I Will Do Better, page 7
FACT: ANY SCHMO can small talk at a dinner party, make a good impression for thirty minutes—hell, even an hour. It’s after dessert has been cleared, after that refill of a good white, after the A material and trusted anecdotes have been trotted out and someone’s gotten comfortable and let their guard down a bit—that’s when you learn who has to opine about things they clearly know zero about, who enjoys talk of sedition and racial jokes, who’s the bouncing psycho with an ego that cannot be contained. That’s when true nature is revealed.
Six weeks in, say. Scarves were being wrapped around necks with dutiful care. Leaves were clogging drainage gutters. Literally everyone was getting over the fall bug that had been going around. Lily hadn’t remained all that keen on her instrument or her promises. On the plus side, she’d had her first afterschool playdate. (Imagine long stretches of two fun, happy girls—as well as crying bursts about who got to play with the Dorothy/Wicked Witch doll.) We’d shared untold walks home from school, during which I’d been filled in on what letters they learned about. We’d adapted the “Clean Up, Clean Up” song as a catchall tune that could have its lyrics altered for almost any purpose. Lily also had done well at her first away game—that is, her first visit to a friend’s house without me staying—though it’s also true that at dinnertime, the mom had called to mention Lily getting scared and panicky about new food. Sure, there had been one or two birthday party meltdowns, although when that much sugar was involved, who didn’t freak? Nothing out of the ordinary.
I arrived at the courtyard. Her two teachers took me aside.
“There might be some socialization issues,” one said. The other added, “We’ve had to talk to her, just a few times, for being bossy to her table friends.”
Three days later, Lily had a tantrum during recess. “She wanted to dictate, make the game rules for everyone.”
I answered that I watched other children needing to have their own way in the courtyard. “I see other kids melting down after they’re told ‘No.’”
“We all see those things,” the brunette teacher said. “It’s normal for the age.”
“You’re telling me Lily’s outbursts are necessarily worse?”
They waited me out. “We understand that she’s been through a lot.”
“YOU CAN’T RUIN this child,” Dr. Jennifer Melfi assured me.
Cinnamon gummy hearts were fused into the inside front pocket of my jeans, left over from February, most likely. We were in that stretch when you think you’re finally done with thermal underwear. I made a mental note about getting spring clothing out of its bin.
Her office. One of our intermittent reviews: checking in on Lily’s progress, my concerns.
“Is it so unusual to not be Mozart?” Melfi asked. “Do you think little Wolfgang could actually hold his violin right when he was three?”
I finished wrestling off my sweater, discarding it on the other side of the couch.
I was sitting on the edge, rocked in place, and stopped. “Remember you told me Lily said she was the doll who could do no right?”
Melfi paused, her forehead pointing toward me.
“Okay, so, irrespective of me, putting aside my untold negative influences on her: Is it possible, somewhere deep inside, Lily believes she can’t do anything right? That she deserves negative attention?”
“You think Lily blames herself for her mother’s death?” Melfi asked.
I ran my hand over my forehead. “Saying it out loud, it sounds fucking dark.” I tugged my earlobe. “Way too much there to get to in an hour.”
“Thirty-eight minutes, actually.”
“Smaller bites, then,” I said. “What I can worry about, I keep seeing her doing okay—following directions, you know, for a little. Then she arrives. That split in the road.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“All right. This girl from my high school? She wasn’t singularly bright or particularly creative. But she volunteered for every club, studied her retinas out, every quiz.”
Melfi twirled a pen, seemed like she was following.
“I wanted a future but was afraid, I thought I wasn’t good enough. So I sat in the back of classes and fucked off and was sarcastic. This girl was determined. She ended up on scholarship to an Ivy.”
“You want Lily to be like her.”
“Not just to be able to do things. To want to learn how to do them.”
“Lily’s not even four years old.”
“Right,” I said.
“She’s still in a primal place, Charles.”
I felt myself get excited, resumed my rocking on the couch’s edge. “It’s just that first moment where she gets rattled. Where things don’t go well and now she’s faced with choices. How bad does she want to do this? Does she really want to be shown? Is there any chance of her sticking with a difficult task by herself?”
Dr. Melfi asked, “You don’t think you’re jumping the gun?”
“Maybe I am. But one of the things I want least in this world is for her fears to grow roots.”
“Charles, push her like this, I promise, each time you want her to do something—”
“I don’t want her inability to pay attention to become foundational.”
