Shadetree

Posted by Ace on September 2nd, 2010 filed in Tales of the Interregnum

“So believe it or not, I just learned two completely new things about Spore,” I say.

Jack takes my hand.  “What?” he asks.

We are crossing the street together, walking the maybe third-of-a-mile from his mother’s co-op to his elementary school.  His hair is freshly buzzed, although not severely so;  there is still enough of it left to toss in the faint morning breeze that haunts the shady spots along the tree-lined avenues.  He is wearing plaid shorts, and a black t-shirt with a skull on it, and carrying a backpack with more skulls on it, into which I have made him stuff the Legos he carried with him out of the house.  Today will be his first day of fourth grade.

“Well for one,” I tell him, “it turns out it’s possible to create screen names on the same master account.  So I could make you a screen name, and then if you sign in with it and play, all the creatures you create and stuff you do will be under your own name.”   We haul off the concrete and onto the grass.  “That’s what Dragonia did.”

“Awesome,” he says, smiling.

“For another,” I continue, “it is possible to make…”   I pause, and glance down at him.  “Do you know what ‘symmetrical’ means?”

“No,” he says.   Then, “Yes. It’s when something’s the same on both sides.”

“Right.  Well it turns out you can make a-symmetrical creatures.  Ones that aren’t the same on both sides.  If you hold down the A key, then you can make one arm bigger than the other, or put the eyes in different places, or whatever.   Which has been in the game a long time now, and I just never knew it.”

“Cooooool,” he laughs.   “Then I can–”

He cuts himself off.  “Can what?” I ask him.

“You’ll see,” he says, grinning and peering up at me with one eye closed, in a wink.

I breathe deeply, stretch and try to shrug off a fitful night with no air-conditioning and no blinds in the bedroom windows.  Three-story high oaks and maples stretch their cool green canopies overhead, sheltering lawns and gardens and red brick buildings with white wood windows.  The gently winding road feels like a haven.   “Boy, this is really wonderful, buddy,” I tell Jack.

“What is?” he asks, looking around.

“This,” I say, waving a hand.   “All this.   Trees.  And… grass.  And… shade.”

“And parks,” he adds.

“Mmm-hmm,” I nod.  “It’s really pretty.   You should be happy you live here.  You get to enjoy it.”   We walk in silence for a beat.  “I get to enjoy it now, too,” I add.  For a little while.   At least.

Jack smiles and squeezes my hand.  “I finally get to have my dream of living in the same place as you,” he says.  That old wound inside me opens then and bleeds a little, but only a little.  “Now if only you and I and Grandma and Grandpa and Mom could all live in the same house,” he continues, thoughtfully.  “We could be one big happy family.”

Grandpa is dead, but he doesn’t bother to point that out, and neither do I.  He thinks some more.  “But then Mom would have to make five breakfasts every morning,” he adds, wrinkling his nose.

I laugh out loud.  “I think having me live across the street will have to be good enough,” I tell him.

The elementary school is a towering building from the 1930s, built out of the same red brick and white-painted wood as all the houses we’ve passed, solid against the cloudless blue sky.  The fields around it are empty, and we cross them, still hand-in-hand, as Jack leaps across rows of whitewashed stones, makes observations about which parts of the playground are new, complains about the grass on his sneakers.  In front of the door where he will enter the school are four bright orange parking cones, each with a yardstick stuck into it, each yardstick bearing the name of a teacher and grade.  The children are intended to line up behind them–  but there are no children yet.  We’re the first to arrive.

The situation rectifies itself slowly.  Parents wander up in lazy ones and twos, trailing along the walks, their school-age children at their hands or walking in front of them, their babies in strollers, their toddlers in their arms or trailing behind.  Jack keeps an eye out for his friends, but he cannot see any of them yet in the growing crowd, and he busies himself trying to talk to new children instead.  When he tires of that, he asks me to pick him up.  I acquiesce, surprised.  It flashes me back to his first day of first grade, when adrift in that same sea of his peers, all he really wanted was just for me to hold him until it was time to go inside.   I kiss his cheek, bury my nose in his hair.  I can still give him that.  I know how little time is left to us, what a short span it will be before he’s finally too big for me to pick up anymore, and will no longer want me to anyway.

He sees his friends at last then.  I let him slide to the ground, watch him take his place in the milling throng around the cones.   Each new wave of children arriving broadens the pool a little, pushes me a little farther away from him.  But I can see him.  I look at him next to the other children, check out their bags, their clothes.  One little girl next to me says to another, “Nice outfit,” and I realize in that same moment that Jack is the only child in sight wearing things with skulls on them, and wonder what, if anything, that means.   Simultaneously, I realize that the children are the only ones speaking English;  every adult within earshot of me is speaking nothing but Russian, Yiddish.  It makes me feel terribly alone.

The doors to the back of the school open out.  Fresh-faced, energetic teachers emerge and prop them open, then join the throng, smiling at the students, waving to the parents, all theatre.  The teacher who comes to rest in front of Jack’s cone has shoulder length red hair, and a pear-shaped face, and many teeth.

Jack looks over his shoulder to where I am, then dashes out of line and up to me.  “They’re gonna take me inside now,” he says, throwing his arms around my waist.

I squat down and hug him.  “I know,” I tell him.  “I love you, son. You have a great day.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, smiling.

“I’ll call you tonight,” I reply.  “You can tell me how it went.”

He runs back to his place without another word.  When they head inside, he’s second in line.

I watch until he disappears through the doors, and into the shadows inside the building.  Then I pick my way out of the crowd, away from the school, across the fields.  The sun is rising over the eaves of the houses, slanting down from the sky, chasing the dew from the grasses.  I slip out of its sight, back under the trees, past the last of the straggling parked cars, then into the quiet streets, alone with the wind and the sounds of crickets.