by MARY GAITSKILL
The Washington Post Magazine
Posted 2004-05-09
We were supposed to have just one. But on our way out the door to meet the bus, we got a call from our local volunteer: There’d been a screw-up, she said. There was an extra kid on the bus, a 6-year-old named Christopher with no place to go — could we take him, too? There was no pressure, she said. We had 10 minutes to decide.
This is the way it all began almost two years ago. It is a story I did not intend to write; I didn’t use a tape recorder or take detailed notes. But I did keep a journal, and I have so obsessively rethought the depicted events for so long that while I’ve occasionally doubted my character, I don’t doubt my memory. My recollection of what people said and the exact way in which they said it is inevitably imperfect, but I believe it is accurate in substance.
The story started when my husband, Peter, and I signed up with a highly respected charity, an organization designed to provide poor inner-city children (usually black and Hispanic) with summer vacations their families cannot afford. For one to two weeks, they stay with rural host families (usually white) who agree, during that time, to treat their little guests as one of their own. When we volunteered, we felt more stable and more affluent than we had ever been, and we were beginning to think about children with whom we might share this abundance. We talked about adopting. We weren’t sure we were ready for that yet. Then we heard about the program. We had some discomfort about the premise of bringing an impoverished child into an affluent world for two weeks, and then sending him or her back into poverty — possibly feeling cheated even of natural anger at people who had, after all, been so nice. But this discomfort was countered by our notion that exposure to nature and animals would have to be good almost no matter what. We trusted our basic goodwill. We thought we could give a kid two good weeks, and learn something ourselves in the process.
Some months after we submitted our application, the charity’s local chairman came to interview us. We gave her three personal references. She asked us if we’d ever been convicted of child abuse. We said no. I asked if we would be able to meet the child’s parents. She looked at me quizzically. Why would you want to do that? she asked. Because it would make a connection between home and here. Because it would make the child feel safer to see that his mother was still in charge. Because — I trailed off; she was looking at me strangely.
“Kids aren’t that complicated,” she said.
And so it was arranged for us to host one uncomplicated child of either gender between the ages of 6 and 8. Sometime later, we were told the child would be a 7-year-old boy named Isaiah. Then, on our way out the door to meet him, we got the call asking if we could take a second child.
We said yes, but not for purely altruistic reasons; we thought if the boys got along it would make things easier for us. We decided that if they didn’t get along, Christopher would be the one to go, since we had already made a commitment to Isaiah. I explained this to the volunteer and asked her to find a backup family in case the match didn’t work; she said she would. No one discussed any of this with Christopher.
WE MET THE BUS in a schoolyard on a tree-lined street. The boys got off the bus and stood before us, hot and blinking. Isaiah smiled beautifully. Christopher glowered angrily and fearfully. The words “oil and water” popped into my head. Isaiah was slim and quick, verbal, bright-eyed and brimming with athletic energy. Christopher was chubby and withdrawn, with the morbid aura of a tiny Uncle Fester.
I thought, They’re going to hate each other. “What’s your birthday, Isaiah?” asked Peter.
“December 3,” piped the child enthusiastically. “I’m going to be 8!”
“And what’s your birthday, Christopher?”
“I don’t know,” he said in a muffled, strangely swallowed way. “You have some water? I’m thirsty.”
When we got them home, we showed them their room and introduced them to our cats. We explained to them that the oldest cat, Suki, was frail and needed to be treated gently. We asked them if they wanted to call their mothers. Isaiah said yes and eagerly went for the phone. Christopher said no and went upstairs. I went after him and found him on his bed.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call your mother?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “She’ll just scream and curse at me.”
“Why would she do that?” I asked.
“Because she hates me.”
I sat with him for a moment, watching his breath rise and fall, half-listening to Isaiah downstairs talking excitedly to his mother. I patted Christopher’s shoulder and went into the next room to call his mom. She wasn’t there.
The boys started quarreling almost as soon as Isaiah got off the phone. Isaiah quickly emerged as a clever bully, charming Christopher one instant, then verbally slapping him the next. We broke up the quarrel repeatedly; finally I asked Christopher if he wanted to go see some cows. He said yes. In the car I asked him about where he lived. In a small voice he said, “I like where I live because they keep the bad dogs locked up.” We were silent for some moments. Sunlight flew over us in big, dreamy shapes. Christopher turned to face me, straining the seat belt as he leaned against the car door to look at me, rubbing his eyes and blinking as if he were coming out of a dream and was astonished by what he saw. He whispered, “I’m going to forget my family now.” Thinking that I must have misunderstood, I asked him to repeat himself. He did. I felt pity and tenderness so strong it was physical. I felt inadequacy and fear, and that was physical, too. There was something big in the car, and I didn’t know what to say.
