Harmony (24 page)

Your first few weeks of homeschooling are shaky but successful. Getting set up was fairly easy: less administrative red tape than you'd expected, and tons of resources online. You have a couple of Facebook friends who have been able to make recommendations about schedules and curricula, and you've connected with a few people through local online groups. And you've been talking to Scott Bean on an almost daily basis. He's helpful with big issues and small ones, with advice both philosophical and practical. And he's giving you a discount, because you've been helping him out with things here and there, mostly related to publicity and marketing. He's about to launch a huge new project—a “family camp” somewhere in New Hampshire, with a core group of families living there year-round and weekly parenting sessions during the summer—and he needs help spreading the word. Josh has made snotty comments a couple of times, suggesting that he thinks you're becoming too dependent on Scott, but it's these phone calls that are keeping you sane.

The academic requirements take about five hours a day on average; you and Tilly generally work for three hours in the morning
and two in the afternoon. You both go for a walk at lunchtime, weather permitting, and you've signed her up for weekend swimming lessons, to compensate for the lost P.E. component. Socialization is another piece of the puzzle, but you've decided to let that slide for the first month or two. You can't do everything all at once.

You schedule your first field trip for Theodore Roosevelt Island, a trip you owe her anyway, since she's finished filling in the sticker chart you made to help her remember to change her pads when she has her period. You structure the week's history lessons around Roosevelt's presidency (jumping forward temporarily from the Civil War), and you get her reading a kids' biography. For fun, you assemble a YouTube playlist: a clip of a
Simpsons
episode that centers around Bart's interest in TR, an educational cartoon from the '90s, a few sound recordings of Roosevelt's actual speeches. As a long-term plan, you're thinking that some time you should take her to a Nationals game, to see the fourth-inning Presidents Race, with giant mascot heads of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and (for some reason) Taft, Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

The two of you get in the car and head out to Virginia around 10 a.m. It's an easy drive; it's not far from National Airport (which you apparently still refuse to think of as Reagan National, even though it's been almost fifteen years since the name change). You have bottles of water and a picnic lunch. A worksheet full of questions for Tilly to find answers to, and extra sweaters in case it's chilly by the water. You're feeling good. Optimistic, even.

You park and walk over the footbridge that leads to the island.

“Okay,” you say. “Easy question. What body of water is underneath us right now?”

“The Potomac,” she says. You give her a high five.

Tilly wants to see the statue first, of course. You've printed out a map and studied the crisscrossing hiking trails, so you know that the monument plaza will be somewhere off to your left, after you reach
the end of the bridge. Last night on the phone, Scott said, “You know, you and Josh and the girls are exactly the kind of family I'm looking for to help me set up the camp. If you ever decide you're tired of city life and all those daily battles, you let me know.”

You laughed and thanked him, flattered but a little weirded out. It's an ambitious plan, this utopian country haven he's imagining for special-needs kids and their parents, but it's a little bit crazy. You're not really sure where he's going to find these families who are willing to give up their entire lives to go raise organic chickens or whatever.

You and Tilly find the right path and start walking. It's a beautiful winter day, chilly but sunny. You'll have to come back in the spring sometime, when there's more plant life and foliage to study. But it's pretty today, too: the starkness of the bare trees, the interlacing shadows on the ground.

It's a weekday so it's not very crowded, but you do pass a few people here and there, running or walking dogs. Tilly's chattering nonstop about the statue: who designed it, when it was built (and dedicated, a whole separate category in statue world), the fact that the architects wanted to showcase Roosevelt in “characteristic speaking pose,” which is why he's depicted with one arm raised over his head. You get a few smiles, and an old lady walking a terrier stops Tilly to compliment her on her “knowledge of history.”

After a few minutes, you cross a low bridge onto a wide flat clearing, paved in bricks, and there's the statue. Tilly stops and lets out a little gasp; she loves this moment, when the giant first becomes visible, rising up through the landscape of the ordinary world. She takes your hand and pulls you forward.

