The Six Times of Alan

All the other children were white.

I considered leaving, using the tantrum-proof promise of ice cream as an exit strategy. Instead, I held my breath for 10 seconds, exhaled with intention—just as Alan always tells me to—and allowed Jules to wander off and play. In this regard, I’m unlike my husband, who thinks children should be left to interact with the world on their own terms and spends most of his playground-parenting lost in his phone, occasionally glancing at the exits. I’m too busy invoking ancestors and casting protective spells. But it’s been a couple of years now of parenting, and very few people on the playground have proven to be anything worse than casually horrid or vaguely racist. Which is probably why I let my guard down.

This all took place three Fridays ago, at a small park in Manhattan—specifically, where Bank, Hudson, and Bleecker meet. The pristine tangle of primary colors was encircled by a ring of car traffic, chic boutiques, and restaurants that opened only for dinner. The neighborhood had become more upscale and less appealing in the 20 years since I’d known it primarily as a nighttime cruising ground: besotted kisses and furtive, moonlit hand jobs, most of which took place on the Bleecker side of the playground.

Last month, however, there was none of that. What I remember was Jules wheeling around a rusty toy stroller that had been discarded. I recall, too, another stroller-pushing child of similar size and shape, but blonde and white. I remember feeling that everything was going smoothly enough for me to get lost in my email.

I fear I’m being redundant, but this is as propitious a time as any to explain that my skin color, like that of Jules, sits on the spectrum of brown. I occupy a lighter nodule, a decidedly Central and South American mestizaje of the Indigenous-European variety. Jules, too, is a mix of identities, the most identifiable of which is Black—the ethno-racial-political category, not the absence of light. I bother to mention this at all because I’ve noticed on several occasions that this sort of phenotypic asymmetry within a family sows confusion, especially for the other guardians at the playground, who look around curiously, and sometimes with blatant alarm, whenever they don’t see a corresponding Black adult for Jules. Not in an Are you okay, honey? fashion, but more of a Who is guarding this unknown variable? fluster. It doesn’t matter if I’m interacting with my baby in an unambiguous parent–child fashion, the other guardians stare (me, Jules, my face, Jules’s face, then mine again), searching for commonalities, desperate to understand or to prove. There’s no two ways about it: racial discordance unsettles people. And it often casts me as an unwitting eavesdropper.

“This kid. . . .” blared a man in a sweater vest and dirty blond eyebrows a few feet away, before he caught himself and began again, but now in a hopeless, stakes-raising whisper. “This black kid just tried to jump Taylor and steal her stroller, but she wadn’t havin’ dat. Nuh-uh,” he said proudly and patois-y to his wife, a similarly handsome woman sitting beside him and breastfeeding their younger child beneath a white sheet decorated in cartoon rainbows. Then he dragged his hand through the air in a lazy, sass-less semicircle that ended with soft finger snaps. Whether the throwback pantomime was his misguided homage to Black women, gay men, or the resurgent era of drag queens is unknowable.

What was clear was the way little Taylor’s father had manipulated the register of his voice to talk about Jules. It changed me. I detest physical violence—I caught a glimpse of a ufc match at the barber last week and I got woozy—but in that moment, I contemplated digging a grave in the sandpit for the whispering racist. In fact, it took every breathing and mindfulness exercise Alan had ever taught me to keep me on that park bench.

It bears repeating that my child is two years old. Two year olds cannot steal. It’s not possible. They don’t yet understand ownership or capitalism. This isn’t to say that it’s okay to take things, but I don’t believe for a moment that the Klansman in Argyle would have mentioned it to his wife if my baby were not Black. There was racial pride in his insolent declaration; little Taylor hadn’t only defended herself against the patriarchy, she’d vanquished the dark villain from a distant land—or public housing.

________

“Not everything is racism,” says Alan. “I don’t want to disregard how you’re feeling, but on the face of it, he may not have meant any harm.”

“But why characterize the actions of a toddler in terms of criminal behavior?”

“Granted, a poor choice of words, but probably empty words.”

Frankly, I’m surprised Alan is staking this particular claim. It’s not like him to—actually, come to think of it, this is exactly like Alan. Whenever it suits his analysis, he speaks in a nested vernacular, where nothing is abstract or intangible—words within words, desires beneath desires, consequences of the consequences, like that—but when I want to peel back the layers of intent, he talks about “empty words.” Now he’s left me wondering if he, too, wears sweater vests.

“Why didn’t you say anything to him?” Alan continues.

“To the guy at the playground?”

“Seems you missed an opportunity to engage and dispel your fears.”

