“Long, Slow Decomposition” by Jacob Reecher

This is the first in our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform:

Winter comes late now. Christmas was yesterday and you get by with no coat. A sweater will be enough until later January and March is the real bitch anymore. But you like sweaters. You have lots. All-natural wool, all of them, and made to last forever. But a natural forever. Not like those nasty plastics that never break down, that fill oceans and choke the planet.

Ella wears her coat. You make her. Maybe you’re old-fashioned, but kids wear coats in December. Except now she’s hot, and rolls down the window, and the receipt on the dash whips right out on the wind. Store credit is no good, not at Build-a-Bear, not if Ella doesn’t like stuffed animals anymore. So you pull over and you both get out and walk back along the road picking up scraps of paper.

So much garbage lives in the ditch. You wish that when you were Ella’s age this road was immaculate. But it wasn’t. It was worse. You can’t idyll-ize the past. Ha ha. And since then, all the PSAs about reduction and reuse and recycling, all the folk singers at school assemblies, An Inconvenient Truth, got us a not-as-filthy ditch.

“Why do we need the receipt?” Ella asks and wraps a blade of yellow grass around her finger.

You drop a gas station receipt someone blew their nose into. Your hand sanitizer is in your purse, in the car. Through the brown field along the road runs a creek, and cows drink from it. Some of them look at you. Some of them moo. You want to apologize to the cows. For the trash in the ditch. For the chemicals you bet are in their creek. Chemicals that will soon be in them, and then in whoever eats them or drinks their milk.

“We need the receipt to get our money back,” you say, “Sweetheart.”

Ella says, “Don’t call me that.”

If she insists. She’s eleven now. A pre-teen. Way too cool for maternal affection. Or for stuffed animals, apparently. You’re not sure what is her hurry to grow up. Or where she got her ideas about what grown-up means. You used to split joints and bottles of wine with your mom, like a grown-up. You used to screw boyfriends on top of your mountain of stuffed animals, like a grown-up. Not that you want Ella to drink or smoke anything, or screw anybody. Nor that adulthood is all drinking and smoking and screwing. You enjoyed more cigarettes and screwdrivers and sex before twenty-two than since.

“Dad returned his grill without a receipt,” Ella says.

A truck whooshes by, and you wobble in the draft. Garrett had no choice; he lost the receipt. Besides, to convert all your assets to Home Depot store credit would tickle Garrett silly. A checking account, savings account, and Roth IRA’s worth of sawzalls and roto-tillers, power drills and tiki torches. And you might have said so, before you agreed not to put Garret down in front of Ella. As much as you hate Dr. Carrie’s stupid contract, as much as you hate tautologies, a deal is a deal.

“I guess I’m just not as smart as Dad,” you say.

“Yes, you are,” Ella says.

You’re smarter. You can’t say that, per the contract, but you can imply it. The contract only forbids words; tone is fair game. That this gaping loophole slipped unnoticed by Garrett and Dr. Carrie is but one measure of the shallow waters you wade during therapy.

“We’re smart about different things,” you say. “I can read and write, and Dad can return grills without receipts.”

“Dad can read. He used to read to me before bed.”

“You mean Goodnight Moon?” you say, cutting it a bit close. But the line is in.

“He can write, too,” Ella goes on. “He writes the grocery list every week. Last month he wrote me a note to get out of school early for my doctor’s appointment.”

“I write subpoenas,” you say. “It’s different. I write reports.”

Ella’s finger swells red above her grass tourniquet. She seems to notice neither your backhands at Garrett, nor anything else: not the cars that pass at seventy miles per hour; not the cows that trundle away from the creek, presumably to a barn; not the crow that lands up the road, snatches a napkin, and flies away; not that your receipt could be next. There your daughter leans against the car and watches blood flood her pinkie.

“Do you want store credit at Build-a-Bear?” you say. “They don’t sell makeup or Seventeen.”

She says, “They only gave Dad store credit for the grill because he could have bought it at Wal-Mart or Lowe’s. Where else can you get a build-a-bear besides a Build-A-Bear?”

“Listen, it’s not up to me,” you say. “I didn’t write the fucking return policy.”

Utterly unfazed by your language, Ella says, “Why didn’t you just get an email receipt?”

