this woman’s work

I woke up thinking about a little boy who came to the daycare where I worked during the time I took off from college. I’ll call him Max but that wasn’t his name.

He wasn’t the cutest child in the class; he was sturdy and small with lots of brown hair. His mother was outrageously beautiful; she looked like Isabella Rossellini and she worked (appropriately) at the Lancôme counter at the mall. Her husband, however, was decidedly frog-like with slightly bulging blue eyes and a wide, flat mouth. Max took after his dad. We used to wonder what Max’s mom saw in her husband but then we learned they were divorcing and the question didn’t seem relevant anymore.

Max was a little older than the other kids in our 3-year old class. He was also very, very smart. He had this roughened voice that sounded like he was speaking through sawdust. He would come to me with very serious, ostensibly innocent questions but I could see his eyes darting this way and that and would know he was trying to distract me from something else. I fell crazy in love with him.

He must have watched a lot of television at home. He was a big fan of Bugs Bunny (he apparently had all the episodes memorized) and that’s usually the persona he was claiming. He would answer to Max, but reluctantly, and he would grimly remind us that he was Bugs today. One day he was trying to get his way on something and I was only half-attending to our argument when I realized that I had somehow just agreed to what he was asking. I looked down at his gleeful little face and the end of the conversation came back to me. He had done that thing that Bugs does, that “rabbit season!” “duck season!” trick and got me to say yes instead of saying no by switching his side of the argument mid-way. Pretty smart for a not-quite 4-year old.

After the divorce, his semi-neglectful parents got more neglectful. Max was always clean and seemed well-fed but he was fading into himself a little more everyday. A kid steeped in age-inappropriate cynicism already, it was getting worse. At least once a week his parents forgot who was supposed to pick him up. He would be drearily circling the atrium on one of our red tricycles while the teacher wanting to go home would start calling his list of emergency contacts looking for someone to come and take responsibility for him. I only had to witness this once when I came back to pick up a lesson plan. I sat and talked with him until his father came to pick him up, huffing with annoyance about being inconvenienced yet again.

At some point Max developed alopecia and all of his hair fell out. First in great, ugly clumps and then completely. No one knows why alopecia happens and there isn’t a cure. You just wait and see if the hair grows back. Max’s did eventually but I don’t think it’s any accident that this began during the great chaos of his parents’ divorce. His carefully constructed tough boy veneer began to crack and his thumb found his way to his mouth more and more every day. He was never a very cuddly kid but he began creeping into my lap and I would rock him and rock him and rock him, while his eyes drowsed shut and he sucked his thumb contentedly.

Max moved to one of our sister schools a few months later. It was closer to his mom’s new job. When I was ready to move to Portland, I visited the school so that I could see how he had grown. I stood in back of the playroom figuring he wouldn’t remember me by now. He was slightly taller and his hair was back, thick and straight. He looked up and saw me. He stood there staring and I smiled. He walked over and looked some more, not saying anything. Then, tentatively reaching his hand up, he said, “Have you come to take me home now?”

Max must be in his mid-teens now. He has a pretty common name so I’m not sure if I could find him if I tried. I loved him very much. I hope that somehow he still knows that.

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