Читать книгу The Resurrection of Joan Ashby - Cherise Wolas - Страница 22

From his birth, Eric was like that nursery rhyme: when he was good, he was very, very good, and when he was bad, he was horrid. All that was missing was the little curl right in the middle of his forehead. His hair was as black as Joan’s, but the same texture as Martin’s, straight as a pasture of reeds, not a curl to be found.

When the daughters of the former Pregnant Six came over for playdates with Daniel, it was Eric who absorbed their attention, whom they insisted on mothering, ordering Daniel around in supercilious tones—“Bring me his blanket,” or “He needs a new bottle, make sure you warm it up right”—while Eric cooed in their arms, wrapped long blond or brunette or pale red hair around his chubby fingers. He was angelic with the girls, never screamed when he was their make-believe baby. But with his own mother he screamed, jags that lasted for hours when he wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, or wet, or dirty, or ill, or hurting, or teething, and Joan couldn’t figure out if it was because the world seemed to him a frightening place, or if it was simpler than that—mere frustration that he could not yet make himself understood. When he would finally lock his lips together, the silence itself rang, as if a bomb had decimated all the sounds in the world, leaving nothing behind.

Daniel was usually a good sport and played the game of happy family while Joan and some combination of Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa watched a version of the future unfold. But sometimes, when he grew tired of heeding commands, he disappeared, and Joan would find him in his room, at his white desk, a notebook in front of him, a pen in his hand. During one of those afternoons, he started a story about Henry refusing the kind offer of another squirrel family to join them. “Come be with us,” the mother squirrel said. She was fat and round and her fur was brown. “No, I’m not interested in having any brothers and sisters, not anymore. Being on my own is much better.” Joan silently agreed.

When the weather was nice, the women sat outside at Joan’s old writing desk. Purchased in a secondhand store for twenty-five dollars when she was eighteen and new to New York, there was no longer room for it in the house, but she had not wanted to set it out on the curb, dumped into a garbage truck. It hurt her to use the table this way, on which she had written so much, now stained from sweating glasses of iced tea and wine and gin and tonics and soda cans, but at least she could sit at it, her bare toes kicking at the cool grass she and Fancy had planted. Listening to the women’s delight with how their eldest daughters so naturally cared for Eric, Joan would wish just one little girl would refuse to hold him, would say she had different dreams for herself, did not want to waste her time learning how to mother, that it was a skill she would have no use for. But such was unlikely, for as smart as Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa were, they were vocal about their maternal fulfillment, their satisfaction in having children, “Even better than we imagined it would be,” they frequently said, in earshot of their daughters. “Don’t you think so, Joan?” they asked her, and although Joan smiled, never did she nod her assent.

Once, her life had been completely fulfilled by a different kind of striving, that did not involve watching children interact and hearing ecstatic mothers describe their crushes with motherhood.

It always came as a shock to her then, that she was no different from any of them: a formerly famous writer now a stay-at-home mother, taking a yoga class two towns over twice a week, reading to Daniel, listening to his stories, trying to find a way in with Eric, a four-day weekend twice a year with Annabelle Iger in New York, happily hearing her rail against marriage, against children. Joan’s failure to produce the first novel demonstrated, Iger said, the norm’s destructive, debilitating effects. The way Iger held Martin wholly responsible would give Joan a sense of malevolent glee.

One cold afternoon, when the daughters of Augusta, Teresa, and Dawn were playing their usual game with Eric and Daniel in the nursery, and the women were in Joan’s kitchen, cups filled with hot coffee, plates filling up with slices of Reine de Saba, the chocolate almond cake Dawn was testing on them before offering it at Boulangerie de Rhome, the news of the day was that, in Vermont, a social worker was shot to death with a rifle by a mother fearing she would lose custody of her children. Meg and Teresa pressed their hands to their mouths, as Dawn said, “I’d do the same thing, shoot anyone who tried to take my kids from me.” Joan nearly said aloud what she was thinking: she loved Daniel, she did love Eric, but sequential hours at a desk of her own, in a room of her own, with the ideas, or at least one idea, flowing, having a brief respite from custody, from mothering, from Daniel’s after-school questions about everything, from Eric’s screams, would not be half-bad.

At two, Eric’s first word was not Mommy, Daddy, Daniel, Fancy, grass, bath, or candy, or any variation thereof, but no. And it was not a general no. It took Joan and Fancy several days to understand what Eric was trying to refuse, and even Daniel, who could decipher Eric’s grunts and waving hands easily, was confused.

No meant no more reading to Eric at bedtime, no more big books, no more children’s books, no reading at all, refusing that which was essential to Joan. However, if promised a red lollipop, he would listen to a story of Daniel’s. He seemed to like the little gray squirrel, but the lollipop had to be in sight at all times, otherwise he stuffed his little fingers into his little ears and turned his face to the starry blue wall.

If the color blue, among other things, encouraged efficiency and communication, then Eric excelled at combining those two traits, efficiently communicating his needs and his wants without linguistic prowess.

No more reading came first, then No diaper. “No diaper,” Eric said to Joan when she was changing him one morning. “No diaper,” he said to Fancy that same day, when she was doing the same thing. He tugged at the diaper, pushed it down, figured out how to get one leg free, then the other, then ran through the house naked from the waist down, his chunky little ass so low to the ground.

“He’s done with diapers,” Daniel said to Joan.

“I get that, love, but he’s only two. Barely potty-trained. He’s not ready to make that decision for himself,” and Joan diapered Eric again.

