CHILDFALL

When he looked at his daughter at the breakfast table, he felt a twinge of unease.  This morning it was worse than usual.  She was gobbling scrambled eggs and toast.  Watching her made him lose his own appetite.  It was pointless to complain.  She had this compulsion to stuff herself.  And to drink—she was into her second glass of milk.  Why his wife allowed it was a trouble to him.  They argued about it, and he suggested taking her to a child psychologist.  But his wife only laughed.  She, his wife, was thin as a nail but had been herself a butterball when she was little.  Why deprive her? she argued.  The time will come when she will be obsessed with how she looks, and then you’ll worry about her not wanting to eat at all.

     “Well,” he thought, “but in the meantime?”  Still, the kid embarrassed him, and he wondered if his wife wasn’t in denial.  Her short little legs looked like hams.  Her buttocks were round and lumpy.  And her belly was massive.  But what most bothered him about his not-so-little girl was her round, red face, and the way her puffy cheeks narrowed her eyes to barely opened slits.  She was five years old now and beginning kindergarten.  When he saw her with other kids, he felt revolted.  He envied other parents for the sleekness and charm of their well groomed girls.  He wanted to love his own, but he couldn’t.

     His wife wouldn’t tolerate controlling the child and was outraged at him when he confessed he was ashamed of her.  That response forced him to keep his opinions and feelings to himself.  And so, watching her this morning filled him with loathing, he pushed his chair back and rose from the table.  Once he left the house, he would turn to other things.  But now, he felt gloomy.  He bent down to kiss her on the cheek, which she slanted up to him to receive with a prim smile on her lips.  He patted her on the shoulder as he wished her a good day at school.

     Then, with a child’s clairvoyance, she said, “I know how much five plus five is.  It’s ten.”

     “Oh,” he said, “you’ve been working overtime.”

     “I’m not afraid of school anymore,” she replied.

     “I never thought you were,” he said, realizing he had been communicating his feelings to her and resolving to make a better effort in future to mask them.

     The import of this conversation went by his wife, who was off somewhere in her own thoughts.  Relieved, he readied himself to depart.

Mark and Lisa Wellman were young and well to do.  He was slender and graceful, with black curly hair and blue eyes.  He wore dark blue or charcoal gray three piece suits to the bank where he worked and where he was rising rapidly.  Lisa Wellman was also slender and fine looking, like her husband.  Her employment as a “fragrance counselor” required her not only to be graceful but to appear sophisticated and worldly as well—a role she filled to perfection.  Since the department store where she worked didn’t open until 10 a.m., she took charge of their daughter in the mornings and took her to school.  Then she came home to straighten up the house and leisurely plan her wardrobe for the day.

     This morning, after her husband left, her daughter put a question to her.

     “Mommy, is daddy going to lose his job?”

     “What on earth makes you think such a thing?”

     “I don’t know,” the child responded, finishing her milk. 

     “C’mon, now, go brush your teeth and finish getting dressed.”

     Instead of sliding out of the chair, she rested back in it and rolled her eyes up, thinking about her father.  Something about him this morning touched her.  She felt it. 

     “Daddy’s not right,” she said with conviction.

     “Well, little girl,” her mother said exaggeratedly, “what’s your diagnosis?”

     “What’s a diagnosis?” the child said puzzled.

     “What you think is wrong, that’s a diagnosis.”

     “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.  “Maybe he’s getting sick.”

     “Well, that happens,” her mother said, reassuringly.

Since he had the most flexibility in his schedule, it was her father who picked her up after lunch and brought her to the day care.  It was the most unpleasant part of his day.  The kids came out of the school’s front door while parents waited—some beside their cars, the passenger doors open; some standing on the sidewalk, mostly mothers, chatting as they waited; some right up by the doors, where they grabbed their little ones’ hands and hustled them away.  He stood off by himself at the curb. 

     As the first children came through the doors, they looked shy and hesitant, until they saw their parents.  Then their faces brightened and they ran as their parents came to them.  Mark Wellman saw his Natalie in the first group to come through the doors.  Unlike other parents, however, he didn’t wave and shout to her.  Instead, he stood at the curb and waited for her to spot him.  The child had come through the doors and out of the shade of the building and stood in the warm sunlight, looking at the parents coming towards her and scanning those she could see far back by the street.  It took her a while to spot her father.  When she saw him, he was standing by the curb staring at her but making no sign to attract her attention.  This is what he usually did, and usually she just walked herself off to him and got in the car when he opened the door.  It wasn’t until she was inside that he kissed her on the cheek.