Engagement with the racist dad would have been impossible. After overhearing his empty words, I never again achieved the level of calm required for interaction with a perfect stranger. All the scenarios I concocted from that recently painted playground bench were loud and unevenly keeled encounters that ended with me in handcuffs. In some of the scenarios, I undoubtedly deserved to be arrested, but the stigma around being labeled racist is so libelous, even approaching little Taylor’s dad with a diplomatic affect might have triggered a 911 call. No one, after all, admits they’re racist. No one on a playground has ever said, You’re right, that came from a dank, unholy place deep within me that I need to exorcise. And certainly never in a West Village playground. It’s much easier to be racist, deny it, drive your accuser crazy, and accuse him of being crazy. And it was easier still to remind myself that I’d made a choice to be in that place.

That I was capable of leaving it whenever I wanted to.

That I had a savings account.

That I had an acupuncture appointment on Monday.

That I shouldn’t get distracted by interpersonal encounters.

That this wasn’t police brutality.

That reparations would one day close the wealth gaps that have sustained anti-Black racism for centuries.

I told myself all these things. Then I whispered into Jules’s ear, “Want Daddy to buy you some ice cream?”

Alan nods when I finish recounting the events of that fateful Friday.

Then he scribbles something into his spiraled notepad.

________

I’ve returned to Alan (the fifth rapprochement in almost a decade) because I detest the inefficiencies of beginning a new relationship. Having to explain myself—Worse! Having to pay someone to listen to me explain myself: childhood, livelihood, fears, insecurities, coping mechanisms. It’s enough to give up on therapy altogether. Alan is problematic, but he knows me, and that’s invaluable.

“How did your parents meet?” he asks, apropos of nothing, midway through our second session of this, our most recent, reconciliation.

Alan is tall and lanky. His knees, one resting on the other, form a mountain of gently wrinkled khaki that peaks near his chest and gradually erodes as he sinks into the off-white cushions of a blond wicker chair.

Today, I was my usual early, in time to catch a glimpse of him playing solitaire on his phone. I make sure to arrive ahead of our scheduled time because Alan ends our sessions six minutes early. “Enough time for a trip to the bathroom and a call to my teenage daughter before my next client,” he explained years ago, when I first started seeing him. “Quality not quantity,” he said in response to my eyebrows. In the moment, the aphorism assuaged me; by the time his reasoning became fishy, I was already home. Addressing this minor injustice now would only confirm Alan’s oft-repeated observation: I’m drawn to conflict but afraid of confrontation—he also thinks I’m petty. And digressive.

It was a timing issue, in a way, that led me to dissolve my relationship with Alan the first time. I used to arrive between 6:49 and 6:56 for our 7:00 p.m. appointments, but one time, I got there at 7:03, and instead of just sitting down and beginning the session, I made it a point to apologize profusely (a habit that feels at once involuntary and contrived) and, well, he took that as a sign of weakness and pounced. Not that he was consciously pouncing or exploiting weaknesses—and not that my uncharacteristic lateness on one day (one day!) should constitute a weakness—but humans do excel at capitalizing on each other’s weaknesses, I’ve noticed. It’s our way of taking or maintaining an upper hand, especially when Human A exhibits a character flaw that Human B (the one who pounces) also exhibits or suppresses in some manner, which I believe, in this case, Human B (Alan) has made a rather self-serving feather in his cap. How else can one explain his regularly ending our 45-minute session six minutes early but then having the audacity to comment on my one, solitary incident of lateness? Which is exactly what happened almost 10 years ago.

“Have you ever heard of cpt?” he asked, after I’d finished apologizing for my tardiness.

“No. No, I haven’t,” I responded, dabbing at my brow and neck with a one-ply tissue I’d pulled from a ceramic box atop his djembe-drum coffee table. But I had (of course!) heard of cpt, only never in the context of a white doctor and a brown patient.

“You know, Colored Peoples’ Time,” he said, very matter of fact, camouflaged in part by the enormous corn plant beside him.

Whatever he uttered next didn’t register because, by that point, I was too busy feeling microaggressed at a macrolevel.

I kept one more appointment with Alan after the cpt incident. I used the end-of-year holidays as cover for not returning: I had to leave town for Thanksgiving; in early December, it was my husband’s holiday party; then, my holiday party; followed by Christmas. Alan called twice that January, but each time, I muted the ringing and stuffed the phone back into my pocket.

________

“How my parents met? Why?” I ask. It’s been a few weeks since the playground incident. My legs, too, are crossed—a hillock of dark blue denim.

Alan lifts the mug of water from the drum’s untreated rawhide. “It occurs to me that we’ve never explored the origins of your origins,” he says and sips.

