Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

  “The stupid remote. Where the heck did it go?”

  For the same reasons that she sought out Claire and Amy, Kathy tended not to confide in her mother when she was feeling angry or exasperated with Todd. Marjorie’s first impulse was not to defend her son-in-law or to reassure her daughter about the choices she made. Her inclination, conscious or not, was precisely the opposite: to sow discord, to exaggerate the significance of whatever it was that was bothering you, and ultimately, if she could manage it, to pull you down into the swamp of her own unhappiness, just so she could have a little company.

  Kathy’s father, Rick, had jumped ship after three kids and sixteen years of wedlock, not for a younger, sexier woman—which would have at least been understandable on some pathetic, totally clichéd level—but for a sickly neighbor five years Marjorie’s senior. The humiliation of that—of being traded in for Gail Roberts, a middle-aged divorcee with a smoker’s hack and orthopedic shoes—had done permanent damage to Marjorie’s psyche, scarring her with the bone-deep conviction that men were liars and marriage a cruel joke, the punch line of which always came at the expense of the unsuspecting wife.

  “There,” said Marjorie, as the TV went mute in the background. “That’s better. So how’s my little guy?”

  “Great. He’s sleeping right next to me. What a cutie.” Kathy gazed down at Aaron, who was shirtless, wearing only a pull-up. His rib cage looked frail beneath the taut skin, his limbs scrawny and delicate. And yet it was oddly easy to imagine him stretched out and bulked up, a fully grown man, as strong and handsome as his father. “What are you watching?”

  “E.R. just started. School bus went into a ditch.” Marjorie clucked her tongue, as if reacting to an actual disaster. “What a mess.”

  “I can call you back when it’s over.”

  “That’s okay. I saw this one already.”

  Kathy kept quiet, waiting for her mother to pose the inevitable next question.

  “So where’s Todd?”

  “Out.”

  “I’m surprised the library stays open this late.”

  “Oh, he’s not at the library,” Kathy reported. “He’s playing football with his buddies.”

  “Football?”

  “He joined some kind of team. They play tackle without pads.”

  “But it’s ten o’clock.”

  “You should have seen him before he left the house. Couldn’t eat dinner, couldn’t carry on a normal conversation. All worked up, like he’s playing in the Super Bowl.”

  “Did you say tackle?”

  “No helmets or anything.”

  “He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t break his neck.”

  “If he does,” Kathy said, “he better not come crying to me.”

  In the pause that followed, Kathy flashed on a strangely vivid image of Todd in a wheelchair, his mouth open wide, waiting for Kathy to feed him another spoonful of baby food.

  “Can I ask you something?” Marjorie said. “Do you think he’s having an affair?”

  “An affair?” Kathy scoffed. “He joined a football team.”

  “Honey,” Marjorie said, affecting a tone of world-weary patience. “It’s just a smoke screen. Nobody plays football at this time of night.”

  “These idiots do. He comes home drenched in sweat, scrapes, and bruises all over his body.”

  “If you say so. But do you remember when your father took up golf? He bought a new set of clubs and started getting up at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings? Well, it turned out he wasn’t spending much time on the golf course.”

  “It’s not an affair I’m worried about, Mom. Something’s wrong with Todd. He doesn’t talk about the future anymore, doesn’t even like to think about it. It’s like he’s stuck in place, like he doesn’t even realize that his life is slipping away from him.”

  “Do you want me to come up for a visit? I could keep an eye on him while you’re at work, make sure he’s staying out of trouble.”

  Kathy scrunched up her face and raised her middle finger to the phone. She should’ve known it was hopeless to try and have a serious conversation with her mother, one that would require her to imagine a world in which not every man was as heartless and deceitful as her ex-husband. And even he was hardly the monster Marjorie made him out to be. For all his faults, her father had built a loving and long-lasting relationship with Gail, nursing her through the twin afflictions of emphysema and chronic arthritis. Whenever she visited them, Kathy was touched to see how he fussed over that poor woman, fiddling with the pressure on her oxygen tank, making sure the plastic tubes were properly situated in her nostrils, holding her hand as she sat gasping for breath on the couch.

