to tear through it. One moment, life appears idyllic. You are in a place as chaste as an elementary school gymnasium. Your little girl is twirling. Her voice is giddy. Her eyes are closed. You see her mothers face there, the way her mother used to close her eyes and smile, and you remember how flimsy that wall really is.
"Cope?"
It was my sister-in-law, Greta. I turned to her. Greta looked at me with her normal concern. I smiled through it.
"What are you thinking about?" she whispered.
She knew. I lied anyway.
"Handheld video cameras," I said.
"What?"
The folding chairs had all been taken by the other parents. I stood in the back, arms crossed, leaning against the cement wall. There were rules posted above the doorway and those annoyingly cute inspirational aphorisms like "Don't Tell Me the Sky's the Limit When There Are Footprints on the Moon" scattered throughout. The lunch tables were folded in. I leaned against that, feeling the cool of the steel and metal. Elementary school gyms never change as we age. They just seem to grow smaller.
I gestured at the parents. "There are more video cameras here than kids."
Greta nodded.
"And the parents, they film everything. I mean, everything. What do they do with all that? Does anybody really watch this again from beginning to end?"
"You don't?"
"I'd rather give birth."
She smiled at that. "No," she said, "you wouldn't."
"Okay, yeah, maybe not, but didn't we all grow up in the MTV generation? Quick cuts. Lots of angles. But to just film this straight out like this, to subject an unsuspecting friend or family member to that..."
The door opened. The moment the two men stepped into the gym I could tell that they were cops. Even if I didn't have a fair amount of experience, I am the county prosecutor for Essex County, which includes the rather violent city of Newark, I would know. Television does indeed get some stuff right. The way most cops dressed, for example, fathers in the lush suburb of Ridgewood don't dress that way. We don't don suits when we come to see our kids perform quasi-gymnastics. We wear corduroys or jeans with a V-neck over a T-shirt. These two guys wore ill-fitted suits in a brown hue that reminded me of wood chips after a rainstorm.
They were not smiling. Their eyes scanned the room. I know most of the cops in the area, but I didn't know these guys. That troubled me.
Something felt wrong. I knew that I hadn't done anything, of course, but there was still a little I'm-innocent-but-I-still-feel-guilty flutter in my stomach.
My sister-in-law, Greta, and her husband, Bob, have three kids of their own. Their youngest daughter, Madison, was six years old and in the same class as my Cara. Greta and Bob have been a tremendous help.
After my wife, Jane, Greta's sister, died, they moved to Ridgewood. Greta claims that they had planned on doing that anyway. I doubt it. But I am so grateful that I don't question it much. I can't imagine what it would be like without them.
Usually the other fathers stand in the back with me, but since this was a daytime event, there were very few here. The mothers, except for the one now glaring at me over her video camera because she overheard my anti-video-cam-rant, adore me. It is not me, of course, but my story. My wife died five years ago, and I raise my daughter alone. There are other single parents in town, mostly divorced mothers, but I get a ton of slack. If I forget to write a note or pick up my daughter late or leave her lunch on the counter, the other mothers or the staff in the school office chip in and help. They think my male helplessness is cute. When a single mother does any of those things, she is neglectful and on the receiving end of the superior moms' scorn.
The kids continued to tumble or stumble, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I watched Cara. She was big on concentration and did just fine, but I suspected she had inherited her father's lack of coordination. There were high school girls from the gymnastics team helping. The girls were seniors, probably seventeen or eighteen. The one who spotted Cara during her attempted somersault reminded me of my sister. My sister, Camille, died when she was about this teens age, and the media never lets me forget it. But maybe that was a good thing.