The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind . . .1
There was a towheaded boy in a picture in the hallway at Grandma’s house. It was a little mysterious, as no one in our family looked like that. Who could this blond boy be, when everyone else had raven’s hair? My brother and I used to scour the floorboards and bookshelves and closets for any kind of mystery at all – the bronze-cast shoes on the bookshelf, the small door on the outside of the house, the depths of closets suspiciously closed. Whether the clues were made-up or real, it didn’t matter to us - which meant that the picture of a mysterious, blond boy was a clue we Nancy Drews couldn’t pass up. Where was this blond boy? I used to stare at the picture and wonder.
You told me once that Where the Wilds Things Are was your favorite book as a child. You were a crazy kid, the kind that made your mother go to bed in tears. (Although, as a mother, I can tell you that it doesn’t take much. It’s just that we care so consumedly. A mother’s child is her responsibility to raise, and she feels this weight like an ache in her bones, both tender and painful. Because your mom is a great mother, she felt that mother-fear strong, and it made her cry. It was depth of love that did it.) But, you did break through fences with go-carts; and you lit yourself on fire once when you spilt gasoline by the water heater, and your dad had to jump through flames to grab you. These are called mistakes. Sometimes willful, sometimes not. This is the way of children. You were that crazy wolf suit boy pounding nails where they didn’t belong, hammering at them stubbornly and fiercely. That’s your nature: fierce.
That very night in Max’s room a forest grew . . .
Humans are complex bodies of lit neurons that fire off in all directions. Like fireworks set off on a cliff face, arcing in the sky and blooming over the water: they explode. This display is either brilliant or terrifying, depending on the direction in which they’re pointed. Your favorite firework, when pointed to jettison toward you, is a dangerous explosion.
You have a pitted scar on your wrist where that dog bit you. The dog belonged to a vicious neighborhood boy. You said the boy saw you walking by and sicced his dog straight on you; obedient to the call, the dog lunged at you and sunk his teeth into the soft flesh around your hand.
You said, too, that the kids at school used to call you “the brain.” To me that sounds like a compliment, but you knew those kids better than I. And you didn’t take mean jokes from anybody. Maybe you looked like a nerd, maybe you were smart like a nerd, but you fought like a wolf suit boy.
. . . until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around . . .
Your mom has great stories from her time as a nurse in the back hills of West Virginia. In one story, she rollerblades down the halls of the boarding house where she and the other nurses lived. When the girls heard someone coming, they’d roll into their room and jump into bed - sheet shushing, roller-skates plonking against bedrails - and they’d throw their covers over their shoulders as if they were sleeping. At least some of your wild comes from her.
In another story, your mom remembers being called into a school. The girls there had been taking one of their classmates into the bathroom and forcibly running her under the shower. Your mom wouldn’t say, but the girl must have just started to be a woman and didn’t know how. “It should have been handled different,” your mom said.
Back then, they let the nurses deal with these things, so your mom’s job was to call on the girl’s family and help things out if she could. Your mom said that as she was going into the hollow to visit the family, there was the girl’s dad on the porch, having seen her at a distance, waiting with a shotgun. “What those girls did was wrong,” he called out. “I know,” she said. And that was it. Your mom wanted to talk, he didn’t, and she had to walk away. “Wasn’t nothing I could do.”
I always think about that father. He was something of a wolf suit boy. What would have happened if he could have stopped and seen he was cared for? That the pain he found was the outer working of a system trying to serve him. The nature of a broken world was spilling forth, but he didn’t recognize the source of the problem. He had a fierce desire to protect his daughter – a mighty defense against would-be attackers. But, of course, a defense strategy is only effective if it’s armed against the real enemy. Your mom wasn’t the enemy. Sometimes, for all of us, our fiercest responses aren’t directed toward the source of the problem, and we burn the ones we love the most.
Wild Thing and King | Picture by Maurice Sendak
And Max the king of all wild things was lonely . . .
You love the book, so you know what the wolf suit boy wanted more than anything else . . .
. . . to be where someone loved him best of all.
Isn’t that the best ending to this book? The wolf suit boy forsakes the wild things, gets into his little boat, and sails back through time and trouble to return to the place he was so desperately trying to escape. And this is the sign of his being loved – a meal. Personally, I picture breaking bread and pouring wine.
My son loves this book now, and he’s his own kind of wolf suit boy. You’ve always felt a kinship with him. Like meeting like. Just like you, my son is pounding at nails everywhere. Every once in a while, his own finger gets the pounding, and he howls for comfort in his distress. As his parents, his dad and I are right there, running to scoop him up. He might have been a right hooligan, but, sheesh, when he calls for us, we’re coming. We’d eat him up—we love him so!
In the end, more than the wild and the willful, this is the real tell of a wolf suit boy: that even after he travels past a thousand days and nights to the furthest lands unknown, after his hair turns from blond to black—raven black—and he sits in loneliness long, that even there the boat stays tethered. He may come home. And when he does, he will know he is loved.
All of the italicized quotes are directly from or adapted from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Wonderful writing as always, Mary, with beauty, mystery, insight--all wrapped into one delightful read. You brought to mind our own wolf-suit boy. Long ago he created mischief with a true innocent's heart. Seems he never realized until after the fact that his choices could go terribly wrong. And then, all too soon, his creative little mind would be working on what he might try next, rarely stretching himself to consider the consequences. (Thankfully we only had to take him to the ER once!) But ah yes, as his parents, we certainly could have eaten him up, we loved him so. Now he's grown, the mischief has nearly disappeared--except for the twinkle in his eye.