“What kind of stuff?”
“Stuff like death. It’s not good. And you don’t need to worry about it. You’re going to live for a long, long time.”
“My teacher says people who are my age will live to be a hundred because of how good medicine has gotten. She says she’ll only live to be seventy-five. You and Mommy, too.”
“Me and Mommy, too, what?” George says.
“You’ll only live to be seventy-five. That’s only thirty-three more years.”
“But a hundred is good for you,” George says. “That’s ninety-two more years.”
“I know,” Archie says. “I did the math. Want to see?”
George says yes, and Archie flips to an earlier page from his journal. There, and for the next several pages, are rows and rows and rows of numbers, where Archie has tried to figure out how many more days, hours, minutes, and seconds are in ninety-two years. Most of the figures aren’t even close to accurate.
“I only have about a million minutes left,” Archie says. “And that’s if I don’t sleep. And that’s if my teacher’s right about how many years I have left. She might not be right. Kids my age die all the time. They get sick or their cars crash or they fall off something.”
“I’m sorry you’re worrying about this,” George says now. “I didn’t know this was scaring you.”
“I don’t want to live ninety-two years. I don’t want to live longer than you and Mommy.”
“Look, Archie.” George pulls the curtain back from the picture window above the couch. “It’s a nice day. Let’s get out of the house. Let’s go to the park.”
“Can I bring Mr. Carrots?”
“You can bring Mr. Carrots in the car, but he’ll have to stay in there when we get to the park.”
“The far park?”
“Yeah,” George says. “The far park.”
The near park is only a couple of blocks from their house, but every time they go there, they see some of the kids from Archie’s class. What are Archie’s relationships like with his peers? Not good. Sometimes, if it’s only one or two kids, the right one or two, they’ll play together okay. But if there are three or four of them, they’ll gang up on Archie. If Archie’s in the sandbox, they’ll throw sand at him until he leaves for the swings. At the swings, they’ll run in front of Archie or push him too high. On the slides, they’ll climb up the ladder right behind him, crowd him, until he gets scared and comes back down, kids stepping on his hands on the ladder rungs.
The kids’ fathers and mothers just sit there talking to each other. They just watch all this. They’ve known each other since they were kids. George just sits there, too.
But St. Louis is a great place to raise kids, so there are lots of parks. After getting Archie dressed, George slowly approaches the closed bedroom door—Miranda’s in there—and he listens. He hears nothing, and he says nothing. He goes back down the hall, gets the keys from the peg by the back door. He and Archie go to the car, past the unfinished shed. George stops at the BP station and spends $ 13 on a quarter-tank of gas and drives into the next suburb to the far park.
When they get there, the park is crowded, but that’s good, because Archie can sort of get lost in the crowd and do what he wants to do. It’s a nice park, recently updated, with a new play set shaped like a mansion, surrounded by flower-and-garden-themed seesaws and swings and slides and these wobbly metal mushrooms on springs the kids can climb and balance on.
George finds the only unoccupied bench and sits down. Other parents arrive with their children, but none of them sits down on George’s bench. They see other people they know, and shout hello and wave, and talk and laugh and smile, and the women touch each other’s arms during conversation. It’s warm, even warmer than George expected it to be, and some of the women are wearing long-sleeved T-shirts and slacks. The men, there are three of them around the playground, are wearing jeans and sweaters and golf vests and polo shirts. George tries to see signs of unemployment in the men—there’s one who keeps checking his watch; George is frequently stunned when he checks his watch these days, expecting it to be hours later than it really is. There’s another guy with a cell phone in a holster on his hip. If another man in the park is unemployed, George would bet it’s the guy who’s climbing the jungle gym and chasing two little blond girls around—overcompensating. George had planned to sit for a minute, then put Archie on the swings, but since he’s seen the chasing man, he decides to stay where he is. All of the men look healthier than George—all of them are younger.
