Planting Dandelions (17 page)

His answers were typically brief and noncommittal. He was bending and flexing his arm freely, but I still read pain on his face.

“Honey, you look so sad,” I said finally. “
Are
you sad?”

He shrugged. “Not really, I guess.”

Just like the kids have learned that Mommy's “maybe” means “probably,” and Daddy's “maybe” means “unlikely,” I have learned that my son's “I guess” means “
you
guess.”

“Are your feelings hurt about something?”

“No.”

“Are you missing something or somebody?”

“I guess.”

It didn't take a full round of twenty questions to find out that he was grieving for his best buddy from his old school. My guy cried quietly into a tissue as I stroked his hair and tried to tell him what I know about friendship and life changes, which is that sometimes it's really hard, and you cry. The elbow was completely healed. I was never so grateful to have wasted an hour on a Sunday afternoon in the ER. Who knows how long my child would have held that grief inside?

Me, me. I do.

A very long time.

I put my arm around him while he wept. I promised we'd call his buddy when we got home, and that I not only understood his feeling sad, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if he felt mad at us for making him change schools.

I felt him uncurl. He twisted a damp piece of tissue in his hands.

“Better?” I said.

“Yeah, but there's just one more thing.”

When a child like my child is about to give you something of himself, of his own accord, you sit very still and you breathe very carefully.

“What, honey?”

“I wanted to buy the house we looked at that had the creek in the backyard.” I had to think a minute before I could clearly picture it, one of the dozen or so properties we'd looked at in a whirlwind couple of days, over six months before.

The things we hold on to, the length we hold on. His mother's child for sure.

“Trust me,” I said, on the day we made the offer on a different house. “Aw,” he said quietly, his disappointment barely registering above radar. I was surprised by it, but not deterred. Spring runoff aside, that listing was all wrong for us: bad traffic, a failing school zone, wall-to-wall carpet. It was never a serious contender. I knew he'd forget all about it as soon as we got settled at our new address, a secluded suburban valley teeming with kids, a short bike ride away from a great school and a real creek. I did.

Trust me is what parents tell children when the needle goes in, when the classroom door shuts, when the wish is denied. Don't be afraid, don't worry, don't cry. Someday you'll understand. You'll see.

“Trust me,” my father said, standing at the foot of the crumbling stucco stairs where I bolted on our first night in Tobago, upon seeing the concrete box that was to be our home for the next several months while he wrote a play. Lizards clung to the mildewed ceiling and walls. It felt like a cave inside. Outside, it was too dark to see anything but the white wash of stars across the black sky. Spilled milk.

“Trust me,” he said, leading me back inside and tucking me in bed. When morning came, I got up quietly, tiptoed past my sleeping family, pushed the louvered door open, and stepped out into a paradise. I was ten years old, and I was living on Robinson Crusoe's island. Who cared what it looked like indoors?

“Trust me,” he said, the last time I saw him alive, when I begged him to go to the hospital, because he was dying in a dank cave of an apartment, and there were no stars in that darkness, no hope of seeing things differently in the morning, only the pain and squalor and madness of late-stage alcoholism laid bare. It wasn't going to be all right. The monster was real.

“Trust me,” he said, as it devoured him. Don't be afraid, don't worry, don't cry.

Daddy.

“I'm scared,” my five-year-old says, not wanting to sleep alone.

“What are you scared of?”

“That something will get me, and you won't know.”

I'm scared of that, too.

“Not going to happen,” I say. “Trust me.”

The words are a prayer, not a warranty. I understand that now.

In the end, the tooth fairy finally comes through, something under the Christmas tree always makes up for what isn't there, and the Easter bunny gets away with all kinds of twitchy behavior as long as he leaves chocolate. Maybe for the kids, these are early exercises in doubt and faith. Or maybe the practice is for me, a way to wean myself slowly from the fond and fierce delusion that it's within my power and duty to see into their hearts, grant all their wishes, and prevent them from ever being hurt or disappointed in life.

The power that comes with being a parent is both awesome and minute. We get to be vanquishers of nightmares, granters of wishes, and readers of minds, with eyes in the back of our heads, and kisses that heal. We are also poor gods, petty dictators, and bad Santas. We are helpless to keep the world, or even ourselves, from ever inflicting pain on our children. Love isn't enough. Instinct isn't enough. Our good intentions aren't nearly enough. The best we can hope for is that it all counts for something, when the jig is up, when someday comes around, when our children finally do understand, and see.

Hell, I got my faults. I admit it.
But hell, I got my ways, too.

—HENRY MOON, in the movie
Goin' South

M
y oldest son came to me one weekend afternoon, anxious, because he had a Cub Scout woodworking project for which he needed his dad's tools and assistance, and his father did not share his sense of urgency about getting started. The best way to get help from somebody, I explained, is to clearly state what you need, and to ask them nicely. Then I set a trap. I went to Patrick and casually mentioned that Cub Master Chip had invited all the Scouts and parents to come use the power tools in
his
workshop, the implication being that Cub Master Chip's workshop, power tools, and genitals were infinitely superior to anything we had at home. It worked.

