“You’re saying the boy’s eyes were sort of locked on the television?” the intern asks.
“Yes,” your mother says.
You’re still sleeping, and the intern rolls you onto your side and listens to your lungs with a stethoscope. “And when you turned the television off,” he says, “the seizure stopped? Just like that?”
“And he went to sleep,” your mother adds.
“Mm-hmm.” The intern places you on your back again and rubs his chin and considers. “He shows no signs of poisoning, and the tox screen was normal. It’s possible that John—”
“Junior,” your mother says.
“That Junior had what’s called a photosensitive seizure. It can be caused by bright shifting patterns on TV screens. But you said nothing like this has ever happened before? That he’s watched TV before without any problems?”
“Yes.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And he’s not waking up,” your mother says. “Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”
“It’s common to see lethargy, and yes sometimes deep protracted sleep, after a seizure.” This is what the intern says, but he’s actually thinking that your mother is right, you really ought to be awake by now. “Listen, we’re going to run a few more tests. I’m not entirely satisfied just yet.”
But these tests disclose nothing, because no test has yet been invented that can reveal a patient is suffering from the soul-dread caused by knowledge of the impending end of all existence. So: more pointless expenses for your father, which he will bear with the grim patience of Atlas. He also bears, with somewhat less patience, the intern’s implying that your mother is batty, and he hustles the three of you out of there before he feels compelled to show this overeducated know-nothing a trick he learned in Vietnam involving two of his fingers, the intern’s nostrils, and a sharp upward thrust.
By the time the family arrives home you’ve come fully awake, but you are not your usual chatty, energetic self. Quiet and glassy-eyed, you refuse the mashed carrots and Shake ’n Bake chicken breast your mother offers. While the rest of the family eats dinner you sit on the kitchen floor with your back to the cupboard and brood like an unhappy teenager, which is sort of comical in a three-year-old. But no one is laughing, least of all your mother.
Then your father excuses himself and leaves, drumstick in hand, for his shift at the bakery. You, in your Tuffskins overalls, continue to stare at the kitchen floor and play listlessly with your own hair. This goes on, in one form or another, for weeks, months, until your mother sort of forgets that you were ever an animated, happy child and stops worrying so much about it. You are now a serious child. She has met other serious children. She’s not pleased about it, but after all, in most other ways you are normal, even exceptional—you’ve already started to read on your own and nailed potty training in less than a week. You eat and sleep normally, and there is no recurrence of your seizure episode.
This last is because you now fear the television like a cat fears water. And it is this fear that your brother recognizes and exploits—whenever you enter the living room he turns on the TV, and no matter what’s on you turn and toddle frantically back in the direction you came. Every single time. It is a foolproof way for your brother to rid himself of you, and now when he is home he spends almost all his time in the living room, alone and unmolested, sometimes even pretending with ease that he has no brother at all.
John Sr.
At the bakery it’s just me. It’s a small place. Just me and the raspberry horns and the tourtiere pies and my cigarette going in the ashtray near the back sink. Every once in a while a car passes through the dark street outside the storefront windows, but that’s pretty much all I see of people while I’m there, until the end of my shift at eight when Monica shows up to open the store for the day. A solid twelve hours by myself, nothing but the radio to keep me company, and I like it just fine, being alone. It’s even better in the winter, during a storm, when the snow piles up outside and no cars come by at all. Inside the bakery it’s warm and there’s plenty to keep my hands busy. Times like that, for all I can tell I’m the only person left on earth. I could go on making pies and watching the snow pile up until the end of time, so long as there was enough coffee on hand. I don’t need company like some people seem to.