I won’t tell him how my parents met. To begin with, it’s none of his business. What’s more, my mother would undoubtedly disapprove of my sharing her personal history with a stranger. But more to the point, I don’t want him to know. Why does he want to know? It’s a rather unremarkable story—they met at a house party in Queens. Even so, I know Alan will find some way to categorize it as a foundational moment. He’ll remove his aviator eyeglasses and pinch the hypotenuse of his scalene nose, all the while practicing a measured bopping, as if he were speeding along a dusty highway, listening to the one decent Buffalo Springfield song. That’s useful insight. That explains plenty. Then he’ll attempt to decipher something that isn’t coded.

“The story of my parents is somewhat complicated,” I say without a plan.

“Complications are mountains we must climb to reach the rivers of truth.”

Something about the lack of creativity in his metaphor angers me. It makes me want to give him the complications he so desperately seeks. I remain quiet as I scan the room. There are no fewer than six copies of The New Yorker on the short table beside me. Nothing comes to mind.

“They met at a house party in Queens.”

Alan pulls off his glasses—“Uh-huh”—but doesn’t pinch the bridge of his nose. Instead, he scribbles something into his notepad. I don’t believe he’s written anything at all. This is merely his way of completing a tiny circuit that took him nowhere. Doesn’t matter. I’m not here for analysis. I want peace and, maybe, transcendence. Guidance, too. I want to better understand the origins of my weeks-long shitty mood. I want a plan of action.

________

Not even a year after I’d stopped seeing Alan for the first time—after the cpt encounter—I called and left him a voicemail. A week later, he left me a voicemail. The following Tuesday, I was in his waiting room by 6:30 for our 7:00 p.m. appointment.

My husband and I were going through a spell of asynchrony. Passive disagreements, differing priorities, long silences. It was as if Gus and I were on the same stage but somehow performing from different scripts—repertory theater gone awry.

“If you want, we could try couples counseling,” Gus suggested, one Saturday afternoon, while repotting a basil plant that had flourished beyond our wildest expectations, but I knew going to therapy together wouldn’t work because my husband isn’t much of a talker, and I don’t do well with audiences.

To secure a new therapist, my insurance plan first required three preliminary sessions with an intermediary counselor who would, in turn, refer me to someone permanent. I argued that four or five sessions might be enough to solve the problem altogether, but the customer service representative on the phone wouldn’t budge (“That not how this works, Sir.”), so I skipped the intake process and gave Alan a second chance. To his credit, he never questioned my 10-month hiatus.

“How is the sex?” he asked, during our second or third session of that first reconciliation.

“I mean, we both finish, so it’s ultimately fulfilling, but I wouldn’t say it’s as thrilling as it used to be.”

“Hmmm. I see.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“What does what mean?” he responded.

“Well, what did you mean by ‘Hmmm’?”

“Do you always believe there are hidden meanings to everything?”

“No—Sorry, I just thought you were going to say something more.”

“Have you tried fighting with your lover?”

Alan, whose brother was gay and had died of complications from aids during an early wave of the epidemic—something he mentioned casually during our very first session—has always referred to Gus as my lover, as if he were in the know, as if we were still in the mid-80s, or maybe as a tribute to his brother.

“Like a physical fight?” I asked.

“Sometimes, even in hardy relationships, time can mask small resentments. It’s possible that you two have been too nice to each other.”

“Too nice?”

“Partnerships ebb and flow. They’re exciting, then naturally less exciting, then they’re peppered with moments of excitement, but you’ll never again have the exhilaration you had at the beginning. Take it from me, I’ve been thrice married.” Alan chortled with the artfulness of a mall Santa.

After that session, I went home and picked a fight with Gus over his loud typing, which is indeed frantic, but it was just annoying and not something to fight about. The following day, I chastised him for leaving his rain boots in the entryway. “I keep tripping over them. Why don’t you just put them in the closet with my shoes? Do you expect me to do it? Do you think you’re better than me? Is this your way of saying you don’t want to be with me?”

Gus’s emerald eyes went wide before settling into a squint, as if he were examining an exotic but harmless insect. “Are you feeling okay?” he asked.

In the days that followed, Gus took in stride my complaints about his runny eggs, cold feet, and his penchant for overplanning. But then, in the process of trying to fabricate a polemic, something authentic surfaced: I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t him per se; my beef was with the world, but Gus, in a way, represented that world. Apart from being a good listener, a good lover, and a good friend, he was also pedigreed, apolitical, and a smidge pedestrian. I wanted someone who would inspire me to be a better human, someone who would drag me to boring movies, someone who’d hogtie me in the bedroom while reciting the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program.

I wasn’t, in those days, able to articulate my needs, but the doubts had formed something wedge-like that was expanding between us. I attributed it solely to race: “Being in a mixed-race couple is tough. The world pits us against each other, and I feel it. It’s too much for two people to bear.”

“But have I done something wrong?”