But once we got out of the car, it was okay. He asked questions about the birds he saw. He noticed every butterfly. He held my hand as we climbed up the rocky embankment to the pasture. He liked the cows so much he wanted to climb over the fence to pet them. At the bus stop, my impression of Christopher had been that he was hurt and dull-witted, and that the two qualities were related. I was receiving a different impression now, one of a deep and highly receptive intelligence. He reached for my hand again on the way back to the car.
When we got back to the house, Christopher went to sleep in front of a “Spiderman” video while Isaiah played hide-and-seek with Peter and me. When we went out back to play tag with the garden hose, we thought Christopher was missing too much, and we woke him; he said he was sick. He went upstairs and napped while Isaiah played charades with us. When we all went in, Peter checked on Christopher, who was difficult to rouse, angry and weepy because, he said, his eye hurt and itched. “Bo-ring!” sang Isaiah. By the time we figured out Christopher had hay fever, it was time for dinner.
We went to a pizza parlor, and I stopped off for some children’s Benadryl. I had to cajole Christopher into taking it, but finally he opened his lips in a gentle shape that gave his mouth an expression of innocence stronger than the reflexive sullenness of his eyes. I said, “I hope you get better soon, baby.”
“I don’t,” said Isaiah.
When the pizza came, the pieces were too unwieldy to eat with our hands, so we used knives and forks. Isaiah had no trouble with this; Christopher was clumsy with the utensils, and Isaiah called him stupid for it. I cut Christopher’s pizza for him, showing him how. He looked at me with an expression like that of a starving kitten I’d just given a dish of food. He cut the rest himself then, smiling and bright.
When we got home, we sent the boys upstairs to wash their hands. Almost immediately Isaiah came running down singing, “He hit Suki!” Peter ran up the stairs, Isaiah boun
ding happily behind. “How could you hit a defenseless little animal!” Peter roared. By the time I got there, he was looming over Christopher, who was curled up and clutching his genitals with both hands, staring at my husband in stricken terror.
“Peter,” I said, “tone it down. He’s only 6.”
Peter sat on the bed and told Christopher he was sorry he’d yelled so loud, but that he must never hit our cats again. Apparently, Christopher realized Peter wasn’t going to kill him, and so he got up to join Isaiah, squatting on the floor to watch with great interest as we coaxed Suki from under the bed. Then we all went downstairs, and Peter suggested we see who could make the scariest monster face. Within minutes, we were all monsters; within seconds, we were having a fantastic pillow fight. All of us were laughing and shouting; a picture got knocked over, and we moved the game out to the yard, where it became a game of catch.
By bedtime the boys were friends. When we turned out the light and shut the door, I said, “I think it’s going to work out.”
THE NEXT MORNING they were enemies again. They fought about everything; for example, about who Peter’s cat Bitey liked more. Most intently, they fought over who Peter liked more. Of course they would; neither boy had a father at home. Peter took them out every day for physical activity — an area where Isaiah excelled and Christopher did not. We had borrowed bikes for them; Isaiah knew how to ride, but Peter had to teach Christopher. Christopher fell off the bike a lot, and every time he did, Isaiah taunted him. Christopher responded with rage or tears. His temperament was a mix of aggression and needy vulnerability that Peter found extremely taxing. He would dutifully scold Isaiah, but it was clear that he favored him, which made Isaiah act cocky. When I bought flowers, Isaiah asked me why I did that, and I said, “Because you’re here.” “I hate flowers,” he replied. “They ugly.” “I like them,” said Christopher. “That ’cause you stupid,” said Isaiah.
But Christopher was hostile, too, sometimes to Isaiah, sometimes just generally. He was always talking about “old ladies” he’d beaten up or killed. “My mama says, ‘Shut you mouth or I’ll break it!’ ” he’d yell for no reason. When we got his paperwork via FedEx, we read that his “possible behavior problem” was “hitting,” that his response to conflict with kids was “hitting,” and that his response to conflict with adults was “hitting.”
“Face it, Mary,” Peter said. “He’s not a likable kid.”
But to me, he was. To me, everything about him said that he was a likable kid who was ineptly trying to figure out how to behave in a world that he experienced as violent. When we got hold of his mother, she could scarcely allay this impression; she spoke no English and I speak no Spanish.
But even though I liked Christopher, his problems seemed too big for us to cope with, at least with Isaiah going “ha-ha!” every time he fell off the bike. Since we had committed to Isaiah, I began to consider sending Christopher somewhere else.
“We can’t protect him,” I said to Peter. “And he knows you don’t like him.”