  “You know what, Mom? I shouldn’t burden you with this stuff. It’s not like you don’t have troubles of your own.”

  “That’s okay,” Marjorie said cheerfully. “It’s no burden. I’m happy to help.”

  The Auditors’ middle linebacker started talking trash during the very first series of the game. He was an angry slab of muscle—five-ten or so, maybe two-twenty—with a buzz cut and a demonic-looking goatee.

  “Sweetheart.” The linebacker waved to Todd as the Guardians broke their huddle and approached the line of scrimmage. “Over here.”

  Todd ignored him, glancing left and right to make sure his teammates were set. It was third and eight. The linebacker amplified his wave, crossing his arms overhead, as though signaling to a rescue helicopter. The sleeves of his T-shirt had been ripped off to expose the barbed-wire tattoos encircling his grotesquely pumped biceps.

  “Did you shave your pussy for me?”

  Todd gestured to DeWayne, moving him farther toward the sideline. With fourteen players on a regulation field, there was a lot of open space to work with.

  “You know I like my bitches smooth.”

  “Green 42! Green 42!” Todd shoved his hands up against Larry’s ass in anticipation of the snap. “Hut! Hut!”

  He faked a handoff to Bart Williams, then bootlegged to his right, glancing around the secondary while waiting for DeWayne to make his cut to the middle. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the linebacker slice past Larry, who was no match for his speed and strength. Hearing footsteps, Todd rushed his throw, releasing an off-balance wobbler that he knew would fall short. He didn’t actually see it land; the linebacker crashed into him while the ball was still in midair. Todd heard himself whimper as he slammed into the turf.

  “You’re cute,” the linebacker said, using Todd’s skull for support as he stood up. “Wanna have my baby?”

  Todd was still lying on the ground, gasping for air when Larry came rushing over to help him to his feet. Blushing with embarrassment, he squeezed Todd’s shoulder and brushed off the front of his shirt with the brisk efficiency of a valet.

  “My fault. I missed my block. It’s not gonna happen again.”

  It went downhill from there. Sometimes you were simply over-matched, dominated by the opposition. Todd remembered the feeling well from his high school and college days; it was like a waking dream where nothing your team did seemed to have any effect. Your guys hit the other guys, but the other guys don’t fall down. Perfectly thrown passes squirt through the hands of your butterfingered receivers; your opponents make impossible catches, as if their palms are covered in Velcro. The Guardians fumbled pitchouts, shanked punts, blew their coverage. The Auditors just kept marching up and down the field at will, methodically eating up the clock.

  After a while you stop worrying about the score and start worrying about your dignity. For Todd, this meant defending himself against the linebacker, who seemed to be everywhere on the field and had begun pushing the prison bitch motif to unpleasant extremes. He complimented Todd’s pretty mouth, groped his ass in the pileups, and repeatedly offered to show him a good time under the bleachers after the game.

  “I’ll love you nice and slow, honey. Not like those other slobs.”

  Because each team had so few members, there were no subs, not even for i
njuries; everyone had to play both ways. On defense, Todd was the free safety, a position that gave him lots of good opportunities to tackle the linebacker—he doubled as fullback for the Auditors—or at least take a crack at him after someone else had brought him down. A knuckle in the nose here. A knee in the spine there. Was that my elbow in your gut? The more shots he took, the looser he started to feel, until he got to the point where he was throwing his body around without reservation, as if hurting the other guy were more important than not hurting himself, which was, of course, the secret to playing good football.

  And then he got it: the play the safety dreams about. His enemy cutting across the secondary, leaping for a badly thrown pass, arms stretched overhead, midsection exposed, defenseless. Todd leapt too, going for the man, not the ball, two large bodies smashing together at high speed, like atoms in a collider, his shoulder catching the other man right in the breadbasket, just below the rib cage. Ooof! The sound of air escaping a container, a bag squeezed flat. They both went down; only Todd got up.

