Rescuing Julia Twice (24 page)

One Saturday afternoon, we return from Home Depot. The fall chill is settling in.

“Let's open the town,” I say to Ricky and Julia.

The town is a comprehensive set of wooden blocks that are tiny replicas of houses and shops and public buildings. The set has mix-and-match roofs that remind me of the Beaux Arts architecture of the Upper West Side. There are plastic green trees and a yellow bus and red fire engine. Julia tears toward the cardboard box and rips at the plastic furiously. The pieces spill to the floor. I try to get her to play
with
me, but she wants to do her own thing. The blocks amuse her for less than ten minutes.

“Julia, wait. We've just started.” She drifts away.

I'm about to toss the blocks aside and move on to my heady to-do list, but I sit down again. I put roofs on houses and string houses into streets and make streets cross with other streets where pedestrians find the post
office and the hospital and the school. Then I add plastic green trees near the buildings and school buses and fire engines along the roads.

“You've done a fine job, Mama,” Ricky says, standing behind me. “Julia, come look at the town Mama made.”

“Julia, hurrr-ry up, we're waiting,” Ricky calls, his hands cupped over his mouth like a megaphone. “I see Betty. There she is. She's waiting for you. C'mon.”

Betty is our ketchup-red SUV.

“Can you see her?” I ask with a scowl, squinting to scour the shaded woody trail we've been walking for the past hour.

“She's playing her usual game,” Ricky says.

By that he means she's hanging back thirty feet on the trail or hiding behind a wide tree or pretending she has a pebble in her shoe. This is what she does. Every time. Anything to control the pace and manipulate the mood of a family outing. We've been taking long walks with Julia since she was two. At three and a half, she's capable of hiking five forested, hilly miles. Her legs are solid slabs of muscle. She's a jaguar, built for endurance. She could be the world's tiniest Olympic athlete. We call her Bam Bam. She never breaks a sweat. On a long trek, she doesn't complain about fatigue; she doesn't raise her arms and whine “Hold me.” What she does is stall and tarry and hide because it makes her feel powerful. Going along is out of the question. Harmony is abhorrent. No exceptions.

We've tried to encourage her to walk alongside us by playing word games or educating her about this bird or that berry. We bring apples and
say, “We'll eat them in twenty minutes,” hoping to dangle the proverbial carrot. Ricky says we should try donuts. And he's probably right—I've seen the mothers who use sugar as their prime weapon. We grasp her hand, but she eludes us, Jell-O sliding through my fist. We sing. She won't. She either runs far ahead or lags far behind. Her tactics frustrate Ricky. I beg him to stay patient.

“Why?” he says. “She makes this so unpleasant. What's the point?”

“Think of it as a long-term investment,” I say. “It's painful now, but one day this will be second nature to her. It's something we can always do together as a family. Hiking is a ritual she'll seek comfort in because she'll associate it with something she's always done.” Ricky is skeptical but willing to persist.

My mother never walked through the woods. She has never laced up a pair of hiking boots or climbed a steep trail to a plateau where the whole wide world is there for you to feast on. My family didn't spend time together outdoors. We didn't hike or camp or swim in lakes. My mother was a city girl, at home among concrete and chaos. My father was a hybrid. He spent his teen and adult years in Brooklyn, but as a young boy he was raised among immigrant farmers in northern Connecticut. Married to my strong-willed mother, who once said, “If you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all,” his intense desire for the natural world had to be sated with exotic images from
National Geographic
and from
Animal Kingdom
flickering on a thirteen-inch television on his bedroom dresser. Lucky for me, I got to go to sleepaway camp in the Catskill Mountains for a decade. I learned that the woods are the finest retreat when my heart is confused.

Ricky is tapping his muddy boot. Julia is dragging her feet; she's wearing a smirk that says,
Look how clever I am for making you wait.

“Maybe
we
should duck behind that tree—give her a taste of her own medicine,” I say. “If we disappear out of sight, maybe she'll get a good scare.”

“I doubt it,” Ricky says.

“You're probably right. Either she's too smart for us, or she wouldn't give a rat's ass if we disappeared.”

Suddenly Julia sprints toward us. When she catches up, she doesn't stop. She slices by like an airborne razor boat skimming a lake.

“Juliiiaaaaa, stop!” Ricky yells.

She's hurtling over a green mound toward the parking lot.

She won't slow down. She won't acknowledge Ricky's pleas.

He scoots after her. After a couple of minutes, he gains a lead. And with plain intention, he sticks his boot in front of her shins and she topples forward onto the grass. I'm ten feet behind, but I see the whole thing. I'm stunned. Before I close in on them, I spot a man with a wild-eyed look clamoring up the knoll from the other direction, his arms winding like windmills. Julia is splayed on the ground, crying. Ricky lifts her up, brushing dirt off her knees.

The stranger is apoplectic.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he shouts. “I saw what you did. She's only a little girl. Are you crazy?”

“Mind your business,” Ricky barks back.

The guy continues yelling and shaking his head as he turns around and walks back to where he came from.

Julia is shell-shocked, but she's stopped crying. She's not hurt.

“Are you all right?” I say to Ricky. “Is she okay? What was that about?”

“I don't know,” he says, looking dazed and ashamed. “I lost it. I saw her heading to the parking …”

“I understand,” I say, stroking his arm. “She drives us to extremes.”

“I shouldn't have done that,” he says, looking ashen.

