What they learn, George and Miranda, what they always learn, is that their eight-year-old son, Archie, is continuing to struggle with impulsivity issues, focus problems, inappropriate behavior. A teacher shows George and Miranda a plastic bag she keeps on her desk, filled with the work Archie hasn’t finished. He’s simply incapable of completing his work. No one says ADD or ADHD. George and Miranda have noted the way the teachers and counselors and the principal avoid those terms, probably because there are medical and perhaps even legal points involved.
“But there are some not-so-fine points involved in a word like incapable, too, aren’t there?” Miranda asks George as they’re driving home. The radio is talking about Goldman Sachs. Four soldiers killed in Iraq. “If he’s really incapable . . .”
“You saw the bag,” George says. “I don’t know.”
And they’ve had him tested, they’ve tried all the meds. The drugs that turn Archie into a speed freak—grinding his teeth, pulling at his hair, staring vacantly—the drugs that make him incontinent. You’ve got to try to establish the proper dosage, the doctors say, but George and Miranda can’t stand to have Archie on those pills.
George and Miranda and Archie have seen more doctors over the past three years than a kid with cancer would. These doctor visits, with co-pays and deductibles, run George and Miranda more than $500 a month. One night, after an especially long day with Archie, George said this:
“I just, I don’t know, I just think about some kid with leukemia, and what his parents are going through, and . . . I just thank God that he’s healthy.”
And boy, was that the wrong thing to say, because Miranda said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What?” George said.
“You seriously just said that, you thank God he’s healthy?” Miranda was sitting on the bed in a long T-shirt, putting lotion on her legs. She still had a wet little pile of cream-colored goo in her left hand.
George said nothing. They’d finally got Archie to sleep, but if they raised their voices, even a little, Archie would wake up and come running down the hall. George walked to the bed and slid his slippers underneath.
“No, George, I mean it,” Miranda said. “You know what, I’m glad, too, I thank God, too. Because if I had to go through something like that, with you and your pious bullshit . . . You know what those parents are going through, you know how they do it? They’re fucking adults is how. Jesus.”
“Sorry,” George said.
“Seriously, you know what, I’d rather he was sick, I’d rather he had leukemia or whatever horrible thing you said. You know, I looked at you right before you said that, and I knew you were going to say some horrible crap thing like that. I could see it in the shape of your mouth. I waited for it. I should have started screaming right when I saw your mouth.”
“I just—”
“Yeah, I know what you just—you think that makes it better, makes me feel better? You’re just trying to shut the whole thing down. Ah, yes, everything’s okay because at least Archie’s healthy. Well, he’s not healthy, George. He’s got some kind of mental illness.” She stood up to move to the bathroom, suddenly remembered the lotion in her hand. She looked at it as though she didn’t know how it got there. She stopped, rubbed the lotion into her elbows and forearms.
“If he were sick,” Miranda said, “there would be a course of treatment, viable options. What I can’t handle is this.” And she shut the bathroom door and stayed in there for quite a while.
So George has learned not to talk that way, and he understands where Miranda’s coming from, he agrees that, yes, that whole line of thinking is stupid and sentimental. There’s a small part of him that still thinks it’s possible to recover from all this, but he can’t get to feeling sorry for himself. It’s going on five months, and now whole weeks go by when George doesn’t have an interview. He’s even started looking out of town, out of St. Louis, although so far, St. Louis’s unemployment rate has stayed slightly below the national average, which currently sits at 9.4 percent. In St. Louis, it’s 9.1, which means that George is not as good as 89.9 percent of the working adults in the St. Louis metropolitan area. This is one of the grievances George nurtures late at night.
And the worst thing is, he made it through the worst. Or they thought he’d made it through the worst. They’d even started to relax, or, if not relax, to grimly carry on. They started putting back some money in 2008 and 2009, when they started worrying, when people in George’s field were being plowed under at a truly inevitable rate. But he survived 2008 and 2009, and in 2010 they all took pay cuts, and then he was laid off. There’s an unfinished toolshed in the backyard. It has a floor, three walls, and part of a roof.
