Parents start preparing their children for middle school early now. Even before they are old enough to read, there are tutors, educational videos, flashcards. The flashcards have diagrams or letters or pictures, or sometimes all of these things, depending on the target age.
The flashcards for the youngest children start with the basics. O is for Oxygen. But how do you explain something so invisible, necessary, fragile? To help, many of the flashcard sets come with sample scripts for parents who are too old to have gone to middle school and learn the things that middle school children do now.
For oxygen, the script suggests: Oxygen is even better when it comes in pairs. Here is a picture of a tree exhaling. A tree, yes, that’s what that is—you may not have seen one before. They used to be everywhere.
For carbon: Here it is, the letter C. It is pencil scrawl and diamond and star spew. Look, there are its four welcoming arms.
Now this one, the parents might say. This one has both carbon and oxygen. See? Carbon dioxide. You are right, the carbon’s two pairs of arms are reaching out on either side. It comes between the oxygens and they can no longer be dance partners. You are right, the carbon looks kind of like half a spider. No, my love, we don’t smash spiders. But we would smash this carbon dioxide if we could. We want it to become something else. That’s what trees did, they got the pair of oxygens away from carbon and put them back together again. Now, instead of trees, we have middle school.
People gave me flashcards soon after my first daughter was born, and neighbors pressed them into my full hands when I was pregnant with my second. I never showed my daughters the flashcards. I felt foolish talking about something I didn’t really understand, ashamed that I didn’t understand it. Instead, we played capture-the-flag in the winter when the air was clearer, my girls’ wild feet running over the bare dirt. Sometimes in the summer, too, if we woke early before the smoke had settled too close to the ground. If we were lucky, there would be a breeze, and the air would feel like the past, like pleasure.
Even without the flashcards, my girls were enough: now they, too, wear the green uniforms and the neighbors’ faces are photovoltaic with pride as we walk by on the way to the schools. None of us have seen the inside of the school, but we can imagine it: these brilliant minds bent over laboratory benches, finding new ways to capture carbon. We have visions of equations, protective goggles, Nobel Prizes. My girls’ uniforms have badges with a pair of oxygens, holding hands. Twin molecules.
My girls are not twins. I have two girls, because they say two is the right number. Somehow there are not supposed to be more people, because more people make more carbon dioxide, but they also say we need enough people so that we can all take care of each other. They say the math works out.
My older girl is Nest. A name with utility. A name of something once found in a tree. We must be useful now, thoughtful, hopeful, selfless. All the things we were not during my own childhood, which at the time seemed simple but now people think of as reckless and ignorant.
When I was pregnant with Nest, I read all about pregnancy and birth and babies so that I would be ready. They say the act of making flashcards is what helps you remember things, so I wrote out by hand each concept I didn’t know. Gravidity, BPAs, Cluster Feeding, SIDS. I followed the waterfall method, placing the flashcards that I knew in one stack, and working with smaller and smaller stacks of unfamiliar words until I could remember them all.
When Nest was born, her eyes were so wise it was as if she held me, as if I were the egg. I didn’t need to look at my flashcards anymore, with my reflection now nestled within her pupils.
The year she was born was when they started talking about the capturing in earnest, how it would solve everything, how the children would lead us. As Nest got older, she and I built card houses out of all of the flashcards, leaning Sulfur Dioxide up against Multiparous. Sometimes Nest’s father helped. He is a big man who does what he is told.
Maybe, when I wasn’t looking, he showed her the flashcards as we were all instructed. Maybe that is how she got into middle school. They only take the best of the children, and she did not get the best from me. As a child, I was always looking out the window at the sky, not knowing that I should remember how blue it was.
My younger girl is Pearl. A pearl is something captured inside an oyster. Made after years of wearing down and wearing away. Birth is sometimes called confinement, but it could be called containment, captivity. You are forced inside yourself to bring something new out, and you are never really free again. I didn’t want to be free, not from my daughters.
