Following Ezra, page 7
“You are a not long person!” he says.
That makes for another extensive conversation on the car ride home. We have talked about weight, not about height.
Or aging.
“You have wrinkly skin,” he’ll say to the drugstore clerk. “Does that mean you’re going to die soon?”
Few things escape his notice. Meeting a woman, he’ll seem to stare intently for a moment, lost in thought, then say, “You have makeup all over your face.”
Lying on the chair at the dentist’s office after the hygienist finishes cleaning his teeth, he excitedly—and abruptly—greets the bearded dentist. “Hi, Dr. Bendik! Do you ever shave?”
Though some people are taken aback, others find Ezra’s honesty to be refreshing. Lacking the impulse to censor his thoughts, he simply speaks the objective truth. As Shawn likes to say, Ezra is the master of uttering what everyone else is thinking.
He’s like the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story, the boy is the hero—the one who articulates what no one else has the nerve to say.
In reality, that kind of honesty is rarely rewarded. I sometimes think about my own difficulty negotiating Shawn’s question when she comes home from a shopping excursion with a new outfit, tries it on, and innocently asks, “How does this look on me?” After years of marriage, I still haven’t figured out how to finesse that simple query. How will Ezra ever learn to navigate these waters?
As much as I marvel at the honesty of Ezra’s compulsive urges to comment on people’s appearance, they also make me deeply uncomfortable. In part, that is because his instincts are so jarringly different from my own. If Ezra seems inclined to say whatever comes to mind, unfiltered, I am his opposite. From a young age, I was reserved and shy, particularly with adults.
My instinct is to choose my words carefully—sometimes so carefully that I fail to speak up for fear of misspeaking. I am probably the last person in North America who feels self-conscious about talking on my cell phone in an elevator or any public place. On my morning jogs, I frequently think of the quip I should have made the day before, the comment I wish I had raised in a meeting or in a conversation. That characteristic certainly contributed to my decision to become a writer; my occupation consists largely of pondering the most careful ways to use language.
Though I share his solitary nature, in this sense Ezra is becoming my opposite: Anything that crosses his mind soon crosses his lips.
One afternoon, buckled into his booster seat in the backseat of my Camry, he begins spouting nonsensical words—fuckus, shick—and repeating them aloud to himself. From the slight grin on his face—the same expression he had the time I reprimanded him for calling Charlie “fat”—I can tell that he knows there is something vaguely wrong about what he is doing (even though he has deftly found a way to say words that only resemble actual cusses), but also that saying those words gives him a certain thrill.
“That’s not okay!” I tell him.
“I can’t say that?” Ezra asks.
“Nope. You can think about that, but don’t say it.”
“But when can I say it?” he asks.
“Never.”
“Never? But I want to!” He isn’t giving up easily. Ezra has already gathered that these words contain a special kind of energy; he wants to use them. “Where can I say them?”
Desperate to head off a tantrum, I give him an idea. “Ezra,” I say, “you can say those words when you’re alone—when nobody else can hear you.”
I forget about that conversation until many months later. One July afternoon, we take the kids to a crowded public swimming pool. I lie on a towel beside the large pool, keeping an eye on the boys, who are splashing around among swarms of children enjoying the cool water.
I lose track of Ezra, then spot him, alone in the deeper part of the pool, treading water and occasionally tilting his head forward, submerging his mouth. Panicked that he’s having trouble, I dive in and swim quickly to Ezra. I am relieved to find that he is not floundering at all; he is in complete control, and intentionally dipping his mouth just beneath the surface. At first I think he is simply blowing bubbles, but then I get closer and, listening carefully, realize that he is actually speaking. Every few seconds, he dunks his mouth in the water and utters another underwater curse: “Shit!” “Fucker!” “Ass!”
I can’t imagine what’s going on.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“You told me,” he says, “I could say those words when I’m alone!”
