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The anthropology student
Aidan O'Brien
A train whistle chirping in the vent above her bed woke her. She shot the vent’s deadpan slits a sidelong look.
The sound: not the sound of a freight train warning its location as it traced the Willimantic River, no, this sound: a high, two-toned, tinny squeal, followed by a rhythmic chugging meant to imitate wheels on a track, but better approximating ocean waves, febrile as foil, crashing too fast: her son’s old toy train.
The anthropology student assumed, lying beneath her purple blanket, doubly purpled by the darkness, hair still damp from a shower she knew she shouldn’t’ve taken before bed because it made her scalp itch and chafe and little white flecks of dead scalp skin like salt flakes dapple her black hair in the morning—she assumed that the toy, packed away, had malfunctioned, was keening as it expired. Sounds from the basement often came up through the vents.
She did not want to get up. She decided to lie there and wait. The battery would die, surely. A circuit would disconnect.
The whistle blew a third time. Get up, she told herself. If the sound was in her room, then it would be in her son’s room as well. It might wake him. (It already had.)
Alright. She would get up.
She moved through the dark house: the carpeted staircase, the ground floor’s long, thin central room—through the walls she could often hear happenings in the townhouses on either side, including, in unit 410, loud arguments between a mother and father, the latter a PhD candidate in Biology—past the small kitchen, to the basement door, to the basement staircase’s top step. Turning on the basement light, she heard a shifting, scraping noise. The cause of the disturbance was some animal. She stood still, assessing. A raccoon, perhaps, she thought. There were many in the area. They hunkered in the dumpster at the end of her row of townhouses, little bodies tensing like fists when the light hit as you opened the lid to heave in your bag. She padded halfway down. She anticipated a striped scrunched-up muscle tensing against her sight. Turning, she peered through one of the gaps between the steps, looking in on the basement’s back half, on the old white washer-and-drier pair that sat shoulder-to-shoulder along the far wall, on piled crates and plastic totes filled with her and her son’s belongings, herself tensing, prepared to run back up and call University Housing's emergency line—“There’s a raccoon in my basement. Someone needs to get over here now!”—forecasting a delay because there was always a delay, always a bigger emergency in some other unit, always some irreplaceable member of Housing staff on their first vacation in eight years. They would ask if the animal was contained. Was it away from other people? Was it in amongst her valuables? Could she just lock the basement door and not go down there for an hour? Two hours? She would say: “You need to get over here right now. My ten-year-old son lives here.”
But there was no raccoon, only Rita.
We moved to Storrs, Connecticut, to Plum Hill, unit 411, in late July 1998. My mother was pursuing a PhD in Anthropology, a six-year program at the University of Connecticut. I, her only child, age nine at the time of our arrival, would live there for just one year. The following September, I would leave to attend Aspinwall, a prestigious academy for boys ages ten to eighteen in the Hudson River Valley. My mother told me that, by going, I was giving myself “a real advantage.”
(From episode 37, “The Origins of You”: “People never forget where they come from. But sometimes it can be good to go back, backroads your hometown, your neighborhood, your old stomping grounds, because it’s never exactly what you thought it was. It's always an opportunity to learn something about yourself. You never quite escape the ecosystem you grew up in—the emotional habits you developed, the survival methods.”)
Plum Hill, the housing development for students with children: a single, squarish, sloping, one-way loop of road with three rows of townhouses (pastel blue, vinyl slat siding) and an open field with a playscape on the spare side, the loop meeting itself at a four-way intersection where, if you went straight, you were guided out of the development; if you turned right, you entered a little asphalt spur like a vestigial tail, a cul-de-sac with two more rows of townhouses (these grey); and if you went left, as I and the other children always did on our bikes, you were guided through the loop again, the panting ascent to the hill’s flattened top, the breezy slalom down the far side. A bus stop monitored the intersection. Waiting students watched the playscape: a small structure with two slides, a plastic tunnel that could be crawled through, a metal ladder, a ropey, rubber net ladder, a swing set, and a tire swing which was the unanimously-chosen, vomit-inducing star of the head-bumping, knee-skinning, shrilly-shouting show, where on weekends and evenings I played with the other Plum Hill children. Back of the playscape, the field stretched, wooded on either side, to a chain-link fence that looked in on the next university development, Klassen Lane, consisting of visibly tidier, smaller apartments for the childless. My mother described it as “full of students who actually get their work done.”
(Episode 12, “The Productivity Paradox”: Looking directly into camera two. “Work is a mindset.”)
Plum Hill was nothing like where I’d come from. It was stocked with families from all over the world, all wrangling a better life out of the opportunity provided by the University of Connecticut, the nation’s—in that year’s News & World Report—71st ranked public institution. At any given time, on almost any given day, at any given daylight hour, there were children playing outside, foreign and domestic, scraping across the dead grass, gargling in their many languages. I was encouraged to play with them. “Get out there,” Mom said. She had her degree to work on.
But I could not get out there. It was not so easy. I peeped out at two sprinting children, my eyes just above our wide living room window’s white lip. Mom unpacked a box of books, stacking tomes between the spread legs of her gray slacks.
“Look,” said Mom, “you know how much you love to watch Animal Planet? Think of it like that. We’ll pretend they’re all animals out there, all different species, all totally undocumented. It’s your job to go out there and study them so that we’ll know what they are. You can figure out what they like to do. What they like to eat. Their habits. Alright? Then you can come back and write down what you’ve learned in your notebook and you can tell me about them.”
I can picture myself going out, my gangly arms and sweetly glowing eyes, my inability to not count the steps between any two locations, so that I could figure, on average, the distance between them.
