Stuck in the Middle with You

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  But then, this is one of the fundamental contradictions of parenthood—the unending necessity to teach your children lessons that you yourself still have not learned.

  YEARS LATER, it finally occurred to me to watch Brideshead Revisited again. I couldn’t remember why we’d never finished it. I put the tape in the machine and hit play. The film picked up right where I’d stopped it on a snowy night long ago.

  A young man’s hand reached out and picked a plover’s egg from a bowl and raised it into the air.

  Charles Ryder looked at his new friend Sebastian, with whom he was already in love: He was magically beautiful, Charles says, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love. And withers at the first cold wind.

  I opened my eyes. The game was afoot. I gazed around the dark hotel room, immediately sensing a situation in progress. Deedie drowsed to my left, her chest softly rising and falling. Through the screen door that led to the balcony I could hear the ocean crashing on the beach.

  A voice cut through the darkness. “What now?” it said. “What now!”

  Through the murk I could just make out Zachary’s silhouette. He got up on his feet, and his head peeked over the edge of the portable playpen. I checked the clock. Four A.M.

  Oh God please no, I thought. Sweet weeping Jesus.

  One of Zach’s legs went up and over the rail, followed a moment later by the other. There was a clunk as he hit the floor. Then he stood again. “What now?” he asked. “What now!”

  Then he began to run around the condo. The little feet pattered against the floor. As he ran, Zach shouted, “I’m awake! I’m awake! I’m awake!”

  We were on vacation. Sanibel, Florida. Sean wiggled in his crib. He sat up, took a look around, and began to weep.

  “Waah,” he said. “Waah. Waah. Waah.”

  “I’m awake! I’m awake! I’m awake!”

  Deedie opened one eye. I understood in a glance. “Go get ’em, Daddy. It’s your turn.”

  “Waah, waah, waah.”

  I PUSHED THE STROLLER down the beach. The sun had not yet risen. The breeze blew in off the ocean and whipped my hair around. I was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, a battered sweatshirt that said WESLEYAN.

  Zach sat in the front of the double stroller, holding a juice box. He pointed out a group of sleeping seagulls. “Birds are dreaming,” he said.

  Sean had fallen asleep again, bottle in his mouth. I remembered what this was like. Something similar had happened to me a couple of times during my sophomore year of college.

  At two years old, we no longer had to give Sean a syringe of digitalis twice a day. Although he was still a pale, thin thing, like an orphaned waif in Dickens, he was partial to a good bottle. He was one of those hair-of-the-dog boys.

  The stroller wasn’t really made for the beach. The rubber wheels sank into the soft sand. In a compartment between the wheels was a backpack full of all the things I’d need in case of an emergency. Extra diapers. Wipes. Baby bibs. Vitamin D ointment. Band-Aids. Baby rice. Juice boxes. Crayons. Books by Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss. Cheese sticks. In the event of a nuclear emergency, the boys and I could probably hold out for days.

  Zach and Sean and I rolled by the dark ocean, our wheels crushing the shards of clamshells and conches, slipping on slicks of seaweed and the egg sacs of sea creatures. There was no one else for miles, it seemed. The hotels and condos and beach houses to my right were virtually all dark, except for an occasional blue glow coming from a high room in which a television had been left on. I pictured a dad like me, passed out in a big chair, a child in his lap, the television screen crackling with snow. But then, the era when stations shut down for the night, after playing the national anthem, had come to an end right around the same time my sons were born, hadn’t it? Time was passing. I’d been a college student, then I was a married man, and now I was a father. I still didn’t quite feel lifelike though. The ocean roared all around.

  “Wake up!” shouted Zach, and waved his arms. He was wearing a tiny blue jean jacket from OshKosh. “Wake up, birds!”

  The seagulls, irritated by youth, spread their wings and rose. One remained behind, beak-first in the sand.

  “Daddy,” said Zach. “Why isn’t that one waking up?”

  The bird’s eyes were missing. “Oh,” I said. “Maybe his dreams are too wonderful to wake up from?”

