Fathermucker

by Greg Olear

  “Roland! Jesus Christ!”

  I move to separate them, to push him away, but he swings at me, too, connecting a (thankfully) glancing blow to my crotch. “What the . . . ” My reaction is instinctive, involuntary. I swing back, smacking him on the arm. I’m able to temper the force—I don’t hit him hard, and I don’t hit him where I can hurt him—but I hit him just the same. I can’t stop myself.

  “God damn it.”

  Now Maude is crying, and Roland is crying, and there’s a palm-shaped red mark on his left forearm, and my mood, already precariously dark, has gone completely black. I want to get into my car and drive off the Mid-Hudson Bridge. This is my nightmare: losing control, hurting him. Behaving like a savage. How can I teach him to check his violent impulses when I am unable to check my own? That the temptation to slap an unruly child is universal—Gandhi shared a bed with hot virgins to gauge his willpower; a better test of his self-control would have involved watching a four-year-old boy with Asperger’s for a few weeks—does not make me feel any less like shit, nor does the fact that I’ve managed to not come close to doing so during the rest of Stacy’s long absence. I’m waiting for the sirens, for Officer Stalin to come back and make good on his threat of arrest, for the cold metal handcuffs, the rough hand on my head as he stuffs me into his squad car.

  The red mark on my son’s arm, a scarlet letter, my shame.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t mean to do that. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “No,” and his voice is wild, “you shouldn’t, you stupid Daddy!”

  I fall on my knees, and I hug Roland, and I hug Maude—who hasn’t stopped crying; me slapping the resident bully doesn’t make her pain go away, any more than frying a murderer brings the victim back to life—and I rock them back and forth, back and forth, and like the little old lady in Goodnight Moon, I whisper, “Hush . . . hush . . . hush.”

  “I want Mommy!” Roland says.

  “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “When we wake up?” Maude asks.

  “Yes, when we wake up.”

  “I want her now!”

  “So do I. But we have to wait one more day.”

  None of us is badly injured, so Roland and Maude eventually stop crying, and when they do, I give them their vitamins, which they choke down through post-tears aftershock hiccups. After another round of apologies—and another round of demands for Mommy, this time intended to hurt my feelings (it works)—I help Roland into his pajamas, set him up with Wonders of the World, and promise him a new floor-plan book if he doesn’t disturb us while I put Maude to bed.

  Back when Britney Spears was in the throes of one of the more egregious periods of self-destruction ever chronicled in the tabloids—despite the best efforts of Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson, the photograph of the bald-headed Brit flailing her folded umbrella at a phantom paparazzo remains the gold standard of Celebrity Gone Mad—Us Weekly ran a story about how she once barricaded herself in the bathroom with her two young sons for many hours, causing Kevin Federline, gold-digger-turned-father-of-the-year, to call the police and, ultimately, the high court to deem her unfit to manage her own affairs.

  Of all the crazy details and angles in that trainwreck of a story—and there are too many to count, starting with, Spears managed to make Kevin Federline seem like the paragon of parental stability—what really struck me was how she’d managed to keep those boys locked quietly in the bathroom as long as she did. My kids are about the same age as Sean Preston and Jayden James, and there’s no way Roland and Maude would tolerate being confined in a bathroom, even one as palatial as Brit’s must be, for more than a few minutes, now matter how many folded umbrellas were trained on them. What was her secret? According to the tabloid report, what Brit did was, she plied both kids with generous doses of NyQuil, which had a sedative effect on them.

  Not a night has gone by since reading that article that I have not fantasized, during the Herculean labor that is bedtime, about giving Roland and Maude a hearty shot of NyQuil to hurry the process along.

  The Nightime Sniffling Sneezing Coughing Aching Stuffyhead Fever So You Can Rest Medicine! Of course!

  Maybe Britney Spears wasn’t so crazy after all.

  Written by Virginia Kroll and mawkishly illustrated by Fumi Kosaka, Busy, Busy Mouse is, for a preschool book, high concept. It tells parallel stories: a little girl and the titular mouse going through their diurnal routines—with the realistic twist that, since the mouse is nocturnal, he is just getting up when the little girl is ready to say goodnight. Maude loves this book. We’ve already read it twice, eschewing Guess How Much I Love You (just as well, as I can’t narrate Sam McBratney’s heartwarming tale of Big and Little Nutbrown Hare without bawling at the end) and Biscuit (the aw-shucks pooch whose increasingly desperate bedtime demands mirror Maude’s own), the remaining books in our stack (we’ve already made it through The Cat in the Hat and Maisy Goes to Preschool).

