Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  Now that Cubby and I were alone in the house, we had to learn a new dynamic. For one thing, I quickly realized his mom had been right all along: She had done most of the work of keeping the house and managing, feeding, and watering the kid. Now it was time to do my share.

  I might have complained about dirty dishes or piles of laundry before, but there was no one to complain to anymore. Like all parents, I hoped Cubby would grow up to do most of the chores, but for now, I had to do them myself. Housework proved surprisingly tiring until I figured out how to minimize waste. For example, we made it a habit to eat food in the wrapper, saving plates. We drank our liquids from the can, saving glasses. We even used our socks two days in a row, generating less laundry. With those techniques, we reduced the housework to a level even I could handle.

  Now that Cubby could read, we became a team in the kitchen. “How long do we heat this?” I’d ask. He’d read the label and tell me, and most of the time, he was right. In that fashion we mastered microwave cookery and quickly moved on to greater culinary challenges. We soon excelled at heating multiple courses of our dinner for precisely the right amount of time. We might heat a pot of soup, a bag of vegetables, and a casserole all at once. We also learned to heat things in a pan, on top of the stove, and complete a preparation by adding a second or even a third ingredient after a certain amount of time had passed. Together, Cubby and I became just like chefs.

  Meanwhile, I prepared Cubby to do additional housework and looked forward to the day he would deliver me to a state of domestic bliss by doing all the household chores, and cooking too. Sadly, that never happened, though I did get him to wash the dishes.

  He was reluctant at first, regarding dirty plates as too toxic to handle, but our new home was only a quarter mile from an old landfill, and I warned Cubby that rats came out of the landfill at night, looking for food scraps. If they found food in this house—out in the sink or on countertops—we would be in the gravest danger. I reminded him of the television shows that showed rats chewing through walls and looked pointedly at his bare feet. After that, getting Cubby to wash dishes was never a problem.

  When he balked at additional labor, I reminded him of the promises that were made when I bought him. “Does all chores happily,” I told him, but he remained parked in the living room. I could get another kid, one who’d act better, I’d tell him, but he didn’t move. I even invoked friends and family. “Uncle Neil had a kid once,” I told him. Uncle Neil was a crusty old buddy of mine who didn’t even have a dog, so that got Cubby’s attention. Seeing the chance, I said, “He got a kid just like you, but he got so frustrated when the kid wouldn’t do chores that he sold him to a Sumatran reptile trader, and the kid ended up cleaning cages in a circus.”

  Cubby didn’t even blink at that. “You can’t sell me,” Cubby replied. “It’s against the law to sell kids today.”

  Housework was not the only thing I had to manage. There was the kid himself. Sometimes he would just get out of hand. He’d refuse to do what I wanted, all the while advancing his own bizarre suggestions for what we should do. His ideas were generally things no normal adult would do. For example, when faced with a sink full of dishes, he said, “Okay, Dad. Let me show you these killer cards that came in my latest Pokémon deck. You can admire them here on the table. Just don’t touch.” Furthermore, his notions frequently involved considerable expense and often travel to distant locales. “Dad,” he would exclaim. “You are confused! We are not broke. You have plenty of money to take me to Disney World!” Something had to be done. After all, I was the parent and ostensibly in charge. Unfortunately, my position as leader who must be obeyed was not always clear, especially to him.

  I was bigger and stronger than his mom, but for some reason, he ignored me while obeying her. That even proved true in our new house. “Mom always lets me do that,” became a frequent refrain. I had no way of knowing if his claims were true or not, and it aggravated me that she was the main parent in his mind even when she wasn’t there.

  I had heard of jailhouse lawyers before, but as Cubby became more verbal I realized I had a new life-form on my hands: a playroom lawyer. When I threatened him he responded by telling me that whatever I proposed was illegal, and citing his own interpretation of the law in his favor. To hear him tell it, parents had no rights at all, other than the right to buy their kids games and bring them food. The older he got, the harder it was to defeat him with logic. Threats and arbitrary rules didn’t work either. I needed something new to motivate him.