  I smiled inwardly. Well played, Daddy!

  But Zachary looked at me sternly. “Daddy,” he said. “You tell me the truth.”

  How was it, I wondered, that at age four, he could already tell the difference between the truth and a lie? Did he have some special sense that I’d either lost or never had to begin with?

  “The truth,” I said mournfully. I looked at Sean, still clutching his bottle. There was milk on his chin. What is it that children dream about, before they know what the world is? Are they remembering the place they came from?

  “Okay, Zach. The truth is that bird is dead. I think he can’t wake up, as much as he’d like to.”

  Zach thought about this. “We should bury him,” he said.

  I looked at my watch, as if I were in a hurry to get somewhere. But where was it I was so certain I needed to go at four thirty in the morning?

  “Okay,” I said.

  Zach raised his arms, and I lifted him out of the stroller. He reached into the storage compartment between its front wheels and extracted a plastic shovel. Then he looked up at me. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said. He began to dig a hole.

  I watched as my son dug the grave. In addition to his jean jacket he was wearing a pair of overalls and a red T-shirt and a small Boston Red Sox hat.

  He looked up at me with an expression that suggested he was irritated I wasn’t of more use.

  “Daddy,” he said, “you get things for the headstone.”

  I walked toward the shore and began to gather shells. I was barefoot, and the cold ocean encircled my feet up to the ankles. Sanibel is famous for its seashells. There were scallops and mussels, a broken nautilus. I returned to the site of the interment. Zach stood somberly by the hole like a New England minister.

  “You should take off your hat, Zach,” I said. He thought about it, then took off the Red Sox cap and held it in one hand. He didn’t ask why, which was good because I couldn’t have told him.

  “Okay,” he said. “We are ready to go.”

  I realized that this was my cue to lower the gull into its tomb. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of touching the dead bird, not least because whatever had killed it might well have been contagious. In the worst-case scenario, Zach and Sean and Deedie could all have been back there later that afternoon, digging a hole for me.

  So I borrowed Zach’s shovel and used it to lift the corpse. Then I lowered the gull into the hole. Zach nodded. I was just about to cover the bird up with sand again when he said, “Daddy. We should say a few words first.”

  I looked at the boy. It’s worth noting that he wasn’t a particularly morose character. But he did have a very strongly developed sense of right and wrong. At preschool, he’d once made one of his instructors cross when she’d asked him to pretend to be a character from a story. Zach’s face had grown red and angry. “I’m not a character from a story,” he said tearfully. “I’m me. I’m Zach Boylan!”

  “Okay,” I said. “What should we say?”

  “I’m going to say a poem,” said Zach. I nodded and thought, Okay. Is this one of those moments you always remember because it’s so adorable? Or because it was the first clue you had that your child would someday grow up to shoot the president?

  “Little seagull,” said Zach. “I’m sorry you’re dead. Even though you woke me up with your squawking. Although you are gone now, I can still hear your song.”

  Then he looked down into the grave, with melancholy and wonder, and folded his hands before him. While I thought, You have got to be fucking kidding me.

  Zach lifted his head and said, “Okay, we can cover h
im up now.” He put his hat back on.

  I glanced toward the stroller, where Sean was still asleep. “Shouldn’t we wake up your brother?” I said. “Don’t you think he should be part of this?”

  Zach shook his head. “No, Daddy,” he said, a little surprised I’d suggested such a thing. “This is just for you and me.”

  The sky in the east was growing brighter now, a faint wash of blue and gray above the horizon. I got the shovel down into the sand and covered the bird. Afterward, we marked the spot with a stick and decorated the tomb with shells and seaweed. I thought of Shelley’s grave in Rome, where I’d once stood alone and fought off tears. The poet’s epitaph quoted The Tempest: Nothing of him doth remain, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.

  Then, having done the right thing by the gull, Zach climbed back into the stroller, and I took up my place once more at the bridge. “Forward!” said my son, and using my superhuman strength, I once again began to push my children across the face of the broad earth.