“No diaper,” Eric yelled in the middle of the night, abandoning sleeping straight through, a trick only recently mastered, until his demand was honored. It was three in the morning, and everyone was gathered around his crib. Martin said, “He knows his own mind. So let’s try underpants. Maybe he’s telling us he knows more than we do.”

Apparently he did, and Joan thought his name was proving itself—he was ruling his own world, setting the guidelines by which he was willing to live. Superheroes ran across his bottom from then on. Somehow, he had trained himself.

The week Eric left diapers behind, Daniel said, “How old was I when I stopped wearing diapers?” Joan thought, then said, “Almost three. Right, Fancy?” And Fancy nodded. “So does that mean Eric is smarter than me?” The corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes, too, were drooping like some old hunting dog, like the oldest hunting dog in the world. “Of course not,” Joan said. “Everyone lives their life on a different schedule. Eric is early in this area, you were right on time.”

Eric was, however, very slow to talk. He gathered up one word at a time, then ran with that word as if it were a kite on the end of a long rope. At three, his favorite word was sandbox. Led to the sandbox, he would spend happy hours alone building battlements, bridges made of fallen branches and twigs, forts with his own shirt and pants, holes filled with water from the hose that he figured out how to uncoil and turn on. Usually, he did not destroy what he created.

If blue fostered intelligence, then Joan had her doubts, both about the efficacy of colors employed this way, and about Eric. At four, his mouth was a receptacle for items other than food—bobby pins, pennies, paperclips, buttons, crayons, the sundered hoof of Fancy’s stuffed giraffe. At four and a half, he began eating sand, clumps of dirt, chewy leaves, flowers plucked from the gardens, his baby teeth masticating it all. At nearly five, he was also sucking on pebbles, mashing pen caps of cheap ballpoints down, like some steel-toothed machine, until he bit through the plastic. It was as if his refusal to breastfeed had manifested into an unquenchable oral fixation. Martin issued his professional determination that it was a phase he would outgrow.

But when Fancy found a sliver of bark between his front teeth, his tongue green from leaves, teeth marks scratching the surface of a rock he had in his pocket, she brought her concerns to Joan, and Joan couldn’t keep herself from yelling at Eric. “Why are you eating all this crazy stuff?” and Eric, calm with that irritating half-smile on his lips, said, “I just like how it feels in my mouth.” She left Fancy with Eric outside on the swings and went inside, to a living-room shelf where she found Martin’s Diseases and Disorders and searched its pages for a disorder that might explain why he was stuffing strange things down his gullet, if it indicated some kind of mental disturbance, and there it was:

Pica the persistent eating of nonnutritive substances like paper, clay, metal, chalk, soil, glass, sand, ice, starch. Probably a behavior pattern driven by multiple factors. Some recent evidence supports including pica with the obsessive-compulsive spectrum of disorders. There are several theoretical approaches that attempt to explain the etiology:

Nutritional theories attribute pica to specific deficiencies of minerals, such as iron and zinc.

The sensory and psychological theories center on the finding that many patients with pica say that they just enjoy the taste, texture, and smell of the item they are eating.

A neuropsychiatric theory is supported by evidence that certain brain lesions in laboratory animals have been associated with abnormal eating behaviors, and it is postulated that pica might be associated with certain patterns of brain disorder in humans.

Psychosocial theories surrounding pica have described an association with family stress.

Addiction or addictive behavior has also been suggested as one possible explanation for pica behavior in some patients.

Treatment: Education about nutrition. Psychological counseling. Behavioral interventions for children with developmental disabilities. Closer supervision of children during play. Child-proof homes and play environments.

Eric didn’t seem to have developmental difficulties, or an obsessive-compulsive disorder, the sandbox was regularly raked, there was no lead paint in the house, none, as far as she knew, in the dirt. He was the youngest member of a loving family, and chewed a children’s multivitamin every single day. What stress could he have?

That night, Joan showed Martin the pica entry and said, “I think our youngest son might be suffering from this.”

They had a heart-to-heart with Eric in the living room. Martin on the couch, Eric on the ottoman, Joan in the comfortable armchair some distance away. Triangles were the only thing she remembered from junior high geometry, and if a line were drawn from Martin to Eric, Eric to Joan, Joan to Martin, they were the three points of an obtuse triangle, and she, way out there, was the longest side, the point at the end of ninety degrees.

“Eric, do you feel compelled—is something making you eat dirt, sand, pebbles, leaves, twigs, sticks, stones, grass, and anything else that people don’t usually eat? Something inside that’s telling you to eat those things? Voices, or just a hunger you can’t explain to yourself?” Martin asked.

“No,” Eric said.

“No what?” Martin asked.

“I don’t hear voices and I eat real food when I’m hungry.” It wasn’t an explanation, but it was something.

“Will you stop eating dirt, sand, pebbles, leaves, twigs, sticks, stones, grass, and anything else you know doesn’t belong in your mouth?” Joan was impressed Martin could reel everything off twice in the same order, although surely he did the same thing, with medical terms, in the operating room.

“Yes,” Eric said. “It’s just for fun anyway.”

“Will you promise not to have that kind of fun anymore?” Martin asked.

“Yes. No more fun,” he said. “Can I go?”

Martin nodded and Eric ran from the room, his bare feet stomping on the hardwood floor. He had Martin’s loud walk.

“Pica crisis averted,” Martin said. “Next.”

And it was true, the crisis disappeared or never truly existed; still, it seemed strange to Joan that Eric would have eaten any of those things in the first place, and she wondered what went on his head.