I first befriended a Japanese boy named Masashi. He told me to call him Mark. His new name, a symbol of his intended assimilation, an appreciated gesture. (It is right, I think, for the immigrant to put his hand out first. From episode 39, “An Emotional Journey”: “No community is going to welcome you, if you don’t welcome yourself into it.” Locking eyes with a brown-skinned man in the audience’s front row.) I then met a set of fraternal twins from Ohio named Ashley and Branden. And then Myaing from Myanmar and Joseph from Queens and Bastian and Valentina from Chilé. In my journal, I created little lists of their likes and dislikes. I was studying them.
(A little facsimile of that journal: a few words scribbled on three still stuck-together pink sticky-notes at the dressing-room desk. One name per note. I flip back and forth between them like the words might make a moving image.
Mark. Likes Legos. Does not like it when someone touches his Legos. Likes to swing. Favorite color is blue. Likes the tire swing.
Valentina. Likes Disney movies. Likes Pixar movies. Likes tv shows. Likes frozen yogurt sticks. Favorite color is pink. Does not like the color blue. Does not like being told that she only likes things because they are girl things. Likes the tire swing. Likes kickball.
Branden. Favorite color is yellow. Likes tetherball. Likes grilled cheese sandwiches. Likes mustard. Likes flowers. Dislikes when the tetherball gets too high and cannot reach it because he is short. Dislikes the tire swing. Dislikes being told that he is short.)
These other kids, these other species, began coming to my house, ringing the doorbell and calling my name, knocking on the screen door with the busted pneumatic closer, rattling it in its frame. We’d play tag or tetherball or try to make one another vomit on the tire swing. We rocketed around the neighborhood on our bikes. That winter, we would mash snow down the napes of one-another’s snowsuits until the skin on our necks became numb and fingers of freshly melted water crept down our backs. Only thunderstorms sent us scurrying indoors.
Eyeing a dark mid-August cloud, Mark suggested we play in his room.
“Only after I meet his parents,” Mom said when I asked.
She went right over, rang the doorbell, and retreated back down from the stoop to wait on the front walk, hands clasped behind her, standing back so as to not be “right in their faces” when they answered. This was a peeve of hers: people who stood too close when you answered the door, as though at any moment they might try to push past you.
“One day, they might,” she warned me.
She found Mark’s parents pleasant and welcoming. I started going over to his house. We played with his Legos, or, more often, I helped him conceptualize new Lego creations via pen and graphing paper, Mark being leery about letting anyone touch his prized collection. I smelled the strange foreign scents of his family’s food, scents thicker than the scents of my Mom’s cooking. (Episode 15, “Attraction”: “The suggestion of ethnic food is a wonderful and low-stakes way to show a potential mate that one is open to adventure.”)
After finishing her work, Mom often bowed to the tidal pull to be in my vicinity and would come out with a mug of tea—one of the many branded mugs from various events her catering company had worked in her past life—and stand on the edge of the playscape inhaling the steam and watching us. I learned to evince embarrassment around her. “Ugh, here comes my Mom.” Her ambling approach always lodged a sticky lump of warm well-being in my chest.
Entering 4th grade, I was one of the big kids. A dominant force, at least, on the playscape; at least, as determined by my age. I in no way thought of myself as such, but this was my first introduction to the world’s many hierarchies, and it was a soft landing, in retrospect, arriving at the top.
So: one of the “big kids.” “Big kids” climbing the playscape slide, shoe soles suckered to the sunbaked plastic. “Big kids” playing “knights” with sticks scoured from the field’s edge. “Big kids” daring one another to scale the fence facing the next development. “Big kids” who needed to be reminded to watch out for cars. “Big kids” boarding busses to school, where, being in 4th grade, we were the oldest class (the move to Middle School looming but, a year away, insubstantial). “Big kids” at the precise age where parents find themselves stopping to say “How did you get so big?” or “How big you are!” because we are only just big, have only been big for a minute. “You were small yesterday,” Mom says. “Big kids” bringing home sheets of equations. “Big kids” big enough to be left in the car with the window cracked— “but don’t open the door for anyone”—while Mom runs into the supermarket for olive oil and a butternut squash. “Big kids” pulling other “big kids” to the ground. Pushing and tugging. “Big kids” at other “big kids’” houses. "Big kids" wincing away from the hydrogen peroxide sizzling on a scuffed knee. A mother’s wet thumb erodes a streak of dirt on the edge of one’s mouth, distending the skin, stretched freckles going oblong. Home-bound mothers (frankly uneducated—mothers intellectually ineligible for any real connection with my own parent, I knew) hold toddler hands and indicate the big ruckus of our bodies saying, “Watch out for the big kids.”
(Episode 87, “The Generation Gap”: “Are there any parents in the audience today?” Peering out past the studio lights. “Let’s have a show of hands. Alright. Keep your hands up if you’re worried about your children—worried about their well-being: their safety, their development. No hands down? I thought not. Parents, now, are more worried about their children than they’ve ever been.”)
“What have we learned today?” Mom would ask.
“About which animal?” I would answer.
(Episode 7, “Gamification”: “It doesn’t matter how silly it sounds. It’s about getting what you need. Say you’ve got an overbearing father. Give yourself five points every time you reject a phone call from him. When you get to one hundred points: you win. What have you won? Space. Every animal needs its territory. Yes: territory. And yes, I know, you’re all picturing a wolf peeing on a tree. Am I right?” Low laughter from the audience, murmured assent. “Well, fine. So am I. But here’s the question: when was the last time you demanded your own space so boldly?”)
A happy little gang, confident in our ownership of Plum Hill’s little distractions.
Which is all to say that our collective reticence around Rita was something of an anomaly. I estimate Rita’s age, in the time I knew her, as seven or eight. She was short, with sly eyes and ugly knees. She was homeschooled. Her English consisted only of simple affirmatives and negatives like “No” and “Yes”—deeply flavored by her Portuguese accent—and used only when a nod or shake of the head would not do. “Yes,” may’ve been her only English word, considering, as my mother noted, that “‘No’ is ‘No’ everywhere.”
