Home Game

by Michael Lewis

  Maternal propaganda. I am a professional writer and therefore am meant to be keenly observant. Without Tabitha, however, I would notice next to nothing about my own child, and certainly nothing admirable. All I am able to see by myself are the many odd-colored substances that emerge from her that need cleaning up, and the many unpleasant noises she makes that shake me from my sleep. But there are all these other, more lovable things about her, too, and her mother sees every one of them and presses them upon me with such genuine enthusiasm that it thaws my frozen heart. Her facial expressions, for instance. She has her Smurf Face and her Bowel-Movement Face and her E.T. Face. She has her How-Ya-Doin’-Today Face and her Call-Me-at-the-Office Face and her Mafia-Hit-Man Face—which is the one when she curls her lip at you and you half expect her to say, “You talkin’ to me?”

  Her gift for mimicry. A five-week-old baby is for the most part unresponsive to ordinary attempts to communicate with her. You can scream at her or you can sing to her, and all you’ll get in return is a blank stare. But if you press your face right up close to hers and contort it into grotesque shapes, she’ll copy whatever you’re doing. Stick out your tongue, she’ll stick out her tongue; open wide your mouth, and she’ll open wide hers, too. Lacking anything else to do when we find ourselves thrown together, we do this, and the more we do it, the more I like her.

  Her tendency to improve with age. Already Dixie has progressed from waking every ninety minutes and screaming at the top of her little lungs to waking every two hours and screaming at the top of her lungs. While this might seem insufferable to anyone who didn’t know any worse, to me it seems like extraordinary progress. An act of goodwill, even. She still won’t win any good citizenship awards, but she’s gunning for Most Improved Player, and it’s hard not to admire her for the effort.

  But there’s something else, too, which I hesitate to mention for fear it will be used against me the next time we divvy up the unpleasant chores around here. The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you don’t want to, maybe especially when you don’t want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. “Have you ever owned a dog?” he said. And that’s the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation. It’s because you want to hurl it off the balcony and don’t that you come to love it.

  THE FIRST RULE of fatherhood is that if you don’t see what the problem is, you are the problem. For most of the past couple of weeks I hadn’t been able to see what the problem was. Everything had been going swimmingly. For the first time since the birth of my second child I was able to get back properly to work. My fear that my children would starve, or, at the very least, be forced to attend public school, was receding. The time I needed to earn a living had to come from someplace, of course, but it hadn’t been obvious to me where in the family it should come from. Not from my wife, to whom I am addicted. Not from my eldest child, who has made it clear that she can’t survive on one minute less of parental attention than she received before her sister was born. The only person who would be perfectly untroubled by my absence was the baby. Having worked up enough feeling for her that I could say honestly that I preferred having her around to not, I could now, in good conscience, neglect her.

  Sure enough, by laying Dixie off on her mother and various babysitters I was able to slip back into something like my old routine. Within a week I had a new book up and nearly running. All was well. And then her mother turned up in my office, with that look in her eye. I tried to head her off before she got started, by telling her just how secure I was making our family’s finances. She was uninterested in the family’s finances.

  “You need to set aside time to spend with Dixie,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’ve spent time with her.”

  “You just went an entire week without seeing her.”

  “It’s not like she knows.”

  “You know,” she said. Which was true. Sort of.

  “How often do you want me to see her?”

  “I think you should have enough material about Dixie to sustain a biweekly Slate column,” she said.

  My first thought was: What kind of father is it who sees his child just enough to generate material for his column? My second thought was: My kind of father.

  In that spirit, but not only in that spirit, I took Dixie and her mother to the Parkway Theater in Oakland, to see Italian for Beginners. The Parkway Theater, the greatest invention since birth control, is a cinema that, on Monday nights, admits only people over the age of eighteen, and then only if they are accompanied by people under the age of one. Sixty parents of thirty babies purchase their tickets, order their dinners, gather their glow-in-the-dark dinner claim-check numbers, and head into a theater. There, seated on deep plush sofas, infants howling mightily all around them, relaxed for the first time in a week, they wait placidly for their dinners to arrive and their movie to begin. It usually does this without much warning. There aren’t any previews or ads at the Parkway. Whatever they’re showing just starts right up.

  Watching a movie with thirty babies is different than watching a movie without them. It’s actually better, in some ways. The babies themselves, all piled up in one place like that, are themselves worth paying to see. They tend to howl all at once—say, when a character laughs raucously or a shot rings out in the night. They also tend to sleep all at once—say, when a character isn’t laughing or a shot isn’t ringing out. Occasionally, they even perform amazing tricks. Just before the movie began, for instance, a six-month-old girl in the front row balanced herself in midair, with nothing for support but her father’s unsteady palm. The whole crowd cheered.

  The success of an evening at the Parkway turns on the movie. There are good movies to watch with babies and bad movies to watch with babies. Italian for Beginners, odd as it may sound to anyone who has seen it, turns out to be very nearly the perfect movie to watch with babies. It opens with a firm promise to be one of those bleak Scandinavian character pieces in which every character is either dying or despairing, or both. This came as good news for us, as it seemed unlikely in the extreme that any character would laugh or that any shots would ring out in the night. Nobody needed murdering in this one. Also, there’s nothing like the misery of life as presented in Scandinavian art to remind the new parent that, no matter how bad he thinks he has it, some people have it even worse. Scandinavians.