“Well, now that you mention it. . . . The other day, you didn’t say anything when the server brought you the bill and handed you back the card, even though it was my American Express.”

“I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t notice.”

“See! That’s exactly what I mean. You’re white. You don’t have to notice.”

Seems like a perfectly harmless and legitimate observation to make in the post-Obama years; back then, however, it hit Gus hard. His lips came together neatly; the rest of him looked wounded and droopy. We remained at opposite ends of the apartment until the sun set. That’s when Gus emerged in a pair of white briefs—he knows what his soccer-player thighs do to me. Right there, on our wobbly gray ottoman, we had sex that was equally pliant, cathartic, and, yes, thrilling. Afterward, I apologized for being mean, and he apologized for unwittingly enabling racism. Never again did he allow restaurant servers to hand him the check. And I stopped seeing Alan. That was eight years ago.

________

“Have you been back to the playground?” Alan asks, his index finger pressing the tip of his nose up and down and then up again, as if he were alone.

“No. I don’t want to interact with any of them anymore.”

Between Alan and me, on the djembe, rests a bowl of candy corn left over from Halloween. The tricolor confections are appealing, and I’m feeling peckish, but I won’t allow my hand into that nest of invisible bacteria and viruses.

“Them?” he says with a lilt and begins to stab at his notepad without looking down, as if he were casually creating a work of pointillism. “Painting with a broad brush makes you just as bad as the image you’ve concocted of the other father on the playground. Actually, worse, because your actions are premeditated.”

Truth is, I haven’t taken Jules to a playground since it happened—six weeks now. Instead, I emptied our hallway closet—old papers, buttonless coats, broken tennis rackets, stripped leather shoes, incomplete board games, obsolete CDs and dvds—and turned it into a play space. I pasted glow-inthe-dark stars on the walls, lined the floor with cork panels, and tucked two small chairs and a plastic kitchen-set in there. Gus, while happy about the purge, was concerned with my propensity for avoidance.

“Your lover is right. And we should explore some strategies,” Alan says, before flipping his pad closed and uncrossing his legs. “Same time next week?”

________

“You want the number for my therapist?” asks George. My ears and fingertips are cold. We’re standing on the corner of 1st Avenue and Houston, not plastered, but technically drunk, and trying to hail a cab back to Brooklyn. “She’s amazing, Filipina—a lesbian too.”

I’ve known George for more than 15 years—I went to graduate school with his wife—but only in the last couple of years have we found ourselves standing next to one another at social events. For a few months now, we’ve been meeting for happy hours. At first, our conversations seemed to be exclusively about everyday racism, but eventually we got to talking about books and movies and politics, all of which lent themselves to more productive conversations about institutional and structural racism. “Husbands of Color Convening,” reads the subject line of all his emails to me—his wife, like my husband, is white.

George is older, but I don’t know by how much. His pop culture references (he saw the original Dreamgirls on Broadway with his mom) and the age of his daughters (both teenagers) suggest 10 years, as does his reticence toward car-hailing apps—“I’m not afraid of these cabbies,” he’s said on more than one occasion. George is half-a-foot shorter than me and weighs more too. He edits television programs, mostly sporting events, and he’s won at least a half-dozen Emmy Awards, all but one of which he keeps under his bed, for fear of showboating. He’s a lifelong New Yorker, in equal proportions direct and fragile.

“I had a white therapist once. He told me I needed to ‘trust people more.’” George is partial to air quotes. “‘If you could just open up and let people in.’ Can you believe that nonsense?” George asks, fingers curled.

“The nerve,” I say.

“Get this: the therapist sends me to ‘race-related’ anger management classes. They’re led by a super young conflict mediation and meditation ‘expert.’ A white woman who makes us do trust exercises. Entire class is Black men, and on the first day, we have to take off our shirts and give each other back rubs. Back rubs! Can you believe that? The second class, she wheels in white mannequins—honest-to-God mannequins from, like, a department store, all of them wearing striped polo shirts—and we’re supposed to pretend they’re real and engage them in conversations from scripts she’d written. When I get there the third week, there are small cages, the size of shoeboxes, in the middle of the room. Inside . . . hamsters. Fucking hamsters, man!” George, still one arm aloft, turns to face the street. Two empty cabs drive past. He accepts their insolence and faces me again. “Each of us gets one hamster. Mine is reddish, like old brick, with white streaks. Cute little guy. After petting them for like a minute, she plays something over the speaker system. A deep voice saying racist shit. I mean, really really racist shit that I can’t even repeat, like a Tarantino movie. The instructor says that if the recording makes us ‘feel anger,’ we should take deep breaths and hold them for 10 seconds, all the while hugging our hamsters. Then she tells us to stand on one leg, with one arm extended and the other still holding the little critters, ‘like footballs against your chests,’ she says. I looked like a fool. A damn fool. All of us did. That was it—the last class for me. Now, whenever I cross paths with a racist motherfucker, I tell him he’s a racist motherfucker, and I get the hell out of Dodge. Then I go to the nearest bar and order the most expensive whisky they have. Used to be three whiskies, but Irene—that’s my therapist—she helped me get down to one.”