Which is why I get tired of it sometimes, listening to the guys at the warehouse. They always talk about what they would’ve done and been if this thing or that thing had turned out different. As if the wives and babies and mortgages are all accidents that just happened to them. They talk just to hear themselves, to fill the long hours of lifting and sorting, hours that in my opinion would be better spent in silence if you don’t really have anything to say. They trade stories about all the carousing and hell-raising they did as kids, and really it’s pretty unremarkable stuff—mailbox baseball, drinking their father’s scotch and jumping out second-story windows into snowbanks, that sort of thing—but they tell it like they were arch-criminals, like everyone should be as impressed as they are. This is the talk that leads into the should’ve-could’ve stuff I mentioned a minute ago—look at the way we used to be, how did we become the way we are now?
Because you’re grown men, I’d like to say. Act like it.
There are things I could tell them that would really blow their hair back, if I wanted to. They were all of them 4-F—flat-footed, hard of hearing, whatever excuse they could come up with—or else too young, so I’m the only one who served. I could tell them about the times I had, fun and not so fun both, if I was inclined to talk about the past. Which I am not.
But I have to listen to them talk, because I am there and they are there and none of us is leaving anytime soon. To hear them tell it they all were just one good break away from being something much more than warehouse loaders. Dan Coyne is the worst—he goes on and on about the year he spent waiting on tables in Fort Myers, how much money he made, how you can follow the season north to ritzy summer communities like the Hamptons and make enough money to have a house in both places, just keep bouncing back and forth, getting rich off rich people, and never see a lick of snow.
Sounds terrific, but the obvious question is, if it was so great, why did he stop doing it? It would be a mistake to ask this question. I know, because I did once, wanting to be polite. I had to listen to him talk about how he met a girl and she got pregnant and he brought her back here to Maine because this was home after all and they got married because that was the right thing to do but if he’d just wrapped it up he’d still be living the high life but don’t get him wrong he loves his family very much, just look at what he puts up with every day in this shithole, if that’s not proof he loves them then what the hell could be. He’s probably right, it does prove he loves them, but to my mind it also proves he’s a coward with little imagination who doesn’t think before he acts. Otherwise he’d have had the good sense to realize he didn’t want a family, and the discipline not to start one.
People make mistakes, of course, drink too much, say things they don’t mean, spend money they don’t have, start a family without planning to. I’ve done all these things, give or take, myself. Maybe what really bothers me is that guys like Dan never own up to their mistakes, never accept their lives as they are today, with all the accumulated blunders that brought them to this place and time. In some fundamental way they are not really here. They’re in a past that never really existed, or a future that never will exist, even while their bodies are in the present, in this warehouse, loading real packages onto real semis, with real wives and children at home, and very real opportunities for small but meaningful pleasures all around them. Pleasures that I enjoy, in my way, and never pass up. Holding Junior, even though he’s five and a little big for that now. Smoking a cigarette and watching the sky outside the bakery go from black to pink to blue every morning. Brushing Debbie’s hair. Falling asleep over the morning newspaper. Taking two days off, in the fall, to split wood with Rodney. These times are not lost on me. I am her
e.
I’m not saying I have no regrets. Who would believe anyone who said that? When someone claims to regret nothing I just assume that he and I have different definitions for the word, and leave it at that. For my part, I’ve got two. I just try not to think of them much. What’s the point?
They’re pretty big, as far as regrets go. First thing is, I passed on being a big-league ballplayer. I was picked out of high school by the Astros in the first round of the 1968 draft. Which being drafted isn’t a guarantee of playing in the big leagues—most guys never make it out of the minors—but I would have. My senior year I batted .647 with 22 home runs and 65 RBI, second-best numbers in the country. People still talk about it. I was bigger, faster, and stronger than a lot of guys already in the majors, especially at third, where players tend to give up power for average. I mean today you’ve got someone like George Brett, he’s a big strong guy at third, has some pop and looks like he might bat .400 this year for the first time since Williams did it, but two things: I was bigger than Brett, and this is 1968 I’m talking about. Six-foot-five, 240, hit with power to all fields, could handle line drives to either side and throw to first—accurately—on the run. There wasn’t anyone but me who could do all that back then.
