Following Ezra (13 page)

“You can buy only one small thing,” I keep reminding Ezra on the fifteen-minute drive. Oddly, despite a superhuman ability to remember birthdays and addresses, he can’t seem to hang on to simple directives from his dad. I test him: “Can you get something
huge
?”

“Noooo!”
he says from the backseat, drawing out the word.

“Are you going to run around the store?”

“No!”
he promises.

“Who are you going to stay with?”

“Abba.”

“What if you don’t listen?”

“Then we have to leave.”

“That’s right.”

I glance at Ezra in the rearview mirror and smile at how easily he is charmed. I envision driving him home as he delights over a five-dollar Bart Simpson pen, or maybe a key chain.

I park the Camry on a quiet side street. Ezra is running already.

I call after him: “Stop! Slow down!”

Trouble is, at eight years old, Ezra has not learned to slow down. He has only two speeds: fast and asleep. I grab his hand, clutching it as we wait at the crosswalk for the light to turn, then hold tight as we traverse the four lanes. From the sidewalk, Ezra can see into the Aahs!! windows, with their lively, brightly colored displays blending oversize cartoon characters with mannequins in frilly lingerie and novelty T-shirts. Excited, Ezra attempts to move even faster, and I struggle to slow him down, gripping his hand as we slip inside the store.

Aahs!! In seconds I know that this is the best and worst place possible for an eight-year-old boy who is easily overstimulated by the toy shelf at Walgreens. Every aisle is a cornucopia of schlock: pink coffee mugs with protruding breasts, snow globes and joy buzzers and fake vomit. Ezra notices none of that, breaking free of my grasp to speed toward the back of the store, where, just next to the cash register, he discovers his holy grail: an entire
Simpsons
island, a bulging, seven-foot-tall mountain of Simpsons. I watch my son quickly size up the display as if he has just happened upon a truckload of ice-cream sandwiches: Half of him is overcome with joy; half of him is paralyzed by the quandary of where to begin.

Before he takes another step, I kneel down at his level and firmly grab his shoulders.

“What did I say?” I ask. “What can you buy?”

Suddenly it’s as if the conversation we shared in the car wasn’t minutes ago but rather sometime in the Pleistocene era. He mumbles something, but keeps looking past me to the towering shelves of yellow curios. He is like a wild animal, surging with energy, operating on reflexes, impossible to harness.

“What are you allowed to buy?”

He keeps glancing away.

“Something
big
?” I ask.

“No.”

“What are we getting?”

“Something small,” he says evenly, quietly.

“Good,” I say.

By then, though, it’s too late. Amid the rubber action figures, the mugs, the T-shirts and chess sets, Ezra has spotted the object of his desire. His eyes—now as fully protruding as a Simpson’s—are locked on the top shelf of the display. Pointing upward, Ezra begins to yell.

“The Homer!” he calls. “I want the
Homer
!”

I follow his focus to the tip-top shelf, zeroing in on the thing that has so captivated my son. It’s yellow. It’s bulging. It’s bug-eyed. It’s nearly as tall as Ezra himself. It’s—

“The Homer! I want the
Homer
!”

“But that’s not what we came—”

“I want the
Homer
!” he keeps shouting.

I quickly scan the shelves for something—
anything
—more within the allotted budget. A key chain? A comb? Feeling more anxious and sweatier by the second, I wave one knickknack after another in Ezra’s face, trying to distract his gaze from the gigantic stuffed cartoon man. Ezra shakes his head and I anxiously search for more options.

“Ezra . . .
Look at me!
” I say, in what starts as a whisper but then emerges as a barely controlled holler. My sudden intensity and volume pique the attention of the surly woman behind the cash register, who glances up from a customer, peering over her reading glasses for just long enough to catch sight of an eight-year-old boy in shorts and a red T-shirt scampering up the shelves, hoisting his three-and-a-half-foot-tall body upward, one shelf at a time, higher and higher, closer and closer to the jackpot.

“Sir!” the cashier calls out. “You’re going to have to control your—”

Before she can finish, I take hold of Ezra, who tries to wriggle from my grasp, his flailing limbs knocking over a rack of talking Krusty the Clown dolls. Flustered, I scramble to catch the merchandise and simultaneously catch my son’s fall on the linoleum floor.