The entire time George is recounting this, his arm has remained in the air. His eyes are as wide as the avenue before us. This stretch of pavement is at once alive, familiar, and threatening. I don’t know if it’s the alcohol, the night, or his vulnerability, but George looks older than I’d imagined all these years.

“Life’s too short to keep giving these people the benefit of the doubt,” he says convincingly, and points to a mustard-colored hulk with headlights, just below Houston. “This cab, right here.” George gestures with his chin toward the other side of the street. “It’s going to take a left. Get out there and grab it!” he insists, with an unfiltered urgency. “You’re the ‘safe’ one in this scenario, mi hermano.” George’s exaggerated Pacino-as-Latino accent dissolves into a whistling laughter, a tea kettle boiling. He slides past me, into the narrow space between two parked cars, before nudging me onto the margins of the road. I throw one arm up and begin waving.

________

According to some (but maybe all) neuropsychologists, fears are merely unprocessed traumas, often forgotten. To overcome the former, one must invoke the part of the brain that stores the latter. This is done through a combination of bilateral stimulation and conversation, which allows for the unpacking, processing, and healthy repackaging of the memory.

The third time I started seeing Alan was because of my aerophobia. The fears of being trapped and of crashing had coalesced into mid-flight panic attacks and had all but decimated our vacation plans. I searched my health insurance website for therapists trained in this type of hypnosis, and there was Alan.

“We’ll do some subtle exercises,” he explained, “engage both halves of the brain. The source of your fear might be completely unrecognizable to you, something possibly sowed in your youth. Even while in your mother’s womb.”

Alan’s solution was to swing a pocket watch in front of me, as I recounted every painful memory I could dredge up. During the third session, I unlocked an episode of high school bullying. During the fifth, I recalled a patch of turbulence on a flight when I was 10 years old. During the eighth session, I was four and a neighbor’s dog jumped onto my chest. During the ninth, as Alan was attempting to coax me back into my mother’s uterus, I began to hear a soft, steady murmuring. At first, I imagined it was the sound of amniotic fluid encircling me, but then I realized it was Alan, snoring. He’d fallen asleep with his arm extended and raised, the pocket watch dangling, no longer in pendular flight. I stared as his torso grew and shrank subtly, as his lips pulled apart slowly, as drool pooled in one corner of his mouth. His already long face looked longer, his shaggy gray hair, shaggier. For almost 13 minutes, I waited quietly, occasionally checking my email, thinking that this was the first time I’d ever gotten my money’s worth. Then it crossed my mind that Alan might have had a stroke, so I hit the drum with force. He sat up straight away but didn’t acknowledge what had happened. He simply cleared his throat and raised his wrist up close to his bleary eyes. “Alright, same time next week?”

I wasn’t angry—the gold-plated to and fro was, admittedly, sleep inducing; plus the radiators had kicked in, producing a soporific warmth—but I didn’t return after that. I asked my primary care doctor for a Xanax prescription instead. That was nearly seven years ago.

________

I don’t teach on Fridays, just a morning faculty meeting and some paper grading. My plan was to take Jules to the park this afternoon. Until I read the morning paper. On the front page of the education section was an article (that should have been in the health section) about overlapping research studies at 25 universities—the Ivy League, the junior Ivies, and some larger state schools—each of which arrived at the same conclusion: white people overestimate the age of Black children. The smallest misperception was four years; the largest was 20. In other words, depending on the white person, a 10-year-old Black child is either 14 or 30.

(Thirty?) (Thirty.) (thirty!)

I was so overwhelmed by the findings that I missed my stop and had to walk an extra 20 minutes to work, all of which I spent thinking about the playground on Bank Street. Was it possible that little Taylor’s father had thought my baby was six? Twelve? Twenty-two years old? No. It couldn’t be. No way. Or maybe. . . . That would certainly explain why little Taylor’s father was so impressed at his daughter’s ability to protect her toy stroller. A two year old defending herself against a 22 year old in diapers is, without question, an incontrovertible feat.

(What if all the other guardians believed my toddler was 22?)

After 10 blocks, the acrid thoughts coalesced into something knotted and searing. My throat felt like one of those neon puddles that streams away from a construction site. The brisk wind had been, only moments earlier, nipping at my nose and ears; now, there was a balmy lather between my clothes and my skin. Already, I was rehearsing the things I would say. Already, I was contemplating the handcuff scenarios. I called in sick to work, stopped by the market for some ice cream, and doubled-back to pick up Jules from daycare—a rookie move: the ice cream was soup by the time we got home.