I never gave myself a chance to prove it, though. When I got the telegram from the Astros I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t a surprise; I knew I’d be drafted, but now it was real and I had to make a real decision. I sat on my bed in the room I shared with my four brothers. I read the telegram a few times to savor the moment, then put on my pea coat and marched through the rain to the military induction station before I had a chance to change my mind. I signed paperwork, gave blood, told them I wasn’t queer or crazy, stripped down and spread my cheeks, took an oath, and that was that.
There were a couple of simple reasons, and I didn’t agonize over them much. Every man in my family for three generations had served. My great-grandfather, a Canadian citizen, fought with the British First Battalion in the Boer War. My grandfather joined the French Foreign Legion and was killed at Verdun before the U.S. even entered WWI. And at Guadalcanal my father gained eight pounds, in the form of shrapnel, and lost a dozen friends. So there was the legacy thing. But where for rich people a legacy means you’re expected to be the third generation at Harvard, around here a legacy means that if there’s a war on you’re expected to strap on your jungle boots and go get shot at.
Then there was my old man, the second and more compelling reason I passed on baseball. He considered it a boy’s game, not a profession, and what he said went even though I was a grown man. So after graduation in June, I belonged to the Marines instead of the Astros.
And that leads direct to my other regret: it didn’t have to be an either/or proposition. I could have served my four years and still been young enough to play ball. I may have had to spend a season in the Cape Cod League getting my swing back, but then it would have been like I’d never left. Except that when I got back from Vietnam a good part of my right hand was gone, and along with it any hope I had of playing baseball again.
It’s not the missing fingers that I regret so much as the way I lost them, about which I’ll only say that I was stupid and deserved what I got and if I can ever think of a way to confess and ask for forgiveness I will do that. And until then I will hate myself a little bit and work hard every day to be a good man. This is about all that has stuck with me from my Catholic childhood—do your job, live clean, be the best man you can—and it seems to be enough.
But it is not easy, being a good husband and father. The hard part is the worry. The work and the bills, not sleeping, those things are easy. It’s the worry, and what I do with it, that gets to me sometimes.
Take Rodney, for instance, my oldest boy. There’s a lot to worry about there, and Debbie doesn’t seem to notice. She’s preoccupied with Junior, who’s had some health problems but seems to be better the last year or so. Sure, he’s grown into sort of a glum kid, but it’s not like he has a bad attitude or gets into trouble. He’s polite and well behaved. Keeps to himself, doesn’t have any friends. Reads a lot, which I guess as a parent you can’t really complain about. He’s really into computers, has this thing from Radio Shack that we scraped together the money to buy him for Christmas. He likes to write little programs for it. He showed me one the other day where the screen turned half-blue and half-green, like the earth and sky, and then a little bug-looking thing ran across from one side to the other. It’s pretty amazing, actually, this five-year-old kid teaching himself how to program a computer. So he’s smart, obviously. Which may be part of the reason why he’s quiet, a loner. We went to see his teacher, Mrs. Collins, and she said that sometimes smart kids have a hard time in the lower grades because they’re so far ahead of their classmates. Not to worry, she said, but Debbie worried anyway, out loud, and when Mrs. Collins said we should think about skipping Junior ahead a few grades Debbie put a stop to that idea quick enough.
At some point Debbie went to the bathroom. When she was out of ear-shot Mrs. Collins told me she was concerned about Junior, too. He’s very morbid, she said, it’s strange, I don’t really know how to explain it except to say he seems preoccupied with apocalypse. That’s how she said it, emphasizing the word. I know it sounds odd, she said. I didn’t want to mention it in front of your wife for fear she would become upset. But it seems to be on his mind constantly. During art activities he draws these pictures. Just a couple of weeks ago I found Junior sitting by himself against the fence on the playground. He was staring out toward the hills on the other side of the valley. I asked him if something was wrong, and do you know what he said? He kept staring at the hills and the sky and said, It’s so big, the world is so big, how can it be obliterated?
