The Push
“She’s apologetic when told to be, yes,” the teacher said hesitantly when you asked her. “She’s smart. She knows her behavior is hurtful, but this hasn’t seemed to deter her like we’d expect. At this point, I think we need to introduce consequences.”
We agreed on the strategy and thanked her for the meeting.
“Look, it’s not good, but every kid goes through this kind of thing. Testing the boundaries. She’s probably bored in there. Did you see all that plastic shit lying around? It looked like a room for babies. Remind me how much we’re paying them?”
I watched the bubbles dance up the side of your glass. We’d gone for a drink, my suggestion. I thought it might ease the tension between us.
“We’ll talk to her,” you rationalized to yourself. “Something’s obviously provoking her to act this way.”
I nodded. Your reaction made no sense to me. You were such a sensible person in every respect. And yet when it came to our daughter, you lost all your levelheadedness. You defended her blindly.
“You’re not going to say anything?” You were angry.
“I’m—I’m upset. I’m disappointed. And yes, we’ll talk to her . . .”
“But?”
“But I can’t say I’m surprised.”
You shook your head—here she goes.
“Other kids her age would act out by biting or hitting or saying, ‘You’re not coming to my birthday party anymore.’ What she’s doing sounds . . . kind of cruel. Kind of calculated.” I put my head into my hands.
“She’s four, Blythe. She can’t even tie her shoes.”
“Look, I love her, I’m just saying—”
“Do you?”
How good that must have felt. It was the first time you’d said it aloud, but I knew you’d been thinking it for years. You stared at the ring-stained bar top.
“I love her, Fox. I’m not the problem.” I thought of how carefully the teacher had chosen her words.
I walked home alone and gave the babysitter money for her taxi. Violet was fast asleep. I slipped into her twin bed and pulled the duvet over my legs and held my breath when she stirred. She wouldn’t have wanted me in there but it’s where I so often found myself. I was trying to find something in her stillness. I don’t know what. Maybe the raw, sweet smell of her when she slept reminded me of where she came from. She was not perfect, she was not easy, but she was my daughter and maybe I owed her more.
And yet. As I lay there in the dark, I felt a twinge of vindication thinking about the meeting. I’d been living with a terrifying, unrelenting suspicion about my daughter, and I sensed that someone else could finally see it, too.
28
Sometime in the weeks that followed, I went to a gallery downtown after I dropped Violet off at school. There was a controversial exhibit that had been reviewed in the newspaper the day before, and I watched you read it over your morning coffee. Ever so slightly you had shaken your head before you turned the page.
I took one step inside the gallery and stared at the walls. On the matte white paint hung portraits used in media coverage of children who had been accused of gun violence. Unthinkable, sometimes deadly violence. Children, some barely old enough for acne, barely large enough to ride a roller coaster. I thought of how tiny those boys’ genitals would have been, how juvenile they were, hairless, sexless.
Two of the children were girls. Each smiled widely, intensely, lips nearly curled under. One had braces. She would have gone with her mother to the orthodontist every month for an adjustment, picked out which color bands she wanted for her wires. Asked for strawberry ice cream after, because anything else in her mouth hurt too much.
For hours the children watched me. Could they recognize me as the kind of person they came from? Someone like their own mother? An employee with short, side-swept hair barely looked up from reading art catalogs at the lumbering oak desk in the corner. I touched the glass covering one young girl’s school portrait. A perfect braid hung over each shoulder. Where does it begin? When do we know? What makes them turn? Who is to blame?
On the walk home, I talked myself through how irrational it was to think I’d find something familiar in those portraits. Going there was an absolutely mad thing to do.
I picked her up early from school that day and we went for hot chocolate and cookies. She offered me half of her cookie when we sat down.
“I think you’re a very kind girl,” I said. She licked the chocolate chips of her half while she thought about this.
“Noah said I’m mean. But I don’t like Noah anyway.”
“Noah doesn’t know you very well, then.”
She nodded and stirred the marshmallow goo with her finger.
We skipped dinner—the cookies had ruined our appetites. In the bath she closed her eyes and floated over a layer of bubbles like an angel in the snow.
“I’m going to hurt Noah tomorrow.”
Her words stopped my heart. I wrung the facecloth and hung it on the tap, careful to measure my reaction. She wanted a reaction.
“That wouldn’t be nice, Violet,” I said calmly. “We don’t hurt people. Instead why don’t you tell him one thing you really like about him? Does he share nicely? Is he fun to play with at recess?”