“But I
want
the Homer!” he keeps screaming. “I want the
Homer
!”

I feel every soul in the store glowering at us—the man waiting to pay for his exploding golf balls, the spiky-haired college kid scanning the greeting card aisle, the stock boy unpacking a box of windup chattering teeth. I feel flushed and sticky. I abandon all thoughts of persuading Ezra to settle for a more modest purchase.

“Abba, buy me the
Homer
!” he keeps calling, and I fear that my behavior is about to traverse the line of what constitutes acceptable parenting, even in a store that trades in fart candy and imitation vomit.

“That’s it,” I say. “We’re going.”

I grab his hand and tip my head to the right, gesturing toward the door. Ezra understands. I know this because he chooses this moment to render his body completely limp, and he falls from my grasp to the floor, folding himself into a fetal clutch on the cold floor.

“Don’t make me
go
!” he cries, now wailing like the widows on TV news footage from the Middle East. Tears gush from his eyes; desperation fills his voice: “I waaaaant the
Hooooomer
!”

With the cashier and a gaggle of customers glaring, I yank Ezra by the arm, pulling him to his feet and then up the aisle, past the itchy toilet paper and the penis-shaped candles and out toward the door. Firmly and with conviction, I tug my son to the sidewalk outside, where he keeps turning around, sobbing wildly, begging to go back, pleading for the Homer. Trying to ignore his pleas, I keep yanking at his arm, but as we wait for the long crosswalk signal to change—it feels like a year passes as we wait by the curb—he rushes from my grip and, when I follow, takes hold of the corner of the building, sobbing and begging and clutching on so tight that his knuckles are turning white.

The sky is darkening, all kinds of people are walking by, and I’m trying to remember:
Why was it that I wanted to have children, again?
Did Shawn and I spend enough time researching this whole enterprise? It just seemed like the thing to do. Our parents had children; our grandparents raised kids. I guessed we should too. How hard could it be? What was the worst thing that could happen? I recall an expectation of clever banter over the family dinner table; I conjured images of playing catch with my kids on the lawn or driving them to piano lessons. I figured there would be rough moments, but I did not expect that father-hood would entail moments like this, doing hand-to-hand-combat on the streets of Westwood, making desperate efforts to wrench eight-year-old knuckles from storefronts.

I am so focused on the work of prying flesh from stucco that I almost don’t hear—

“Is that . . . Tom?”

I look up and find myself eye-to-eye with Jeff, the brother of a close friend, waving and trying to smile while also furrowing his brow in puzzlement, obviously trying to make sense of the tableau in front of him: a grown man trying to peel a third grader from a building.

“Anything I can help with?” Jeff says, haltingly.

I try to evince a smile. Ezra wails uncontrollably. I shake my head.

“Nah,” I manage to say. “I think we’re okay.”

 

 

I should have listened to Ruth. The first professional we ever consulted about Ezra, the therapist offered some oblique advice a few short months into our sessions. Her morsel of wisdom seemed of little consequence back then, but it came to haunt me later.

“Very often, these kinds of children develop obsessions,” Ruth said, “things they want to talk about exclusively all the time.” She told us about one client, a girl from an ultraorthodox Jewish family, who had developed a severe and persistent preoccupation with Madonna. Not the mother of Jesus; that would have been trouble enough.
The
Madonna. The child ranted incessantly about Madonna’s music and Madonna’s boyfriends; she spewed detailed trivia about Madonna’s songs, Madonna’s videos, Madonna’s wardrobe and Grammys. To teachers, playmates, anyone who would listen (and plenty of people who wouldn’t), she would expound on Madonna. “And this,” Ruth said, raising an eyebrow for emphasis, “was not a family in which that was okay.”

