Chinese Handcuffs

by Chris Crutcher

  It amazed her sometimes that she maintained as well as she did. She had read enough books and watched enough “Oprah” and “Donahue” to know she was probably badly emotionally damaged, but she often wondered how she’d ever been able to function at all. Generally credit for that went to her grandfather. Through all the hazy, indeed often blacked-out memories of her past, her grandfather stood strong and tall and clear. She had known what was healthy then, what was real.

  And there was Sarah, the therapist she had been sent to just before she turned six, after her real father was sent away. Sarah was a big, earthy woman, and the person most responsible for helping her six-year-old mind understand that what had happened with her father was not her fault, that because his late-night visits sometimes felt a little bit good, she was not bad. Sarah had actually joined Jennifer in her pain and rage and jumped over the cliff with her.

  “What do you want to be today, J. Maddy?” Sarah asks, and Jennifer looks around the room at the possibilities. Sarah has called her J. Maddy from the first day, over her mother’s protests, and that has helped J. Maddy feel strong. Sarah believes it is important for children to feel strong.

  “I want to be a baby,” J. Maddy says now in answer to Sarah’s question.

  “Whose baby do you want to be?”

  “Yours.”

  Sarah cradles J. Maddy in her arms like a forty-pound Baby Huey, handing her a bottle filled with juice, which J. Maddy puts in her mouth while she sinks into the powerful woman’s chest. Sarah rocks and hums and sings nonsensical songs for a few minutes, and J. Maddy immerses herself further into her. Then J. Maddy pulls away and says, “I don’t want to be a baby anymore.” Sometimes it feels so good just to be held again for a little while. It was hard at first because Mommy wouldn’t put up with it for a second and J. Maddy thought it was wrong—after all, she was six—but in Sarah’s room it’s safe, and nobody teases her or calls her names, and then after a while she feels strong and wants to go on to other things.

  “Let’s do noses,” J. Maddy says suddenly, crawling off Sarah’s lap as the bottle drops to the floor.

  “Who wants to do noses with J. Maddy?” Sarah asks, and all of the other five children raise their hands.

  “So get ’em,” she says, and the bathroom boy runs to the cupboard and pulls out a large blue plastic box filled with rubber noses with elastic bands to fit around your head so they’ll stay on, noses for every animal in the world and some that don’t really exist, J. Maddy knows, like the dinosaur noses.

  J. Maddy doesn’t call the bathroom boy that; she just thinks it. His name is Jeremy, and lots of times when he goes into the bathroom, he talks about how bad dads pee-pee on him and then throw him in the garbage. Sometimes he throws a fit when he talks about it, and then he’s not talking at all but screaming. The kids have played the “Bad Dad in the Bathroom” game over and over for Jeremy, and the bad dad gets handcuffed and thrown in jail behind paper bars in the playhouse, and sometimes he stays there and sometimes he kicks the bars away and comes after them. Jeremy usually plays the bad dad because it’s his game, but sometimes he wants J. Maddy to be it. It’s a hard game because sometimes it seems that nothing anybody does will keep the bad dad down.

  J. Maddy called Jeremy the bathroom boy once, and he punched her in the eye. “You can tell Jeremy you don’t like to be hit,” Sarah said, at which time J. Maddy screamed those very words at him. “And you can tell J. Maddy you don’t like to be called bathroom boy,” Sarah said to Jeremy, and Jeremy screamed it right back at her.

  It was understood.

  Today J. Maddy chooses alligator noses for everyone, and even though Michael wants the elephant nose, Sarah offers him the choice of wearing the elephant nose around his neck and the alligator nose over his face. That way, if there is emergent need of an elephant, Michael will be Johnny-on-the-spot.

