Two towheaded boys, ages four and ten, sit on an Upper East Side stoop with a blonde woman barely out of childhood herself. The boys have bowl haircuts, having had it cut that way by their father who literally placed a bowl on their heads and trimmed around the edge with household scissors. Their mother made them promise never to let their father cut their hair again.
The day is either spring or autumn, sunny and warm and cool at the same time. Small cotton ball clouds look close enough to touch. The younger boy plucks an ivy leaf from the planter on the far side of the low wrought iron fence that surrounds the entrance to the basement. He twirls the leaf between his fingers. With wonder his eyes trace the contours of the thick mother vine that births all the ivy that covers the face of the brownstone. Years later it will be cut and dug up to keep it from pulling the bricks down.
Inside the house doors slam, footsteps thump down stairs, dishes break. Mom and Dad's fight has moved into the kitchen, just inside the front door. The younger boy tries to stand and look in the window, but his babysitter touches his shoulder and shakes her head. Her face is wet.
He looks to his brother. The older boy is sitting on the top step with his face between his knees, arms folded over head, crash position. He is swaying slightly side to side, rhythmically. The younger boy knows his brother is crying, angry, or both, so even more risky to bother than usual.
Mom and Dad fight like this all the time, the boy doesn't understand the reasons why. He doesn't think he's as upset as the other two on the stoop. He's not crying. Being a kid who likes puzzles he generates a plan, so he can move on from being unsure of how to feel.
Mom and Dad, always fighting.
Brother can't help, crying. Babysitter can't help, a grown-up and crying.
I'm going to make everyone so happy no one ever fights again.
That's his perfect four-year-old's plan.
He slips between the bars of the wrought iron fence, then back through. He weaves his way along the fence to the sidewalk.
The front door swings open and Mom comes out carrying a rush of inside sounds and smells. She pulls the door shut behind her and the door knocker clacks.
She's going to stay with a friend, she's not sure how long, none of this is your fault. She kisses her sons, hails a taxi, and it drives away.
Dad moves out a couple days later. When he's gone, Mom comes back.
A year passes. The five-year-old boy climbs over the wrought iron fence into the enclosed area next to the stoop. He can hear Mom shouting into the phone in the kitchen. He monkey-twirls over the basement stairs' railing, moves to shoot between the bars of the fence and out onto the sidewalk-- but his head gets stuck. He has grown.
His cries for help bring Mom rushing outside. He's really stuck. A small crowd gathers. They attempt, on a neighbor's suggestion, to use Crisco to lubricate the square bars of the fence whose edges are digging into the boy's scalp. They try to push his head free and he screams so they stop. The fire department is called and though they laugh a little, they very quickly proceed to cut and remove a section of the fence to gently free the boy.
He closes his eyes, as told to, while they cut. He feels the sparks that cool before they touch his skin. He peeks through his eyelashes but Mom covers his eyes with her hand.
Afterward, tears drying, Crisco in his hair, he asks to watch as they weld the piece of fence back into place. The boy holds the heavy mask with two hands and watches the sparks leap and fade like falling stars through the dark glass. The crowd takes this as a sign he's fine and they disperse.
Mother and son walk up the stoop into the house where she will live, alone, into the boy's adulthood.
When he visits he will try to find the places where the fence was cut and welded back together, but whether by quality of work, layers of paint, or general rough texture of age, he can never find them.