Now, as we walk to school in the smoke-light, Pearl’s skin looks orange and iridescent. Looking at her, at both of them, I am an empty oyster. Proud, but lonely, too. We walk together, one of them on each side. If I had four arms to hold them, I would. Instead, I drop them off at the gate, and they go in to do the good work, capturing the carbon, and I go home and stay inside until it is time to pick them up.
At home I have trouble keeping the curtains closed, even though it keeps our house cooler and blocks out the strange skies. Through the windows, I can see the stumps that my friends and I once used as bases for our games, the place where we would draw a line in the dirt to separate the sides. There had been many children in the neighborhood then. If enough of us got captured by the other team, we would link arms to make a chain leading out from the jail—an old patch of deer brush—so that someone from our team could rescue us. Sometimes, we all forgot about the flag because it was so much fun to run and tag and get free.
Now there are so many things we can’t forget. There are no more outside games. Those of us who are not doing the capturing must keep ourselves inside, away from the bad air. If we get sick we will make more work for everyone.
At the end of the day, I layer myself in protective clothes and face scarves, grays and yellows and browns, and walk back to school. The girls come out glassy-eyed and quiet. It is a long day at school, but they say it is necessary for them to learn everything they must do.
When they first started, the girls would come home ravenous. They craved tri-tip and mashed potatoes with pools of gravy. The school sent messages home to the parents: we were to ignore their hunger—they were being fed a balanced diet in class to support their learning. There’s an adjustment period, the parents would say to each other at the gate. Don’t you remember middle school? I’d never go back.
I tried to do what they said. But late at night, when the girls would wake half-dreaming, sometimes I would make them spaghetti with butter and cheese. They slept more soundly, looked more like themselves, like children, instead of undersized adults with faces shut like all the doors.
Now the parents don’t talk at the gates any more. Our own adjustment period has passed. When my girls were little, their toes were so strong that they could cling to my hair with their feet and hang upside down like bats. We would walk like that as the sun rose, their warm bodies wind-chiming gently against my back. Now I want to be the bat, swooping them up under my leathery wings.
The parents have been told not to ask them too much about their day; it may be some time before they can explain what they are doing in a way an older, guiltier generation can understand. Instead we walk home, like bats only in that we are silent, silent but for a few small clicks of our tongues.
In the mornings I try to watch through the gates. I look for flags. I look for children running, but the air is too thick with the elements I can’t remember, and I am too ashamed about my own childhood. How happy it was, how little I thought about the future.
Instead, I ask one of the recommended questions. “Do you love it?”
“Yes,” they say. “We love it.”
I start asking them every day.
Before they were born, I took in ironing and mending. There has been less and less work over the years, because now we are to focus on the world around us, not the small details of the inside of our homes. Still, I iron while they are gone. I iron napkins and pillowcases. I iron bedsheets and towels. I take the curtains down, one at a time, and iron them, too, even though the closed windows will never let in a breeze to blow and wrinkle the fabric.
I capture the water from the laundry and use it in the toilet. I capture the water from the shower and use it in the sink. I recycle the air, I reuse the bottles, I make dinner out of leftovers, and then make breakfast out of dinner. My house is a container, everything trapped inside. I imagine the girls at school, learning how to do the same thing, to capture, and I feel calmer.
❦
One day, on the way home from school, Pearl burps. It is long and loud and exuberant and I remember that she hasn’t been any of those things in weeks. “Oh, Pearl,” I say, trying not to smile. “Is some boy in your class teaching you how to burp the alphabet?”
The girls look at each other. “There are no boys,” Nest says.
“Boys are not allowed to do what we do,” Pearl says.
“What do the boys do?” I ask. They look at each other again and say nothing. For a moment, I feel relieved for the girls. They will not have to become oysters. They will not one day be emptied of their great treasure; it will always be their own. Yet after they go to bed and my husband is reading the news again, even though it only makes him sad, I make a list called “All the boys I’ve loved but not like that.”
At first, I write names, but then this seems embarrassing, and I just put initials. In case my husband finds us. By us, I mean me and my list, because he will not be jealous of the boys, but he will be jealous of the list. Because I am so good at capturing these things and writing them down, while he can only go to work and come home again and read the news and feel sad. No wonder the boys are not doing the good work my daughters do.