  “ ‘Up comes the sun. Good morning, everyone.’ ”

  As the nameless heroine, a brown-haired girl with tiny black circles for eyes, yawns and stretches in her bed, our friend the Busy, Busy Mouse, wearing what appears to be a yoga outfit, careens into the mouse hole beneath her nightstand.

  “Turn the page?” Maude asks (she’s in my lap, in the glider). I nod.

  “ ‘Baby crying. Eggs frying.’ ”

  On one panel, the little girl and her apron-clad dad fry up an egg, as her little brother fusses in the highchair. Opposite, the Busy, Busy Mouse sits at his own kitchen table enjoying a snack of milk and cookies, his twitching tail visible behind his chair.

  “Turn the page?”

  “Go for it.”

  On the next few pages, the girl and her kid brother get into the groove of their day as the mouse goes through his bedtime routine, the latter falling asleep as the former are at their busiest. How exactly is it cute that this poor girl has a fucking mouse hole in her room? Are her parents unaware of steel wool and plaster of paris? I’m convinced that all these literary vermin are meant to make children more amenable to the inevitability of mousely cohabitation. Don’t be afraid of me! I’m cute! I’m cuddly! I’m just like you! As video games desensitize kids to violence, the Busy, Busy Mouse makes rodent infestation seem like a blast.

  Before I can continue, Roland bangs on his door—because of the child safety knob, he’s imprisoned in his room—shouting for me, his voice cutting through the din of the twin noise machines.

  “What are you doing?” I open the doors, first Maude’s, then his. I don’t want to get mad at him again, but it’s hard not to, when he’s so blatantly disobedient.

  “I was going to stay in my room,” Roland explains, “but I have to poop.”

  “Oh.” I calm down. “Well, in that case. Sorry. Hold on, Maude.”

  But Maude doesn’t want to hold on. Or rather, she does want to hold on—to my jeans. So the two of us wait in the hallway while Roland does his business. He insists on the door being closed, for privacy, which suits me just fine.

  “Okay, done!”

  I open the door to find the boy in downward-facing dog, pants at his ankles, his reddish butthole winking at me, and in the bowl, a black-brown turd the size and shape of my fist. Seriously: it looks like a miniature version of that Joe Lewis monument in downtown Detroit, only made of shit.

  “Oh my God,” I exclaim. “How did that come out of your body? This is the biggest poop I’ve ever seen!”

  Roland blushes with pride.

  “I want to see,” Maude says. “I want to see.”

  “Hold on a sec.”

  I grab a baby wipe and clean Roland’s behind—it’s a no-wiper, as his poops tend to be; not a speck of brown on the wipe—and help him pull up his pajama bottoms and underpants. Then the three of us stand around the bowl, like the witches from Macbeth over their bubbling cauldron, admiring the big stink.

  “Wow,” Maude says. “That’s a gi-nor-mous poopy.”

  “T
hanks, Maude,” says Roland.

  He flushes it away, and returns to his bedroom, and I bring Maude into her room, sing through the eclectic list of songs I’ve appropriated as lullabies—“The Boxer,” “Fire and Rain,” “Piazza, New York Catcher,” “Tom’s Diner”—and lie with her on her futon mattress (the only thing she’ll sleep on other than our bed or the floor) until she conks out. Then I go back to Roland’s room, read him Wonders of the World, and then, as an encore, The Cat in the Hat.

  “Is your arm okay?”

  “It’s fine, Daddy.”

  “I’m so sorry I hit you.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy.”

  “I was wrong to do that.”

  “I know.”

  I tuck him in.

  “Can we turn off the light?”

  “No thank you, Daddy. I’d like to sleep with the light on.”

  “Okay.”

  I sing him his favorite lullaby song—“Thunder Road” (or “Screen Door Slams,” as he calls it), which he prefers because it’s long—and kiss him goodnight.

  On the way out, my hand on the child-safety doorknob, he detains me with a question, as he often will. “When are we having the playdate at Zara’s house?”

