Échappé

an outtake from CHOOSE THIS NOW, forthcoming from Noemi Press, 2024

By Nicole Haroutunian

When Berry refuses to let go of the bunched-up fabric of my skirt she has clenched in her fist, when she refuses to join the rest of the kids in her ballet class inside the studio, when she refuses to say what the problem is, I basically lose it.

I mean, I don’t, but sort of. I hiss, you love this class. What is the issue? Just get over there.

She stands frozen, her face impassive. I give her a little shove. Nothing. You’re a Not Scary Ghost! I say. Her small curly head pokes out of a hole I cut in a white crib sheet. I used iron-on letters to spell out NOT SCARY GHOST, per her request. It’s adorable. I try again. You have to go show the other kids your costume. It’s almost Halloween! It’s your special Halloween class! Look, Mario is dressed as a puppy! Look, Eliana is Elmo! Go.

She lifts a corner of her costume, sticking the sheet into her mouth and chewing. So, then I say, Do we have to leave? I turn around and walk toward the door. Usually this does the trick. Usually, she doesn’t really want to go. But today I guess she does because she just walks calmly toward the door right along with me. No digging in her heels. I hate myself for the tactical misstep. I give her one more chance to go in. Nothing. I have no choice; I have to follow through. That’s what the people on the internet say. She’s almost three; she can understand consequences. So, I grab her by the arm and tug her out the door. Now she’s crying. She was coming willingly; there was no reason for the tug. Behind me, fifteen caregivers avert their eyes.

I’m so mad, I’m vibrating—I feel it in my temples and in my teeth. But like Berry, I can’t quite articulate why. What is the problem with leaving dance class, exactly? I mean, there’s the money. The teacher is so good, she’s worth it, but it’s a feat of budgeting to make it work. As we skulk toward the stairs, I hear her guiding the tiny children through a series of moves, using the actual ballet words: plié, plié, échappé! We tried a dance class before this one where the teacher was all pizza-feet and diamond-legs and Berry, a purist, was appalled. I was fine échappéing that one. On the street, I look up at the holding-pen window, sure that there will be a row of parents up there watching me, watching to see if I’m still pulling Berry now that we’re outside, watching to see if she’s still crying. What a poorly behaved child, they’re thinking. Thank god my kid isn’t like that. What a poorly behaved mother. I don’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

On the ten block walk home, I catch sight of myself in the plate glass window of a shoe store. My hair looks ridiculous. I can see, even in the reflection, that I’m red in the face. I used to think this old, bedraggled look was a costume—new-mom-drag—and I’d cast it off, get back to normal soon enough. Now I wish I had a sheet over my head like Berry. Like those moms in the old photographs, sitting under blankets to prop up their kids for a studio portrait, a faceless piece of furniture. Except Berry wouldn’t stand for it. She doesn’t want me to dress like her. She’s vetoed all of my costume ideas. And I’ve let her!

We round the corner, almost to our place, and there at a charmingly off-kilter table at our local café, two women sit drinking their lattes, deep in conversation. In this window reflection, what I see on my red face is longing. The forty-five minutes while Berry is in dance class and I’m on the other side of the door, waiting in the adult holding area—the kids are two and three, so we’re supposed to stay on the premises in the event of potty needs or meltdowns or nosebleeds—those forty-five minutes are the only time during the week that I talk to other grown-ups. I work from home: before she wakes up, after she goes to bed, during copious amounts of screentime. I’m either with Berry or she’s at preschool—those precious two nine-to-three days a week—and I’m at my computer. That’s not really by choice, it’s by financial necessity. Or, financial privilege, or some combination of the two. It’s a privilege to work and be with her at the same time, is what I’m saying. It’s a privilege that no one called a social worker when I pulled my child by the arm from the dance studio like a monster. In any case, I used to have coffee with friends. Now I have forty-five minutes of dance class to talk to some people with whom most of what we have in common is kids the same age. But guess what? That’s enough!

I say all of this to Berry, who is two and three quarters years old.

We never go to this café ourselves because it’s too close to our apartment. I know if we do it once, we’ll never be able to pass it by without a meltdown again. I tell Berry that if you go there, they make you drink coffee, so each time we pass, she shouts, Coffee is NOT for kids! The last time I had an existential crisis in front of it was a mere two or three weeks ago. We were elbows deep in potty training. When Berry has to go, she has to go, and what a victory it is if she tells me with enough notice that I can whip out the travel potty, pre-loaded with a plastic bag. She said, Mama, time to pee! And all thrilled—even though, yes, we’d just left the house and she could have used the actual toilet there—I set up her commode on the sidewalk just behind a tree and then when she was done, I wiped her bum and gave her a high five. Then I realized that while she was behind a tree regarding the cars on the street, she was right in front of the café and this group of twenty-something guys were sitting there, noses scrunched. They were the kind of guys that, ten years ago, might have bought me a beer, might have actively tried to get me to go home with them at the end of a night of drinking. Now, they had no reason to notice me, generally, except when I had my kid pee right out in the open, a slim shield of glass between the bag of urine in my hand and their egg sandwiches. I wanted to think that, one day, they’d be where I was, too, but of course they wouldn’t be. They’d be at work.

We get to our building, haul up three flights, stagger through the door. I turn on Daniel Tiger because, although I don’t want to reward Berry and TV is still, somehow, a reward, I also really don’t want to deal. Within five minutes, she’s asleep on the couch. I wish I’d taken her costume off of her so it won’t be so wrinkled for actual Halloween next Wednesday. Watching her sleep, curled up and sucking her thumb, I remember how many times she showed up in our doorway last night, how she’s not going to bed earlier like she’s supposed to even though she dropped her nap, despite my best efforts to cling to it. She’s too tired for dance class. Too little to know that, unlike me. I text Taline. I am a terrible mother.

Awful, she responds.

I tell her what happened, how I behaved.

Wine?

I envy Taline, her wine. I’m too tired for wine. It makes me feel sick now. I have all the pre-Berry bottles of it lined up in the kitchen, little more than décor at this point. I curl up on the opposite side of the couch, across from Berry, bury my head in my arms. Maybe if I rest, too. But it’s like my bones are itching, like they want to climb out of my skin.

How would that be for a Halloween costume?

I try again. I match my breathing to Berry’s little snores. In and out. I press my feet against hers and she presses back, a small, sleepy dance. When she wakes up, I’ll ask: how about a pas de deux?

Here is the assignment, if you'd like: To deepen your understanding of a character you're writing about, imagine an "off-screen" moment they experienced before the events of the scene you're working on, open a new document, and put it down on the page. When you return to your actual project, you might find that you have a new way into the material.

Nicole Haroutunian is the author of the novel Choose This Now (Noemi Press, forthcoming 2024) and the short story collection Speed Dreaming (Little a, 2015). Her work has appeared in the Bennington Review, Post Road, Joyland, Tin House's Open Bar, and elsewhere. She is an editor of the digital arts platform Underwater New York, a cofounder of the reading series Halfway There, and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Woodside, Queens, in New York City.