When George was a kid in Alabama, parents didn’t even take their kids to the park on Saturdays. You wanted to go the park, you just went to the park. Saturdays, you got up, bolted down some sugar bombs, got on your bike and hit the streets. If other kids were mean, you just had to deal with it. You grew up, and your parents didn’t have to sit there at a picnic table and watch the whole damn ugly thing. Now there are all these parents around. Spending time with their kids. Because they work all week.
LaShonda says most people get jobs because they know people who know people who are looking for people who are looking for jobs. LaShonda sends George to meet-ups, job fairs, networking groups, coffees. LaShonda says you have to put yourself out there. George is not good at putting himself out there. Even so, he can’t help but feel he’s worthy of a job, especially since he doesn’t really care what the job is, particularly. Phrases like working life or words like career have always struck him sort of funny. He just wants a job he can get up and go to every day, get paid for, and get home to Archie and Miranda. He wants to go on vacation somewhere once a year—nothing fancy, the lake or something. He wants to have enough money to pay the bills. He wants a college fund for Archie. He likes to watch the Cardinals on television, and would like to be able to get the cable back on before baseball season. He used to buy books, but now he checks them out of the library. All these buildings he passes every day have people inside doing jobs they get paid for. Another grievance for late at night.
When he first lost his job, George would say to himself: In two months this will all be over. At idle moments like this, like sitting in the park while Archie played, George would imagine himself into that two-months-away future, and it helped him feel better. Later, when the money started getting really tight, he’d say, In two more months, this will all be over, and he’d cheer himself up by thinking about how in two months the money would seem like a lot more money because he was getting used to having a lot less. When the money fully ran out, George said to himself, In two more months, this will all be over, and he imagined himself very responsibly recovering from the long-term job loss by carefully managing his money, by upgrading his skills, by shaping his ass up. Now it doesn’t even seem like he can—
Archie’s nowhere. George can’t find him. He was on the balance beam by the jungle gym, and then he was by the sandbox, but now he’s not there. George is up and on his feet—there’s a ringing in his ears. He’s looking everywhere, now he’s running. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees one of the fathers, the watch-checker, and he sees the man’s face looking at him. George runs to the parking lot, to the soda stand. He runs into the bathroom—there are two boys in there looking at their popsicle mouths in the mirror, and when George bangs into the bathroom it scares the boys—they lock their eyes on his in the mirror before George turns to look under the stalls. “Little kid?” he asks the two boys, putting his hand up to Archie’s height. The boys in the mirror shake their heads.
He’s moving again—there’s no telling where or what . . . there’s a pond near the playground, and George sees Archie’s red jacket floating in the water; the cell-phone-holster man is missing, and George sees Archie in the back of his car; there are a bunch of kids crowded around one of the wobbling metal mushrooms, and they’re laughing and pushing the mushroom back and forth, and George sees Archie’s sneaker pop out from underneath.
No, really, that’s Archie’s sneaker popping out from beneath the metal mushroom, wher
e a fat boy at least twelve years old is now jumping up and down on top of the mushroom as the other kids keep springing it back and forth. Archie is underneath. Archie is getting stepped on.
“Hey, hey!” George shouts. He runs toward the metal mushroom. Some other parents—cell-phone-holster’s back, there are some bare-armed women, they’re up and moving now as George shouts and runs toward the mushroom. The kids scatter from the mushroom, all except the fat kid who hops down and just stands there, looking at George and another person who’s behind George.
“He wanted us to do it,” the fat kid says to the person behind George, who turns out to be the fat kid’s mother. George has arrived at the metal mushroom now, and he sees Archie underneath, bleeding from a cut above his eye, another on his knee.
“Lamar!” George hears the fat kid’s mother say. “Lamar!” she says, scolding. The kid’s name is Lamar? Archie is crying and bleeding, and George is still trying to pull him out, and Archie screams more. His hair is caught in the metal mushroom’s enormous spring, so George gets down on his knees to lift the mushroom, but he can’t lift it at the proper angle because Archie is lying underneath. George keeps shifting his feet to try to get the mushroom lifted up, and when he does, Archie scoots away, tangling his hair even worse. There’s blood in the dirt, and Archie’s screaming.
