Want to read something that doesn’t mention coronavirus a single time, not even in the introductory sentence? I will do my best to avoid mentioning the crisis we’re living through, so that, for the length of a blog post, you can pretend that it’s okay to resume providing haircuts for your neighbors and standing next to the produce at the grocer recommending the freshest pieces to shoppers.
While the quarantine hasn’t been easy for me (you try dedicating yourself to teaching my very stubborn cats how to sing), I imagine it’s been slightly more challenging for parents. So much like how one convinces their child to consume nutrients by asking them to imagine those that are deprived of nutrients, consider how much easier it is to rear children that aren’t engulfed by flames when they become upset.
In “Nothing to See Here” by Kevin Wilson, our narrator (Lillian) lives with her mother and lets life wash over her, friendless but for the sporadic letters from the roommate she took the fall for in boarding school over a decade ago. When Lillian was booted from boarding school and returned to the dreary life she’d hoped to escape, she stopped trying to escape it. But then she gets a letter from her friend offering her a lucrative gig. This chance having fallen into her lap, she takes it.
Turns out her very rich, letter-writing friend has married a senator, and the senator has some children from another marriage that need rearing. The only problem (other than Lillian’s total lack of childcare experience) is that the children catch on fire. The fire doesn’t hurt them, but it does hurt their surroundings.
I won’t tell you how the relationships develop, other than to say they do so in a satisfying fashion. This book is a delightful cocktail of comedy and beautiful writing. I opened the book to find a good example, and the first page I opened offered one (I’m pretty sure every page would):
When we opened the door, the kids were just standing there like zombies. They were ten years old, but the looked younger, stunted in some meaningful way. I hadn’t actually given much thought to how I was going to take care of them. Originally, I had thought I’d just stand next to them for the whole summer and gently direct them toward good decisions. I thought I’d just sit in a beanbag chair and they’d read magazines next to me.
Now it was clear how much this job would require. I was going to have to bend and twist these children into something that could live in that crazy-rich estate back in Franklin. It was going to be like teaching a wild raccoon to wear a little suit and play the piano. I was going to be bleeding and bruised every day, and that would still be preferable to catching on fire, the fillings in my teeth melting while I held on to these little kids.
And as they stared at me I knew how much of myself I was going to unfairly place in them. There were me, unloved and (bad word redacted) over, and I was going to make sure that they got what they needed. They would scratch and kick me, and I was going to scratch and kick anyone who tried to touch them. I didn’t love them; I was a selfish person and I didn’t understand people all that well, not enough to really feel an emotion as complicated as love. But I felt tenderness for them, which felt, to my little heart, like a kind of progress.
I uncomplicatedly loved this book. It was a tremendous distraction from the ghastly news we’re perpetually suffused with, and a good excuse to write about something other than coronavirus. *Reminder to me, if I’m not too distracted by news of crises, to remove all references to coronavirus from this blog post.*