  Without Dixie I would have stewed in my seat, thoroughly ticked off that I had been conned by the cheery-sounding title into sitting through an Ibsen drama. With Dixie I was pleased to have been conned.

  But then something happened. Two things, actually. First, about midway through, a bleak Scandinavian character piece became a spoof on a bleak Scandinavian character piece. Everyone who needed to die died in a hurry, leaving the remaining characters to cope with their despair, unaided. And toward the end of the second act their quiet Nordic depression took a dangerous U-turn, as all at once they discovered, as if they were thinking an original thought, what Scandinavians have known for centuries: If you want to be happy in Scandinavia you have to go to Italy. The second thing that happened resulted directly from this shocking eruption of Scandinavian joie de vivre: Dixie woke up and began to holler.

  The implicit rule at the Parkway is that you can let your baby cry and enjoy the show and no one will think any less of you. The Parkway offers the guilt-relieving sensation usually available only to smokers who find themselves surrounded by other smokers or to fat people who find themselves seated on airplanes with other fat people. But if before you arrive at the Parkway you have earned a reputation with your wife as a neglectful father, this sensation is no longer so easily had. Instead, you must rise and wal
k around with your child until she is mollified. The final scenes of the movie I glimpsed only out of the corner of my eye. A happy Scandinavian remains, to me, an elusive sight.

  THE OTHER NIGHT Quinn and I went camping in Fairyland. Fairyland is a toddler-sized Disneyland smack in the middle of Oakland. Three times each summer it sells tickets to about twenty-five parents and allows them to pitch their tents, and their toddlers, inside the park. For the first time in their young lives, twenty-five small children have a chance to spend the night under the stars or, at any rate, the skyscrapers that loom over Fairyland. A few months ago I mentioned to Quinn that we might do this, and she has been unable to contain herself on the subject ever since. Every other day she has asked me, “When are we going camping in Fairyland?” or “Can we sleep in a tent today?” She’s never been camping or slept in a tent and can’t possibly know what any of it means. That is why she wants so badly to do it.

  We enter not through the main entrance but through a gate in the back of the place between the miniature Ferris wheel and the bumper boats. Twenty-five parents and their toddlers line up and wait for the gate to open so that they can rush in and find the softest, most level patch of grass to pitch their tents. In line are Quinn’s friend Matts and his father, John. John is the reason I am here; John told me about camping in Fairyland. John, who has done this once before, also told me that I didn’t need to bring anything to Fairyland except a tent and sleeping bags: Fairyland would take care of the rest. But John, I notice, carries many more possessions than I do. I have only three large sacks; he has eight. What is in those other five sacks, I wonder? What does an experienced Fairyland camper bring with him that I have neglected to bring?

  The gates swing open and the other families rush to find the best spots in the dish-shaped campground. Quinn is more interested in the fact that she appears to have Fairyland entirely to herself, and she rushes off past the Ferris wheel to pet the donkeys. The great thing about Fairyland, from the point of view of a three-year-old, is that it is designed with a thirty-six-inch-high person in mind. The horses on the carousel are designed for a thirty-six-inch-high person, the cars in the steam train are designed for a thirty-six-inch-high person, the long tunnel in the Alice-in-Wonderland section is designed for a thirty-six-inch-high person. It’s a home explicitly for children between the ages of two and five; any ordinary seven-year-old is made to feel unwelcome. With one exception, it is a Lilliputian world drawn perfectly to scale. The exception is the donkeys. These large animals, which Quinn claims are “llamas,” are also surprisingly aggressive. I rush after her and quickly lose any chance of securing a comfortable place to sleep. By the time I herd Quinn back into the saucer, all of the soft, level places have been taken. We’ll be spending the night on the hard, steep slope just below the rim.

  All the other fathers have their tents looking very tentlike. These are elaborate affairs, with great huge roofs and fancy walk-in entrances. The man in the tent beside me not only has his tent up and running, he has a fantastic contraption that looks like a giant fire extinguisher and sounds like a pneumatic pump. He’s huffing and wheezing over the thing like a pro. He is inflating what appears to be a full-sized mattress inside his enormous tent. I do not own one of these. I have never even seen one of these. My tent is still in its sack on the ground.

  Quinn looks around, then at me.

  “Where is our tent, Daddy?”

  “It’s in there.” I point to the blue sack.

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t put it up yet. You want to help Daddy put up the tent?”

  “I want to go see the llamas.”

  A bit tensely: “I need you to stay here while I put up our tent.”

  In a flash, she’s gone.