Ezra surely has trouble controlling his impulses, but when he understands the rules, he can learn. What challenge him are the subtleties of what one can and can’t say—even if it’s true. He tells African-American people their skin is brown. He reminds acquaintances repeatedly that their loved ones have died—and what, exactly, they died from.
“Grandpa Jack, he passed away from cancer—you’re very sad,” he tells a family friend on a dozen different occasions.
“George died; he was very old,” he reminds another friend, months—even years—after her dog was put down.
He has become hyperaware that he is Jewish, and curious who else is. With so much talk in our house about things Jewish—holidays and synagogues and rabbis and schools—he comes to think of this as fair game. It begins with repeated questions he asks Shawn and me: “Is Thanksgiving Jewish or Christian?” he’ll ask. He has the same question about the Fourth of July, Halloween, countries, and fictional characters. It’s usually focused on borderline concepts; he’s trying to figure out the world and it’s unsettling to him when things or people don’t fit neatly into categories. As with most of his habits and quirks, at first I perceive this new preoccupation as a sign of progress, an indication that Ezra has achieved a new level of awareness. Soon, though, it crosses over into the territory of very annoying behavior. How many times can I answer the same Thanksgiving question?
“Is Thanksgiving a Jewish or Christian holiday?”
“Both. It’s American.”
“Is it Jewish or Christian?”
“Both.”
“It’s Jewish and Christian.”
“That’s right, Ezra.”
“Thanksgiving is Jewish and Christian.”
After a while, his chatter is not so much about getting the information as it is about repeating the question, and then the answer, stimulating himself through the act of reiterating.
And then he crosses yet another boundary. We’re at Ralphs, the grocery store, and the cashier asks how our day is going.
“Are you Jewish?” Ezra responds. The man shakes his head and smiles.
I’m not sure where the question is coming from. But it becomes one of his standard lines. Ezra asks our gardener, people walking their dogs in the neighborhood, his gym teacher, a waiter at an Italian restaurant. He doesn’t seem to have plans for what to do with the answers. He simply likes to ask.
I see the questions as positive developments, for two reasons: He is gaining an awareness of religion and what it means. And at least he’s not asking why they’re fat.
When he meets people with any signs of gray hair or wrinkles, he gets into the habit of asking them their ages, then issuing one of two responses: “Oooh, you’re middle aged!” or “Oooh, you’re old!”
I suggest that it would be better merely to tell people they’re looking well. He tries that, and it’s an improvement, though he throws so much enthusiasm into it—“You look great!”—that he leaves some people feeling a bit unsettled. Just as reading facial expressions doesn’t come naturally, neither does understanding tone of voice or knowing how to moderate the tenor of his delivery. His speech often sounds stiff and unnatural.
Sometimes his reactions reveal how he is puzzling over things he doesn’t grasp. After a couple we know splits up, every time we spend time with the woman, Ezra asks where her ex-husband is.
“He doesn’t live here anymore,” Beth patiently reminds him on each occasion. “We’re divorced, remember?”
The next time Ezra sees the ex, it’s at his daughter’s bat mitzvah, at a dramatic moment when he’s carrying the Torah scroll up the synagogue’s center aisle. Spotting the familiar face, Ezra dashes to the aisle and plants himself directly in the path, halting the entire procession.
“Ronnie!” he says. “You’re divorced now! You live in a new house!”
While Ronnie tries to smile and make the best of it, I reach out an arm like a vaudeville hook, quickly extricating my son from the scene, planting him back on his seat next to me. I glare at him, but Ezra merely looks perplexed—then slowly seems to realize what he’s done.
“Was that like saying he was fat?” he asks.
“Not exactly,” I say, smiling. “But close.”
