Three days later, when I finally stopped shaking (the Chicago police laughed when I called, and the boy was gone when I drove myself over to the intersection -- to do what, I don't know -- but it's not as if I felt any safer), we began our search for a new life. A life where the kids could run free, where we could feel secure, where we would not have to pay exorbitant private school tuition to protect our children from the diversity of an urban school system. We would move to a place where there was a fraction of a minority student in the local school, and, as far as I could tell, he was a Chinese Jew.
My third one was not yet born, not yet even a fully formed idea. My older two were three and four, still best friends and constant companions who needed nobody other than mom and dad and each other, needed little but their own mutually fed imaginations to occupy themselves for hours. They seemed excited about our soon-to-be new digs, running up and down the wide hallways when we visited as if they had broken out of cages and finally been set free. Their favorite room was the bathroom in the hallway, where they each had their own sink.
No matter what game they were playing back in those days, they usually dressed in their Aladdin and Jasmine costumes. My son wore off white harem pants and a purple felt vest, his bare protruding belly jiggling as he ran amok with his fake sword, his rosy cheeks puffed out around his perennial smile filled with even rows of what looked to be Chiclets. My daughter paraded around in Jasmine style glitz, her sparkly green costume topped with a jeweled necklace and a matching headband tucked around her unruly curls. I bought them each a bath mat emblazoned with a picture of the Disney couple soaring through the air on a magic carpet. On our next visit to the house, they placed the mats on the floor by their respective bathroom sinks. Workers were still putting the final touches on the house, but my children had landed in their living quarters and were ready to stake their claim.
On the day we moved in, one bath mat had mysteriously disappeared. The violation was not quite as severe as the boy pointing a fake gun at my sleeping children, but still, I have always wondered who would take a child's bath mat and, more importantly, why. Nevertheless, our young family's magic carpet ride began, and the four of us set out on our new life together. My daughter, who had always seemed to march quietly but bravely through life, almost as if she owned the place, suddenly got jittery. If I disappeared around the side of the car for a couple of seconds in the grocery store parking lot, she panicked, thinking I had left her there. I don't know whether it was the parking lot or suburbia in general that scared her, although I have my theories.
On balance, though, we thrived, and we grew up together in that house, once so new, now a bit ragged. We adjusted to public suburban schools that, even with their fraction of a per cent of diversity were still more diverse than the private schools downtown. At least admission was guaranteed; we did not have to go through an application process more rigorous than the ones they would eventually go through to get into college just so they could have the right to finger paint. Their baby sister was born, and they wore their Aladdin costumes less frequently; she was too small to be the genie, too angelic to be a villain, so the whole thing just wasn't going to work anymore. We would ride by the high school and I would point and tell them that one day they would go there, even though I never really believed time would go so quickly and they would all pass in and out of that building in a blink of an eye and sail off on their own magic carpets to places and adventures as yet unknown.
I am cleaning out the house in suburbia now, getting ready to move on as soon as my youngest, the baby, leaves for college next year. Our carpet, hardly magical, is stained with dog pee and other delights, including a big burn in the shape of an iron (ouch; must be why I don't do that kind of thing anymore). Going through the hallway closet, I found the surviving bath mat, rolled up neatly and stuffed in with some long forgotten bedding. I unfurled it and looked at the young pair, perched confidently upon their magic carpet without even holding on as it hurtles through the sky on what appears to be, come to think of it, quite a bumpy ride.
My ruthless emptying of the nest has its limits. That mat is a keeper.
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