Harmony Read online

  “Idiot” is not quite right—it’s not that you think of yourself as stupid, exactly—but it’s a good enough placeholder. “Bitch” could be satisfying, if it weren’t sunk so deep in cultural muck, buried under alternating layers of misogyny and saucy reclamation. (“You say I’m a bitch like it’s a bad thing!” You’ve seen it in catalogs: you can have it embroidered on pillows. Perfect for Mother’s Day.)

  Were you ever a good person? Some part of you knows that you were, maybe even are. But the bad stuff is so much more prominent. When you were a kid, you never once stuck up for someone who was being teased; instead, you’d watch, relieved, glad that no one was examining you with such focus. You screamed at your parents, too many times to count. You let a longtime friendship lapse, out of awkwardness. You spanked Tilly once, in fury: four hard swats across her bottom.

  So many offenses, and so many car trips. It’s a ritual, your own private sacrament; you’re zealous enough that you’ve become your own church. You take yourself to confession; you whisper your own private gospel: the Idiot’s Prayer. Penance, penance, penance, but that’s where it stops. This is a church that has no use for forgiveness.

  Luckily, it’s time-limited: you’re done the moment you pull up in front of your house, the moment you step out of the car. Go in peace; pause button pressed. Because you know you’re on your way to fill up your mind with something else.

  When you sit down with your computer, you feel both anticipatory pleasure and anticipatory guilt. Your role as a stay-at-home mom has changed in recent years, now that the girls are in school, and it’s less obvious what you’re supposed to spend your days doing. But it almost certainly isn’t this. Come on, though; ease up already. Give yourself a break. We’re done with this, remember? Save it for the car.

  You open your laptop, and there is your city. You’ve built it up from nothing, a stretch of worthless brown dirt, a primitive population still working on their farming skills. Now it contains a city hall, sixteen restaurants, and a sports arena. You’re saving up to build a world-class art museum.

  This is the latest in a series of video games you’ve played over the last several months. Before this, you ran a cartoon diner, selling burgers and milk shakes to customers in a number of different historic settings. If you took too long with their orders, they’d fume and storm out. You sold chili dogs to Napoleon and apple pie to Shakespeare. Cleopatra had a particular fondness for your french fries.

  Now you’re building a city that you call Dizzantium. You grow crops, run factories, design parks, all to keep your tiny inhabitants happy. They’re an adorable but fickle bunch, these masses you command. If your “civic balances” get low, they stalk through the town in gangs, causing riots and defacing your monuments with graffiti. Fights break out in the streets. But if you give them what they want—a new grocery store, a naval victory over a rival city-state—they throw tiny parades in your honor.

  You see what you’re doing, channeling your social and emotional needs into this predictable artificial environment. An hour before Tilly’s third birthday party, Josh found you sitting in the middle of a messy playroom, organizing the furniture in a dollhouse. It may not be terribly fruitful to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying.

  You keep your phone next to you while you play. Because one of the things you’re not thinking about while you’re strategizing battles and civic upkeep is the fact that Tilly is coming very close to being too much for her school to handle.

  Matching up Tilly with a school that works for her has never been an easy task, although it took a while before you really understood that you needed to start worrying. The two years she spent at her second preschool—she’d had to leave the first because of a potty-training deadline that the two of you couldn’t seem to meet—were happy ones, for the most part. She didn’t connect with many of the kids, but she was still young enough that you didn’t think it was necessarily a problem. (The going theory, even among the parents of some of her classmates, was that she was simply too smart to find other three-year-olds interesting.) And the teachers seemed to like her, which made every difference.

  It was already clear, though, that your local public elementary school—a good one, one of the reasons you bought the house you did—wasn’t going to be the best place for her. She was quiet and dreamy, often locked inside her own head. Spinning out elaborate fantasies when you wanted her to listen to directions, pacing the room when you wanted her to sit still. But she could also be alarmingly rigid, tantrums bursting out of nowhere if (for example) you added the cheese powder to the macaroni before you poured the milk, when last time you did it the other way round.

  You and Josh did your research, and you figured out what you could afford, and you applied to a private school whose website said all the right things about nurturing. And you sent your child into a situation she was not the least bit prepared to handle.

  She started in September, and by Thanksgiving, she was in the middle of what might be, without too much exaggeration, called a breakdown. Here is what a breakdown looks like in a five-year-old: She has nightmares. She wets her pants. She kicks and she bites. She does every single thing she’s ever been asked not to do.

  The school tried to help, during the early part of the trouble, before things got too intense. They called you in for conferences with the teachers and the school counselor. They gave you books to read; they suggested, of all things, that you buy her a trampoline.

  The trampoline thing seemed to come out of nowhere, even after the teachers tried to connect the dots for you, with lots of phrases like “sensory input” and “motor planning.” But it didn’t take a lot to convince you. It doesn’t have to be big, they told you. They have these little round ones, three feet in diameter; try a toy store or a sporting goods store. And yes, you told them, of course. Of course, you would buy her a trampoline. Of course, you would drive out to the suburban mall; of course, you would find a place for it in your house and encourage her to jump for ten minutes before school each morning. You remember how hopeful this felt: I will buy this for my little girl. I will do this because I want to help her.