Another car flies up the road. Paper and leaves dance along after it. When you bought the bear, you asked for an email receipt. But the cashier printed one anyway. Whoopsie. Here’s another piece of garbage. There’s another tree from the forest to the landfill. And then the transaction was complete; the cashier couldn’t also send an email. So now here on the side of the road you sift through more garbage. Garbage everywhere. The fiberglass patio furniture Garrett brought home after he returned the grill. Garbage. The magazines and eyeliner Ella will buy when she trades her bear for cash. Garbage.

“How long was it?” you say. “Do you remember?”

✶

You never could help but sense, in stuffed animals, souls of a kind. See an awareness, in those beady eyes, of their cruelly ironic fate to smile through abuse, abandonment, destruction.

Ella’s bear is a cheerleader. Her crop-top says GO TEAM! Her pom-poms are red and white. From the backseat her little bear face watches you in the rearview mirror. It says: You made me this way. It says: You brought me, like this, into a dying world for nothing but a child’s rejection and bargain bin purgatory. You wish you had put her in a bag.

Cherryvale Mall’s parking lot is full. Ella was not the only one disappointed yesterday. You prowl for a space and guess the contour of each Christmas letdown: that Toyota’s pants were the wrong size; that Jeep already had a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul; that Chevy wanted a PlayStation, not an Xbox. Unhappy with the garbage they were given, here they all came to exchange it for different garbage, and to perfume the warm December air with exhaust. What fools. Not just the Toyota and the Jeep and the Chevy, but everyone. All this—the gifts and the cars and the malls—did we think it would last forever? Did you?

You squeeze into a space and Ella kicks open her door. It spanks the truck in the next space and you wince and scowl by reflex.

Ella hops down. “Sorry,” she says, but she’s not.

If you tell her to be more careful, she will say she didn’t mean to. And you will ask if she meant not to, and she will say she couldn’t help it, you parked too close. And you will lose.

You say, “Don’t forget your bear.”

“Why can’t you carry it?” she says and slams the door.

You look at the bear in the backseat. You could carry it. It would be easy. Just reach back and scoop it up. You’ve carried Ella’s things for over a decade now. What’s one more day? Try to remember when you enjoyed it: after her first day of kindergarten when you shouldered her sequin backpack, or when you carried home from the fair her green-ribbon brownies. In the rearview you watch Ella stretch her skinny little girl body, as if her weary bones ached from the ride into town. She threw that backpack away because some mean little girls made fun of its sparkle. Years later, to spend her time with those same girls, who were still mean, she quit 4-H.

You wriggle out of the car. “You carry it,” you say. “It’s yours.”

“I don’t want to carry a teddy bear through the mall,” she says. “People will think I’m just a little kid.”

A) God forbid. B) Yes, and without the bear, the entire mall will gaze awestruck at the long, dark vixen in the winter coat over a T-shirt, skort, and plastic pumps.

You say, “It’s your bear. If you want to return it, you have to carry it to the store.”

Ella twists her pinkie into her hair and pulls. If she keeps disrupting the blood flow to that finger, maybe someday you will tell a doctor to amputate it. And you will have no idea where she picked up this nervous habit. Ha ha. Or maybe Ella will just pull out a lock of her hair and leave a bald spot. That’s what made you finally quit tugging your hair. And landed you in therapy and on meds. Ella thought bald mommy was so funny.

Now she says, “I didn’t even want the bear.”

No kidding. Well, we all get things we don’t want sometimes. Even if we think we do, we don’t. You were so sure you wanted a baby. Yes, the world was going to hell, and Americans were the problem, and there needed to be fewer. But you reached an epiphany: only to build family fulfilled the purpose of woman and man. Plus, you could build of yours a shining and hopeful beacon. You could raise one part of a generation to save the planet. Then Ella came and you were tired forever.

“Well I gave it to you, and now it’s yours,” you say.

Ella cocks an eyebrow, or tries. She can’t always make the faces she sees on the internet. Despite the fact that she does little but watch the internet. That also is your fault. You gave her a tablet when she was maybe two. Not even. You were tired, but excuses are like noses. So much for raising a savior of the planet. Imagine the energy those videos burns—to make them, to watch them. And for what? For Ella to learn these awful sarcastic faces and try them out on you in the mall parking lot. You should have just carried the bear. This is no hill to die on.

“I thought Santa gave it to me,” Ella says.

You scoff out loud. Never mind that Ella still sends letters to the North Pole and hangs a stocking. Never mind that you baked cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve. Never mind that the tag on the bear read FROM SANTA CLAUS. She knows damn well there is no Santa. She knows damn well from whom the bear came. You pop the trunk and dig out a tote bag you use to carry groceries, because plastic bags are so wasteful. You stick the tote in her face.

