“And that’s when we’ll get the proof book?”
“Yes, I’ll e-mail you the link.”
“Link?”
“Yes, it’s all online.”
“Oh, so we don’t look through an actual book?”
“No, I do it all online.”
“Oh,” says Beth, sounding disappointed.
“It’s great. You’ll like it. You can choose the size, black-and-white or color. It’s easy to navigate, but if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.”
Olivia places her camera in her bag and zips it shut. She folds her beach chair. It’s time to go. She will happily hold Beth’s hand via phone or e-mail through any step of the purchasing, but this is the end of the face-to-face part of this relationship.
“Okay. Thanks. Sorry about Jessica’s sour puss.”
“She was fine. She’ll look great.”
“I think she was upset that her father wasn’t here. We separated this winter, and it’s been hard on them.”
“I’m sorry.” Olivia stands with her heavy camera bag over one shoulder and her beach chair tucked under the other.
“It’s been hard for me, too. Do you see this a lot? Families without the father?”
Struck by something familiar in Beth’s question, Olivia pauses in her haste to leave. She studies the expression on Beth’s face, and it registers. The need to feel normal. The desire to be accepted.
“All the time,” Olivia lies.
Beth smiles, grateful.
Olivia senses something else familiar in Beth but can’t quite put her finger on it. And then, there it is, like looking in a mirror. Loneliness. Olivia decides to wait with Beth until her daughters return with their dog.
The sky has completely clouded over now, and the sun is just about to set. The air is noticeably chillier than it was only five minutes ago. Beth grabs a sweatshirt from her bag. As she’s pulling it over her head, Olivia notices a marriage self-help book sitting faceup at the top of Beth’s bag.
“That’s my book,” says Olivia aloud instead of to herself as she’d intended.
“What?”
“I mean, I helped edit that book. I used to work at a publishing house.”
“Oh. I haven’t read it yet. It belongs to a friend.”
Both women stand in awkward silence. Beth turns and looks down the length of the beach. Her girls are three dots in the distance. She turns back and rakes her toes through the sand. “So you used to work in publishing?”
“Five years ago. Feels like even longer.”
“I know this is a little forward, but I’m writing a book. It’s a series of related stories, or maybe it’s a novel, I’m not really sure yet, but I’d love for someone professional to take a look at it.”
“Oh, I edited self-help, not fiction—”
“That’s okay. I’d really appreciate your feedback, if you have the time.”
Outside of her job, Olivia’s never offered to read anyone’s anything. She’s never wanted to be the one to tell someone not to quit her day job, to crush someone’s dream. She looks down at Beth’s bare feet, at her blue-painted toenails, at her copy of Mending Your Marriage, at the wedding and engagement rings she still wears on her finger, at the hopeful expression hung on her lonely face. She sighs. She has time.
“Sure. I’d be happy to take a look at it when you’re done. Just let me know.”
“Thank you so much!” says Beth, her face lit up.
Olivia smiles. She adjusts the beach chair under her right armpit. It felt light when she first picked it up, but now it’s feeling heavy and unwieldy. And the strap to her camera bag is digging into the bare skin on her shoulder. She didn’t bring a sweatshirt, and she’s cold in her sleeveless sundress. She looks over Beth’s shoulder.
“Here come your girls.”
Beth turns and sees her daughters and her dog walking toward her. “Oh, okay. Thanks again. I knew there was a reason I picked you to do our pictures.”
Olivia extends her somewhat free hand to shake Beth’s, but Beth maneuvers around this formal gesture, the camera bag, and the beach chair and gives Olivia a sincere hug. Chills run down Olivia’s arms, but not because she’s cold. It’s been a long time since anyone has hugged her.
“You’re welcome.”
The girls file in next to Beth. Sophie is holding a huge seagull feather in one hand and the dog’s leash in the other, and Jessica is holding a bag of poop.
“Mom! Look what I found for you!” yells Gracie, smiling, excited.
She holds out the palm of her hand, displaying the amber-colored exoskeleton of a baby horseshoe crab.
“Cool, sweetie,” says Beth.
“And this is for you,” says Gracie, extending her other palm toward Olivia.
Olivia offers her somewhat free hand to Gracie, and Gracie rolls a white, almost translucent, wet, oval pebble into Olivia’s palm. Chills run down her arms again.
“It’s a pearl,” says Gracie.
“Thank you,” says Olivia, her voice catching at the back of her throat. “I love it.”
“Okay, we’re off. Thanks again,” says Beth, and they all begin walking toward the parking lot.
“We’ll talk in six weeks?” Beth asks at her car door.
“Six weeks,” says Olivia, even though it could easily be eight.
Beth waves, disappears into her car, and drives away.
Olivia tosses her camera bag and chair into the backseat of her Jeep and gets in. The warm air inside feels like a thick blanket wrapped around her bare skin. As she backs up, it begins to rain. She turns on her lights and wipers, relieved that the weather held for her portrait session. She pulls out of the parking lot, grateful for Gracie’s gift still in her hand, smiling as she drives down Hummock Pond Road in the pouring rain.
