LITMIR.BIZ

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Joan’s failure to produce the first novel demonstrated, Iger said, the norm’s destructive, debilitating effects. The way Iger held Martin wholly responsible would give Joan a sense of malevolent glee.

      One cold afternoon, when the daughters of Augusta, Teresa, and Dawn were playing their usual game with Eric and Daniel in the nursery, and the women were in Joan’s kitchen, cups filled with hot coffee, plates filling up with slices of Reine de Saba, the chocolate almond cake Dawn was testing on them before offering it at Boulangerie de Rhome, the news of the day was that, in Vermont, a social worker was shot to death with a rifle by a mother fearing she would lose custody of her children. Meg and Teresa pressed their hands to their mouths, as Dawn said, “I’d do the same thing, shoot anyone who tried to take my kids from me.” Joan nearly said aloud what she was thinking: she loved Daniel, she did love Eric, but sequential hours at a desk of her own, in a room of her own, with the ideas, or at least one idea, flowing, having a brief respite from custody, from mothering, from Daniel’s after-school questions about everything, from Eric’s screams, would not be half-bad.

      At two, Eric’s first word was not Mommy, Daddy, Daniel, Fancy, grass, bath, or candy, or any variation thereof, but no. And it was not a general no. It took Joan and Fancy several days to understand what Eric was trying to refuse, and even Daniel, who could decipher Eric’s grunts and waving hands easily, was confused.

      No meant no more reading to Eric at bedtime, no more big books, no more children’s books, no reading at all, refusing that which was essential to Joan. However, if promised a red lollipop, he would listen to a story of Daniel’s. He seemed to like the little gray squirrel, but the lollipop had to be in sight at all times, otherwise he stuffed his little fingers into his little ears and turned his face to the starry blue wall.

      If the color blue, among other things, encouraged efficiency and communication, then Eric excelled at combining those two traits, efficiently communicating his needs and his wants without linguistic prowess.

      No more reading came first, then No diaper. “No diaper,” Eric said to Joan when she was changing him one morning. “No diaper,” he said to Fancy that same day, when she was doing the same thing. He tugged at the diaper, pushed it down, figured out how to get one leg free, then the other, then ran through the house naked from the waist down, his chunky little ass so low to the ground.

      “He’s done with diapers,” Daniel said to Joan.

      “I get that, love, but he’s only two. Barely potty-trained. He’s not ready to make that decision for himself,” and Joan diapered Eric again.

      “No diaper,” Eric yelled in the middle of the night, abandoning sleeping straight through, a trick only recently mastered, until his demand was honored. It was three in the morning, and everyone was gathered around his crib. Martin said, “He knows his own mind. So let’s try underpants. Maybe he’s telling us he knows more than we do.”

      Apparently he did, and Joan thought his name was proving itself—he was ruling his own world, setting the guidelines by which he was willing to live. Superheroes ran across his bottom from then on. Somehow, he had trained himself.

      The week Eric left diapers behind, Daniel said, “How old was I when I stopped wearing diapers?” Joan thought, then said, “Almost three. Right, Fancy?” And Fancy nodded. “So does that mean Eric is smarter than me?” The corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes, too, were drooping like some old hunting dog, like the oldest hunting dog in the world. “Of course not,” Joan said. “Everyone lives their life on a different schedule. Eric is early in this area, you were right on time.”

      Eric was, however, very slow to talk. He gathered up one word at a time, then ran with that word as if it were a kite on the end of a long rope. At three, his favorite word was sandbox. Led to the sandbox, he would spend happy hours alone building battlements, bridges made of fallen branches and twigs, forts with his own shirt and pants, holes filled with water from the hose that he figured out how to uncoil and turn on. Usually, he did not destroy what he created.

      If blue fostered intelligence, then Joan had her doubts, both about the efficacy of colors employed this way, and about Eric. At four, his mouth was a receptacle for items other than food—bobby pins, pennies, paperclips, buttons, crayons, the sundered hoof of Fancy’s stuffed giraffe. At four and a half, he began eating sand, clumps of dirt, chewy leaves, flowers plucked from the gardens, his baby teeth masticating it all. At nearly five, he was also sucking on pebbles, mashing pen caps of cheap ballpoints down, like some steel-toothed machine, until he bit through the plastic. It was as if his refusal to breastfeed had manifested into an unquenchable oral fixation. Martin issued his professional determination that it was a phase he would outgrow.

      But when Fancy found a sliver of bark between his front teeth, his tongue green from leaves, teeth marks scratching the surface of a rock he had in his pocket, she brought her concerns to Joan, and Joan couldn’t keep herself from yelling at Eric. “Why are you eating all this crazy stuff?” and Eric, calm with that irritating half-smile on his lips, said, “I just like how it feels in my mouth.” She left Fancy with Eric outside on the swings and went inside, to a living-room shelf where she found Martin’s Diseases and Disorders and searched its pages for a disorder that might explain why he was stuffing strange things down his gullet, if it indicated some kind of mental disturbance, and there it was:

       Pica the persistent eating of nonnutritive substances like paper, clay, metal, chalk, soil, glass, sand, ice, starch. Probably a behavior pattern driven by multiple factors. Some recent evidence supports including pica with the obsessive-compulsive spectrum of disorders. There are several theoretical approaches that attempt to explain the etiology:

       Nutritional theories attribute pica to specific deficiencies of minerals, such as iron and zinc.

       The sensory and psychological theories center on the finding that many patients with pica say that they just enjoy the taste, texture, and smell of the item they are eating.

       A neuropsychiatric theory is supported by evidence that certain brain lesions in laboratory animals have been associated with abnormal eating behaviors, and it is postulated that pica might be associated with certain patterns of brain disorder in humans.

       Psychosocial theories surrounding pica have described an association with family stress.

       Addiction or addictive behavior has also been suggested as one possible explanation for pica behavior in some patients.

       Treatment: Education about nutrition. Psychological counseling. Behavioral interventions for children with developmental disabilities. Closer supervision of children during play. Child-proof homes and play environments.

      Eric didn’t seem to have developmental difficulties, or an obsessive-compulsive disorder, the sandbox was regularly raked, there was no lead paint in the house, none, as far as she knew, in the dirt. He was the youngest member of a loving family, and chewed a children’s multivitamin every single day. What stress could he have?

      That night, Joan showed Martin the pica entry and said, “I think our youngest son might be suffering from this.”

      They had a heart-to-heart with Eric in the living room. Martin on the couch, Eric on the ottoman, Joan in the comfortable armchair some distance away. Triangles were the only thing she remembered from junior high geometry, and if a line were drawn from Martin to Eric, Eric to Joan, Joan to Martin, they were the three points of an obtuse triangle, and she, way out there, was the longest side, the point at the end of ninety degrees.

      “Eric, do you feel compelled—is something making you eat dirt, sand, pebbles, leaves, twigs, sticks, stones, grass, and anything else that people don’t usually eat? Something inside that’s telling you to eat those things? Voices, or just a hunger you can’t explain to yourself?” Martin asked.

      “No,” Eric said.

      “No what?” Martin

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