Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“Come on!” she yelled at Byron, and grabbed his squirmy hand. Byron’s body instantly went limp, the weight pulling down on her hand. “Stop it!” she yelled.

She felt her brain levitate and separate from her body, and she saw this foreign Diane’s behavior: a privileged, aggressive woman furious at her child for not being perfect.

But that wasn’t Diane, not the real Diane. She loved Byron. He was the embodiment of vigor and energy and courage, everything she admired and wanted. Byron was Diane at her best. There were times when she looked at his beautiful naked body, the perfect muscular miniature, legs flexing as he climbed on tables, chairs, beds, closet shelves, kitchen sinks, refrigerators (no mountain too high, no cliff too sheer), and she rushed to grab him and kiss the hard loaves of his buttocks, the soft swelling of his belly, the sweet wrinkles of his neck and felt she would be happy forever, permanently, invulnerably proud of the achievement of Byron’s existence.

It wasn’t that she wanted Byron to be the best: he was the best.

When Diane watched her brave son master things so easily— walking sooner than others, talking sooner, climbing sooner, becoming toilet-trained in a day, absorbing knowledge like a sponge, fearless of adults, shaking his mass of sandy curls, his wide mouth stretched in an impish smile, brown eyes glistening, hungry to swallow the world and make it his — and then looked at grown men— men like her husband, conservative, worried they wouldn’t please, lazy in the face of knowledge, unable to care for themselves, their hair crushed and dulled, their asses bloated, their eyes corrupted by fear, their mouths cautiously pursed — she wanted to know what had happened, and what terrible thing could happen to her Byron.

She thought she knew: soft mothers, envious fathers, brain-dead teachers, lazy friends, a culture of television, status, and possessions.

She wanted Byron to get into Hunter, into a school of hungry kids, poor kids who not only wanted what the other fellow had but whose parents couldn’t buy it for them. She had persuaded Peter to move the television into his study, hidden by a cabinet, out of sight and access. She had disposed of the crib when Byron was fifteen months, and following her pediatrician’s advice, when Byron was two, she showed him that the shit in his diaper belonged in the toilet.

“See?” she said, holding the turd (in its diaper cocoon) above the bowl. “It goes in here.” He got the message right away and was trained. Except at night. He couldn’t hold his pee in that long. But during the day he would often just go off to the bathroom, lower his own pants, and do his business without fuss.

Of course, people would laugh if they knew she felt intense pride about such simple things. The articles in the Times and New York Magazine whined about children being pushed. It was fear, that’s all, Diane believed, fear by her generation that the sloppy educations, the diluted culture, the spoiled, dependent childhoods, the values of acquisition, all of it, if it were thrown out, would produce superior people, better than themselves, smarter, surer, and with an elegant, discerning taste. She wanted a son who was afraid of nothing and no one. She wanted a responsible, self-sufficient, educated, and strong man to flower in the corrupt soil of New York, to defy the tradition of neurotic, self-absorbed, veneer-educated, spoiled middle-class kids that, more or less, described herself, her husband, and all their friends.

So she was angry at Byron’s failure to take the IQ test. She tried not to be. She pulled him out onto the street, and reminded herself that she had taken him to it at the early age of two and two months precisely because she wanted him to have several cracks at it, that this fiasco was merely a preliminary hearing, not the trial.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” Byron said, speaking in triplicate, a maddening habit he often fell into. “Ice cream. My ice cream.”

She had promised him some before they went to the test, a simple reward for being good. “You’re going to meet a woman and play with her for a while. If you’re nice, you can have some ice cream afterwards.” That’s what she had said. It had never occurred to her that Byron might balk completely and thereby call into question whether this treat should be granted. Even if he had done poorly, although Diane wouldn’t know that for many weeks until the test results were sent to Byron’s pre-nursery play group, she had meant to give him the treat, to suggest the fact, possibly untrue in this society, that good work was rewarded. But should she compensate him for utter failure? Was that something she wanted to encourage?

Keep your promises, advised one book.

If you make a reward conditional, keep to the conditions, admonished another.

Which had she made? And did Byron know the difference? What did “if you’re nice” mean? Maybe he thought he had been nice. But he hadn’t been. That much needed to be made clear.

“Ice cream, ice cream, ice cream,” Byron said.

“No,” she mumbled, not out of fear at his reaction but afraid of her anger.

“I want ice cream, I want ice cream, I want ice cream.”

“Don’t say that over and over. You only have to say things once.”

His face closed, like a door shutting out light and noise. His eyes dulled, his body went stiff, his mouth tightened, and he raised his shoulders, retracting his neck. “You said I have ice cream after.”

“If you were nice to the lady. I mean, to the woman. If you were nice to the woman, I would give you—”

“I was, I was, I—”

“Byron!”

“Oh!” he grumbled, and tossed her hand back, a gift refused. He stomped off, lifting his feet and slapping them down, a comical exaggeration of a manly huff. When he reached the curb, Byron turned back to her, put his chubby hands on his swaying, elastic hips, and compressed his fair eyebrows so that the subtle undergrowth of black hairs darkened his brow. Angry, he looked more like Diane. “I want ice cream!” he trumpeted.

A passing man laughed. “So do I,” he said, and moved on.

She felt the lava bubble below and push against her crust. Stay calm, she warned herself. She decided to ignore him for the moment, keep the refusal silent, fearful that articulation would become rage. Diane hailed a taxi and moved to its door. “Come on,” she said.

Byron looked at her, his head upturned. The curls of his sandy hair were innocent and beautiful. His lean torso — she could picture the washing board of his ribs ripple as he stretched — sat uncertainly on his bowed legs.

“He’s so adorable,” Diane could hear her mother, Lily, say.

“Come on!” she shouted, her hot core steaming through.

Byron sat down on the sidewalk. He crossed his legs underneath him, closed his eyes, and put his hands over his ears.

“What’s the story?” the cabdriver said.

“Start your meter,” Diane said. “I’ll get him.” As she moved toward her little Buddha, the crust cracked, nothing could stop the rage flowing up through the faults in her hardened pride. “Byron! Get up! Get up right now!”

He shook his head and made the curls dance. Everything was black for a moment, her head filled with the smoke. She found herself carrying Byron, a dangerous thrashing fish, in her arms. His feet, his hands, kicked and slapped her. There were blows to her face and stomach, and her ears were scraped by the coarse edge of his screams. They were right in front of the testing facility, around them people were watching, but she felt great relief at dropping the pretense of calm about her disappointment.

She hurled him into the taxi’s back seat, a final statement of her power, her strength. He landed awkwardly and bounced off the upholstery, falling to the car floor. She got in, told the driver the address, and left Byron hunched down there, holding the side of his face that had hit the floor. She ignored the cries, no longer willful yells, but pathetic and tearful. She left him alone, sitting rigidly. She left him to cry without her comforting arms — without her love.