  If being alone together was a huge adjustment, introducing a new third party was potentially an even bigger one. I had read every book I could find on the subject of stepparents in an attempt to maximize my chance of success the second time around. One book I read suggested it took one year for every year of a child’s life before they would accept a stepparent. According to that theory, it would take eight years for Cubby to accept someone new in my life.

  I had met someone new, and I was hoping I would not have to wait that long. Martha was a shy, introverted graphic artist who was as different from Cubby’s mom as anyone could be. We shared many interests: computers, graphic design, cars, and quiet time alone. Equally important, we didn’t fight over every decision—a very welcome change from my marriage. I’ve heard that some people go from one extreme to the other in their relationships, and I guess I was such a person. The differences were unmistakable. Cubby’s mom was totally disorganized, whereas Martha never had a single piece of paper out of place in her apartment. They even looked like opposites. Little Bear was short and round; Martha was tall and thin. I wondered what Cubby would make of her.

  The two of them hit it off right away. Martha didn’t have any children of her own. She had gone through a cancer scare some years before and could not have kids as a result. However, she liked Cubby, and he liked her. In fact, Cubby actually invited her to join us in our new home in Chicopee.

  “You can stay in the basement,” he said brightly. “I would come down and play with you, and we could all do things together.” I am sure Cubby could not imagine a more attractive invitation, and he smiled happily when she said, “That sounds like lots of fun!” She smiled back, but never did take up residence by the furnace.

  When Martha moved in that first winter, life became more comfortable. I’ve never done well alone and I didn’t have much confidence I could make it on my own, despite the evidence to the contrary, so I was much happier. Martha believed in me and shared my values when it came to running a house. Soon we began working together in the business, and that went well too. And everything stayed neat and orderly.

  Also, I found it amazing what a difference two adults made when it came to managing a kid. Cubby was very happy, because he had a new playmate, as well as someone else to do his bidding.

  He proved that on one of our first outings together—to the zoo. As we walked through the entrance Cubby spotted some wheelchairs sitting to the side in case they were needed. “My ankle hurts,” he said, and plopped into the nearest chair. We looked at each other and pondered. Should we go home? Did we need a doctor? “Come on,” he said. “Push me and I’ll be okay.” Martha dutifully rolled him all through the zoo, a trip that took several hours and gave her an excellent workout. He admired one animal after another from the comfort of his perch.

  When we passed two draft horses I decided to test his knowledge. “Can you tell which one is nuclear powered, and which is a farm-raised horse?” When he admitted he couldn’t, I gave him a tip: “The nuclear ones have hollow hooves, and they move their legs exactly the same way every step, because they’re robots.” Cubby nodded as if he’d known that all along.

  When it came time to leave, she rolled the chair back to the entrance. I prepared to drive the car around so we could load our injured child aboard with a minimum of walking.

  Just as I approached, he popped straight up out of the chair, two feet into the air, and landed on his feet with the biggest of grins, saying, “Ha! Fooled
you both!” We laughed so hard, it was impossible to be mad.

  Tricky as he could be, one thing did not change: He still relied on me for tuck-ins and protection from monsters. He never tried to fool me then. Monster protection was, after all, serious stuff.

  I felt like we had the beginnings of a family again.

  One new thing Cubby and I did together was take up hiking. The house I’d moved to bordered on the Chicopee State Forest, and we immediately began hiking under the pine trees. I hadn’t realized how I missed having a place to walk till I found one again, now that I’d grown up. As a kid I’d walked for miles in the Shutesbury woods, and I spent all my time outdoors at my grandparents’ in Georgia. I’d lost sight of that as I’d gotten older and tied down to workplaces.

