Monsterville
by
Mickey Greaves
You were four when you started having nightmares. To help you go to sleep, I would lie down with you in your bed.
We lived in a very old place in Chelsea. On the fireplace, there were Symbolist tiles, mottled brown glaze on clay that had radiating lines from each central figure, a woman, in all her glory, who looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. Egg and dart plaster trim ran the edge near the ceiling. The old brownstone had served for years as a tenement for the working class. It smelled of old plaster, wood smoke, mice in the walls. It teemed with stories. The building was later converted, some would say diminished, by being ribboned, into tiny rental apartments.
You and I sensed the presence of spirits.
Remember when we found a snippet of a Greek newspaper behind the refrigerator? It was from a day in the winter of 1890. Above it, a hole in the plaster lathe wall revealed a tuft of hair. For a minute it looked like human hair.
With the newspaper was a small bone.
“Is that bone from a person, Mommy?” you asked me, trembling, your big brown eyes gazing up at me.
You were crouched next to me, wearing what you had chosen for the day. I remember it was all black. You wanted to be a ninja for school.
Of course, I answered no. The hair, like steel wool to my touch, had to have been horsehair, which builders used for insulation when New Yorkers worked in the streets and horses were our coworkers. But the bone? For a moment, I imagined it splintered following a sudden argument, perhaps over the stove. A violence that left the other person behind, her soul escaping, like a vapor, sputtering like a gas lamp, her body parts tossed away, just some garbage near the kitchen wall.
That night in your tiny room, you asked me to do a search for monsters. You needed action, my words didn’t count. I looked in the closet, in the bureau drawers, behind the bed. Really, there was no room for anyone of flesh and blood to hide but I knew you were worried about phantoms. You imagined that they were like mice, able to collapse on themselves at will but scarier, extruding through a hairline crack in the plaster. So I persisted and exaggerated my search, making sure you knew I was being thorough.
Soon there was nowhere else to look yet your little body was still rigid with fear. I held you tight and kissed you all over your face, trying to make you giggle, making noises with my lips against your smooth skin. You were too afraid to respond. I knew better than to insist that you go to sleep. You were still too nervous.
How could I make your fear recede? I needed something to slow time and the buzzing of your brain.
My hair was blonde then, and thick, held back in a ponytail with a small black band. I pulled the elastic out and settled my head next to yours on the pillow. In my hand, raised above us, I showed it to you, stretched between my thumb and two fingers, making them a tripod.
“Look,” I said. “I bet you didn’t know I had a monster-fighting tool here.”
“That’s for your hair.”
“Yes, I try to keep it handy in case I need it to get rid of monsters. It is incredibly effective. Let me show you how it works.”
You needed the distraction. You needed to press your scary thoughts away, just for a moment, long enough to sleep.
The hall light sliced through the bedroom door, leaving a last sliver of brightness, right before the no man’s land at the end of the bed. I put the small black band next to my feet, and then tucked you in front of me.
We looked down at the black ring, in high relief against the white cotton sheet. The part closest to the hall light cast a thin shadow over the rest as if there were a shallow depression inside the ring. Maybe a hole.
In that moment, we both believed I could get rid ofyour everybête noire.
“So what you see now,” I said, in my best tour guide voice, “Is a one-way portal, a hole that sucks up all the monsters.”
I don’t recall you saying anything to that. I could feel your little body start to relax.
“It’s very quiet,” I said, pressing my warm words into the crown of your hair. “You really have to listen.” My own ears perked up. I thought I heard the crunch and whoosh of bogymencaught in the ring. Or perhaps it was your anxiety, made tangible, leaving the room.
You scooted your butt further into my stomach and began a soft, breathy cadence.
It was just a little magic, on the edge of a moment.
That was years ago. I keep practicing, though, making the monsters go away. Now you have your own life, separate from mine. You don’t need my protection. I struggle with that, a mother’s unemployment.
For one thing, I have more free time.The other day I took an after-dinner walk in Prospect Park. It was still twilight, but night was descending fast.
I was near the bridge across from the boathouse when the big man’s voice reached me. He was up against a hundred-year-old tree and in the darkening gloom was facing it. It was already hard to see; I imagined his arms were around it.
