Following Ezra by Tom Fields-Meyer

Author:Tom Fields-Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

It’s two years later, a Sunday. Ezra, now eight, is stuck, as he so often seems to be. He has trapped himself in a verbal loop, fixating on his latest Disney obsession, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He is riveted by these seven little men—each with a distinctive face, a fixed set of expressions, each with a name that sums up his personality and disposition. They have everything Ezra is drawn to: categories, predictable personalities, bright colors. He has frequently returned from school recently with a backpack full of drawings he has etched with crayons on lined notebook paper, his own renditions of Sneezy and Happy, Dopey and Doc. The pictures are rough but remarkably detailed, showing Doc’s spectacles, Sleepy’s droopy eyelids and robe.

Now he wants more. Somehow he has convinced himself that he desperately needs to get to the Disney Store in search of some kind of figurine versions of the dwarfs. And he won’t let go.

“We will go to the Disney Store at Westside Pavilion,” he tells me.

“No, Ez.”

“We will. Say yes, Abba. We will go.”

I shake my head, but Ezra is undeterred, repeating his request with increasing urgency. The more firmly I refuse his demand, the more energetic his entreaties become. Yes, we will, yes-we-will, yeswewill. He is stimming on the words. He is also determined, pushing his face into mine, struggling to find any way to convince his father to give in.

“Yes, Abba. We will go to the Disney Store today. You will take me.”

I shake my head, trying to ignore him.

“But we must go.”

I feel both exasperated and fascinated by his persistence.

I hold steady, trying to look stern. We are locked in a standoff. Neither of us is budging. And then I get an idea: Maybe this is the moment I can induce Ezra to express himself in writing. In recent months, he has begun showing interest in the desktop computer we keep in an armoire in the living room. Since he has discovered that he can use Google to search for images, I have watched him sit at the keyboard, using a single index finger to type in the names of one animal after another: pigs, cows, bears, sheep. Mesmerized, he clicks on the mouse and stares at the monitor, surveying screen after screen of photos. But will he type more than the few letters of an animal’s name?

I motion for Ezra to come with me to the computer. I sit on the black desk chair, pulling up a folding chair for Ezra. He sits, but bounces and squirms, a bundle of anxious, uncontainable energy. Without speaking, I type one sentence:

“Ezra will write here what he wants to tell Abba.”

“But you need to take me,” he says aloud, still begging for the Disney Store.

Silently, I point at the words on the monitor. I wait for him to read them, and wonder whether he will slow down and focus for long enough to internalize them, and whether, if he does, there is any chance that Ezra will respond in kind.

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