“He does?” said Peter, genuinely surprised.
And the next day he vainly tried to hide it. We went to a nearby lake, and Peter spent the whole time in the water with Christopher while I stayed on shore building sand castles with Isaiah. But as soon as Christopher came out of the water, the two boys began to bicker. In the car they began slapping at each other. When we stopped at the grocery, Christopher went in with me. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I want to go home.” “What don’t you like?” I asked. “The man doesn’t like me. He likes the other boy. I’m afraid he’s going to take me somewhere and leave me.” And, as it happened, he would.
Back at home, the fighting continued, Isaiah calling Christopher “ugly big-head” while Christopher helplessly sputtered, “I’m gonna [expletive] you up!”
“Dry up, Isaiah,” I said. “We’re all ugly, okay?”
“Yeah!” cried Christopher, liking this idea enormously. “We all ugly!”
“I’m not ugly,” snapped Isaiah. “You are.”
“This isn’t working,” I said to Peter in the kitchen while the boys squabbled over a game of Mousetrap in the living room. “It’s more than we can handle, and it’s not fair to either of them. Christopher will have a better chance somewhere else.”
“Get used to it,” the charity representative said when I reached her. “My kids fight all the time.”
“We’re not used to it,” I told her. “I didn’t think this experience was supposed to be about fighting.”
She hadn’t found a backup family, but she said she’d start calling people and get back to me. Within moments she called back. She’d found what seemed the ideal alternate host: a widow named Eileen who had raised a son and had also taught elementary school. She was hosting an 8-year-old named Jack, a repeat visitor of whom she was very fond. I told Eileen that Christopher had problems but that I thought they had been aggravated by the chemistry between him and Isaiah, then compounded by our lack of experience. She agreed to take him, and the charity woman said she’d be over in two hours to pick up Christopher.
“Don’t tell him he’s going to stay somewhere else,” she said. “Tell him he’s going to a pool party. You can drop his stuff by later.”
I intended to follow this advice, but I couldn’t. I thought Christopher deserved to know, and I thought I should be the one to tell him. I took him to the park to do it.
“You don’t like Isaiah, do you?”
“I hate him.”
“How would you like to go to another place where there’s a nicer boy who’d want to play with you?”
“No. I want to stay with you and Peter.”
“But it’s close by; we could come visit.”
“No. I want to be in the house of the four cats.”
I was not expecting such a firm refusal, and in the face of it, I could not follow through. Instead, I pushed him on the swings and he shouted my name over and over again.
And then I took him home. We told Isaiah to go to our bedroom. Then we sat Christopher down in the guest room and told him he had to go. He was hurt, then angry. When the charity woman knocked on the door, I explained the situation.
“Let me handle this,” she said. As soon as she hit the bedroom door, she began talking, and talking fast.
“Okay, Christopher, it’s like this: You were supposed to go somewhere else but then you couldn’t go there anymore. Mary and Peter were kind enough to let you stay here until someone else could take you, and now it’s time to go.”
Christopher grabbed the bed with both hands and yelled, “No! N-O spells no!”
By this time Isaiah had popped out and was dancing around singing, “Ha-ha! You go away!” Peter took him back to the other room.
“Look, Christopher,” the charity woman said, “I talked to your mother, and she says she wants you to go.”
Christopher lifted his head and gave her a deliberate, searching look. “Lady,” he said calmly, “you a liar.”
“How dare you! How dare you call me a liar!” she screamed. “Don’t you ever call an adult a liar!”
The boy cried out incoherently and scrambled across the bed. I put my arm around him and said, “We’re doing this because we want you to be happy.”
“You a liar too, Mary!” He began to cry; I sat back, shamed. Isaiah burst into the room again, singing, “Ha-ha!” Christopher ran from the room to the staircase, where he locked both his arms through the banister and cried, “Don’t send me away! They always send me away!”
Looking ready to cry herself, our representative sat on the stairs and valiantly made an offer she could scarcely have desired to make. She told Christopher that if he wanted, he could stay with her. She had horses, she said, and dogs. He could — “I would never stay with you!” yelled Christopher with conviction
. “You are gross! Your family is gross!”
And then Isaiah did something extraordinary. He darted in and crouched so close to Christopher they were nearly touching; he grabbed the banister with all his might. His body language expressed pure, animal solidarity. He was whispering to Christopher, and I felt wild hope; if Isaiah was whispering anything conciliatory, I would stop this whole thing cold. I got in close to listen and heard, joyless and malicious: “They send you away, ha-ha.” I cried, “He’s the problem, not Christopher!” Then I turned to Christopher and said, “This is not your fault!” He gave me the same intense look he had given me when we were in the car together. The charity representative took him by the shoulders and shouted, “You are making me late!” Christopher was carried out screaming, “Send the other boy away!” until his voice broke.