And here’s the thing: all of us were dirty, quite a number of us were foreign. Many were just beginning to learn English. But there was a sense that the earthy streaks smudging Rita's cheeks and forehead were different from the ones coloring our faces: something old about them, ancient, as though they were as they’d been yesterday, the day before that, that she’d been born with them. (A recollection, an interjection: didn’t I see her mother rubbing her face with a wet-wipe once? Weren’t her cheeks a harried pink when she first arrived on-scene each day? And her clothes were always clean. Her black hair brushed. Are the remembered smudges on her forehead and cheeks just memory’s manifestation of anticipated tragedy? Memory is not honest. Do I want it to be?)
She’d arrived just before me, in June, according to Mark.
By September, I was fully folded into the pack. She was still different though, abnormal, operating on the fringe.
(I tell my patients—my many patients, all across America—“Never mistake life for art. Life is unexpected. You never know what’s coming. Never anticipate. When you anticipate, you are anticipating a narrative. When you react, what you are reacting to is life, real life.” [Episode 41, “The Stories We Tell.”]
“Real love is loving the real,” I tell them. A mantra. I repeat it over and over again.
I tell them I learned this lesson when I was little, a little boy with those sneakers with the lights implanted in their opaque soles that light up blue when you walk like the flickering carapaces of aloft lightning bugs. A little boy who at one time fancied himself something of a poet, although I didn’t write poems very often and had only ever read the poetic stylings of Shel Silverstein and a bit of Wallace Stevens, and the latter only because I’d opened a poetry collection of his at the public library one day—the book interjecting itself into my newly literate aimlessness by jutting slightly off its shelf as though repelled by the books on either side—and saw a poem entitled A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts which struck me as a title for a children’s poem. It turned out otherwise. It disturbed me with its image of a “humped-up rabbit,” which I imagined as a deformed, Quasimodo-ish mammal, a bunny banished for being so huge and so ugly and with two different colored eyes: one red and one green. It upset me, not fitting into the paradigm of the nature shows I watched, which made everything seem intelligible, everything fundamentally predictable, organized in a schema of behaviors and desires.
I don’t tell my audience all of this of course. But, sometimes, I forget how much I did tell them. Where did I start? Where did I stop?
I go back and watch the recordings. Every time, I re-realize what I look like, how my body moves.
Every time, I am surprised when I see the title card. A Deeper Understanding with…with me.
“I always say,” I always say, “that we’re the most complicated animals. But we’re still animals. We can still, if we are very perceptive, if we are very curious, understand ourselves.” [Episode 1, “Understanding Ourselves.”]
I toyed with the idea of being a poet at boarding school, at Aspinwall. I scratched a few lines of verse in my textbook margin. I told a friend I’d started writing poetry. But I was only a poet for a moment, a few weeks even. And then, already the bad spouse, I deserted.)
“Rita,” she said, moving into the basement.
Rita stood, the electric train at her feet, the little light in its front flickering. The anthropology student stepped toward Rita, approaching as one might approach a wild animal, a single hand outstretched. “Rita,” she said, “how long have you been down here?”
Rita did not speak.
A footfall sounded on the steps. Swiveling, startled, she saw her son.
“What’s she doing down here?” the boy said.
“Go back up to bed.”
“What’s she doing here?” he repeated. She noticed, he would not say Rita’s name.
The girl stood static at the center of the space, spotlit by the naked bulb above her, seemingly transfixed by the situation she’d engineered.
“Rita,” she said, “how long have you been down here?”
Rita shook her head as though she did not know, or it did not matter.
“I was down here,” the mother said, “just before I went to bed. I didn’t see you. Were you here then?”
Rita shook her head.
“Do your parents know you’re here?”
Again: no.
The mother, the anthropology student, reached up and put her head between her hands, the palms cupping either cheek, the neck tense. It looked as though she were holding her head in place, as though she’d just caught it like a bumped vase trembling on a sideboard’s lip. Her grey-streaked, straight hair was jagged along the collar of her checkered pajama top. She stood there, sandwiching her face between her hands, considering. Warring impulses within her. On the one hand: this child, she must get it out of the house. On the other hand: her son, snapped off from sleep, she must get him back to bed.
“Go to your room,” she said to her son.
She heard the creak of the boy retreating a few steps. But he didn’t leave, went up only so far as to be hidden behind the hot water heater. She could’ve gone and given him one of her stares and said, “Go,” but she didn’t. She didn’t want to turn away from Rita.
“I’ve got to take you home, Rita,” she said.
“I want to live here,” said Rita.
“You can’t Rita,” she said. “You can’t live here. I’m not your mother.”
“I want to live here,” Rita repeated. The girl wore fleecy purple pajamas with pink polka-dots. The elastic of the pants had gone slightly slack and sagged around her hips, giving her a heavy look, overstating her. Her arms dangled at her sides.
“You can’t.”
Rita stared at her.
“You can’t,” she repeated. And then, “Rita, did your parents do something to you?”
Rita shook her head. She could not say— or wouldn’t. Finally, again, “I want to live here.”
That phrase: she must’ve taught it to herself. The anthropology student could picture her practicing it in the bathroom mirror, watching how the English looked on her lips, white skin sweating and waxy in the light. “I want to live here.” The tap at the end of “want,” the sizzle of “live.”