  And maybe it did help, but not enough. You can say that she was expelled, or you can say that she was asked to leave. You can say, if you’re in a particularly bad mood, that those assholes kicked her out. What you can’t say, will never be able to say, is that you couldn’t have prevented it from happening.

  The thing is: she was still so little. You can hardly believe it when you look at pictures now, how little she was. There was so much about her that was big: the force of her tremendous will; the astonishing vastness of her intellect, still emerging; the outsized chaos she brought to your household. But this is all she was: a little girl. God, the picture of her on her first day of school, standing on the porch in her little purple jumper. Will you ever be able to look at that picture without wondering if that was the day you made all the wrong choices?

  You walk through your city, keeping an eye out for tasks that need to be done. A rival army has burned down your armory—bad for morale. Once you finish repairing it, you should have enough points to advance to the next level, which will mean a cache of gold coins and a new set of goals to unlock. You gather materials and begin the painstaking task of reconstruction.

  You remember reading once, in a college psychology class, about a process called “thought-stopping.” It’s a component of mind control, used by cults to gain control over new inductees. You give people a task that occupies their minds fully, and they’ll pay less attention to any nagging questions that might occur to them. Chanting works, and singing, and speaking in tongues. Backbreaking labor is always a popular choice: work until you’re exhausted, then fill up your brain until it’s time to sleep. If you’re chanting with a group for hours every morning, you’re not wondering if this is where you really want to be. If you’re going purposefully blank so that y
ou can speak in tongues, you’re not asking whether you chose this life or it chose you. And the thing is, you’re complicit in it. You’ve agreed to every step.

  After Tilly’s diagnosis, you got in touch with the special-education team of the local public school system and requested an evaluation. Their placement suggestion—an autism classroom inside a mainstream elementary school—has not been ideal. Most of the kids in her class are more severely disabled; some of them are nonverbal. The teachers and aides are overstretched, and none of the kids seem to be getting what they need. The environment is chaotic and not particularly stimulating, and Tilly’s behavior is becoming more and more out of control.

  You have the feeling, lately, that your days are made of tempered glass, the kind they use in making car windows. Safety glass, as you learned in college on a drunken December evening when one of Josh’s friends held a cigarette lighter to the frosty back window of his Toyota Camry, is not actually shatterproof. It’s “safe” because when it does break, it crazes itself into a thousand small, dull pieces. The glass is designed so that when it suffers an injury it can’t withstand—a massive impact, most often, though it can also be something as random and momentary as an impulse in the head of a nineteen-year-old boy who’s going to have a hard time explaining this to his parents—it breaks in such a way that no single piece can hurt you. You’ll end up with glass in your hair and on the seats; you’ll find it months later in the pockets of the coat you were wearing that evening. The pieces are harmless: blunt little jigsaw fragments, not a sharp edge in sight. But inarguably broken beyond repair.

  When you wake up in the morning lately, you have a sense that the day ahead of you is shaky, but still solid. You know what you need to do: get the girls up, pack lunches, get everyone dressed and fed and into the car. Drive them to their separate schools. Every morning, you give Tilly a kiss, and you have a little talk about what’s going to be expected of her, and how she might act to meet those expectations. And then you go home and wait for the phone call, hoping that today might prove to be made of sturdier stuff than yesterday was.

  You play your video games and control what you can. Build your society, a tidy little microcosm. Keep your residents well fed, keep their landmarks clean. Plant your crops and wait for time to pass.

  You’re trying to make things better for Tilly: you’ve had multiple conferences with her teacher, and you have a call in to the district special-education office, but it’s been hard to connect with a real person. Now the situation is coming to a head, and you don’t know what you can do to fix it. And you have no idea at all what’s going to come next.

  Right before the phone rings, a little box pops up on your screen. Congratulations: your citizens have acquired the ability to manufacture rubber. Welcome to the modern world.

  chapter 10

  Iris

  June 5, 2012: New Hampshire

  The next morning, Scott gives us a talk after breakfast. We’re sitting in the dining hall, with our empty plates still in front of us. The grown-ups have moved the picnic tables around, so they’re set up like three sides of a square. Scott’s at the top table, right in the middle.

  “So,” he says. “Listen up.” He stops to take a sip of his coffee, while we all scrape our chairs so we’re facing him. He waits for it to get quiet, then he puts his cup down and sits up a little straighter.

  “Okay,” he says. “We’ve got five more days until our first batch of Guest Campers arrives, and we’ve got a lot to do in that time. It’s not all going to be fun, and it’s not all going to be easy, but we’re in it together, and that counts for something. You, me, all of us . . .” He makes a circular motion with his finger. “The thirteen people in this room, we’re the Core Family of Camp Harmony. The CF, that’s us. And not one of us ended up here by accident. I chose you guys because I saw something special in each of you. And you were the people I wanted by my side on this journey.”

  I look down at my plate. It’s always kind of embarrassing when grown-ups get all sincere and touchy-feely.

