“You all right?” he called. “Ivy?”
“It’s making me uncomfortable!” she yelled from the top of the staircase. He could picture her standing there, one foot raised, ready to flee. “Tell me when this part is over, okay?”
He wanted to share a commiserating look with Dorothy, but she was still watching the screen, sawing her little pendant back and forth on its chain. “So much for current events,” he said.
His daughter had a pretty collection of pens and pencils. A tiny roll of tape, a pink pocket stapler, and a packet of candy-colored paper clips. All these items lived inside a sleek gold pouch with a zipper, and were brought out into the open when she was doing her homework at the kitchen table. Her tapered fingers danced over them in search of the right highlighter. Her fingernails sparkled. Her school supplies sparkled. She had affixed very small puffy stickers in strategic places to her notebooks and binders. Watching her at work, he realized with pride that his daughter would have been one of those girls who intimidated him when he was that age.
When he was that age! A slight prickling, like sensation restoring itself to a numb hand. Was his old self considering a return? To his surprise, he had trouble recalling his thoughts and emotions from sixth grade. Surprising, because he remembered the fact of having felt things; it was the point at which his parents took to calling him Heathcliff.
There were a few standouts, to be sure—the memory of being lifted into the air and carried on a gurney, after he’d badly sprained his ankle on the basketball court, and noticing how far away the ceiling of the gym appeared, and the menacing pattern of the rafters—but, in terms of day-to-day twelve-year-old feelings, he had, strangely, lost access. And the access needed to be only temporary: all he wanted was a point of comparison. Was what she was going through normal? In the afternoons he held his breath, never knowing which girl was going to climb into the passenger seat: the happy one, braces flashing, asking if they could make a really quick stop at Baskin-Robbins; or the other one, the one in pain. Had he ever felt that way, too? If only he could remember. All that came to him were the first and last names, in no particular order, of every kid in his homeroom: Steven Burke, Tracy Mayson, Derek Wong, Billy Flanagan, Dawn Littlejohn, Josh Tokofsky, Luke Mandel, Rafi Moncho, Danielle Blood … And sometimes along with the names the faces would materialize, like mug shots.
New post: a pair of lips, shining wetly.
“Try not to internalize,” Dorothy whispered to him, taking his hand as they waited in the dank hallway outside the Nutcracker auditions. “Practice wearing a neutral expression.” They stood in silence for a while, trying to hear what was going on behind the closed doors. When their daughter finally exited, looking a little dazed, they gently shepherded her to the car. Did she want lunch? Starbucks? “If it’s okay, I think I’d just like to go home and watch YouTube,” she said quietly.
From the depths of the sofa, a now familiar voice bubbled: “Hi, guys! I’m back, and I’m so excited because today I’m going to be talking about room decor. As you guys know, I love being creative when it comes to doing DIY decor, but today is extra special because I’m going to be showing you my mini HomeGoods haul! I got so many amazing things, but I think the thing that I love the most is this incredibly fluffy pillow—as you can see, it’s huge, and I’m pretty sure it’s real sheepskin. Yeah, it says here 100 percent wool from New Zealand, but don’t worry, no sheep were killed or anything—I don’t think so, right? It’ll just grow back. But the best part is how good it goes with these other decorative pillows I got at HomeGoods—that place is so amazing! Their selection is always changing! I went in thinking I needed picture frames and a dog bed but then I turned down this one aisle and I saw the pillows and I went crazy!”
By nightfall his daughter seemed to have revived. She practiced her jazz turns on the slick floor of the kitchen; she winked and dimpled at her reflection in the sliding doors, as if for an audience stretching into the darkened backyard. The dad, rinsing dishes in the sink, had to keep dodging her left foot, which she kicked, without warning, high into the air. She always kicked on that side; it was naturally the more flexible of the two. To the dad, it would have made more sense to practice kicking on the less stretchy side. I am the best, she sang tunelessly, the best, the best, the best. You can’t beat me, no you can’t, so don’t even try, because I am the best. The song sounded as if it had been made up on the spot.
Later that week, the physical therapist came into the waiting room while his daughter was still whirring away on the bicycle. For a moment, he thought she was there to grab a magazine, but then she perched on the chair beside him and started speaking. “I’m wondering,” she said, wearing her small, formal smile, “if Ivy has been keeping up with her exercises at home?” His chest began to tingle, the Ivy-vise squeezing. She wasn’t improving. She wasn’t going to get a decent part in The Nutcracker. She’d have to spend a second year in the angel corps, shuffling across the stage in the Snowflake scene while holding a battery-operated candle from Home Depot. He felt totally defeated. “I think she has,” he said. “I’ve been telling her to.” Then he admitted, “But I really don’t know.” To his shame, he heard himself adding, somewhat sulkily,