     Today, however, there was no kiss.  Feeling neglected and sad by her father’s omission, she sat quietly and leaned against the door, so she could turn her head to him and watch him drive.  He didn’t look at her, seeming to concentrate on the streets.  She knew if she spoke he would turn to her.  But she didn’t speak.  She watched him instead.  As she did so, she became more and more convinced that something was wrong with her father.  It almost made her cry.  In order to help him, when he pulled to the curb in front of the day care and turned off the engine, she opened the door and said, “You don’t have to get out, Daddy, I can go by myself.”

     He looked at her and said, “OK, I’ll see you later.”

     He watched her walk to the door, then pulled away. 

     It was her mother who came for her a little after four o’clock.  All through the afternoon she thought about her father.  But when her mother came, she felt defeated by the challenge of explaining him.  Instead, she told her mother all about what she did that day.  Because her mother liked to hear about what she did and always had ideas to share with her, she felt cheered and happy by the time they got home.

     All evening after her father came home, however, she could feel his unhappiness.  She could also feel how he tried to hide it.  That was plain by the way he turned his face from her, and also by the way he talked.  She worried about him.  She wanted to do something to make him better, but she didn’t know what to do because she didn’t know what was wrong.  And she worried the more when her mother told her she was imagining things about him. 

     That night when she went to bed she didn’t sleep.   Light from the partly opened door made deep shadows on the one side of her room.  Because she couldn’t turn her back on those shadows, she turned on her side facing them and tried to ignore them, but dark and ominous forms filled her head whenever she closed her eyes.  She heard her mother through the door talking with her father.  For a long time their voices comforted her.  But then she heard her father say something about her, and she listened with that child’s clarity of vision and those feelings of revelation that accompany a child’s understanding.

     “Natalie is gross,” she heard her father say.  She didn’t know what gross meant, if it was good or bad, so she listened hard to what came after.

“And you are responsible.”

     “Don’t say such things about our daughter.  She’s a perfectly normal little girl.  So what if she’s plump?  Who cares at her age?”

     Plump? she thought, what does that mean?

     “Oh, don’t give me that she’ll-be-anorexic-soon-enough crap.  You’re raising that girl according to lunatic values.  I can’t stand to look at her sometimes.  This afternoon, when I picked her up at school, she looked like a miniature sumo wrestler coming through the doors.”

     “Oh, you’re exaggerating.  She thinks there’s something wrong with you.  She said so this morning and again tonight.  She senses you don’t like her.  Is that what you want?  That’s what’s happening.”

     “Well, I don’t.  I can’t stand to look at her,” he said again. 

     And then the house fell silent.  She couldn’t hear what they were doing.  Her heart beat so hard it made her turn on her back.  She forgot all about the shadows.  She stared up at the ceiling and felt herself being absorbed into its darkness.  Her father couldn’t stand to look at her.  She didn’t understand why.  But he said it and she heard it.  Her little body shook to the gasps and heaves of the silent sobs she couldn’t control.

     She finally slept, and the whole world with its childfull of hurts disappeared for a little while.

But only for a little while.  In the morning at the breakfast table she wanted to tell her father that she loved him, but words wouldn’t come.  Instead, she sat and stared at the bowl of cereal her mother prepared, and when her father said goodbye and kissed her on the cheek, she felt no gladness and had no smile on her face.

     “Well, mopey, what’s the matter with you this morning?” her mother asked.  “You haven’t touched your cereal.  You better hurry up and get ready, we haven’t much time.”

     “I don’t feel hungry this morning, mommy.”

     “Don’t you feel good?” her mother asked.

     She put her hand on Natalie’s forehead and said, “You feel fine.  Maybe it’s an upset stomach.  Is that what it is?  What hurts you, Natalie?”

     “Nothing,” she said sadly.

     “Well, try to eat a little of it.  We can’t send you to school with no breakfast at all in your stomach.”

     Natalie tried to eat a spoonful but couldn’t make herself.  She felt her stomach in upheaval and couldn’t tell her mother about what she heard last night.  All she could think about was her father’s voice saying “I can’t stand to look at her.” 

She left the table and went to her bedroom to get dressed for school.  Standing in her underwear in front of the mirror on her dresser, she repeated out loud what her father said.  She looked at herself to see what he couldn’t stand to look at.  She was just herself.  She didn’t understand.  But as she looked, a feeling of self-loathing crept into her heart.  What she saw in the glass is what her father couldn’t stand to look at.  This is what she knew and what she felt.  She looked at her image and hated it.

