According to my Bond

When I worked as a lifeguard, I never agreed with friends that it was an “easy job.” If a pink swim cap disappeared in a lane, I would hold my breath until the swimmer stopped holding hers. When a kid waddled fast on the wet edge, I threw myself into an anxiety loop wondering when to intervene with a shriek of the whistle.

That was how I felt now. I could not focus on King Lear at all. The gimpy legs of a little stranger moved up and down next to me and the small body moved back and forth over the ledge of the stone gazebo. Where were her parents?

“You okay?” I asked, suppressing the urge to scoop her up and deposit her safely 3 feet behind me.

“I’m fine!” she called out, falling 10 feet down and landing like it was nothing.

Her sister, maybe 2 years older, shot in, “She’s fine. I know she’s fine because she’s my sister.”

“Oh. Good!” The sister had those amazing summertime holes in her jeans that leave the whole knee protruding.

When the younger girl shot back around and up the stone stairs for another wiggle and drop, she had a slice of pepperoni pizza in one hand. She did have parents somewhere then.

Swinging her head back, with just one hand for leverage on the railing this time, she looked at me upside-down, curiously, and intently.

“Do you know why we’re here?”

“Why?” She had shocking blue eyes.

“Our names are all Shakespeare, all four of us.

“Oh wow. Do you… like Shakespeare?” I never know how to talk to children.

The cryptic answer came, not wholly unrelated, “They want us to understand it.” Amazingly blue, and amazingly curious.

I thought about what was coming after intermission – Lear would go insane, Gloucester’s eye gauged out, and most everyone would die. I’m not sure I would want her to understand it.

But for some reason, as the play went on, I found myself trying to explain. Maybe I thought that some distraction would keep her from wiggling on the edge of that stone cliff. She was head-first over the ledge now, then feet-first again but just above the heads of some newcomers who were staring at me like I was a negligent parent. In their gaze I half believed I was. I felt responsible, involved. And she was watching so calmly and intently that she seemed to patiently welcome an adult explanation.

“What’s happening?” she demanded again, less patient.

I did my best children’s Lear. “The old king split up his kingdom between his daughters. He gave the two that said nice things about him all the land and he was mean to the third one and made her leave because she wouldn’t say really nice things about him. Now the two daughters who got everything are being mean to him.”

“Why are they being mean to him?”

“They are mean girls.”

“How old are the daughters?”

“They are old enough to go to college.”

“I hope the sisters will go and find their other sister and they will all go away together.”

“We will have to wait and see.”

Her big sister was pulling a blue blanket over their feet.

I redirected, “so… you are all named after Shakespeare characters? What are your names?”

She brightened. “I’m Antonia. I’m eight. Juliette is ten, Miranda is five and Lysander is eight. We’re twins. Then we also have a half-sister who is 18. She lives in England with her mom and her new dad.” She said this with the proper degree of casual disgust, probably the way she had overheard her father say it.

“And then Mary, but Mary died” –my heart stopped— “…fives minutes—no, thirty seconds after she was born. She’s five now in heaven.” I breathed out. “So we usually just say we have four kids and then we tell them the story, about how there are really 6.”

“Yeah that makes sense.”

“It’s sad that Mary died.” Antonia commented sagely.

“Yes.”

“But she’s in heaven.” She reassured me.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what Shakespeare play you’re in?” I redirected again.

She paused, squirmed. “Ummm I think Chicago.”

I grinned so hard it was hard to hide it in the dusk light.

“Why do they keep pulling down the curtains?” Indeed, the panels of the stage and the words “future strife may be prevented now” kept disappearing piece by pieces, leaving a skeletal set.

I paused. “I think they want you to feel the way the King feels. Like everything keeps getting taken away from him. But I could be wrong.” That was probably too much. I never know how to talk to children.

“Is that the youngest daughter?”

“No that’s the oldest daughter. She’s kicking her father out of the house.”

“Oh.” (a pause)

“I just feel so sorry for the King” said the benevolent elf with a sigh.

“Yeah. me too.”

She ran away for more pizza from her mysterious supplier and came back accompanied by an even tinier girl in an overlarge T shirt—so large it was like the T shirt was moving by itself. This was Miranda. She pointed at Edgar on the stage and, like a tiny Jacobin, shouted like an accusation, “HE HAS REAL BLOOD!” and ran away again.

“Is it real water?” Antonia followed up. The storm scene had begun.

“I think so!” (phew – something simple).

“Are they trying to get home?”

I paused. How could I possibly explain that they were going insane and having a mock trial of Lear’s absent daughters?

“I think they’re lost in the storm.”