Late at night, they come downstairs in their nightgowns and ask for spaghetti. “They dissemble things,” Pearl says, her mouth full and sleepy. “The boys.”
“Disassemble,” Nest says. “They unmake things. All the things that were made and not needed, they unmake so that they can become something else.” I imagine cardboard boxes and exercise bikes and archaic computers.
When the girls go back to bed, I pull back the ironed curtains and look out the window at the empty yard and I make a list of the boys we used to play with. Stephen and Greg and Sean and Darius and Tom. And the girls. Hannah and Emily and Alinya and Cassie and Megan and Siobhan. We played and there seemed to be no differences between them, the boys and the girls, only that we all wanted to run and hide and escape and shout and win. I know we are all doing what we are supposed to be doing now, that this is a new world that we must capture and unmake, that there are no winners but only survivors. But there is also no one left to play capture-the-flag with.
❦
Weeks pass, and then one night moonlight finds its way through the heavy curtains. When I open them, the sky is bright and clear. I could almost imagine it blue, but vast and black is close enough. I wake the girls and bribe them with macaroni and the last of the bacon. Then we go outside. I take an ironed pillowcase and snip it in half with my shears. My husband comes out yawning, and when I give him macaroni he seems less sad. Even though there are only four of us, we make teams. Pearl picks my husband, and Nest and I take our flag and hide it in the rain barrel, which has been empty for the last four winters.
Nest guards the flag while I crawl along the ground to the other side, covering myself in moonlit dust. My husband, who was a boy once, is dozing next to the stump. I slip the flag out from where it dangles from his pocket. I run and run and run with it and no one notices me until it is too late. I love capturing so much that I take the flag back again and tuck it under my husband. Pearl sees me this time and she chases me and then Nest chases her and we laugh so loudly that it is almost as if there are boys here, and girls, too, and other people who used to be children.
My daughters’ faces change in the moonlight: they look fragile, luminous, brave. They look like the children they should be. As I tuck them back in bed, their lips shiny with grease and youth, I see their school uniforms hanging on the back of the door. The badges look at me like twin eyes. I glare back. I don’t care how proud the neighbors are. For my girls there should be only clear skies and running and trees, if they will ever come back again. I should be the one who does the work, who looks tired and a week older with every day that passes.
I slide the uniforms from their hangers. Through the night, I rip open seams and sew them back together. I iron, I iron. I am iron. A flashcard with Iron would have a picture of a blood cell. It would have a picture of me.
The girls are so plump with sleep that they do not notice me at first over their small bowls of cereal. Then Nest gasps. “Mom. What were you thinking?”
“This is the work I should be doing,” I say. “It is my work to do, not yours.” None of us recognize this voice of mine. When they laugh, I say it louder. When they stop laughing, I shout so that they can hear me over the whirring air filter. The uniform’s stiff fabric feels like a shell. At least it is mine.
Finally, Nest stands up from the table and takes from my hand the spatula that I don’t know I’m holding.
“It’s not your work,” Nest says. “Not any more. You did what you could.”
“But I didn’t. None of us did.”
“You’re right,” Pearl says. My Pearl. Nest looks at her sister; there is the smallest of head shakes. “No, Mom,” she says. “You can’t. Besides, you hate wearing green.” This is true. It reminds me too much of the world as it once was.
I sit down on the chair where Nest has been sitting. It is still warm. “I’m so good at capturing.”
“Not this kind,” Nest says. She sighs. Pearl scoots her chair over until it’s right in front of me. She reaches out and holds my face in her cupped palms.
“You must have worked all night,” my husband says, looking up from his paper. “You rest. I’ll walk the girls.” They find green clothes—t-shirts, sweatpants, Nest wears her father’s too-large bathrobe. They are off to do the work, the work I didn’t do, gathering up all the pieces of the world I didn’t manage to hold onto before they were gone.
Inside, I am more restless than usual. I iron the newspaper and the rug and even my own hair. At noon, I am still wearing my patchworked green uniform, the lapels pressed to a cutting sharpness. I still have the sunburst feeling of the flag in my hand, and I let this carry me outside, into the world, and down the streets to my daughters’ school.