  The loudmouth linebacker lay flat on his back, gulping like a fish on the thirty yard line. Todd didn’t do a celebratory dance or anything like that. He just bent down, until his face was a couple of inches from the linebacker’s, and gave the man’s cheek an affectionate pinch.

  Todd had played football long enough to know that there’d be a price to pay for such a sweet moment, and he paid it two series later, when the enraged linebacker blindsided him on second and long, wrapping him in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet, and slamming him into the earth with a savage pile-driver tackle worthy of World Wrestling Federation. Arms pinned uselessly to his sides, Todd had no choice but to break the fall with his face. He left a fair amount of skin on the artificial turf—it felt like granite covered with sandpaper—and was surprised to discover that his teeth were still planted in his mouth.

  He was lying in a fetal position, whimpering like a little dog as the linebacker squatted above him, beating his chest and roaring like Tarzan. Todd kept his eyes open, hoping to fend off whatever cheap shot was coming next, so he got a good view of Larry Moon calmly walking up to the linebacker and delivering a right hook to the side of his head, a good solid sucker punch that knocked the King of the Jungle right off his feet. The game was called on account of the brief brawl that ensued, the victory going to the Auditors, 26–0.

  Kathy lay wide-awake in the dark, her hand resting on Aaron’s shoulder, rising and falling with the gentle rhythm of his breath. She still felt guilty about going behind Todd’s back, complaining about him to her mother, of all people. Marjorie had never come out and said it in so many words, but she’d never really liked Todd or accepted him as a member of the family. She was suspicious of his good looks and winning personality, both of which she considered to be serious liabilities in a husband—the average-looking dullards were enough trouble, as she’d learned from bitter experience—and weirdly gratified by his inability to pass the bar exam, as if she had known all along that he wasn’t quite up to snuff. Kathy must have been angrier with him than she’d realized, to betray him to his enemy like that.

  What made it even more self-defeating was the fact that she hadn’t even told her mother the truth. She’d made it sound like it was the football that was bothering her, the sheer physical recklessness of the game, the possibility that Todd might be seriously injured on the playing field, throwing their already complicated domestic arrangements into complete disarray.

  But that wasn’t the issue. Kathy wasn’t one of those timid people who believed that a life worth living could—or even should—be risk-free, purged of any chance of a bad outcome. She understood that sometimes you needed to do something crazy, even potentially self-destructive—ride a motorcycle, jump out of an airplane, play tackle football without a helmet—to remind yourself that you were alive and not just cowering in the basement, waiting for the storm to blow over. She had compiled a substantial list of foolhardy things she was planning to do the moment her last child went off to college—traveling to a war zone was right at the top of it—and she wasn’t about to condemn the thrill-seeking urge in anyone else, especially the man she loved.

  No, the thing that really annoyed her about Todd joining the football team was how transparently happy it made him. The past couple of weeks he’d been a different person, as if he’d finally served eviction papers to the grim stranger who’d been living in his skin all spring, trudging dutifully off to the library every night, trudging dutifully back home. Ever since he’d hooked up with the Guardians, he’d been smiling more, listening when she talked, asking about her work. She could even see it in the way he moved—he was energized, lighter on his feet, as if he’d been magically reunited with his younger self, the carefree boy she’d fallen in love with in college. It should have pleased her to witness this transformation, but instead it filled her with shame and sadness, made her realize how much pressure he must have been feeling to live up to a vision of himself that had never really been his own.

  I did that to him, she thought. I sucked the life right out of him.

  She was the one who’d encouraged him to go to law school, despite his grave and frequently expressed doubts about his fitness for the profession, and she was the one who’d insisted that he give the bar exam one final shot, make one last good faith effort to pass the test before giving up on a career into which he’d put so much time and effort. At any point in the past six months she could have set him free with a single word, released him from his private hell of failure, but she hadn’t done it.