Peter put Christopher in the back of the woman’s van, got in himself and held him in his arms. Christopher first beat Peter’s chest, then clung to him. Peter rocked him, stroking his head and back.
As the van drove away, I stood outside the house panting with the effort to stop my tears. Behind the screen door Isaiah was chanting, “Ha-ha!” and dancing with furious distress. I approached; he locked the door and cried, “It’s not fair! I hate everyone here but the cats!” His face was streaked with tears.
“I don’t blame you,” I said flatly. “What just happened was wrong. I’m sorry. I don’t even want to come in.”
I sat down on the stoop and tried to think how to recover the situation. A moment passed. Isaiah opened the door. “Ain’t you comin’ in?” he asked.
I came in; he promptly sat on the floor and put his hands over his ears. But he was listening with his entire face. I sat down in a chair. “Isaiah. We don’t know very much about children. We’ve never done this before.”
Slowly, his hands came off his ears. He listened with the intensity of a soldier trying to crack a code.
“We thought if Christopher came it would be good for both of you. But — ”
“I hate Christopher!” he shouted. “He’s stupid!”
“Isaiah,” I said, “you should understand, you have something Christopher doesn’t have.”
“Like what?”
“You have a mother who loves you.”
“My mother doesn’t love me, she hates me!”
“I don’t believe that. I can hear she loves you. I can hear it in her voice.”
“She doesn’t love me, she hates me! That’s why she sent me here!” Isaiah put his head down and sobbed raggedly.
I sat down on the floor with him, not talking for some moments. I didn’t touch him because I sensed he didn’t want it — not from me anyway. Finally I said, “If your mother doesn’t love you, I don’t know why. Because you are a lovable boy.” And at that moment I meant it. I had gone from wanting to throttle Isaiah to wanting to love him. He was, after all, the surviving child, and we had to take care of him.
LATER THAT NIGHT, while Isaiah played with a neighborhood girl, I called Eileen. She said that Jack was being “lovely” but that Christopher was strangely quiet and unresponsive. “He keeps going into the deep end of the pool, and he can’t swim,” she said. “We tell him not to but — ” I asked her if she had a life vest or inner tube. No, she didn’t. I told her I’d bring her one the next day.
When I brought the life vest, they were at the community pool. I half-expected Christopher to hate me. But I wanted to see him anyway. My heart was pounding, and my face was flushed. He saw me and started thrashing toward me, shouting my name. He was thrilled to get the life vest. He asked if Peter was coming. He asked if Bitey was coming. “Bitey would be proud to see me!” he cried.
But when I talked to Eileen, she said, “I can’t keep this kid. He’s out of control.” He and Jack bickered constantly, and she couldn’t take it. I told her I’d help. I said I’d come by every day and take him biking or to the park. She said she’d see.
That night she called and said Christopher was going home the next day. She’d asked him to do something, and he’d said he was going to cut her. When I hung up, Isaiah said, “Why you so sad?”
“Because Christopher got sent home. That makes me sad.”
He looked down and said, “Oh.”
About an hour later Isaiah threw the first in a series of huge, daily tantrums. This one began while he watched me put barbecue sauce on a chicken. I was using a brush, and he remarked that his mother put it on with her hands. I asked if he’d like me to use my hands. “No,” he said, “your hands are dirty. My mom’s hands aren’t dirty. Just because she’s black don’t mean her hands are dirty.”
“I know that,” I said. “And just because I’m white doesn’t mean mine are dirty.”
He began to shout, “You’re dirty and you’re ugly!” over and over.
I tried to joke him out of it, but he just escalated. As he shouted, his face became shockingly rigid, almost masklike; strangely, he looked like a woman — a malicious, half-demented woman.
That night I lay awake for a long time, visualizing the scene on the stairs again and again. At that moment, this whole program appeared to me like a mechanical apparatus — a conveyor belt for children — designed with benevolent intent. But like any machine, it sometimes malfunctioned, and one of the little human items got caught in the gears and chewed up. Christopher had been one such “item,” and Peter, the local volunteer and I had been the gears.
The next day the charity representative called to say she’d put Christopher on the train. She said she felt awful. She said that when she’d told him he was going home he said, “To my real home? With Peter and Mary?” Again, I imagined the grinding gears. The charity lady said, “I feel I failed Christopher.” I said, “We all failed Christopher.”