“—she’ll stop being interested. The second she knows you want it, she’ll stop.”
“But—”
“You don’t have to ascribe it to blaming herself for her mother’s death.” Jennifer Melfi’s voice was firm. “But she is missing her mother. Can’t you see she’s overwhelmed?”
“Right.”
“Be patient. Give yourself a break.”
For the first time, I leaned back. “Yeah.”
“Give Lily a break.” With enough force that meant she needed to be heard, Dr. Melfi repeated: “You are not going to ruin this child.”
A TUESDAY AFTERNOON, meaning I had to hustle over from the undergrad class I’d started teaching. Arriving at the Third Street courtyard a few minutes behind schedule, I was harried, as usual, sweating pretty good, my hoodie pocket stuffed with seaweed snacks: Let’s hope today I grabbed a package of regular flavor from the bodega, and not wasabi.
When I got to the courtyard, Lily was busy with a group of kids. Actually, she was breaking off from the group.
I watched my child’s attention pivot—toward one of the mothers. A creative director (stylish, wedding rock as big as the Ritz, take-no-shit attitude). This woman had shown kindness to Lily in the past weeks, making sure to first get a nod from me, delivering a fresh strawberry into Lily’s cupped hands, offering a spritz of bug spray.
Presently, Lily’s face was warning-light red. She was paying attention to what Creative Director Mom was saying.
“What’s going on?” Heading over, I tried to keep my voice even. “Everything all right?”
“She gave it to me.” Lily kept her hands behind her back.
“It’s mine,” went the other girl.
“It’s her hair clip,” Creative Director explained. From her expression, I saw she’d tired of Lily’s exploits. “We bought it over the weekend.”
Obviously, the clip belonged to the other girl. This was a chance to be firm yet empathetic, establish a pattern of the larger good being most important.
Lily was adamant, in full waterworks mode. “It’s not FAIR.”
“Is there anything …?” I said to the mother. “Maybe Lily could have it tonight? We’d bring it back tomorrow?”
Creative Mom looked confused. “I don’t think that would be right.”
Taking Lily aside, I said, “We’ll go shopping. I know a row of stores. We can find you a pretty vintage clip of your own.”
Lily jerked away, let out something piercing.
“Sweetie,” I said.
She dug in, bawled that much harder.
When she’d been upset as a baby, more than once Diana told me, “Let her cry.” Rocking her toward calm, Diana would tell Lily, “Go ahead, girl, it’s all right. Express yourself. Take as long as you need.”
“Can you calm down?” I questioned myself as much as her, ordered as much as asked.
Wiping away her snot bubble, I continued. An exhaling breath. “Lily, my love?”
She looked to me. Hopeful. I was on her team.
“Would you please give the clip back?”
Lily twisted out of my grasp. She kept her fist clenched around the clip, held it away from me, flailed, cried out again.
Common sense suggests heads turned. This was a distraction. The mothers looked a few seconds. That was that.
But I felt their acute attention, became convinced of their gawking—all the moms who’d been cool enough, but really never had trusted my gender to begin with, the ones who’d clocked my snide remarks, my aura of disgruntled servitude, how I implicitly judged them, the life paths they’d chosen, the mothers who worried I had an ulterior motive for showing up every day in that courtyard, that maybe I was prowling for bored moms to bed. All of these mothers were staring bullets.
And not just them—those few acquaintances I always sat close to and conversed with, kind women who offered playdates for Lily with their kids, who at least gave me some props for the effort I put in every day but who also saw that, realistically, my daughter needed help. They were watching me, too, keeping their distance, leaving me alone to deal.
“ENOUGH,” I said. “LILY.”
She stopped kicking my shin, stopped squirming in my grip. Her expression was still frenetic, fire through her cheeks and eyes, the gap of her open mouth. Now Lily zeroed in on me, focusing, squinting. She closed her mouth, set her jaw. Stillness took her. My daughter appeared possessed, taken by a sense of herself—no, by more than that. I recognized this—every bit of the misery I felt. One of my legendary shitty expressions, manifest on my little girl. Only Lily wasn’t just channeling my misery; she was claiming it, remixing it. Eyes electric, she was directing my misery back, toward me.