In the school office, the two secretaries greet me with cheerful burbling. “You are the mother!” the pair of them say to me. “The mother! Oh, your daughters! Oh!” They look like a two-yolked egg, their teeth slightly yellow against their green scarves. I lick my own teeth, which feel as pointy as my lapels.
“They are so good at their work—so good. They are capturing like crazy.”
“Like crazy?” I say.
“Better than crazy,” the taller one says. Her hair looks as if it could capture its own planet’s worth of carbon. Dense and wiry, so blonde it is almost green. The other woman’s hair is a dark red-brown. Chestnut—a word my daughters only know as a color of hair. I will have to make a flashcard. I will have to make flashcards for Puffy White Clouds and Beach Umbrellas and Airplanes. I will write the script: People once took these to other places just to see somewhere new. Just to See the World!
“Oh yes,” says the blonde one. “Their work is better than a hundred thousand planted redwood seedlings, better than dissembling a thousand cars—”
“Disassembling,” the tree-haired one says. The two of them stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of a large door, and their shoulders look as impenetrable as shopping malls.
“Better than a cow the size of the moon!” The blonde one claps her hands.
“Cows work the other way,” the other secretary, the other door-guard, says. “They fart out gas.”
“They fart!” We all giggle, distracted by cows.
“Like a peat bog the size of the moon?” I ask. There was a boy on my first list named Peat, spelled like the bog. His eyes were brown. He died, like so many of those boys did, before they could dissemble the bad air. So many things have gone wrong.
“Yes,” the women agree. “Yes. They are so very good at capturing.”
I am, too. While they have been talking I captured the keys that they left swinging brightly on a hook by their desk. I take the keys and push through their shoulders and quickly unlock the doors.
“Stop, stop!” they both say. Their voices are as hopeful as words written on flashcards. I do not stop.
The doors open onto a hall, which turns into a larger hall. On the far side is an archway filled with light. I run through it and come out into a giant stadium, open to the sky. In the center of it are two enormous diving boards painted, by someone who has never seen a tree, to look like trees. There are browns and greens and yellows, but the colors are all in the wrong places.
On top of these trees are my daughters. There is no water beneath them, only Astroturf. They are so very, very high. Down in the stadium seats, there are small bunches of girls. Girls wrapped in silvery blankets, girls sprawled across each other, girls cradling each other’s heads in their hands. I reach up and touch my own face the same way Pearl did this morning. There are girls lying on beds made of piles of green uniforms, with IV bags full of emerald liquid dripping into the soft insides of their arms. There are other girls sitting alone. They look the most harrowed of all.
At least my girls have each other. My girls. I look up. Each of my daughters is alone on a diving board. Each steps out toward the end of the board and grips onto the edge with her toes.
I begin to climb the rungs on the spine of the trees. As I get closer, my daughters open their mouths. Their mouths do not look like regular mouths; they are as big as undersea vents, as dark inside. Molecules shimmer around them and pour in. It is the carbon. They are capturing it. It is pouring in, purpling and iridescent like a bruise.
There is nowhere for the carbon to go once inside them. One of the girls—it is Pearl—clutches her belly and doubles over. Nest glances down at her sister. Keeping her mouth open, she reaches out a hand and circles the palm on Pearl’s back. They stay like this, one standing, one crouching, their mouths still open, the carbon still pouring in.
It gets easier and easier to climb. As I climb I feel the air around me get clearer, cleaner. It is like breathing in all of spring but without the pollen, It is like popsicles and ice baths and glaciers gleaming into my lungs. It almost makes me dizzy. As I breathe, Nest starts to crumple. No, no, no—this is not how it’s supposed to be. I take off my uniform jacket with one hand, holding onto the top rung with the other. I rip the fabric with my sharp teeth and wave it like a flag. “Here,” I shout. “You can’t get me! I’ve got it!” A roaring sound starts up in my ears that at first sounds like cheering. But it is only the wind beginning to pick up, echoing through the stadium. Where are the children? Where are the boys? This game only works if there is someone left who is trying to get the flag back. ◆
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