“Thanks, Mom.”
“She’s very tactile, you know? She’s very interested in the texture of things. Maybe she’ll be a designer. And I love how her hair bounces.”
“That is a great head of hair,” my dad agreed.
Ten minutes after we arrived, a middle-aged mother showed up at the playground dressed like a Turkish hooker. She had long black hair and was wearing a tight blue tank with painted-on skinny capris and platform shoes that sank down three inches into the mulch. I’m certain that she had a speed dating session set up at the local Romano’s Macaroni Grill at happy hour.
This woman was clearly violating protocol by not wearing yoga pants and a hoodie to the playground. But I didn’t say anything because that wasn’t my business. She kept chasing her kid around in her giant platform shoes in front of us, and I tried not to stare at her even though her outfit was basically a giant sandwich board that said “STARE AT ME” in block letters. I kept it to myself, which would have worked out splendidly if my parents hadn’t been sitting next to me.
My parents live in a very quiet part of northwest Connecticut, the kind of place where you can go weeks on end without seeing another live body. Spotting a provocatively dressed human being counts as a real event for them, and so they began a running commentary on Turkish Hooker while I was trying to ignore her and make sure my son didn’t get tangled up in the rope bridge for the ninth time.
“Look at that woman, Drew,” my mom said.
“What? What woman?”
“That woman right there. Boy, she’s heading out tonight.”
“Oh Christ. She can hear you, Mom.”
“Nonsense. Look at those pants. How do you get pants like that on?”
Meanwhile, the surface temperature of the playground was rising to roughly a million degrees, and I had lost track of my son. I scanned for him, but Turkish Hooker kept flouncing around in front of us, running her fingers through her hair like she was on the set of a goddamn L’Oréal ad. I stood up in a panic because any time I lose sight of my children at a playground I assume some deranged pederast has grabbed them and thrown them into a windowless van.
Then I realized my son was sitting in the tunnel slide, only he couldn’t exit the tunnel slide because a ten-year-old was hanging out at the bottom of it, like a complete dick. Downward sliders should always have the right-of-way, but there are any number of older kids who have no respect for matters of slide etiquette. I spotted my son’s shadowy lump through the opaque plastic and reassured him.
“Don’t worry, son. You’ll be able to get out once this nice boy moves out of the way.” I said the last sentence extra loud so that the ten-year-old would take the hint. I fully expected him to tell me to go fuck myself because ten-year-olds do that sort of thing. Instead, he got up immediately.
“Sorry about that.”
“Oh, no problem,” I said. “Thank you for moving.”
And I was heartened for a moment. A playground, when you think about it, is something of a miracle. There are any number of opportunities for children to inflict fatal harm upon other children they don’t know. They can push each other off structures. They can punch each other. They can strangle each other with swing chains. But that rarely happens, and when the ten-year-old made way for my son, I found myself marveling at how all these tiny, immature people were able to coexist in this spot in relative peace.