“Stop Looking at Me!!!”

About ten years ago, we bought a little Danish table for our living room—the first time in my life I’ve ever owned a piece of furniture whose principle purpose is supporting food. This table comfortably seats two but conceals leaves that, when expanded, make space for four adults. In its current configuration, with one of two leaves out, we have a table for three. The math holds up. We have positioned this table up against the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Kina and I frame the table; Kina’s chair is closest to the kitchen door, and mine is next to the window. Laurea sits between us, facing the wall—which she continually reminds me should have some art on it. It is only now, as I write this, that I understand why she’s always so annoyed by the blank wall.

For months, Kina’s demanded a spot on Laurea’s lap (see the story in second position from our edition of January 12th), so her formal seat has gone unoccupied for most meals. Lately, though, she’s begun to understand how large a human being she actually is, and so has taken to sitting in the big girl chair like a normal person who speaks in full sentences. This means that she and I once more face each other while eating—nice for me, annoying for the girl who speaks in full sentences.

There is a protocol for asking questions at the dinner table in our household, as frequent readers will recall. Kina’s intricate dance of conversation—a question that yields to an answer before circling back to a new asker’s question—is elegant but fragile, and frequently feels more hokey-pokey, less quadrille. On a bad day, if you miss a step, the whole thing falls apart—and by “the whole thing”, I mean Kina.

I should probably know better than to ask her a question out of cycle, to dig for further detail about a play date or what she had for lunch. We’ve made it clear to her that screaming is an unproductive response to persistent questioning, and that it’s nice to say “I’d rather not talk about this” (second story, January 11th) instead—which both gives me the advance notice I need to mind my business and sounds hilarious coming from a four-year-old. Still, even with the polite shove-off, Kina’s irritation simmers just below the surface, and I can hear it coming a mile away. Stop. Looking. At. Me.

I grew up in homes with multiple rooms, where you could successfully isolate from an annoying sibling on a different floor if you needed to. In a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, this is somewhat more difficult, requiring a carefully-crafted social contract that helps us all preserve the illusion of privacy and personal space. Kina and I spend the lion’s share of every day separated by no more than twenty feet, a hollow-core door, and a tacit agreement not to hear each other. If I have to use the bathroom, I come out of the bedroom and slink through the kitchen silently. The door squeaks, but we agree that I am invisible. See something, say nothing.

It’s been hard to ignore lately that Kina has been waking up at five or five-thirty every morning—in clear violation of our longstanding 6:24 wake-up agreement. Thumps are heard, and the sliding of chairs to light switches. Legos are poured out and toilets are flushed (thank god). The cumulative noise of a conscious child is impossible to sleep through, and yet we agree to pretend that it is not happening, because to do otherwise is to acknowledge the total inadequacy of the space we occupy together. We shore up the illusion that she is asleep, because that illusion is part of a larger fantasy in which we are not trapped in an endless pandemic with closed schoolrooms and office desks that, by all outward appearances, are IKEA dressers with three cookbooks stacked on top. Stop looking at me.

So when I find myself on the sharp end of a demand to let Kina be invisible for just a few seconds, I have no objections. I stare off to the left of her head at a ceramic Buddha on the bookshelf behind her, and I think. I think about my place in the dance of questions we ask ourselves to make the days make sense. I think about fixing her bedroom door so it shuts cleanly without scraping on the floor. I think about how much I’ll miss her someday, when we can leave this house separately for hours at a time. I think about how this is the largest house Kina’s ever lived in, and how one day it will be the smallest.

It can be hard to brush up against each other all the time in this place; it didn’t expect us to serve us this way, and we ask a lot of it—and of each other—but in these moments of pent-up frustration, I sometimes find myself surprised I don’t feel the walls closing in. Instead, I think about how tightly they hold us together—in shared space made private, dancing back to back, as we hold hands.

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