“Don't beat yourself up,” I say. “I thought that man was going to slug you.”

“He's an asshole.” Ricky pauses. “Thing is, it's assholes like that who call the police. Before you know it you've got social services in your house. Nobody understands what we're dealing with.”

“You're right. Nobody does. It's not your fault. Grab her hand. Let's go.”

We are in the car heading back to Ellenville. Julia is merrily humming “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” The sun sags low in the sky. Parched leaves dangle languidly from naked tree branches. The last of the season,
the ones that have endured. Ricky is staring ahead, concentrating on the road. He's quiet. For the first two years after we brought Julia home, I thought I was the only one in the world who experienced difficulties with her, that I'd made a mistake, that motherhood and I weren't meant to be. I told myself the problem is that she's not really mine and I had overestimated my ability to love and bond with a child who's not my flesh. Shame grew every day. Ricky's patience and tenderness with Julia offered some solace.

Then Julia had a nanny and subsequently she has started nursery school. A different picture started to emerge. Other adults found her difficult to manage. They had trouble hiding their exasperation. I recognized the forced smiles, the tiny blow of the lips that made a wisp of hair move. I knew the code phrases:
She certainly has a lot of energy. She's quite a fireball. Does she ever tire?

But only in the last year have I seen Ricky become aggravated with her behavior. She's just as unresponsive to him as she is to me. He's described her as “feral”—which is a perfect description for a child who seems to need no one.

In late July, when we temporarily relocated to Ellenville, I enrolled Julia in a nursery school six miles from the house we will live in soon. She's been there for three months, and it's not going well. I am often told she has trouble participating in circle time. She's been given several time-outs alone in the kitchen because she's disruptive in the dining room. The head mistress of the nursery school thinks it might be because I pack Julia's lunch for her every day. I don't bother to say,
I've walked through your kitchen and I'm not interested in feeding Julia the high-fructose, chemical-laden crap you serve.
It seems caretakers in institutions presume a child's difficult behavior is traceable to something the parents are doing. When Ricky drops Julia off in the morning, she clatters off without saying good-bye. When he or I pick her up, she is hiding under a desk, alone, filthy, and wild-eyed. Neutral at best about
our arrival. There's an expression of relief on the teacher's face when we leave.

I can't put my finger on why this school is especially bad for Julia—worse than other group environments she's been in. Is it the transition from the city to the suburbs? Is it that the school is cheerless, cave-like, and somber? The rooms are underground. The lighting is poor. Even the backyard playground equipment is threadbare. Ricky thinks it's because the school doesn't hire trained professionals. “They hire on the cheap,” he says, adding that Jocelyn, one of the two teachers, is essentially a babysitter. Julia, he says, has learned to “chew her up and spit her out.” As she does with any adult who is yielding and soft.

One day while lamenting the nursery school situation, Ricky says, “You know, there's a pair of twins—well not really twins, brothers, who are a real handful also.”

“Really?” I say.

“Yeah, Timmy and Kenny. Apparently they are both adopted from Russia. And I've heard through the grapevine they are a nightmare.”

“Have you seen them?” I ask.

“I have. And here's the weird thing. They remind me of Julia. Same manic energy. Same faraway look in their eyes. Same craziness. When they see their dad at the end of the day they take turns saying, ‘Hi Daddy, hi Daddy, hi Daddy, hi Daddy,' over and over. You know, the way Julia does.”

“Wow,” I say, contemplating the rare opportunity to meet someone who may know how I feel. “The next time we pick her up together, show me the brothers.”

“I will.”

Morning temperatures in Ellenville plunge into the forties, though it's early October. The charming lake cottage is not so charming in winter's grip. We keep losing electricity, one time for a three-day spell. The utility company is in no rush to restore power to a desolate mountain road
lined with summer bungalows. Yesterday we raided our rented storage room near our new house for sweaters and corduroy pants. Seeing our belongings for the first time in three months made me yearn to get our house finished and to move in. I spend every waking moment cracking the whip on painters, plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. Julia's unhappy days at nursery school loop through my mind and press on my heart. I need to find another school, but I must focus first on getting us settled.

One night it sounds like a sot is stumbling among glass bottles outside the window. I race to the window and squint. Blackness. In a hushed whisper, I call Ricky upstairs. He turns off the light and we return to the window. “Oh my God,” I gush. “He's massive.”
He
is a colossal, silver-eyed black bear who is erect on his hind legs and leaning on our car. “Oh my God,” I keep saying. Ricky shines a flashlight into the bear's face. He sees us. No biggie. “Oh my God,” is all I can say. Eventually he clatters away. I barely sleep that night. I'm jittery the next morning. Ricky, who comes in from outside, reports Mr. Hungry Bear left a swath of detritus. “I've tried to pick up what I can.” We resume our routine and drive two hours to Nyack, where we drop Julia at nursery school. Ricky and I go off to work. I spend the day calling every subcontractor to keep each one on schedule. I worry about our cats alone in the flimsy cottage. When we return at night, I ask Julia and Ricky to make insane yodeling noises as we walk from the car to the house. Julia likes this. “I've heard that's the way to keep the bear away.” In the days that follow, I throw every ounce of myself into making our move-in date Halloween, no matter how hard I have to fight and scream. The word “deadline” is not a word contractors know. I make a lot of people angry. I harass and harangue. I'm single-focused. I'm mama-bear, keeping me and my “cubs” from harm.