  One eye on the donkeys, I unravel the tent and count our possessions with the other. These are: the tent and two sleeping bags I bought last week at REI, one head-mounted coal miner’s flashlight that Tabitha gave me so I could see the barbecue pit when I grilled at night, three diapers, one sack of wipes, a purple and green glow-in-the-dark toothbrush, one tube of strawberry-flavored toothpaste, insect repellant, a pair of what Quinn calls “my stripey PJs,” along with the pink slippers she insisted she could not do without. Finally there is a tattered and yellowing Outward Bound student handbook from the last time I camped—years ago, when I spent a month wandering about a wilderness area in Oregon. In this tattered Outward Bound handbook is everything I have forgotten about camping. Or so I think. When I open it I see that it is, like Outward Bound itself, more concerned with my spiritual development than my survival. It’s filled with aphorisms the Outward Bound student is meant to take to heart:

  They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock for want of a shelter.

  —Job 24:8

  For the first time in more than two decades, I pitch a tent. It has such an odd shape to it, I think to myself when I am finished. John wanders over and stares a bit. “It looks like one of those old Volkswagen beetles with a tarp thrown over it,” he finally says.

  “I’m a little worried the fly sheet isn’t on right,” I say.

  He thinks about what appears to be my problem. “I think you’ll be okay in downtown Oakland,” he says.

  The man in the tent next door continues to pump away at his inflatable mattress. Sweat drips from the tip of his nose. John leaves. I turn to the sweating man. So far as I can see, his giant inflatable mattress is no more inflated than it had been twenty minutes before. No longer does he seem quite the aficionado.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  He stops, relieved to have an excuse not to keep pumping away. “Trying to pump this fucking thing up,” he says.

  I peer into his tent at the limp mattress. “How does it work?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure,” he says. “My wife bought it.” Pause. “This whole thing was my wife’s idea.”

  I sympathize and yet at the same time do not. The truth is, I am pleased by his distress. It means that it is possible, just, that I am not the least-prepared father for the journey that lies ahead of us. Quinn and I may not survive, but we won’t be the first to go.

  A night in Fairyland divides fairly neatly into two dramatically different experiences. The first amounts to a rave for toddlers. The Fairyland staff lays out a buffet banquet of hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, and chocolate and vanilla cupcakes: food that not a single toddler can find anything to object to. Not a single vegetable! Not one fruit! For the first time since I have become a father I dine with my child, alongside other parents and their children, unaccompanied by torture-chamber shrieking. All the children eat happily, greedily, so that they can scramble away as quickly as possible to the Fairyland rides, which stay open until nine p.m. But there’s more! At eight o’clock at night, when most of them would be in bed, they attend an expertly executed puppet show. They watch the story of Cinderella with giant sacks of popcorn on their laps and their mouths wide open. At eight-thirty a woman dressed as a gypsy leads them in song. At ten p.m. they stumble, exhausted and sated, back to their tents. There begins the second part of a night in Fairyland.

  About two years ago, addled with lack of sleep, my wife and I adopted a firmish policy not to further encourage Quinn to view the middle of the night as the most interesting part of the day. We shut the door on her at nine p.m. and do our best not to hear or see her until seven in the morning. And it has worked, so far as we know, though she still tends to get up a few times a week around three a.m. and holler at the top of her lungs. But as a result of our policy I know next to nothing about her sleeping life. That changes this night.

  We crawl into the tent at ten. For the next hour Quinn amuses herself by punching the roof and racing outside and trying to climb inside other people’s tents. When even that gets old, she settles into her sleeping bag and instructs me to read her a book. Eleven-thirty at night must feel to a three-year-old like four in the morning to an adult, but Quinn lasts, along with every other child
in the camp, until eleven-thirty. During the second reading of Harold and the Purple Crayon, she falls asleep. Here is a rough log of what occurs during the next six hours:

  12:15. Quinn pokes me in the head until I wake up. “Wake up, Daddy. Wake up, Daddy,” she says. “What?” I say. “I need you to snuggle me!” she says. I curl up next to her. She falls back to sleep.

  1:00. “Daddy!” I wake up and find her seated bolt upright inside the tent. “What?” I say. “You forgot to put bug spray on me!” It’s true. I apply insect repellant. She falls back asleep.

  1:38. “My sleeping bag came off!” “What?” I say. “My sleeping bag!” she wails. I cover her up. “No!” she says. “I want your sleeping bag!” As her sleeping bag is four feet long, this presents a problem. We negotiate and compromise on both of us sleeping under both sleeping bags.

  3:15. “An owl is in the tent!” Again, she’s bolt upright. “What?” I say, scrambling for the miner’s headlamp. By the time I find it, she’s fast asleep.

  4:12. “Daddy.” I wake up. This time she’s awake, alarmingly alert and rested. I am not. “What?” I ask. “Daddy, I just want to say how much fun I had with you today,” she says. Actual tears well up in my eyes. “I had fun with you, too,” I say. “Can we go back to sleep?” “Yes, Daddy.” Then she snuggles right up against me for what I assume will be the long haul.

  5:00. The fucking birds are actually chirping. Quinn, of course, awakens with them, turns to me, and begins to sing:

  There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name, O!

  B-I-N-G-O

  B-I-N-G-O

  B-I-N-G-O

  And Bingo was his name, O!