Bright Shards of Someplace Else

Out of the Mouths of Babes

1 Out of the mouths of Babes He was nine years old. He had eczema. He scored very high on all tests that measured verbal ability. Some teachers mistook his brilliance for a smart mouth. Flossing was a point of contention, sometimes . He had a special diet—be sure to follow the special diet. He was different. A different child. Grace had learned all this about the boy, Andy, in the first few moments of setting foot inside the Henderson household. Much could be made of the order in which the mother listed the boy’s traits. He was a young rash, an articulate and bratty rash, a high-maintenance and oh-so-special rash. Grace nodded as if everything the mother was saying was perfectly logical and expected. The boy sat across from her, playing a hand-held video game and sucking from a silver juice bladder. He pulled the straw from the juice and used it to scratch his head, then put it back. “What was that again?” “I said, keep him off the phone. He doesn’t need to be on the phone today.” The mother gathered up her bags, turned to her son, and smiled. Grace would see a usual range of looks from parents during this moment : the clingy ones would blink all misty-eyed; the ragged ones would flash a guilty smile, ashamed at their own relief; the boastful parents would give a kind of wink, imagining all the ways the nanny would soon be dazzled. But when this mother met her boy’s eyes, she visibly shrank in her suit as if caught in a compromising moment. The Out of the Mouths of Babes 2 boy looked up from his game and gave his mother a tight smile—the thin courtesy a person gives a beggar who is thanking him too profusely . The silver car backed out of the driveway, the late-afternoon light flashing off its hood. The boy shielded the game screen with his hand and kept on playing. Grace watched him for a moment. He was sandy haired, with a high rosiness on his cheeks that looked like misapplied blush. His irises, under a frill of tufted lashes, were dappled graygreen like Spanish moss shot through with sun. She considered greeting him, or hunkering down next to him and asking about his game, but thought better of it. She hated the awkward joviality that always marked the first one-on-one discussion with a child, so lately she had skipped it altogether. She had all evening with the boy—the mother would be out late on a catering job—so there was no need to hurry things along. She began her tour. The mother had shown her around the house —here’s the pantry, here’s the laundry, be careful about this lock, it needs a hard turn, hold down the handle for a second or two to flush—but she always made her own circuit when the parents left. She enjoyed seeing how people arranged their things, found a comfort in the contents of other people’s medicine cabinets—those little curios of weakness and disease; she liked noticing the things that had been done for her first-day benefit (toys stuffed under the bed, fanned magazines on the coffee table, fresh soap in the dish) and the things that had gone undone (the rusty sink drains, dirty panties at the top of the laundry pile). She popped her head in the master bath, ran her hands over the couple’s bed, then stepped into the boy’s room and looked around. The twin bed was neatly made, and books rather than toys filled the shelves. The only concession to whimsy was a stylized bear painted on the wall, its paw in an abstract-expressionist honey pot composed with loose strokes. Out of the Mouths of Babes 3 Theboywasanonlychild,itappeared.Thethirdbedroomwasused as a study, full of dark shelves and dressers. She particularly liked going through drawers. Funny that it was a pleasure, she thought, as she pulled the small brass knocker on the first set of drawers. As a child she had found troubling things: a note from her father to a mistress (“I want to dwell in the minute I first see you”), a bizarre letter that her mother had been long drafting to her own father, the handwriting and mood changing over the course of...