When she gets home, she adds Gracie’s rock to her growing collection in the glass bowl on the coffee table. She then connects her camera to her computer and retrieves one of her journals from the kitchen table. As the images from today’s shoot are downloading onto her computer, she sits in her living-room chair and thinks about Beth and her three daughters, about her loneliness and her book. Olivia wonders what it’s about.
Then she opens her journal and reads.
CHAPTER 21
April 12, 2005
I spent today back in eighth grade. It started at the playground. We got there late morning, and Anthony ran straight to the swings, as usual. His body is way too big for the toddler bucket seats, but he refuses to even try the big-boy swings, so I hoisted him into one of the buckets and pushed my five-year-old next to another mother pushing her two-year-old. She smiled nervously at me and said nothing.
It was finally warm out today, and the playground was crowded. There were lots of kids Anthony’s age playing with each other. Two boys and a girl were chasing each other up and down the slides, laughing, having a blast. A line of four kids were playing Follow the Leader, moving across the field of grass next to the playground, all arms up, then down, all jumping, then crawling, then clapping. Another group of kids were playing under the jungle gym.
A couple of girls were selling wood-chip ice cream. The customer kids waited their turn at the “ice cream stand,” placed their orders, paid with wood-chip money, and “ate” their delicious treats. They went back for seconds and thirds. It would’ve been adorable to watch if it didn’t make me want to sob.
Anthony is light-years away from any of this. Interactive play. Imaginative play.
Friends.
All these things that other kids do spontaneously and naturally would have to be broken down into discrete behavioral pieces, and Carlin would have to work on each one with Anthony for hours and weeks and months before he might learn to pretend that a wood chip is vanilla ice cream. But it wouldn’t be for the pure, innocent joy of it. He’d do it to get the Pringles he wants or to get Carlin to stop bothering him about it, to be finally left alone already. Because that’s what he wants. To be alone. That?
??s what gives him joy.
All Anthony wants to do at the playground is swing. But I see these other kids playing, and my heart wants more, and I get bored just standing there, pushing him over and over. I stopped his swing a bunch of times and asked him if he’d like to try the slide, if he’d like to play with the other kids, if he’d like to go over to the sandbox. He loves sand. But nothing rivals the swing, and he wouldn’t budge. So we stayed there, swinging. I felt self-conscious and defeated.
Why can’t I just be happy that he’s happy alone on the swing? Why do I have to insist that happiness is doing what I want him to do? Because the world is full of people, Anthony, not swings, and I want you to be happy in the world and not just happy in a swing. Is that too much to want? Is it selfish to want this?
Because the other kids at the playground can play independently and don’t stay on the swings all morning, the other moms were free to sit together at one of the picnic tables. I pushed Anthony on the swing and listened at a distance to these moms chatting and laughing, having a grand old time. I felt like I was in eighth grade all over again—the awkward outsider, not part of the “in” crowd.
They say 1 in 110 kids have autism now, but I don’t know any other mothers in town with an autistic kid. Where are they? I’ve been out of work entirely now for six months, and I miss adult company. Conversation. Morning meetings.
Friends.
Carlin and Rhia are over every day, but they’re Anthony’s therapists. They don’t count. And David acts like I’m asking him to re-shingle the roof every time I ask him the simplest question. I know I’m probably being sensitive because I’ve got my period, but I felt how lonely I am while I watched this group of moms. A group I won’t ever be a part of. Like the popular girls in eighth grade with their perfect Farrah Fawcett hair and their fancy Jordache jeans. I hated them and wished I could be one of them in the same breath.
We’d been at the swing for over an hour when the moms called their kids over to the picnic table for lunch. The kids came. The moms opened pretty, insulated lunch bags and passed out sandwiches, yogurts, orange slices, string cheese, Goldfish crackers, and juice boxes.
A fun picnic. Not for us.
It was time to go. I gave Anthony a 1, 2, 3 warning, which sometimes helps, but not today. He gave a quick screech and flapped his hands when I stopped the swing, but when I didn’t immediately return to pushing and instead began lifting him out, he lost it. His body went stiff and his screeching escalated to an I’m-being-murdered decibel.
I had to use all my strength to pry him out of the bucket, to carry him, forty-five pounds of dead weight screaming in agony over being separated from a swing that he’d just spent the last hour and a half on, to not look back at the moms at the picnic table who I’m sure were looking at me the whole time, judging me, thinking, Thank God I’m not HER. Just like eighth grade.
I got Anthony in the car and turned on Barney as fast as humanly possible, and he calmed down. God bless Barney. Then, I stupidly decided to stop at CVS on the way home. I just got my period this morning, and I only had a couple of tampons left. For any of those other mothers at the playground, it wouldn’t be a stupid idea to go to CVS when you have your period and only two tampons left. They’d breeze in, zip out, no problem. They might not even remember the quick errand by the end of the day. But for me, this was a colossally stupid idea. And I’ll never forget it.
We always go straight home after the playground, and I always take Center Street to Pigeon Lane, but CVS is the other way. I hoped Anthony wouldn’t notice. I hoped it wouldn’t matter. It would only take a few minutes. Stupid girl.