“Your kid hasn’t gone out in eight weeks?”

Alan blows his nose, which is reindeer red and dripping, like a cold or an addiction.

“Of course Jules has gone out. Just not with me. My husband has playground duty.”

“How long do you think you can sustain this?”

I don’t respond because I know Alan won’t want to hear my answer: I am able to hold out for a long time. I’ve been, for most of my adulthood, inching toward this very isolation: seeking out carefully curated spaces where I might retain agency over my life; avoiding the arenas of over-encroaching whiteness to which I’d previously aspired; realizing, better late than never, that being outnumbered is a terrible way to live.

“Do you want your kid to have paranoiac tendencies? This is what will happen if you continue down this path. The world isn’t against you.” Alan is bellowing, but I’m not sure if he’s chastising me or overcompensating for his congestion. He reaches for the tissues. “No one enjoys playgrounds. But this is what we have. Adapt, or die out,” he says less aggressively. “Same time next week?”

I collect my things and say nothing.

“And remember the breathing exercises!” Alan calls out while fluffing the cushion of his wicker chair.

________

“I’m sorry, but that man sounds like a fool. Why do you keep going back to him?” George asks. “Is this Stockholm syndrome?”

We’re waiting for our pastrami sandwiches in the basement food court of a new shopping mall in downtown Brooklyn. Despite the exorbitant prices, the place looks as if it were constructed in a high school shop class, everything wooden, rustic, uneven. George, too, is dressed down. Sweatshirt and sweatpants. I could never. Whatever comfort I might derive from soft loose-fitting cotton, would be no match for the flock of pointy-arrowed assumptions piercing me all over. Not George. He wears his lack of concern with a Boy Scout’s pride and a peacock’s pageantry. Sometimes he goes out of his way to look archetypically homeless. Tattered clothes, double coats, fingerless gloves. “I like to fuck with people,” he said to me once. I look forward to this, to growing older and caring less, even if it means wishing away my youth. I look forward to wearing anything but dark jeans up to my waist and a button-down shirt beneath a V-neck sweater.

“You know what it’s like to start therapy from scratch,” I say. “Besides, this guy isn’t all bad. He doesn’t push pills.”

“Why did you start going to him?”

“I told you, because of the playground.”

“No. The first time.”

“Oh. Lots of reasons.”

“There’s always one thing. A deciding factor or a—”

“My boss. Remember when I was working uptown?”

“Was that the cancer research?”

“Yeah. Well, one time, we were in the middle of a meeting, a dozen people around a table, looking over the results of the previous week’s data collection. And he made a mistake, my boss. Something simple. And I corrected him. It was harmless. Not only harmless, it was expected. We’re scientists; it’s part of the culture to be accurate, to catch errors. He didn’t take it well. His face tightened up, his eyes got small. I knew right away I’d stepped out of line. And before I could autocorrect, he blurted out, ‘You’re not from here, are you?’ I was so taken aback, I wasn’t sure if he meant the city or the country.”

“Fuck outta here!”

“Everyone else stayed silent. It was awkward as hell. I think I was in shock. But he kept going: ‘You’re an example of why immigration is good.’ Then he moved on to the next page of the report. As if nothing had happened.”

“People are nuts.” George rests his elbows on the table and clasps his hands together. “You know what your problem is?” he asks. “Middle-class life. You’re so focused on succeeding you didn’t realize the room changed around you. My advice: quit trying to find that space between ignorant and hateful. The world is most certainly against you. You have to decide how you want to face it. And do it quick because what happened to Jules on that playground is just the tip of one iceberg. The sea is full of them.”

“Number 37,” calls out a voice from the gaggle of gangly employees crowned in green visors standing a few feet away. George bounds over to the counter, says something that makes the young workers laugh, and picks up both of our orders on an orange tray.

“Stupid. That’s what it boils down to. People are stupid,” he continues, as he plops down onto his sawhorse bench. “Remember I told you about that short doc I’m working on for PBS? It’s about scurvy. Turns out, when England was ‘a thriving empire,’ more sailors died from scurvy than in battle or lost at sea. Millions of people. Millions! But then a ship captain realized that if he gave his crew lemon juice, they didn’t get scurvy. Case closed, right? Nope. People continued dying from this completely preventable disease for like 200 years. Two hundred years! Even after it was official policy, people resisted the lemons. How can you explain that?”

“Probably a number of—”

“I bet they were embarrassed their cure had been hiding in plain sight. Never forget, people are stubborn in addition to stupid.”

