by David Hicks
“You scared me,” she says. “You know that? You still do.” She swallows the bagel and swigs down the rest of her coffee. “You’re all friendly and smiling, but then . . .” She shakes her head.
I feel, in this moment, that in some way I have, all these years, actually needed her to be angry with me. That way, it’s been easy for me to play the victim. Poor me, I have a crazy ex. She’s insane! A lunatic! What’s a nice guy like me to do?
Now? I don’t know what to do with this person in front of me.
“I’m working on it,” I say. I’ve been seeing a therapist. Last time I was in therapy, years ago, when I was still married, all I did was cry every week. This time, I’ve been getting down to business. Why I am the way I am.
It hasn’t been pretty.
“I know I used to brag about how protective my parents were,” she says, her voice now husky. “But really, I hated it. And here I am being the same way with my own kids.”
She folds her arms. “I was protected,” she said, “and they gave me a safe place to grow up, but, you know . . . it wasn’t really safe safe. It was just protected. So I was always afraid of being alone, on my own. Now, being on my own, you forced it on me, but . . . I realized I’m okay, I can do it. In fact, it’s made me stronger. Better. So”—she cracks a smile as she wipes away a tear—“thanks, I guess. Asshole.”
She lets go of the mug and holds out both hands, palms open. “In the meantime, Hawk, I am the way I am, I can’t change that. I worry about them. All the time. Every minute they’re with you. So all I’m asking for, all I am asking for, is to know where they are and what they’re doing when they’re with you. Is that too much for a mother to ask?”
I think about it, then shake my head. “No,” I say. “No, that’s not too much to ask.”
*
The following Friday, I get the kids, and we take them to Judy Lee’s house. I text Rachel where we’re going and I bring my cell phone with me. Jade, Judy Lee’s partner, makes a great dinner (rainbow trout with Brussels sprouts and rice) that Nathan and Janey don’t like, then microwaves some popcorn and puts on an old movie called Darby O’Gill and the Little People. It’s a terrible film, but it’s an old favorite of Jade’s, and she apparently put a lot of thought into its selection, so I pretend to enjoy it. The kids sit on the floor with a blanket and pillows, stuffing their faces with popcorn, getting it all over the floor. They love watching movies, any movies, and they have no taste whatsoever.
I don’t follow the plot. Instead, I chat with Jade and watch the backs of the kids’ heads while half-listening to Louise’s conversation with Judy Lee in the kitchen. I’m trying to relax—here we are, doing a normal thing families do, visiting friends and watching a movie together—but Louise’s voice has dropped to a whisper.
The film stars a young Sean Connery, singing a jaunty song, and it’s okay the first time, but then it gets sung again and again throughout the film:
She’s my dear my darlin’ one, my smilin’ and beguilin’ one
I love the ground she walks upon, my pretty Irish girl
By the time it’s sung by a bunch of leprechauns, Nathan and Janey are giggling and singing along quietly to each other. I can see what’s coming.
*
On the car ride home, they sing the song over and over in the back seat, louder and louder, collapsing in laughter, but they don’t remember the words, so they just sing it like, “She’s my dear my darlin’ one, na na, na na, na na, na na,” sometimes in their human voices, sometimes in their leprechaun voices. Janey laughs so hard she falls onto Nathan, and Nathan tickles her until she can’t stand it anymore and starts screaming.
Louise smiles back at them, but then spends the rest of the drive looking out the window.
*
The next morning, it’s raining, so the kids set up shop in the Contemplation of Life room. They sell various items to their “customers,” meaning Louise and me.
Poems:10 cents
Neck masagg:20 cents
Fortun: 10 cents
Oreo cookie: 5 cents
Mind reeding:10 cents
News papr: 25 cents
Majic trick: 25 cents
Pichures:10 cents
Creecher cards: 5 cents
Chores:25 cents
Janey is a good retailer. She sits at her table for hours, clearing her throat when she hasn’t had any business for a while. She sells her products below market rate and is always courteous. Nathan is more of an entrepreneur. He has built a robot named “Newman” using cardboard boxes and duct tape, and he gives Newman its own booth in order to double his sales potential. When he finds out that Janey has raked in sixty cents more than he has, he decides to run a lottery: he rips up paper, charges ten cents per ticket, and writes our names on them; the more tickets you buy, the better your chances of winning. Then he crumples them up, tosses them on the floor, and calls Tess into the room, and whichever ticket Tess sniffs first is the winner—free dishwashing for the whole weekend, a free room cleaning, one hour of garden work, instant garbage takeout—and he pockets the cash. Afterwards, when he shows off how much money he’s made, shaking the coffee mug full of change in front of Janey’s nose, she knocks it out of his hand and it spills all over the rug. When Nathan screams at her and shoves her to the floor, I snatch him up and carry him upstairs, my jaw clenched.
*
After dinner, it’s still raining, so once they reach the one-hour limit for TV watching, they come back into the Contemplation of Life room and beg us to play Sorry, the only board game in the house. I say okay, but Louise makes a face.