And perhaps Isaiah, too. His emotions seemed to bounce all over in near-constant turmoil, like a radio with a dial flipping madly from one station to the next. He demanded nonstop attention, but if you looked at him longer than 10 seconds he’d yell, “Quit looking at me!” He’d ask us to give him something to eat, and then refuse to eat it because we’d touched it. He said the flowers I got for the visit were ugly, but when they wilted and I threw them out, the first thing he said that morning was, “Where my flowers?” His tantrums seemed to come from nowhere, but in retrospect it’s clear they were the result of several stressors coming to bear on a young child alone in a strange place he actually had no desire to be. Once when we were out, his mother called and left a message that ended, “Isaiah, you know I love you.” He listened to it again and again, his eyes so full of longing that it was almost unbearable to see. This child loved his mother profoundly, and at 7 he was not ready to leave her to stay with strangers for two weeks, let alone affluent white strangers. Yet he had gotten the message that to do so was a privilege, the best thing that could happen to him.
The second time we took him to the lake we bought him a net so that he could fish for minnows. Peter and I followed him with a bucket, and he caught so many fish that he soon attracted an audience of children. A towheaded boy asked him for some minnows, and Isaiah said no. Towhead looked at me and said, “Is he your son?” For a strange moment I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t, and I think it would’ve offended Isaiah mightily if I had. But my saying no seemed painful to him as well; he became so rude to us that I walked away. An hour later, when we told him it was time to leave, he became hysterical, screaming and tearing up everything he could tear. Peter picked him up and carried him to the car, where he tore up his paper and crayons, sobbing, “Mommy! Mommy!”
“Isaiah, stop it!” Peter said. “You’re a smart boy, you don’t have to act this way.”
“I’m not smart, I’m dumb!” He spoke as if furious at us for suggesting ot
herwise.
“Don’t give me that,” Peter said. “I know you’re smart.”
“I’m not smart,” said Isaiah, weeping. “I’m dumb. I’m dumb because I’m black.”
I said, “You’re dumb because you’re . . . what?”
“Because I’m black!”
“Because you’re . . . bad?”
He stopped crying out of sheer exasperation and spoke as clearly as he could: “No! I’m dumb because I’m black!”
Peter and I sat silent and shocked. Isaiah began to cry again. We offered him some juice. He said he didn’t want it because he wasn’t sure whether or not our mouths had been on it. We got him some new. He drank it and cried himself to sleep. When we pulled up to the house, he gleefully leapt out of the car to get our mail and hand it to us, reading out our names on each envelope.
This happened every time he came out of a tantrum; he would throw himself into a passionate scheme of friendliness every bit as involving as his hostility. It was as if part of him wanted to believe in the ideal version of his experience with us, and he strove to make it real as ardently as we did. He would come running to show us a new drawing, sing us a song, tell us an anecdote. He volunteered to help with chores. He loved being read to at night, I think because it meant he had our full attention without being looked at. One night we were reading The Story of Ferdinand, and he asked me to guess which of the illustrations was his favorite. I guessed right away: the sweetest, most delicate drawing in the book, a picture of Ferdinand’s baffled little head peering from the mouth of a dark cavern into a great arena. Isaiah gave me a rare look of appreciation. “How’d you know?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just you.” And it was — funny, subtle and delicate. But if I’d said that, I’ll bet he would’ve turned remote and hostile again.
During his final tantrum he clawed Peter, tore my shirt open and then ran around slamming doors and throwing things. Then he came bounding up the stairs asking, “What we having for lunch?” I was so angry I refused to speak to him for the rest of the day. I started to soften when I looked at him intently singing along with a cartoon — but then he saw me and yelled, “What you looking at!”
Later that night I said, “Isaiah, I was really angry at you today. And I know you know why. Tomorrow I won’t be mad anymore, and we can start on a good foot. But I don’t ever want to see that kind of behavior again.” And for the next two days I didn’t, but by then his visit was over. It took 10 days for us to begin to know how to set limits, and for him to understand our style of doing so. Under the circumstances, I think that was pretty quick.
WHEN WE TOOK ISAIAH to meet the bus, he barely spoke to us. The bus came, and he got on without looking back.
Back home, the house seemed empty. Isaiah had taken his best drawings with him; I found some rejects and put them up on the refrigerator. I walked to the park and sat there for a long time. I thought about Isaiah dancing through the house singing, “Wake up! Spri-ing, where are you?” I thought about him crying in our car saying he was dumb because he was black. I cursed myself for being too shocked to address that, for not telling him he was wrong. I thought even more of Christopher, carried out of our house screaming. I thought of him at the pizza parlor looking up at me like a hungry kitten, sitting in my car blinking while sun and shadow streamed over him. Then I felt too sad to think.