“Carry it in this,” you say. “Then nobody will think you’re a little kid.”

She doesn’t take the bag. She steps back to glare at you over it.

“Or we can go home,” you say, “and you can live with the gift you got.”

Ella snatches the bag from your fist and stomps three steps to the car. She jerks the handle and tells you to unlock the door.

Inside Cherryvale, standard tinny Muzak blares. No more “White Christmas.” No more “Let it Snow.” The season ends that fast. The plastic trees that presided over lobbies, plastic garlands that adorned handrails, plastic snowflakes that dangled from ceilings, are all gone. Thrown away. Everyone eats while they shop. Hamburgers, pretzels, ice cream cones. It smells like a county fair. Wrappers and half-eaten snacks overflow every trash can. En route to a landfill, or maybe even to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Joy to the dying world.

You walk with purpose: get in, get out, get home. But Ella moseys and you lose her in the teeming crowd. Only for a few seconds, but you’ve lost her before. At the grocery store, you crossed whole wheat pasta off your list; at the Burpee, you admired a diorama of Native agriculture (the First Peoples farmed sustainably); you walked into Lake Louise to dunk your head and cool off: and she was gone. And you panicked, and became a monster, and berated the cashier and the tour guide and the lifeguard. Your daughter was missing, you shouted over and over, as if they didn’t understand. Why didn’t you even call Ella’s name? Because something came over you; you only felt it, watched it happen, helpless.

You feel something swoop in again and are about to accost a security guard when you spot Ella there, fingering a potted fern. She’s like a puppy with an attention deficit. You call, but she doesn’t hear you. You have to go get her. You’re almost at her shoulder when she pulls a leaf off the fern. To watch your daughter torture a live thing turns your stomach. You feel sick whenever she snatches up Fluffy or picks a dandelion to wish on. You’ve learned to swallow and look away, but right now something has you in a state. You reach frantically to slap her wrist, and she cowers in pained anger.

“What did you do that for?” she howls.

You will not explain yourself to Ella. Not anymore. You used to squat down to her level, look her in the eye, to talk out feelings, to teach her how to be. Apparently she never listened. And anyway, now she’s old enough to figure it out on her own. But dozens of passersby’s eyes turn your way.

For them you point at the plant and say, “Don’t do that.”

Ella says, “It’s not even real.”

“Yes, it is,” you say, and despise yourself for it. When you argue with an idiot, et cetera.

“No, it’s not,” she says. “How could it be real? It doesn’t rain inside.”

You grab her hand to drag her away from the scene, but she plants her feet and leans back.

“Let go of me,” she says.

You hate it when she speaks in italics—more than when she crops her T-shirts with a knot above the belly or won’t eat her vegetables because she’s “on a diet”—the other tics she picked up from her mean-girl friends. So like a tug-of-war trick you let go and she falls on her butt. Your petty satisfaction morphs into horror as Ella’s momentary confusion dissolves into furious tears. The whole mall may as well be watching.

You crouch next to Ella, ssshh and coo your very best. In between hyperventilated sobs Ella says she landed right on her tailbone. You apologize profusely, but remind her that she told you to let her go.

“Not like that,” she says. “You made me fall on purpose.”

Of course she’s right. Once upon a time you created, adjusted, or warped her reality at will. It wasn’t raining, it was sprinkling. Those weren’t home-fried potatoes, they were Hollywood hashbrowns.  But you can’t gaslight her so easily anymore. She doesn’t get up or calm down until you promise her ice cream.

The table is littered with bits of French fry, and sticky from a spilled soft drink. But it’s the only one left in the food court, and if Ella tries to walk while eating her towering ice cream cone, disaster will strike, you’re sure. At the ice cream shop, when you said just one scoop, Ella’s lip quivered, and her hand caressed her tailbone. Now she licks the third scoop of chocolate as it slides not slowly enough from its perch.

“I’m sorry I let you fall,” you say. “Sweetheart.”

“You made me fall,” she corrects.

You don’t concede this, not even with a nod or a shrug. You have a piece to say, a lesson to teach, that you’ve worked out in your head since the scene by the fern. It’s by some measure more self-justifying than you want it to be, but sometimes it’s hard to untangle what’s right from what’s right for you. In this case, it’s important that Ella understands your motivations. Unless you explain why you reacted as you did, she might think of it as pure and unnecessary cruelty—kind of like pulling a leaf off a helpless plant. Anyway, you’re really looking out for Ella’s mental health. She will need all the wellness she can get, for the end of the world.