The anthropology student looked at Rita, looked past Rita, noticed a blue bin with its popped-off top tipped against it in the corner, the storage container for toys her son no longer played with, a collection she’d been threatening to donate whole hog for years. (“I need you to go down there and sort those old toys. Create two piles: toys I want and toys I don’t want.” And her son’s rejoinder: “But what if I don’t want a toy that I’ll want later?”) Rita had gone through the small stash of belongings squirreled away down here: the toy bin, the winter clothes, the box of old picture books—Where the Wild Things Are, The Poky Little Puppy, The Important Book. (She recalls holding her infant son in her lap, the book propped beside them, her careful finger drawing lines between words and images. This is that. This is that.)
“Let’s get you home, Rita.”
Rita shook her head.
“Rita.” She was using a tone, forceful, one her son feared, “Rita, you need to go home.”
She approached Rita slowly, emerging into her son’s view from behind the water heater, visible between the steps’ slats. Again, she subconsciously mimicked the hosts on those Animal Planet shows her son watched: tan men and women in khaki safari outfits who would engage dangerous creatures with great care, making no sudden movements, speaking in low public-radio voices to the cameras that tracked their progress. “This snake is responsible for more deaths per year than any other venomous animal.” “The Hippopotamus is highly territorial and capricious.” “By my posture, I am showing the gorilla that I pose no threat.” “The tiger is the largest of the big cats.” “That monument of cat.”
She picked up Rita’s hand from where it dangled at her side, limp, a soft and weirdly-formed ornament. Rita’s dry palm sopped the slight dampness of her own sweating fingers. She walked Rita to the bottom of the basement steps and looked up at her son sitting there, waiting for her. He stood, went jogging up ahead of them. The clock hanging above the shoe shelf in the living room read 1:45am.
“Go on up to bed.” She pointed upstairs, as though her son did not know where bed was. But this was a night to be clear. To act with clarity. Everything would be well thought out. Done with great intention.
“I’m going to take Rita home,” she said.
Rita was always running, always sprinting around the field, around the border of the playscape’s wood-chip stage, around the other children—always running or ready to run. She wore a determined expression. It suggested that she was running towards something, that there was something she needed to do, or somewhere she needed to go, although she wasn’t going anywhere.
There was only one game she took part in: tag. We quickly came to dislike playing it with her. Each and every one of us—though we never discussed it—dreaded her inevitable tenure as “it.” When she was “it”, when she was coming after you, you became the living correlate to that determined expression winching her lips together, flaring her nostrils, cutting her eyes down to dark brown beads. She was small and her big feet flapped out ahead of her. Not fast so much as determined. She just kept on coming, interminable, ceaseless, not one of those frenetic “it”-types, an “it” always veering off to chase someone new, rendered witless by excitement, thinking this or that target will be slower than the last, giving the previous quarry a chance to rest. No. She picked someone and went after them. (I recall her watching a program on National Geographic on the Canadian Tundra. It shows a pack of wolves hunting down a caribou over the course of a forty-mile chase.) Sometimes, I would simply allow her to catch me, just to get it over with. I would simply run a little slower, let the gap dissolve a little faster, lean in, albeit flinchingly, to the moment of her hand on my back or elbow, a little grabbing hand that never just touched, that snagged, that pinched fabric and pink skin between scallopy nails. (Though no, her nails were nice. I saw her mother clipping them on the porch one night, humming as she did so, throwing the clippings in the grass.)
She had no real friends. We rarely saw her parents. A rumor went around that her mother had given birth shortly before their arrival at Plum Hill, though the infant was never seen (at least not by me) and the mother never seemed to leave, an invisible circle circumscribed around their home by who knew what force. Her father was yet another grey-faced foreign graduate student going off to classes or to teach or perform research every morning—I assume. Did I see him? I must’ve. But I didn’t know who he was. They were Portuguese, as I've said. That’s what my Mom thought, at least. That’s what she told me. She might as well have told me that they were Nigerian or Russian. She might’ve said, “They’re disgusting,” and that, to me, would’ve been where they were from. They were mysterious to me. They were frightening.
(Episode 13, “Knowing and Being Known”: Here is an activity, an exercise in empathy, in knowing the other, a tactic for de-escalation, which I want to prescribe to you. It's for when you notice that an argument is starting—an argument with your spouse or partner or friend or co-worker or even your child—when an argument is starting, recognize it, acknowledge it, say, ‘I see we’re starting to have an argument.’ Now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to propose that you each try to argue the others side. It takes humility to do this. A genuine interest in understanding. You have to really argue their case to them, and they have to argue your case to you. It’s always a surprise what doing this will reveal. Maybe there’s something you hadn’t thought of. Maybe hearing your side spoken back to you will reveal something about what you wanted that you hadn’t understood. What you’ll realize, is that the motivation of the other person—your spouse or partner or friend or co-worker or even your child—isn’t so inscrutable, isn’t so mysterious. It makes perfect sense. A perspective is never just a perspective. It is embodied. It is a lived coherence.”)
My Mom was the one person Rita formed an attachment to. I never knew how it happened.
I think it must’ve been the case that my mother came out one day, not long after we’d moved in—sipping black tea from her 1993 Boston Machine Parts Expo mug (an event she’d catered), eyes slightly unfocused from so much reading and writing—and, in a moment of extreme academic bleariness, accidentally showed Rita more than the modicum of decency neighborhood parents usually afforded to children not their own, dooming herself to Rita’s affection.
(Episode 2, “Basic Needs”: “We are animals. We want what all animals want.”)
Thereafter, whenever Rita saw my mother emerge from unit 41—guiding the screen door closed so it would not slam, assessing the neighborhood from the vantage of our stoop—she flew in her direction, sprinting across the road, indifferent to oncoming vehicles. My mother, seeing her, would say in a sort of defeated tone, “Oh, Rita,” and Rita would wrap herself around my mother’s leg and bury her face against my mother’s thigh. Mom would disentangle the girl and guide her back across the street—careful to look both ways, saying, “Rita, look at me looking both ways”—and settle herself onto one of the benches facing the playscape. “Ugh, my mother,” I would whisper to Mark or Ashley or Myaing or Valentina.
