The Boy Who Loved Windows by Patricia Stacey

Author:Patricia Stacey [Stacey, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786742073
Publisher: Da Capo Press

Tyranny of Attention

I HAD SOMETIMES FELT PERPLEXED when I looked in the mirror during those four and a half years before Walker was born. Elizabeth and I were so close, it was as if I half expected to see her face in the glass instead of my own. We had gone everywhere together. I had kept her, a large smiling baby in a sling, by my side. Our togetherness had been sometimes more than even I could handle. After she was born, I was in bliss most of the time; then I might sink into despair, exhaustion. Walker, on the other hand, was obviously her opposite. If Walker drank light, Elizabeth drank color, vibrance; he recoiled from the shine of her. Hunger for intimacy made her desperate with him at times, overbearing, as if she wanted to reach in and pull something right out of him. She was grasping for communion, but he withered in her hands.

Lenore insisted that Walker needed to be more like Elizabeth, more outgoing, more outwardly directed, less inward in his gaze, but she also believed that Elizabeth needed to be more like Walker (though of course, not to the degree of urgency). Elizabeth could benefit from learning to be more inward-moving, more introspective; she could benefit from learning to be comfortable with solitude. Ultimately the issue was a question of temperament. She was the ultimate extrovert, he the ultimate introvert. So it might be good for Elizabeth if I encouraged her to be alone sometimes. Still, the contrast between their disparate needs made it continually difficult to ever find time to do anything valuable for both of them simultaneously.

Loudness, which delighted Elizabeth, scared Walker: her meat, his poison.

My relationship with Elizabeth changed overnight, over months. As I worked with Walker for hours every day, I found myself putting Elizabeth in front of the television more and more. She was often watching three hours a day of TV now that she was in kindergarten. She was passionate about movies, loved musicals: Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music. Disney. Disney. Disney. I introduced her to Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Our Gang, Woody Allen. She would have a great repertoire of movies under her belt, but I felt sad and sickened about it most of the time, the hazy blue-gray flickering light emanating from the living room.

That fall that Walker turned one, Elizabeth developed a particular obsession for a film called Fly Away Home, a fictionalized story of a girl’s heroism as she flies an ultralight plane to lead a motherless flock of geese on a successful migration. The movie begins as a thirteen-year-old girl named Amy loses her mother in a car crash in the rain. Over and over Elizabeth watched the accident; over and over she watched Amy step into the role of mother to save some geese.

So here’s the question I still don’t know the answer to. Was it about her and me? Was it about my absence? Elizabeth now insisted that we call her Amy.

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