“Lamar, that little boy is badly hurt,” his mother says now.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Lamar says. “He wanted us to do it. He wanted to see what it felt like in there.”
“Lamar,” the woman says again, and then takes the boy’s hand and walks away. When Archie sees the blood, he kicks and rolls away from George, farther underneath the mushroom. His eye will need stitches. Emergency room visit—how much?
Lots of parents and kids are gathered around now. Cell-phone-holster asks George if he wants him to call 911.
“Just fuck off,” George says, not so under his breath that people can’t hear it. He reaches under the mushroom and grips the hair caught in the spring into his fist. Archie’s sweating, bleeding scalp is on one side of George’s fist, the cold metal coil of the spring is on the other, and George rips, and Archie screams. George tries to pick Archie up, but it’s hard to get him out from under the mushroom where he’s crying and for George to get to his feet at the same time. He’s out of breath and sweating on this weird warm day when everyone should be so happy.
“Come on, Archie,” George says, still kneeling there. “You can stand up, right?” Archie is still crying, his tears mixing with the blood from the cut above his eye. He looks like one of those wrestlers who’s had a chair smashed over his head. Everyone, adults, kids, are still hovering around, making it hard to breathe. Everywhere George looks he sees knees.
“I apologize, but will everyone please just leave us alone?” George says now, loudly, into the knees. “He’s fine, I’m his father,” George says, and feels at once that there’s a failure implicit in that confession. The knees start to back away. George leans in under the mushroom where, once more, he puts a hand between Archie’s hip and the gravel ground and pulls.
He’s got him. Archie’s still kicking and crying, but George has got him. George carries Archie to the car, has to shift him to the other arm to get the keys out of his pocket. He gets the car door opened, gets Archie strapped in. Archie cries and hugs Mr. Carrots the whole way to the emergency room, where Archie screams and fights the doctors and nurses. They eventually have to strap him down to a board to put six stitches in his eyebrow.
So the trip to the park ends up costing them $283.
Today George has his first job interview in three weeks. “Good luck,” Miranda said when George called her with the news. She doesn’t mind working. She likes working.
There was a time, in people’s living memory, when women had to justify the decision to work outside the house. Where her parents lived, on the farm in Stanberry, in northwestern Missouri, women would still have to justify such a decision, if there were anywhere in town to work. In Stanberry the only place women really can work is at the regional school, and the women who teach there are either young and unmarried or honest-to-God spinsters. Living there is like living during the Eisenhower administration.
But in St. Louis, in this economy, women have to justify the decision to stay home with their kids. And some do, and good for them, fine with that. Miranda doesn’t even want that, George knows, especially if that means staying home with Archie all day. She loves her son. She’s said to George that she doesn’t think she ever even understood love until Archie was born. But she does not want to stay home with him all day long.
And she likes to work, she likes her job. But George knows she doesn’t like being the family’s sole breadwinner. There’s something wrong with that, and no rationalization or socioeconomic thinking will fix it. It’s just not natural for a woman to go to work while her husband stays home and becomes less and less of a man every day. Another grievance for late at night.
But today he’s got a job interview. A LinkedIn friend recommended George for the interview. LaShonda showed George how to get on LinkedIn. George doesn’t know this person who recommended him for the interview, but they’re LinkedIn. The guy wrote George a message, said he couldn’t promise anything but an interview, but he knows the HR rep, and he’d get George on the list. George wrote him back and said thanks. The guy sent George a message: Thanx? Thats it?
So George had to write back and thank him more, and tell him how great he was for doing this, and how much George appreciates him and his time, and thank him again. The man didn’t write back.
But George assumes the interview’s still on, so he’s driving out Manchester Road in make-you-weep traffic because they’ve got Highway 40 shut down. The radio sings, For a hole in your roof or a whole new roof, Frederic Roofing.
