Even though I still can’t see him, I know that Teddy is horrified at the mention of his name, which is not even really his name, since Vogel is my last name, and Teddy’s last name is Flynn, Gary’s last name, but the school, irrepressibly progressive, insists on allowing teachers to call children by the mother’s surname instead of the father’s, even if the names aren’t hyphenated, whenever they want to. I can feel myself start to bristle—a school should call a child by their given name, not a politically correct interpretation of what their name could be, right?—when I realize Mr. Noah is coming to the end of his brief parent-intro and that in seconds it will be time for me to get up and speak. I pull out my old dog-eared copy of Bird from my bag, the one I used to read from when I still did readings, and pick a few pieces of stray dog hair from my sweater.
“. . . so here’s Judy Vogel to tell us all about writing children’s books!”
I hug the sling as Mr. Noah waves at me to come forward, out of the shadows. When I’m standing next to him, I realize that he is indeed wearing a bib—made from terry cloth, with a little lamb on it. Maybe he wears one first thing in the morning with the preschoolers? He points at the sling.
“Teddy didn’t mention there was a new baby!”
“There isn’t.” I finally find Teddy in the crowd, and as soon as I do I almost wish I hadn’t. His face has crumpled into misery. “It’s a dog,” I whisper.
“A dog-baby! How adorkable is that?” he coos, and just as I’m about to start nervous-talking about the dog and how much I love wearing her and how she’s helped get me through a difficult time, I watch Teddy sink into the crowd and disappear, like he’s fallen backward into a dark lake that has swallowed him up whole. I want more than anything to find him and apologize for embarrassing him, but instead I pull something else out of my bag: a Bird on Your Head knit Peruvian-style hat that was part of the official promotional merchandise for the book and animated television series. I take a deep breath and put the hat on over my hair, tucking the long strands behind my ears and letting the multicolor yarn ties fall straight along the sides of my face. Then I step forward to start my presentation.
That’s when the doors to the all-purpose room fling open and a teacher runs into the crowd. Her hands form a frantic T—for time-out. “We need you upstairs right away, Mr. Noah!” she yells in a panicked screech. “It happened again!”
Mr. Noah turns and stares at her across the sea of student bodies. His mouth drops open into a horrified O. “Again??” he says, before chasing her through the crowd and out the doors toward the middle school, his crepe-soled shoes squeaking on the polished wood floor as he flees.
* * *
The interruption of my “talk” before it even starts proves to be a total buzzkill to the crowd, and to me, and I can’t help feeling annoyed that what I assume is nothing more than a clogged toilet or maybe a mouse in one of the middle school classrooms couldn’t have waited until I finished. Rattled by the teacher’s dramatic entrance and Mr. Noah’s even more dramatic departure, I stand there for a few silent seconds with the stupid Peruvian bird hat on my head, staring out at all the children, who are looking at me expectantly. My presentation, if you can even call it that, lasts no more than five minutes—just long enough for me to explain that my book was essentially a “weirdness manifesto” about “embracing difference,” and that I’d written it because my mother always used to look at me like I was the strangest person on earth—“like I had a bird on my head.” When it’s clear they have no idea what I’m talking about, I try reading from a page tagged with an ancient Post-it note:
“Why are you wearing orange tights with a purple skirt?
Why not a girl’s blouse instead of a boy’s shirt?
Why don’t you color instead of playing with dirt?” my mother always said,
Looking at me like I had a bird on my head.
“There’s a bird on my head! A bird on my head! But I love my bird!” is what I said.
Crickets. I don’t understand the logic of having a parent or grandparent or beloved guardian speak to an audience having such a large spread of ages—how could you possibly appeal to everyone? What might be mildly interesting to thirteen-year-olds will be excruciatingly dull to eleven-year-olds and incomprehensible to six-year-olds. I might just as well be speaking in tongues.
Once I’m done, and once I open it up to questions—and get none, which surprises me, since all they ever told us when we started at the school was how curious and inquisitive Montessori kids are—I’m instantly overcome by a strange combination of humiliation and relief. Just the way I was when I did painfully underattended bookstore events for my second and third books—Stop Doing That! and Why Don’t You Like Me Anymore?—all I wanted to do was leave.
This morning I speed-walk with my arm under the sling through the school’s hallways, which are festooned with student artwork (Who I Am: A Self-Portrait Project is clearly the current unit, which I have mixed feelings about—isn’t this generation self-referential enough?) and fake-talk into my phone past the library to preemptively avoid real-talk with anyone who might try to engage me in conversation. I pass a TUITION DUE! sign on the window of the main office and ignore Grace, the combination business manager, Spanish teacher, and after-school program director, who’d summoned Mr. Noah and interrupted my presentation earlier and who is now practically falling over herself waving at me through the glass, trying to get my attention.
I put my phone away, give a mom walking toward me a big aggressively smiley “Hi!” because she’s staring at the sling, and then at me, like I have a bird on my head, and am about to storm through a side door onto the playground. Just when I think I’m safe, I feel the poking: first on the arm, then on the shoulder. I close my eyes and try to collect myself before turning around to face Grace, who has somehow managed to catch up to me.
“Boy, you’re fast!” I say, hoping that opening with an aggressive compliment will help me stall for time. “And you’re not even winded!”
“I run.” Grace shrugs matter-of-factly. “Marathons.”
“Seriously? That’s impressive.” She is wearing a fleece zip-up with the Morningside Montessori logo and a nylon knapsack loaded with hot and cold reusable beverage containers in both side mesh compartments.
Another shrug. “Not really. I used to have an eating disorder but now I run. Which means I just traded one obsession for another.”
I blink, then smile, trying my best to lean into the awkwardness.
“I’m sorry,” Grace says. “TMI.”
I laugh out loud. “Are you kidding? You’re talking to someone wearing her dog in public. I’m the embodiment of TMI. Which means I’m the one who should be slinking away in shame.” But instead I’ll just stand here and endure my shame, hoping you take the dog-bait and forget to ask about our overdue tuition.
“And I’m sorry about the interruption this morning.”
“Yeah, what was that all about?”
“I can’t say.”
“Really?”
“No. I can’t. Privacy issues.”