And there’s Archie, and yes, there’s his teacher walking alongside him and holding one hand while Archie drags his book bag with the other. While he was standing there waiting, George felt that a teacher would be coming out with Archie. It was in the air, like a smell, like the wind, and so George is not surprised. What has Archie done today?
What has George done today? There was a coffee at the Radisson in Florissant he was supposed to attend. He didn’t. He didn’t even get dressed until noon. He watched SportsCenter. He watched CNN. He watched ads for injury lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers, asbestos lawyers. Our attorneys are former IRS employees, and they know how to handle your case. He watched seven-and-a-half minutes of facial cumshots and four minutes of a blonde fucking another blonde with a strap-on dildo. Two minutes of a woman fucking a machine. Less than a minute of two men fucking a woman in the ass at the same time. He checked the ads on Monster. Ignored a phone call from Miranda. Ate a bologna sandwich.
“We had just another real rough day,” the teacher says. “Archie, you want to tell your dad?”
Archie does not want to tell his dad. His long hair blows in the wind. Some other kids run past Archie and the teacher and down the steps to the sidewalk. One of them bumps Archie and Archie smiles, laughs goofily, says, “What the heck?”
“Archie,” the teacher says. “Tell your dad.”
“I got in trouble for hugging Josh Okey,” Archie says.
“Mr. Putnam, he was not just hugging Josh Okey,” the teacher says. “He was practically chasing Josh Okey around the room. We had to put Archie outside in the hallway. You’ll get a report. I had to write him up.”
“I’m sorry,” George says. Archie is now watching, and laughing at, some boys who are chasing each other around the front lawn of the school. George puts his hand on the back of Archie’s neck, firmly. “We’ll work on it. We are working on it. Please keep us informed of any problems.”
“What’s your schedule like next week?” the teacher says now. “I talked this over with Ms. Patti, the counselor.” She says this like George doesn’t know who Ms. Patti is, like he’s not practically family with Ms. Patti after the last three years. “She’s got some new ideas. Can we meet next week, with you and your wife?”
“I’ll have to get back with you,” George says. Archie has slipped George’s hand, gone over to sit on the concrete bulldog like it’s a horse. “I’ll have to check with Miranda.”
Months they’ve known this woman now, and she still always calls Miranda “your wife.” The actual unemployment rate nationally is something more like 20 percent when you include the part-timers, the underemployed, and people who have given up looking for work.
“Mr. Putnam, the other kids have to be allowed to learn,” the teacher says now, sotto voce into the wind, serious into the wind.
“We’re really sorry,” George says. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. We just have to keep working on it.”
“Try to make a time to meet next week,” the teacher says. “It’s important. Ms. Patti asked me to invite you.”
“Okay,” George says. “I’ll be in touch.”
He goes to Archie at the bulldog, has to do everything in his power to resist grabbing him by the arm and dragging him to the car. He does resist, and feels a little better about himself for resisting. Then he feels worse because he’s got nearly three hours alone with Archie until Miranda gets home, and that’s three hours if she doesn’t have to go out for drinks after work. He and Archie walk through the crowd of kids and moms toward where he’s parked the car. He decides he will not speak to Archie. He sets a grim look on his face. Not that not talking to Archie ever works. But neither does yelling or spanking or making him sit in the corner or not letting him watch TV or crying. They’ve even tried crying. Archie’s maturity level is not where it should be for an eight-year-old boy, the doctors say. His emotional maturity is a little slow-developing, the doctors say. Nothing works.
They get in the car, they pull into traffic. It’s about a five-minute drive to their house. After about two minutes, Archie starts singing. George looks at him in the rearview mirror. Archie sees him and says, “What?”
“Why do you do this stuff, Archie?” George says. “What is the matter with you? We talk about this every morning. You say you understand what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate, and then I’ve got this teacher coming and telling me you’re chasing some other boy around the classroom trying to hug him.”
“I don’t know,” Archie says. “The teachers always get me in trouble. Other kids do things, too.”
“We’ve talked about this, Archie. You’re not other kids. I can’t do anything about those other kids and neither can you.”
Archie says nothing.
“You know you can’t do that, right?” George says.
“Yes.”
“Then, Archie, what the hell?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Son, you can’t just say you’re sorry.” Archie calls this saying my sorry. He thinks it fixes things. I said my sorry, Archie will say. I said my sorry like thirty times. It baffled George and Miranda until they realized he was confusing the second-person possessive with the contraction for you are. Because George and Miranda have said to him, over and over again, “You can’t just say you’re sorry.”
“You can’t just say you’re sorry,” George says now. “You’ve got to show you’re sorry. You’ve got to stop doing these things you have to say you’re sorry for. When are you planning to figure this out?”
“I don’t know,” Archie says. They’ve pulled into the driveway at the house. George doesn’t get out. He just sits there quietly for a moment.
“Can I have a snack?” Archie says. “I’m hungry.”
“No, Archie,” George says. “Get out and go to your room.” The house is unlocked. Archie gets out of the car, dragging his book bag behind him, past the unfinished shed. George sits in the car. The car is still running. The radio is talking about the Euro crisis. The market continues its despondent slide.