THERE THEY WERE, all my worst inner conflicts, not just on display in that courtyard but coming home to roost. I was indeed the one being exposed, once again Bocking things up. And the thing is, it’s not like you just recognize the problem, clap your hands, and, clap clap, everything gets better. Lily showed up to school the next day. She had some standout moments in class, some stumbles, and then, that afternoon, I picked her up. Playdates took place, friendships melted down, quickly recovered just fine, or maybe opened a breach. Whether my unintentional influence was the direct cause, whether the deeper issues connected with her missing a mother were coming to the fore, ratios of how much of this, proportions of that, the answers were most definitely not apparent. Time moved in the only direction it knows. We stumbled along in its gale, trying to plant our feet here, get some leverage there, and then, pretty much the same way that one of Hemingway’s characters famously went broke— “gradually and then suddenly”—her fourth birthday approached. Meaning, the first anniversary of Diana’s death. Lily and I had been through a full year of this. A year.
If anyone deserved a celebration, it was this child. I brought cupcakes to school for all the little lovies. Even better, a friend’s wife called. She’d procured us tickets to Mary Poppins on Broadway.
A week before the show, I explained: “We have to prepare. That means a moratorium goes into effect.”
Lily stared at me, then the computer screen.
No more Natalie Wood lip-synching to Marni Nixon?
No Liesl dancing around the arboretum with that Nazi?
She looked upset, did not understand.
“From here on,” I said, typing into the YouTube search engine, “we’re full-on supercalifragilistic. All the expialidocious.”
That fancy blue dress fit her better than ever, God bless it. Lily looked radiant. We arrived at the theater super early, immediately dropping an heiress’s ransom—more cash up in flames—at the merch table, netting ourselves candy, a dolly, a child’s tee, a flying umbrella. One more example of so many of us around her—me, first and foremost—trying to buy away the pain, to provide her with something fantastic that could not be availed in her real life? And of all possible shows, Mary Poppins! The story of a woman magically flying down from the clouds to tend for children and make this broken family all better!
Reader, it surely was overcompensating. Sign me the fuck up.
The usher handed us Playbills; we headed down the aisle, admiring the hall’s gilded ornaments, its elegant balconies. I’d spent my life getting discount tickets, heading up to the nosebleeds. These seats weren’t just good; they were right in the middle of the orchestra, and as we waded into the sea of tourist parents and their exceedingly cute daughters—of course wearing sequined outfits—I could not help but wonder about the coinage that must have been dropped for these tickets. How could I ever properly thank these people?
Arriving at our seats, unwrapping from our coats. Lily and a nearby girl started talking, and fed off one another’s excitement, and soon were looking through their programs, pointing. I stored our swag, collapsed into my seat, felt a rush of relief, high-fiving myself for getting her here.
For a few moments I watched Lily, just looking at her: talking, animated, engaged.
The announcement came from overhead concerning phones and candy wrappers. The lights dimmed. I felt Lily’s body tense.
I tensed as well. She’d experienced all of one movie theater in her young life. How could I have overlooked the traumatic event that was lights turning off inside a huge hall?
And I’d prepped her for live music, right?
The orchestra began their slow pound toward the show’s overture.
On cue, Lily screamed.
“It’s all right.” I leaned over. “It’s part of the show.”
Her mouth widened so I could see deep to her tonsils. She wailed louder.
The music’s pace increased; Lily kept bawling. Whatever I tried, it was obvious her cries were not about to end.
Now, from behind a fluorescent beam of flashlight spotlighted my child, the usher leaned toward me, his whisper directing us.
Lily’s face was fully crimson and her mouth was wide and I was gathering up all our merch, making jerking motions, rising in a crouch and taking her hand. I was easing us between the other parents and kids on our row, “Sorry … Excuse us … Sorry.”
Our walk of shame ended; we emerged into the lights of the lobby. The usher firmly, if politely explained we couldn’t be allowed back inside while Lily was a distraction to the other guests.
I crouched. “Take breaths.”
Then I followed my own instructions, breathing out.
We could take as long as we needed, said the usher.
Lily sniffed. She looked at me with those saucerlike watering eyes.
“Daddy,” she said.
I knew from her tone. She wanted to go home.
“Don’t you want to see ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’?” I asked.
“Daddy.”
I have previously mentioned the male capacity to feel sorry for himself, how easy it is to take that first step. I was now slaloming, in full plummet.
December’s air was crisp on our faces. Side by side, we were heading toward the Times Square subway station. A hard pulse rocked my temples, throbbed through my neck.
