say.
“Please,” he says automatically. Then, smiling at me: “It’s a Fun-Dip. I bought him it with my own money! Twenty-five cents plus tax!”
He concludes with an excited little bounce. Jake, though, seems unaware of him. Jake’s spoon moves from packet to mouth. Jake licks his lips.
“Jake,” Noah says, “could I have a taste of your Fun-Dip, please Jake?”
Maya walks over to Jake with her mouth open like a baby bird. He doles her some of the sweet powder. “Me too!” Noah says with some urgency. Jake sinks lower into his packet. I look around for help but Aaron and Ernesto are staking the tent. Laura is close enough to have heard but she remains oblivious. It’s what her Zen has turned into, non-interference in the social behavior of her children. “Ja-ake?” Noah says, tugging at his sleeve.
“You have germs.” Jake raises the packet to his lips for a long proprietary swallow, then walks over to his mother, folding down the open corner. “Laura,” he says, “save this for me.” Laura takes the packet. Noah looks confused. You little jerk, I say to Jake under my breath. You 6-year-old slimeball. But Noah has already backed away, dazed by the rebuff he has no words to challenge.
My arms and legs feel stiff, my brain gray fuzz. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this supposedtobe good for him? An experience from which adult self-assurance derives? I imagine Laura:feeling these small pains now will help him handle them later on, and Aaron’s misappliedZen boiling down to everything we do will only make it worse, not Zen but laissez-faire parenting, survival of the fittest, which means of the nastiest, least sensitive, psychologically least vulnerable–regard “Lord of the Flies,” oh wise, discerning jurypeople–but Aaron’s voice in my head drowns out the voice that says give Jake a kick in the teeth, and I remember the girl who moved into the house across the street when I was 5, who’d had what was called infantile paralysis. She spent a month in an iron lung, my mother said, and I felt sick to my stomach, having seen magazine pictures of a vault on little crib wheels, a custom-made prison cell certain children were consigned to for not taking a nap in the hot afternoon or going swimming too soon after lunch, inscrutable justice of the universe. This girl, whose name was Darlene, I remember, had emerged from her cell. But she wore metal splints to hold her legs straight and she lurched along the sidewalk, her head turned hard to one side, as if listening for a near-inaudible instruction–it made me gag in the back of my throat. Her arms didn’t swing back and forth like other people’s but rather shot out suddenly, randomly. The thumb and forefinger of both her hands were pinched together as if she were holding teacups. Once she fell down in the middle of her driveway, a heap of limbs and metal sticks, and I stood on my side of the street with my hands over my eyes not just because I wasn’t allowed to cross but because, if I touched her, I thought, I’d end up in an iron lung. I stood there crying till her mother walked out the door. Later in my backyard I tried to see how fast I could move walking like her, leading with my side, circling my stiff, wobbly legs.
Now, though, I regather enough of myself to track Noah down. “Jake’s a jerk,” I say conspiratorially, putting my arm around him. He bears my embrace more from compassion for me, it seems, than from any comfort he derives. With Aaron’s pocketknife I butter him an ear of corn. He eats it.
After dinner we settle all three children into Laura and Ernesto’s tent. Jake makes no objection. Noah is calm, a little remote, a cross between a zombie and a yogi. As they nestle in sleeping bags Ernesto tells them a ghost story he made up that’s scary enough to satisfy without inducing nightmares. We’ve given them two small flashlights, and as the tale pro- ceeds they run the lights over the ceiling of the tent, taking turns like angelchildren. Giggles and mur-murs flow from the tent even after we’ve zipped them in. From time to timeoneofus strides over from the campfire and tries ineffectually, congenially,to quiet them down. Aaron and Laura are right, I tell myself.Imust learn to trust the spirit of growth in Noah. All will be well if I can keep from interfering. Raising a child is like boiling a small fish.