He was not your typical tree hugger. Shouting. In the twilight, when the birds are most restive, they were still. Perhaps even they were listening.
I had passed him and began to look back, hearing his raised voice when I saw another woman move towards him and thought she was going to speak to him. Ah! Someone else would handle it. What a relief.
She furrowed her brow at me then, shook her head, and kept on walking. She was minding her own business and nodded at me to do the same. Yet shouting in a public place meant something. He was putting on some kind of show. I leaned against the bridge balustrade to understand the noise of it, waiting.
There were pauses where he must have let someone else talk. It was hard to tell, all I could hear were the booming bass notes of a man in a pulpit, as he spewed the hot embers of a sermon over a small congregation.
He was saying something about the right way for a man to treat a woman.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom.
I saw him put both hands up and lean in against the tree.
His hands were layered, thumb on thumb. It was a chokehold. He pressed his weight into it. Beneath him was a teenager, no more than 15 years old. A stripling. Wearing the latest hoodie, and the fancy shoes of a trendsetter.
I looked around and saw two guys gazing up into their phone, taking a selfie. I knew they heard the man. Wasn’t anyone going to do anything?
The stream of walkers widened away from the commotion, like a ripple in a pond. New Yorkers edging away from a scene is a classic tell and should have been a warning to me. I know the code in New York -- live and let live, without interruption or interference.
Unless someone is getting hurt.
I fumbled for an idea. Should I call 911? I knew where the cops were – a mile away at the park entrance. Too far away, too slow to respond, too many questions.
“Hey,” I said. That’s all I could come up with. I was struck by how little air I could put behind the word.
As I edged closer, a girl, about four years old, if I had to guess, ran up to me and grabbed my leg, looking up into my face. Her hair was plaited around a headband or some other shiny thing. Complete with a tiny tulle skirt – sparkles on it – she was a pint-sized Glinda the Good, and the youngest to springfrom thegroup of five people gathered around the tree. Frankly, it wasn’t until I saw her that I realized how complicated the situation was.
“Hello … Hello!” She said.
I looked down at her.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I said, softening, just as an older girl, maybe 13 or 14 years old, pulled her away.
Glinda seemed to know why I was there. I wasn’t so sure.
Going in, I knew I had no plan B. Yet that’s how it is, isn’t it? Whatever disaster it is. We see someone drowning and don’t we jump in? There’s no time for another thought. We never check to see if our bathing suit is on straight. Don’t we know an emergency when we hear one?
He was still choking the kid, a boy as tall as he was, slightly lifted onto his toes and looking down, through careful hair, away from the man. He wasn’t defending himself. He was trying to tuck his chin in to protect his windpipe and keep the air he had. I didn’t think the kid had enough breath in him to say anything, anymore.
Then the man said, “No,” pressing down for emphasis, “You will not speak. To a woman. Like that.”
I wondered what woman he meant. The big man had cleared the area with his voice. Wasn’t I the only woman within a hundred feet?
“Hey!” I said, still trying to make up my mind about what to do. Maybe I could distract the man. He dropped his hands and turned to me, glowering.
“This is my son,” he said.
“Yes, I said. “I have a son, too.”
I’d heard from a friend, a social worker, that the way to get an angry parent to calm down is to find common ground. Introduce yourself, even. Acknowledge that we all have bad days, that they’re having a bad day. Then keep a business card handy for someone they can talk to before they physically harm their kids. A civilized exchange. Yet we had jumped all the way to the end of the intervention strategy. I suddenly wished I had taken my friend’s card. It was a little late for that.
“No, this is MY son and I’ll do what I want,” he said.
His son. Of course, I knew the rationale. Isn’t a man entitled to hurt his own son?
And it flashed to me then the time when your dad backed you against your bed. At 15, you were finally the same height as your father.
I knew you’d been arguing. First, there was the rumble of your dad telling you off. Then came the back talk from you. What followed was the scrape and bang as the bed hit the wall. I dropped my dish towel and slid around to your bedroom doorway. You two were face-to-face, you with your back straight, unbending, and Dad with his hands around your neck.