Philip Seymour Hoffman had been on Broadway that spring for seventy-eight performances of Death of a Salesman. I sure hadn’t been able to see that.
Hadn’t even thought about tickets to see Pacino in the thirtieth-anniversary remounting of Glengarry Glen Ross.
The trip we’d just made … the cash we’d incinerated … her inability to just fucking sit there …
And me begging—on my knees—for us to stay, to watch that reductive, soul-sucking Disney-fied bullshit.
Sharp pain down the middle of my forehead; something inside me cracking open.
All my friends, all the nannies and sitters, the teachers, the therapists, both mine and hers, the money, the institutions, the entirety of this jury-rigged support network, a literal year spent building it, propping it up, thinking and researching and sweating, learning in advance potential dangers, mapping the danger zones, meeting the enemy, knowing it was them, it was us, defusing all bombs, blowing ourselves to smithereens, anything anyone could imagine, create, borrow, purchase, steal—
And still a lifetime to be spent outside the ballet, waiting for the doors to open.
A lifetime alone in the park, watching rich, healthy Shake Shack parents who had no clue.
Once again I’d rammed headfirst into the limitations of best intentions.
Once again I’d exposed, to the light, the stark difference between the ideals of the person I wanted to be and the reality of who I was.
I felt myself giving my life for this little girl, hating the sacrifices but sure as hell making them, busting my ass—and failing.
Clearly and definitively failing. Oftentimes. And in the most basic ways.
The single last thing I wanted to do was to make life worse for Lily. Was there any doubt this was happening?
Again I circled back to the big questions, immovable, unavoidable: What is wrong with me? Why does everything have to be so hard?
Pedestrians passed us in the other direction; a kindly, aging couple looked us up and down. The man volunteered: “She’s a cutie.”
“Get fucked,” I answered.
We continued homeward. Heading east on Twenty-Third, I noticed Lily lingering, slowing, a few steps behind me. What was wrong now?
Let me tell you.
Having managed to take her doll out of the box on the subway, Lily had become preoccupied, was happily unbuttoning Mary Pop-pins’s blouse.
Nothing was wrong. Not one goddamn thing.
FOUR YEARS OLD
CHAPTER SIX
From: charles bock Subject: lily bock withdrawing from violin class Date: March 25, 2XXX at 8:43 AM EST To: XXXXXXXX@thirdstreetmusicsch.org
Hey there third street music school. This message concerns Lily Bock. She is enrolled in XXXXX’s private violin lesson on Thursday afternoons, and the group class on Friday.
Six weeks in, say. Scarves were being wrapped around necks with dutiful care. Leaves were clogging drainage gutters. Literally everyone was getting over the fall bug that had been going around. Lily hadn’t remained all that keen on her instrument or her promises. On the plus side, she’d had her first afterschool playdate. (Imagine long stretches of two fun, happy girls—as well as crying bursts about who got to play with the Dorothy/Wicked Witch doll.) We’d shared untold walks home from school, during which I’d been filled in on what letters they learned about. We’d adapted the “Clean Up, Clean Up” song as a catchall tune that could have its lyrics altered for almost any purpose. Lily also had done well at her first away game—that is, her first visit to a friend’s house without me staying—though it’s also true that at dinnertime, the mom had called to mention Lily getting scared and panicky about new food. Sure, there had been one or two birthday party meltdowns, although when that much sugar was involved, who didn’t freak? Nothing out of the ordinary.
I arrived at the courtyard. Her two teachers took me aside.
“There might be some socialization issues,” one said. The other added, “We’ve had to talk to her, just a few times, for being bossy to her table friends.”
Three days later, Lily had a tantrum during recess. “She wanted to dictate, make the game rules for everyone.”
I answered that I watched other children needing to have their own way in the courtyard. “I see other kids melting down after they’re told ‘No.’”
“We all see those things,” the brunette teacher said. “It’s normal for the age.”
“You’re telling me Lily’s outbursts are necessarily worse?”
They waited me out. “We understand that she’s been through a lot.”
“YOU CAN’T RUIN this child,” Dr. Jennifer Melfi assured me.
Cinnamon gummy hearts were fused into the inside front pocket of my jeans, left over from February, most likely. We were in that stretch when you think you’re finally done with thermal underwear. I made a mental note about getting spring clothing out of its bin.
Her office. One of our intermittent reviews: checking in on Lily’s progress, my concerns.
