No one had spoken. It was oppressively quiet in the Volvo. The tape deck was on but the volume was very low. I don’t even know what was playing. Minor Threat? Cap’n Jazz? We caught weekend traffic in the Market and crawled slowly through it. It was busy, people walking, people on bicycles. Perhaps one of the last bright days before the snow came. People moved easily. The air was cool, but fresh.
We stopped at a light, near the corner of the old market building, and there was a crowd of people there. I rolled down the passenger-side window and heard music. I stabbed the eject button on the Volvo’s tape deck.
There was a band surrounded by people standing in a semicircle. The band was playing a U2 song, “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I could see their small amplifiers through a break in the crowd. The light stayed red and I watched and listened.
“Kill me now,” said Gavin. “Is that U2?”
“It’s a cover band,” said Donald. “Mad Market, or something. They’re always playing down here. People love that crap.”
The guitarist was sawing away and his guitar had a ringing, sustained quality to it. He strummed and strummed as the music rose and the crowd bent their knees. The stoplight stayed red for what seemed like forever. I leaned out the window of the Volvo, my elbows bent, chin resting on my wrists, and I watched. I wanted to see what was happening. I wanted to watch those four young men play music and entertain a crowd of people on a brisk, sunny Saturday morning. The band all had long hair in ponytails, and baggy hooded sweaters and jeans. The guitarist’s sweater was tie-dyed. The singer wore a bandana and sunglasses and he held his microphone with both hands as he stepped forward. He seemed both earnest and showy.
“I want to run…” he sang.
I can see myself there as though this was all a movie that I am watching today. I can see my sallow skin and my sunken eyes, my short, severe hair. I can see the disapproving looks on the faces of Gavin and Donald. I can see myself as I was then, inward-looking, lost, watching a band play a U2 song on a street corner, and I can see the people gathered around them looking attentive, not walking by, but stopping and waiting for something to be expressed to them. And I am looking out that car window in that interval between red and green. Twenty-one years old. I want to talk to myself as I was then. I want to say, Look at those people. How do they differ from you? Can you imagine what it is to be them? Look at them smiling and slapping their thighs. I want to ask my younger self: Do they look happy? Do they look like they know what happiness is?
LIGHTER THINGS
This is where we’re at: the wind has been up for twenty-three days now. Not gusty, but up, steadily. It just swung around one afternoon and began pouring out of the east. It’s normal, of course, for the wind to blow hard through the spring and the early summer, but not like this.
Our house, a stout, plain farmhouse, sits on the soft hills that roll southward to Rice Lake, which appears to us as a blue smudge through the trees that ring it. But those trees are bent nearly horizontal now, and the house feels as though it has developed a lean. The wind hammers against the walls and it has torn off the shutters, the antenna, bits of the trim. I consider it a miracle that nothing has yet come through the glass.
I am a daughter of this place and this soil which is blowing away. My husband comes from a family that farmed tobacco near Leamington, but he came here to be with me. For twenty-six years we have put our beans in the ground but this year the wind took them all. All the seed. The wind scoured the fields bare and then began digging away at what was beneath our hill. We have learned that our hill contains the past, and all we had forgotten is buried there. The bones of a cat. Rusted things. Boxes and suitcases and old wooden crates. The lighter things—unsent postcards, legal documents, the adult magazines I discovered beneath mattresses, the love letters, the motel receipts—flap violently and are gone almost before they can be identified.
Our three sons have grown and left us, but we see them in our hill, too, in what has been exposed. Stolen video game cartridges. Keys to the Oldsmobile that Joshua wrecked. Parts from the Ski-Doo David lost beneath the lake’s ice. Henry’s hockey gear. Pocket knives and BB guns.
At night we lie still and wonder what we will find peeking above the dry earth come morning. How long, we ask aloud. How long? And soon, when we feel that it is close, when the gale is just set to erode the last of our hill, and so to uncover those articles and acts and words and truths we were certain we had put deep enough that they would never again see daylight, we will button our coats and step over the threshold. We will leave our battered house behind and we will lean into that wind, making for the exposure of the baldest patch of land, where we will throw wide our arms and, like scraps of paper, hope to be carried away.
DOROTHY
My little girl is a bit timid. She routinely stands open-faced and mute when there are other people nearby. Observing. She’s especially daunted in the presence of other children, older ones most of all. She eyes them zoologically, stands stock still as though afraid any movement will frighten them off, or alert them to her presence. I like to believe this is the reason that she’s never shown off her ability to others, or even outside our house.
She’s two-and-a-half years old, and she is something. I know it’s my parental duty to say such things, and I know your place is to smile approvingly, then roll your eyes and shake your head once I look the other way. But you need to trust me on this: she really is amazing.
She asks me to sing her the alphabet song, and I’ll do it but stop periodically at different spots, and she will, without hesitation, fill in the next letter. Two years old.
I hum the theme to Sesame Street to her and she breaks into song, getting most of the words right. Those she forgets she’ll simply leave out, or she’ll look at me with a great big open expression on her face, asking me to fill them in.
I know you’re expecting a work of fiction. My name is Andrew Forbes and I am a writer and a stay-at-home dad. I write short stories. Almost everything I write is fictional, but please trust me on this: this is a true story.
Dorothy, my wife Marie, and I live in Peterborough, Ontario. Marie writes policy concerning wildlife for the provincial government. Dorothy and I keep a very full schedule of playgroups, story circles at the library, gymnastics for toddlers, swimming lessons, and assorted errands. Our days are packed.
The girl loves animals, especially cats and dogs. We have an unruly blue heeler named Rebus and an odd-eyed white cat named Rudy. Dorothy laughs hysterically when the pets do the slightest thing, and nearly hyperventilates when the dog chases the cat. It’s an unhinged, full-body laugh that we try to replicate with antics and tickling, but it never reaches the frenzied pitch it does when animals are involved.
And then there’s this: Dorothy can walk up the wall and across the ceiling.
This is true.
She’ll be standing on the wall so that she is sideways and you’re straight up and down, and if she’s holding a toy she’ll drop it and it will fall hard onto our blond hardwood floors. She began doing this just before her second birthday, though she’d been walking on the horizontal plane since she was eleven months old.
We were in the family room, surrounded by toys. Marie was in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea. I think it was a Saturday morning. Dorothy lay on her side, pressed her feet to the wall just above the baseboards, and began walking. Soon she was halfway up the wall, giggling a bit. To Marie I said, “Look at this.” Marie looked, slowly put down her mug, and walked toward us. “Be careful, Dot,” she said.
“This is strange, right?”
“Well, yes,” said Marie, but even without her saying so I could tell that she felt as I did: that all parents suspect their children to be exceptional, but here was our proof.
In a minute Dorothy had had enough, and simply walked back down to the floor.
“How did you do that, Dottie?” I asked.
“Oh, Dad, it’s okay,” she said.
“Dorothy,” I s
aid, “what’s happening?”
“Daddy,” she said, “I want a juice box.” We still call them juice boxes, even though most of them are now little foil pouches.
Life is composed of things not said, or uttered once and never again. Odd as it seems, Dorothy’s wall-walking quickly became just another facet of who we are as a family. People’s days are full of special circumstances, of peculiar details. What takes place within the walls of our home is unique, as is what happens in yours. We have a familial understanding, a list of tics, things relayed almost telepathically. With a narrowed eye my wife can communicate to me what it would take you several paragraphs to make me understand. Her shoulders—the set of them, the tension held there—tell me everything I need to know about her mood, though it took me several years to learn to read them.
“What’s wrong?” I’ll say.
“How’d you know?”
“Your shoulders.”
Likewise, with our children, we invent normalcy, craft anew the small stuff of daily life. This is what we’ve done with Dorothy: designed, or fallen into, our own kind of normal, though it may not resemble even remotely what happens around your kitchen table. Maybe your kid can recite the names of the prime ministers. Maybe you’re expected to prompt him at every meal (“And after Borden?”). Maybe you cut the crusts off her toast without being asked. You know your children.
My daughter is articulate, musical, curious, and has somehow found the ability to defy gravity. We, as a family, have adapted and accommodated, and we’ll continue to do so.
Some days, I’ll admit, I just can’t unearth the patience to humour her adventurousness. We’ll all have breakfast, then Marie will leave for work, and I’ll turn to my daughter and say, “Please, Dottie, no walking up the wall today, okay?” And she, brandishing the unblinking logic of a two-year-old, will say, “No, Daddy, I can walk on the wall because I can walk on the wall.” How do you argue with that?
I should hasten to note that she is not universally amazing. She can’t dress herself. The tantrums have become more severe lately, and she is brought out of them with ever greater difficulty. She can be rough with the cat. When she tires of a meal or a snack she’s likely to just drop the remaining food on the floor. And, maybe most frustratingly of all, she’s among the last of her friends to resist potty training. In a shameful turn we have resorted to bribery. If she uses, or even attempts to use, the potty, she gets one sticker in her notebook. We bought sheet after sheet of cows, horses, fairies, stars, moons, at the dollar store, anticipating buy-in on her part. So far, though, the sticker sheets are almost wholly intact. The notebook is mostly empty.
We are, I believe, conscientious parents. We read books and magazines about child-rearing. We go to the public library every week and we check out books about how to shepherd a toddler from diapers, through training pants, and on into the promised land of underwear worn confidently and without mishap. All of the literature—and there is a lot of literature—says that accidents are to be expected, steps backward, regressions, setbacks, and that we are not to make a big deal of them. But none of the books we have consulted mention how best to react if your child is standing on the bathroom ceiling, her ultra-fine blonde hair hanging down and brushing your face as you peer up at her, you imploring her to come down and try the potty just one more time, while she holds her training pants in her hand, waves them like a pennant, and then pees all over herself, and you, and the floor, while grinning.
Some nights I lie awake and dream up ways to harness her mysterious ability. “Dottie, can you dust the top shelf?” Window cleaning. Straightening pictures. I stand six-foot-three, and just as I have been asked time and again by stooped old women to retrieve items from high grocery shelves, so too will she wear the mantle of her gift. Into these things we are born.
Sometimes I tell Marie that we should take Dorothy to the climbing gym, where they have a fifty-foot wall studded with those little fake rocks. “It would blow their minds,” I say. “No,” she says, arms folded. “We should have fun with this,” I say, but she reminds me that our daughter, our beloved first born, our only child, is not a circus freak. I concede the point while filing away a secret plan to buy Dottie a Spider-Man costume for Halloween.
On a bright Sunday, Dorothy and I were sitting at the dining room table. It was mid-afternoon, snack time. She sat on her knees on a chair. Before her was a plate with maybe a dozen red grapes, cut in half, three or four slices of cheddar, and a pile of Goldfish crackers. Outside the large picture window the wind blew errant snow flurries through the boughs of a pine.
“Dottie,” I said, “why are you throwing things? Please stop throwing things.” She had been tossing toys and food all day. She’d take them into her tiny hands, scamper up to the ceiling, then disperse them like a sprinkler head. A maniacal, laughing sprinkler head. The dog was beside himself.
“No. I want to throw things,” she said. “I like to throw them and I will throw them and it’s okay.”
“Dorothy, please.” I tried to sound stern, though no amount of sternness has ever altered her behavior, at least not that I can remember. But any day now, I’ve long thought, she’ll start to recognize my fatherly authority. “Dottie, I want you to stay down here, please, and I want you to stop throwing things.”
A dazzling lack of success left me frustrated, but not wanting Dorothy to see me frustrated, I went upstairs to our bedroom. Marie was not there. Neither was she in the spare bedroom across the hall, Dottie’s room, or the bathroom.
“Marie?” I called. Dorothy was by then throwing something edible. I could hear the dog’s claws scuff against the floor as he jumped. She giggled loudly.
“Marie?” I made my way to the basement and checked the office down there, as well as the workshop. Finally I found my wife in the laundry room, sitting cross-legged atop the clothes dryer, reading the fourth book in a series about a dystopic future populated by attractive teenagers. It must have been eight hundred pages long.
I asked, “Are you really hiding out down here, reading?”