  “Next week,” I tell him. “I’ll go arrange it now. Go to sleep!”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  I make it as far as the kitchen, where I set about cleaning the coffee pot, when Roland calls for me in the monitor. I grab a container of blueberry yogurt and a spoon—usually what he requests at this hour—and head upstairs.

  But he’s not hungry.

  “There’s a noise,” he says. “It’s making me afraid.”

  “Noise? What noise?”

  Then I hear it, too. Scratching. The unmistakable crackle of mice in the wall.

  Shit. I’ve never heard them up here before, although his room is over ours, so it makes sense. But I try and show no fear. He’s not adept at reading facial expressions, which works in my favor, as I’m able to disguise my own pulse-pounding terror. More loud scratching.

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes, that.”

  “That’s nothing to be afraid of,” I tell him. Not a lie. The mice can’t get out, and even if they could, they won’t harm him or even go near him. “It’s just . . . it’s just the heater.”

  “The heater?”

  “That’s all it is.”

  I kiss him again, hoping that he believes me, that my musophobia won’t be passed from father to son, like anemia or male-pattern baldness.

  “When are we having the playdate at Zara’s house?” he asks again, as I’m about to close the door.

  “I’ll find out,” I tell him. “But we can only do it if you go to sleep now.”

  “Okay, Daddy.” He sighs. “I love you, Daddy.”

  Right up to the moon.

  “I love you, too, Roland. I love you, too.”

  Right up to the moon . . . and back.

  Friday, 9:23 p.m.

  THE CHILDREN ARE NESTLED, ASLEEP IN THEIR BEDS (OR, IN THE case of Maude, the futon mattress on the floor). In the baby monitors, I can hear, over the whir of the white noise and the throb of the steam train engine, their relaxed breaths—Maude’s softer and slower, Roland’s louder and more herky-jerky. Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse (as far as I know).

  Victory! Success is mine! I want to shout from the rooftops, to scream for joy, but instead I am utterly silent.

  No matter how miserable I feel during the day, no matter how hopeless my life seems at four in the afternoon—and today the misery and hopelessness were particularly acute, as the Headless Whoresman could attest; if he had a head, he’d nod—my mood always lifts when I realize that the kids are asleep. I can see clearly now the rain has gone. I’ve never done smack, but this must be what heroin feels like, the immediacy of the mood shift; one minute you’re a ball of stress, but as soon as that opium works its way into your bloodstream, ooooooo ahhhhhhhhhhh mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

  No doubt about it: this the best part of the day

  I change from my lone pair of jeans to my lone pair of sweatpants. I make myself mac and cheese (my default meal when Stacy is away; I don’t even waste time wondering what I’ll have for dinner), dig a Rolling Rock from the way-back of the fridge, behind Stacy’s bottles of Magic Hat #9 (it’s literally ice-cold; the container of cream cheese back there is frozen solid), and pop it open. I carry food and beer to my desk, and eat like a starved animal.

  I check my e-mail: a rambling missive from Laura, sent to me, Mom, Frank, and Michael’s parents, with several attached photos, about the day they spent in Pisa; a form letter from Cynthia Pardo, in her guise as broker at Coldwell Banker, advising me to get to know my Realtor™ (Bruce Baldwin, for one, has followed her advice to a T); a “friendly” reminder that my Chase Visa payment is due; and a short note from Meg, who had to take poor Beatrix to the ER on account of her reaction to the wasp sting.

  Nothing from Stacy. Nothing from Sharon, whose number I have not managed to procure.

  I check Facebook. Neither of them has updated their statuses. But Chad Donovan’s cryptic post, I see, has been removed from Stacy’s wall. I look up his page (on Facebook, as in life, I’m not friends with him), and sure enough, beneath his creepy-looking picture—drug addicts who find Jesus in rehab tend to have a certain crazed glint in their eye—is a long passage from Matthew, something about fishermen, the whole thing in unreadable caps. Yeah, cross him from the list. Stacy’s lover, if such a person exists, is not the Second Coming of Chad Donovan.

