“There’s something wrong with that child,” Nanny 1 says.
“Yah, there’s always snot dripping from his nose. And whoever heard of a boy afraid of grass?” Nanny 2 replies.
Or it might be the other way around. Marissa can never tell Nanny 1 and Nanny 2 apart. They’re not the kind of girls who would have told her their names or engaged her in friendly conversation. They wear skinny jeans and neat T-shirts that reveal tanned, strong arms. Bracelets dangle at their wrists and delicate gold loops pull down the lobes of their ears. Their feet are brown but laced by the straps of gaily colored flip-flops. Nanny 1(or 2) has metallic blue nail polish on her toenails. Nanny 2 (or 1) goes for the old stand-by— warrior red.
Marissa smiles a half-smile as she hears their unforgiving laughter and pretends she belongs to the pretty girl who’s just pushed a younger child’s Barbie doll head first into the sand. The playground is a battlefield on many levels and her real charge, Frances, isn’t winning. She wills him not to look at her, not to run to her, not to come anywhere near her for another half hour.
She frowns and turns her attention back to her book, a six-hundred page history of Western Civilization. She takes classes at night at City College when she can and this book is both a torment and a promise that she’s meant for something better, even if it will take her a decade to graduate at the rate she’s going.
She can hear Frances make his peculiar noises. He’s nearly five, too old to be afraid of his own shadow, to be so afraid of…everything. He’s walking in odd patterns on the cement by the jungle gym, avoiding the tufts of grass that split the cement in places. A young boy comes shooting down the curve of the slide and Frances gives a shrill little shriek. Nanny 1 and Nanny 2 laugh cruelly.
“Damn,” says Nanny 1 and she makes a swooshing gesture with her wrist.
“Freak in progress,” Nanny 2 says.
Marissa slaps the pages of her book together more loudly than she intended and she shoves it into her shoulder bag. She gets up, her cheeks burning, and walks to Frances. She is wearing high tops and low riders that do not flatter her figure. She is conscious of the way her blouse is a bit too tight around her breasts. “Freak in progress,” she says to herself. She reaches for Frances’ hand and he takes hers. His hand is sticky with some mysterious substance but for the sake of her own dignity, she does not slap it away. He looks at her and sniffs. He is always on the tail-end of a cold. He’s a docile boy for all his other failings and when she tugs at him, he follows her without protest. She walks out of the park with her head held high and Frances in tow. She thinks that she’ll have to find another place for Frances to play. There’s no way she’ll face those bitchy girls again.
Outside the park she exhales and senses that Frances has exhaled as well. She drops his hand and turns to face him. She reaches into her shoulder bag and finds the packet of tissues squashed by her Western Civilization book. She tries to wipe France’s hand free of whatever stickiness he’s accumulated. She tries to ignore his woebegone face, but when the tears start falling on her arm, she looks up.
“Frank,” she tries, but he winces as if her attempt to make him a more rough-and-tumble boy hurts him. ‘That’s not my name,” he whines. He sniffs again as if he’s swallowing a large chunk of mucus.
“Stop that,” she snaps. “That’s disgusting.”
He mutters, “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I can’t breathe.” As she watches, big fat tears streak down his cheeks and she nearly starts sobbing herself.
“Oh, Frances, why do you have to be so, so….” she discards a few words first (stupid, fragile, lame), and settles for “sensitive.” “Why do you have to be so sensitive? It makes you a target. When you go to school, you’ll have to be stronger.”
Marissa stops and sees the downward pull of Frances’ lips. His mother has managed to delay Frances’ entry into the school system, avoiding daycare, where he no doubt would have been mercilessly teased. Even though no one has communicated the tribal bestiality of kindergarten, Frances has somehow become aware of it. He speaks to Marissa of the impending Fall with the resignation of a convicted prisoner waiting for his jail term to begin.
Marissa cups a hand around the boy’s wet cheek. “Don’t think about it. You’ll be fine. I’m just kidding. You’ll make lots of friends. There will be lots of boys and girls, just like you.”
“You’re lying,” Frances says.
They stand there for a moment, catching their breaths as men and women in suits and well-put-together casual clothing push past them. Marissa takes Frances’ hand and gives it a squeeze to show him that she doesn’t hold his oddness against him, not really.
She walks with him to Washington Square Park where dog walkers, college students, drug dealers, and undercover cops congregate. She sits down on one of the few empty benches and takes in the buildings of NYU and feels that familiar clawing at her chest. She’d always wanted to go to school there.
“Then why didn’t you go?” Frances asks her.
She’s startled to find that she’s spoken this out loud. Frances has taken a seat beside her on the bench and is swinging his short legs back and forth rapidly so that the bench shudders.
“Not enough money,” she says abruptly. She wants to be angry at him. He is the child of parents who can afford a nanny, who can afford to send him to a prestigious preschool (where he’ll still be tormented mercilessly, but the education will be good). She finds she cannot muster the energy. He is not his mother, the thin, perfectly accessorized women who walks in a cloud of expensive perfume. He is not his father, that parody of a successful man who clothes his aggression in Armani business suits. He’s just Frances, a poor sad sack of a kid who will always be too sensitive for his own good. Marissa can tell that he wants to run up to two small white poodles tussling in front of them, but they are perilously close to a patch of grass by a tree and if he runs to them he might accidently touch it with the heel of his sneaker. Even worse he might fall into it. She can read the terror of this in his eyes along with his desire.
“Frances,” Marissa says in an even voice, trying not to spook him. “What is it about grass? You used to love grass.”
“I did not,” he says.
“You did,” she urges him, not really knowing if this is true. “You started walking on grass.” She tries to picture Frances as a toddler with a bright, questing look and fearless air. She wants to make this true for him. “You really did,” she says again.
“That doesn’t mean I looove grass,” he says, making his voice all swoony.
Marissa has to laugh. “You are too smart for your own good, kid,” she says. They are silent for a moment.
She gets up and she lifts him and he gives a small gasp of alarm. She holds Frances under her arms like a football and she tilts him so that he can reach for the dogs without touching his feet to the ground. He sees her intent and he smiles, his thin face splitting wide with his grin as if he has been waiting his whole life for this act of kindness. The dogs’ owner, an older man wearing clothing too warm for the weather, looks up, alarmed, but then accepts what she’s doing as perfectly normal. Frances reaches his arms out as if he’s a small airplane and the dogs bark excitedly. Marissa strains with the effort of holding him but she won’t drop him for anything. For this small fraction of an instant, she wants to make his differences a joyful thing.
He reaches an index finger forward and one of the dogs leaps up, contacting for one moment a cold, wet dog nose, to a five-year old finger. Frances tilts his head back to look at her as if he’s discovered a new world and she smiles at him, gritting her teeth from the effort of holding him aloft, feeling her arms tremble. Frances doesn’t feel how she’s poised on the edge of dropping him; he doesn’t see it in her eyes. He’s a child after all; he still has faith in her.
She steps away from the dogs and from the grass and sets the small boy upright, carefully, on the cement. He is still giggling. He doesn’t know how close he was to his own personal disaster. She wipes her hands on her jeans carefully and then slicks down his hair which is now standing up in all directions. “Ready to go, Frances?” she asks him. He nods and leans his small body into her and she feels the weight of him and his small, intense devotion. It’s only a matter of time, she thinks, before she does drop him after all, but for now, she has not failed him.
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Photo credits
Children in sandbox by Cale
Washington Square Park by Grzegorz Pietrzak
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