Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

He’d just turned four years old, one of those birthdays where we along with him were suddenly older. Charlie had avoided gaining too much weight while she was pregnant (even though I told her that it didn’t matter, that she should be eating double whatever she wanted because it was what Haim wanted too) but it’d been a long, difficult delivery, and she’d lost a lot of blood and was confined to bed for several weeks afterward and then extreme caution for months after that, during which time her curves became fuller, and small rises of fat began collecting at her lower abdomen, arms, and thighs. This had seemed a gentler body, one suited for the mothering of an infant. Now, though, in Haim’s fourth year something had made her decide to regain, as much as she could, the body of her own youth. She found a gym that had a good daycare, and, at about this time, began talking to me about what we should do next, in terms of me teaching high school or doing any of the things I’d promised to try if writing didn’t work out. By this, our fifth year in Iowa, I’d been out of the masters program for as long as I’d ever been in it, and, in both Charlie’s and my mind, the luminous encouragement and private assertions of confidence the faculty had once confided in me had faded, until it almost felt like I’d dreamt them. Charlie made a modest salary as an assistant in a law office, and I had a small stipend teaching Comp 101 at the university, but we were still depending on money from my mother, which shamed us both.

Charlie’s body had, by the day of the parade, tightened and streamlined into an attractiveness that owed more to fitness than out-and-out sexuality. We were thirty years old, and I marveled at how her legs, bent in my periphery during sex, had completely changed, become slender, thin, graced with toned muscle instead of the full curves of her college years, as if this were an entirely different person than I’d first slept with. Her skin, which once seemed to lag behind her in the aging process, blushing smoothly with the cherubic health of a child, now seemed to have gotten ahead of her, and, standing there as the music of the marching bands approached, I could see again how in certain lights it seemed thin and almost grayish, the small fingers of red spreading over her cheeks sharp-edged with capillaries in the cool air.

As the floats and squads from the local baton-twirling studio passed along, I had been distracted by a small boy in front of us, sitting calmly on his father’s shoulders, watching the parade with what seemed like an intelligent reticence. Every once in a while, he’d reach out and pat the top of his father’s hair lightly, as if to say thank you. Haim was in and out of our sight, Charlie doing an awkward side-step thing along the back of the crowd to keep an eye on him as he moved. I could see some of the other parents eye the crowd in the direction he’d rocketed from, looking for someone to give the disapproving glance to, looking for me. Finally Haim came back to us and watched, leaning backward against Charlie’s legs.

When the drunken middle-aged alumnus, leaning out from the top of a passing papier-mâché “hawk’s nest” and wearing a black and gold jester’s hat, threw the necklace of beads toward the crowd I saw it falling directly to me against the blank gray sky, and I reached up and caught it. The beads, I could see now, were actually tiny plastic black and gold football helmets. I can only guess that I must’ve forgotten that Haim was back with us, or maybe that I assumed that by then he’d run off again because, in a daze, I reached up to where the small boy perched, where he was turning to see who had caught the prize, and gave it to him.

I looked down at the sound of Haim’s wail. For a moment he wasn’t even crying yet, just looking up at me in shock and betrayal.

“For Christ’s sake,” Charlie said, picking him up and looking at me. “Really? Really?”

Sometime around the middle of Haim’s second year, something had changed. He would only let Charlie help him with his food, only let Charlie put him to bed at night. He began to follow her around the house, and screamed and screamed when she left for work. As she cooked dinner, he would stand, leaning against the side of her leg, turning the thick pages of one of the picture books silently, occasionally glancing up at her, as if to make sure she had not disappeared when he was not looking.

This was also around the time we began to understand his mind, what gifts he had inherited straight from Charlie. The only thing he would do with me (and then only if I faux-pleaded) was to let me watch him turn the pages of one of his books. Charlie and I had also begun noticing right about this time that Haim seemed to have, without any real help from us, intuited the alphabet, and was beginning to read. It was small words at first, but then when he added larger ones they were all the words that were supposed to be the hardest, the ones not spelled phonetically. He loved books, and would carry stacks of them around to wherever he was playing in the house. Charlie had worked with number cards when she was little and so she decided to try this with him, and by the time we were planning his third birthday party he could do simple addition operations with single-digit numbers. Our daycare reported that Haim cried from the moment I dropped him off until the moment Charlie picked him up, with only a few breaks for sips of water in between. His face became red, dry, and chafed. Charlie decided to cut back on her hours at the law firm in order to stay home with him more. She couldn’t stand the thought of him toddling around ready to learn with no one there willing to teach him.

On the night after his fourth birthday party Haim had woken up crying, and wouldn’t stop until Charlie came in, even though I’d gotten up to see to him, and wouldn’t calm down enough to tell her what happened until I left the room. I stood in the hallway while Charlie talked him down. He’d had a nightmare.

“Daddy’s gonna, daddy’s gonna leave me all alone,” he said, with barely enough breath. “He’s gonna leave me and replace me with a different boy.”

“Why would you say that? Don’t say that honey,” Charlie said, rubbing tiny circles on his back. “Daddy loves you very, very much. Daddy would never, ever leave you.”

“I dreamed it,” Haim insisted. “It’s gonna be true.”

“Well, I’ve known Daddy a really, really long time, and he’s never left anybody,” my wife said. “So I know he won’t leave you. You’re his favorite. What kind of boy could ever replace you?”

“It was, it was a robot boy,” Haim sniffled. “Except it — except you can’t tell, because they look, they look like — they look the same.”

“No, baby,” Charlie said. “Robot boys aren’t real, and Daddy wouldn’t trade anything for you.”

Haim shook his head.

“You watch,” he said. “You watch.”

After that we’d made a deal with Haim, made a goal of one whole day with no crying. We would try to make sure we were doing things where he felt comfortable, things that didn’t make him feel afraid or anxious, and he would try to be a little calmer. Charlie even took him to work one day at the office, and he wrote quietly on papers spread out on the floor behind her desk, filling page after page with the scrawled numbers he was just learning. The homecoming parade had been the closest we’d come to a cry-free day.

In the car on the way to the restaurant after the parade was over, I was thinking about the way the whole world seemed to be on the verge of great change — the fields into the winter anonymity of snow, Haim into a prodigy, premature school-goer with an acute self-awareness, a separate person from us, the qualities currently in concentrated miniature ready to swell, gain volume like one of his tiny plastic dinosaurs that, left for an hour in water, was suddenly too big for the bowl; its terrible, squishy body somehow all contained there in its condensed beginning. I was thinking about how strange it is that you can’t really see even two or three years into the future. That you go through each of your days having no idea toward which sadness you are headed.