When I got home, Peter and I called the charity. We told the woman there how the visit had gone, stressing that we’d sent Christopher away not because he was a bad kid but because of our inability to cope with the situation. I said I’d like to be sure his mother knew that. I also told her we might be interested in having Christopher next year. She gave me the family’s address and said she would keep us in mind.
But Peter didn’t want Christopher back. He felt sorry for him but he didn’t like him; he felt a second visit would likely go bad and hurt Christopher again. I could see the sense in this, but I did like Christopher. I more than liked him. Whenever I thought about him, my feelings were overwhelming. I had never had such feelings for a child. Peter thought my feelings were more about guilt and projection than they were about Christopher, and this seemed possible to me. But it seemed equally possible that Peter’s dislike was about guilt and projection, too. For the next week we went back and forth about it; the more emotional I got, the more convinced he was that my emotion was suspect. Finally we agreed that it was okay to send Christopher’s mother a note with photographs. We kept it simple. We said we were sorry about what had happened; we said, “Your son is a good boy.” We found someone to translate the note into Spanish, which I copied onto a card with bright flowers on it and inside put two pictures of Christopher. “That’s it,” Peter said. “We drop it unless the mother writes us back. Otherwise, we’re being pushy.”
A month after I mailed the note to Christopher’s mom, it came back stamped “Moved/No Forwarding Address.” I called the charity and got a social worker. When she gave me the new address — in probably the worst neighborhood in the city — I thanked her and told her we’d get the letter out.
“Or you could call him,” she said. “You could call the little boy.”
And so I did. I asked a friend who spoke some Spanish to help me talk to Christopher’s mother. But it was Christopher who picked up the phone. When he realized who it was, he just said, “Hello, Mary,” as if it were the most natural thing in the world to hear from me. He asked about Bitey. He asked where his life vest was. My heart was pounding. I asked to speak to his mother; I listened to my friend talk to her in cheerful, broken Spanish. When the phone was returned to me, Christopher’s sister was on the other end. Her name was Maxieel (pronounced Maxi-elle) and she was 10. Her voice was vibrant and curious. She surrendered the phone to Christopher reluctantly. I talked to him for almost half an hour. I said, “Christopher, I was sad when you left.”
“Did you cry?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I did. I cried when you left.”
There was a short, dense silence; I felt his presence strongly, like you feel the body warmth of a person next to you in the dark. He asked if I would call him tomorrow. I said no, but that I would write. There was another silence, full of question marks.
“Okay,” he said. “I go now.”
Because he had asked about it, I sent Christopher his life vest. Peter did not approve, and instead of a discussion we had a fight about it. He was afraid I was raising expectations we would not be able to meet. He was also afraid I was using Christopher to indulge benevolent fantasies that were more about my needs than Christopher’s. I argued with him, but I was afraid, too. When I was talking about Christopher with a friend, she said, “Don’t you think this is really about wanting a child of your own?”
“I don’t want a child. I want him.”
“But he’s already got a mother.”
“I know. But maybe we could foster him and his sister, be like godparents.”
“Does Peter want to?”
“If he doesn’t, I’ll divorce him.”
“You’re talking crazy.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did know. But I was not able to hold back from sending the life vest. It was true; I did have fantasies, so strong and florid they were like a seductive cloud of dreams that I had to grope my way through whenever I called or wrote or even thought about Christopher. But I could also feel something real under the fantasy, though I couldn’t yet see what it was.
I called to see if Christopher had gotten the vest. He had not. He wasn’t as communicative this time; all he said was, “Can I come there again?” When I said, “I don’t know,” he put the phone down. Maxieel picked it up. She told me t
hey’d been out the day the package was supposed to arrive. I talked to her for about 15 minutes. She said she hated their new neighborhood because their mom was so scared there, she wouldn’t let them out, and they “never got to do anything.”
When the post office returned the vest, I sent it again, with some books and a letter. Two weeks later Maxieel sent us a letter thanking us for the books, as well as a picture of the family. So began our communication. Every month I would send books and then follow up with a call to see if they’d gotten them. Maxieel talked to us about everything — family, shopping errands, her mother’s boyfriend in prison, and school. Christopher was more erratic, sometimes talking so fast it was hard to understand him, then falling silent for minutes at a time. “I want to tell you something,” he said once, “but I don’t know what it is.” Peter got drawn into the phone conversations and was slowly won over by the children’s enthusiasm. We’d pretty much decided we’d have Christopher again, and when Maxieel asked if she could come too, we said yes.