Rita would return to my mother at intervals, demanding affection, grabbing her legs or climbing up onto the bench and trying to insert herself onto my mother’s lap. Mom fended off these advances with something like good humor and something else like genuine annoyance and a third thing that might’ve been anxiety. If another parent was on-hand, I would see her whispering to them—in those moments when Rita was not trying to swarm her—and I think she must’ve been saying that that child over there, yes, that one, the one running around like she just hit a beehive with a stick, the one not playing with the others, “has developed a strange affection for me and I don’t know what I did.”
It took a month for my mother to open up to me about Rita. It was only near the end of August, as I was preparing to start fourth grade, my application to Aspinwall still in the future—a grueling process which would probably come to nothing, which would certainly come to nothing, as Mom reminded me repeatedly, after all, only one child, once every two years, was selected for Aspinwall’s Edgar Aspinwall scholarship, the full ride that would be my only ride if I were to ride at all, considering the cost of tuition, room and board, associated fees—so that I fully expected rejection, was primed for it, and, anyway, what was Aspinwall to me?— nothing!— a building full of rich waspy boys ages ten to eighteen somewhere off in the Hudson River Valley, a place I’d never been, with lawns sporting palm trees for all I knew, with white sand beaches where the boys might drink out of coconuts after rolling up the black legs of their pleated uniform pants to give their pale calves a taste of sun, (in reality, some boys were given “sun lamps” by their parents, fearing seasonal depression), and so it meant very little to me, initially, that single sheet of paper in its white envelope with its four stinger-sharp corners and my name at the center, which said that they were sorry to report that I had not been accepted for the scholarship, that there had been many, too many, a plethora of highly-qualified ten-year-old applicants with such a range of talents and personalities that it beggared the imagination, so many quality applicants that the prospect of choosing just one, for the selection committee, had been a process bordering on impossible, that they’d only chosen because it was the right thing to do, they had to choose, their contract insisted that they do so, and, well, they hadn’t picked me, and I felt nothing because I’d been told that this was impossible, that the essay and the good grades and the two interviews had all meant nothing and that this was nothing and I would not (thank Christ!) be going away from my mom…
None of that existed yet.
It was the end of summer, almost. I was starting school next week. I was starting 4th grade at J. Edwin Jordan Elementary School in Storrs, CT. We’d only been here for a month. My mother was sick of this child clinging to her. She needed to tell someone. Who did she talk to about her life? Only me.
(Episode 38, “The Happiness Paradox”: “I’m here for you.” Looking at the audience, from face to face. Picking out faces. Locking eyes. Lingering. Moving on. “I want you to write to me. Tell me if what we’ve talked about today has been helpful for you. I’m not just saying this. I know you might be thinking, ‘he has to say that’ but I don’t. I really don’t. The producers wish I wouldn’t.” Big smiles in the front row. “I’m missing production meetings because I’m responding to your letters.”)
“I worry,” Mom said.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“I think Rita doesn’t get any affection at home,” she said, “and so, you know, who am I to not give her any?”
“But on the other hand,” she said, “I would never want anyone to think that I was actively seeking it out. What if her parents were to see her wrapped around my leg? What would they think?”
I did not know what to say to this. I had no advice to give. Up in my room, I had a notebook filled with the likes and dislikes of all the neighborhood children. Each entry started with the word “species” and a colon and then the child’s name. In Rita’s entry I’d written, Likes running. I do not like Rita. What advice could I offer her? She was highly educated. She’d divorced a bad husband. She was raising a child. She drove and sometimes totaled cars. She kept a copy of a special National Geographic issue on the subject of volcanoes on her bedside table, which she said she found cosmically reassuring.
“Don’t tell anyone what I’m telling you now,” Mom said.
I had a mouth stuffed with pizza. It was make-your-own pizza night in our house, except the only topping we had was cheese.
Mom had said, “But you get to decide how much cheese you want!”
She’d said, “That’s too much.”
She waited in silence for me to respond.
“I won’t say anything,” I said, “to anyone.”
After dinner, we watched TV.
We watched two things together: Animal Planet and National Geographic specials. Mom owned VHS box sets of the latter, documentaries grouped together by shared thematic content (such that, for example, the special on wildlife in south Pacific Islands appeared in both the “Tropics” box set and the set on “Volcanoes”) and gifted to her year-after-year by her older sister—who would host me during Aspinwall’s long summer breaks—and who’d run out of gift ideas for her studious little sibling. My mother believed that nothing in those shows could possibly be inappropriate for a child because it was all “nature,” “the real world.” I buried my fear in those moments when the cameras caught, say, a cheetah tackling an impala or a white shark bullying a seal’s body from below. Right at the moment of its doom, the prey would sometimes look around for just a moment, look its killer in the face. This moment haunted me. I could not stop thinking about it. It became many hours alone in the darkness of my bedroom, where warm air came trickling up from the basement.
The anthropology student peered down into the sleeping September basin of Plum Hill’s home-stuffed belly, Rita’s hand tight in her fist. The road flowed down the hill, looping to the stop where she caught the bus to campus, where the school bus picked up her son at 6:45am. An open slope of grassy hill occupied the circle’s center, with a couple of short, young trees and two wooden picnic tables chained to concrete blocks buried in the ground, the tables grown crooked from their angled life. To her right, in the black field’s open swathe, street lamp light ribboned on the playscape’s metal bars. Beyond that: dim lights from the neighboring development.