  AFTER SUNRISE, I returned to our condo and traded the stroller for a bicycle, locking the boys into some sort of New Age yuppie rickshaw that I dragged behind a rented ten-speed. I heard the boys talking to each other as we pedaled down the boulevard. Zach was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Sean. He was up to the caterpillar’s sixth day: Our hero was eating through a chocolate cake, a Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, a cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a slice of watermelon. To my right was the endless ocean, the skies turning pink and blue now. There were joggers and shell seekers and loner dudes with metal detectors.

  We pulled up at a diner. I picked up the boys and carried them, one on each arm, into the restaurant. There was no one else in the place. A waitress looked at me with a grin. “You can sit anywhere,” she said. I bore my sons to a booth by a window. I sat Zach down on a cushion, then buckled Sean into a high chair. I opened up my backpack and handed out juice boxes and crayons. My sons set to work.

  We ordered scrambled eggs for Sean, pancakes for Zach, a bagel with lox for me. From the kitchen I could hear people speaking Spanish. The ceiling of the diner was hung with old nets into which seashells had been placed. On the walls were giant plastic marlins and paintings of the Sanibel lighthouse. Someone turned on the stereo, and a local radio station played Paul McCartney and Wings. We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert.

  Sean pointed at me and said, “Man.”

  I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was five fifteen. I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes, felt the stubble against my palm.

  Zach said, “Daddy, do birds go to heaven?”

  “I don’t know, Zach. What do you think?”

  He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know much about heaven,” he said.

  “Well, it’s a mystery,” I said.

  He thought about it some more. “I think there should be birds in heaven.”

  I agreed. “So do I.”

  Sean pointed at me again and said, “Man. Man. Man.”

  “What do you think God is?” I asked my son.

  He answered this question without hesitation, as if he’d been working on his answer for some time. “I think God might be an invisible sparkling wind that talks.” Thanks for asking.

  Sean looked at a large conch shell suspended in the net above us. “Shell,” he said.

  Zach considered his brother. “Baby Sean is learning a lot of words,” he said.

  “Pretty soon he’ll be talking up a storm, won’t he?”

  “He’ll be talking a word storm!” Zach agreed.

  The waitress brought our breakfasts. She poured more coffee into my cup. “Anything else?” she said.

  “We are having a special breakfast,” said Zach.

  “Is that right?” said the waitress. She had a name tag that said DESTYNEE.

  “It’s just boys,” said Zach.

  “Special,” said Destynee. She looked at me and, incredibly, her eyes were shining, as if she were on the edge of tears.

  “Negg,” said Sean, raising a fistful of scrambled eggs to his mouth with his bare hands.

  I HAULED THE BOYS in their New Age rickshaw back beneath the brightening skies. More people were out now, more members of the dawn patrol. A dad threw a kite into the air and shouted to his daughter: Run, now run! Zach was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to his brother again. On day seven, the caterpillar ate a single leaf. He’d had a stomachache, but he was feeling better now.

  I rode along the bike path, which now cut through dunes and areas of tropical forest. Now and again I’d traverse wooden bridges that crossed over murky-looking swamps and canals. There was the rumor of alligators. We stayed on the path.

  At length we found ourselves at the Sanibel Island light. I locked the bike and lifted my sons once more, and carried them toward the lighthouse.

  The light at Point Ybel is not much more than a high pyramid-shaped scaffold capped with a glass dome. Zach and Sean didn’t seem particularly impressed by it, but I didn’t expect them to be. One thing I’d learned as a parent was that views are largely wasted on anyone below the age of sixteen. Still, the boys were glad to be placed down upon the sand, and they began to run toward the ocean crashing endlessly before them. I sat down on the beach and watched as Zach combed the point for shells and Seannie immediately set to work digging in the sand. A flock of tough-looking seagulls looked over at the boys impassively.

  I rubbed my eyes again, watching my sons, watching the sunrise bathe everything in blinding light.