We called the children’s mother and asked if she would like to meet. We went on a Sunday morning, accompanied by Peter’s friend Tom, a Spanish-speaking Episcopal priest. We brought a board game and some cookies. Christopher’s mother opened the door and formally kissed us while Maxieel hovered in the background. The building was a broken-down walk-up with junk piled in the halls, but the apartment was large and well-kept. There were framed pictures of the children on the wall. Christopher’s mother served us ginger ale on a tray. Christopher emerged from a bedroom, sulking with his fist in his mouth. “I don’t know if I want to go back,” he said. “Nobody’s going to make you go anywhere,” Tom said. Visibly relaxed, Christopher flashed a smile.
The board game came out; both kids played. Tom joked with them, playing a pretend guitar and singing in a ridiculous voice; they laughed. I sang them a song about our cats; they laughed again. Maxieel showed us a certificate Christopher had received at school naming him Student of the Month, and we praised him. Maxieel was startlingly beautiful, with huge, ardent eyes and a gentle mouth. I had Tom tell her mother, “Your daughter is very pretty.” Her mother made a face and indicated, yeah, but she’s fat. It was a mean thing to say — but still I liked her. I liked her without knowing why. She held her body like a pillbox that she peered from with deep, wary eyes. But when she touched Christopher’s back, I could see tenderness in her hand.
Christopher ran into the bedroom and came out with a ball; he and Peter went out to play. While they were out, I talked to the mother through Tom. She told me that she came from the mountains of the Dominican Republic, where she had four more children. I told her I had no children, and that it was wonderful for me to know her children, even in a limited way. I asked her if the kids could come visit us for a weekend, and if so, which weekend would be good. She said they could come during Holy Week. When Peter and Christopher came back in, she gave us candles to take home.
THE EASTER VISIT WAS A SUCCESS. There were problems: Christopher became so allergic that he couldn’t breathe. We took him to the emergency room. They wouldn’t treat him without the consent of a relative, and his mother wasn’t home. We finally found an aunt, and he was treated for asthma for the first time. Soon after, he rode his bike into traffic and almost got hit, causing me to scold him so angrily that he cried. He threw several bad tantrums, the worst occurring on the first day, right after we’d bought him and Maxieel bicycles. We were returning home from the store, and we declared that it was Maxieel’s turn to sit in the front seat of the car. He kicked at her seat and yelled, “I hate you all! I hate everybody!”
“I do too,” I said. “If you’d been here last week and we’d had a Hate Everybody contest, I would’ve won.”
“No, you wouldn’t, ’cause I would’ve punched you.”
“Don’t even joke about that, it’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Then I have nothing to say to you.” I sat away from him, and we rode in silence, listening to Peter and Maxieel talk in the front seat.
“How am I supposed to trust you?” he muttered. “You don’t even like me.”
I hesitated. “You’re wrong,” I said. “I do like you, and part of why I like you is that you hate everybody.”
When we got home, I went out biking with both kids. It was getting dark and chilly, and Maxieel went back in quickly, leaving me and Christopher alone.
“Don’t you try to lose me,” he said.
“I never try to lose you. I always try to find you.”
I could tell he liked that. There was a silent, pleasurable moment, and then he said, “Thank you for the bike. I’m sorry I said I hated you. I didn’t mean it.”
“I accept the apology. I know what it’s like to hate everybody.”
“But I don’t hate everybody,” he protested. “I just need to say it sometimes.”
He was careful with the cats, especially Suki. He still reached for my hand when we went for walks. Both he and Maxieel loved the petting zoo we found. They loved going to the park at night. They loved painting Easter eggs and hunting for them. Most of all, Maxieel loved the horseback-riding lesson I arranged for her. The first pictures I took of her that day show her preparing to mount the horse, chin down, jaw set, eyes looking up at mortal challenge. In the final ones she is sitting erect with her shoulders back, a broad, triumphant smile on her face.
About a month after this visit, a social worker from the charity called and said that because of a bad report from the field representative, they didn’t think they wanted to send Christopher out again, even though we were willing to have him. They’d reevaluated him, and he had shown disrespect for authority. How? An authority figure came into the room, and he was disrespectful. How? He had glared and not answered questions. What questions? The social worker did not recall, but she assured me that their procedure was tried and true. They had a very negative impression of him and a very lengthy negative report from the local charity representative who strongly recommended that he not go out again.
“Why would you want a child like that anyway?” the social worker asked. “Who punches, kicks, spits — ”
“He didn’t do that.”
“It says in the report he did.”
“Can you read it to me?”
She put me on hold, came back and said she couldn’t find the report but that she knew that’s what it said.
I told her we’d had him out for Easter and that it had gone well; she was not impressed. Back and forth we went. Grudgingly, she said they had not made up their minds. They had sent out a questionnaire to his teacher and they had not yet received it back. When they did, they’d make their decision. “But it doesn’t look good,” she said ominously.
