“Let’s make a picture, Byron.” Balloon head floated down. “Draw a picture of your family. Here’s some paper. Want to pick out a crayon?”
She pushed him like a stroller. There was a yellow table. She smiles, but her voice frowns. He stood still. The crayon box was right in front. He looked at the balloon head.
Smile. “Pick out any color.”
“Draw!” he shouted. “Draw!” he shouted again. His voice came out like water from a faucet. Whoosh! He picked up a red crayon and danced it across. Broken red. Big X. “There!” he said, and pushed the paper, pushed the box, sliding off the table. “There!” he said.
The balloon head bobbed, up and down, no smile anymore. Just the frown.
“Where’s my mommy?” he asked. Balloon head was no fun.
THE DOOR closed. Night. Good night moon. Luke fell. Down on the blanket, yellow and soft.
Mommy and Daddy went out into the glowing night.
He sucked hard and smelled the bakery of sleep, warm and pungent.
Listen. Grandpa’s voice. Rumble, rumble. Like Daddy — underground.
I’m alone!
I’m alone!
The room was dark and empty. Out — out — out in the glowing night.
He wanted to grow up, grow up huge out of the crib, out of the dark, big and bigger, to be in the day, to be in the day with Mommy and Daddy.
I’m alone!
I’m alone!
He cried. He cried. And heard a baby cry. And screamed.
There was a crying baby in the dark.
The rumble, the feet came, and scared him.
Press into the blanket and hide. Hide from the crying baby and rumble feet.
“Luke?” Grandpa brought the light, the hot light in, and with him, Daddy’s voice. “Luke? Can I read to you?”
“Yessss!” It hurt to talk. Water was everywhere.
Grandpa caught him. Luke went up, big and up, out of the dark and the crib, into the warm light.
Luke squeezed into the hot body, fell against the pillow chest, and rested.
There was no crying baby.
There was Luke and Grandpa.
Grandpa opened the book and read.
“ ‘In the great green room,’ ” Grandpa rumbled, thundered inside, “ ‘there was a telephone. And a red balloon.’ ”
Balloon in room. Luke laughed.
Grandpa looked at Luke. His face, his bright white face, got so big. Luke squeezed into the hot. “I love you, Luke,” Grandpa sang.
Grandpa glowed in the night. Safe and hot and big. Glowing in the night.
“What’s going on?” Grandma said, and with her came more light.
“We’re reading,” Grandpa said.
“Can I listen?” Grandma asked.
“Sure,” Grandpa said. “That’s all right, isn’t it, Luke?”
He sneaked into the warm, against the rising, falling chest. Grandma took his hand and held it — smooth and cool she was, calm and gentle.
Grandpa rumbled like the outside: “ ‘Good night moon. Good night room. Good night cow jumping over the moon. Good night air. Good night nobody.’ ”
Grandma kissed Luke’s forehead. Soft and cool. She left.
But Grandpa stayed and rumbled on, rumbled on, rumbled on. Luke put his ear to the thunder and the heat. In Grandpa’s white bright glow, Luke baked to sleep.
9
THE TESTER looked at Diane with the dead eyes of a bureaucrat. Eyes without the possibility of appeal. “I don’t think he’s ready for this yet,” she said.
Byron hopped across the linoleum floor, slotting his feet in each black and white square as he moved, an unguided pawn in New York’s educational game.
“You should have him tested again in six months,” the tester continued, returning a form to Diane. The woman’s body was already half turned, ready to dismiss any complaint, or deflect any inquiry.
“What happened?” Diane asked anyway.
“He doesn’t want to answer any questions.”
“No! No! No!” Byron sang, hopping his way on the squares. “No, no, no!” he chanted.
This brought a smile to the tester’s face. “Don’t worry. That’s very common with bright two-year-olds. Give him another six months.” And now, having expended the full supply of her goodwill, the tester did show her back to Diane.
Diane would have liked to have the woman arrested. She wished she could say anything, anything at all, to disrupt the tester’s control and self-confidence. “I was thinking of enrolling him in Suzuki violin,” Diane said abruptly.
“I would wait on that too,” the woman said, and then gestured at another anxious parent.
“No!” Byron hopped on one square. “No!” Byron hopped on another square. Then back and forth, rocking and chanting. Diane noticed the stares of the other adults, followed quickly by averted eyes, and felt her red-hot rage at this humiliation. She had come to test Byron’s IQ early, just in case he needed tutoring. Obviously he would.
“Come on!” she yelled at Byron, and grabbed his squirmy hand. Byron’s body instantly went limp, the weight pulling down on her hand. “Stop it!” she yelled.
She felt her brain levitate and separate from her body, and she saw this foreign Diane’s behavior: a privileged, aggressive woman furious at her child for not being perfect.
But that wasn’t Diane, not the real Diane. She loved Byron. He was the embodiment of vigor and energy and courage, everything she admired and wanted. Byron was Diane at her best. There were times when she looked at his beautiful naked body, the perfect muscular miniature, legs flexing as he climbed on tables, chairs, beds, closet shelves, kitchen sinks, refrigerators (no mountain too high, no cliff too sheer), and she rushed to grab him and kiss the hard loaves of his buttocks, the soft swelling of his belly, the sweet wrinkles of his neck and felt she would be happy forever, permanently, invulnerably proud of the achievement of Byron’s existence.
It wasn’t that she wanted Byron to be the best: he was the best.
When Diane watched her brave son master things so easily— walking sooner than others, talking sooner, climbing sooner, becoming toilet-trained in a day, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, fearless of adults, shaking his mass of sandy curls, his wide mouth stretched in an impish smile, brown eyes glistening, hungry to swallow the world and make it his — and then looked at grown men— men like her husband, conservative, worried they wouldn’t please, lazy in the face of knowledge, unable to care for themselves, their hair crushed and dulled, their asses bloated, their eyes corrupted by fear, their mouths cautiously pursed — she wanted to know what had happened, and what terrible thing could happen to her Byron.
She thought she knew: soft mothers, envious fathers, brain-dead teachers, lazy friends, a culture of television, status, and possessions.
She wanted Byron to get into Hunter, into a school of hungry kids, poor kids who not only wanted what the other fellow had but whose parents couldn’t buy it for them. She had persuaded Peter to move the television into his study, hidden by a cabinet, out of sight and access. She had disposed of the crib when Byron was fifteen months, and following her pediatrician’s advice, when Byron was two, she showed him that the shit in his diaper belonged in the toilet.
“See?” she said, holding the turd (in its diaper cocoon) above the bowl. “It goes in here.” He got the message right away and was trained. Except at night. He couldn’t hold his pee in that long. But during the day he would often just go off to the bathroom, lower his own pants, and do his business without fuss.
Of course, people would laugh if they knew she felt intense pride about such simple things. The articles in the Times and New York Magazine whined about children being pushed. It was fear, that’s all, Diane believed, fear by her generation that the sloppy educations, the diluted culture, the spoiled, dependent childhoods, the values of acquisition, all of it, if it were thrown out, would produce superior people, better than themselves, smarter, surer, and with an elegant, discerning taste. She wanted a son who was afraid of nothing and no one. She wanted a responsible, self-sufficient, educated, and strong man to flower in the corrupt soil of New York, to defy the tradition of neurotic, self-absorbed, veneer-educated, spoiled middle-class kids that, more or less, described herself, her husband, and all their friends.