Part 15 (1/2)

That afternoon I bring Dev in solo to the warist, who tells reen sweater and heavy boots that ground her to the floorboards as she points to hi

In tribal cultures, she says, mothers work in the fields, and kids-once they've learned not to fall in the cooking fires-run around in a gaggle like geese Only in the 1950s did the bloated econo fantasy

Till then, I'd believed my job was to impersonate a preschooler every second I ith Dev In some ill-considered way, I hadn't wanted hi so short, so ill spoken and incontinent

Dr G looks atinto a little tilde of concern as she says, You can cook or fold clothes or relax

But if I fold clothes, I say, he starts throwing them over his head

Tell him to stop, she says

I don't want to yell at hi up his arms with open palument-says, then don't yell at me

You don't have to yell at him, she says In fact, if you yell at him, what happens?

He'll yell back? I say

Worse He'll stop listening

Dev picks up two druht a fast trill

See, he's an extre with those black-lashed blue eyes of his as he bangs on

I tell hi you out for the yeller you are

Just worry less that you should be doing so for him every second, Dr G says She tellsrocery store, where Dev grabs all the candy bars off the shelf, the doctor teaches me how to put him in a time-out-a minute for every year of his life-which I initially hate to do, for it feels like punishment So I wait till he's pulled stuff off the superht off Which et to it, I' atwhat's beco cherry-reed to squeeze ency appointment at dawn Our couples sessions have beco 101

She explains that if I wait till I'er beconize, and he'll wait till I' to stop The time-out isn't punishment, it's a circuit breaker you throw

Sleep I crave sleep That night his coughing keeps us up all night I'm filled et sand The doctor tells o in at increasing intervals, adding a e hi

Even looks like in The Exorcist? The Exorcist?

Even if he's possessed by Satan, she says He'll cry hi ain, What about your drinking?

For an instant, the plant-filled roo, I've cut way down

Not long after, on a warm afternoon while Dev's in the tub, Warren and I step across the hall to the bedroo You always always this, and you this, and you never never that We unzip our ged beasts reared back The roo with our invectives when-in the doorway-there stands Dev in his three-year-old body He's naked and gap- that swirls around us arrests into violent stasis The fury in the room dispels itself like smoke siphoned up with a hose that We unzip our ged beasts reared back The roo with our invectives when-in the doorway-there stands Dev in his three-year-old body He's naked and gap- that swirls around us arrests into violent stasis The fury in the room dispels itself like s frolets daed behind hihtered animal (Almost twenty years later, he told me that this crisply drawn memory was the worst of his life) I've never been on the receiving end of such a plaintive stare Standing in a sniper's crosshairs would feel safer

Later, as we draw the quilt up over hih, Mr Bear-we practically sing our lauarantees Over his horizontal body, our shadows cross sa to helps us play nicer

Like Martin Luther King? he says

What does Martin Luther King teach, sweetie? Warren says

Dev's twiddling a blond ringlet around his finger as he says, Take turns Share toys

You know Grand in Sel, No, she didn't

So I tell the story How she clie students, and they rolled through the swauns and blind batons that swung down even on bodies huddled in surrender Hoithour upended pot pies off TV trays,fire hoses pinning people against chain link

That was brave, Dev says

You're brave, I say

He nods as if considering I am, he says

But as Warren and I stand in his doorith arht anymore, Dev wears the wearied expression of so lied to

At the bottoh me nearly breaks me in half, and Warren unbends me to draw , and he strokes my hair in the old way and says, We can't do that in front of hi skull begins to take on skin--Wislawa Szymborska, ”An Old Story” (trans Stanislav Baranczak) The next night, still hungover, I sullenly drag in to the therapy group for people trying to quit Maybe they knoays to cut back that won't e church basement-a yiant posters like you'd expect at a high school pep rally, splattered with cornball slogans There are rows of alu chairs, baby-shi+t brown in color

I warpto iood and sober person who's only wandered in through curiosity and happenstance Here the coffee costs a dime, and you can read the styrofoam cup'sat the urn, I hear a tweedy classics professor say to a big blackarically, as I hear this, soe of pity swells through me I heapabout h to coy face his red-ri ers It's like running fro extension cord unplugged from all compassion, and it's suddenly found a socket The roo by a book cart loaded with navy blue hy The leaves of the oaks are dabbed with orange paint A wo her tortoiseshell glasses with a red silk square

We're asleep e Saunders say, but we can wake up In that instant, for no reason I can discern, I wake up Faces cease to be blurs and grow distinct features Co toward me fro a plate covered in foil, talking to a handsome, mustachioed friend whose leather jacketvehicle I stand aside as he lowers the plate to the table and peels off the foil-ho into each other People from around the roo h and warm chocolate

Pleasure, I feel-mouth to spine to head A small uprush of pleasure This, I think, is why other people aren't screaotten to feel sorry for enerate any kind of report on my own performance

The marine says to the professor, Days three to ten suck the worst You can do it this time Just drink a lot of water And call me Build a wall around the day and don't look over it

The chair I fold s et and rifle my purse for hand lotion Why don't I carry iven a tin of ht off As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I'm the kind of person who-if he can't have too -doesn't want any of it