When George got riffed, they sent him to LaShonda at the outplacement agency, and she explained all the programs they had available for him—severance, COBRA, social-networking solutions, job counseling, psychological counseling, emotional counseling, mock interviews. She said that most people change jobs five or six times during their working lives, and that most of the time, especially in this economy, it happens just like this. She advised George not to watch the evening news stories about the economy. She said it is very important to treat job hunting just like a job, to get up every morning, get dressed in business clothes, and get to work. She said it is very unlikely to take longer than three months.
LaShonda encourages George to recognize his own value. She says potential employers will ask him what he’s been doing with his time, and he needs a sharp and ready answer. She says long-term unemployment is an emotional roller coaster. She says that regular exercise provides immediate and lasting value for the long-term unemployed. It’s okay to grieve, but he won’t really feel better until he gets out of his house and outside of himself. He needs to embrace the concept that change is good. Be open to starting at the bottom—once employers recognize their value, good performers are quickly promoted. She recommends volunteering as a great way to network and contribute to solving some of the problems in your community. You need to turn negatives into positives. The fact that you’ve been unemployed so long, for example—a case could be made that this gives you a unique perspective any employer should value. Or you could express to a potential employer that, as a long-term unemployed person, you will be among the employer’s most valuable employees, because you now understand how valuable a job is, and you’ll work harder than anyone now that you’ve finally got a job again.
Don’t be discouraged by job postings that indicate they will accept only applicants who are currently or recently employed. Oftentimes, a third party is responsible for the job posting, and you can turn your unemployment story i
nto a great cover letter.
Has he been checked for heart abnormalities? And brain tumors and epilepsy? What about autism? Well, these things are spectrum disorders. People can have them and still be highly functional.
Tell us about Archie’s bedroom. Tell us about your bedtime routine. Tell us about the books you read to him.
How old is your house? Is there lead paint? Proximity to power lines, to heavy industry, to busy streets? Are you on a bus line? Have you professionally cleaned your air conditioning ducts and vents lately? Your carpets, your drapes?
How does Archie do with various kinds of fabric? Are there shirts he particularly likes or doesn’t like? Does Archie’s mood change when he’s looking forward to something? Have you thought about taking a nice vacation somewhere? Have you had him tested for BPD? OCD? Nasal polyps? Schizophrenia?
Are there firearms in the home? What kind of art or pictures are on the walls? Is his room on the same level of the house as yours? Have you ever let him just cry it out? How long has this been going on again?
Here’s something they do in St. Louis: everywhere you go, people will invariably ask you where you went to high school. There is a tremendous amount of data encoded in your reply to this question, and the native St. Louisan deciphers it quickly. Your answer not only reveals the neighborhood where you grew up, but how you grew up. It carries with it financial, religious, genetic, athletic, sociological, and demographic information. When you answer this question, your interrogator believes not only that he or she knows everything about your childhood and young adulthood, but that they’ve got a pretty good idea about what kind of person you are today. Where’d you go to high school?
The assumptions involved in this question/answer equation are not pretty, and to George and Miranda—neither of whom grew up in St. Louis—it is amazing that no one ever sees how squalid the whole thing is. St. Louisans always talk about how hard it is to lure new businesses or new people to the area—well, this is one of the reasons why. St. Louisans love to talk about St. Louis as a “big city with a small-town feel,” but they’re wrong on both counts. St. Louis has neither of these feels. It feels like exactly what it is: a static, lifeless, dead-water burg, a place that lacked enough imagination to remake itself when people stopped using beaver pelts as currency, and that runs, after a fashion, on the inertia of old money. Anybody who grew up here and had any real sense isn’t around to answer the question, Where’d you go to high school, because the minute they graduated from high school, they got out of here so fast they left skid marks. St. Louis alternates between fits of manic boosterism—new stadia, weird art parks, frenetic ad campaigns—and long periods of impotent civic depression. The city faces a hopeless racial divide, a structurally unsound economy and workforce, an aging population, and hideous suburban sprawl. Every five or six years, someone commissions a massive, multimillion-dollar study to tell St. Louis what’s wrong with it, why it can’t attract new industry or stop white flight or revivify the schools or plug the brain drain, and then no one ever acts on the studies’ findings, because it’s stuff St. Louis has known about itself all along, and it’s too much trouble to try to fix it. Hardly the vision young Auguste Chouteau would have wanted for his city. Chouteau was only fourteen years old when he arrived at the bluffs south of the Missouri-Mississippi confluence on Valentine’s Day of 1764 to build a fur-trading post to the specifications of his employer, Pierre Laclède of New Orleans. Heading a crew of some sixty Creoles, Indians, and free Blacks, Chouteau got the post built on time and under budget, and he went on to become one of St. Louis’s early leading lights. There’s a street named after him, and people pronounce it SHOW-tuh, which, like a lot of things in St. Louis, is close but not quite right. Here’s something people say about St. Louis: It’s a great place to raise kids.