I pondered that for a moment, conjuring a scene: of a long Sabbath table, candles aglow atop a white lace tablecloth, a zaftig matriarch at one end ladling matzo ball soup, her bearded, black-clad husband at the other, and ten or twelve children in between all paying rapt attention as little Rivka—pigtails, elbow-length sleeves, skirt to midcalf—holds forth about her favorite cuts from “Like a Virgin.” Back when Ruth issued her warning, Ezra—then just three—hadn’t settled on fixations beyond his plastic dinosaurs and jungle animals. In light of this new information, I imagined my little boy progressing up the evolutionary chain from stegosauruses to woolly mammoths to alligators, in a steady arc leading directly to pop divas. As I considered that, Ruth offered a cautionary thought. “Be careful what you expose him to,” she said. “You don’t know where it will lead.”

I recall that ominous tidbit of advice on darkened Westwood Boulevard. Powerless to budge my shuddering, wailing bundle of tears, I’m now sitting cross-legged on the cool sidewalk, wondering how I might ever distract Ezra from what has become an all-consuming quest.

You don’t know where it will lead
, Ruth said.

Well, now I know.

In fact, I have recalled her words frequently in the months and years since, each time experiencing a discomfiting combination of anticipation and fear.
Be careful what you expose him to.
What will it be? What will Ezra fixate upon? In retrospect, those words of counsel have been among the least helpful bits of wisdom we have gathered in our journey with Ezra.

It drives me to books and articles and Web sites in search of information about children like Ezra, children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome or children who are simply a bit odd. I keep coming across descriptions of little boys who are unable to function among peers, and who develop unusual preoccupations with sets of trivia—commuter train schedules, say, or insect species. I read repeatedly about a boy in England with exhaustive command of the minutiae of refrigerator fans and motors. I am confident Ezra will not find his way to train schedules. For kids in West Los Angeles, public transportation is about as remote and abstract as molecular theory. Refrigerator motors? He is certainly obsessed with the
contents
of our refrigerator, but I don’t think he is even conscious of the mechanical gizmos keeping his snack food chilled.

How, I sometimes wonder, will we do that? Could those boys’ mothers and fathers have avoided exposing their tykes to trains, or insects, or refrigerators? Could dangerous, life-sucking obsessions be lurking around every corner? Sometimes I watch Ezra take in the world and wonder what he might seize upon next.

Should we have kept him from watching
Sesame Street
? As a toddler, Ezra sat mesmerized just like millions of other children, idly picking at his Cheerios as he took in Bert and Ernie’s latest tiff. And then, at a moment that escaped our notice, he crossed over into a different zone. He was no longer just another toddler hooked on PBS; he was positively addicted to the Muppets. He spent long hours paging through picture books, viewing and reviewing drawings of Cookie Monster and Grover and Zoe. His wasn’t mere enthusiasm. Addiction was closer to what it was—and not just to watching the television show, but to populating his world with these characters, to the exclusion of human beings and real interactions. That is the behavior that shows up in Karen’s preschool classroom, where Ezra seems lost and drifting, except when he spots pictures of the characters he knows from
Sesame Street
.

 

 

Ezra’s fixations are powerful and all-consuming, but not endless. In time, he turns his focus from Elmo to another imaginary character: Thomas the Tank Engine, the quirky anthropomorphic locomotive who had his own PBS program, populated by a mixed multitude of stiffly animated train cars, a helicopter, a bus, and a handful of odd humans.

At four, Ezra chatters nonstop about Thomas and Thomas’s friends, holding forth on the topic to the exclusion of almost anything else. When I mention this to other parents, some smile empathetically and assure me that, well, that’s just how kids are at that age—and tell me how their little ones are just as absorbed with the objects of their own infatuation: Pokémon, say, or baseball cards, or Barbie.

“I know just what you mean,” they say.

I know they don’t. I suppose these mothers and fathers are trying to be reassuring. Instead, I take it as myopic. When one mom insists that her son, too, prattles on about Thomas “all day long,” I know she is being hyperbolic. I’m not. For a while, every time Ezra speaks, it is to say something about Thomas—a phrase or a question or a description. When he wakes up in the morning (“Is Percy friendly?”), when I step in the door in the evening after work (“Diesel is grumpy!”), when he is in the bath (“James is going very fast”), over pizza dinner (“Thomas is a really useful engine”), when we are settling him down to bed (“Henry is very long”), he keeps the chatter going.