The two of you admire the monument, which is not terribly big compared to the others on Tilly's lists, but is quite nice, as these things go. You walk together, slowly, around the plaza, checking out the other components of the memorial: a couple of fountains and four
giant slabs of marble containing Roosevelt quotes. They're labeled “Nature,” “Youth,” “The State,” and “Manhood.”

“They put those up in the '60s,” says Tilly. “I think it was kind of a sexist decade.”

You let her wander around on her own, and you head over to one of the low marble benches to unpack your picnic. You can tell that she's going to want to stay here for a while.

Through the trees, you can hear a school group approaching, a small chaos of voices and laughter. When the group arrives, you can see that the kids are around Tilly's age, maybe a year or two younger. You can't tell what school, but they're wearing uniforms: khakis for the boys, plaid skirts for the girls, polos for everyone. A different life, and Tilly could have been among them, maybe. They've all ended up in the same place, for today anyway.

You take a bite of your sandwich. Tilly isn't interested in eating yet; she's still looking around. You're facing the “Nature” monolith, and you read over the quotations.
There is delight in the hard life of the open
. You suppose that's what Scott's trying to get at with his camp.

Tilly comes running up. “Can I borrow your phone?” she asks. “I want to take some pictures of the statue.”

“Sure.” You hand it to her. You watch her approach the statue, walk around it, capture it from different angles. You rummage through your bag for an apple. Some of the kids near you are playing I Spy.

“I spy with my little eye,” says one of the girls, “something that begins with
B
.”

“Bench!” says a boy.

“No.”

“Bug?” says someone else.

“Eww, where?”

“Nowhere, I just thought maybe she saw one.”

“Nope,” says the first girl. “Not it.”

Sometimes your kids used to play this on long car trips. Tilly would change the wording to include a hint. “I spy with my hungry eye,” she'd say as you passed a McDonald's.

“I know,” shouts another girl. “Barrette!”

“Yes! Finally!”

You smile. Here in a national park, and they're looking at each other's hair.

You hear sudden laughter from over near the statue, and you glance up, some mechanism of maternal radar pinging.

“Oh my God,” says one of the kids near you, peering in the same direction. “What the hell is she doing?”

You don't see Tilly at first, so you stand up so you can see over the crowd of heads. She's lying on her back, taking a picture of the statue from underneath. You grab your bag and head over to . . . well, you're not sure what. To protect her, or rescue her, or do damage control, if necessary.

“I spy with my little eye,” says a boy behind you. “Something that begins with
R
.”

“Retard?” asks one of the girls. Gales of laughter.

Little bitch
, you think, without meaning to.

“Hey, Tilly,” you say. She's sitting up now, looking curiously at the group of kids staring at her.

“What?” she says. She's addressing them, not you. “I wanted to get that shot.”

A few kids are laughing, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“Don't worry, though,” she says. She pauses to stand up and brush herself off. “It may have looked like it, but I wasn't trying to take a picture of his crotch.”

Now they're all laughing. “Come eat your lunch,” you say. You take her arm, but she shakes you off. She seems glad to have an audience.

“So this statue's only seventeen feet,” she says to the group. “But do any of you know what the tallest statue in the world is?”

“Hey,” you say, but she raises her voice to talk over you.

“It's not the Statue of Liberty, if you were thinking that. It's the Spring Temple Buddha in Lushan County, Henan, China.”

“Come on,” you say, pulling her with you. “We've got to go have our picnic. And these kids probably have to get back to their group.”

She lets you pull her this time, but yells back over her shoulder, “It's 420 feet! Not counting the pedestal!” You're really not sure—does she not hear that the kids are laughing, or does she just not realize that they're laughing at her?

Last year, for Christmas, the girls got a Wii, and for a while, they spent all their time playing video games. Their favorite was
Mario Kart
. Iris liked to play as one of the grown-up princesses, but Tilly (for reasons that may or may not have been significant) was drawn to the baby characters. Most often, she'd choose to be Baby Peach, who was admittedly adorable: a little golden-haired cherub, crown on her head, pacifier between her lips. Occasionally, it would strike you as funny, the idea of a baby driving a race car, speeding through factories and shopping malls, barreling into gold mines, soaring down mountains, gliding across rainbow tracks in the depths of space.

