It’s bedtime in Amityville. We’ve been so completely lulled by our own placid rituals—a hypnotic “you are getting sleee-peee” piano CD, the children zipped into pajamas like cotton sausages, our collective recitation of the known-by-heart Toby What Are You? —that the horror takes us by surprise. First it’s the oscillating fan. In the half-light of evening, Ben, who is six, squints at it from his bed. “The fan looks kind of like a face,” he says. I look at its round, blurred shape and hum a vague assent—“Mmmhh”—but I’m the only person here who’s half asleep; the children are both sitting up in bed now, wide-eyed as owls.
“The fan is making a loud-loud sound,” three-year-old Birdy adds, as if we might be collectively cataloguing the fan’s attributes. “A loud-loud noise,” she clarifies, and it’s true: This fan is older than I am, dusty and belligerent, its blades clacking around in wavery circles.
“And it kind of looks like it’s looking at me,” Ben says now, worry hiking up the pitch of his voice. “Mama, will you please turn it, so that I can’t see its face?”
Of course. Only something happens—the oscillator knob gets depressed somehow while I’m moving it—and the fan suddenly twists around, its old head roaring. Birdy screams and both kids dive under the covers.
Later, the fan is safely unplugged, and the children rush over to examine it with all the after-the-fact bravado of tourists poking a dead shark on the beach. The evening seems safe again, soporific even, now that the sky is fully dark and the frogs trill a little something from the pond, a croaky song about mosquitoes and the moon. But on the return to bed, fear shows up again, like a sudden knock on the door: Ben catches sight of his own distorted reflection in the window and startles. “Yikes,” he says. “I know it’s just me, but yikes.”
“You’re really having that kind of night,” I laugh and pull the heavy curtains closed, but when I go to arrange the sheet over him, Ben’s heart vibrates under my hand. When our cat was still alive, this same thing used to happen to him at the same time every night, and we called it “the eleven o’clock spookies”—when one thing spooks you (a moth at the screen) and then another (the wind rattling the oak leaves), and before you know it, you’re tearing around the house, your claws scrabbling on the hardwood floors and your own tail in hot pursuit.
I used to get it too, as a child: our apartment was shaped like an L, and, according to my carefully calculated assessment, there was the safe arm—the one that culminated in my parents’ bedroom—and the unsafe one that housed the horror of horrors, also known as the front door. I used to sprint dreadfully through the front of the house and then catch my relieved breath once I’d passed the bend. Phew! Of course there were other horrors to consider afterwards: a limb hanging over the side of the bed, for instance (the goblin equivalent of a worm on a hook) or the way my own pounding heartbeat sounded, to my ear on the pillow, precisely like marching armies of angry green spacemen. And, once in bed, did you turn your back to the bedroom door, which they could simply open and saunter through? Or to the crack between bed and wall, through which their miniature, devious ranks could slip? Believe me, I understand fear.
Maybe this is one reason we struggle with our children’s fears: We actually understand them all too well. When the kids are afraid, our own weaknesses as parents feel embarrassingly visible, as if all our neuroses have been grafted successfully onto the rootstock of our children. At any given carnival midway, I watch parents badger their trembling children, as though toughing out the Scrambler might be the key to human development and future success—a key that’s in danger of being lost forever by a reluctant kid who just wants to ride the Baby Belugas again. People worry that their kids will appear weak or overly coddled; they want their kids to be “brave”—even though bravery might properly refer to the righteous overcoming of obstacles rather than the simple tamping down of county-fair anxiety. I know how they feel because at a summer birthday party, eight kids ran screaming through the sprinklers of a miniature water park while Ben wrapped himself in a dry beach towel and shook his head firmly—“no thanks”—and I encouraged him in nagging whispers. “Don’t get too attached,” I want to say now—to the midway parents, to my own water-park self, to Ben. “These fears will come and go.”
Because it’s true—they will. For most kids, fear is a shape-shifter. One year Ben and I spin on the Tilt-a-Whirl together and I scream and scream, centrifuged flat like a screaming paper version of myself pasted onto the back of the ride, while Ben smiles, as placid as a Cheshire cat. But even though his one-year-old sister will, Ben won’t ride the gentle carousel: the joyless equine faces scare him. The next year Ben will happily ride the carousel with his sister, and when a giant stuffed bear tries to embrace them, it’s Birdy who bursts into tears. One year Ben says yes to the braining whiplash of the Rock-n-Roller Coaster and no to the Haunted House; the next year it’s the opposite. Birdy thrills to the flying elephants but dreads the spinning strawberries. Both of them will fly happily down the bumping Mountain Slide that gives me such coccyx-cracking vertigo I can barely watch.
It’s not linear, kid fear, and its windy path can be mystifying. In his six years of life, Ben has been terrified, at different moments, of each of the following things: objects floating in containers of water; lions; toilets that flush automatically; the blender; drains; bubble baths; death; crabs; dinosaurs; falling coconuts; school; dogs; Strep throat cultures; the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up; crocodiles; elevators; Shrek; missing a plane or ferry; snowplows; and snakes. There are some common themes—water, scary animals, loud sounds—and most of these fears fall well within the arc of reason. And some of them are even ones I share, in particular snakes. You know, and death.
Is Ben picking up on my fear? I wonder. Lately the news has been apocalyptic. I open the paper, and mudslides are burying towns, tidal waves are crashing over cities as if we’re living in a sensational futuristic movie. We know too many young people with cancer. A family of four, friends of friends, has been murdered in their own basement for no apparent reason. People just like us. And one day, paused at a traffic light in the center of town we see the inexplicable sight of a gigantic snake, thick as Ben's leg, dead in the road in rubbery loops, its last meal a visible mess of blood and fur. It’s so terrifying to me that it feels deeply symbolic—only I’m not certain what of.
“Where did that come from?” Ben asks, thrilled and panicky, and I have to say, “I’m not entirely sure.” Other times he phrases the question more directly: “Are we safe?” And I say, “Absolutely,” and hope it’s the truth.
Now, on this fright night, Ben has to pee one last time, and he talks Birdy into accompanying him. His latest fear is that a snake will slink out of the toilet bowl to greet his naked bottom—even though he knows that this is irrational. “Really," he reassures himself, "it would be drowned, and so the worst thing that could happen—and this wouldn’t even happen—is that you’d flush up a dead snake. Which would be very surprising, although not exactly dangerous. But still.” I know that “But still”; I spend a good portion of my life there: Sometimes fear can be impenetrably shrink-wrapped inside its own logic—well-protected from reason and reassurance.
But Birdy is Ben’s perfect, fearless companion. “Benny’s scared of the toilet snakes,” she says gently as she toddles away beside him. “So I keep him company.”
And Ben says simply and, in the best sense, shamelessly, “Thank you, Birdy.” How beautiful they are in their openness, these kids. And in this moment I wish not only for safe futures but for what they have now: fearlessness about fear itself.
Ben and Birdy are much older than they were when I first started working on this piece—they’re twelve and eight now—and we’re all so different from how we were. The kids are so fearless relative to their younger selves, staring down the fan, or draining the tub without running from the room in a fright. And I am too. There’s this Kay Ryan poem I love so much, a poem called “The Niagara River.” In it, she writes about how you act like the river is a floor, you position your table on it and sit down as the scenery changes like so many paintings getting replaced on your walls. “We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River,” the poem ends, “but it is hard to remember what that means.” I do remember what that means, I do. But I think that I used to feel like we were all just rushing headlong and barrel-less toward the falls. And now it occurs to me to sit a while and enjoy the view.
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