We’re all easier now. On the verge of buoyant. Laura can’t find her matches so we sojourn to the station wagon to light our joint. It moves from hand to hand, a faint red eye glowing in blackness. My wheel of thoughts slows down, thins out. Laura does not tell us how quickly Jake’s learning the piano or how many friends have asked him to sleep over. She describes the ethics lesson Jake gave Maya the other day on what behavior would send her to hell. It included lying to parents and spitting dinner food out into the toilet. “Where did he learn about hell?” Laura asks but not as if she cares. Our voices float in the dark, removed from our selves. “Ernesto told him he’d go to hell if he didn’t practice the piano.”
In her tone is something metallic. Ernesto doesn’t respond though. Aaron says, for Ernesto, “Why do you think he practices the piano?”
I nod at Aaron through the dark. “Everyone knows about hell,” I say. “It’s genetically transmitted. Like the poop jokes kids bring home from pre-school!”
We laugh.
We leave the car for the cool, starry night, talking about the nature of hell outside Catholicism. In Judaism it’s sheol, but no one in my family seemed to worry about it. Hell was bad luck on earth–the death of children, business losses, boils. The air is damp, balmy. I lie back on Aaron’s lap and look for shooting stars in the arena of sky inside the ring of trees.
For the Hindus hell was just another stage in life’s slow journey toward understanding, more painful than earth but just as temporary, from which you emerge when your evil deeds are burned away. The ancient Greeks had their Tartarus with poor Tantalus and Sisyphus, but for the most part their underworld was like a rainy Sunday with nothing to do. Persephone visits for six months. There are pomegranate trees. In rare instances, if you plead well like Orpheus, you are permitted to retrieve a loved one.
A second joint is lit, this time in the embers of the campfire. Sometimes grass deadens me, pushes me deep into a vault of shyness and mental fatigue, but this stuff feels light and airy. The talk becomes urgent in a pleasant way–our own descents into Hades, acts of personal heroism or craziness.
Laura describes how once she jumped on the back of a guy, a stranger, who was beating up his girlfriend. It was night on sleazy Wells Street. She’d pulled the guy’s hair, poked him in the eye; she’d never dream of doing it now. The woman she rescued was more surly than grateful, as if Laura had been messing with her man.
“Nutsoid,” Aaron says. But I can tell he’s impressed.
Ernesto starts his own hero story. I think of car trips with my family, me practicing in my mind how, if we had an accident–these were pre-seatbelt days–I’d put my arms around my younger sister, of whom I was intensely jealous, and save her from crashing through the windshield. Later in therapy I dreamed I carried my hefty shrink down 14 flights of the building in which he practiced, damp towels over our heads.
When it’s my turn I tell about a night in Florida in a furnished kitchenette my family rented (I was 8 or 10) when I walked into the small living room just as a floor lamp began to topple. I wanted to run out before the terrible sound of the crash and I wanted to step forward to save the lamp and there seemed to be time to make a reasoned choice because it was all happening so slowly. I watched the lamp fall graceful as a cut flower, till the white glass bowl and the three peripheral and one center bulb exploded on the thin rented rug.
Everybody laughs. But it’s a little hard to breathe. I move deeper into the vault of myself, slowing down and down, till I can’t raise my arms and legs. I want the sweater Laura has draped over her shoulders. It’s thick Mexican wool. I’d burrow into it. I move closer to the fire but it only warms my hands, my knees. I’m cold, shivering, no strength to keep myself warm.
They rise. Aaron says, “Come to bed, Joanie.”
I think of the tent, my down-filled sleeping bag, ready to collect what heat I have and wrap it around me. I want to be there. I imagine myself there. “She’s in a trance,” Laura says.
“She never gets this high,” Aaron says.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” Laura whispers in my ear.
“I’d like to know what’s going on in her mind,” Ernesto says. “She looks blissed out.”
“No one says blissed out,” Laura says.
“I know that,” Ernesto says. “Do you think I don’t know that?”
