In the parking lot, in the minivan, she held out for about forty-five seconds before asking Evan about the situation.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He was sitting in a booster seat beside Meredith, who was strapped into her car seat and beaming at him, fresh off her puppy run, basking in the glorious light cast by her big brother. This was the way it always was, and Claire had tried to accept the fact that except for when Meredith was looking at Evan, for whom she had always saved her very best smiles, happy had never been Meredith’s default emotion. Baby Evan had usually had a smile on his face, but baby Meredith’s go-to expression had normally been one of consternation and/or suspicion. Creased forehead. Narrowed eyes. Pursed lips. It was if she were always waiting to be put down in her crib, anticipating it, whereas with Evan it had been a daily surprise: This place? Again?
“Honey—” she said to her son.
“Really, don’t worry about it,” he said again. He was playing a handheld video game—a car-only treat—and he didn’t even bother to look up from the screen.
“Of course I’m going to worry about it,” she said, watching him in the rearview mirror. “It’s not nice. Does it make you feel bad?”
“Yeah,” he said absently, still not raising his head. “But it’s okay.”
The game beeped and buzzed. Did he even know what he was saying? Was he even part of this conversation? He adored his electronic games. If they’d let him, he might have played all day. But they didn’t let him, of course. He exercised regularly. He played baseball with the neighborhood kids practically every afternoon. He was an active child. A porker? Ha. Hardly. She’d show those kids a porker. She’d seen a kid in the grocery store last week stuffing his face with free samples while his mother (incidentally, also a porker) stood by and watched with a big fat smile on her face. She’d bring that kid in for fat show-and-tell. “You want to see a real porker?” she’d ask the class.
She was going thirty-eight miles per hour in a school zone. Okay, Jesus. Jesus, what was wrong with her? She took a breath, eased off the accelerator. She was shocked by her own capacity for cruelty—the little boy in the grocery store had a name, a story, she reminded herself. She was ashamed, and didn’t even know where the rage had come from, so suddenly. Of course it wasn’t the fact that Evan was not really a porker that made the bullying unacceptable. It was terrible to call someone fat if they were actually fat. And yet to call someone fat who wasn’t . . . she somehow couldn’t get past this particular element of the injustice. It just seemed wrong on a whole other level.
“Evan,” she said. “It’s not okay, honey. It’s not okay at all. It’s mean and awful to call people names. I think I should talk to someone about it.”
“What? No!” he exclaimed, horrified enough to look up from his game and meet her eyes in the mirror. “Don’t worry about it, okay? There’s nothing you can do!”
Full stop. It was a good thing, perhaps, that their eyes only met in the mirror, that it was only his reflection that spoke, that she was not looking into her child’s face directly when he said this. Her eyes slipped back to the street in front of her just as something crawled over her skin, something unfamiliar, something slimy and cold that surely belonged at the bottom of the ocean. In less than a second it had her covered from head to toe, and then it started squeezing. So this was the world that existed for her six-year-old son. This was it. A place where things could make him feel bad and absolutely nothing could be done about it. A place where she was powerless to protect him. At six he had somehow already reached the conclusion, independently, somewhere within the walls of that elementary school—that elementary school where he had whistled just last year!—while she at home and at the office had cheerfully and blindly persisted in her belief that she had at least a modicum of control over the things in the world that could harm him. She wasn’t a fool, but really, was a modicum too much to ask?
Meredith was clamoring for his attention. He was looking at his game. The game had swallowed him. Meredith was dying for attention—“Ebben, Ebben, Ebben,” frantically, smacking her hand on the side of her car seat. A group of kids darted out from behind some parked cars and Claire braked hard, probably harder than she needed to, and she and Evan and Meredith lurched forward. “Sorry!” one of the kids yelled, looking back guiltily, but another was laughing. A dog was barking in a nearby yard.
“Ebben! Ebben! Ebben!” Meredith insisted.
“Evan, for god’s sake, acknowledge your sister!” Claire shouted.
?
In all the ways that Claire knew mattered most, she had lived a charmed life. She was fortunate, and she’d been taught from a young age to appreciate that good fortune. She was not one who went blithely through childhood and adolescence taking everything for granted, forgetting that it was a luxury to have three square meals and a room of her own and a shiny bicycle in the garage. She was an only child, and her parents—who had both been in their mid thirties when she was born—had constructed their middle age around her. They were both teachers—her father taught high school English, her mother middle school social studies—until Claire was born, and then her mother left full-time work and became a substitute teacher so that she could be a full-time mother. Home had always been a safe zone. And if her father occasionally drank too much, and if her mother sunk low and occasionally spent the morning in bed after Claire left for school, it was all forgiven and forgotten between them when she walked through the door in the afternoon.
“You were the glue,” her mother told her a couple of months before she died. “You have always been the glue.”