Not only do George and Miranda resent the parochial insularity of this place they wound up in, but George is convinced that his difficulty finding work is inextricably connected to the fact that when people ask him where he went to high school, he has to reply that he grew up in Alabama, moved here for work. That, in other words, he’s an outsider, and in St. Louis, outsiders are weird. Also, it’s pretty doubtful that any place where people go around asking each other where they went to high school can also be a great place to raise kids.
That said, there are nice parks in the area, and today it’s suddenly warm. George and Miranda have decided to take Archie to the park. On the TV in the kitchen, policemen in riot gear are pepper-spraying college students somewhere in California. Without cable, the picture comes in fuzzy.
“Arch,” George says. “Get up. We’re getting outside.”
Archie has brought most of his toys and stuffed animals out of his room and has laid them in a semicircle around the couch, where he sits arranging and rearranging them in patterns only he can discern. The couch is not a long one—Archie can lie out flat on it, but barely. Archie has his journal with him, and every time he rearranges a toy or an animal, he makes a note. It’s a Saturday. Archie hums atonally while he works, and occasionally makes a noise that sounds like a splash.
There are times on Saturday when George and Miranda can almost feel normal. But Saturdays are also a problem, because it’s hard to go anywhere without spending money, and George and Miranda are trying not to spend money without letting Archie know they’re trying not to spend money. Archie used to like to go to the Magic House, which is a mansion in the next suburb over that they’ve converted into this play world for kids. There’s a pretend construction site, a beanstalk that goes up three flights of stairs, a room where kids can dress up and act out picture books, a mock-up Oval Office where kids can stand behind a podium with the presidential seal and see themselves on a television on the other wall. But for months they’ve been telling Archie that the Magic House is under renovation, because it would cost twenty dollars for all of them to go. And twenty dollars is nothing, of course, except three or four shirts for Archie at the resale shop, five gallons of milk, three cook-at-home dinners. So most Saturdays, especially since it’s been cold, they end up just sitting at home. But today it’s warm—it’s like spring is suddenly coming. Strange weather. “Arch, get up,” George says again. “Let’s go to the park.”
Archie doesn’t respond. He sits in the middle of the couch and carefully selects certain toys or stuffed animals from the semicircle on the floor. His stuffed rabbit and constant companion, Mr. Carrots, is always included in his selections. Then he picks up one or two other toys, a book or two, and lies down on the couch, fitting the items around his body. After lying still for a moment with whatever toys he’s selected, he sits up, puts the toys back in the semicircle, makes a note in his journal, hums to himself, and then repeats the process with Mr. Carrots and two or three other things.
“What’s he doing?” Miranda says. She and George are watching Archie from the kitchen. They bought the house just before the housing market collapsed. If they’d waited a week or two, they could have probably saved thirty grand. Or been turned down for the mortgage in the credit crunch. Miranda has always wanted to close off the kitchen from the living room. Even if George got a job tomorrow, even if he got a good job, the whole first year of his salary would go to paying off debt. Their savings are gone. They cashed in his pension, what was left of it. The ARM explodes next month. George says, “I don’t know.”
Tell us about his activity levels. How much sugar? Sodas? Has he been checked for food allergies? What kinds of play does Archie like? What kinds of play does he avoid? What are his relationships like with his peers? How does he interact with other children?
Archie is lying on the couch now with Mr. Carrots, his Diego Rescue Pack, and two Daniel Pinkwater books. He lies very still. His hair spreads out around his head. George and Miranda like Archie’s hair long, but now his hair is too long. Archie’s haircuts cost twelve dollars, and every trip to the barber is a behavioral disaster.
“Archie,” Miranda calls. She leaves the kitchen and goes
to the couch, where Archie has sat up and is making another note in his journal. She kneels down beside the couch and says, “Archie, what are you doing here?”
“I’m trying to decide which of my toys I want to have buried with me when I die,” Archie says. He says this very matter-of-factly, like this is something boys all over the world do every day, and there’s something in the statement, so plainly made, that makes Miranda feel like she’s been grabbed by the throat. She can’t breathe. She turns to George, and he sees that crease in her face again, a line of what looks like sucked-in flesh running from her hairline to her chin. She never used to cry when they first got married, before Archie. They’ve fought about this. You can’t lose your composure, he tells her; I have no composure left to lose, she says. Miranda sees that George sees that she’s losing it again, and she hates him for seeing it, even though she knows he’s right. She stands up and runs out of the room, down the hall. She decides to be a coward today. That’s what one of the doctors, one from about a year ago, said to George and Miranda once—you can’t be cowards with a kid like Archie.
George isn’t sure what to do. But this is how it happens, how their life seems to happen these days. You wake up in the morning with a vision of the day, and in a moment everything goes very wrong. Miranda can get that line in her face and cry and run off, but George can’t. So now he’s standing alone in the kitchen watching Archie carry on with his plan for the afterlife.
He goes to Archie, who’s scribbling another note in his journal.
“Archie,” he says, “I don’t think you need to be planning stuff like that or thinking about that kind of stuff.”
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 16