  After fortifying myself with the last swallow of amber Latrobe goodness, I type “Rob Puglisi” in the Facebook search bar. Three Rob Puglisis pop up (one of them, surprising given the Italian surname, is black), but none is my dapper therapist. Rob’s not on Facebook, or else he’s hidden himself from the search engines; probably the former. As I’m mulling over the significance of this—and I’m now convinced that if Stacy has gone Bathsheba on me, Rob Puglisi is King David to my doomed Uriah—a new notification pops up. A friend request. Chances are, a long-forgotten classmate from Livingston High, an underwhelming acquaintance from Rutgers, or else an unloved colleague from my time at News Corp.; the percentage of friend requests made by people I actually care about is miniscule. But I’m wrong:

  D. W. Reid has requested to add you to their [sic] friends’ list.

  Wow. He really does want to be friends!

  I click ACCEPT.

  AT THE VERY BOTTOM OF CABLEVISION’S ON DEMAND MENU IS A heading marked ADULT, where you might order up such cinematic masterpieces as Eat My Box, Ram My Rack, 18 & Easy: Barely Legal Schoolgirls #4, and that beloved Oscar nominee, MILFs Get Freaky. I’m on the basement couch now, nursing a second Rolling Rock, the purring Steve in my lap, making dough on my flannel shirt. I’m trying my damnedest to distract myself from my interior monologue. Should I indulge myself with a little girl-on-girl action? Some Amateur Moms Come, peut-être? Nah. I’m tired as hell, and I’m not feeling particularly lusty. Plus, Stacy returns tomorrow, so I should recharge the ol’ nine-volts, on the remote chance that she wants to get busy—that I want to get busy; that both of us want to get busy; that both of us want to get busy and have the opportunity to do so—tomorrow night. But it’s more than that: this business with the affair has made me not want to contemplate sex at all, even sex involving barely legal schoolgirls.

  Instead, I flip on the basketball game. Nets at Knicks, preseason “action,” a replay of a game played two nights ago (tip-off for the 2009–2010 season is not till next week, when the Knicks travel to Miami to take on the Heat). I try to identify all the players—New York has traded virtually its entire roster in the last two years—but the only player I recognize is the slothful center Eddy Curry, the embodiment of the team’s bloated salary cap. I’m well beyond eyeball level in debt, while he gets paid fourteen million dollars a year to sit on the bench and look bored.

  Commercial: the Dos Equis Guy, holding court with
the ladies, fencing, powering along in his motorboat. A gentleman who cares more about women, sport, and adventure than beer—what a novel concept! No wonder the ads are so popular. The Dos Equis Guy represents what we men aspire to be (an active participant in life who, when he deigns to consume beer, drinks the imported stuff; Daryl “Duke” Reid), not what we too often are (pathetic, chauvinistic armchair quarterbacks with a weakness for cheap domestic swill and the bloated guts to prove it; Joe Palladino).

  The Dos Equis Guy bears more than a passing resemblance to Rob Puglisi.

  I try Stacy again. Straight to voicemail.

  Stay thirsty, my friend.

  A jarring cocktail of fear, panic, and desperation explodes in my heart and radiates throughout my body. In the window, I can swear I see the Headless Whoresman, peering in, checking on me.

  SOMEHOW—THE BEER-AND-A-HALF PROBABLY HAS SOMETHING to do with it, as does the fact that the Knicks are putrid; and, of course, the criminal lack of sleep in the last five days—I manage to nod off during the telecast. I dream again; not a full dream, just a Coleridgean snippet: a mash-up of the couch, the basketball game, and the Mystery Woman from this morning’s interrupted vision. We’re not at Meg and Soren’s house this time; we’re at Madison Square Garden, The World’s Most Famous Arena, and the Janel Moloney Mystery Blonde is one of the Knick City Dancers. I’m sitting in Celebrity Row, next to Spike Lee, and Walt “Clyde” Frazier, the longtime Knicks color commentator, whose talent for mangling SAT words rivals his Hall of Fame abilities on the hardwood, keeps saying, “Things are starting to percolate down low.” Spike Lee tells me to get my ass on the court and talk to the Mystery Woman, but there are too many dancers in the way, and I’m intimidated by the presence of the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers (that’s who the Dream Knicks are playing), who is not Phil Jackson but Rob Puglisi. Things are starting to percolate down low. Then the buzzer sounds . . . and sounds again . . . and sounds again . . .

  Still half asleep, I pick up the phone.

  Glancing at the cable box—all of the clocks in the house, I realize, are attached to a device whose primary function does not involve time-telling: cable box, coffeepot, microwave, range, cell phone—I see that it’s a little after ten. It’s got to be Stacy, so I answer without bothering to check the caller ID.