Muffin Magic

Ben had Emma for the weekend, and after the birthday fiasco two weeks ago, he was going to make it up to her. Looking back now, he could almost laugh—how he’d put on a purple gorilla costume and lumbered into the backyard carrying a bunch of bananas only to have his daughter completely freak out. Then, in a moment of either brilliant parenting or simple incompetence, he’d taken the sheet cake with its purple gorilla face icing and flipped it upside-down so as not to further traumatize his kid.

Now, on the car ride home from the 4-H Fair, he gave her a banana for a snack. Then the alarm in his gut, but it was too late. What had he been thinking? Another point scored for incompetence.

He watched her in the rearview mirror, expecting her face to melt, but she only peeled the banana in silence and took a bite.

Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad parent after all.

It had been a long morning at the fair, her hand gripping his in the throng of people as they meandered from ride to ride. At each, he stood among the other parents watching the kids. The merry-go-round of miniature cars with their tired horns. The dragon-head roller coaster that barely rose or dipped, the kids uniformly unimpressed. The Frog Drop which lifted his daughter twenty feet high, then fell in a series of sudden, bouncing bursts. Another father had turned to him then. “That your kid?” he’d asked, amused as if they were in on a good joke. “She going to lose her lunch?”

Ben had been noting the same thing: a greyish green sheen to Emma’s face. Another point scored for his parenting decisions. He said, “A trip to the fair is never complete without a good puke.”

The dad laughed and Ben felt a rush of disgust: why was he tossing Emma and himself under the bus? He really wanted to tell the dad to mind his own business.

But Emma never threw up and, in fact, had been a trooper through it all. She’d sat on Ben’s shoulders and let him walk through the tents of canned fruit, the pens of ducks and chickens, the collections of immense pumpkins, zucchini, and yellow squash. She let dwarf goats nibble treats from her hand, patiently sat through the judging of dairy beef steers, and let a man lavishly dressed as a vagabond produce a cherry tomato from her ear and then feed it to her.

When they found a man completely spray-painted silver and frozen in place, Emma reached to touch him, but Ben caught her hand.

“No touching, just looking,” he said.

“But he’s not real.”

“He is. It’s a real person. Just pretending to be a statue.”

He tried to pull her away, but Emma wouldn’t budge. She stared at the man, waiting, entranced, her face a mix of hope and dread.

“We could be here a long time, sweetie. Come on. The guy’s not going to move.”

Suddenly, the man bent towards Emma, arms reaching to grab her. She shrieked, her body convulsing in utter terror as the man froze again. She battered against Ben’s legs, trying to climb him, then collapsed on the ground, her screams stuttered as if unable to breathe. When he lifted her, he found she’d wet herself.

He turned on the man. “Seriously? What the hell are you thinking? You idiot!” he shouted and shook a fist at the man as if he might use it.

The man was a true artist. He didn’t move, and Ben knew it was time to go.

Now in the car, Emma finished the banana, let the peel drop at her feet, and nuzzled into her car seat for a nap.

“Please, no sleepin’, Peepin’,” he said. Lately, she’d been dropping her naps, but when she did take one, bedtime was a prolonged mess. “Stay awake, and when we get home, I got a chocolate chip muffin with your name on it.”

When it came to ill-timed naps, he was never above bribery.

She closed her eyes. A minute later, her head was collapsed on her chest.

At home, he unbuckled her. “Uppy,” she whined, reaching for him. “Uppy, uppy.”

“Legs don’t work?” he said. “I thought naps were supposed to be restorative.”

She pressed her head against his neck, and he carried her inside, afraid she’d fall back asleep.

“Muffin,” she said. “Muffy, muffy.”

“Your memory still works.”

He got her situated at the table, cut the muffin in half, and brought it to her on her favorite rainbow plate.

Her mouth flattened, lips pressed together, eyes pinching shut.

“What’s with that look?” Ben asked. “You’re forgetting. A world in which chocolate muffins exist is a good world. No animals were harmed in the making of this muffin. No child labor laws broken.”

Her face pulled inward then, her mouth opening to this small, beautifully formed circle, and she howled a long, “Nooooo.”

It didn’t seem possible so much sound could come from that small opening.

She shoved the plate away, one half of the muffin skittering across the table.

“What? What is it?” he asked, but he knew. In fact, the moment he cut the muffin he’d sensed it was a mistake.

“I cut the muffin in half? Is that it?” he asked. “Look,” he said, and pushed the two halves together. “It’s whole again. You get the same amount. It’s still one whole muffin. Two halves equal a whole. Look,” he pulled the halves apart and put them together again as if performing a magic trick.

What she really needed, he thought, was a better grip on math. For a moment, he saw himself writing out the equation for her, this kid who didn’t even know how to write her numbers. He might as well be explaining quantum mechanics, whatever that was.

Still she screamed, her eyes shut, head thrown back. He wondered if she could even hear him over her wailing.

He waited for her to calm a little, waited for the right moment. He wished he’d bought himself a muffin, too. A backup muffin. The one thing he’d learned about parenting was the need for backups: backup sippy cups, backup clothes, even a backup for Bedtime Bear, the new Gund he kept on a top shelf sealed in a Ziploc which, if she ever discovered, would likely send her into hysterics, not to mention leave her with a lifelong fear of suffocation by plastic bag.

Really, what she needed most—and he, too—was a backup parent. Wasn’t that the real reason parents should stay together: to tag team?

But there was no tag-team parent, no backup muffin. His daughter was learning the hard way that you could count on life to always suck a little so that the real art of living was maintaining some humor about it all.

Emma was staring hard at her plate, her crying a quiet whimpering.

“Watch,” he told her. He found a rubber band and wrapped it around the two muffin halves. “See? Ta-da!” he said. “Magic.”

Her mouth quivered like she wanted to say something. Her eyes lifted to his, and something in Ben sank. He saw only betrayal in her face, a foretelling of his own future. She was barely four, and already she’d lost faith. As if it would do no good to hope he’d ever get it right.

(For a quick analysis of what’s really going on in “Muffin Magic,” check out the discussion here.)