Perfect Little World(31)
“Dr. Grind, I want my kid to have access to everything you’re talking about. I want to be able to provide for him and to be a better parent. But I don’t know if I can do what you’re asking. I’m a lonely person, a solitary person, I guess is a better term. I just don’t know if I can walk into some new space and be surrounded by people who are now supposed to be my new family and be expected to love them and care for them. I’m worried about taking care of one kid. I can’t take care of ten kids.”
“You won’t have to, Izzy. That’s the beauty of this project. You will never, for as long as you live with us, be alone again. You will be surrounded by people who care for you, who will do everything they can to help you become the person you envision. It will be so strange. I can’t deny that. I’m asking you to love other children as if they are your own. I’m asking you to support the other parents as if you are their sister or best friend or partner. I’m asking you to accept a nontraditional family dynamic. Your child, as much as you love him, will no longer be entirely your own. He will be a part of a larger family. But I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t think that, ultimately, it was going to change your life for the better.”
Dr. Grind was looking at Izzy with an intensity that she never experienced in relation to herself. It was a crazy idea to be included in something so obviously flawed and yet so idealistic and beautiful. She imagined her son, nothing but a blur at this point in her mind, surrounded by other children, every day a chance to be exceptional. She thought, for the millionth time, of her future as it lay before her without the aid of this project, working two jobs to make ends meet, her son in the cheapest day care she could find, so tired at the end of the day that her baby felt like an unbreakable curse, failing each and every day until the bottom fell out of the world.
She knew, without reservation, that her own mother would have chosen this project for Izzy. It had all the markings of something her mother would love, a woman who desired equations and routines to ensure excellence. The buildings themselves looked like an alien planet, something her mother would have drawn on a sheet of paper during a fever dream. Was she using the ghost of her mother to justify a life-changing decision? Maybe. But it wasn’t difficult for Izzy, who had always kept her mother’s ghost right at the edges of her life, to imagine that this felt preordained in some weird way.
She picked up the photos from the table and flipped through them again. It was a fantasy, science fiction, to think that this could be her home.
“Okay then,” she said.
Dr. Grind’s face opened up with shock. “Well, Izzy, you should think about this. I have about fifty pages of contracts and documents that you need to look at, have someone look over with you. I have about four more hours’ worth of information to discuss. I want you to be a part of this project, but I want you to have the facts. This is not for everyone, not for most people, honestly. I want you to feel confident about this. It’s ten years of your life. Ten years of your child’s life.”
“Okay,” Izzy said, her face itching with embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I’ll think about it more.”
Izzy realized now that she had acquiesced too quickly, that she had almost missed out on hours of wooing, the unfamiliar joy of being wanted, of hearing Dr. Grind offer up even more ridiculous promises, even more pseudoscientific reasons for why her son would become a superhero, a kid genius. She would have missed out on listening to someone tell her, over and over, that things were going to be fine. She sat back in her chair, the baby happily swimming in the confines of her own body, and she smiled at Dr. Grind, who smiled back, shrugging his shoulders as if he couldn’t believe this was happening either.
That night, her messenger bag weighed down with the papers that Dr. Grind had left with her after their three-hour conversation, Izzy walked into her room and locked the door, even though no one else was in the house at the moment. She took out the papers, shaggy with Post-it notes attached to where she had to sign her name, and laid them out on her bed, as if they were a code that could be broken. Dr. Grind had suggested that she have a lawyer look over the documents, as if Izzy had access to someone with a law degree, someone who could make sense of what Dr. Grind had already spent hours explaining to her. There was a fifteen-page memo that outlined the ten years of the project, but Izzy simply could not wrap her head around the next few months of her life, much less ten years into the future, as if anything would turn out the way Dr. Grind and his assistants were so confidently predicting. Or maybe they were right, maybe they had lined up the project in such a way that they really could see into the future. Her eyes wandered over the documents so that she caught snippets of the project.
At night, the children are placed in a communal sleeping area, tended by a rotating team of nurses, caregivers, and biological parents (determined by color-coded bands).
She tried to imagine this reality, but she soon realized that the only way she would truly understand any of this would be to throw herself into it and see for herself. It was strange to realize it, but The IFP, in trying to give her a range of options in order to have a more fully realized life, was banking on the simple fact that she had almost no options at the moment, which made it impossible to refuse the project.
At 10:30 P.M., her father returned from the market, carrying two plastic bags filled with the unsold food that had been sitting under the heat lamps for hours, corn dogs and chicken fingers and potato wedges and thick, tasteless wedges of pizza. This was, and had been for years, her father’s primary source of nutrition. Izzy walked into the living room and sat down on the sofa while her father eased himself into his recliner. He barely acknowledged her presence, simply nodded toward all the food on the coffee table, and bit into a corn dog. She searched through the food, already lukewarm from the drive home, and took a chicken finger for herself.