A man and his son.
“Stop!” I said.
Nothing changed. Nobody could hear me anymore. Your father was in a full-on rage, a complete flooding of the brain, the overwhelming surge dampening all rational thought. Your arms were limp at your sides.
There was a sly smile frozen on your face, a mask to cover anger, hurt and, what was it? Oh, yes, resignation.
Sweetie, you were always clever. Your sharp tongue got you into trouble. In just one moment, you had discovered how easy it was to anger your father, a spiritual man, a Buddhist, to the point where he wanted to reach the source of your voice, to silence the soft susurration of your breath and crush your windpipe with his fixed intention. He was going to put you down so that you stayed down.
I wished you would do something. Elementary school karate wasn’t enough; I needed you to tuck your chin, grab both his wrists and kick him in the groin. A little Krav Maga to stop him.
Why hadn’t I taught you how to fight? Maybe because I’d never learned how. I was taught to use my words, instead.
I wanted you to push back. You needed to win. Yet I couldn’t wait for that.
“Stop!” I said and pressed my way between you, facing your dad and risking an accidental backhand to the face.
Then your dad dropped his arms. Shouting as he left, he slammed the front door. It was hours before he was calm enough to come home.
I don’t remember what the argument was. Yet underneath it was your need to assert dominance. It is what young men are born to do. To make your own mistakes and still become the big man. There has to be a better way to let you.
“Stop. You can’t do this,” I said to the man in the park.
What he said next came out as a torrent, like a fire hose, insults and accusations, as if he knew me, and politeness with a stranger, society’s customary remove, had been abrogated. I was included as the enemy. He advanced on me, spitting, with eyeball-to-eyeball anger. I held my ground. He accused me of recording him with my phone. Not so. When I spoke quietly in reply, he was deaf.
Not a surprise. It’s what bullies do. I edged in front of his son, putting myself between the man and the kid. At least he wasn’t choking the boy anymore.
I had to wonder, where was the young man’s mother?
I came to my senses and remembered the step in the intervention process my friend had suggested. I extended my hand and told him my name.
He pulled back from my hand like I had a disease -- like I was the disease.
By jumping in, though, I bought time. I felt the teenager behind me sidle away. A young boy of eight or nine, bobbing and weaving, in a kind of conspiratorial peek-a-boo, appeared behind the man, then. Also very slight, he shook his head and raised his index finger, waggling it at me in warning. Cut your losses, he seemed to advise me.
I nodded at the boy, probably the peacemaker. That was me, too, growing up. Yet angry menhave changed me. I won’t stand by.
I ignored a new wave of the big man’s pithy epithets, and don’t recall most of the things he said to shake me loose so he could go back to berating his son. And then he said he was a professor of American history.
That was an odd thing to say. There was the stink of something when he said that. Pride? Yes and no. It was the extra assumption. That I was a North American.
He didn’t even understand his ignorance. So I thought, I’ll flip the scenario. I spoke a new language. Like I was the kind of American he hadn’t studied.
For a second he was taken aback. I almost laughed at his frown, at the traffic jam in his thoughts. To see a loud man caught in his own conclusions was such a pleasure.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” he said.
I guess I should have completed the pivot, and played dumb, as if he could still say anything to me, and I wouldn’t understand. He would have stopped shouting much faster, but my own ego prickled.
“That was Portuguese,” I said. What a mistake. The man was fluent in all kinds of bias.
What followed was a full-on history lesson about “people like you.” Now he was berating me about Portugal and Queen Isabella. He derided a whole country and its history. At last, he sounded, well … crazy.
He thought I had to be from Portugal. Yet what about the other America? South America? Brazil.
I heard him and waited. Finally, he ran out of words. The man went silent, slumping. Then a streetlight behind the tree beamed on. Ah, it was late. He appeared to come into himself then and moved away from me. Hoisting Glinda up onto his back, he took his older daughter’s hand. His sons gathered around him, training their eyes on the ground as they followed the road out.
It’s been a few days. I still wonder about those motherless children, son. I guess Ican’t help it. I’m not ready to retire.
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