  Cubby liked the outdoors too, though he had no experience locomoting himself for miles at a time or carrying a backpack with a lunch or tools. He was clumsy at first, but he took to it like a pro and he became coordinated in no time. The only problem was endurance. Cubby would run out of steam, and I’d have to carry him. Luckily, that ended when he got a little older. By age eight, he had more energy than me and he’d just go and go and go. He was up for hiking anywhere I took him, but I think his favorite area remained the familiar complex of trails behind my house. One main trail at the end of our street led to a network of woods roads that went for miles around the old Westover Air Force Base. One of the old roads went right past the end of the main runway, and you could watch the giant cargo planes fly fifty feet overhead from the safety of the woods. We saw B-1 bombers on occasion too, and when we did, we figured some faraway dictatorship was about to go up in smoke. You could tell the B-1s were special because they took off at night and flew almost straight up into the sky. They roared something fierce and looked like the prehistoric birds I’d told Cubby about as a tyke.

  I’d take Cubby with me as often as he’d go. Once Martha joined us, she came along too. Cubby always ran ahead. “Come on,” he’d say, trying to get me to go faster.

  “You run ahead,” I told him. “You’re the bait.”

  Bait? That stopped him dead.

  “Sure. What if there’s a bear, or even a pack of weasels? They grab you, and I know they’re there. Otherwise, if they grabbed me, you’d be stuck. I might be able to rescue you, but you’re too little to rescue me.”

  My argument made perfect sense, but Cubby seemed troubled. Cubby had never imagined himself as a bear might see him: as lunch. He did not like the idea one bit.

  After a moment, he responded just like many adults—with denial.

  “There are no bears out here, and no such thing as a pack of weasels.” He said that with great certainty. Even so, he knew it wasn’t true. There are definitely bears in the New England woods. And weasels? Who knows …

  It’s one of those puzzles of childhood. As a kid, you tell yourself there are no bears. But everyone knows there are bears out there. Yet you’ve never seen a bear. Does that mean they don’t exist? Maybe, but perhaps there’s another explanation. Maybe the kids who saw a bear got eaten, and the remaining kids in the neighborhood have not seen a bear. Yet. Perhaps that is why the number of children on my street seems to diminish, slowly and almost imperceptibly. Some say the neighborhood is aging and the kids are moving away, but I suspect something different: They have become food.

  Storybook bears like Winnie-the-Pooh are nice. That’s because some writer made them up to make nasty child-eating monsters seem cuddly and kind. Real-life bears may look cuddly and kind too, but they’re not. That’s why I run them off when they enter our yard, even today. On three occasions, bears have come out of the woods while I was working outside. Each time, I spoke to the bear, firmly and positively, and he acknowledged that I was Absolute Ruler of the Yard. I am, after all, quite large and backed up by both a bear bell and a Winchester rifle. Seeing that, the bears retreated into the woods, without the need for sterner measures.

  “Go to some other house,” I told them, “and eat the pets and children there. These pets and kids are off-limits.” I repeated those words to all the woodland creatures that came calling, and Cubby and the dog lived in peace as a result. He still rings the bear bell from time to time, just for reassurance. We haven’t needed the Winchester yet.

  Some kids would have left it at that. Not Cubby. He knew they were still out there, lurking in the woods. Beyond the reach of the bell. And he wasn’t sure what they were doing. That was when animal knowledge failed him and he turned to the law. “You couldn’t let a bear eat me. You’d go to jail. I’m a kid. You have to protect me.”

  That sounded good, but it wasn’t true. “The law just says I can’t feed you to a bear. It doesn’t say anything about a bear coming and grabbing you, all on his own.” Cubby considered that and dismissed it all with simple child logic. “You still have to protect me. You’re the dad.”

  That was something I could agree with. “I do protect you, Cubby.” My protection must have worked, because we’re both here all these years later. Soon, I will be old, and he will be there to protect me.

  As much as Cubby loved bedtime stories, there were nights when they didn’t work. Maybe Cubby was sick or scared or excited. There were any number of reasons he might fail to go to sleep, most of which were inscrutable to me. Other parents might lock their kids in the dark and let them cry it out, but I was never a fan of that method.

