The Child by Sarah Schulman Page B

took out four
Mallomars. Eva wouldn’t want any. Mary could eat them all. Eva didn’t like junk food. She was afraid of it. “He thinks if the audience can’t tell from the start who in the play they’re supposed to care about the most, they’ll get mad. But I don’t think that way. I refuse to be back-story, but I know I’m not the only story. Do they?”
    That sounded good. She’d made her point clearly–if anyone was smart enough to get it. Mary stuffed a whole cookie into her mouth, thereby freeing her hands for the more pressing task of typing out that phrase on her keyboard. She’d savor the next Mallomar. This one had been a martyr to the larger cause.
    “I’m totally fucking up this bicycle.”
    “Lift the chain, Eva. You’re gonna get greasy, it’s unavoidable. There’s no other way to fix it.”
    “You’re always so sure,” Eva said admiringly, lifting the chain. She got greasy and fixed the bicycle. “It works. I’m like the audience–I get nervous. I just watch and wait, wondering what I’m supposed to feel, supposed to do.”
    “But it’s your life .”
    “But it feels like it’s taking place in their world.”
    “Eva, art creates worlds.” Mary reached for the chocolate milk. “It makes everything possible. If what I’m offering the audience is truly transforming, the rules should not matter.”
    “Perfect. You were so right. Want to go biking?”
    “No way. You almost get killed three times a day on that bike. I can’t bicycle in New York City. I’d never survive. Bikes are for the country.”
    “But, honey,” Eva absentmindedly rubbed the grease all over her clothes, “when are we ever in the country? You just have to watch out for car doors opening.”

    “I don’t want to,” Mary said. “I don’t want to think about car doors when I’m riding a bike.”
    “Mary, you’re dropping cookie crumbs on your keyboard.”
    “Oh shit.”
    “Dreamer.” Eva smiled as she went out for a ride. No helmet. Wrong way down a one-way street. Riding on the sidewalk.
    Like she had her whole life.

8
    Daniel Wisotscky, Certified Social Worker, aged sixty-six, had been logged on to his computer for three solid days exploring America Online. He was still angry about having to learn the computer, but the Mulcahey family’s case made it finally essential. What Wisotscky found on the Internet shocked him, in spite of forty years as a mental health professional and twenty years as County Family Counselor for Van Buren Township.
    The first truly upsetting thing that Wisotscky uncovered was the Hairy Chest Page. This was a site for homosexual men, and, presumably, heterosexual women, with advanced fetish compulsion toward men with hairy chests. Wisotscky had previously been aware of a wide range of sexual fetishes, such as “pregnancy pornography,” featuring pregnant models. He’d also discovered online images of naked women shaving their pubic hair and ones of women being rained on. However, there was a strange ironic stance to the Hairy Chest Page that he found particularly grating: it had no shame. It was like making a fetish out of a Bic pen.
    Wisotscky found this idea to be terribly disturbing. Not only did the site show full-frontal nudes of hairy men that any child could download, but the designer of the Web page also made available a fifteen-thousand-example annotated listing of all the moments in American and European cinema in which an actor bared a hairy chest. It was insane.
    Wisotscky noted that there was a new arrogance behind deviant sexual behavior in the computer age. There was a flagrant
ingenuity; almost a smirk. The next site he went to was dominated by the image of a young male child orally sodomizing an adult. It was more old-fashioned and made clear to him that the electronic light field of the computer was hypnotic. This, combined with the easily accessible lurid imagery, could convince any child to participate, unwittingly, in the complex trappings laid by a