The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [48]
Such images were an attack. They caused physical pain, and why did we insist on hurting her? Why did it seem that we were instinctually driven to cause her pain? It was not right to hurt her on her birthday. Especially on her birthday. What kinds of parents were we, after all?
We’d grown so accustomed to hiding our feelings around Esther that it seemed easier to just not have those feelings in the first place.
You people and your memories, she’d said through a sneer.
Esther requested that her birthday not serve as an occasion for us to pretend that we were closer than we really were, since why should that random date, a date based on the most flawed and sentimental calendar, make us suddenly tell lies about how we really felt?
“Sweetie,” I countered.
“See, like that,” she said. “There’s a lie right there. You think that a generic endearment will somehow show how you feel toward me, talk me out of how I actually feel. One word is going to do that, a word used for pets? How many people use that exact word to hide what they feel? It’s like you’re throwing up on me, actually. I feel like you just threw up on me.”
But in the years before these revelations and rules, before she was overwhelmed by insights she felt compelled to share with us, we’d had birthday parties. We staved off tantrums and avalanches of greed, accommodated in our home the children who seemed to function—if barely—as Esther’s friends. Along with these preteen colleagues we welcomed skulking parents, who would invariably let one of their babies—babies had not been invited, but there they were, there they always were—go off on a shelf-clearing campaign. Then a parent would quietly retreat, without the baby, to the off-limits master bathroom and take a toilet-wrecking shit that could never be flushed, only to emerge with the blissful look of someone whose own home is not being destroyed at this very moment, stepping half-apologetically, but really with relief, with genuinely visible relief and perhaps even a kind of lurid joy—this party is really fun!—over dumped cupcakes, grinding them further into the rug we should have pulled up before the party, but did not, because in the end we always failed to imagine how savage these people could become.
“There you are,” the parent would scold the baby, as if it was the baby who had disappeared. The baby would crawl over, try to stand, hold up its arms in supplication to be carried, then topple over.
Depending on the baby, it would either sob, laugh, or be gorgeously oblivious to all mortal proceedings. One of those three behavioral paths.
“Come smell the shit I took,” the parents never said.
Instead the one-sided, rhetorical, patronizing dialogue would commence: “What did you do? Huh? What did you do?” the parent would interrogate the baby, picking it up and seeming to study it for evidence.
A theater of mock blame the parent should have been directing to the mirror.
“Why not ask someone who can actually answer you?” I wouldn’t say to them. “I’ll tell you exactly what your baby did. Would you really like to know? Can you handle a conversation with a real, live adult?”
I stood and stared at these people and they serially failed to read my mind.
Instead they would be locked in some kind of airborne mouth-tickling activity with the baby—holding it aloft and, to all appearances, trying to eat it—a baby who by now, so many years later, as a seven- or eight-year-old, I’d guess, was probably shouting that same parent into a corner, turning the parent pale, speaking with so much force that the parent was husking, shelling, dying in a house somewhere probably not so far away.
Had those parents built a locker beneath the stairs, as we did? Cut in a peephole,