Susan Senator

I am having great day, I went to Dunkin Doughnuts.
I bought a blue berry muffin I took my boots off and
put
my sneakers on thanks for sending my sneakers.
see you when I get home
Love
Nat

Sounds like a friendly email, right? Well, I don’t know. If you knew what I know, you would read sinister undertones into it.

Sometime this past weekend, Nat came to realize that his old sneakers had been removed from the shoe basket and thrown away. (Ned did it, and then went away for the weekend, thanks alot, Ned!! Also, some similar sneakers that Nat never wanted to wear, were discarded in a typical Ned purge, comparable to the zeal of a Stalinist purge, minus the bloodshed. Every once in a while, the purge neuron fires off in Ned’s complicated brain, and suddenly I’ll find some tiny corner of our otherwise messy house cleaned to within an inch of its life, like my copper pots will suddenly be orange with an unfamiliar shine, or my corner of the desk will be in files and folders.)

So Nat was upset not to see the familiar pile of shoes in the shoe basket. He kept saying, “New sneakers.” And I kept saying, “Nat! These are your new sneakers. Those other ones were your old ones, so we threw them away!”

Oh, how could we have been so stupid? So now every morning there is a struggle. Nat will only wear his boots to school. He refuses to wear his sneakers, even though he wore them for the last month! Somehow, throwing away the other ones rendered these No Good.

So I got sneaky. I hid his sneakers in his backpack this morning and wrote a note to his teachers: “Help! Nat refuses to wear his sneakers!”

And when I got that email from Nat, where he thanks me for sending in the sneakers, to me it sounded kind of sinister, like, “How very clever of you, Mother! You may have outwitted me this time…”

And of course, “See you when I get home,” felt less than benign…