“Oh,” I say, my hand in a box of stale Cheez-Its. “They stopped watching after the second episode.”
“I’m shocked they got that far.”
“Yeah, well. I used to get links to the episodes early. And they begged me to send them. And I did and then I just never heard anything, and after a while I checked in and my mother said, and I quote, she was worried I was making a mistake that would hurt my future prospects in life. Also that there was no way she could recommend the show to her friends in good faith because some ofthe things we spoke about, some of the things we did, were private things, things between a husband and a wife, that should not ever be discussed out in the open and especially not by people who were not married to each other.”
Henry holds out a hand. I pass him the box of Cheez-Its. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Your parents always struck me as a little repressed.”
“A little?” I laugh. Hook my finger through the heart charm on my new-old necklace, saw it back and forth obsessively. “You know, part of me could respect it. If those were their values, and they just stuck to them. But when the show came out, it was immediately this zeitgeisty, awardsy thing. And then I started writing for it. And directing it. And then I won a very prestigious award. And they wanted to be invited to everything. And I did. I invited them. To all the premieres and the parties. Because I wanted them to be proud of me. And they are, so proud. But it’s like… they’re proud of my success but ashamed of what I do. Does that make sense?”
Henry offers me the box of Cheez-Its as a consolation. We nibble and crunch for a moment, not talking.
“Do you think,” Henry says, “you are the way you are because of them?”
“I don’t think there’s one thing that happened to make me the way I am. I think it’s a bunch of things and whatever sneaky internal damage occurred when everything collided.”
“Like?”
“Well, I think I have a thing about being taken care of.” When I was a child, my parents did nearly everything for me. I hated the mornings, and so they laid out my clothes at the foot of the bed. In the bathroom, a slug of toothpaste coated my toothbrush. When math and science made me want to lie down and never wake up, mymother took on algebra, my father acid-base definitions, and let me return the A’s in English. This was a precarious deal, I’d come to find, because any time I did anything to displease them, which was often, they threw it back in my face. They did everything for me. Did I have any idea how good I had it, how ungrateful and selfish I must be at my innermost core to not see that on my own?
“And you have a thing with taking care of people,” I say. “So we plug in there.”
Quietly, Henry says, “Hurting you is the opposite of taking care of you.”
“Oh,” I muse, offering him the box again, but he waves it away. I set it down on the counter and dust salt from my palms. “The daycare thing is definitely tied up with that.”
Henry frowns. “The daycare thing?”
“I told you about that.”
“Uh,” Henry says. “No, you did not. A daycare thing? I would remember a daycare thing.”
Henry would. Henry would remember this. “I really thought I told you this.” I uncross my arms, cross my feet. I suddenly cannot find a position that feels comfortable.
“What the fuck happened?”
I clasp my hands at my pelvis. That still feels wrong. I jam my hands into my pockets. Better. “I went to this daycare where they spanked you.” I laugh a little; Henry does not.
“What would you get spanked for?”
“Like, if you did something wrong.”
“What would you do wrong?”
“The first time. The main time. I got lost.”
“You got lost? How is that a three-year-old’s fault?”
“I wandered off,” I say. “Or I didn’t wander off, exactly, but I didn’t keep up.” I’m falling all over my words, struggling to explain. I take a deep breath. Center myself. Start from the beginning. “There was a stable not too far from the school. You could get there through a path in the woods. They would take us there to visit a horse named Nickles. It was my turn to pet him or feed him a carrot or whatever, and I was doing that, and all of a sudden I realized it had gotten very quiet. I looked over my shoulder, and everyone was gone. I was all alone in the middle of the woods. I stumbled around until I found a house and knocked on the door. They brought me back to the daycare center, and the owner dragged me into the middle of the room, pulled down my pants, and told all the kids to gather around.”
Henry stares at me in horror. “She made the other kids watch.”
“She always did. Sometimes she would just put a kid in her lap and cross their arms over their chest and hold them by their wrists and, like, turn them, in a circle, telling all the other kids, like, ‘Look at so-and-so, he’s been very bad. He did something wrong. Stare at him.’ She owned the daycare, this woman. Her name was Mrs. Worther. She could be so mean, but then after she would punish you like that, she’d, like, dote on you. Cuddle you. Stroke your hair. It was all extremely fucked up, and so yeah, that’s probably at play here.”
Henry is staring at me, appalled. “Uh, ya think?”
Something about the way he says this is funny to me.Uh, ya think?Extremely funny, actually. I start to laugh.
“Jesus,” Henry says, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s almost as fucked up as the fact that I didn’t talk for, like, a year.”