  She hadn’t said the word.

  It was because she was a coward, Kathy understood that, a selfish person who wanted to have it both ways—wanted to live the interesting life of an artist without accepting the unpleasant financial sacrifices that usually came along with the package. She had friends from film school, people in their thirties, who were still living in run-down apartments in Brooklyn and Somerville—with roommates!—deferring marriage and children, scraping by without health insurance or dependable cars, still trying to nurse their youthful dreams of making honest, noncommercial, socially conscious movies, dreams that were becoming more and more unlikely with each passing year.

  Kathy, by contrast, had chosen the path of compromise and accommodation, working her way up the public television food chain, from lowly PA to sound technician to editor to assistant director, putting in impossibly long hours on remarkably dull projects (“Part Four of A-Pickin’ and A-Grinnin’, Our Comprehensive Five-Part History of the Banjo”), finally arriving at a point where she was able to direct a project of her own. Wounded Survivors: Forgotten Heroes of the Pacific War wasn’t a particularly original piece of documentary filmmaking, or even a subject in which she had a great deal of interest—she had consciously, if not cynically, designed her grant proposal to piggyback on the wave of World War II nostalgia that was sweeping the nation in the late nineties—but she knew it was an important landmark in her own career, a stepping-stone to bigger and better things.

  All along, her ace in the hole, the one thought that saved her from the tedium and petty politicking of public television and the bourgeois economic despair that was always gnawing at her—How will we ever be able to buy a house, take a nice vacation, send our kids to a decent college, etc., etc.?—was the prospect of Todd becoming a successful lawyer, making enough money to support the family in the style she believed they deserved to live, while at the same time freeing her to have more children (and more child care), and to work only when she wanted, and only on projects she believed in. All that was standing in their way was one stupid test.

  Her plan—it was so humble, so eminently doable—made so much sense that she couldn’t quite bring herself to let go of it even now, when she had no choice but to admit to herself how miserable it had made her husband. Maybe the football would help. Maybe it would wake Todd up from his funk, give him the energy and confidence to rise to the occasion and pass the test on his third try. If it happened that
way, it would all be okay: They’d be able to look back on the past two years as a blip on the screen of their happy life together, a necessary interlude of struggle, rather than a grim period of anxiety and stagnation, the time when it all went to hell.

  He can do it, she told herself, rolling onto her back and gazing up at the gray blankness of the ceiling. He can do it if he wants to.

  Despite the loss, and despite the searing pain in his face—his right cheek felt like it had been pressed against a hot skillet—Todd felt oddly exhilarated in the bar after the game. It wasn’t that he’d given a superstar performance—he’d made his share of mistakes on the field—it was that he’d refused to be intimidated. He’d taken his lumps without complaining, and then he’d hit back with everything he had. He could feel a new respect in the way the cops looked at him, slapped him on the back, included him in the conversation. Big Todd! What are you drinking, buddy? He wasn’t on probation anymore; he was a member of the team.

  “Oh man.” Tony Correnti stood behind him like an old-time boxing trainer, massaging his trapezius muscles. “You are gonna be one sore puppy tomorrow morning.”

  “Advil,” advised DeWayne. “Advil and ice. Ice and Advil.”

  “Don’t forget the Ben-Gay,” said Pete Olaffson.

  “And if all else fails,” said Bart Williams, “you can always consult our team physician.” Bart grabbed a shot glass from the cork-lined tray in the center of the table and offered it to Todd. “Dr. Daniels. His friends call him Jack.”

  “To the good doctor.” Todd saluted his teammates with the glass, then threw back the shot. “I feel better already.”

  One by one the Guardians took their leave until only Todd and Larry Moon remained at the table. Larry was in a funk; Todd had noticed it the moment they sat down. He’d been drinking steadily for the past hour and a half, but he’d held himself aloof from the conversation, only joining in if someone asked him a direct question.

  “Thanks for punching that guy,” Todd told him. “I think he was about to dance on my head.”