“Is the moral of this tale that it’s going to take 200 years for everyone to catch up?”

“I don’t know. I’m not an oracle. I’m just old. And my old ass can confirm for you exactly one thing: being allowed into a party is no fun if nobody wants you there.” George cocks up one side of his face and sways his head from side to side.

I realize that despite George’s leisurewear there really is no relaxing.

“Could be worse,” he says in an almost whisper. “We could be broke.”

________

I rekindled things with Alan for the fourth time about four years ago. My husband and I had gone to an adoption orientation meeting, at an agency that matched “Latino birth families” with “Latino adoptive families.” Half of the crowded room was comprised of gay couples. The other half were straight couples and single women, most of whom had exhausted their procreation options before arriving there looking rather exhausted. In the weeks that followed, I wondered if it was too soon to be a parent. Had we truly come to the end of our lives as childless people? Would we regret this and, by extension, resent the child? And what of all the challenges—the racism, the homophobia, the misogyny? Was I equipped to steward a young life through a minefield that had left me limping through this world? Almost immediately, my eczema flared up, and I began sleeping fitfully. One time, I dozed off at my desk and drooled onto one of my student’s papers.

I needed to talk.

Apart from one tasteless joke (“Who’s going to breastfeed?”), the sessions with Alan were effective and uneventful. After a few months, I wasn’t anxious anymore. In fact, the hassle of getting to therapy eventually outgrew the need for it. To escape, I told Alan our adoption classes were only available in the evenings during our scheduled session time. I said I’d be in touch when the adoption classes were over. “Whatever works for you,” he responded. “I’ll be here.”

A week or so later, he left a voicemail. “Alan here,” he began. “Remember, many less thoughtful people have been great parents. Don’t overthink it. You’ll do fine.”

I was not expecting that kindness from Alan, even if it did in a way make sense. In his mind, I was the only thing getting in the way of myself.

________

Just over two years ago, I stopped seeing Alan again. Kind of.

It was early spring, and I was walking beneath scaffolding, thinking about how, seasonal allergies notwithstanding, I had a pretty good life. I’d just begun the tenure process at work, Gus was attending a group for anti-racist whitinos on Tuesdays, and we were next on the waiting list for a baby. I could have been in many worse places: the crosshairs of a drone in Yemen; a cell in Guantanamo; or the Middle Ages. I was thinking almost exactly this when, out of nowhere, a penetrating boom disrupted the expected cacophony of downtown Brooklyn.

Across the street, the two-story scaffolding affixed to a mid-construction high-rise apartment building had collapsed. No one, it seemed, had been walking beneath when it happened. Several people took out their phones and began snapping pictures, but most resumed their cadences immediately, as if all of it were acceptable, safe, and normal. They stepped around and over the rubble and through the dust plume, undeterred, eager to continue their commutes home. Even the small, round-faced man in a yellow hardhat, who clung to the remaining beam one story above, looked unfazed, simply mouthing softly, almost apologetically, his cries for help, as his coworkers rushed to prop up a ladder.

I tried to go about my business, but the heat traveling up my chest and toward my neck was paralyzing. Right there on the street, I removed my scarf and coat and rested my hands on my knees. It wasn’t only the noise that unsettled me. The entire scene served as a reminder that the city was, at all times, on the verge of implosion. That we build endlessly without much foresight. That New York was bursting at the seams with money, but everything was done on the cheap. That it was the worst and best place to raise children. That the dangling construction worker who bore an uncanny resemblance to my father probably wasn’t part of a union and probably wasn’t from this country and probably had a child who would one day grow up to be middle class and queer and wary of doctors and playgrounds and any place where intentions might be suspect and that, despite his disposable income, he’d never truly enjoy his luxuries because even on planes he’d fear being trapped and he’d also fear the antiterrorism vigilantes that his distress and skin color might inspirit, and that no matter how much the experiences of father and son diverged, they would always be united by their outsider status.

After the construction dust settled, I took out my phone.

“How long has it been?” Alan asked.

“I don’t know, more than a year?”

“What?”

“About 18 months, I think.”

“What?”

“Almost two years.”

“I can’t hear you well,” he said. “Are you on the street?”

After some repetition, I deduced that he wasn’t available on Tuesdays at seven.

“I could do Wednesdays, 7:15 to 7:45,” he said, quick and crackly, like a drive-thru voice.

Of the 30 minutes he was proposing, I feared we’d only be together for 24, and there’d still be a $40 co-pay.

“I’m away from my calendar right now. I’ll recheck my availability and call you back later.”

But I didn’t call him back. Until seven weeks ago. After the playground.