As soon as I went left instead of right out of the parking lot, Anthony started screeching. When I kept going, he started kicking. I should’ve turned around then and there, but I kept going. He started screaming, whipping his head and flapping his hands, fighting against the buckle of his car seat as if he were being repeatedly stabbed with a knife.
Fueled by sheer and again stupid determination to run a simple and necessary errand, I got all the way to CVS, but there was no way I could go in. There’s no way I could physically carry him given the state he was in; I would never leave him alone in the car, and there was absolutely no way to reach him with a rational explanation.
Mommy needs tampons, sweetie. Please stop freaking out. We’ll be home in five minutes.
So I drove home.
By dinner, I was out of tampons. But I wasn’t going to risk another meltdown in the car, so I had to wait for David so I could go to CVS alone. I made a homemade pad out of wadded toilet paper to hold me over until he got home. But David was forty-five minutes late (with no phone call), and the wad of TP was no match for my period, and I bled through onto my favorite skirt.
Eighth grade all over again. At least my accident happened at home and not at the playground in front of the “in” moms.
It occurred to me while I was driving to CVS for the second time today that I’ve spent my whole life since eighth grade terrified of being the outsider, doing almost anything to fit in, always desperate to belong. Anthony doesn’t worry about any of this. He doesn’t mind being by himself. He enjoys it. He doesn’t care what people think. He’s not going to get caught up in wanting expensive designer clothes or the latest $100 sneakers. He’s not going to drink or smoke pot to look cool. He’s not going to do anything because everyone else is doing it.
He doesn’t care what other people wear or think or do. He likes what he likes. He does what he wants to do. Until I say it’s time to go and rip him out of his swing.
I thought about those kids playing Follow the Leader today. Anthony will never be a follower. He won’t be the leader though either. This thought would normally shred my heart and make me weepy, but as I drove to CVS, I felt unexpectedly at peace.
He’s simply not playing that game.
CHAPTER 22
I am swinging on the swing at the playground. I love swinging. Swinging puts me in my body.
I usually know I have hands, but if anything interesting is going on, if I’m counting or thinking or watching TV, my body disappears from me. I don’t have a voice, so people sometimes treat me like I also don’t have a body, like I don’t exist in the world. And because most of the time I’m not aware of my body, I think they might be right. Maybe I don’t really exist in the world.
Swinging makes me exist in the world.
My thinking often gets stuck repeating. If I find a thought I like, I think it again so I can keep enjoying it. These kinds of thoughts are like Pringles. Pringles are so yummy, I never want to eat just one. I want to eat another and another and another. If I find a yummy thought, I want to think it again and again and again. But if I think it too much, then I don’t just want to think it. I NEED to think it because I’m afraid if I don’t always keep it with me, I might lose it forever. So my thinking gets stuck a lot on the same idea again and again and again. And when this happens, nothing else exists.
The other day I got stuck on Three Blind Mice. I said these three words inside my head, loving them for a whole morning. Nothing else existed. Not even me. I became those three words. Three Blind Mice.
But I don’t get stuck on Three Blind Mice right now because I’m swinging. When I swing, I am no longer my repeating thoughts. When I swing, I am a repeating body. I am moving through air, forward and down and up, backward and down and up, forward and down and up, backward and down and up. I am Anthony’s body, repeating this perfect rhythm. I swing, and I am here!
I am forward and down and up, backward and down and up, feeling the cool air tickle my face. My face is smiling. My face is real.
Then my mother stops the swing and says something about going over to the sandbox. I flap my hands and make a noise to let her know that I don’t like her idea. I don’t want to get off the swing. I flap and make a noise because my voice won’t say the word NO.
My mother understands me and starts the swing moving again.
I love sand. I love
to scoop up as much as my hands can hold, raise my hands high, and let the sand spill down. I love the feel of the sand moving through my fingers, how it drizzles and sparkles in the air like music as it falls. It’s almost as good as water.
But sand in a playground sandbox is not like sand at the beach. Sand in a playground sandbox is always too close to other kids. When I play with sand in a playground sandbox, another mother will tell me I can’t play with the sand. She’ll say, Please stop doing that, the sand is blowing into people’s eyes. And my mother will take me out of the sandbox because I won’t stop doing that, and I also don’t know how to share the sand.
My mother stops me again and wants me to go over to the slide. I make a noise and flap my hands, and she starts the swing moving again. Forward and down and up, backward and down and up.
I don’t like the slide. Sometimes kids will walk up the slide on their feet instead of sliding down the slide on their bottoms, and that is breaking the rules. If I’m at the top of the slide and another kid starts climbing up the slide, then I don’t know what to do. I can’t slide down because the kid is in the way, but I can’t climb back DOWN the steps because the slide steps are for climbing UP. That is the rule. So on the slide, I might have no solution to my problem, and I don’t want that.
And out on the playground, a kid might hit me or push me or ask me a question. The mothers always ask me a question, invading me with their eyes and an UP sound at the end of their voices. What is your name? But my voice doesn’t work, so I can’t even tell them that I don’t want to answer their questions.
On the swing, I feel protected from all of this. No one can touch me, no one wants me to say my name, and no one is telling me not to play with sand. I only want to swing.