When Ezra is about eleven, Shawn has scheduled an appointment at the house for a project she is working on with a woman who happens to be both obese and rather short. That morning the doorbell rings. I listen from upstairs as Ezra dashes to the front door to see who is there. I run to intervene, but not quickly enough. From the hallway, I watch him swing open the door, catch sight of Cathy, suddenly gasp, and then cover his mouth with his right hand. I greet Cathy and point her toward Shawn. As she walks past me and inside, Ezra, still standing near the door, speaks to me in a stage whisper.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I tell him I am proud of him.
I can sense it was difficult for him, but slowly Ezra is learning.
Not long after that he is telling me about playing a board game at school with a teacher and another student. The boy’s name sounds familiar, but I’m not certain which kid he is.
“Matthew,” I say. “That’s the really tall kid, right?”
Ezra stares at me, bug-eyed, a surprised grin flashing across his face.
“What?” I ask, not understanding what he’s thinking.
He is silent.
“What is it?”
Finally he erupts. “You talked about his body!”
I ponder that for a moment, and realize something about my son: Every deficit comes with a gift. In this case, his challenge is coming to understand the subtle nuances of talking to—and about—other people. The gift, however, is an honesty and openness that other people will always envy. After all, is there a rational explanation for why we favor tall people over short people, the slender over the obese? Shawn and I have the task of helping our son to navigate the arbitrary, sometimes counterintuitive rules of social engagement. In the meantime, like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Ezra is teaching us a thing or two about telling the truth.
CHAPTER FIVE
Finding My Son at the Zoo
With his difficulty mastering the complexities of what one should and shouldn’t say to people about their bodies, it’s no wonder that Ezra is drawn to animals. You can call a giraffe tall with impunity. You can say all you want about how fat the hippo is without hurting anyone’s feelings.
In fact, Ezra has been attracted to the idea of animals from early on, becoming so enamored with a friend’s plastic jungle animals as a toddler that we gave him some of his own—zebras, a lion, and a tiger—for his second birthday. Another child might have employed the figures in imaginary play—say, acting out dramatic, violent interactions between the lion and his prey. Not Ezra. As a toddler—before we truly grasped his differences—he would haul around his growing collection of animals and dinosaur figures to the brick back patio of our Los Angeles home, spending long hours lining up the creatures in precise, symmetrical patterns as Shawn and I watched, feeling a combination of amazement and bewilderment.
Occasionally Noam or Ami would knock a rhino or stegosaurus out of place—or grab one for their own play—and elicit a fit of uncontrollable screaming from Ezra, who was tortured at his precise formation being broken.
“It’s all right, Ezzy,” Shawn would say, crouching down and trying to put the creatures back in place, but it was impossible to placate him. He seemed to be following a rigid system in his own mind, and only he could fix the problems.
At age three, he singles out a three-inch-long wooden alligator from a jigsaw puzzle as his special companion, then designates a similarly sized plastic toy alligator as another. For months, he goes everywhere—the playground, the bathtub—clutching one alligator in each hand. Soon after, he adds a foot-long plastic crocodile he keeps nearby at all times. Other children have security blankets. He has security reptiles.
That causes its own set of problems. Our family is setting out to visit my parents in Portland when an airport security screener peeks into Ezra’s Elmo backpack and begins shaking her head sternly. I can’t imagine what the problem is, until she points at the larger plastic crocodile inside.
“He can’t carry that on,” she says sternly.
“He has to,” Shawn replies, smiling. “We don’t have a choice.”
The woman shakes her head again. She explains that it is forbidden to carry a replica of anything that would be illegal on a plane—guns, bombs, crocodiles.
“Come on,” I plead. “It’s a toy.”
Never have parents begged with such persistence for a green hunk of plastic to be allowed onto an airplane, but the woman won’t relent.
“Crocodile!” Ezra screams, reaching for the toy. Shawn tries to comfort him while I rush back to the airline counter, trying to skip the lengthy line of stone-faced business commuters and explain to a clerk why I am in such a hurry to check a pint-size Sesame Street backpack and return to my family.