  Sarah makes an alligator nest of paper sticks and other indigenous swamp material, and the kids begin to crawl around on their bellies, making huge alligator sounds that really sound more like lions and tigers. J. Maddy is the mother alligator, Jeremy is the daddy alligator, and the other kids are kid alligators. Jeremy can’t be in the nest because he hurts the kid alligators, but J. Maddy keeps going away to play or watch alligator television, and Daddy Alligator sneaks in and hurts the kids. Everyone knows J. Maddy’s alligator game because they’ve played it at least as many times as the bathroom game. The kid alligators scream and Mommy Alligator comes back and Daddy Alligator slinks off, but then Mommy Alligator goes off and Daddy Alligator thinks of a new way to sneak up on the alligator kids. Finally Gail, who is playing the J. Maddy alligator, bops Jeremy with a bad daddy beaner—a large foam rubber club—and all the other alligators roar and get foam rubber clubs of their own, and J. Maddy switches with Gail so she can be J. Maddy alligator and Gail turns into the mad mom alligator and everyone beats Bad Dad Jeremy into the “Everblades.” Then, to everyone’s glee, J. Maddy unveils Grampa Alligator. She has a beard from an abandoned Uncle Sam costume to go with her alligator nose, and when Mommy Alligator and all the kid alligators just can’t cut the mustard, Grampa Alligator takes over. It is understood that when Grampa Alligator shows himself, bad dads shake in their scaly boots. Only when she feels particularly powerful does she allow herself to call on Grampa Alligator.

  And that’s the way it is in J. Maddy’s life for months. All the kids in the group have had bad dads; some have had lots of them, and the children have games for each. Some also have bad moms, and there are games for them, too. Sometimes the moms win, and sometimes the dads win. But sometimes the kids win. It’s very hard work, but J. Maddy is starting to feel strong.

  After extensive work with J. Maddy’s mother, Sarah even sets up a time for J. Maddy to tell her mother how mad she is that her mother didn’t protect her. Her mother is able to tell her she is sorry, that it was her fault and not J. Maddy’s.

  It is such a relief.

  Over the next few months J. Maddy is able to tell her mother things she thought she would have to hold inside her forever. There are tears and pain and nothing is easy, and sometimes J. Maddy dreads going in because she has something she knows will make her mother feel really bad, but each time they stay with it until it’s all out in the open.

  And with Sarah and the other kids, J. Maddy flies. Sometimes they’re strong and sometimes they’re weak; but they’re always real and there are no lies, and Sarah just seems to join with them in every horror any kid wants to approach. J. Maddy loves Sarah, and she loves the other kids, and something in her heart is happy.

  And then it’s gone.

  J. Maddy and her mother go into a big room in a big building one day, and there are people in suits and they use a lot of big words that J. Maddy doesn’t understand; but it sounds like they’re telling her mother that she’s better now but that she should continue letting J. Maddy see Sarah, though she doesn’t have to.

  Linda promises that she will.

  But when she doesn’t have to, she doesn’t. J. Maddy doesn’t even really get to say goodbye to Sarah, her mother just keeps coming up with excuses not to take her, and pretty soon Sarah and the other children begin to fade into the dark caverns of her memory. Mom keeps promising to take her back, and she even hears her promise Sarah that on the phone one day; but they don’t go, and J. Maddy starts feeling tricked again. Good things always go away. She fights with her mother about it and one day even gets slapped for calling her a big fat liar. Her mother immediately bursts into tears when she hits J. Maddy, and J. Maddy takes care of her, telling her it’s okay and she won’t tell anyone.

  She jumped off with us, Jennifer thought, lying in the darkness. She remembered hating Sarah for a while because she thought Sarah was big and strong and powerful enough to come get her, to make her mother keep taking her back until she was finished. But no one could get through Linda Lawless’s inertia. She just faded away and couldn’t be touched. Sarah was powerful with Linda because Linda was isolated during
that time; there were no men around. But men began to show up shortly after the day the people told Linda she was better, men J. Maddy didn’t know, and though none of them really hurt her, many were strange and scary, and her mother left her alone in the house a lot to go with them.