One day, you were sitting with the girls but not paying much attention, when you heard Tilly make a joke: “Do you think this would be safe, Mommy? To let a baby drive through a volcano?”

You laughed, surprised that she'd thought of it, too. And then you put down your phone, or whatever stupid thing you'd been focusing on, and you watched your children play their game, rooting silently for Tilly to win. Something about it made you want to cry: brave Baby Peach, poised before the volcano. Baby Peach, starting up her motor and driving right into the fire.

You lead her over to the bench where you've left your things and start repacking the picnic food.

“What are you doing?” she asks. “I thought we were going to eat here.”

“I think maybe we can find a nice spot somewhere else,” you say.

The group of kids have turned away from the statue to watch you. One of them fake-coughs, loudly. “Loser,” he calls, tacking it on to the end of the noise.

“What?” asks Tilly. She turns around to look at the kids, bewildered.

“Sweetie,” you say. “Let's go.”

“Who's a loser?” she asks the group at large.

For a minute, no one answers. Some of the kids look down or hide their laughing mouths behind their hands. Some are still staring openly, enjoying the show. Where the hell are these kids' teachers?

Then a voice from the back of the crowd—you can't tell who's talking or even if it's a boy or a girl—yells out, “You are, you freak!”

It's like they all have permission to talk, suddenly. “Freak!” yells someone else. “No one cares about stupid statues,” calls someone else.

You watch Tilly's face as she begins to understand, finally, that they're making fun of her. You watch her crumble right in front of you. She opens her mouth and lets out a surprised little wail. And then, just before the tears start, she turns around and runs.

She's not a fast runner, but neither are you. You follow as she races back the way you came, out of the clearing, into the trees. You keep her in sight, but you can't quite catch up.

“Tilly,” you call. “Wait! Tilly!” You're already out of breath.

She's not stopping. You follow her out across the footbridge and into the parking lot. You don't think she has a plan, exactly; she just wants to get away. But the parking lot isn't very wide, just a pull-off directly from the parkway. If she keeps going, she'll reach a bike path, a narrow strip of grass, and then the road itself.

The only reason she doesn't make it—the metal barriers and the cars flying past—is an uneven patch of asphalt in the parking lot. You thank God for the loose gravel, for her clumsy feet. Thank God for her badly skinned knees, bleeding through her jeans. Thank
God for her wrist, for the tiny bone that snaps when she lands and prevents her from going any farther. Because you weren't going to be able to stop her. Your running and screaming and calling her name . . . it did nothing. You don't know why you thought you'd be able to keep her safe. You don't know how you thought you'd be able to do this alone.

One year, you spent the night before Mother's Day in the emergency room at Children's because Iris was vomiting blood. She was maybe a year and a half old. It turned out not to be as bad as it sounded—she just had a regular old stomach virus, and her esophagus had become irritated from all that puking—but you were there for a good long stretch, maybe from 6 p.m. until three or four in the morning, because that's just how long these things take. Iris had thrown up on your shirt in the elevator on the way up from the parking garage—no big deal, the quantities were pretty small at that point—and when the intake nurse asked what color the vomit was, you just showed her the stain. At 11 p.m., you'd seen a doctor and had been sent to an inner waiting room to try to coax Iris to drink something, anything. (You couldn't, which is why you were there so much longer; eventually, they had to give her IV fluids to rehydrate her.) The local news was on, tossing out a progression of increasingly horrifying stories as you held your squirming girl and wiped away each flavor of juice she drooled back out. Against all this, you became aware of a flurry of activity and looked up to see a stretcher rushing past, a child moaning, a mother chasing behind. The TV news had moved on to something fluffier now, because they wanted to end on a happy note, because it was almost Mother's Day. You were happy to sit there all night, if necessary, happy to be a low priority. You were well aware that there were a lot of mothers in the world who were in worse places than you.