“Why?” Lulu demands.
“Reminds me of the drought.”
“Well it reminds me of the rain!” Lulu says.
Parenthood is underrated, because there’s no way to talk about it. How can these chemicals and minerals, the chemicals and minerals of Lulu, add up to this?
* * *
We try to be good parents. We try to foster compassion, independence, thriftiness. We permit Lulu to go by herself down the street to the bodega. We give her an allowance if she makes her bed every day. We let her hang out with Mason Mitchell, the unpleasant boy on the third floor whose parents don’t care if he plays video games all day and whose home doesn’t contain a single print book. We try to not freak out when Mason’s mother gives them Mountain Dew for dinner. A kid needs friends, especially an only child.
But sometimes I don’t think we’re doing it right. It feels, at times, impossible. I’ve come upon Lulu browsing the Internet, staring silently at pictures of starving children and people drowned in tsunamis. I’ve watched her watch a video billboard screening a liquor ad in which seven almost naked women dance around a man in a tuxedo.
Sarah is strong but sometimes at night she’s been known to weep. We’re all she has, and we’re not enough.
Yet on Thursday evening, when Lulu meets me at the front door of the apartment building, jumping up and down, grabbing my hand, yanking me along toward the back door, it feels like we are doing something right.
Bless Steve Stanhope. Because there’s a half-centimeter chunk of glittery white matter emerging from the crack in the concrete. Before I can bend down to examine it more closely, Lulu flings herself into my arms as she hasn’t since she was a toddler. That’s the thing, you hold your kids less and less with each passing day until one day you hardly get to touch them at all.
Sarah refuses to come outside and look at the growing thing. She barely glances at our glowing faces.
“I’m sure it’s great,” she says.
I head to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. I like to drink cold water when I’m annoyed. Put out the fire. My hand is on the tap when Sarah calls from the other room, “Contaminated!”
“What?” I snap.
“They put out the announcement an hour ago.”
I grunt in her direction, as though it’s her fault.
“Only for forty-eight hours. There’s a gallon of bottled in the fridge. We can boil more too.”
“But it’s so hot in here already,” I say.
Lulu and Sarah are silent in the other room.
“Thank you,” I say, ashamed of myself, and open the fridge.
* * *
The night turns out just great, though. We have rutabaga with brown sugar and allspice for dessert. Lulu and I go out to check on the growing thing after dinner and it’s still there, a small sparkle in the dark. The Stanhopes’ generator purrs away on the other side of the wall. And though I can hear the twins splashing in the pool, the moist noise seeping through the peephole, Lulu doesn’t seem to notice — she’s never been in a pool, so maybe the sound doesn’t even register. We come back inside and boil a bunch of water and hang out and read print books and Lulu falls asleep smiling.
Then we turn on WaveMaker, and the apartment takes on that special hush, and Sarah pulls out the CockFrolick and steps out of her work dress and skin is still skin, you know?
* * *
“No respite,” Sarah says at two in the morning.
What’s driving her crazy is the noise from the upstairs neighbors, who stream violent movies all night long.
I get up and go into the bathroom and buy a campfire app. I return to bed, a fire flickering on the screen of my phone, the sound of crickets and crackling sap joining the WaveMaker in the battle against the sound effects. I place the phone beside her on the pillow and swipe the volume up to its maximum level. The audio is fantastic. I can practically smell the wood smoke.
“Turn that off,” Sarah says.
“It’s working!”
“No,” she says.
When I listen hard, I can still hear the movie raging upstairs, and maybe it’s almost worse, listening for that beneath the sound of the campfire. But I don’t pause the app.
“Please,” she says. “Seriously, it sucks. Don’t you think it sucks?”
“I think it’s good,” I say.
“That’s depressing,” she says, rolling away from me.
I pause the app. I consider and reject the possibility of proposing a nighttime stroll. We do that sometimes, when we both can’t sleep, use Google maps to take a walk on a Greek isle or through a Peruvian village. We hold hands while one of us scrolls.
Sarah rolls back toward me, apologetic.
“You know what I hate?” she says. “Those screen savers at work that show one gorgeous nature scene after another.”
A siren down the block launches its long wail. We lie there listening.
“Remember Lulu dancing naked in front of the mirror when she was two, wearing all your necklaces?” I say.
Sarah stiffens, surprised out of her crankiness.
“She’s experienced plenty of joy,” I say.
Our heads are so close together that I can feel her nodding.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” Sarah says.
I get nervous.
“Sometimes when you take the recycling out and I hear you through the window clanging the metal bucket against the container,” she says, “it sounds like the opening drumbeat of this awesome and never-before-played rock song.”
* * *
By the time I get home from work on Friday, Lulu’s plant is a quarter of an inch tall, a glittering globular dime-sized cluster oozing out of the concrete. She crouches down to drip a few drops of pre-boiled water on it. The contamination warning has been extended through the weekend.
“I’m sure contaminated water is just fine for it,” Sarah said, sweating in the kitchen, where now there’s always water boiling on the stove.
But Lulu insisted.
“Do you love my crystal plant?” Lulu asks, looking up at me.
I steal another quick glance over her shoulder. The thing glints in the dusk. This is a good one, Steve Stanhope. Flowers for city kids. Magic for the contamination generation. Thank you, sir.
I’ve never seen Lulu this happy. Being happy, that’s how you thank your parents. That’s all you have to do.
All evening Lulu and I are like two mirrors, reflecting excitement back and forth at each other. She strokes my arm while I read Flora to her. Together we do an Internet search about cacti.
“You two,” Sarah says.
After Lulu goes to sleep, I head out back to examine the crystal plant in the orange moonlight. But en route I get waylaid by shouting coming from the Stanhopes’ lawn. I shouldn’t rush over to the peephole. I rush over to the peephole.
It’s been covered over. Thank goodness. Who wants to see that damn lawn anyway.
Well, me.
I put my ear up to the place where the hole used to be. In the great distance, Steve Stanhope is yelling a one-sided fight, presumably into a cell phone. “Beta? Beta!”
“What’s eating you?” Sarah says back inside.
“You should go and check out that thing back there,” I say. “Pretty cool stuff.”
* * *
Early Saturday morning, before Sarah and Lulu are up, I’m taking out the recycling yet again (I don’t know how three people can create so much waste), and there, in the bald humid light of day, I see the crystal plant for what it is.
I drop the recycling bucket and kneel down.
Five or so pebbles, rolled in glue and then glitter, stacked messily atop each other, drizzled with more glue, more glitter. The same old school glue they sell at the bodega. The glitter from tubes.