I was relieved when my companions disappeared. There was just no way I could have made the ending kid friendly. I watched people wrapping up blankets, support staff breaking down the stage, actors making little circles with their friends, taking in the peace of the scene, coming back to reality. I caught a last sight of Antonia and Lysander moving through the crowds in the distance like little twin fireflies in blue blankets.

As I was finally stretching to go, I noticed something next to me where Antonia had been. It was small and black and flat – a little moleskin notebook, the kind with a securing strap and thick unruled manilla pages. I opened it. On the hard inside cover, under “this notebook belongs to—” someone had scrawled “the Muse.”

But it seemed like the muse had primarily inspired to owner of the little book to make antipasto. “Fresh mozzarella, olive tapenade, fennel, brie” read a compellingly specific list.

I stuck the notebook in my jacket pocket and made my way to the train. Almost everyone had left the park, and there was no way to find the owner.

My Bluetooth headphones died on the train so, bored, I flipped through more of the pages. It wasn’t as blank as I had hoped and did seem to hold more than lists for antipastos. One page held phone numbers next to French names. There were some notes for what seemed like a novel, with characters and descriptions, under the hopeful heading “NANO RIMO IDEA.” I flipped open to a page where there was a little drawing of an unfortunate horse with a disproportionate body, piebald hide, and colic-stricken looking eyes, and the artist’s signature in large shaky print: ANTONIA. I smiled and kept flipping for more drawings.

Four lottery tickets were pressed flat like leaves into the back cover, so flat I hadn’t noticed them at all. I wondered why a person would buy 4 lottery tickets. Buying 1 was giving fate a chance. Buying 50 was strategic. Buying 4 somehow seemed irrational and sad.

It then also occurred to me that the Shakespeares had bought one for each child. That was less sad. It made sense. I could imagine the children themselves demanding it, wanting to scratch off the sparkling gray lines over the magic numbers, seeing it as a game.

It was exciting, to scratch away the grey matter to see the lifelike code underneath. 7…4…2…0…0…9… I had never done it. I had to google how to find winners.

One of the numbers was a match. I tested it 3 times. I squinted. I used a little piece of paper to block all but one number at a time. I read the chain aloud. I shouted to the empty car.

I felt a flood of regret. I had scratched the tickets absent-mindedly, never imagining one would win anything at all never mind $20K. If I had found money, I would have returned it without question. But wasn’t this different?

A crazed defiance came over me. They were a rich, pretentious family, I decided, had chosen pretentious names for their children, had matching sweater vests, probably paid for fancy Montessori schools where tiny precocious children played small violins and zipped their coats independently at an unthinkably early age. They bought olive tapenades. They summered in Marseilles.

They would never know the difference, and the money would not make a difference to them. It would make a difference to me. I could go to the dentist. I had several cavities and no disposable income, so I had taken to using daily painkillers, eating lukewarm foods, and chewing only on the left side. I dreamed of hard fillings, would even have thrilled at getting the kind that dentists wouldn’t do anymore because they were toxic, the only kind insurers would cover. I held the ticket harder. I felt very strongly half-entitled to it, like a seagull acting like sole proprietor of a stolen sandwich, lashing out.

I thought about what judgmental strangers on the internet would say, then Jesus, then Bernie Sanders, then for some reason Natalie Portman, and finally Kant and Cavell. I got nowhere. And how would I get it to them even if I wanted to? I could contact the Shakespeare Company; there was almost definitely an email list from the shows’ ticket sales. I hated knowing this was true. I bit my lip, a new habit that distracted from the pain of the tooth.

A mousey little girl with a slice of pizza and her sister, the independent ghost of an overlarge T shirt, danced through my mind, yammering to the stars in their beautiful little voices, to the fireflies, to the dusk.

The family was eccentric, but not well off. I suddenly knew that this was true. Rich people didn’t have such disorganized list books. They didn’t let their children run around like fireflies at summer tragedies for entertainment with holes in their pants.

The money was not mine. But that was not important. I did not have a moral belief about the money. That wasn’t it. It was that I was afraid of something in myself, an ugliness, a part of me that was willing to distort things, to change my memory of the Shakespeares who, less than an hour ago, I believed I would have done anything to protect, thrown my body over the stone ledge as a cushion without a thought. The money was not important. And that was where the philosophers went wrong, thinking goodness and badness was about ideas, beliefs. Really, the worst things, the unremarkable moral tragedies all around us, happened because of what normal people allow themselves to distort.

On the blank page opposite Antonia’s drawing of the colicky horse, I wrote “Do not let your right hand know what your left is doing,” mostly a note to myself. I would try. I buried my head into my shoulder in a blissful agnosticism about what would come of trying, feeling the familiar vibration of the outdated train. I felt a rush of power.