Perfect Little World(13)
After he descended the ladder, finding himself relieved to be back on steady ground, he eased himself onto the floor. He sat quietly, legs crossed, and imagined what would come next, the new family he would bring into this wonderful space.
Three years ago, Dr. Grind sat in the vast waiting room of the headquarters of Acklen Super Stores, the largest retailer in the world, located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mounted on the wall to his left, an enormous original painting by Helen Frankenthaler was proudly displayed, swaths of deep color that suggested a horizon. As he walked into the massive building, he’d noticed what he assumed was a Georgia O’Keeffe in the front entrance. In such a bland, inoffensive space, everything bright lights and sensible carpet, the only reading material on the coffee table the Acklen Super Store newsletter, it was strange to see major works of art presented without comment. It was as if a museum had decided to start selling time-shares over the phone and simply forgot to remove the art.
In the week since he had been summoned, almost entirely without pretext or explanation, to meet with Brenda Acklen, the matriarch of the Acklen family and fortune, he’d been reading up on her life. She’d met her husband, Terry Acklen, the founder of Acklen Super Stores, at an orphanage where both were wards of the state. Her husband had quickly turned a few discount stores in Knoxville into a global concern. Though it felt unseemly, Preston had checked and rechecked the fact that Brenda Acklen, eighty-two years old, was worth over nineteen billion dollars. Though she’d let her sons run the business after her husband died nearly eight years earlier, she remained active, funding several charities for underprivileged children and amassing a personal collection of virtually every important female artist of the twentieth century. And now, after a series of phone calls and e-mails with both her and her assistants, Preston had taken Mrs. Acklen’s private jet from New York to Knoxville in order to talk about, what Mrs. Acklen had mentioned in vague terms that would be irritating if the person wasn’t a billionaire many times over, something simple and elemental, something that Dr. Grind had devoted nearly all of his life toward understanding more completely: family.
Dr. Preston Grind was the son of Drs. Stephen and Wendy Grind, two of the most famous child psychologists of the 1980s and ’90s, specializing in childhood trauma. Their son, Preston, had become part of the public consciousness soon after he was born, when he became the initial subject of what became known as the Constant Friction Method of Child Rearing. According to the Grinds, the world itself was harsh and unpredictable, exacerbated by human beings who were programmed to selfishly consider only their own interests. The failure of many parents, in their opinion, was that they tried to create a false and ultimately unhelpful view of the world with regard to their children, seeking at all times to provide comfort and to make life free of complication. This resulted in children who, as they became adults and were forced to interact more closely with the true world around them, were incapable of processing the actual unfairness and destructive qualities of society. In a series of landmark studies, they sought to create a world where baby Preston would exist in what they called “a state of constant friction” in order to make him more adaptable, more capable of handling whatever challenge might present itself. Instead of being swaddled and kept warm in a crib, Preston would randomly be removed from his bed at various times during the night and placed on the floor, the temperature adjusted to make sleep uncomfortable. Regular feeding times were discouraged and sometimes meals lasted mere seconds. As Preston learned to crawl, weights were attached to his ankles to make his movement more difficult. One of the most famous aspects of the study involved Preston, at age three, being handcuffed and placed in a locked room with the keys to both the handcuffs and the door hidden somewhere in the room. He managed to exit the room in less than five minutes. The only constant in the experiment was the affection of the doctors for their only child; they were never outwardly cold or physically violent with Preston and showered him with approval for his ability to handle outside impediments in order to reinforce the idea that, while the world was difficult and unpredictable, parental love was unwavering. Critics of the studies continually brought up the fact that, despite their affection and careful nurturing of the child, they were, without his knowledge, also the ones responsible for his discomfort. These experiments continued until he was eight years old, by which time the experiment had been labeled by the Grinds to be a resounding success and their book, The Constant Friction Method of Child Rearing, had become an instant best seller.
In the face of criticism, the Grinds frequently brought up the results of young Preston’s upbringing. He showed an unusual aptitude for learning in all of their tests and recorded unprecedented IQ scores for a child so young. He skipped several grades and eventually received a B.A. at age fifteen from Brown University. He then went to Harvard and received a doctorate in clinical psychology at age twenty. He was, they reported for the rest of their lives, with no other scientific processes that would ever equal the Constant Friction Method, the greatest example of how children could be made exceptional by preparing them for the wilderness of the world into which they would enter.
An entire subculture of child rearing based on the Grinds’ methods developed soon after their book was published, sometimes resulting in high-profile charges of child abuse leveled against the parents. The Grinds were frequent expert witnesses in these trials, defending the actions of the parents as the truest expression of parental love, to prepare the child for a world that was not a “fairy tale” and might not always produce a happy ending. By the early 2000s, the method had been summarily dismissed by most experts, though Preston’s success always served as a rebuttal to those assertions. “The method may have been flawed,” Wendy Grind once told a reporter, “but the result was perfect.” As Preston set out on his own career as a child psychologist, his parents, who were both exhibiting the earliest stages of dementia, committed suicide with sleeping pills, side by side in their bed. When Preston heard the news, he felt the unwanted effect of his parents’ method asserting itself, steadying his emotions, leaving him without sorrow, but with an instantaneous acceptance that his parents were no longer living, no longer with him.