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The lies started out innocently enough. We were on a train ride, about four hours long, between Budapest and Vienna. Charlie was five, so it took him about a half hour before he got tired of playing with the little snack tray, drinking his water, and eating cookies. We spent another thirty minutes or so playing repetitive games of chess, in which we, each having only one strategy, always ended up with weary kings doggedly chasing each other around a deserted board. Then Charlie occupied himself by tormenting his sister for a while. Poking her and whispering the same word under his breath over and over again is good fun, but even that gets old. Looking out the window at the bucolic landscape, I pointed and whispered, "Did you see that?" Charlie's head swiveled around. "What?" he demanded, peering out the window. "The elf." Charlie's interest was piqued. "What elf?" "We just passed him. I think he was coming out of the forest. He had a basket of mushrooms that he's going to cook for dinner." "Really?" he asked, intrigued. "Of course," I answered with an air of authority. "Hungarian elves love mushrooms." "Where do they live?" "They build little houses out of tall grass." This information met with Charlie's satisfaction. He likes specifics. "Keep looking," I encouraged him. "Maybe you'll see one." Charlie pressed his nose to the train window and studied the green landscape as it rolled by. "I saw one!" he cried out. His eight-year-old sister Kyla, who, up until now, had been politely ignoring our flight of fancy, looked up from her book with disdain. Kyla is a level-headed girl. Although she loves stories, she draws the line at any claim that they are true. She has never been hoodwinked in her life. Before Christmas when she was four, an elderly woman made a friendly overture to her: "What is Santa bringing you?" Kyla beckoned her to lean down, and then whispered in her ear, "Thought you should know: Santa isn't real." When she started losing teeth, she informed me that the tooth fairy wasn't real, that obviously the parents were the ones putting money under the pillows. Her love of money compelled her, nonetheless, to write letters to "the Tooth Fairy," with specific requests ("Please leave the tooth so I can build a castle"), but she allowed us to harbor no illusion that she actually believed in the winged benefactor. I found her pragmatism impressive and adopted the position that I'd never lie to my children. Because they were so smart, see? Secretly I felt that children who fell for the Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy stories just weren't that observant, although of course I'd never say that to the parent of one of those gullible children. I just thought it smugly. My theory was blown out of the water by Charlie, who hungers for fantasy and believes in everything. Santa, the tooth fairy, Scooby Doo, everything. I asked him once if he thought Santa was real and he looked at me incredulously. "Of course Santa is real," he said in the monotone that he uses when talking to someone daft. "Of course he is." It was inevitable that Kyla's pragmatism and Charlie's fantasies were going to have a showdown on that train. "There's no such thing as elves," Kyla informed Charlie. "Elves are real!" Charlie yelled. "Mommy said!" Kyla looked at me with narrowed eyes. "Mommy, are elves real?" It was a colliding of worlds. Both children looked at me expectantly: Charlie with his wide, trusting eyes and Kyla with her cynical gaze. I had never lied in response to a direct question from my kids. Even the questions like "Just how does the sperm get to the egg?" have gotten straight answers from me. I was proud of my honesty. But Charlie made me rethink my philosophy. He was so desperate for a world of fantasy, for something amazing to believe in. Surely his insistence on believing in the fantastic came from something important and legitimate in his soul, just as did Kyla's need for clarity and truth. Two children with two different needs. As always, I had to weigh the two needs. Whose need would be met, and whose would be short-changed? And what about my needs? Maybe I had been ill served by my insistence on staying grounded in the world of reality. How many elves had I missed? I looked at Charlie and said evenly, "Of course elves are real. Of course they are." Kyla harrumphed and went back to her book, looking up only occasionally to roll her eyes. Charlie and I were on a roll, and his dad was joining in now too. As we chugged over the Austrian border, we spun yarns of Hungarian elves—how they played the accordion and danced around campfires at night, how they went on excursions to Budapest and played tag on the Chain Bridge, how they needed tiny passports to visit Austria. We dressed them in blue jackets with brass buttons and shiny boots that clicked and clacked when they danced. We were living in England, traveling through Europe as much as we could while my husband, Stan, worked on a one-year assignment for his company. Being Americans in Europe was a strange thing. We often encountered scenes that could have been fantasy: a dragon festival in a small village in France, complete with a wheeled dragon almost as long as a city block; a Halloween celebration in Scotland that involved burning a wicker ram in a bonfire. Stan and I were always looking at each other in amazement. Did we actually just see that? So it was almost effortless for me to spin the elf tales, half believing them myself. We had seen people drag massive rooster lanterns one night through an English town. Why not elves? Charlie was enraptured by the tales of the tiny elves and looked for them everywhere. When we hiked on the cliffs of Mejean, France, we looked down at the toy-like boats bobbing in the sparkling Mediterranean and told him of the peculiar elves that lived in the caves. "They wear berets," I told him, "and they lull hikers to sleep with songs from their sea shell flutes, then eat their bread and apples." Charlie spun around to face a rustling in a bush behind him. "I think I heard one," he whispered. "Hold onto your apple," I warned him. The more we regaled Charlie with stories of elves (they have underground homes in Ireland, they love to swim off the coast of Spain) the more annoyed Kyla became. Finally she confronted me. "Why are you telling Charlie things that aren't true? Do you want him to think the wrong thing?" I could see how upset she was. It wasn't just about Charlie being misled. Her world view was being shaken. Her parents, whom she counted on for straight talk, were telling lies. To her literal mind, it was just wrong. "Kyla," I said, "this is hard to understand, but right now Charlie needs to believe in elves. When he doesn't need to believe in them anymore, he won't." "Why?" she demanded. "Why does he need to believe in elves when they are not real?" "Charlie is a different person than you are. I think that what he likes about believing in elves is that he can imagine a whole world that we don't see. When he sees grass sway in the wind, he can imagine that tiny people are rushing past it. Everything is more than it appears." I wonder how much of her attitude was of my doing. Did my belief in honesty and straight talk when she was smaller help form her into a person who couldn't conceive of believing in the unseen? Did I turn her into a person who wouldn't be able to believe in miracles or God—even if she wants to? Or did my philosophy actually spring from her analytical personality? I couldn't remember anymore which was the chicken and which was the egg because I had been entrenched in my position of truth and facts for so long. She turned away, and I got the impression that my explanation was lacking. How could a child so rooted in reality understand? But after that conversation, when we told the elf stories to Charlie, Kyla watched us with a steady gaze, one we recognized to mean that she had heard enough and was turning everything over in her head. Charlie's demand for stories was greater than the supply. On another train ride I finally told him, "I don't know any more stories right now. Maybe later." He sulked and whined, unhappy that the well had run dry. I started to get annoyed—until Kyla, who had been drawing on a pad of paper, said, "Charlie, look at this picture." He studied a series of tall rectangles dotted with little stars. "You know what these are?" "What?" Charlie asked. "These are skyscrapers. You know how the lights sometimes flash on and off in skyscrapers? You know what that really is from?" "What?" Charlie's whine was gone. "Spies. There are spies sending messages to each other. And you know who the spies are?" "Who?" asked Charlie breathlessly. Kyla's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Elves." While Charlie stared, spellbound, out the window, I met Kyla's gaze. She had a knowing smile on her face. Then, the glint was gone. When she turned to look out the window, I wondered what she saw.
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