Mutual Aid

What will it be like when your kid is safe?

You drop them off at the classroom door.

As you walk back through the parking lot, you notice a woman pacing on the far end. She looks prematurely aged, a grandmother. Her dress is baggy, and her gaze flits about. You head toward her, although before you can make it across the lot, three other parents have descended upon her, along with a city worker. You ask the woman for her phone number so that you can come to her aid if needed. So do the other parents. While you jot the number down, you realize she’s married to the man who took your phone number two years ago, when you stood distraught in the school parking lot, wondering how you would hold it all together. He called to check on you several times. She, this grandmother, delivered a basket of fruit to your front porch.

The city worker appears to have a handle on the situation, so you step aside. It is Thursday — your company no longer operates on Thursdays. One of the other parents, who introduces herself as Iracema, confesses to feeling shaken by the woman’s distress, so she takes the day off as well. Her company has a generous wellbeing policy. “They say, you can call in sick and you can call in sad.” 

You go for coffee. You learn more about Iracema’s life, and she asks you about yours. From across the coffee shop, a teenage boy watches you with stormy eyes. But he’s wearing a Young Arborists uniform, and before too long, he walks out the door, joining a troupe of uniformed kids on their way to the Gardens.

A morning movie is playing at the Rialto. Iracema buys your ticket. There are several reclining chairs set up in the auditorium, and Iracema, who has dysautonomia, takes one and puts her feet up. A documentary comes on: a filmmaker’s travelogue about visiting his father’s hometown in Uruguay for the first time. In his voiceover, he says, I wanted to feel connected to this town, but I could hardly speak the language. I didn’t know anyone. A terrible feeling of isolation came upon me. I felt angry, susceptible. Susceptible to anything. But when a stranger would come and speak to me, even just to ask where I was from or what my name was, I would suddenly become immensely grateful. It was as if a tiny bomb inside me had been defused. 

Outside the movie theater, a man with a tangled beard is standing on a platform, shouting his theories of the universe. You and Iracema talk to him. Iracema appears genuinely curious. Soon an usher steps out and offers everyone surplus popcorn. For a moment, you worry that the bearded man will think you’re making fun of him — eating popcorn while he shouts, as if he were nothing more than a spectacle — but he accepts a bag of popcorn and sits down on the platform to eat.  

After saying goodbye to Iracema, you pass by the same coffee shop, where you see the grandmother and the city worker sharing a late lunch. They’re smiling. It turns out that the grandmother’s income had been sent to an obsolete bank account. The funds will be routed to her new account tomorrow — with interest. There is still some exasperation on her face, but the temperature has been lowered. You make a note to put some dinner on her porch tonight.

The day is hot. You spend the early afternoon in the Gardens, lying on a bench, watching as an exacting man teaches the Young Arborists how to prune a branch. He has channeled an entire life’s frustration into this lesson. “Unless you do it right,” he says, “the tree will die.” The stormy-eyed teenager from the coffee shop is there, inhaling, exhaling, listening. His hand, which in an earlier era might have held any object, even a vicious object, today, instead, holds, merely, a bag of soil. 

And then it is three o’clock. You walk down the boulevard to the school, cross the parking lot, and open the door to the classroom, where your kid is waiting for you, in the same spot, as if no time has passed.