A Good Man by Ani Katz

Author:Ani Katz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

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Driving home on the parkway, Ava nodding off beside me, I listened to the end of a story on NPR about growth-attenuation therapy for severely disabled children.

Unable to care for themselves, entirely dependent on their parents, these children would only become more of a burden as their bodies grew and developed. As they aged, it would become harder to hold them, harder to move them. And so these children were given doses of estrogen to close their growth plates, hysterectomies to sterilize them. Their breast buds were removed and their puberty was halted. Their parents would be left with a smaller, more manageable child—a child who would stay a child forever.

She’s going to be a baby for all her life, one mother said, unrepentant. I need to be able to hold her for all of mine.

I’m just trying my best, she added.

Her voice faded into the trills of dueling marimbas, the story subsumed by an interlude of African jazz. Then the news: another stabbing at a train station in Paris, wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, late-season hurricanes pummeling the Gulf Coast, sixty-year sentences for inauguration protestors, the settlement of a lawsuit over cancer-causing weed killer.

I changed the station and was pleased and relieved to find myself wandering the haunting, atonal landscape of Alban Berg’s Lulu with the German soprano Marlis Petersen (a two-decade veteran of the title role, she was rightfully considered the essential Lulu—there would never again be another like her). The star-crossed, despoiled heroine had just escaped from prison; I listened as we climbed through the groves of our neighborhood, the houses growing larger with each gentle bend and hill, sun flashing through the gaps in the yellowing oaks. I glanced over at my daughter and watched for a moment as the shadows from the overhanging trees shifted over her placid face, as Lulu interrupted her lover’s heartfelt serenade to ask if this was the sofa where his father had bled to death at her hand.

It wasn’t until I pulled into our driveway and saw Miriam’s car that I remembered our phones had been off all day.

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