She pushed Rita in front of her, got her moving. She fought the urge to break into a jog. “Shhhh, Rita,” she said, though Rita had not spoken. “No talking, just walking.” Desk lamps were on in the upper stories of a handful of homes, muted by closed shutters or the prettier window shades tenants sometimes installed. Her son, getting up at this time to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, often discovered the light on in her bedroom, her at her desk, glaring down at a book or her computer screen, a cup of tea beside her, the still steeping teabag cooking the water to a bitingly bitter flavor that kept her awake. Its taste clenched her neck, made her gut tighten like lust. Drink too much and she’d be over the toilet, retching. Then back to work.
The row of houses—her row—ended. The road bent around the side of the hill and swooped down. The homes in this row, Rita’s row, were built into the slope, each lower than the one before, their roofs like a giant staircase. She could not remember the house number. In daylight, she felt sure she could’ve picked it out, having seen (with dread) the little girl come sprinting down the steps so many times. Darkness made the scene unfamiliar. They walked, her splayed hand across the girl’s back, bridging her shoulder blades, pushing her forward. In front of unit 306—ah-ha!—Rita’s stride stuttered, her foot catching on the air.
“This is you?”
Rita looked at the big white-painted number on the unit’s blue siding. The anthropology student looked around. No one, she felt sure, had seen them.
“Come,” she said. “No talking, just walking.”
She pushed Rita forward, to the end of the row, off the sidewalk, onto the grass, around the end of the last building. They looked up the backs of the homes, up along a long thin sloping lawn broken up by the little concrete patios that belonged to each unit. The space between the patios and the forest opposite was only about four meters wide. On Wednesdays, for much of the year, large riding mowers came through and guzzled up excess grass. The men riding them could look through the back windows and right into peoples’ homes. Some tenants closed their blinds. Some, like her, did not care if the men were looking in. “Wave,” she would prompt her son if he was playing on the carpet, and she too would wave to the man on the lawn mower with his thick black boots and insectoid goggles and he would see or not see and wave or not wave back.
They walked up the darkened row, to the rear of Rita’s unit.
“How did you get into my house?” she whispered, pointing at the homes.
Rita pointed at a window.
No one locked their windows. Why would they? Who was going to break in, another student? There were too many people around and they all knew each-other and no one owned very much.
“Is your window open?” She mimed the act of opening it: grabbing a sill, pulling up.
Rita nodded.
They came to Rita’s unit—she’d been counting the back doors to be sure—and peered through the window.
“I’m going to open the window and put you in,” she said.
Rita shook her head.
“Yes,” she said, “I am.”
Rita shook her head again. “No.”
“You have to go home, Rita,” she said.
Rita looked at her.
She knelt down beside Rita, the knees of her pajama pants becoming wet in the grass, and said…
…something…said something. The connection severs. My mother becomes inscrutable to me, a mystery. What I now saw, I saw because after my mother told me to go back to bed I went up and stood on the 2nd floor landing, listening; saw because I heard my mother grunting into her tight boots, her low voice asking Rita if she’d worn a coat, her hand guiding the screen door closed as they went out because it slammed shut if you did not and I did not hear it slam; saw because I went back down, pulled my black windbreaker out of the entryway closet, slipped it on over my pajamas, pulled on my sneakers, and followed them out, careful also to control the screen door as it closed behind me; saw because I followed them, hunching low, staying way back, even heard my mother say, “no talking, just walking”—the mantra of night (often, we’ll conceptualize an episode by boiling it down to a mantra: “Just sleep on it.” “Your body knows better than you.” “Happiness is a habit.”); saw because I was peeking around the corner of the unit at the end of the row; what I now saw was my mother kneeling, saying something to Rita, and Rita saying something back, something that she, the anthropology student, considered, staring at Rita’s home. She nodded.
Turning, she pushed the window open, put a hand on either side of the frame, and, reaching up, grasping the frame with both hands, pulling herself into Rita’s home.
“What are you doing?” I wanted to shout.
From within the open window, two arms extended, my mother’s arms. Rita reached up, was lifted in.
(What motivated this? Was my mother so caught up in the project of not being perceived as having any sort of special relationship with Rita that she’d chosen to return the girl in a manner that would look all the more suspicious if the two of them were discovered? —that would maximize the sense of their being in some sort of highly inappropriate relationship? Only later did it occur to me that this whole production might’ve been for Rita’s sake, that she did not want Rita to incur her parent’s punishment, whatever that might be. And then, still later, after Rita’s death, after Plum Hill, after Aspinwall, I realized—a revelation built up over years, a metastasizing insight that cannibalizes memory—that my mother’s motivation is always going to be unknown. It is something that I still, despite it all, despite my career, despite all these people telling me how well I know them, how there is no such thing as a stranger to a mind like mine, something I still don’t know. It is something of her fundamental, unknowable essence—which I was never given the chance to know, having lost her so long ago, having only known her with the flawed insight of a child's mind.)
When Rita died, I would ask my mother, “How did she die?”
“I don’t know,” Mom would say. “I really don’t.”
I wouldn’t believe her. “You are an adult,” I wanted to say. “You are my mother. You study people for a living. That is what you do. You know. I am certain you know.”
Staring down the grassy lane back of the townhouses, hands pressed slick to dewy blue siding, I feared Rita would never give her back.
I stayed there for I don’t know how long.
Then, impelled by a building pressure inside of me, I began to slink closer, pressing myself against the building. I dashed past a back door, then a window. Another door, another window. Again and again and again. And then: the open window. My hands on the lip. My eyes lifting to peek in. I saw nothing. Just a living room, the lumped-up curves of furniture swooping in and out of perceptibility. Had she gone upstairs? Had they gone to Rita’s basement? I lowered my head and thought for a moment, then lifted it again.
I lifted it and my Mom was there. Startled, she gave a short scream, just a yelp. She threw herself out the window, all in one motion, right over my head. Landed hard on the grass.
“Mom,” I said.
She stood. She said, “Run.”