  “So,” Scott says, after a pause. “Let’s get started. What we’re trying to do here, we’re basically trying to build our own little city. We’ve already got the houses, and the paths that lead from one place to another. What else do you think our city might need?”

  “Cars,” says Ryan. He’s wearing a shirt with The Simpsons’ Duff Beer logo on it.

  “Yeah, okay, good,” says Scott. “But we’ve already got cars, and it’s not going to be that big a city.”

  “A castle,” says Charlotte. Still wearing the tutu from yesterday.

  Scott nods and pretends like he’s considering it. “Interesting,” he says. “Good idea.” And then he looks straight at me and gives a tiny nod. “Anyone else?”

  He’s smiling a little, like there’s a joke that nobody else is in on, like we both know these are stupid answers and he knows that I have it in me to say something smart. “Food,” I call out. “Like a grocery store, or you know, not a store exactly . . .”

  “Bingo!” he says, pointing at me. “We’ve got to be able to eat, right? Most important thing.” My mom turns and smiles at me, and some of the other grown-ups are looking my way, too. “So if we want to be our own city and not always relying on other cities for our food, what are some things we can do?”

  I wait, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is going to answer, so I speak up again. “Plant a garden,” I say.

  “Absolutely,” says Scott. “First order of business, plant a garden.”

  He stands up and goes to get an old art easel that’s folded up in the corner. He sets it up where everyone can see it and puts a big pad of paper on it. “Candy,” he says. “Come on up and be our note-taker.”

  Candy walks up to the front of the room, and Scott hands her a thick black marker. Candy runs her hands across the top and side of the pad of paper, with a big flourish, like she’s one of those girls on The Price Is Right.

  “Garden,” Scott tells her. “Write that at the top. And underneath, we’ll list the smaller tasks we need to do to get our garden going.”

  “Hey,” Tilly says suddenly. “I know.”

  Everyone turns to look at her, and I get that nervous feeling in my stomach, because this isn’t group-conversation time, and anyway, who knows what she’s going to say? I doubt she has any helpful gardening tips. She might start talking about statues or make a joke about how Scott’s name rhymes with “snot” or something.

  “Yes, Tilly?” Scott says. He looks kind of amused, not all annoyed that she interrupted him in the middle of his speech. And down the table, my mom and dad seem totally fine. They’re not like sitting up extra-straight, getting ready to grab her arm if she says something embarrassing. And I realize: it’s okay for Tilly to be Tilly here. No one’s going to care; no one’s going to think we’re weird for having her in our family.

  “We can call it Beantown,” Tilly says. “Our little city. Either that or Scottsdale.”

  Some of the grown-ups laugh, but it’s not mean or anything. My mom’s even smiling at her.

  “I like the way you think, Tilly,” says Scott. “Always looking at the big picture. But the problem with those names is that they’re all about me, and that’s not really right, I don’t think. What do you guys think about calling it Harmony?”

  “Harmony, New Hampshire,” Tilly says. I can tell she likes it, because she gets up out of her chair and does this thing she does when she’s excited where she taps all of her fingers on her cheeks, in order (pinky to pointer), a couple of times really fast. “That can be our address. Camp Harmony, Harmony, New Hampshire.”

  Even I know it’s not as simple as that; you can’t just decide to call yourself a town and expect it to be all official, like with the post office or whatever. But as Scott moves the conversation back to gardening, I reach over and put my arm around her and give her a hug from the side. She’s my
sister, and she drives me crazy, but I love her more than anything. And sometimes—not always but sometimes—I like the way she thinks, too.

  • • •

  We spend most of the morning brainstorming our “city-building tasks” (which is a phrase that Tilly came up with, in case you couldn’t tell). There are four main categories of things we have to do to get everything up and running:

  – Food cultivation (which includes gardening, and a whole bunch of other related stuff, like composting and collecting rainwater for irrigation);

  – Animal keeping (we’re getting a chicken and we’re going to hatch baby chicks! And we might eventually get bees for honey, but I don’t want anything to do with that);

  – Daily maintenance (boring stuff like cooking and cleaning, laundry, shopping for anything we can’t make ourselves);

  – And “camp growing,” which is a bunch of random but sort of fun things, like building a play structure and making a new sign that says “Camp Harmony,” so we can finally take down the “Kozy Kabins” one.

  I’m kind of hoping that I can help with that one, maybe even come up with the design. I’m really good at art, and I don’t think I’m bragging by saying it, just “identifying my strengths,” as Scott says. But that’s the last thing on the list. The first project I’m working on is setting up an irrigation system for the garden. I’m on a team with Scott and Ryan, and right after lunch, Scott takes us over to the planting area, which is a big flat rectangle of land by the edge of the woods. I thought we were going to have to start totally from scratch, which I was kind of excited about, because I already know how to do that a little bit. At my school in DC, there was a garden in one corner of the playground, and all the classes helped out with it. But this already looks like an actual garden: the dirt’s all in rows, with green leaves starting to poke up here and there, and in some places there are poles stuck in the ground (for beans, I bet) and little signs saying what’s planted where.