“And don’t call me sweetheart,” Ella adds.

If she insists. You take a deep breath and start at the beginning.

“You should be nice to plants,” you say. “Plants prevent global warming. They take carbon dioxide out of the air and make oxygen.”

Ella licks her ice cream indolently. It’s melting fast—without that freezing mall AC, it would be a puddle already—but she doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. She didn’t pay for the ice cream. And there is always another scoop in a cooler somewhere. Until there’s not. But why do you care? You’ve eaten plenty of ice cream in your life, and she won’t share hers anyway. If she loses one scoop, or two, or all three, you lose nothing. And yet Ella, oblivious or blasé across the table with her cone, infuriates you.

“That’s what we breathe,” you say.

“First of all, you should be nice to me,” she says. “Second, I don’t care about global warming. I hate the cold. I hate wearing this stupid coat. And third, I know we breathe oxygen. I’m not stupid.”

“Well then you ought to know,” you say, “that global warming means less oxygen for us to breathe.”

That’s not exactly right. But the finer points of climate science aren’t important right now. Important right now is, you decide—you realize—humility. Ella needs to learn humility. She needs to see and, even if she disagrees, to acknowledge your point of view. To know what she doesn’t know. To understand that she doesn’t understand. She can’t act, forever, like she’s the only one with any sense.

Ella huffs and puffs. “Look,” she says, “I can breathe just fine.”

“Now you can. But if we keep tearing plants—”

“Plus, breathing hurts when it’s cold. I bet global warming makes it easier to breathe, really.”

Her ignorance frustrates you so much that you aren’t even impressed by her logic. This is exactly the problem. She figured out how to think before she knew what to think. She doesn’t know the difference between true and truthy. You wish that for one more year, your words were as evident as the sting of cold air in her lungs. More evident. If she would only listen.

“If global warming meant less oxygen,” she says, “they’d call it global de-oxygen-ing.”

“Fine,” you say. “Kill all the plants. See what kind of world you grow up in. See if I care. I’ll be dead.”

“Good.”

Like that, you can’t wait to get Ella out of your sight. The hour it will take to return the bear and drive home cannot end soon enough. You grab her collar and drag her out of the crowded food court. She flails like a snared rabbit, and chocolate ice cream goes everywhere. You apologize to nobody.

There are two lines at Build-A-Bear.

In one, a little boy hugs his new firefighting grizzly.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he says. “Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank…”

He is representative of the other children in that line. They all just built bears, and now wait for their parents to cash gift cards.

You stand with Ella in the other line. It is full of spoiled snotty children like her, tired frustrated parents like you, and lugubrious stuffed animals like Ella’s cheerleading bear. Ahead, a dragon in a leather jacket masks his existential terror with sunglasses and a coolly defiant grin. Behind, a tiger’s scrubs and stethoscope belie her reticent despair. You can imagine how they feel as they watch their furry counterparts find loving homes. As they await the dusty discount shelf in the back of the store. You wish you could tell them it will be OK. Of course, a lie, but even so.

You and Ella are not speaking. She conjures occasional sniffles, palimpsests of the tantrum that followed the ignominious exit from the food court. Above her left ear a thick dollop of chocolate ice cream dries into her hair. You will let Garrett wash it out at home while you go for a run. But that’s still a long time coming. Though the happy line whisks along, yours moves at a glacial pace. You snort. Glacial: an adjective not long for this world.

“What’s so funny?” Ella says. Each word plunks like a stone in a pond. What’s. So. Funny.

You’ve had it up to here with this attitude. All the parenting books you have read—borrowed from Dr. Carrie, or from friends, or bought at strangers’ recommendation—advise you to reason with children. Their authors never met Ella. They never saw her cock her bony hip like a full-figured woman. They never saw her smack her own forehead and cross her eyes because you are so stupid. They never heard her demand an explanation for a private joke, as though she were entitled even to your thoughts. Reason is useless. But you refuse to lose your temper again.  Ella thinks she is smart, grown up, because she can win a shouting match, cry crocodile tears. But there are other ways to get under her skin.

“Mummy’s just pwaying with words in her head,” you say. “You wouldn’t unduhstand, Schweet-hawt.”