Mrs. Collins was quiet for a second, just looking at me, and then she gave this nervous laugh and said, Normally we’d be happy, not to mention a bit surprised, to hear a first-grader use a word like “obliterated” in the proper context. But surely, Mr. Thibodeau, you can see why this is troubling?
And I told her, Yes, I can.
All the trouble and tension in the world, she said. The Soviets in Afghanistan. Reagan’s saber-rattling. Kids pick up on it more than we realize. They may not understand it fully, but it works its way into their subconscious.
It was at this point that I suspected we were talking less about my son and more about Mrs. Collins’s politics. I could tell, from what she said and how she said it, the flower-print dress and the gentle way she moved her hands, that she’d probably been a war protester. I stopped listening to her. The point had been made, after all.
So yes I worry about Junior. I want him to be happy, goes without saying. But it’s Rodney. Something is wrong. Debbie doesn’t see it, and I’m not around enough to do anything. Even if I spent less time working, Rodney’s twelve and isn’t home a whole lot. He’s either at school or at his uncle’s or out with his buddies from the neighborhood, these two little hoods I don’t like much, Kevin and Jesse are their names. There are a couple others whose names I haven’t gotten yet, but I can tell they’re trouble too. Long stringy hair, jeans ripped at the knees. Ride their BMX bikes like they think they’re Harleys. They draw pictures of skulls on the back of their denim jackets with Magic Markers. Rodney did it, too. We spent thirty bucks on that jacket, because he wanted it so bad, and then he turns around a week later and writes Iron Maiden on the back. At first I was pissed, but I didn’t say anything. It was his jacket and he could look like a clown if he wanted. I’m careful not to be too much like my old man. I don’t have to control everything. Besides, once they reach an age, kids can only learn these lessons on their own.
So that’s one of the more obvious signs that something’s up with Rodney, the boys he hangs around with. Pete, the kid down the road on the corner, he and Rodney were best friends for years, but Pete’s out of the picture at this point. Has been for a while, actually, when I think about it. Just looking at them now, Rodney and Pete, you can see the rea
son why. Pete’s hair is still cut in the flattop he’s had since he and Rodney first met. He plays basketball nonstop on the courts down the block, even in winter, and doesn’t own a denim jacket that I’ve seen. Kids grow apart. I myself went through three or four different sets of friends from when I was a boy until I graduated from high school. Still, different as they are now, I wish the two of them could have found a way to stay close. Rodney could use a good influence.
Any event, it’s not so much what Rodney’s doing that bothers me. It’s what he’s stopped doing. No more baseball. He quit a week into the last Little League season, said he didn’t want to be seen in the uniform. This is a kid who just a couple of years ago would shag fly balls for hours, until it was so dark out that it was either call it quits or take one in the face, which he did more than once. This could be a tragedy, because the kid’s even better than I was at his age. A tragedy. I don’t use the word lightly. And not only has he quit the game, he’s stopped collecting the cards. For years we gave him an allowance of three dollars in exchange for doing any combination of the dishes or the laundry five times in a week. Until this year he always used the money to buy baseball cards. Not GI Joes, not candy cigarettes, not music tapes. Baseball cards. Always. He must have had ten thousand cards or more, all packed into cardboard boxes, collecting value in the basement. Or so I thought. Until the other day, when I took a couple hours off from the warehouse to finish putting up some paneling in Junior’s room. I needed a new blade for the jigsaw, so I went down into the basement and saw all the cards were gone. They used to take up a whole corner, and now there was just this big dark stain where moisture had seeped into the broken concrete.
I’m usually not the smartest guy in the room, but even I can figure out something’s wrong here. The kid goes from baseball being his world to dropping the sport almost overnight, then sells off a card collection he spent half his life putting together? There’s an issue, and I wish I didn’t know what it was, but I’m starting to get an idea.
Everything Matters! Page 5