Eleven Grandfathers

One day after work, when it’s far too late to go to Carroll Park, I let Leila convince me to take her there “for just a little while.”  For a girl growing up in a one-bedroom apartment, the park is her backyard and a day rarely goes by that we don’t spend an hour there playing behind the ledge all kids seem to recognize as a storefront; or scaling the trunk of a four-foot thick oak that was downed by a storm and repurposed as a kid-sized mountain. Just like any other part of New York City, this park has its rush hours and lulls, but it’s always reliably filled with the children of the Brooklyn Baby Boom and their caretakers. We see several representatives of the French contingency who flocked here with the opening of a French immersion language program at the local elementary school; cross the line of Jamaican nannies collectively watching one another’s charges; ignore the grey-suited fathers yelling at their sons that this is their last five minutes on the swings; and pretend it isn’t time for our own dinner.

            When Leila was three, I spent most of my evenings and weekends climbing the jungle gym with her or squeaking down the slides inappropriately dressed in a skirt and bare legs; but since then, she’s graduated from the baby side of the park to the big kid side and I’ve finished reading Bringing Up Bebe—that blockbuster memoir by an American mother raising her children in France the French way: breakfast at eight, lunch at noon, snack at four, dinner at eight. Nothing in between, no whining, no fighting—every one of them perfectly bred and able to bake a yogurt cake on a Sunday morning and wait till snack time to eat it. Yeah, right. The few mothers I know who read it said they’d given it a try and then laughed their socks off, but I was still determined to make a few of the ideas work, in particular the laissez faire park attitude the author claimed fosters independence in the kids and allows the grownups to recapture something of their old social lives. After all, wasn’t it time to stop getting dizzy on the swings? But at the end of a long working day (and I work full-time) I never feel like chatting up a stranger, so I sit down on a bench and open the only reading material that’s at hand (Leila’s book about dogs), looking up every once in a while to make sure I still know where she is.

            Eventually, having introduced herself to a group of little girls who were chasing and hugging one another, Leila comes over with one of them.

            “I have a dog just like that,” says the little girl, pointing to the back-cover picture of the author with her Lab. The girl is wearing a strapless dress patterned with the colonial flag and, although it’s getting colder, keeps her sweater slung around her shoulders like a second flag.  Still on my French kick, I swallow my questions for Leila (“Aren’t you cold? Don’t you want to go home now?”)  because I know that her blood runs warm and of course, she never wants to leave the park. In between rounds of hide and seek, they stop by to chat. The girl’s name is Jacquelyn (Jackie for short), and I wince to hear Leila talk in that way she now has of speaking over people when she feels she has an important fact to convey, like her age or the name of her school.

            About the school, Jaquelyn says, “Oh I go there, too.”  I ask what grade, and then she says, “Oh I go to another school now but I had the same teacher.”

            She tells us her family moved to the States recently, and would be going back to England in five years.

            “I have a cousin named Tom who’s a year younger than me,” Leila says, apropos of nothing.

            “My brother’s name is Tom,” says Jacquelyn, “and I have 11 grandfathers.”

I laugh. How wonderful to have such an imagination! Encouraged by my attention, she continues, “My grandfather died in the war. He was shot and put on a cross.”

            Leila picks up on the escalation and announces, “Well, I had a great great great grandfather who died because he was old.”

            But the girl is not to be underdone.  “My grandfather,” she says, “was God.”

            At this I laugh again, amused by this bombastic game, and she goes on to say, “and my mother was the first person ever alive.” 

The girls go off again and I sit on my bench watching kids wiz by, thinking someday I will be sad not to spend half my life in this park. The child’s play, the birds, the light, the trees, even the pregnant women—I’ll miss them all. The park is getting darker then, and I get up because I can’t see Leila directly. They’d first been on the twisty slide, then the bouncy bridge. As I stand, the girl’s father comes over from the (really huge) distance from which he’s been watching her.

            “I saw my daughter talking to you,” he says with what sounds like an accusation, softened only by the Irish lilt.

            “Yes.  What a wonderful imagination she has!”
            “I guess you could call it that,” he says, and I figure, Black Irish dissatisfaction.  A strain of it runs in me. I’m  still standing there talking to him, looking for Leila to tell her it’s time to go home for dinner when she comes running, crying “Someone scratched and kicked me!”

            Great, I think.  We should have stayed home.  And then it gets worse.  The parents of one of Leila’s former classmates appear with their daughter, who is crying hysterically, and they tell me another adult witnessed Leila kicking and scratching their daughter.

“Your daughter should apologize,” they demand.

Indignant, Leila says, “I didn’t!! I didn’t do anything.”

Knowing she’s hit me, but never anyone outside the family, I bend down to ask the crying girl what happened.

            “She did it,” she sobs, pointing to Jackie.

            That’s when the father gets this look of dejá vu.

            “Tell us what you were feeling, luv?” he says in the voice of a weary psychotherapist.

The situation straightened out, I take Leila and get the hell out of there, not even waiting for an apology for the misidentification. On the way home she tells me Evie asked her to fight with her against the other girl (over what she has no idea) and that when Leila refused, Jackie just went over and tried to choke the other girl. The next day when I bring up the situation and point out the girl’s instability, saying “You know what she did wasn’t normal….” she only seems to remember that she’d found a friend to play with. There is no trauma for her, though I still shake at the whole thing and berate myself for not recognizing the danger in that child and her father (in my head) for knowingly unleashing her in what was clearly a volatile environment for her. Something remains of the incident in Leila’s brain though, because we’ve seen Evie once or twice since then, her apple cheeks blooming pink, and Leila doesn’t object when I say to her, “Let’s go play somewhere else for a while.

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