Over the next several weeks, Natalie made a discovery.  Whenever her father was present, she couldn’t eat.  His presence oppressed her and she lost all will to do anything when she was near him.  But whenever she told her mother she couldn’t eat, she discovered that this pleased her father.  He would break into a big smile and look at her mother.  And she found that the more she did this, the more pleased he became. 

At first, her mother didn’t say anything about it.  But after a while, she began to frown and look worried when Natalie refused to eat, and she would say that Natalie was going to waste away.  Natalie would look first to her father and see the pleased expression on his face, then to her mother and see the worry lines in her forehead and the frown on her lips.  This reaction of her parents puzzled her, but she was surprised to find that she had this power over them. 

And then Natalie made another discovery.  She found that this power over her mother and father pleased her more than eating, pleased her more, in fact, than anything else.  She was sorry that her mother worried, but she was fascinated by how she could always make those wrinkles appear.  But more, she was intrigued and filled with a sense of mysterious efficacy by the way she could affect her father.  With the skill of an artist, she learned how to use fork and spoon, dish and glass, to make moods in her parents.

And these, like a true artist, she mixed and mingled, producing shades and variations of moods.  For example, sometimes, when her mother made an effort to prepare something she thought Natalie would especially like, Natalie would taste it with particular relish, and then watch her mother’s expression.  As for her father, when she played with her mother like this, he had a strange look of interest and suspicion in his eyes which was too subtle for her to understand, but which she could induce on his face with the certainty of the artist producing an effect with her brush.

But these pleasures were always short-lived.  When she went to bed at night, the sound of her father’s voice returned so vividly that she felt like she actually heard it.  “I can’t stand to look at her” became the defining trait of her growing sense of self.  After her mother brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed her goodnight, she got up from her bed and stood in front of the mirror.  Then she would say to herself, “I can’t stand to look at you.”

What she saw when she looked in the mirror was not herself but the hated image her father couldn’t stand.  Gradually, these two things separated in her mind—herself, the one looking, and herself, the one her father couldn’t stand, that looked back at her.  And she learned to keep them separate, so that there grew in her a secret feeling of difference between the person her parents saw and the person who had the power to affect that seeing.  This secret became the special thing about her life, the source of her power, and she thought about it all the time.

One morning in the week before Christmas, when Natalie was getting ready for school, her mother said, “You can’t wear these pants any more; look at them, they fall off your hips!”  Then she went through her daughter’s dresser drawers looking for something else to dress her in.  This was the way it happened.  She kept her daughter home from school that day and took the day off herself.  Together, they went to the gaily decorated department stores and replaced Natalie’s clothes.  

      When they got home, Natalie’s mother said, with annoyance in her voice, “If you go on like this, we’ll have to buy you new clothes all over again.”

     “Like what, mommy?  Go on like what?” Natalie asked, frightened by the sound of her mother’s voice.

     “Instead of growing up, little girl, you’re growing down.  You’re getting smaller rather than bigger.  You want to grow up, don’t you?”

     In response to this, Natalie raised her eyes and looked thoughtfully at her mother.  She wanted to say “I’m not growing down, I’m the same as always.”  But before she could say it, her mother bent down and kissed her on the cheek and mussed her hair and said, “Come on, let’s put your new things away.”

     Natalie wanted to grow up.  But what her mother said was true.  She was growing down.  She looked at herself in the mirror wearing new clothes—everything new!—and saw a different person than she was used to.  This confused and depressed her.  And later, when her father came home, he made a fuss over how pretty she looked.  She was glad he kissed her, but when he paid no attention to her at the dinner table, she felt like her secret was useless anymore.

     That night, she stood again in front of the mirror.  The door of the room was ajar, as her mother usually left it, and enough light came in from the hallway to allow her to see herself.  She was wearing new pajamas.  “Are you growing down?” she said to the image her father hated to look at.  “Yes,” the image said back to her.  She wasn’t surprised at all that the sound of the word had come from her own mouth.  “I’m sorry,” she said back to it, in a tone that suggested she could feel the pain the other was experiencing.  “I’m sorry, too,” the image said back to her.  “Are you afraid?” she asked it.  “Yes,” it replied, “Daddy doesn’t care anymore.”  She returned to her bed with a feeling of gloom, an unsolaced unhappiness, and, turning her back on the shadows that always used to threaten her, fell asleep.

     Natalie walked in the light of new snow and amid the tunes of carols that were by now familiar.  Her boots made light prints that formed a thread-like line behind, which she could trace all the way back to the house when she turned to look, but it wasn’t long before her path was lost amid the comings and goings of so many others.