  Before we divorced, Little Bear could always make him go to sleep, often by singing. It was a long, grueling process at times, but it worked. Then I moved out, and I had to get him to sleep on my own. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my stories put him to sleep, but there were exceptions, and I needed a strategy for those occasions. I had read in a child-rearing book that tiring monologues were effective, but that was easier said than done. My first problem was determining what subjects would be “tiring” to a little kid. I had been in plenty of business meetings where presenters stood at a podium and recited endless statistics with bullet points from charts, putting us grown-ups to sleep, so I tried reading him stock prices from the Wall Street Journal. My hope was that it would not only put him to sleep but increase his financial prowess. However, he got bored after ten minutes or so and began complaining nonstop. “Read me a different story, Dad,” brought the stock report to an end.

  I was saddened and disappointed by his lack of interest. Not only was the stock report not putting him to sleep, he wasn’t learning anything about finance either! I had read so much about subliminal advertising and how we learn without knowing. I read Cubby hundreds if not thousands of stock prices, and I never heard one single peep of stock market insight from him when he was awake. That plan was a failure, and it explains why he has no money in the bank today.

  I tried civil engineering thrillers, like the history of Hoover Dam and the building of the interstate highways, but they had the opposite effect from what I intended: They woke him up. He wiggled his ears and asked questions! Then I tried talking, but conversation woke him up too. I realized the problem was the need for responses. If he had to think of an answer, he had to stay alert to do it, and going to sleep became impossible.

  Finally, I remembered a trick my own grandmother had used on me many years before. She called it counting sheep. I updated it to “counting bulldozers.”

  I had counted bulldozers myself as a child in Georgia. We had two at the edge of our property, a D4 and a big D9. They lived behind the Georgia Forestry Service station, out by the state highway. Rangers used them to bulldoze firebreaks whenever there was a forest fire. That was the kind of thing I could embrace, and it was easy to multiply them in my mind until I had imagined an endless line of D4 and D9 dozers. My grandmother didn’t understand that, but she was never a bulldozer sort of girl. Her roots were more farm-animalish. She preferred sheep or pigs, neither of which held much interest for me.

  There were lots of ants to count, but I could never embrace that either. Ant farms were popular in those days, with advertisements for them in every
major magazine. I never had an ant farm myself. My Uncle Bob told me they were mostly used to pick up girls, but I was too young for girls and I could never see how you could pick up a girl with an ant farm anyway. Also, they might escape and get all over my room and even bite me. I always liked machinery better, and I figured Cubby might too. And he did.

  “Just pretend we’re at a construction site, and a long line of bulldozers is pushing dirt past our bed. There goes one now—a big Caterpillar. Here comes another one, a littler Cat. Here’s a Komatsu. Now I see a John Deere.” Sometimes I would even work in older or the less common brands, like Allis Chalmers or Case. I enjoyed variety in my imaginary construction machinery and, equally important, I had to keep changing brands and styles to stay awake myself. The trouble was, Cubby stayed awake too, because he kept asking about the different machines.

  “What color is the Deere? Is it green? And if Deere and Caterpillar are named after animals, what is Komatsu named after?” They were good questions, deserving of answers, but the goal was getting him to sleep, not expanding his knowledge of machines.

  He would also get distracted by details. When I told him that a Caterpillar with a ripper was going by, he asked what it was. Kids with less curiosity might have let the ripper slide by undetected. Not Cubby. I was forever explaining.

  “A ripper is a claw that sticks into the dirt behind the bulldozer. It tears a line in the soil that makes it easier for the next bulldozer in line to dig in. That’s why they call it a ripper. It rips the ground. You can do the same thing in your sandbox with your finger behind a toy bulldozer.”

  My explanation proved to be a mistake, because Cubby suddenly became fully awake and eager to verify what I had just said. Eventually we reached a balance, where the bulldozer stream was monotonous enough for him to go to sleep but varied enough to keep me awake. We’d count one Caterpillar after another, with the occasional Komatsu thrown in for variety. I’d lean against the headboard, patiently listening as those bulldozers crawled by. “Pet me,” Cubby would say, and I’d gently stroke the top of his head as we lay there. Sometimes I fell asleep too, which was fine, until I fell off the corner of his little kid bed. If he stayed asleep, that was my signal to head to my room. If he woke up, we started the petting and the bulldozers all over again.