Do I remember my first days alone with Meadow? I sure do. I remember looking down at her, her thumb snug in her mouth, her Stinky Blanket under the other arm, and me filled with complete terror. The neighborhood was as silent as a tomb. The leaves on the oak trees were still. An acorn pinged off the hood of a car. I could hear my blood in my ears. I waited for someone to approach down the street — anyone. I longed to make the sort of meaningless small talk I was so good at. How would we fill a day, two people with such a different sense of fun? I felt overwhelming pressure to do something outrageous or entertaining. I worried that she would just pick up Stinky Pillow and walk away from me. What I didn’t know was that she was helplessly bound to me already. It was me who could have wandered away from her. I could have left her outside of the fire station and walked away and — after a year or two of effortful self-justification — would barely have thought of her again.9 My daughter stood barely looking at me, as if embarrassed by her position, the ligature of her polka-dotted underpants visible above the elastic of her corduroy rompers. My heart flipped. How abandonable a child is.
With this vague gleaning of one another’s vulnerabilities, we were off. We quickly exhausted the territory of the apartment, whose dolls and crayons had always bored me. To be outside was better. We both could breathe there. We played in the wet sandbox and the wet grass. We discovered that we could stand inside the hedge that bordered our property and thereby go unseen by the mail carrier. We discovered that on the other side of the hedge, summer’s late blackberries still clung to their scary-looking vines. We debated whether or not the hedge was ours and therefore the blackberries were ours also. (We decided yes.) We found, in the neighbor’s yard, an overgrown garden. We discovered that the scent of mint leaves, when crushed between thumb and forefinger, stayed on the skin for hours. We made grass stew. I noticed that my daughter was able to combine her mother’s scrupulous attention to detail with her father’s relentless sense of wonder. I came to see that her apparent ordinariness (her fondness for glitter and for high-pitched screams of excitement, etc.) was a kind of camouflage for the truer, inner child burdened by extraordinary perception. The child — I quickly came to see — was gifted.
O tiny imitator! Compact mirror! Within days Meadow was using words and phrases that I had used casually, almost aloud to myself, thinking she had not understood. A boo-boo was a laceration. A burp was an eructation. Acorns were ubiquitous. I never talked down to her. I had always loved words. My early experiences learning English satisfied me, if nothing else did, by the language’s interesting consonance with German. And so, almost casually, I threw in some foreign words, phrases from Spanish, Japanese, and even my buried native tongue. She retained every word. Anything you threw at her stuck. Naturally I wondered what else she might be capable of.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G.
One day, I sat her down with some old Clebus stationery and several sharpened pencils.
“This,” I began, “is an A. The sound” (I said) “of A is ah or the sharper aa, as in cat. If you add a y, the sound is the same as how you say the letter—ay. Like day.”
“Aaay,” she said. “Can I have a graham cracker?”
“Sure you can. Just as soon as we finish what we’re doing. B. B sounds like buh. Buh.”
“Buh.”
“What other words start with the sound buh?”
“Hamburger,” she said.
“Good try. Try again.”
“Bug.”
“Bug! Yes! Bug.”
H-I-J-K-LMNO-P.
And by the end of that fall, she could read. She was three years old.
Is it now safe to say that I made my share of mistakes? Sure. Can I now say freely that she took a couple of knocks in my care? That twice I lost her in the Grand Union — I had to do the grocery shopping, too — and she had to be raised on the PA system? That once, at home, we were visited by the fire department for something unwise we did with the smoke detector in the name of science? But the thing I will never apologize for is teaching her to read. I don’t care how it makes me look.
Ask her; she’ll tell you. We had fun together. Our days were full. I was getting the hang of parenting. I was no longer bitter about the busted real estate market or my lack of earning potential. I could accept the unique humiliation of asking my wife for pocket money. I even unearthed my manuscript from beneath its sward of bills and took up — at nap times — my independent research. And all this should have been good but for a single problem.
Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y, and Z.
“Where have you been?” you said, your face in a literal sweat, as you stepped out of the apartment and onto the porch. “I’ve been losing my mind here, Eric. Pacing around for two hours. Two hours! It’s dark. It’s November.” You fell to your knees and began to search your daughter’s body with your hands, making her laugh. She was bundled in her parka, hood up and cinched. I was confused. Why wouldn’t she be fine?
You looked up at me. “Do you even know what time it is, Eric?”
“I guess we lost track of time, hon. We’re sorry.”
“We’re sorry? She isn’t in charge of getting you guys home on time. Jesus. I was out of my mind with worry. You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have left a note? My poor peanut. Are you cold? Where were you?”
“The liberary,” Meadow said from behind her scarf.
You sighed, routed. As a middle school teacher, you had to support library use.
“Come in, come in,” you said, ushering us into the apartment, which glowed with golden light. “You two worry me sick.”
Throughout the winter, this sort of conversation repeated itself with little variation. I could see your evident exasperation with my time management, lack of schedule, etc., but as far as I was concerned, I was a trustworthy guardian — a man of strong build, multilingual, a good problem solver — so what were you so wound up about? As far as I could tell, a parent got through his or her day via a mix of structure, improvisation, and triage. This took complete concentration. Thinking about you or about how you would have done it would have been an unhelpful distraction. Did you want us to stay home all day watching the window?
But OK. I really don’t mean for this document to devolve into the jeremiad that I was never permitted to deliver in family court. I readily accept the following charges against me, that: