I know how it feels to have to begin speculating ominously weeks before each summer ends and the new school year begins about the innumerable ordeals massing ahead of him. (I know how it feels to be notified of an office meeting scheduled to take place and have no idea what it's going to be about. I know that I am already troubled grimly and sadly about whether or not I will be allowed to make even my three-minute speech at the company convention in Puerto Rico this year, let alone about what will become of me if I do have Kagle's job by then and have to take charge of the whole event. Will I be good? As good as I know my three-minute speech last year would have been if Green had let me give it? I think I hate that bastard Green too, but I'd rather not admit that to my wife. Why would I want to admit to anyone that I hate and fear the man I work for, yet continue to work for him? Why do I let myself agonize over what even at best would have been no more than an amusing three-minute speech? The sky is falling, tumbling down on all our heads, and I sit shedding tears over an unhealing scratch on a very tender vanity. At least my boy's problems are real. They occupy space. They dangle from the ceiling of a gymnasium and glower at him from the dark and evil face of a physical education teacher.) To his young and practical mind it seems so pointless to have to go through one school year making complicated adjustments to people, young, old, good, neutral, and bad, only to have the relationships all terminated when spring ends and summer comes (for him, and for me now too, the year begins in September and closes out in June. Summer marks time. Summer is for taking inventory, adding bank balances, and fucking around in); and then have to go through the same harrowing process in the fall of adapting to new relationships that he knows from the start will be dissolved as well the following spring (as methodically and insensibly as the changes in seasons themselves, and for no more beneficial purpose. The seasons do not change because we want them to), leaving him isolated once more outside some sheltering context (the home, obviously, has not been substantial enough) inside which he can orient himself securely with some conviction that it is going to last awhile and maintain meanings and directions that will not blur and alter suddenly without explanation. (Where is a frame of reference now for any of us that extends even the distance to the horizon, only eighteen miles away?) My boy puzzles over things like that.
("How far is the horizon?"
"Eighteen miles at sea level," I answer rapidly. "Or only fourteen. I forget which."
"Why sea level?"
"I don't know. Maybe if you're up higher you can see farther.")
He puzzles over things like that well in advance (although not in these words, which are mine. He is only nine and lacks my vocabulary. Where was I when I was nine? Isolated among friends in elementary school too, where it was mandatory that I see a dentist twice a year to have my teeth fixed and have my head examined once or twice a year by a nurse right in the classroom, along with all the other kids, whites, Blacks, Jews, Italians, for nits, without any of us ever being told what nits were, although intonations signaled they were bad. That was a test I always passed. I don't know how I would have survived if I had ever failed. Once a girl peed in her seat in the classroom during a geography test and everyone knew it. I don't know how she survived. I don't think I could have ever survived if I had ever peed in my seat in the classroom during a geography test).
When my boy puzzles over things in advance, he tends to puzzle over things that perplex or torment him. (He almost never sees anything good in store for him. He has wishes; he never sees them coming true, even though he knows I promise and give him just about everything he asks for and everything else I think he wants and should have. When he does chance to think about something pleasant that is likely to happen to him, his reveries turn negative: he begins grieving it won't. He loses it before he even has it. He is like our salesmen, and me, wired by experience to expect, and long for, the worst — just to have it over with.) They pollute his summers for him. (The early part of each summer is marred for him by the need to acclimate himself to the surroundings of whatever beach or country house we have decided to rent that year. He won't go away to camp, and neither will my daughter ever go again, although they don't enjoy being with us. We never know what to do with Derek. It is always so embarrassing to hide him; and equally embarrassing to disclose him. The latter part of the summer is ruined for him by the approaching fall. Sometimes, to my chagrin as well as his, the cares of early summer and late summer overlap, so that if one set subsides for a while, the other is present already, gnawing at his peace of mind. Sometimes he pisses me off, and I begin to worry about everything too, including the feelings of enmity toward him that start fermenting inside me. I'm afraid I am beginning to dislike him.)
I know (and am annoyed) that weeks before the end of summer he begins fretting despondently about all the trials he knows are lying in wait for him: the schoolwork, the accomplishments expected of him in gym (he welcomes running and dodging games, at which he is swift, nimble, and foxy), the new teachers, the old teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the shop teacher, and the science teacher (he has always been leery of shop teachers and science teachers. Perhaps because they are men), the music teacher (will this one also require him to stand up in turn and sing solo a few notes in order to determine into which section of the chorus to classify him for those times when they have to perform at the weekly school assemblies?), the student monitors from grades higher than his own (boys bigger and stronger than himself with license to order him about, and older, taller girls with badges and arm bands of authority and with embryonic breasts starting to swell forward toward him mysteriously and threateningly. I remember how it was when I was small), and the boys and girls familiar to him from the preceding school year who will not be in his class again. He laments the loss of children he knows, boys and girls, even those he does not like, who move away into different communities or are transferred by their parents into private schools (more and more of us seem to be transferring our children into private schools, which are expensive and not much good, and then transferring them out again into other private schools that are not much better. We don't like the heads of these private schools. More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution, and soon there will be nothing left. No more newspapers, magazines, or department stores. No more movie houses. Just discount stores and drugs. More and more of us, I think — not just me — really don't care what happens to our children, as long as it doesn't happen to them too soon) or the one or two who drowned or got hit by cars during the summer (the incidence of accidents suffered each year by children we know corresponds with portentous accuracy to the incidence of accidents suffered by adults I know in the company. Martha in our department is going crazy), and those others who, as a consequence of inexorable and unfathomable processes in operation in offices downstairs (adults toiling assiduously with records of living children that are dead already on sheets and cards in folders and cabinets) have been separated from him (like our tonsils and our baby teeth) and scattered about into different classrooms. He hates changing from teachers who have been kind to him.
("What are you worrying about?" I will ask him when I can no longer endure in silence the thought that he might be worrying alone.
"I'm not worrying," he will reply.
I wish I could be more of a help to him. I wish he would let me try.)
"What are you worrying about?" I will ask again.
"I'm not worrying," he answers, looking up at me an instant with a glimmer of surprise.
"What makes you look so glum?"
"I was thinking."
"What were you thinking about," I persist with a smile, "that makes you look so worried?"
"I don't know. I forgot already."
"You looked so glum."
"I don't know what that means."
"Sad."
"I'm not sad."
"Tired?"
"Maybe I'm sleepy."
"Do you stay up late?"
"Sometimes I don't fal
l asleep right away."
I sometimes wonder if he really worries as much as I think he does. I sometimes think he worries more. He is a cautious little thing (or seems to be. I know I worry for him and expect the worst to happen to him also. So does my wife. I used to worry about my daughter too when she was little, but now she is past fifteen, and the worst hasn't happened. What is the worst? I'm not sure). Maybe the worst has happened and went unrecognized, because my boy, now that I look back, has never had an easy time of things (and my daughter is having a lousy time of it now, unless she is acting too. Wouldn't it be funny if both were acting more unhappy than they are merely to spite and upset us? Ha, ha. I wouldn't find it funny at all. Even as an infant in a playpen he always seemed to be siphoning everything around him in through large, mysterious, intelligent eyes and judging everything he absorbed tentatively before making up his mind and allowing himself to react — even when he reacted spontaneously, as when grinning or giggling suddenly, there always seemed to be a premeditated delay, an infinitesimal lag, but a lag nonetheless, during which a decision had been arrived at. Even an offer of money, or an ice cream pop, would bring a moment's weighty consideration before acceptance. I lose patience with him often. I shout and shame him sometimes — then deny I shouted and try to persuade him I was only being emphatic. It's no way to build confidence. I try to be generous and companionable to make up for it.
"Say yes or no," I demand of him in explanation. "What difference would it make if you are wrong? What would you lose by making a mistake?"
He is confused.
He is afraid of making mistakes.
So he makes them with me by vacillating).
I know he must wonder now why his life has been arranged to be so unceasingly difficult (why I shout at him so frequently, or seem to, why I undoubtedly do raise my voice) or if there ever will come a time of tranquillity and bliss for him in which no new implacable demons are waiting in ambush for him, stirring in time as the moment of contact draws near, making ready for him, practically in view. (I know I wonder all of that for him. When will he be able to relax and take things easy, so I can relax and take things easy too?)
"Tell me, what do you want to do?" I ask him so many times out of disconsolate, moody concern. "What do you want to be?"
"I would like to learn how to drive a car someday."
"Everybody does that."
"If I can. Do you think I will?"
He likes the smell of gasoline and is afraid of fire, height, and speed (but not of airplanes, if he is in one).
How weary (I feel) he must be already of challenges and adversity, like a spent and weatherbeaten old man (homunculus), or a resigned, moribund, whitehaired old woman embracing her own demise with relief. Often, when something of a particularly eroding nature seems to be preying on his mind, a shadow of gaunt consternation will fall across his fragile, fine features, a stricken look of transfixing amazement, as though he is troubled deeply by the fact that he is troubled at all.
He hardly seems altogether at ease anywhere but at home, although he has always laughed a great deal when with people he knows. He makes jokes. He has wit and a talent for giddy and imaginative tricks. They are mainly verbal, always harmless, usually successful by one light or another. He seeks safety and invisibility in humor. (I do too. I find it in sex, which is always humorous too.) And he labors industriously to surround himself inside a womblike atmosphere of compassion and good spirit and survive there eternally (like the me I really think I am, I think, swaddled cunningly inside my cocoon, hiding secretly in a foxhole no one knows is there), dissembling, peeping out guardedly nearly all the time (one part of me anyway) to reassure himself (myself) that our outer shell of protection is still there and intact (and we are there and intact too), recoiling hastily (searching in horror for some unobstructed avenue of escape, I am sure, and searching in horror in vain) when we spy or think we spy any omen of any hazard of puncture, deflation, and disintegration. (He is upset by basketball, which he does not understand.) His impulse always is to be endearing; he wants no enemies, dislikes disagreements, and does not enjoy competition. He feels least in jeopardy when everyone around him is happy and sated with contentment (he feigns complete indifference to Derek when we let him and tries to pretend he is able to ignore him); he feels most in jeopardy in proximity to somebody sullen or someone manifesting anger, especially me. (He is as much afraid of me at times, I believe, as he is of any sullen stranger glaring to himself in a cafeteria, or even as he is of Forgione, or Forgione's assistant, with their demands for rope climbing, chinning, tumbling, push-ups, and basketball games that my little boy finds impossible to do well and baffling to understand.) He is the only member of my household who hesitates to come into my study to interrupt me. (He is even too diffident to come inside to say good night to me at bedtime, though I keep asking him to do so and keep assuring him that I will not mind.