“Is it so unusual to not be Mozart?” Melfi asked. “Do you think little Wolfgang could actually hold his violin right when he was three?”
I finished wrestling off my sweater, discarding it on the other side of the couch.
I was sitting on the edge, rocked in place, and stopped. “Remember you told me Lily said she was the doll who could do no right?”
Melfi paused, her forehead pointing toward me.
“Okay, so, irrespective of me, putting aside my untold negative influences on her: Is it possible, somewhere deep inside, Lily believes she can’t do anything right? That she deserves negative attention?”
“You think Lily blames herself for her mother’s death?” Melfi asked.
I ran my hand over my forehead. “Saying it out loud, it sounds fucking dark.” I tugged my earlobe. “Way too much there to get to in an hour.”
“Thirty-eight minutes, actually.”
“Smaller bites, then,” I said. “What I can worry about, I keep seeing her doing okay—following directions, you know, for a little. Then she arrives. That split in the road.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“All right. This girl from my high school? She wasn’t singularly bright or particularly creative. But she volunteered for every club, studied her retinas out, every quiz.”
Melfi twirled a pen, seemed like she was following.
“I wanted a future but was afraid, I thought I wasn’t good enough. So I sat in the back of classes and fucked off and was sarcastic. This girl was determined. She ended up on scholarship to an Ivy.”
“You want Lily to be like her.”
“Not just to be able to do things. To want to learn how to do them.”
“Lily’s not even four years old.”
“Right,” I said.
“She’s still in a primal place, Charles.”
I felt myself get excited, resumed my rocking on the couch’s edge. “It’s just that first moment where she gets rattled. Where things don’t go well and now she’s faced with choices. How bad does she want to do this? Does she really want to be shown? Is there any chance of her sticking with a difficult task by herself?”
Dr. Melfi asked, “You don’t think you’re jumping the gun?”
“Maybe I am. But one of the things I want least in this world is for her fears to grow roots.”
“Charles, push her like this, I promise, each time you want her to do something—”
“I don’t want her inability to pay attention to become foundational.”
“—she’ll stop being interested. The second she knows you want it, she’ll stop.”
“But—”
“You don’t have to ascribe it to blaming herself for her mother’s death.” Jennifer Melfi’s voice was firm. “But she is missing her mother. Can’t you see she’s overwhelmed?”
“Right.”
“Be patient. Give yourself a break.”
For the first time, I leaned back. “Yeah.”
“Give Lily a break.” With enough force that meant she needed to be heard, Dr. Melfi repeated: “You are not going to ruin this child.”
A TUESDAY AFTERNOON, meaning I had to hustle over from the undergrad class I’d started teaching. Arriving at the Third Street courtyard a few minutes behind schedule, I was harried, as usual, sweating pretty good, my hoodie pocket stuffed with seaweed snacks: Let’s hope today I grabbed a package of regular flavor from the bodega, and not wasabi.
When I got to the courtyard, Lily was busy with a group of kids. Actually, she was breaking off from the group.
I watched my child’s attention pivot—toward one of the mothers. A creative director (stylish, wedding rock as big as the Ritz, take-no-shit attitude). This woman had shown kindness to Lily in the past weeks, making sure to first get a nod from me, delivering a fresh strawberry into Lily’s cupped hands, offering a spritz of bug spray.
Presently, Lily’s face was warning-light red. She was paying attention to what Creative Director Mom was saying.
“What’s going on?” Heading over, I tried to keep my voice even. “Everything all right?”
“She gave it to me.” Lily kept her hands behind her back.
“It’s mine,” went the other girl.
“It’s her hair clip,” Creative Director explained. From her expression, I saw she’d tired of Lily’s exploits. “We bought it over the weekend.”
Obviously, the clip belonged to the other girl. This was a chance to be firm yet empathetic, establish a pattern of the larger good being most important.
Lily was adamant, in full waterworks mode. “It’s not FAIR.”
“Is there anything …?” I said to the mother. “Maybe Lily could have it tonight? We’d bring it back tomorrow?”
Creative Mom looked confused. “I don’t think that would be right.”
Taking Lily aside, I said, “We’ll go shopping. I know a row of stores. We can find you a pretty vintage clip of your own.”
Lily jerked away, let out something piercing.
“Sweetie,” I said.
She dug in, bawled that much harder.