  The time is coming, Jennifer thought, to remember what Sarah said to both me and my mother: that kids have an inalienable right to unconditional care, and parents who don’t give it are breaking a spiritual law. She remembered those words as if Sarah had spoken them yesterday. Someday soon, Jen would have to abandon her mom for whatever fate lay in store. She’d take Dawn, too, because no kids could live in the poisonous environment T.B. and her mother provided, no matter how much money there was. But someday soon she’d have to do what Sarah had told her a long, long time ago, seemingly in another world: Let her mother be responsible for herself.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dillon walked into the kitchen, where his dad sat reading the paper over breakfast. Caulder Hemingway looked up and smiled, sliding the sports section to Dillon’s usual spot at the table, and nodded toward the sink counter, where an open package of granola and a carton of milk stood waiting. “Didn’t get to the dishes,” his father said. “Have to rinse out a bowl for yourself.”

  “Need to get us a domestic,” Dillon said back, shoving a plastic bowl under running water in a semivaliant attempt to wash out the SuperBond-like remains of yesterday’s granola. He chiseled small bits loose with the handle of a spoon, semiseriously rinsed the bowl again, and filled it to the edges. “Surface tension,” he said, carrying it carefully to the table so as not to break the scientific seal restraining the milk from overflow. “We learned about it in fourth grade. Who says your educational tax dollars are going to waste?”

  Caulder Hemingway smiled and shook his head slowly, returning to the front page.

  Dillon ate a couple of bites of the granola, then laid his spoon carefully down beside the bowl. “Dad,” he said.

  “Hmmm?”

  “How come we never talk about Preston?”

  Caulder stared at him over the top of the paper, taken somewhat by surprise but considering the question.

  “Or Mom. And Christy.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t talk about them,” Caulder said, folding the newspaper in front of him. “I don’t talk about them because I don’t know what to say.”

  Dillon nodded slowly. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “Do you want to talk about them?”

  Dillon nodded again. “Yeah, I think I do.”

  His dad leaned forward, resting on his elbows. “Where do you want to start?”

  “I’m not sure. It just seems like three years ago we were a family of five and then three and now two, and nobody ever said anything about how it happened. Or how anybody feels about it. Mom’s same as you. When I go over there, she acts like she’s always lived there. Christy and I are the only ones who ever talk about it.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Well, she just wonders what happened, and I make up things to tell her.”

  Caulder smiled. “To tell you the truth, son, I’m a little like Christy. Most of the time I wonder what happened, too.”

  Dillon merely watched his dad, wishing he were as clear about where he wanted the conversation to go as he had been last night lying in bed thinking about it.

  “Much as I hate to say it,” Caulder went on, “this family thing kind of took me by surprise. I mean from the beginning. I always thought if I put food on the table, kept a roof over our heads, didn’t lose my temper too often, and set up a few family vacations, that I had the father part of this show pretty well covered.”

  “You did a lot more than that, Dad,” Dillon said. “Look at all the things we learned from you.” Dillon flashed back to nights in the distant past—back before grade school—lying out in the backyard under the stars, listening to his dad talk about time and space in a way he barely understood but utterly treasured, how the light that reached our eyes was really from long ago and that we could actually see back into the past by merely gazing upward on a starry night. When Dillon had pressed him, Caulder would say, “Just remember things aren’t always as they appear,” and let it go at that.

  “Look at the things you learned from me,” Caulder said. “I didn’t do as well by your brother. Or Christy.” Dillon’s father closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “He was the first, and I thought I had to do everything right, you know, make no mistakes with discipline and all that, and me just out of the service. Preston might just as well have been born into basic training.” He smiled a tired smile. “I left the humor out. If I had it to do over again, I’d do a lot of things different.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like paying attention. Like going with my instincts, tending to your mother.” He laughed a short laugh. “She used to say I didn’t care. She’d get all quiet, and I’d never ask what was wrong. She thought it was because I was ‘insensitive,’ as she put it, but really it was because I was scared there was something wrong. God knows I wouldn’t have known how to fix it.”

  “It must be tough at first,” Dillon said, “I mean, starting a family and everything.”

  Caulder laughed. “You wouldn’t believe it, my boy. I swear to God I must have thought people were like Disney animals. I used to watch those wilderness pictures about bears and lions and prairie dogs and the like, and those animals just had their babies and fed ’em for a while and whopped ’em alongside the head when they screwed up, and the babies grew up just fine—except for the ones that got eaten. I thought it was just natural to know how to be a dad and a mate.” He looked around the empty kitchen. “I was wrong. The thing, apart from opposing thumbs, that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is common sense. They got it; we don’t.”

