Claire wasn’t sure how she felt about this. “Glue” in the sense of simply being a force that tightly bonds, or “glue” in the sense of the necessary element in fixing something broken? It seemed too late to ask her mother this question, unfair to bring up something, anything, that couldn’t be satisfactorily resolved in a half an hour. That went against all the unwritten conventions of conversing with the dying. No one wanted to end on a sour note. The final days lingered on for months; every conversation might have been their last conversation but wasn’t. Until it finally was.
It was cancer that killed her mother, when Claire was twenty-seven, before Evan and Meredith were born. It was the same year her marriage ran into trouble (she knew this was unfairly euphemistic, designed to not assign blame, where in truth the only one to blame was herself), so all those emotions were tangled up together. Her father remarried quickly, just over a year after her mother died, and she recalled being struck by the injustice of this, that a replacement wife could be attained so quickly and with relative ease, while a replacement mother was not even an option. Of course she knew this wasn’t fair and that her mother was irreplaceable as a person, as a proper noun, but she clearly wasn’t irreplaceable as a common noun—her father once again had a wife, whereas she would never again have a mother.
?
She kept her promise to little Evan. She did not call the first grade teacher and demand names. She did not deluge the principal with frantic emails, in part to prove to them that they had been wrong about her, but also because she genuinely believed that to intervene—at that level—would only make Evan’s life worse. She very much did not want him to be the porker who, by the way, needed his mommy to helicopter in and fight his battles for him. But she was ill with fear every time she dropped him off in front of that two-story brick building with the sloping lawn. A few months before the place had seemed warm and welcoming and full of light, and now it was as if she were pitching him headlong into a jungle whose predators she could not even begin to imagine. And he—her sweet and beautiful Evan, who had been the center of her world, her only child for so long—was defenseless against them. She began to look at all the other children in his class with suspicion. That little blonde with the shirts that said “Daddy’s Girl” and “Princess in Training.” The lanky kid, tall as a fourth-grader, who flung himself down the front stairs, limbs flailing. The redhead with the Eagles backpack who always ignored, and then sneered at, the crossing guard.
“Who’s that?” she’d asked Evan one day, a couple weeks after the porker incident, as they were driving home from school.
“Logan Boone,” he’d mumbled. “He gets his name on the board every day.”
“For what?”
“Name-calling,” Evan said.
She watched seven-year-old Logan Boone swagger down the sidewalk, his backpack slung loosely around one shoulder. Even his gait was reckless, thoughtless; he shared the sidewalk with no one, perhaps not out of malice, she thought, but worse, out of the belief that his space was the only space that mattered. Wasn’t that the very definition of a sociopath? He could imagine the world through no eyes but his own. And he believed himself invincible, Claire was sure of it. So his name was on the board. So what? Big deal! It would not give him a moment of pause, not sneery Logan Boone. Of course he was the one who had first called Evan the name. She was right beside him now in the minivan, and she had the urge to roll down her window and shout something obscene at him. “Hey, you piece of shit!” she would shout. Wait—no. “Asshole, bastard, piece of shit!” It felt good to even think the words, a rush of adrenaline, a moment of euphoria, a parental climax. He was not so powerful, this cruel ignorant child, this ugly boy who didn’t deserve to stand beside her son, never mind—
God, what was wrong with her? She was losing her mind. I am losing my mind, she said to herself in her head, because she knew that if she really had been losing her mind, she wouldn’t be able to have the thought with such clarity . . . although she had never really been sure this was true. But the rage she felt for him was immense: god, that sneer. She thought of the phrase “wipe that look off your face,” and understood it completely for the first time. She wanted to leap out of the car and wipe that look off his face with her fingernails. But she was helpless. He couldn’t have been any uglier, this boy now receding in her side-view mirror, receding back into the place where he could do anything he wanted, where she could not touch him.
?
“Some kids are just assholes,” had been Mark’s predictable response, when she’d told him she’d positively identified the “porker” culprit. “Wasn’t anybody ever mean to you?”
“Not in first grade,” she said. “They’re not supposed to be horrible to each other already. Isn’t that what middle school’s for?”
“It’s a different world,” Mark said, shrugging. “Everything’s changed. Our kids are going to have cell phones when they’re ten.”
“Our kids are not going to have cell phones when they’re ten. Absolutely not.”
“All I’m saying is that everything happens sooner,” Mark said. “The clock’s sped up. But maybe that means it’ll be over sooner, too. Maybe by the time they’re fifteen they’ve already lived through all the crap we had to deal with until we were nineteen.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I don’t know,” he’d said. “We can hope.”
He could hope, that was the thing. Mark could always hope. It was a permanent condition, like freckles, or lupus. Mr. Glass Half-Full, she sometimes called him, though they both knew that 90 percent of the time she did not mean it as a term of endearment. Everyone loved Mark. And why not? He was lovable. What you saw was what you got. Nothing lurked under the surface. She knew some people thought he was a phony—her own mother had thought that for a long time—that his endless chattering away to patients was an act, his friendliness to strangers insincere. But it was all maddeningly genuine, every bit of it. Blessed with impeccable chemical balance, Mark took pleasure in things without questioning why he was taking pleasure in them.
On weekends, when the kids were little, she and Mark would have their friends over, other couples with young children, and the men would set up Mark’s movie projector and sit in lounge chairs in the backyard, drinking beer and watching James Bond movies on the side of the garden shed, while the women sat on the patio talking about their babies and their jobs and complaining about those men in the lounge chairs.