Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

“No,” Sarah whispers.I’m holding her, spooning her from behind on the bed. Tomorrow will be Monday. “It’s not right. I just think — I just think kids now. I mean, our kids. The kids of people like us. They face — they face a lot of — they don’t have — the world — the schools — a lot of disappointment, you know? On a daily basis, right? Like, I heard of a boy who got a ticket for drawing a chalk dragon on the sidewalk. Her school doesn’t own a single microscope, okay? So I just don’t think—”

“It’s too late,” I whisper back. “She planted the seed. She watered the seed.”

“It’s not a seed,” Sarah hisses.

“Be that as it may,” I say serenely.

“‘Be that as it may’!” Sarah whisper-yells. “Are you stupid? Seriously, sometimes I seriously think you are stupid.”

“She can hear us maybe, you know,” I say. Because if Lulu is awake, which hopefully she isn’t, but if she is, she can hear us even over WaveMaker. That’s how thin the walls are.

* * *

On Tuesday evening,the temperature is forty-five degrees higher when I leave my office building than when I entered it in the morning.

“Feels like end times, huh?” a janitor says, laughing as I pass him on my way out to the street.

“Sure thing,” I say to be nice, but then my words stick with me all the way down into the subway. Sure thing sure thing sure thing sure thing .

“Where’s Lulu?” I ask Sarah the second I step through the door. It had been a long bad day. I’d spent nine hours feeling like my computer was an eye disapproving of my every action.

“Out back,” Sarah replies, scrubbing rutabaga in the sink. I can feel her blaming me.

I throw my bag down and run out the door.

There she is, staring at the crack in the concrete. She looks up at me and the day falls away from my shoulders.

“Hey kiddo,” I say.

“It disappeared!” she announces like it’s good news.

So the seed is gone. So a rabid squirrel squirreled it away, or the super finally got around to sweeping up.

“I can’t see it anymore!” Lulu says. “It must’ve sunk down to put in its roots!”

I’ve always thought Lulu is more like Sarah in temperament. Darker, tending toward pessimism. But now it occurs to me (with horror) that maybe Lulu is more like me. Relentlessly optimistic.

“Well well well,” I say, far more accustomed to Lulu’s solemnity than to her glee. “How about that. Let’s go in and have some dinner, okay?”

“Aren’t you glad, Daddy?” she says.

“Oh,” I say, feeling sad. “I am so glad.”

“Thank you for the seed.” Lulu gazes down at the crack in the concrete. “I gave it a few more drops of water. Is that okay?”

She’s wearing her blue school uniform. The humidity frizzes her hair and shines her skin. Sometimes she looks so wonderful I have to shut my eyes.

I say, “Let’s go see what Mom came up with for dinner.”

Inside, Sarah has set the table with cloth napkins. She’s lit a candle. Sarah is the kind of person who can create something out of nothing, a skill that’s coming in more and more handy. Cleverly, she sautés rutabaga leaves with garlic. She roasts the flesh with oil and Italian seasoning and calls it rutabaga gnocchi, and sure, the chunks of it are not entirely unlike gnocchi.

I have this trick where I flick my fingers against the side of my taut cheek to make a sound like a drop of water falling into a body of water. It’s a refreshing sound, and Lulu loves it. Given the hotness of the night, I make the drop-of-water sound a bunch of times as we sit down to dinner.

Lulu claps. Sarah rolls her eyes.

“Ugh, stop it,” she says. “That sound depresses me.”

“Why?” Lulu demands.

“Reminds me of the drought.”

“Well it reminds me of the rain!” Lulu says.

Parenthood is underrated, because there’s no way to talk about it. How can these chemicals and minerals, the chemicals and minerals of Lulu, add up to this?

* * *

We try tobe good parents. We try to foster compassion, independence, thriftiness. We permit Lulu to go by herself down the street to the bodega. We give her an allowance if she makes her bed every day. We let her hang out with Mason Mitchell, the unpleasant boy on the third floor whose parents don’t care if he plays video games all day and whose home doesn’t contain a single print book. We try to not freak out when Mason’s mother gives them Mountain Dew for dinner. A kid needs friends, especially an only child.

But sometimes I don’t think we’re doing it right. It feels, at times, impossible. I’ve come upon Lulu browsing the Internet, staring silently at pictures of starving children and people drowned in tsunamis. I’ve watched her watch a video billboard screening a liquor ad in which seven almost naked women dance around a man in a tuxedo.

Sarah is strong but sometimes at night she’s been known to weep. We’re all she has, and we’re not enough.

Yet on Thursday evening, when Lulu meets me at the front door of the apartment building, jumping up and down, grabbing my hand, yanking me along toward the back door, it feels like we are doing something right.

Bless Steve Stanhope. Because there’s a half-centimeter chunk of glittery white matter emerging from the crack in the concrete. Before I can bend down to examine it more closely, Lulu flings herself into my arms as she hasn’t since she was a toddler. That’s the thing, you hold your kids less and less with each passing day until one day you hardly get to touch them at all.

Sarah refuses to come outside and look at the growing thing. She barely glances at our glowing faces.

“I’m sure it’s great,” she says.

I head to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. I like to drink cold water when I’m annoyed. Put out the fire. My hand is on the tap when Sarah calls from the other room, “Contaminated!”

“What?” I snap.

“They put out the announcement an hour ago.”

I grunt in her direction, as though it’s her fault.

“Only for forty-eight hours. There’s a gallon of bottled in the fridge. We can boil more too.”

“But it’s so hot in here already,” I say.

Lulu and Sarah are silent in the other room.

“Thank you,” I say, ashamed of myself, and open the fridge.

* * *

The night turnsout just great, though. We have rutabaga with brown sugar and allspice for dessert. Lulu and I go out to check on the growing thing after dinner and it’s still there, a small sparkle in the dark. The Stanhopes’ generator purrs away on the other side of the wall. And though I can hear the twins splashing in the pool, the moist noise seeping through the peephole, Lulu doesn’t seem to notice — she’s never been in a pool, so maybe the sound doesn’t even register. We come back inside and boil a bunch of water and hang out and read print books and Lulu falls asleep smiling.

Then we turn on WaveMaker, and the apartment takes on that special hush, and Sarah pulls out the CockFrolick and steps out of her work dress and skin is still skin, you know?

* * *

“No respite,” Sarahsays at two in the morning.

What’s driving her crazy is the noise from the upstairs neighbors, who stream violent movies all night long.

I get up and go into the bathroom and buy a campfire app. I return to bed, a fire flickering on the screen of my phone, the sound of crickets and crackling sap joining the WaveMaker in the battle against the sound effects. I place the phone beside her on the pillow and swipe the volume up to its maximum level. The audio is fantastic. I can practically smell the wood smoke.