"Good night," he will call out to me from the hallway, keeping himself so deeply withdrawn that I will be unable to see him when I turn my head and look up, and recede skittishly into his own room unless I call right back:
"Good night. Come in here a minute. Will you?")
Unless I make him. Once I do make him step inside my study to talk to me, we have little to say to each other. He brings a barrier with him. Or I have one of my own. But I do want to talk to him. We have nothing to talk about. I have to search for questions. He is unresponsive. He makes me interrogate him; he gives one-word replies. I think he knows I am not really interested in answers to the questions I ask him — he seems cross and stubborn with me for even trying.
He is wary of strange men with mean, sinister faces and of wild-eyed men and women in the street who talk out loud explosively to themselves. (He keeps an eye out for them always. Many of them use such filthy language.) He is unnerved by erratic behavior of any kind (even mine when I'm drunk or kidding around in certain ways in public or with his friends. He prefers me to remain dignified when other people are around). If I do lose my temper with my wife or my daughter, or if one or the other of them begins shouting at me, my boy is apt to continue fretting over our abrupt motions and cruel threats and accusations long after the argument has ended and the rest of us are back on favorable terms. My wife and I make endeavors now not to quarrel in front of the children, mainly because of the bad effect our fights have on him (and the salubrious effect they generally have on my daughter. They cheer her up. My daughter will come sniffing up avidly whenever she scents the elements of a marital quarrel brewing and will often gratuitously, and shrewdly, supply the remark needed to make it erupt, although she will sometimes blanch and shrink out of sight in dismay if the outbursts she had hurried up so enthusiastically to observe, and so hopefully to participate in, turn more vicious and hurtful than she could have envisioned. There were times, in large, noisy, crowded cafeterias or restaurants near sports arenas, circuses, or shopping centers, or in hotel lobbies or railroad stations or other cavernous, ceilinged areas in which we found ourselves surrounded by strangers, when he would feel that someone there was glaring at him with hot fury and cold dislike, planning something hurtful. He told me this; and sometimes he would describe and single out the person, always without daring to turn his own face around to look again. When I moved my own eyes swiftly to gaze at the man he was indicating, I was unable to be positive he was wrong. But I always told him he was imagining it. I did this to reassure him). He has a patient habit of mulling things over privately for long periods of time, roving through his mind in search of keys to secret riddles, and I am often unable to determine positively if he is indeed bogged down in something clutching and constraining or if he is merely relaxing and I am only imagining that he is in difficulty. (I make him enigmatic. I do not want my boy to be troubled by things he is unwilling to discuss with me, even if I am prominent among the things that are troubling him. I do not like him to keep things from me. I would like to know he confides in me. I would like to be certain he is eager to an
swer all my questions fully, even though his answers might be lacking in excitement and amount to little of interest to either of us. How can I know something he is thinking about is boring until I know what it is? I would like him to want to tell me everything he thinks of even before it occurs to me to ask. He is, after all, really my only son, and I think he should understand how much I need him.)
He is a good-looking son, kind and inquisitive, and everyone likes him (or seems to. You never can tell with people. Although he can. I know I do). He has fine, sandy hair, a sense of humor impish and intelligent, and pale, slight shoulders and arms. He is not strong. He is slim. His health is good. (We are pleased with him. My daughter is pleased with him now too, although she used to be envious and nasty, and we all enjoy talking about him to others.) It is like pulling teeth from him sometimes to get him to complain. (We tend to think of him as happy and to diagnose his occasional episodes of disobedience, resistance, or distress as symptoms of fatigue or sore throat and fever or as normal lapses into tolerable, childish misconduct.) He is a good little boy and always has been. He is, as my wife or I reflect aloud with pride on occasions, almost too good to be true (and he isn't! Something's wrong, and I think I have always known it, although I have never been brave enough to say so or even to face the thought without diverging from it in haste. All my wife worries about is that he not grow up to be a homosexual, although there is not a single reason to suspect he will. I worry about that only a little.
"He's being good just to spite me!" my daughter will allege impulsively in his presence during some of those playful or tempestuous disputes one or the other is always instigating, sometimes in humor, sometimes with virulence. "Nobody is that good all the time."
"Lesbo," he retorts winningly.
And we are all compelled to chuckle in affectionate appreciation, although my wife is not certain such language is appropriate in front of us or healthy or proper for either one of our children to use, or even know).
Something Happened Page 22