Up ahead, someone’s trying to make a left-hand turn. The radio says, Thank you and here’s my address. George is running late for his first interview in weeks, for a job he’s not qualified for and that he will not get. LaShonda says never to turn down an interview, no matter what. They’re good experience, and you never know. Every interview is one step closer to the rest of your life. Every interview is one step closer to the next fulfilling chapter in your life. Every interview is one step closer to the next exciting chapter in the story of your life.
And George’s cell phone rings. Something happens in his diaphragm every time the cell phone rings now. It’s a whole involuntary routine. The cell phone rings, his diaphragm feels like someone’s popped open a soda can in his chest, he tells himself to calm down. His fingers start tingling. He takes two deep breaths while the phone rings again, he takes the phone out and checks the number, and while he’s checking, he feels this popping sound in his shoulder and neck, like knuckles cracking in there. It’s been a long time since George has seen a doctor for himself. He’s forty-three, a little overweight, but he did quit smoking.
It’s Miranda on the phone. As George pushes the button to answer the call, the diaphragm thing starts again, because there’s no good reason why she’d call. She’s already said good luck.
“It’s Archie,” Miranda says. “The school called. Archie had some kind of freak-out. They’ve got him in a cool, dark room.”
“I’m on my way to an interview,” George says.
“Honey, I’m sorry, I know.” She’s quiet for a second. “I just don’t know what we’ve done,” she says.
She can’t leave to go to Archie. Well, she could. Sure, if your kid gets sick, you’re entitled to leave work. It’s the law. Yeah, no problem, go ahead, of course. We’ll just have to find a way to carry on without you.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “Someday it’s going to be all right,” she says.
George hangs up the phone and he’s in traffic, and now he’s the one trying to turn left, to turn around, and no one will let him in. Always program any contact info into your phone, LaShonda says. George didn’t program today’s interviewer’s contact in
fo into his phone. The radio says, Heal your home with Helitech. While he’s trying to turn around, he’s looking through all the paper on the passenger seat. Someone honks. George looks up and a woman in a blue Chevrolet is looking at him, raising her eyebrows and motioning with her hand, a cutting motion in front of her face. Go, go, he sees her mouth say. George goes. It still takes him another forty minutes to get to Archie’s school. Just as he pulls up, he realizes the worst thing about all this: he realizes he’s delighting in an excuse to miss the interview, and hating himself for delighting in it, which is not delightful. Luxurious, maybe. He’s luxuriating in the excuse—another grievance.
“He’s just having an exceptionally bad morning,” the principal says, meeting George on the walkway up to the school. Someone’s put an orange and black scarf on the concrete bulldog. Has he been checked for color-blindness? For light sensitivity? Two other concerned women are waiting for George and the principal in the school vestibule. One of the other women is the school counselor, Ms. Patti, who calls herself Ms. Patti because her last name is some consonant-thick Slovak impossibility. She believes that Archie needs several periods of tactile decompression during the day, so she takes him off to a converted broom closet to play with Lincoln Logs. The other woman introduces herself as Mrs. Bergeson, the school district’s director of social work. The school is overwarm and there’s a low-level, barely audible hum from something electric in the walls.
“Where is he?” George asks.
“He’s taking a rest,” Mrs. Bergeson says. She hands George her business card. “He’s comfortable and fine. Let’s talk a minute, and then we’ll take you to see him.”
Mrs. Bergeson leads George and the two other women down a hallway. A curly-haired little boy about Archie’s age pokes his head out of a doorway, sees George and the women, and quickly goes back inside. A sign hangs from the hallway ceiling: The Most Special Children In The World Walk Down These Halls.
They go into an empty classroom. Mrs. Bergeson sits behind the teacher’s desk, and the two other women quickly pull up little kid chairs and sit themselves down in them, exactly as though they enjoy sitting in these little chairs, as though they are perfectly comfortable there. George remembers the little chairs from parent-teacher conference night. He was afraid, sitting in one of them, that he’d split his trousers. He stands to the side of the desk.
Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Page 17