Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Why are we going there?” Byron complained. “If Grandma’s dead, why are we going there?” His body was stiff. He had tucked his elbows in and closed his little fists. Like Diane, he wanted to fight unhappiness.

We made him together. He has my hair. He has her eyes. He loves to be in the audience and watch a spectacular, like me. He wants everyone to do things his way, like her. We made him together and so he’s both of us at once. He’s someone else, but he’s our soup, our brew.

“When people die, it makes everyone who knows them sad. So they get together and …” Do I have to say bury? Do I have to tell Byron Lily will be put in the earth, this woman who loved him more simply and absolutely than I did, who loved even the idea of him, do I have to tell him we will put her in the dead ground, alone?

“And cry?” Byron said. He collapsed, broken at the middle, brought his hands to his face, and wailed into them. “I don’t want to go!” he screamed. “I don’t want to miss Grandma!”

Peter snatched Byron from the water. The body folded in his arms, huddled in his lap. Peter’s clothes soaked the water from Byron. Byron cried and shivered. Peter pulled a towel off the rack and covered him, tented Byron within his heart. Peter stroked his back and sang: “It’s okay to miss Grandma. She loved you. It’s okay to miss her.”

The phone rang.

Peter closed his eyes and soaked up his son’s water, the tears of life’s final betrayal, and waited for happiness to return. He knew it would.

A YEAR after Lily’s death, Peter, Diane, and Byron went down to Philadelphia to unveil Lily’s tombstone. A similar ceremony had been held for Diane’s father a year after his death, and Diane felt she should repeat for Lily what Lily had done for her husband. A rabbi was there, but no one else was invited, just as only Lily and Diane had gone years ago.

Peter gave his arm to Diane for support as they walked on the manicured lawn up to the gravesite. He had gotten into the habit of helping her at Lily’s funeral and during the recovery period following her car accident. He continued to, even though she had healed months ago. Diane’s leap backwards had given her legs, rather than her head, to the impact. Her last act, at the final moment before contact with the trees, had saved her life. Whenever she wondered about her desire to live, given her suicidal decision to drive home the night her mother died, Diane recalled her dive to the back seat, her twist away from death; she never again doubted her desire to be alive, to be Byron’s mother, to be a woman, to feel whatever she must.

At odd moments, when she listened to Byron play the piano (at Byron’s own request he had begun lessons shortly after Lily’s death), when she watched Byron blow out the candles at his fifth birthday, when she held his hand crossing streets, when she missed him at her job (she had joined a public-interest law foundation to represent women’s causes), Diane felt, in a burst of heat in her breast, horror at how close she had come to losing all the happy things that surrounded her.

The accident must have also changed how she saw Peter, because he seemed so different. Peter claimed his therapy had helped. He told her what he had discovered about his parents’ divorce and said that knowledge had released him from a prison of conflicted emotions about marriage. He certainly treated his mother differently: he refused to have Gail over to the house, to see her in any way. She took Byron to Gail’s every few weeks, and they were received with almost excessive deference and consideration. But the most startling change in Peter was his desire to have another child. Diane, however, didn’t believe that Peter’s therapy or this reversal of information as to which of Peter’s parents had first cheated on the other could really be the reason Peter seemed so changed to her. She was convinced that during the first years of Byron’s life she had suffered from her own madness, her own distorted way of seeing things — that in those days, she hadn’t really known Peter.

Diane told Peter she didn’t want to have another child. She was tempted to repeat all the things she felt she had done so badly with Byron, to get them right, but for exactly that reason, Diane thought she owed Byron sole attention, bandages for whatever cuts she had made.

“He comes from a long line of only children,” she told Peter.

“Well,” he answered. “We have time.”

But she was forty-one years old now and she didn’t think she had time. She had boarded the train for good and would ride this trip out to its last stop without any more transfers. As a lawyer, she would fight on behalf of lost or losing causes; as a mother, she would raise her child patiently; and as a wife, she would be a companion to Peter. To have another child would mean a temptation to try to be perfect again. And she knew she wasn’t perfect. She was Lily’s daughter and Diane’s illusions: a combination that was flawed.

The rabbi read what he was supposed to; Diane spoke her lines. They uncovered Lily’s headstone.

In the car ride over, Byron had asked if he could make up a poem about Grandma and say it at the ceremony.

Byron stood in his dress clothes, a lean young boy of five, with perfect skin, bold eyes, limber legs and arms, standing at the edge of his grandmother’s grave. He looked up into the sun at Diane and Peter with no fear, no awe.

“Now?” he asked.

“Sure,” Peter said.

Diane watched the rows of graves and smelled the flowers; it was a beautiful sunny day.

“Good-bye, Grandma,” Byron said to the gray stone. “We miss you. We remember your cookies. We remember your hugs. We’ll try to be good and love everybody like you loved us.”

Diane rested her hand on Byron’s head and felt herself drain into him. She closed her eyes, tightened her grip on Peter’s arm, and she was strong between them, the three alone and together: a family.

AMERICA HATES children, Peter thought. It pretends to indulge them, thinks of itself as so generous and abused, but beneath it all is hate. Hate, neglect, and narcissistic rage.

Peter walked through the crowd of adults and toddlers, through the shuffling mass in the park and listened to the so-called grownups:

“No, you’ve had too much!”

“Why don’t you go play on your own?”

“That belongs to the little girl! Give it back!”

“Oh, so they both came down with the flu at the same time. Threw up on everything!”

“My housekeeper says he’s an angel. I come home and all I get is complaints and tears.”

These parents were spoiled children. Giant spoiled children. Some of them liked to hit. Or threaten to hit.

“I’ll give you a good smack if you don’t stop!”

“Do that one more time and we go right home and you get a spanking!”

Others suffocated their babies with psychobabble:

“Are you sharing? If you share nicely with your friend, then he’ll share with you.”

“Mommy and Daddy are tired. Like when you get tired and cranky and need a rest. So we’re just going to sit here. You can play next to us.”

Peter was sickened by them. Of course, it was the logic of their position: in authority, being imperfect, they made mistakes, and in authority, they couldn’t admit their wrongs, their inadequacy. The victims had to bear the blame. Otherwise, society would collapse, children would never sleep, never eat, never learn, never grow up to raise their children just as badly.

“Daddy,” Byron said. He spoke clearly and well. He was a solemn, hardworking child; the joy and energy of his babyhood had been replaced by seriousness and concentration. “I want you to understand something.”

“What’s that, Byron?”