Your family’s screen routines

Tiny Food

Marko, this one reached you through talking about what is watched. Here is a story about Rosa, who has her granddaughter every afternoon of the week.

Rosa has a plot in the community garden, the one with the beans. In early summer the beans have to be tied to their poles with string. It is a job for two hands, and there is no talking while you do it. June is seven. She comes to the garden straight from school every day, with her shoes in her bag and her grandmother's old phone in her fist.

June sits on the bench by the water tap and watches videos. In them a woman cooks real food that is far too small to eat. Rosa knows this much because she has walked past the screen a hundred times. She has seen little pans, a little loaf, a little knife and a pair of hands, and never a face.

The arrangement is fair. Rosa ties beans and June watches. Every so often June says something out loud, to nobody, about a golden pan or about a woman whose name Rosa does not know. Rosa answers "mm". She has been answering "mm" since Easter. It costs her nothing.

One warm evening the bells of St. Anne's are practising, and the sound carries across the railway cutting to the garden. June says something, and Rosa says "mm". This time she hears herself say it, and she does not like the sound of it.

So she puts the string down and sits on the bench, which is warm from the sun. "Show me the one with the bread," she says.

It takes a while. Rosa watches a pair of hands make a loaf the size of a thumbnail. Nobody speaks in the video. There is only music. Rosa asks which of the little dishes June would eat if she could. "The eggs, obviously," June says, and goes on to the next video. Rosa sits through part of that one too. Then she goes back to the beans, which have not tied themselves.

Elena comes to the gate for her beans and says the light is going. It is.

The next afternoon June is on the bench with the phone, and Rosa is at the poles with the string, exactly as before. But now, when Rosa wants to say something about the videos, she has a name for them. She uses it. The sentence goes out across the garden, and it lands or it does not land, the way sentences do.

The Margin

Marko, this one reached you through knowing what is used, and openly. Here is a story about Nate, who has his son with him for half of each week.

Most mornings Nate buys a paper newspaper at Ray's stand, under the green awning. In the evening he reads it at the table with a pen in his hand, because a man has to have something to do with his hands.

Ollie is eleven. He lives at Nate's apartment for the second half of each week. The apartment has one table. Nate's computer stands at one end of it, where Nate works. At the other end there is a placemat with a burn on it. Between the two ends there is room for a newspaper, and for an argument about a newspaper.

In February it is dark by the time Ollie comes in. He sits down at the computer end and plays a game online with other players. He wears a headset, earphones with a microphone, so that he can talk to them. For the first while he keeps his coat on. Nate reads at the other end. It is a good arrangement, and both of them know it.

Ollie says a name out loud. It is the name of one of the other players, who has just done something remarkable with a vehicle in the game. Nate has heard this name several evenings in a row. Tonight it very nearly fits into his crossword, the word puzzle in the paper. He has the pen in his hand anyway.

So he moves. He carries the paper and his coffee down to the burnt placemat, at Ollie's shoulder. He asks what things in the game are called. He writes the names in a column, in pen, in the margin of page four, under the crossword.

"Why are you writing that down?" Ollie says.

"Because I can't keep it in my head," Nate says. "And the settings on this computer are mine, the limits I put on it. You know the ones I mean."

"I know the ones you mean."

It costs Nate the newspaper, which he does not finish. It also costs him a full account of the vehicle, which he has to hear to the end. Some evenings he will take his coffee back to his own end of the table. That is how a week goes.

Ollie plays on, in the same chair, with the same headset. In the margin of page four there is a column of words in Nate's handwriting. They mean nothing to anybody else. By March they will mean nothing to Nate either. He has them anyway.

Behind the Vinegar

Marko, this one reached you through what can be switched on without asking. Here is a story about Lena, whose tablet lies where the whole family can pick it up.

The tablet lives on top of the bread bin. Nobody ever decided that. The bread bin stands next to a socket, and it is the only socket in the kitchen that is not behind the table. So the tablet is charged there, and it stays there, between the bread bin and the tin of teabags. It looks like something that has moved in.

Everyone uses it. Lena looks up bus times on it, because it is nearer than her phone. Cal, who is ten, has it in his hands before his chair is warm. Mara uses it for her homework and complains about it while she does. It belongs to the whole household, and nobody asks before taking it.

It is April and raining, and the first green is showing in the gutters of the roofs. Lena is putting the good scissors away. They go in the cupboard over the kettle. That cupboard is for things that get lost if they are left out. She stands there with the cupboard door open and the tablet in her other hand.

She puts the tablet in. It fits, behind the bottle of vinegar.

It stays there until the evening. Then Lena wants the bus times for Saturday. She wants the good bus, the one that goes out to her mother's. She takes the tablet down, looks up the times at the counter, and leaves the tablet on the counter. Cal finds it there and carries it to the table. The chair is not warm yet.

Lena thinks about the cupboard while she does the washing up. If the tablet lives behind the vinegar, somebody has to take it down every time, and that somebody is her. She would be one more door in her own kitchen, and her week is already all doors. If it lives on the bread bin, then it lives on the bread bin. She knows exactly what that looks like. She has been looking at it for years.

By Friday the tablet is back on top of the bread bin. Some things stay where they are. The big clock at Union Station has run two minutes fast for years. Nobody has fixed it, and it has never once made Lena early.