“Yes,” she said without looking up.
“That’s a pretty good idea.”
“I thought so.” She had bought the book at an airport the week before, and she was by this time three-quarters of the way through it.
“She’s throwing things,” I said.
“I heard.”
“What do I do?”
“Ignore her, maybe?” This is Marie’s stock response, and the tactic has merit, if what you’re hoping to do is downplay certain behaviour and refuse the one thing—attention—that a child hopes to gain by acting out. But in other cases, of course, it’s a flawed technique, and with each shriek, each dog leap, each morsel of food raining downward, I felt a terrific anxiety and a great certainty that ignoring was not our best move here.
“I’d really like her to stop,” I said, a new tide of frustration rising in my chest.
We were silent a moment, her atop the dryer, me leaning against the chest freezer. Upstairs Dorothy was still giggling, Rebus still desperately pouncing on whatever she was throwing (smart money was on the Goldfish crackers) and, because I know my dog, I’d bet his shoulders and back were hunched in a way which suggested that he knew what he was doing was “bad.” It’s a thing most dogs do, an instinctual display of deference, but in Rebus’s case I like to imagine it’s guilt, and that it’s something he’s learned from me.
I have a special talent for guilt, a knack, and in addition to the dog I believe also that I have taught Marie some of what I know, and I trust that Dorothy will inherit this, too. Guilt and an attendant suspicion of free time. Haunted by the thought: Shouldn’t I be making myself useful?
I figure that somewhere along the line this is what became of the Protestant work ethic, warped, morphed, diluted over time. Marie is Catholic by birth, but lapsed enough that she has forgotten the precise mechanism of confession, that periodic tabulation and absolution. This has rendered her ripe for my lessons.
But in one sense having a child like Dorothy has allowed me a measure of peace, of reduced expectations for myself. It has incrementally alleviated my guilt. The reasoning, however tortured, goes like this: if I do nothing else from here on out, I will still have had a hand in giving the world a wondrous human being, one worthy of scientific study. And there’s also the hopeful thought, however dim, that this ability of hers is something I have passed on to her, some super ability that I never discovered and which fear now keeps me from exercising, but which nonetheless lies dormant in my makeup.
By the time I left Marie sitting atop the dryer and made my way up the stairs and toward the dining room, the commotion had stopped. Dorothy and Rebus were not in the dining room, but rather in the living room. He was curled up on the couch, asleep, and Dottie was sitting next to him, a picture book in her lap. She was looking at the illustrations and telling herself the story as she remembered it. The two of them there were quiet and still, and so like perfect angels—the dog’s eyes closed, his chin resting near her knee, both of their faces relaxed, their postures soft and unthreatening—that I more or less forgot what had me so upset.
There is a photograph which shows Marie and me at Navy Pier in Chicago. Marie is six months pregnant, her face soft and cherubic. We are in Chicago as a grand kiss-off to our pre-parental life. Over an extended weekend we have seen the Cubs lose to Milwaukee, strolled the halls of the Art Institute, taken the El, roamed around the Loop, and seen the dolphin show at the aquarium. Now it is Sunday evening, the night before we are to fly home, and we are on Navy Pier, a questioning finger stuck outward into Lake Michigan, taking in the sights before retiring to a dark restaurant for deep dish pizza. The sun is sinking behind the skyline, and we are pausing for a photo, the camera in my hand at the end of my outstretched arm, pointed back at us. Her arms are around my waist, my left arm is over her shoulders. In the photo the lake appears as an indistinct bluish haze. There is a lighthouse tower at the end of the pier, just visible over Marie’s shoulder. We are smiling, happy. And as I look at this photo now, it seems to me, with the wisdom bestowed by the intervening years, that if we resemble anything it is those seamen awaiting commencement of an atomic test at Bikini Atoll. We have been told time and again, by countless experts, some of what we might expect, but if we listened at all we did so blithely, casually, unable to absorb the enormity of it. But soon the thing will come, and it will be huge. And we are destined to live with its effects—the shockwaves and the lingering consequences. There will be no way to imagine our lives as they were before the event.
What You Need Page 13