When she’d been upset as a baby, more than once Diana told me, “Let her cry.” Rocking her toward calm, Diana would tell Lily, “Go ahead, girl, it’s all right. Express yourself. Take as long as you need.”
“Can you calm down?” I questioned myself as much as her, ordered as much as asked.
Wiping away her snot bubble, I continued. An exhaling breath. “Lily, my love?”
She looked to me. Hopeful. I was on her team.
“Would you please give the clip back?”
Lily twisted out of my grasp. She kept her fist clenched around the clip, held it away from me, flailed, cried out again.
Common sense suggests heads turned. This was a distraction. The mothers looked a few seconds. That was that.
But I felt their acute attention, became convinced of their gawking—all the moms who’d been cool enough, but really never had trusted my gender to begin with, the ones who’d clocked my snide remarks, my aura of disgruntled servitude, how I implicitly judged them, the life paths they’d chosen, the mothers who worried I had an ulterior motive for showing up every day in that courtyard, that maybe I was prowling for bored moms to bed. All of these mothers were staring bullets.
And not just them—those few acquaintances I always sat close to and conversed with, kind women who offered playdates for Lily with their kids, who at least gave me some props for the effort I put in every day but who also saw that, realistically, my daughter needed help. They were watching me, too, keeping their distance, leaving me alone to deal.
“ENOUGH,” I said. “LILY.”
She stopped kicking my shin, stopped squirming in my grip. Her expression was still frenetic, fire through her cheeks and eyes, the gap of her open mouth. Now Lily zeroed in on me, focusing, squinting. She closed her mouth, set her jaw. Stillness took her. My daughter appeared possessed, taken by a sense of herself—no, by more than that. I recognized this—every bit of the misery I felt. One of my legendary shitty expressions, manifest on my little girl. Only Lily wasn’t just channeling my misery; she was claiming it, remixing it. Eyes electric, she was directing my misery back, toward me.
THERE THEY WERE, all my worst inner conflicts, not just on display in that courtyard but coming home to roost. I was indeed the one being exposed, once again Bocking things up. And the thing is, it’s not like you just recognize the problem, clap your hands, and, clap clap, everything gets better. Lily showed up to school the next day. She had some standout moments in class, some stumbles, and then, that afternoon, I picked her up. Playdates took place, friendships melted down, quickly recovered just fine, or maybe opened a breach. Whether my unintentional influence was the direct cause, whether the deeper issues connected with her missing a mother were coming to the fore, ratios of how much of this, proportions of that, the answers were most definitely not apparent. Time moved in the only direction it knows. We stumbled along in its gale, trying to plant our feet here, get some leverage there, and then, pretty much the same way that one of Hemingway’s characters famously went broke— “gradually and then suddenly”—her fourth birthday approached. Meaning, the first anniversary of Diana’s death. Lily and I had been through a full year of this. A year.
If anyone deserved a celebration, it was this child. I brought cupcakes to school for all the little lovies. Even better, a friend’s wife called. She’d procured us tickets to Mary Poppins on Broadway.
A week before the show, I explained: “We have to prepare. That means a moratorium goes into effect.”
Lily stared at me, then the computer screen.
No more Natalie Wood lip-synching to Marni Nixon?
No Liesl dancing around the arboretum with that Nazi?
She looked upset, did not understand.
“From here on,” I said, typing into the YouTube search engine, “we’re full-on supercalifragilistic. All the expialidocious.”
That fancy blue dress fit her better than ever, God bless it. Lily looked radiant. We arrived at the theater super early, immediately dropping an heiress’s ransom—more cash up in flames—at the merch table, netting ourselves candy, a dolly, a child’s tee, a flying umbrella. One more example of so many of us around her—me, first and foremost—trying to buy away the pain, to provide her with something fantastic that could not be availed in her real life? And of all possible shows, Mary Poppins! The story of a woman magically flying down from the clouds to tend for children and make this broken family all better!
Reader, it surely was overcompensating. Sign me the fuck up.
The usher handed us Playbills; we headed down the aisle, admiring the hall’s gilded ornaments, its elegant balconies. I’d spent my life getting discount tickets, heading up to the nosebleeds. These seats weren’t just good; they were right in the middle of the orchestra, and as we waded into the sea of tourist parents and their exceedingly cute daughters—of course wearing sequined outfits—I could not help but wonder about the coinage that must have been dropped for these tickets. How could I ever properly thank these people?