________

It’s Monday, and I’ve just left the Kinko’s downtown, where I printed 500 copies of the first page of the article about the research on white people’s misperceptions of Black children’s ages. With a neon green highlighter, I marked the section detailing how people interpret age-appropriate behaviors, like tantrums, as violent in the case of Black children. Five hundred times, I did this. Then I paid a small fortune to have each of those pages laminated.

In the days leading up to Kinko’s, the article had circulated the faculty email list—in our department, any social science research that receives mainstream press becomes a conversation. The head of our one-person biostatistics department cautioned us about the study’s results because of the potential for self-report bias—the tendency for humans to say what’s expected or correct irrespective of the truth. The epidemiologist on staff responded that, if in fact the study’s participants had lied in order to make themselves look better, the discrepancy between the real and perceived age of Black children would be even greater. “At least the research is out there,” she concluded. “Nothing to be done but wait for the information to diffuse.”

(It took the British Navy nearly 200 years to adopt citrus as an official treatment for scurvy. And longer than that for everyone to adhere to the policy.)

The faculty email thread got me thinking. If Taylor’s dad mistook Jules for an adolescent or a 22 year old, he must have also thought my child had developmental issues. Jules is, after all, only two, an age characterized by stumbling, incomplete and often unintelligible sentences, spontaneous sobbing, and tyrannical arm-flailing. At times, I find Jules’s behavior frustrating, and it triggers in me some sort of innate anger, until I remind myself that this is to be expected of a toddler. But now I wonder if the other guardians have spent the last couple of years assuming that I was being attacked by a young adult with a limited vocabulary and a choppy gait.

I’ve wanted to go back to the playground many times. In my mind, I have. Sometimes Sweater-Vest Dad wears a peach-colored polo and boat shoes with no socks; sometimes a light-blue dress shirt, dark slacks, and brown leather slip-ons that match his belt’s color and luster. Sometimes I hang back and study him, his square head, his parted hair. He’s always immersed in his phone; periodically, he waves at little Taylor, his daughter. Sometimes I approach angrily and challenge him to a duel—swords, those beekeeper masks, white jumpsuits—but I never get far because I don’t have the requisite hand-to-eye coordination. One time, I blind-sided him with a sucker punch (jab? Uppercut? I don’t know), but the imagined sensation of my flesh and bone crashing against his flesh and bone left me queasy and with a crisis of conscience.

Sometimes we talk. It begins well enough: “Excuse me.” But whenever I get to the meat of it—“The way you talked about my child belies a deeper pathology that you need to exhume before it ends up harming someone”—the exchange heats up.

Sometimes I bring Jules, who ends up playing nicely with Taylor, leading us to befriend Taylor’s parents. Before we know it, Colin and Scarlett have invited us to their West Village duplex, and I’m thrust into a world of sweater vests and New England summers full of heirloom beach houses and tomatoes, which culminates, many years later, in a rehearsal dinner for Jules and Taylor’s wedding. And it’s during the toast that I usually broach the topic, in a jocular-kinda way: “Imagine, Colin, if I’d let your ignorance stand in the way of our relationship? Huh, Colin? Imagine?” But Colin denies it, and the candlelit wine cave begins to laugh nervously. Then, he tells me I’m crazy, but his voice is in no way jocular-like. We’re back to square one, minus the fencing accoutrement, and now, I have to look into Jules’s eyes and say, “Honey, I’m not paying one damn cent for this ridiculous, overpriced, ill-fated affair. We’re leaving this instant. These people are not welcome into our family.”

________

“Alan?”

“Hiya! We still on for tomorrow?”

“Actually, I—uh—I won’t be there.”

“No problem. Would you like to reschedule, or should we just wait for next week?”

“Alan, I don’t think I’ll be coming back to therapy.”

“Oh.”

“I’m okay for now.”

“We’re all okay from time to time, but therapy is most effective if you stick to it. You’re a prime example of that.”

I remain silent, pacing my living room, wondering if he’s lobbed an insult or paid a compliment.

“So, uh, same time next week?” he says and laughs. “I’m kidding.”

“Okay. Thanks, Alan.”

“Are you certain?”

“Goodbye,” I say.

________

I call George and tell him about quitting Alan, about the laminated fliers, and about my plan to post them in playgrounds. He laughs, but then offers to help.

“Let’s start next Wednesday after work,” I suggest. “Instead of happy hour.”

For a while, we discuss logistics. He offers to bring a hole punch; I volunteer zip ties. We agree to check in with each other in a few days.

Before we end the call, he gets quiet in a way that I don’t expect from him. I assume he’s having second thoughts.

“Something wrong?”

“No. All good,” he says.

“Okay—”

“But if you want, I could pass along my therapist’s contact info.”

I’m touched by George’s concern, but I dread the thought of starting again.

“Sure,” I say.