They smile empathetically at the depth of my bliss. They perhaps envy me. Aaron kisses the top of my head. I sit like a rock, a shoe, as the three tread off to Aaron and my tent. In the darkness an occasional faint giggle flares and winks out. I’m exhausted and know I’ll be worse in the morning. I want to lie down with them, leg number four of a table sumptuously spread, but I’m fixed on the fire. Transfixed. If I move, the dry ice of my bones will vaporize leaving me sprawled like a slipcover. In the fire, if I look long enough, is something I need to see.
I’m almost asleep cross-legged on the ground like the Buddha when I become aware of what feels like pressure over my head. It’s a presence, a phantom, the ghost that haunts campers. I hold utterly still, focusing on the smoke from the fire as it swirls up to the pool of sky inside our ring of trees. The sky isn’t all black, I see. Running across is a smoke-colored streak, that I track down through the trees to the mesh window of the children’s tent. How odd. That we are arced by a bridge of smoke. Bridged by an arc of smoke? I’m pleased by my powers of observation, which detect in the arc individual particles of grit. I feel the grit in my eyes and mouth, take a cleansing breath, repress a faint desire to cough. Then it comes clear: The children’stentisonfire.”Aaron!”I scream. “Laura! Ernesto!!”
Running toward the children’s tent I hear coughing, rising wails. “Unzip!” I scream, feeling for the seam in the smoky dark. “Open the zipper! Pull the zipper down!” as if one arrangement of words is better than another.
Commotion mixes with more sustainedcoughing.I’m fumbling for the zipper tab. Find it under the nylon lip. Blind in the dark, choking, I pull as hard as I can, one hand over the other. The tab comes off in my fingers. The tab is warm. “Mama!” someone cries, I can’t tell who. I claw at the tent with my fingernails. “Pull the goddamn zipper! No, stay down! Noah honey, are you in there?!”
Later I’ll sit with Noah on my lap kissing the side of his head as his coughing subsides. Ernesto and Laura will smile guilty gratitude and I’ll smile back as they brush smoke and terror from their children’s hair. Aaron will apologize, resolve to smoke no more dope, not that he does much anymore. A teenage girl will appear, stare at us, vanish sometime after I’ve stopped watching her. On the asphalt parking lot the tent will smolder with a smell of sweet, noxious plastic.
The fire was small, it turns out, the tent fire-resistant. In fact the only thing flammable, we find, is the cotton flannel lining of Jake and Maya’s sleeping bags (Noah’s was fire retardant synthetic), giving off more smoke than flame. We hug and kiss our children till our hearts slow down enough to lay blame. Jake and Noah, it turns out, started it with a box of matches from the family grocery bag. Noah took them. At Jake’s bidding. “Stick matches!” Noah says with an utter absence of guilt, in awe of the power unleashed.
“They caught first try,” Jake says.
Laura slaps Jake’s hand. “I should spank you. Don’t you know better than that?!”
“Better than what, Laura?” Jake says.
She slaps the side of his head. She slaps him again. Maya starts crying. Jake too. She hugs both of them, laughing crazily. I feel duty bound to punish my son as well but all I can do is kiss his head, his hand, trying to figure out what was different this time, what happened that let me move.
After the zipper broke I started clawing at the tent, the window mesh, but it was like climbing a mountain of glass. I fell to my knees, patting the ground for the lost zipper tab. It was stupid, I knew, another kind of paralysis, but there was no stopping. I was lost with the zipper tab in the stones and sand.
Then, was there a scream? Jake’s cry for Mom, and not Laura? There was a steady light wind, as numbing as in the kingdom of dying embers. I did not find the tab. Something bit my hand. It hurt-itched, a wee break in the scheme of things. I floated toward the picnic table, on which I recalled, lucid writer of briefs that I am, the exact placement of Aaron’s pocket knife. I remember how it opened to my nimble fingers and sliced through the tent like a scalpel. And how I groped through smoke for the hands of children, anyone’s children, since in the hot crackling dark there was no way to tell the difference.
