|
“I know you from preschool,” the woman said to
me, as she scrutinized my face in that way people have when they are figuring
out how it is they know you.
Preschool could only mean the little neighborhood
place my kids had attended years ago. My kids, now nine and twelve, and were
at home, while I was sitting at the Old Stone House, waiting for the reading
to begin. Even though the wind was rattling the windows and the rain was
really coming down, I had ventured out. I knew one of the authors and wanted
to hear her latest story so I was sipping a glass of red wine and drying off
when the woman spoke to me.
“Oh yeah, you’re Victor’s mother!” she said to me
from a few chairs away.
“How did you remember that?” I asked, with a
confused smile on my face. She looked familiar but so many people have that
look, that I-may-have-spoken-to-you-once-long-ago look, that
I-know-you-from-the-bus look. A little wave of guilt ebbed into my brain, I
had no memory of her, and I didn’t recall her child either.
Yet she remembered my son. Was he so memorable?
Maybe he picked on this kid, maybe he teased or bit
this fellow preschooler. I was beginning to dislike this random connection at
the reading.
I was anxious, but I decided to ask more. I had
to know why she could remember my son from a class six years ago.
“I bet you remember that Victor loves cupcakes.”
I said, hoping that this was it. Victor had been notorious in his love of the
small sized birthday treats. He was one of the few kids who ate the whole
thing, not just the frosting.
“Well,” she laughed. “I am sure he did love
cupcakes but that is not why I remember him.”
Oh rats, I thought. Here it comes then, some
terrible thing that I will have to apologize for. Six years after the fact.
It isn’t that Victor was a creep as a tot. He was
actually a nice, fairly quiet boy who did not really like the rough and
tumble kids, stayed away from trouble and got along pretty well with the
other three-year olds. But he had been a biter. He bit his sister and once he
almost bit a boy at Barnes and Noble. I was almost certain that this would be
a biting story.
I smiled at the woman and nodded, to let her know
that I was listening, to go on.
She seemed to hesitate a moment. “I don’t know if
you remember my daughter Tara,” she asked (I didn’t, so my nodding became a
shake), “but she did not speak until she was well into her threes. No
language at all. We were really worried about her, about autism of course and
what else could be wrong with her.”
“Oh,” I said, with some relief that biting had
not been mentioned, “I don’t really recall.”
“No,” she said, “I wouldn’t expect you to. I had
to be in the classroom a lot. That’s why I knew the kids in there. But Victor
was special, I remember him because that was my daughter’s first word.”
“What was?” I asked. I hadn’t understood.
“Well, one day Tara
come home from school and just said ‘Victor’. Victor was my daughter’s first
word.”
“Oh,” I said, “Oh my. Wow! That is incredible.
She actually said ‘Victor’, just out of the blue?”
“Out of the blue she said ‘Victor’.” The mother
answered with a smile, as if she was just hearing the name come out of her
daughter’s mouth for the first time again.
My eyes filled with tears. Recently emotions get
the best of me, especially if they are tied to memories of when my kids were
small. Impending teen-age-hood has made me nostalgic for the days of the
little ones, even though I fully admit that those days of toddlers, strollers
and play dates were tough. But, even with the constant exhaustion and hard
work the kids were cute and they didn’t talk back, tell you that you were
clueless, or roll their eyes at you and huff out of the room. I wiped my eyes
quickly, hoping that I would not look foolish for crying.
“Then a few weeks later,” she continued, “Tara came home and said, ‘Victor wore a red shirt.’ Her
first sentence! She hadn’t said that many words, only one or two other than
‘Victor’, and out came a whole sentence about what Victor had been wearing
that day.”
I nodded, still sniffing back the tears and
taking a big sip of wine to help wash them away.
I took out Victor’s most recent school photo to
show the woman what he looks like today, in fourth grade. I wished she had
brought a picture of Tara, but she didn’t
have one with her. I suddenly wanted to see the girl, to complete this
connection.
“Yep,” she said looking at the picture. “That’s
Victor all right. Tara spent the first few
months at school trying to figure out how to get his attention. She used to
poke him, chase him, hug him and then she finally got it, ‘Victor’.”
“And,” I hesitated, “and how is she doing now?” I
was worried that the story would not be a happily-ever-after kind.
“She is great,” the woman said. “She talks now,
not as much as most kids but she talks.”
As I said how happy I was to hear that, the
reading began.
I was whisked away into the works of the two
authors, mesmerized by their voices and charmed by their views of the world.
The stories they read where memorable, powerful and funny. But what I will
never forget about that rainy night is not the stories told, but the one
experienced.
I wonder if the little girl really remembers
Victor, or if the story of her first word has become like a myth, learned
rather than known, taken on faith. Either way, it is strange to think that
all her life she will know my son as her first word.
|