Arriving at our seats, unwrapping from our coats. Lily and a nearby girl started talking, and fed off one another’s excitement, and soon were looking through their programs, pointing. I stored our swag, collapsed into my seat, felt a rush of relief, high-fiving myself for getting her here.
For a few moments I watched Lily, just looking at her: talking, animated, engaged.
The announcement came from overhead concerning phones and candy wrappers. The lights dimmed. I felt Lily’s body tense.
I tensed as well. She’d experienced all of one movie theater in her young life. How could I have overlooked the traumatic event that was lights turning off inside a huge hall?
And I’d prepped her for live music, right?
The orchestra began their slow pound toward the show’s overture.
On cue, Lily screamed.
“It’s all right.” I leaned over. “It’s part of the show.”
Her mouth widened so I could see deep to her tonsils. She wailed louder.
The music’s pace increased; Lily kept bawling. Whatever I tried, it was obvious her cries were not about to end.
Now, from behind a fluorescent beam of flashlight spotlighted my child, the usher leaned toward me, his whisper directing us.
Lily’s face was fully crimson and her mouth was wide and I was gathering up all our merch, making jerking motions, rising in a crouch and taking her hand. I was easing us between the other parents and kids on our row, “Sorry … Excuse us … Sorry.”
Our walk of shame ended; we emerged into the lights of the lobby. The usher firmly, if politely explained we couldn’t be allowed back inside while Lily was a distraction to the other guests.
I crouched. “Take breaths.”
Then I followed my own instructions, breathing out.
We could take as long as we needed, said the usher.
Lily sniffed. She looked at me with those saucerlike watering eyes.
“Daddy,” she said.
I knew from her tone. She wanted to go home.
“Don’t you want to see ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’?” I asked.
“Daddy.”
I have previously mentioned the male capacity to feel sorry for himself, how easy it is to take that first step. I was now slaloming, in full plummet.
December’s air was crisp on our faces. Side by side, we were heading toward the Times Square subway station. A hard pulse rocked my temples, throbbed through my neck.
Philip Seymour Hoffman had been on Broadway that spring for seventy-eight performances of Death of a Salesman. I sure hadn’t been able to see that.
Hadn’t even thought about tickets to see Pacino in the thirtieth-anniversary remounting of Glengarry Glen Ross.
The trip we’d just made … the cash we’d incinerated … her inability to just fucking sit there …
And me begging—on my knees—for us to stay, to watch that reductive, soul-sucking Disney-fied bullshit.
Sharp pain down the middle of my forehead; something inside me cracking open.
All my friends, all the nannies and sitters, the teachers, the therapists, both mine and hers, the money, the institutions, the entirety of this jury-rigged support network, a literal year spent building it, propping it up, thinking and researching and sweating, learning in advance potential dangers, mapping the danger zones, meeting the enemy, knowing it was them, it was us, defusing all bombs, blowing ourselves to smithereens, anything anyone could imagine, create, borrow, purchase, steal—
And still a lifetime to be spent outside the ballet, waiting for the doors to open.
A lifetime alone in the park, watching rich, healthy Shake Shack parents who had no clue.
Once again I’d rammed headfirst into the limitations of best intentions.
Once again I’d exposed, to the light, the stark difference between the ideals of the person I wanted to be and the reality of who I was.
I felt myself giving my life for this little girl, hating the sacrifices but sure as hell making them, busting my ass—and failing.
Clearly and definitively failing. Oftentimes. And in the most basic ways.
The single last thing I wanted to do was to make life worse for Lily. Was there any doubt this was happening?
Again I circled back to the big questions, immovable, unavoidable: What is wrong with me? Why does everything have to be so hard?
Pedestrians passed us in the other direction; a kindly, aging couple looked us up and down. The man volunteered: “She’s a cutie.”
“Get fucked,” I answered.
We continued homeward. Heading east on Twenty-Third, I noticed Lily lingering, slowing, a few steps behind me. What was wrong now?
Let me tell you.
Having managed to take her doll out of the box on the subway, Lily had become preoccupied, was happily unbuttoning Mary Pop-pins’s blouse.
Nothing was wrong. Not one goddamn thing.
FOUR YEARS OLD
CHAPTER SIX
From: charles bock
Hey there third street music school. This message concerns Lily Bock. She is enrolled in XXXXX’s private violin lesson on Thursday afternoons, and the group class on Friday.