  A woman about my age ran up the beach, huffing and puffing in her workout clothes. She ran toward the lighthouse, touched the scaffold, and then turned around and ran away in the other direction. I watched as she receded. What if I had been that girl now running down the beach, the wind in my hair, and she had been the father, sitting here at the base of the Sanibel Light? Whose life would have been more altered?

  Zach came back up from the shoreline and sat down next to me. “Hi, Daddy,” he said.

  I gathered the boy into my arms and gave him a huge hug. He hugged me back, and as we held each other it occurred to me, not for the last time, that so much of the love we offer our children comes not because we are such warmhearted beings, but because we so desperately, thirstily, crave love in return.

  I let him go, and Zach sat down next to me. Looking at his brother, happily digging by the water, he observed, with the air of a much older person, “Baby Sean’s really growing up, isn’t he?”

  “He is,” I said.

  Zach looked down at the sand. “Daddy,” he said, “I keep thinking about that bird.”

  I looked over at him. He was still wearing his Boston Red Sox hat. The ocean wind rustled the blond curls beneath the brim.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “How he was here, and now he’s gone.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s sad.”

  He curled one of his arms around my elbow.

  “Why did Grampapa die?” he said.

  My father had died eight years before Zach was born. I didn’t know that my father was even on Zach’s radar.

  “He had cancer,” I said. “Melanoma.”

  “Are you going to get cancer?”

  “No, Zach. I hope not, anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” I said. “I use sunscreen.”

  We sat together for a moment, watching the ocean.

  “What was he like?” Zach asked.

  “My dad?” Sean was still studiously digging in the sand. “He was quiet. Thoughtful.”

  “Was he silly like you?”

  “No,” I said. “He wasn’t silly like me. Although if you squeezed his nose, he’d say, ‘Honk.’ ”

  Zach’s whole face brightened. He reached out to me and squeezed my nose. I said, “Honk.”

  “Like that?”

  I nodded. “Like that.”

  Zach looked pleased. He knew his grandfather now.

  “What did
he do?”

  I thought about it. It was such an odd question to answer about a man. What did he do?

  “He played the piano,” I said. “He raised orchids. He liked to go to the hardware store.”

  “What’s a hardware store?”

  “It’s a store where they sell paint and tools and help you learn how to fix your house.”

  I traveled to a day in 1965. Dad was showing me how to use a soldering iron, fixing a toy of mine—a battery-operated flying saucer, in fact. I remembered his workbench, with its vise, and its pegboard, and an array of tiny drawers, each one containing screws and nails of different sizes. It was like his altar.

  My father pressed the solder against the hot point of the iron, and a big silvery drop of the stuff dripped against the contact point on the saucer, where a wire was loose. My nose had filled with the smell of melting tin and lead. I watched as my father moved the curled end of the loose wire into the gooshy metal drop. Then my hand was burning, and I cried out loud. My father, realizing he’d accidentally allowed the tip of the soldering iron to brush against my wrist, dropped what he was doing and clapped me to his chest. I’m so sorry, son. I’m so sorry. He held me for a long time. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’d never hurt you, Jim. I’m so sorry.

  “Did you bury him? Like that bird?” asked Zach.

  “No,” I said, uncertain how to explain cremation to a four-year-old. “After he died, his body was turned into ashes.”

  “Ashes?” said Zach, uncertain.

  I picked up some of the sand at our feet. “Ashes. It’s like white sand. We put it in the ground, under a tree.”

  Zach considered this. As he thought, I remembered being held by my father, heard him tell me he was sorry. I smelled the smell of burning lead.

  “Do you miss him?” asked Zach. “Grampapa?”

  IN THE LAST YEARS of my father’s life he started to sleepwalk. He’d done this off and on when he was younger, but toward the end he made a regular habit of roaming the halls of our house at night. I’d hear his heavy footsteps on the creaking stairs, coming up to the third floor, where I lived in a room sealed most of the time with a heavy deadbolt. I heard him creep through the hallway and open the door to the spare room, diagonally across the hall from mine, and lay himself down in the guest bed. After a while he’d start to snore, and I’d know he was okay, at least until morning.