“You’ve got to go to sleep,” George tells Archie. For two-and-a-half hours now, the child has lain in the bed making his noises. Sometimes the noises Archie makes are words, the grand stories he tells himself, acting out all the parts as he fails to fall asleep. At a certain point, about an hour before he finally falls asleep, the sounds become just sounds, noises—gun noises, airplane noises, wizard-spell noises, miracles. Miranda grew up on a farm in northwestern Missouri, and she believes that the problem with all kids today is that they don’t spend any time outdoors just running around on their own. They have organized activities. They have play dates. But Archie doesn’t have any play dates. The doctors say a child Archie’s age needs between ten and twelve hours of sleep a night, and a child like Archie needs more. They put him to bed at eight o’clock every night, and he’s never asleep before eleven. Then he has to be up at seven to go to school. “You have to go to sleep,” Miranda tells Archie.
When they think he’s finally asleep, they’ll go to close his door, and about half the time he’s not quite asleep. When he’s not quite asleep and you try to close his door, Archie will scream, “No!” It feels like an electrical pulse from the doorknob, straight up your arm and into a vital organ. “You don’t have to scream at us,” George and Miranda tell him, shaking. “We’re right here. Just say, I’m still awake. Don’t scream.”
Once they finally get Archie to sleep, Miranda goes to bed because she has to work in the morning, and she’s liable to be up with Archie’s nightmares in an hour or two. George checks the ads on Monster, even though LaShonda at the outplacement agency says no one ever gets a job off of Monster. The only way to get a job in this economy is to meet people, LaShonda says. Network, network, network. George looks at Monster. He looks at hockey scores. He jerks off to porn. He e-mails résumés. The Internet costs $24.99 a month. He nurses his grievances. He reads the news. In Washington, Congress has averted a government shutdown. The deal includes another six months of unemployment benefits. Six more months? He can’t imagine what will happen if it’s six more months. Don’t let feelings of worthlessness ever enter your mind, LaShonda says. You are not worthless because you’ve been laid off. There is no stigma attached to losing a job in this economy.
Are you churchgoers? the doctors ask. Because a lot of times bright kids like Archie can find some sense of structure in organized religion, and moral prescriptions appeal to their inherent need for boundaries and control. Even if we don’t believe in it? George and Miranda ask. Immaterial, the doctors say. So they go to church.
Are you churchgoers? the next set of doctors ask. Because the last thing kids like Archie need is one more structured place they have to go to on the weekends where they can’t be kids. Archie needs that time to himself. So they stop going to church.
Tell us about his diet. Does he watch violent television programs? Does he wet the bed? How was potty training in general? Is there a history of mental illness or emotional disturbances? Has anyone close to Archie ever died, a grandparent or a pet? Miranda says no, George says no.
Has there been an unusual amount of stress in the home lately? This is where George has to tell him he’s out of work. Going on five months now. The doctors nod knowingly. George wants to kill them all.
This started a long time bef
ore George lost his job, Miranda tells the doctors. George still loves her. This—when she sets the doctors straight—this is one of the times George still loves her. She’s started having drinks with her coworkers after work on Fridays, and sometimes other days, too, because sometimes one of the bosses shows up for drinks, and she doesn’t want to look like she’s not part of the team. People are being riffed at her company, too. That’s what they call it in this economy—riffed. It’s an acronym for reduction in force. A near anagram for fired. Getting fired is what they used to call it. Then they called it getting laid off, but that made it sound like it was something temporary, just until orders picked up again, or something, and the one thing we all know about this economy is that orders are not picking up. Nothing is temporary, except for all the things that are. Especially whatever job you find next. George has been reading about it on the Internet late at night. Precarity, they call it. The new economic and social reality of people’s lives is precarity. In this economy, they call it getting riffed. And Miranda’s been going out with her coworkers for drinks on the theory that it’s harder to riff someone who’s popular with her coworkers. Most of these nights cost between $17 and $25.