Ezra’s strong attraction to animals becomes something deeper when the wildlife is real. One autumn Sunday, when he is still three, Shawn and I pile the boys into the Toyota minivan and drive to Griffith Park, where the Los Angeles Zoo stretches over eighty acres of gently sloping hills. Our afternoon with our three young children among the flamingos and meerkats feels to me like a lovely but ordinary family outing, but it is igniting something new within Ezra.
This shows up soon after, when he is taking his evening bath and I notice him reciting a long list of animals to himself: “Tiger . . . bear . . . rhinoceros . . . hippo. . . .” Following along, I suddenly realize what he is doing: ticking off the names of the animals in the exact order we saw them at the zoo.
The next time we return to Griffith Park, he announces most of the animals even before we have arrived at an exhibit. At the seals: “Now let’s go see the polar bears.” At the polar bears: “Now it’s time for the otters.” Just as with his animal patterns in the backyard, the combination of rigid order and wild animals stimulates him.
So we keep going back.
At times, I wonder if it is the animals he is attracted to, or just the order. After school one afternoon, I visit the zoo with Ezra, who is so eager that he pulls my arm to get as quickly as possible from the car to the gate. Then he dashes on his regular circuit through the zoo, barely pausing. I feel baffled by the behavior and upset at how disconnected he seems. On the drive home, I ask Ezra why he didn’t stop to look at the animals.
Silence.
“I thought we came here to look at the giraffes and the lions and gorillas,” I say. “What were you doing?”
As we make our way through downtown traffic, he is silent again for a few moments and then says something just audible: “I saw them.”
Yes. But I can’t fathom what could explain his rush.
Not long after that we are at a local children’s museum that has an interactive Noah’s Ark exhibit, including large buckets of the plastic animals Ezra so enjoys. While the other boys circulate through the various displays and activities, Ezra spends the entire hour picking through the animals, dividing them by species and size in the toy ark’s small compartments. It strikes me that this is exactly what has been drawing Ezra to the zoo. He has cataloged all the species in his mind. He draws comfort from finding them where they are supposed to be: the koalas in their tree, the lemurs in their cage, the elephants wandering their grounds. Nearly everywhere else he goes, my son is filled with anxiety. Human beings can be unpredictable and scary, with their social rules and their subtle facial expressions. But the giraffes don’t ask questions, and the chimps don’t care what you say about them. Ezra doesn’t merely want to see animals; he wants to live in this mannered world, with its patterns and structures and where there are no surprises.
On another afternoon I encourage him to walk slowly, and I hang back to see what he will do. We arrive at the sea lions just as a zookeeper brings a pail of fish for lunch. Ezra leans on the metal rail and gazes for half an hour, entranced, watching the keeper toss fish. He’s fascinated with how the creatures swim for their food, crawling in and out of the pool. I think of how Ezra can barely sit at the cafeteria table, how he endures karate lessons only while asking his instructor every two minutes when the hour will be up. As I watch him smile with delight, I feel a profound sense of hope mixed with sadness—hope that he has found something that brings him such pleasure, sadness that he hasn’t shown that kind of focused engagement with other people.
Instead of letting his passion for animals become yet another lonely avenue, I decide to make it the foundation of a connection between the two of us. I find myself making the trek to Griffith Park as frequently as I can. Elsewhere, Ezra can be a tangle of tics and repetitive motions, uttering snippets of video dialogue, and hiding out under blankets or mattresses. At the zoo, all of that melts away. I let him flash our membership card, we pass through the familiar gates, and I watch him sprint to the sea lions, morphing within minutes into a different boy: calm, open, and happy.
“Oh, there’s the little ocelot. You see it?” he says, a lilt in his voice, eyes wide with innocent delight.
Friends tease me, curious about how a grown man could spend so much time watching koalas chew on leaves. But I never tire of watching my son, never get bored with the way the zoo transforms him. I cherish those sixty or ninety minutes in which I can connect with Ezra and we can fit in with the crowds, just like any other father and son.
