At home I didn’t think about school problems. I was too involved with Frank and Regina. Regina was crushed when she couldn’t start kindergarten with her friends and crushed again when the doctor refused to let her go in January. This second blow turned her disappointment into resentment, and we had an even harder time keeping her off her feet. Television, books, games bored her. For the first two months or so, her friends were faithful in their visits—one at a time, as the doctor ordered—but as the novelty became a chore for them, they came by only when they had nothing better to do. Perhaps to punish them, Regina was petulant in their presence. She fought with each one of them so often that by the middle of the year, they stopped coming altogether.
After work and on the weekends, I took charge of her. In the rocking chair, I marked papers and wrote lesson plans to the din of the television and was interrupted constantly by her requests for juice and crackers and toys and dolls. One night while Frank was teaching, she turned to me and said:
“I have to go to the bathroom.” The tone of her voice hit something in me. It was the same tone a number of my students were beginning to use, a tone that had more than an edge of command in it.
“Then go,” I said.
“Carry me.”
“What?”
“Carry me.”
“Regina, you don’t need to be carried. You can get up to do that.”
“Daddy carries me. He always carries me.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t always do it.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Well, you can walk to the bathroom and back. That little bit won’t hurt you. In fact, it’ll be good for you—just that little bit.”
“Daddy wants me to get well.”
“I want you to get well too, but you can walk to the bathroom and back. I’ll come with you.”
“No, I’ll go alone.”
I watched her from the corner of my eye. She did a dramatic wavering out of the room, and there was a long, almost ominous silence. When I heard the crash, it suddenly seemed as if I had been waiting for it.
The bottles of bath oil and cologne we kept on top of the toilet tank were scattered on the floor. Regina stood there watching one of them roll in a circle and come to a stop.
“I bumped into it,” she said, without looking at me.
“It had to be bumped pretty hard.”
“I fell.”
The doctor’s primary warning had been: “She must not become excited.” “All right,” I said. “From now on I’ll come with you so you won’t bump into things.” She looked uncertain for a moment, then stooped down to pick up the bottles. “I’ll pick them up,” I said. “You just go to the toilet.”
“I don’t feel like going now.”
Frank came home that night the way he always did, exhausted and pretending not to be. I couldn’t hold back from approaching him with this bathroom business, so I decided to do it lightly. He said he had been carrying her to the bathroom, but he would explain to her why I couldn’t.