Nobody hates a board game the way Louise hates Sorry. She’d rather put on some music, read books, and do just about anything but play a game that pits everyone against one another. When most people draw a Sorry card, they celebrate; but when Louise draws one, she sits back and makes a noise with her lips. She doesn’t want to “sorry” anyone, ever. She can’t bear to “sorry” one of the kids, even if Nathan or Janey is about to win, so she always “sorries” me. If I have no pieces out on the board, then the kids both tell her to “sorry” the other, and it turns into a game of Which Child Do You Love More.
This time, Janey pulls ahead, but then she gets “sorried” twice in a row—first by Nathan, then by me. After my “sorry,” she flings her game piece across the room, kicks the game board to the floor, folds her arms tight, and starts squeezing out tears. Nathan, who was next in line for victory, throws his cards into the box, calls her the most Annoying Sister Who Ever Lived, and stomps up the stairs.
Louise gathers all the pieces and puts them in the box. It’s the third or fourth time this kind of thing has happened. “I hate this game,” she says.
I shove the board into the box, close it, get up, and stuff the whole thing into the garbage.
*
Sunday night, after I’ve taken the kids back to Rachel’s, Louise is waiting for me in the wicker chair, her hands folded. The windows are open, and a nice breeze is coming in through the screens I installed.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You’re leaving.”
She shakes her head, like she can’t believe my attitude. “I just wanted to talk!” she says, and hugs the little pillow to her chest. Her face tightens.
I’ve learned this about Louise: when she’s mad, the last thing in the world she’ll tell you is that she’s mad.
And this: she can cry without moving a single facial muscle.
I imagine her as a little girl on her childhood bed, gazing out the window at the rain, tears streaming down both cheeks. And when I picture her like that, I realize I am as much in love with that girl I didn’t know as I am with this woman I am just getting to know.
She looks up. “Is this what you do?” she says. “Give up on things when they start to get difficult?”
I stand near the door, by Noah’s dog bed
, which Rand asked us to save for him, in memoriam. Yes, I thought. Yes, this is what I do. Because I expect everything to fail. Because when things fail, then I can do my thing. I can go into a hole and feel alone and hurt, just like I did after I left my marriage, just like I did during 9/11, just like I did when my dad chose to go to work instead of coming to my baseball game and then died. Yes, that’s right: If I was a better son, he would have wanted to come back in time for my game, and he’d still be alive today. And yes, I know how stupid that sounds.
Louise goes upstairs—to pack, I presume. I follow her, because I can never just let someone do what they want to do; they should do what I want them to do.
“Hey.” Be tender, I think. Be kind. But she doesn’t turn around. I stare at the back of her: her blonde hair, the shape of her shoulders. I take a breath.
How many chances does a man get to set his life straight?
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, and I’ve never said a truer thing in my life. (I’m a pathetic piece of shit, I’d like to say next, but my therapist has been encouraging me to “practice self-love and self-forgiveness.”) “I need your help,” I say.
For Casey, my ex-girlfriend, the way to run a relationship was to first create a picture, and then find someone to step into that picture. And I did, I stepped into her picture. But here I am doing the same thing, only it’s me creating the picture, here in the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania, and I’ve been asking Louise to step into it. For me, it’s been my version of Sanctuary; but for her . . .
It’s like asking poppies to grow in mud.
She turns around. She’s at the top of the stairs; I’m at the bottom. “If you want out,” I say, “I understand. I do.” And as I say it, I imagine it: having my kids with me more often, continuing to improve my relationship with my ex-wife, Janey having me all to herself, lots of free time to read and watch baseball. An easier life.
Too easy.
Because, you know—I’m starting to figure this out, and yes, it may be too late—what is love, after all, what is life, but a striving against, and not settling for, our inevitable doom? What is it if it’s not a constant assertion of our longing for home, for intimacy, in the face of our unfathomable annihilation?
I think of my father, sitting in the armchair all weekend, watching TV, and I understand: he had accepted his doom, around the same age that I am now. He had given in and given up.
He had been destroyed and then defeated.
I think of him in his coffin and I have to catch my breath, my hand on my chest.
“As for me,” I say after a while, “I’m in. I’m all in.” And it’s kind of like raising a flag.
I lift my hand from the bannister. “But I really do need your help.”
Louise sighs, and sits down on the top step. “How can I possibly help you,” she says, “when I don’t know what I’m doing myself?”
*
The next time we have the kids, it’s the weekend before Halloween, Janey’s favorite holiday. She’s going to be a ninja, and she and Nathan will go trick-or-treating in their mother’s neighborhood on Wednesday, but for now, Louise is upstairs making monster drawings with her. I’m on the couch with Nathan, half-watching a football game, half-grading essays. I’m teaching part-time now at Penn State Worthington-Scranton, a way to earn some money during the off-season—and yes, I freely reported my increase in income to the Broome County Family Court, along with my 2012 tax returns, and my support payments have increased accordingly.
Once their scary drawings are taped all over the house, along with fake spider webs that Louise bought at a place in town called Endless Collections, she and Janey wash their hands. They have a follow-up activity: baking a Halloween cake.
