The Bookseller(77)
I remember how he smiled appreciatively, clearly enjoying this new version of his wife. “Farmer Katharyn,” he called me. “And her farmhands.”
The triplets and I put flowerbeds in the front yard. I let the children pick out the seed packets, and we waited with anticipation for the flowers to pop through the ground and bring patches of brightness to our yard. Mitch and Missy loved the muddy, colorful messes, the warm earth filtering through their fingers. Michael abhorred it; he would shriek when dirt got under his fingernails.
When the fall came, and we had to spend more time inside, I figured that imaginative play would help Michael find a way outside his own head—and besides, Missy wanted to grow up to be a princess. So we played dress-up. On Saturdays, when Lars relieved me of child-care duties for a few hours, I’d rummage through the Salvation Army store, bringing home treasures in satin and lace. These I’d transform into costume after costume, with a little magic on my sewing machine—another new acquisition, and one that was further converting me, I hoped, into the domestic whiz I was sure I could be.
Missy loved the costumes; she changed outfits twenty times a day, becoming Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and a princess she made up herself, a princess named Claire after my mother and Missy’s own middle name. Princess Claire wanted to marry Prince Jon—her name for Mitch—and she would force him, both of them giggling, into a tinfoil crown and a little velvet jacket. She tried the same with Michael. “A princess can marry as many princes as she wants,” Missy told us with authority. But Michael brutally ripped off his royal trappings and ran from the room, cowering in the corner of his bedroom, behind his bed.
I thought that being out in public might give Michael the opportunity to learn to interact with different types of people. So we went on outings: the zoo, the park, the library. Even though I had my station wagon, we sometimes rode the bus, because Mitch, as young as three, had already begun his love affair with transportation. But they were exhausting, those trips, because I never knew how Michael would behave, never knew what, if anything, would set him off. It was like the woman in Sisters’, the one who had come in with the autistic daughter. I know now how that woman must have felt, because my feelings when I took my child out of the house were the same. We’d be having a good day, and then suddenly, with no warning, something would happen—Michael would be hungry and I’d have packed a different snack than the one I’d promised him, or another child at the park would climb onto the swing that Michael had been heading toward, or the weather, which had promised to be sunny according to the television forecasters, would unexpectedly turn cold and cloudy. And then it would start. The screaming, the howling. The other two children would be in tears, and so would I. It was all I could do to get everyone back to Springfield Street in one piece.
By the time Lars came home in the evening, I was spent. The best I could manage by then would be to sit quietly on the couch and read stories to Mitch and Missy, who snuggled next to me.
Michael, as I recall, I was all too happy to hand off to Lars each night. I made it clear to Lars that the moment he walked in the door, Michael was his responsibility.
Despite my desire to make it up to Michael—to change him, to cure him—by the end of the day, I couldn’t stand to spend another second with him.
The September before they turned four, Mitch and Missy began attending nursery school three mornings a week. Logically, that ought to have made things better. Caring for one child, albeit one child like Michael, ought to have been much easier than caring for three, right? To my surprise, I found that things were more difficult on the days that Mitch and Missy were in school. Michael and I both missed them, and the time that we spent one-on-one did not satisfy either of us. Although he did not have the words to say so—he spoke very little, and what he did say, we usually had to work to decipher—Michael did not understand why he could not join his brother and sister at school. Barring that, he could not understand why Mitch and Missy ought not to be prevented from going. “Michael go,” he’d insist when I dropped them off each morning. He shook his head violently, clawing at my arm as I held him at the doorway, as I tried to steal a moment to kiss my other two children good-bye, rarely getting the opportunity to do so. “Michael go, too! Or no go. No, no, no go!” He’d break into a fit and pummel me with his little fists as I dragged him to the car, the other mothers staring and whispering as I made my hasty retreat.
On the short drive home, I would be silent as he whimpered and fussed beside me. I knew it was my job to help him, to comfort him. But nothing I said or did—no touch, no word, no gesture of any sort—seemed to matter to him. So I learned to keep my eyes on the road, choking back the guilty tears. There was nothing, I told myself, that I could do for my child. The damage had been done; it was too late. And it was my fault.
Eventually I started having Lars drop the other two off at the nursery school. That helped, but I still dreaded pickup time; I was never sure how Michael would act in that gathering of children and mothers and end-of-schoolday confusion. But there was no way to avoid it; Lars was at his office at that hour.
The hours between Lars leaving to take the other two to nursery school and my driving to the school for pickup felt like an eternity. I did my best to entertain Michael, trying to engage his interest as I read him stories on the couch, walking around the block at his slow, methodical pace, and taking him to the playground on nice days, where I’d swing him for hours—something he loved, and that gave me respite in a way, a chance to clear my head, the orderly, reliable pace of the swing on its chains a small comfort to both Michael and me.