Rita died eight months later, in May. Her family moved out soon after.
I remember seeing them, the parents, packing boxes into a van. You could not look at them without thinking of their loss. They were colored by it. If we, the other children, were clambering up the slide, were trying to spin Brandon past the point of nausea on the tire swing, were playing the neutered variation of dodgeball we’d invented with the tetherball (a shot of the tetherball ricocheting off of Rita’s pink fist, manicured fingers bunched, camera #2 taking it all in), if we were admiring one of Mark’s LEGO creations—him holding it with great care, reminding us not touch, never taking it out further than his front stoop—and we saw one of Rita’s parents pass, we would feel her death as one of our number, mingling among us.
They needed to move out. If, say, they had lost their daughter and then done nothing, had just kept on going, what would we have thought of them?
(My viewers will tell you that I extoll the benefits of a clean break. Episode 18, “Beginnings and Endings”: “We live in a society that’s quite scared of endings. Think about our obsession with TV shows. We want things to go on and on. But sometimes an ending is the only thing we have left.”
Here’s a challenge: lose a child and then keep being yourself, keep being who you were or thought you were. You see? You can’t. I’m not happy about being right.
Episode 22, “Hierarchies”: “I wish it were otherwise. The truth doesn’t make me feel good either.”)
So: Rita’s family—the mother, the father, the baby that I must’ve seen before but can’t remember until that moment, as they loaded it into the car—they all left.
On a hot, late-May day like midsummer, we, the “big kids,” gathered on the cool wood chips beneath the playscape’s platforms where on other days we traded Pokémon cards or picked scabs of chipping paint off the structures struts or lay on our backs or watched those who had Game Boys play them. We conferred over the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rita’s death.
Valentina opined that Rita’s parents poisoned her. According to Brandon, she’d accidentally decapitated herself. We couldn’t prove him wrong. We hadn’t seen the body. Not even a figure, hidden by a sheet, being put into a van.
“I don’t think it was an accident,” said Mark. “If it was an accident they would’ve said.”
(None of the “big kids” ever considered suicide in Rita’s case—at least, not out loud. We were at an age when things happen to you, not because of you. You do what your friends are doing. Your friends are your friends because they are there. You live where you live because your parents wanted to. Five days a week, you get on a bus that takes you to school.
We did an episode on suicide. Episode 41, “Trials.” The mantra was “just make it to tomorrow.” We showed a montage of suicide survivors telling about the suicides they’d survived: why they’d attempted suicide, how they’d survived it, why they were so utterly and endlessly grateful to have survived. We commissioned piano music to be played during the montage. When the suicide survivors started talking about all the wonderful things that had happened to them since they hadn’t died, the music switched from a minor to a major key.
There was a suicide at Aspinwall. This was three years before I got there. He did it by taking a lot of painkillers and then finding a place where nobody would find his body until it was too late. He stowed his living body away in anticipation of it becoming just another object. One of the older boys told me about it. “He was a legacy. His parents said that he had to go,” he said. “Some kids just don’t adapt.”)
“A murder!” I said. “If it was a murder then someone did it.”
“Duh!” said Valentina.
“Who are the suspects?” said Myang.
“Wait here,” I said.
I ran and got my notebook, full of the notes I’d made on everyone in the neighborhood. Approaching the group, I held it aloft in one hand and shouted, “A list of suspects,” and my voice reverberated off the fronts of the homes at the bottom of the hill.
(Episode 12, “The Productivity Paradox”: “Try to always know exactly what you are doing. What you want to accomplish. How doing this—whatever this is—gets you closer to that goal. It’s harder than it seems.”)
“A list,” I repeated. I flopped the notebook onto the wood chips and said, “We’re all in there.”
“All?” said Valentina.
“I’m fine with people touching my Legos,” said Mark, reading the entry under his name, “I let you touch them all the time.”
“What is this?” said Julia. “Why does it say ‘species?’ How long have you had this for?”
A blunder, I now see. A blunder. No other word for it. They demanded an explanation and I could not bring myself to say that this had been the answer to my own initial shyness almost a year prior, a game my mother invented to help me make friends because I could not make friends if making friends was my goal at the outset, because I could only sidle up to this little community sidelong, as though I weren’t here to make friends at all, as though any friendships made were circumstantial, a remainder, the by-product of a larger, more important task. (I am reminded of how a certain group of boys at Aspinwall found a tube of women’s lipstick lying on the side of the road and began putting it on and kissing one another, tried to rope me into kissing them too, arguing that we weren’t really boys kissing boys but boys kissing lipstick, as though the lipstick itself were some sort of barrier of femininity, a shield against the situation’s physical facts.) So I tried to explain the notebook by telling my friends about Animal Planet and National Geographic. They said, “Why do you have this?,” and I said that there were certain brightly colored birds living on tropical islands and that they would make little stages for themselves out of twigs and dance for one another and they were called birds of paradise and then I looked at them, the others, the “big kids,” all those species, like this was all the answer they needed, and they told me that there was something wrong with me.
“There’s something wrong with you,” said Valentina.
I ran behind my house and sat in the grass with the stalks threading across my ankles. A daddy long-legs placed a tentative black leg on the edge of my notebook, and I said to myself that if they weren’t interested in solving the murder with me, then I would solve it alone.
(My mother, from my childhood: “It’s important to be action-oriented. To pursue your goals.)
So, I would solve the murder, I decided, sitting in the grass behind my home.
What, then, was the first thing to do? The first thing was to look for clues. The place to do that, as far as I knew, was Rita’s old home.
I tumbled through the open window of Rita’s former home, the same window my mother used almost nine months prior.
The living room’s dimness cast a blue-grey tint over everything. It did not occur to me to turn on the large, overheard light, not out of some respect for the home’s solemnitude, the tragedy that had occurred here, but because we never used that light in our own unit. Mom thought it too bright, too white, like office lighting. We used lamps instead.