They do it together. Louise shows Janey how to pack and level off a cup of flour, lets her crack the eggs (then shows her how to pick out the bits of eggshell from the batter, as if that kind of thing happens all the time), and boosts her up onto the counter so she can reach the vanilla extract. When it comes time to put the cake in the oven, she shows Janey how to put on oven mitts and lets her slide it in. It’s chocolate, Janey’s favorite. When Janey says she wants to tell her mom she’s made a cake, Louise helps her to call, then holds the phone to Janey’s ear because her little hands are caked with batter and icing. When she hangs up, Janey looks at Louise and says, “My mom said to say thank you, and she wants me to bring home a big piece for her!”
Well, well, well, as my father used to say. What do you know.
Meanwhile Nathan and I sit with the mixing bowl between us, each with a spoon. Tess sits at attention, hoping we’ll share, but Louise has warned us not to because chocolate is bad for dogs. When it’s ready, the girls present the cake. It has white frosting with “Happy Halloween” in orange letters, but the best part is the enormous black spider with wire legs that Louise placed on top. It looks as if the spider is guarding the cake, daring us all to take a bite.
*
We have the kids again the following weekend, so on Friday afternoon I give Louise a kiss and head out to the car, but when I call out that I’ll see her in a couple of hours, she doesn’t say anything back.
I turn around.
When I come inside, her face is flushed. “You never ask me to come,” she says. It’s as if the words have been stuck in her throat for the four months we’ve been living together.
I coax her into the car.
For the first half of the drive, she talks. She wants to be included more. But she also respects the kids’ need to be with me for the short and precious times we have together. But then she winds up feeling like an outsider.
When she stops talking, I drive for a while in silence. I feel tired. Exhausted. Every time we have the kids, Janey clings to me, Nathan wants me to approve of everything he does, and whenever the kids and I do something—go to the park, watch a minor-league baseball or hockey game, play miniature golf—and I ask Louise to join us, she says something like, “Don’t worry about me, you guys go enjoy yourselves.”
“If you want to be included,” I say to her now, “then say yes when we ask you to come.’
“But—”
“And if you want to do something,” I say, “just you and them, then go ahead and ask them.”
It’s gone from mist to a light rain outside, so I adjust my wipers. “They’re not going to initiate it,” I say. “They’re children. You’re the adult. So just ask! They do stuff with Sam,” I say. “He doesn’t wait for an invitation.”
I know what this sounds like, but it’s as if I can’t stop myself. It just comes out of my mouth. Plus, I know I’m right. I’m always right.
Louise looks out the window. We’ve crossed the border from northeast Pennsylvania to upstate New York, and believe me, there’s nothing to look at. Finally she sighs, as if she can’t believe she has to spell this out to her idiot boyfriend. “Sam lives with Rachel,” she says. “And the kids live there with him. He’s a regular part of their lives; they see him all the time. I see them, what, two or three weekends a month? And that’s when they want you all to themselves, every second. And I don’t blame them. You’re their father. They need you. They miss you. If I initiate something, then that’s time they wouldn’t get to spend with you.” She sits back and fingers the window button. “So how do I do this?” she says. “Where do I fit in?”
I don’t have a good comeback, so I drive for a while, imagining what it might be like if I had no kids, and Louise had two children with another guy who now had custody of them, and I moved in with her, and her kids saw her only two or three weekends a month, and they clung to her all that time, competing for her attention, asking her questions as if I weren’t in the room. I imagine how I would feel in that situation.
The trees outside look barren. “I’m sorry,” I say. “This must be hard for you.”
We talk some more, and I listen to h
er without telling her what to do, without trying to come up with a solution. It’s more difficult than it should be.
I try to think of a couple I know, or have known, who’s done this kind of thing. Then I try to think of any couple I know, any normal couple, who do everything right—who love each other and get along well. When I think of my parents, I almost laugh out loud. My mother talks about her married years as if it were the Golden Age, but I remember my father slapping my mother on the leg so hard that she cried out in pain; I remember dinner ending early one day because he said something vile and bitter under his breath; I remember when he yelled at her so loud I heard him from my friend’s back yard, six houses away; I remember my mother putting out her cigarette on my father’s forearm and him howling like an animal.
“He was a loser,” she said after the funeral, when a bunch of people I had never seen before gathered at our house. “But he was my loser.”
I realize that instead of keeping stuff like this in my head all the time, I should tell Louise what I’m thinking. So I do. I tell her about my parents. I tell her about how sarcastic they were, how they never showed affection. I tell her about the muffled arguments I heard through the wall of my bedroom, next to theirs. I tell her how angry my mother was after my father’s death.
And she listens.
She tells me how her own parents weren’t exactly role models, living separate lives: her mother working overnight shifts at the hospital, her father constantly tinkering in the wood shed. Not the kind of relationship she wants, she says. What she wants is union. What she wants is to be a couple. As for the kids, she says, they’re sweet, they’re beautiful, and Janey is starting to warm to her. She feels great affection for them, and can see how it will turn into love someday. “But first we have to be a real couple,” she says. “Then we can create the picture together, all four of us.”