Boris

jounced, symmetry, neighborhood, graph     -anon               

Boris is three years old. He likes cars and airplanes and the color blue, but only because people tell him he does—though not directly, of course, because who in their right mind tells a three year old anything directly? Boris has one father and one mother, one of whom is Santa Claus and one of whom is the Tooth Fairy. Can you guess who is who?

I admit it’s an unfair question. 

The truth is that Boris’s parents, like most parents, are both and neither at the same time. They have agreed that once Boris starts losing his teeth (around five years, according to the pediatrician), his father will be the one to place the money under his pillow. They’ll hide the little molars in his mother’s jewelry box and reveal them once Boris discovers that the Tooth Fairy, in fact, does not exist. Before Christmases, Mother will use her non-dominant hand to write “To Boris/From Santa Claus” tags. Father, of course, will buy the gifts: toy cars and model airplanes and such. And when Boris turns fifteen he’ll buy him a BB gun. Boris’s father has promised, for a long time now, that he’ll grow Boris into a real man.

The irony is that Boris’s father is currently unemployed and is drinking his woes away at a bar for the third day in a row, so that if he were to go buy a BB gun right now, he’d be using Boris’s mother’s money. Perhaps, when he turns fifteen, Boris will wonder what is manly and what is not.

But for now, the only thing he is wondering about is the symmetry of a circle, a lopsided lump he has traced on a sheet of wrinkled graph paper. 

“This part is not round enough!” he wails. 

His mother, whom the paper belongs to, wishes she could wail too. She is a tired but aspiring architect with only three years of college under her belt. She would have graduated with honors, except she dropped out to marry Boris’s father. Back then, she did not stop her heart from vowing “I do.” Now, she cannot stop her head from hurting. 

The car she is driving jounces down the street, just as it had jounced down the driveway and around the neighborhood and up the hill. Down, up, down, up, just like her career, just like her marriage, just like her life. Boris moans again.

“Boris, please. Mother is driving,” she whimpers. 

Boris’s mother has not slept more than seven hours in the past two days. She had been preparing to go back to school, hence the graph paper; but now that her husband lost his job, she has decided to pick up waitressing again. She often wonders about “back then,” and asks herself why she couldn’t have been both at the same time: wife and architect, that is; because after all, she is Half-Tooth-Fairy and Half-Santa-Claus, albeit always the lesser half. Instead, she is taking her son to the dentist, because Boris, his parents have suspected, has some sort of teething problem. He has been biting everything within eye range.

“His teeth are quite alright,” assures the dentist, who is wearing what we presume to be Boris’s favorite color. “Some children chew to alleviate stress or to cope with difficulty.” 

Just in case you’re picturing the scene incorrectly, this dentist also wears thick-rimmed glasses, sports a slicked-back hairstyle, and, like Boris’s mother, is a woman. Her name is Dorothy, which is not important to the story, but I chose to include it anyway because I’m sure it must be important to her.

Dorothy hands Boris’s mother a sheet of Times New Roman text and points to a line at the bottom of the page. “Your signature here, please,” and this makes Boris’s mother feel very important. The line is bold and black—Boris’s mother remembers someone telling her that black is the color of power, and power means powerful, and full means the opposite of half. She is fully a woman, fully an almost architect, fully a part-time waitress, fully Boris’s mother.

She signs the paper, pushes it across the counter, and ponders what kind of stress is causing her son to cope in such a violent way. She thinks of BB guns and the color blue, lost jobs and late nights and leftover graph paper. Yes, she says to herself, I do hope Boris will grow into a real man. I do. 

She has a sudden urge to tell the teeth-gnashing toddler that she loves him, but Dorothy is standing there and that makes her hesitate. It is invasive to have someone else hear you confess love, even if it is to your own child. 

“I don’t suppose,” Boris’s mother considers, “we say many things directly to each other anyways,” and she picks up her child and hugs him tightly. Boris bites her.

We all laugh.