I was so angry I was tempted to drop the charity altogether — but we felt we needed the insurance coverage they could provide, especially after Christopher’s stunt with the bike. I called Maxieel and asked her the name of Christopher’s teacher; I wanted to hear what she had to say.
The teacher, a woman with a rough, feisty voice, talked our ears off. She said Christopher had had such a bad reputation in school that she had dreaded seeing him in her class. But his behavior problems and learning skills, she said, had improved “by leaps and bounds”; he had been named Most Improved Student for the whole year. He responded best to behavior modification: “When he does something right, praise him — he’s starved for praise, and he’ll work to get it. And when he does something bad, take away a privilege — basically, carrot and stick.” She added, “You guys have been the carrot all year. I told him that if he behaved himself he could visit you again. And it worked.” She h
ad strongly recommended that he be allowed to go.
“We’ll let him go for a week,” the social worker said, “as long as you understand that if you have a problem, you’re on your own. Which means if he has to go back, you’ll be taking him back yourself.”
This visit was even better than the previous one. Because the charity would not allow siblings to come together, we had Maxieel come up secretly on the train, and Christopher came up on the bus. We had made Christopher promise — on pain of having the bike taken away — that he would stop at every stop sign and, at busy streets, dismount and walk the bike across. We talked to his mother about it, and he promised her, too. He kept his promise; overall his behavior was much better. On his first day, we went to the beach; right on our arrival a sudden thunderstorm ruined our plans, and we braced for a tantrum. “It’s nobody’s fault,” he said mildly. “It just rained.”
We took them to the lake another day; we took them to the zoo and the bowling alley and for more night trips to the park. Sometimes we just played board games, and once we put on music and danced together.
Christopher still talked a lot about punching people; his teacher, Isaiah, Peter, and a whole string of imaginary people were conversationally punched several times a day. Sometimes Peter got mad and chewed him out. Once, when Christopher announced, “I’m going to knock your teeth out when I get big,” Peter just laughed. “By the time you get big enough to knock my teeth out, I won’t have any teeth left,” he said. Christopher cracked up, and the moment passed.
His posturing was annoying, but strangely poignant, too. Maxieel told me that when Christopher was 5 he was badly beaten by a gang of older boys, and that a relative once chased him into the street threatening to kill him. The kid lived in a world of threat, and our world was no exception. I asked him if it had been strange to come to our house that first time, and he answered, “It wasn’t strange, it was scary.” When I asked him why, he said, “I was scared to be without my mom.” I can’t imagine any 6-year-old would not be scared under the circumstances. But for this 6-year-old, who had already been physically hurt and frequently threatened, the fear would be extreme. Threat for him was part of the climate, and in that context, his belligerent talk seemed like a sort of engagement. Once, when he and Maxieel were arguing over a game, they started punching each other on the arm. Just as I was about to say something, Christopher lunged at his sister as if to escalate the tussle — and instead, hugged her warmly about the waist. She put her arm around his shoulder; they held each other for a moment and separated. Without words, the quarrel had ended in deep and perfect understanding. I wondered if his verbal aggression was a clumsy attempt to transpose this deep understanding onto the world of words and social rules. If so, Peter’s response about not having any teeth to knock out must’ve struck Christopher like a flash of light, for it verbally turned a “punch” into an affectionate pat.
“I don’t understand him, and I still don’t know if I like him,” Peter said. “But I think I love him.”
Since that visit, we’ve talked to the children almost every week. We take turns reading to them; they read to us, too. They were up for four days during the Christmas holiday, and last month we witnessed their confirmation. I don’t know how the story will end, or how any of us will finally feel about it. But right now, I’m glad we decided to try again with Christopher. And I’m grateful to the charity for bringing him and his sister into our lives. In fact, this summer I will be working as a chaperon on one of their buses.
We still think about Isaiah. Up until recently, Christopher mentioned his name a lot, sometimes wistfully. After Christopher left, Isaiah had sometimes mentioned his name, too. Isaiah despised Christopher’s vulnerability — but I believe he was also outraged to see any fellow kid mistreated by adults. It will not surprise me if one day I learn that when Isaiah grabbed the banister and huddled close to Christopher, he was whispering to him in sympathy and support — kind words that changed to jeers only when he knew I was listening. I remember when he and I were sitting in the car and he was idly speculating on how much it would cost to paint the car; he guessed $200. “If the world was fair and good, it would cost $200,” I said. “But the world isn’t fair and good.”
He looked almost offended. “The world is good,” he said.
“You’re right, Isaiah,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me. The world is good, but sometimes I forget.”
“That ’cause you dumb,” he said.