  Dillon was moved that his father would talk with him like this. It was an experience he’d not had before—one he’d longed for, more than he had known.

  “You know, Dad,” he said after a few seconds of considering the possibilities of sending Stacy to the zoo for parenting classes, “we can still be a family, you and me. It’s not too late.”

  Caulder’s eyes softened, and he smiled slightly. “Yeah,” he said, “we can. It’s never really too late to build something. And Christy can be part of it, too, at least part-time. I made the mistake of thinking that since she was a girl, her mom should raise her. I cheated her out of a lot, and she knows it. I feel it sometimes when we’re together. I owe your sister.”

  Stacy walked into her dining room and slid into her seat beside Ryan, who sat in his high chair, eating the raspberry jam off the face of his toast. She put a hand out and caught his arm as he was about to turn the toast into a Frisbee, took it from him, and put it on her own plate. Her father was a late sleeper and would not be up this morning until long after Stacy had left for school, but her mother sat before a full breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast. She was a big, strong, round woman with energy enough to power the entire family, and she looked entirely capable of taking on surrogate motherhood at this late age of sixty-one. She had accepted Stacy’s pregnancy out of hand, with never a word of judgment or hint of rebuke. Stacy’s father had not been capable of quite so grand an acceptance of events but through his wife’s sheer will had been forced to accept not only the relationship with Preston as he watched it disintegrate into a narcotic fog over the months but the fact that Stacy would carry Preston’s baby to term and would refuse to give it up for adoption. Early on a serious rift had developed between Stacy and her dad over the situation, but time and relentless good-humored pushing by Mrs. Ryder had helped both Stacy and her father overcome it.

  Stacy lifted the lid over the frying pan and removed two poached eggs, skipped the bacon, and dropped two pieces of toast into the toaster. “I’m going to tell,” she said to her mother seated in the dining room. “Today.”

  “Tell what, dear?”

  “Who the drool king really belongs to,” Stacy said, m
oving to the doorway to catch her mother’s reaction, but Isabelle Ryder prided herself in never giving away startled inner responses.

  “Really,” she said. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “The longer I put it off,” Stacy said, “the more I’ll look like a fool when people find out. If it was a mistake, it’s mine, and I may as well start living with it.” Stacy had been awake most of the night, running the dialogue at Jackie’s over and over. There was more than what she’d heard, she was sure of that; Jennifer Lawless had been too pulled back, too reserved to be responding merely to Dillon’s revelations about Preston. But all that aside, Dillon had made a valiant effort to get to the truth of the world as he knew it, and Stacy appreciated that. Dillon had a certain dignity when he went off half cocked. That was the thing she had always missed in Preston: the ability to shoot from the hip while pretending you had taken great care to aim. As she had knelt next to Ryan’s crib following her second visit to his room that night to comfort him, she realized what was missing in her life. It wasn’t Preston—he’d been gone long before he was gone—it was humor. It was laughter. She remembered when, not so long ago, she had been joyful most of the time. That’s why she had always been such good friends with Dillon; he made her laugh. Preston owned her heart, but Dillon had laid claim to her spirit long ago. Since Preston’s death—since that bastard killed himself—there had been no more joy. And without the joy she had wedged Dillon out. Dillon was the Good Humor man, and she knew she had been turning away from him and all he stood for since the funeral. And since the baby—since the shame—there had been even less. What Stacy understood, kneeling there in the moonglow, gazing at Ryan—as joyful a creator of human waste as toddled the face of the earth—was that she didn’t really feel any of the shame, and she didn’t feel the sadness of Preston anymore either. She played at feeling those things because that’s what people—her parents included—expected. Peering through the wooden bars at Ryan, his fist crammed halfway down his throat, looking for all the world as if he were guzzling the contents of his arm, Stacy Ryder called a halt to her time of mourning. And she also called a halt to her time of lies. You can’t laugh when you lie because lies signify shame, and there is no laughter in shame.