Give yourself a hand. Mummy? Schweet-hawt? Genius. Originally, to humiliate meant to teach humility. You never wanted to humiliate Ella, not in the sense of embarrass. You wish she would simply humble herself. You wish she had looked at her bear yesterday morning and realized that whether or not it was her favorite gift, it was a nice and thoughtful one, worth keeping out of respect for you. Or at least waited until the gift was completely unwrapped to ask whether it could be exchanged. Or, for that matter, to have asked at all, rather than declare: “We’re returning this.”

But Ella ignored all these perfect opportunities to question, in the privacy of her own heart, her centrality to the universe. And that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? With the human race. This sick loop of conditioned desire. Who cares about the cobalt mines in the Congo or the sweatshops in Vietnam or the mountain ranges of trash in Brazil. Nothing matters except capital-W-R-N Want Right Now. Don’t think about how this cheerleading bear was made, or what will happen to it. Want it or throw it away. Well not Ella. Not after today. And if she won’t learn the easy way—and she won’t—then you have no choice. She left you with no choice.

“Don’t call me that,” Ella says. “And I would too understand, if it weren’t stupid. How do you even play with words? Words aren’t toys.”

When she said how do you even, she meant you can’t. Then whence, little one, comes the term wordplay?

“It’s something gwown-ups do all the time,” you say, “Punkin.”

Now you’re getting somewhere. Ella already, at eleven years old, believes she has nothing more to learn. That leaves her seventy-plus years to foist her ignorance on the world. Her baseless confidence in herself, her presumption to know, will destroy her soul and poison the lives around her. For her own good to break it, you paste on a wide smile.

“Don’t call me that. Stop talking like that.”

Her voice is shrinking. She keeps looking over her shoulders, as if someone behind her were pointing and laughing. You’re really on to something now. All of Ella’s posturing, her attitude and indignance, makes sense to you now. It’s all a pose, a performance for an audience she imagines forever to be watching just over her shoulder. An audience of her mean-girl friends, maybe, and her proto-jock crushes. And that’s no good either. Your daughter won’t live the life of a rapacious and ignorant fake. Not if you have anything to say about it.

“Talking wike what, honey-bun?”

“Stop it. Stop talking like I’m a little kid,” she says, and twists her hair into a creamy tangle around her finger.

You say, “But you awe a wittle kid.”

And she marches out of the store. By reflex you follow her, but stop. The tote bag won’t hold your place in line if you stray too far. The parents in both lines watch Ella disappear, look at you, and then pretend to mind their business. You stick your head out of Build-a-Bear and see Ella duck into a bathroom. She’ll be fine. Back in line you announce to the mom behind you, but really to the entire store, that when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.

The cheerleading bear has no sympathy for you. You stare down at her in your lap, on the bench outside the bathroom. Despite the splotch of chocolate on her uniform, she smiles like her team just won the big game. There is a shade of loathing in her joy. Now we can be together, taunts the sweet ursine face, forever and ever and ever. You stuff her deep into a trash can. As you sanitize, you see the bear’s future: the custodial cart, the dumpster out back, the garbage truck, the landfill. Long, slow decomposition. When will her smile fade? Will she wave her pom-poms on the day you die? On the day Ella dies?

At a nearby ATM you withdraw sixty dollars. That should be enough for Ella to buy herself whatever she wants for Christmas. She emerges from the bathroom as the machine spits out the cash. Her hair is wet and the dollop of ice cream is gone. You wave her down and wordlessly give her the three twenties. She wordlessly counts and pockets them.

Apparently exhausted by the day’s tribulation, she sighs. You’re burnt out too, but you can’t leave yet. Not until Ella gets her makeup, or her Cosmo, or a diaphragm, or whatever, depending on how old she thinks she is. You have no idea. You don’t even know anymore what you don’t know about Ella. But you’re interested to find out.

“Where to?” you ask.

She looks confused. “Home?” she says.

You point at the pocket with the cash. “Aren’t you going to buy something?”

She shrugs. “I don’t really want anything right now,” she says. “I was just going to save it.”

She turns for the exit, but you catch her shoulder.

“Sweetheart,” you say, but not to push her button; it just slips out.

You think she sees you wince, because she smiles as she rolls her eyes.

“What’s up?”

“Your hair is dripping,” you say. “Let’s get you a hat or something.”

She shakes off your hand and says, “Mom, it’s not even cold.”

You follow her outside. She’s right. The sun is shining. You’re a bit warm in your sweater.