Then there are the nightmares. They’re not like other kids’ nightmares. George and Miranda don’t have other kids, have never really been around other kids, but they know that Archie’s nightmares are not like other kids’ nightmares, because if all kids had nightmares like this, the human species would have died out long ago, because no one would put themselves through these kinds of nightmares.
Archie’s nightmares—like so much with Archie—start with a scream. The doctors say that if he’s screaming, he’s already awake. But they’re wrong. George and Miranda have stood there and watched it. Archie is sound asleep, and he screams. At the scream, George and Miranda get up, move down the hall. By the time they get to his room, Archie’s kicking things in his sleep, spinning in the bed. He looks like the kid from The Exorcist. Then the noises start—again, not words, but noises, sometimes they’re sharp little barks, sometimes they’re deep heaves, like a person who’s been running and can’t stop. That’s when Miranda and George open the door.
Sometimes that’s the end of it. Just the sound of the opening door will trigger something in Archie’s sleep, and a minute later, he’s breathing calmly again. On those nights when Archie goes back to sleep, Miranda and George look at each other like strangers, unable to read each other’s faces in the dark. Neither wants to be the first to admit how incredibly grateful they are.
Because more often, after the heaves and the kicks and the barks and the spins, more screams come. Archie is still asleep, and he’s screaming with a power that starts somewhere below the heart. Then he starts clawing his hands in front of him like he’s being grabbed by something out of the darkest human visions of fear. Then the thrashing, and all this time, he’s still asleep, until George and Miranda go to him and wake him and hold him on the couch for two hours until he falls asleep again. Then they carry him back to bed for a few more hours until the next nightmare, and by then it’s more or less time to get up and start the day.
Touching other children. Sudden verbal outbursts, screams or shouts. Constant fidgeting. Singing. Dancing and flinging his arms when inappropriate. Nose picking. Scab picking. Fingernail picking. Talking during book time. Talking during quiet time. Taking other children’s belongings. Noises. Sitting on other children. Sudden angry outbursts. Don’t look at me, he screams. Whistling. Beats pencils and pens on desk. Doesn’t understand no. Unreliable. Won’t stay in line. Sometimes gets so locked into something there’s no way to get him out. Singing and laughing inappropriately at lunchtime. Impulsive giggling. Can’t keep hands to self. Interferes with other children’s ability to learn. Unable to focus. Willful. Willfully disobeys rules at PE, games, and sports. Constantly acting up for classmates. Laughter incommensurate with the funny event. Has to be told over and over. Can’t take my eyes off him for a minute. Never completes his work on time. Morbid curiosity expressed in frequent discussions of death. Wants always to be the center of attention. Disregards peer censure. Normal range of punishments and consequences seem to have no effect. Almost total lack of self-control. Seems to lack a sense of self. Prone to sullen moping. Takes other children’s food. Cares more about what he wants than about what’s asked of him by teachers. Doesn’t think before he acts. Difficulty gauging risk/reward. Sometimes lashes out. Doesn’t seem to see others as real people. Little sense of the future. Always says, What did I do?
It’s bill night in the Putnam household. It used to be sort of fun. George and Miranda would pour each other a glass of wine, toast another $385 and $312, respectively, toward their not-so-rapidly dwindling student loans, another $1602.61 on the mortgage. They’d take out a pair of dice and roll to see which credit card got the big payment that month. Now it is not fun.
The savings are what’s dwindling now, and fast. They’re still paying most of the mortgage, because their ARM explodes soon, and if George is still out of work then, they know they’ll need all the goodwill they can muster.
They’re stuck on the student loans, too—they used up all their deferments when they were saving for the down payment on the house. And sometime over the summer, they can never remember exactly when, the student loan bills are supposed to increase. In their early forties, it seems highly unlikely to either of them that they’ll ever have those things paid off.
