I rocked back on my heels, made an about-face on the sidewalk, and I realized I was a baby with an object permanence problem. It took effect as soon as the tardy bell toned. I was alone on this side of the school doors, the flat, flat school yard empty. My child was on the other side of the school doors, but it was like she was gone.

I’m going to fail to explain this the way that a baby can’t explain an object permanence problem. It’s a problem not because the object has ceased to exist but because one’s hold on it has become impermanent. My child crossed a threshold that morning, and she disappeared from my understanding of the world. 

I had seen the desks, in little pods of four. I met the teacher, a Mrs. S, a veteran of the second grade set, before the year started, and I’d always liked the school. I knew where she went from the moment she got in the building. But there was something about that pair of double doors, Entrance 11, that was pulling a trick on me. The slant of light was part of it. I watched my daughter’s blonde head pass through the first set of doors, I could see the panels of all their backpacks stamped with characters and cartoons and all their favorite things, and then they were gone. From the school yard, the shadows fell just so on that second set of doors. 

I hadn’t stood there long, just until I couldn’t see her anymore. She crossed that threshold, and something changed on my side of the doors. By the time I spun around, I was alone at a party, no host in sight, nothing to clue me into what exactly it was I’d been invited to anyway.

I hurried back across the length of a soccer field and off school property.

I walked home alone and wondered whether all those sprinklers had been on just ten minutes earlier, on the way to school. They must have been. The street was wet at the edges with runoff. The water had been on the whole time, it must have been, but things tend to seem different going than coming, don’t they? What else was I missing? A sprinkler head snapped back and soaked my feet in my sandals. I shuffled a little, to not fall in the slick that snuck up on me.

Well-meaning mothers had tried to warn me about time, all the tricks that time would play on me. The sleepless nights that would never end, and the years that would fly by. My coworkers pinned me to the wall in the hallways to repeat these things. It sounded so rehearsed, I took the cliches for just that. True, and annoyingly true, but never the whole story. 

So was this what they wouldn’t say? That space would play tricks on me, too? I’d take my child to school, the most ordinary thing in the world, and I’d wonder suddenly who I was with her and without her and where am I and what was I supposed to do with my hands on the walk home? Maybe my arms had never swung before at all. Maybe they had always swung. She would learn to walk and I’d forget somehow and fall on a flat sidewalk taking myself home.

I didn’t solve it on that walk. I still don’t know what’s up with those doors. The other parents and I had shrugged and rushed and did  “oh my, the weather” at each other, but what happens when someone passes through your life and it changes?

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