The abandoned furniture waited for its old owners to move once more amongst it—hands thoughtlessly brushing bookshelves, bodies lowering into chairs, cups tapping onto the coffee table. I picked a heavy bookend off the sideboard. It depicted a little naked man pushing a large, upright flat black slab. He pressed with both hands, his black back arched, looking down between his arms. His shoulders bulged and flexed, showing sinews, veiny muscle.
I went upstairs. On the landing, I oriented myself in the darkness, the ceiling light off, the doors to the bedrooms closed. This floor plan was my floor plan, as it was Mark’s and Valentina’s and Ashley’s. I went into the larger of the two bedrooms first, my mother’s bedroom’s correlate. A king-sized bed with a mattress on it but no sheets. An old dresser—probably something second-hand they’d acquired—with the image of a fruit bowl absurdly inlaid into the center of the uppermost drawer, the handles all carved to resemble cross-sections of what might’ve been any type of citrus fruit. The closet was empty, as was the bookcase sitting beside a little white desk in one corner of the room.
Across the hall, I found another, smaller bed, also stripped of sheets and blankets and another empty dresser, this one white with little pink accents along the edges of the drawers, the swooping curves of its base, and the deadpan lip of its top. In the closet, I left a box full of dolls untouched.
I went downstairs again. Looking over at the open window, it occurred to me that at this moment nobody knew where I was. It gave me for the first time a real sense of having broken in, of having invaded this home.
I opened the basement door and saw that the space down there was about as dim as the living room had been, lit by the same four small, high, thin windows that let light into my own basement. Halfway down, I turned and peered through the gaps between the steps. I saw straight to the back wall, saw the white washer and dryer waiting for the next tenants. I came down off the staircase, around the end of the water heater that was my water heater that had hidden my mother from view as she tried to talk to Rita. If there’d been anything down here, they’d packed it up and taken it. I stood for a moment, standing where my mother had stood that night. I went over to the light-switch, turned it on, and stood underneath the naked bulb at the center of the room, where Rita had stood. I stared at the opposite wall and imagined my mother standing there, crouching slightly, one tentative hand half-outstretched in my direction because she doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. She who knew me better than anyone. Finally, I am a mystery to her. We don’t know one another. That’s how it is now.
In June, I got another letter from Aspinwall. The scholarship I’d applied for, which had been given to another child, had become available again. “…has been vacated…” the letter read. I was the next name on the list. There was a place for me, if I wanted it.
“Wow,” said my mother, squinting down at the letter as though it were something very bright.
I would leave in August, 1999. In November, I would get the news: my mother had died. An aneurysm, of all things, a freak occurrence—not at all the car accident that her sister had been warning her about, which she said she’d thought would be the thing to get her, “if something ever did get her,” when I went to stay with her the following summer.
When I found out, I stopped eating and drinking. I was found collapsed in my room. Of course, the school would not let nature take its course. I was taken to the hospital. I was re-hydrated. I was fed nutrients through a tube in my arm.
There was a suicide at Aspinwall. This was three years before I got there. He did it by taking a lot of painkillers and then finding a place where nobody would find his body until it was too late. He stowed his living body away in anticipation of it becoming just another object. One of the older boys told me about it. “He was a legacy. His parents said that he had to go,” he said. “Some kids just don’t see what an opportunity this is.”
From my book, the one that made me famous, the one that got me my own show:
What I offer is a ritual of leaving. A ritual for a family that has lost a child.
In the night, people from the village or town or city come to the family’s door and break it down. The family—mother, father, other children if there are any—are roused. They are grabbed and hauled into vehicles and taken to the town border. On their way, they plead and wail. Perhaps the vehicles take the family on a last tour of meaningful locations in their lives—the school their dead child attended, their church, the supermarket. Finally, the family are deposited just on the opposite side of the village / town / city border. They are no longer welcome. They must make their way elsewhere. Their belongings are sent along after them, the community packing up the empty home. Their former friends weep at the border, watching them go.
The family has suffered a rupture. Something has broken in their lives, broken beyond repair. So the town answers with another rupture. An echo. The response to the call that was the death of the child. And also—not an invitation, per se—but a needed insistence: you must move on. You must make a new life.
A reminder that the task that we were placed on earth to do is survive.
“Run,” my mom said.
“Run,” she repeated, the two of us flopped over atop one another in the wet grass outside Rita’s window in the middle of the night in September in 1998 in Plum Hill in Storrs, Connecticut.
(Episode 4, “Growing Up”: Speaking directly to a child in the front row. “It might seem complicated, but it can all be explained.”)
“Run,” she said a third time. And we ran home.
We’d gone to bed that night, hours earlier, as we’d gone to bed on any other night. We ate skillet quesadillas with scabs of burned brown-black cheddar cresting off the soft tortilla edges, dipping them in little puddles of Stop & Shop-brand chunky mild salsa. I’d gone upstairs and brushed with prescription high-fluoride toothpaste. According to the dentist, I needed to brush for two and half minutes, morning and night. After brushing I could not drink or eat for thirty minutes. It wasn’t so bad at night because I could just brush and go to sleep, but in the morning, after breakfast, it was something of a trial. The thick pink toothpaste tasted of marshmallow and sapped moisture from my mouth. Mom stopped sending a water-bottle with me on the school bus because the temptation was too much otherwise. My tacky tongue clacked as I spoke to other kids. The University of Connecticut provided dental coverage to graduate students—routine cleanings and one set of x-rays per year—as part of their standard healthcare. We hadn’t had dental care before. It was all a part of the life that her education was giving us. “We’re moving up,” she’d told me on the drive, all our belongings packed into the trunk, and I was confused because we were driving south.
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