“Cub Master Chip is a pussy,” my husband declared, marching to the garage to fetch his saw and ordering our son to bring his building materials. A few minutes later, I heard the buzz of a saw outside and felt a surge of satisfaction and pride at the thought of my man teaching our son in the ways of tools and their safe usage. Of course, I had to ruin it by taking a look.

Patrick sat cross-legged on the porch, the vibrating handle of a small power saw positioned vertically in front of his groin, the reciprocating blade parallel to his midriff, the tip pointing straight to his Adam's apple. With one bare hand, he was feeding a block of pinewood to the rapidly moving saw teeth. There were so many major organs and arteries in play I was stunned speechless for a second. A cloud of fine sawdust surrounded him and our three enraptured children.

“Boys, get back!” I shrieked, moving in to shield them. “Oh my God, the banister!”

My husband turned off the saw and rubbed his eyes. “What?” he asked, coughing and blinking.

I hardly knew where to begin. I pointed to a fresh gouge in the porch rail that suggested he had tried traditional methods before rejecting them, using the rail for a sawhorse. “Do you have to do this out here?” I said.

Patrick looked annoyed and bewildered by my objection. “Well,” he said, licking his thumb and rubbing the gash in the rail with it, “where else would I do it?”

“The garage? Don't you have some kind of workbench with a clamp or something? And shouldn't you be wearing safety goggles?” I was trying not to be inflammatory, but I couldn't help adding, “The Cub master probably has a workbench.”

“Oh yeah, I'll just bet he does,” scoffed Patrick. He turned the power back on and returned to aerial freestyle jigsawing. The boys resumed watching and coughing in the dust. I had overplayed my hand. Safety goggles and workbenches, indeed.

I made the kids move to a safe distance at the far end of the porch before I retreated indoors, defeated. You can get a southern man to start something, but you can't make him stop.

I should know. They're a lifelong fascination of mine, for which I blame Martin Scorsese and my father. I was eight years old when Dad took me to me to see Scorsese's 1978 rock documentary,
The Last Waltz
. We took our seats in a near-empty theater and waited for the movie to start. I glanced back and forth between my father's profile, and the dark and silent screen he was fixed upon so intensely, wondering what was about to happen. There was a flash like lightning, then the opening guitar lick, and the entire frame exploded into light and sound. It was like the birth of a new solar system, with drummer Levon Helm the burning sun at its center. He was wailing about the Missssissippi-rivah, eyes shut, face incandescent. He was a portrait of ecstatic abandon, thrilling to watch and to hear. I had barely caught my breath after his last yodel, when a crazy-looking wild man strutted onstage, a confederate eagle swooping down the crown of his white straw hat. “The Hawk,” Daddy breathed, reverently, and Ronnie Hawkins howled ravenously, “Who do you love?” I gripped the armrests and pushed my spine into the velvet seat back as far as it could go. It was the Hawk, Daddy explained in a whisper, who led Levon Helm out of Arkansas to Canada, where they started The Band, whose legendary last concert we were watching. It was a tidy bit of foreshadowing, since I would grow up and trace the same migratory path in reverse. But that future was still a speck, drifting unnoticed across the projector beam. Nothing beyond the big screen existed for me in that moment. Ronnie Hawkins was as terrifying as Levon Helm was mesmerizing, but there was something about both of them that made every other star on the stage seem dimmer. There was
something
about southern men. The hook was set.

“Mesmerized and terrified” pretty much sums up the experience of falling in love with my southern-born-and-bred husband, nearly twenty years later. The first time I spoke to my new e-mail pal on the telephone, I thought maybe he was having me on. I had never heard anyone speak like that outside of television and the movies. I was enchanted by his soft drawl, the way he could draw out a one-syllable word into two or three, and the hint of country twang in his inflections—considerably toned down, as I gleaned later from hearing him talk to his family and childhood friends. When he got bold enough to call me “sugar,” ice crystals in my northern blood melted and sizzled.

When he sent me a picture in the mail, I surveyed it as if it was a topographical map, and decided his was a face that could only have come from the South. He had long blond hair, sleepy green eyes, and deep lines around his mouth. His craggy features were boyish and ancient at the same time, and made me think of moonshine stills and blood feuds. Something in his eyes hinted at acts of defiance and reckless valor. Only my romantic daydreams didn't anticipate how often it would be me who was being defied, like the time he flew 2,500 miles to see me on the spur of the moment, over my sputtered objections.

“Fortune favors the bold,” he proclaimed, as I sat on the edge of his hotel bed to tell him he shouldn't have come, that his was a hopeless gamble. Thinking he should at least eat something before I sent him back to Arkansas forever, I brought him a bucket of southern fried chicken, from an American franchise that had opened next to one of the dozen or so excellent fish-and-chip shops in my East Coast town. As if he were a koala bear and could eat only food from his native habitat.

“I love you,” I told him, as he sniffed the chicken skeptically and set it aside. “But I can't be with you.” I didn't know how to say that being near him made me want to throw up, not from revulsion, but from the force of my own heightened emotions. I had panic attacks when we were together, and I felt like I might die when we were apart. I didn't know whether I was in love or having an emergency.