the massive Chuck E. Cheese panic attack.
“It’s just fabric!” Phoebe says, reassuringly. “No one ever got hurt by a little fabric.”
“You have no idea,” I say under my breath, but she ignores me, moves over toward Nick, and helps him put the costume over Gary’s head. What I assume is a panicked struggle to resist—arms jutting out, then up, hands pawing frantically at the claustrophobic hooded beak—to keep the costume off—turns out to be an excited effort to get the costume on. I know this is happening because Gary is high, but even so, I can’t help but cheer him on. “Go, Gary, go!” I mutter under my breath so as not to put too much pressure on him to be successful. “You can do it!”
Draped in white, and looking remarkably like a giant bird, Gary is triumphant on the sidewalk, taking a few steps forward, then back; his wings flapping, billowing in the chilly late-afternoon wind. Dying for a glimpse of himself, he races over to the minivan windows and strikes a pose, then turns to us. Phoebe snaps a few photos with her phone, which she shows to Gary. He has a little trouble focusing his eyes under the big head, but once he does, he erupts.
“I love it!” he laugh-cries again, then hugs himself with his wings.
“It’s yours, dude. Keep it.”
Gary gasps. “I couldn’t possibly.” Then: “Really? Can I?”
“I made it myself and I want you to have it.” Nick nods meaningfully, and the puppets get into the front seat of the van. The engine starts and the side door slides shut.
Gary looks down, smooths the folds of fabric with his hands, shakes his head. He’s too profoundly moved to speak. There may or may not be tears in his eyes. And in mine, too: even though he’s doing this with the help of cannabis, his exuberance melts me.
“We’ll be in touch,” I say, for both of us.
They back out slowly, then wave as they drive down the street, the nylon hooves catching air and dancing on the roof of the minivan.
Gary watches in awe, waving wistfully until they’re completely out of sight.
“I love that guy,” he says. “I could really learn from him.”
“Learn what?”
He shakes his head. “I have no fucking idea.” He pauses. “Maybe we can be friends with them.”
Clearly the edibles are talking again. “But you don’t want friends. And you hate people.”
He stares at me, mouth open, disbelieving. “They’re not people, Judy,” he says, seriously, reverently, ridiculously. “They’re puppets.”
Therapy Dog
If I’m honest, which for some reason I hate to be when it comes to the dog, I’ll admit that Charlotte’s true origins were indeed as a therapy animal—for Teddy. We got Charlotte when Teddy was eight, around the time his sadness about being an only child and losing both of his grandparents began, or, intensified.
That year, having just started Morningside Montessori, having lost the few friends he’d made in public school as well as the comfort of a place and routine he knew—even if that school didn’t know what to do with him, and now, in its sudden absence, it was loved and missed beyond expectation—a sense of being alone in the world consumed him. He saw people only in terms of the shape and size of their families: specifically, whether or not they had siblings. Which most of them did. And he did not.
The few only-children we knew—born to couples who had, like us, started late and had decided to stop at just one—were our salvation, until each went back on their assurances to us that they would not have another child and all the other only-children in Teddy’s universe became older siblings. The semicomical betrayal we’d feel when, over dinner, the announcement would come—Sorry! We’re pregnant!—and after the baby itself arrived, that betrayal would turn on the fulcrum of Teddy’s heartbreak. Becoming a sibling was a magical occurrence bestowed on other people but not on him, a fact that deepened the divide between him and the rest of the world, proving time and again to him that happiness was for other people, not for him. It was then that he started looking at the world with a sad hunger, a longing, a deep wish to be connected, to join, to be accepted into the arms of a big noisy happy family. Which we’re not. Because we’re just three. And three never felt like enough. It didn’t when I was growing up. And it doesn’t now.
Everyone else is lucky, he’d say. They