Miranda brings home $3,024 per month, except in the two months a year when there are three paycheck-Fridays in the month. This is not one of those months. George makes $1,164 from unemployment benefits.
They budget $600 a month for groceries and other household necessities. Sometimes that’s enough, sometimes it’s not. Gas, thirty bucks a tank, times two, times four weeks, $240. Sometimes that’s enough, especially with George driving less. They got rid of the cable, the Netflix. They got rid of the Y. They got rid of Archie’s after-school program, which ran them $250 a month and was nothing but a problem, since they got the same kind of calls, the same kind of trouble there as Archie had at school, even more often. Archie won’t settle down during homework time. Archie has problems keeping his hands to himself. Archie throws food during Group Snack. Archie doesn’t listen when adults talk to him. Archie’s temper got the better of him. Archie had to be consequenced again today.
Power, gas, Internet, garbage, water, sewer, cell phone—set those aside for now. Instead, they get out the notebook that has all the medical-bill arrangements. The biggest one, the one they hate the most, is to the pediatric neurologist, a German immigrant who wanted to do a sleep study on Archie that ended up not being covered by either of their insurances, when George had insurance. They pay this man, for his inconclusive sleep study, $210 a month. Total up their current outstanding balances to St. Louis’s medical professionals—$7,352. Current monthly payment due, $511.
Every credit card gets the minimum now, no more big payments, no more pair of dice. Total minimum payment due—$519. George and Miranda guess it’s possible that someone could say there was a time in their lives that they were irresponsible with their credit, that they lived beyond their means, but really, they didn’t. They both like to read books, and they bought some books. They wanted to have this house for Archie, so they bought the house. It needed furniture. They don’t take elaborate vacations. They drive nine- and ten-year-old cars, a Nissan Sentra and a Ford Focus. When Archie first started school, Miranda agitated for a minivan so she would be able to take Archie and his friends places. But Archie doesn’t have any friends. So at least there’s no car payment.
The president gives a speech on job creation. Immediately after the speech, the Senate minority leader says no to the president’s job creation plan. Republicans win the special election in New York, where a former congressman had to resign because he sent out pictures of his penis on Twitter. The stock market’s down three hundred points. In Afghanistan, seven US soldiers are killed by an IED.
Insurances—car, home, life—must be paid, $311 per month. LaShonda at the outplacement agency says it’s smart to open automatic payment accounts for these must-pay bills so that you don’t see them and thus they don’t weigh on your mind. She recommends using your one remaining credit card for these accounts—she recommends cutting up everything but your oldest credit card and paying the balance in full every month. That way the bills don’t seem so daunting. George and Miranda have not cut up their other credit cards. What if there’s a car problem, a pipe break, a smashed window, a fritzy stove?
Throw the utilities back in the pile, and we’re at negative $490 for the month. That’s before drinks with Miranda’s coworkers. Before writing the check for Archie’s lunch money. Before anything that comes up.
And of course they don’t need the after-school program for Archie because George can pick him up every day. He gets there about ten minutes before school lets out, parks the car, and walks a block or so to the front of the school. To wait with the mothers. They all know each other, the mothers, they’re all out talking. They’re all nicely dressed. There are three categories of mothers. The busy professional, she’s on flex time, goes in at six o’clock every morning, wears a suit, slim, distracted. There are the rich wives, who range from the heartbreakingly cute twenty-five-year-old to the brittle but handsome forty-something. There are the uber-moms, thick but fit-looking, sometimes in jeans, all with the same short haircut Miranda calls Suburban Butch. There are no fathers. Oh, occasionally. Not today.
It’s windy today, and chilly. George gets out his phone. No messages, no texts, no e-mails. What do you expect late on a Friday? George is sure these people, these women waiting for their kids, are bound to have problems in their lives, too. You never know what’s happening in someone’s life. George waits where he always waits, by the concrete bulldog statue on the northeast corner of the school’s front lawn. The flagpole lanyard rings in the wind.
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 15