Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  He was stone-faced and withdrawn. His body language indicated his contempt for the whole process. I was anxious. He could be sarcastic. I knew he had no use for people who couldn’t cope on their own, who “stared at their own navels” as he phrased it. I was never sure where this contempt for people who were interested in exploring their own and other people’s thought processes came from but it pervaded his thinking and his consistently negative reactions. I learned from other sources that his mother had a severe nervous breakdown and was hospitalized when his brother died. Pete never alluded to it so it may have had nothing to do with his ongoing put-down of anyone who dealt with mental issues. Fortunately, he didn’t say much to the staff interviewing him and just shrugged what could have been assent or dissent when asked a question. I hoped the experts didn’t notice the contemptuous curl to his lip that accompanied his shrugs but he made little effort to hide it so I assumed they hadn’t missed it.

  I wasn’t sure what the admission process entailed. I was cynical enough to think that making sure my husband was willing to pay the tuition was an important factor. He agreed to this and Max was accepted to start in what they called The Normal Nursery in September. Unfortunately, that was two months away.

  Our house was in the middle of the twenty-five hundred block of Pine Street in what was called Center City, Philadelphia. It was a pretty block with a solid row of three-story brick row houses on the south side, a row of new town houses with garages on the ground floor on the north side. This row of town houses was flanked by a coal yard on the end of the block toward the Schuylkill River. Many of the older houses in this part of town still had coal furnaces so there were trucks going in and out all day long. It was hard to keep window sills free of grainy black coal dust but I figured a little grit was a good trade-off for being in the city.

  The houses on our side of Pine Street were built around 1850 by the owners of a long-gone lace factory on the Schuylkill River and occupied initially by Irish immigrants who were skilled lacemakers. I gather this was an insular group. Our next-door neighbor was the third generation in the same house. She still rented the property and spoke with a slight brogue. There was an Irish bar on the corner with a lady’s entrance on the side street so no lady had to walk past the bar itself. I didn’t know if this was to protect the ladies’ sensibilities or the drinker’s identities.

  Brick must have been cheap in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Everything was brick: sidewalks, houses and even the few remaining outhouses. It was pretty but I wouldn’t recommend walking on a brick sidewalk in bare feet in the summer. The steps were two or three slabs of white marble in diminishing lengths laid on top of each other. The marble was scratched and worn down in the middle of each step by more than a hundred years of tromping feet. The old woman next door dragged her thickened body outside each morning, sprinkled cleanser on her steps then crouched with groans and cracking joints and scoured them. She had an endless supply of tent-like cotton dresses. Flesh-colored cotton stockings were rolled down below swollen ankles and spilled over the tops of leather slippers so old it was impossible to picture the original color. She had the red-veined face of a serious drinker and the thick, purple-blotched legs of someone with poor circulation who sits a lot.

  She mumbled about the decline of standards on the block then looked meaningfully at my gray, dirt-embedded steps. I finally scoured them and then was so intimidated by the whiteness; I hated to walk on them. I scoured the steps three days in a row then decided that gray was fine with me. My neighbor was a kind woman. She gave me credit for trying and conceded you had to be born in Philadelphia to care about white steps.

  August in Center City was hot, as close to unbearable as I ever wanted to get. Early in the morning the heat was already energy-sapping. Sulfur-tinged air from the oil refinery a mile down the Schuylkill River blanketed this end of town when there was no wind. I sat on the stoop and watched Linda play with the girl next door. Seth sat in the stroller next to me slobbering a piece of zwieback into submission.

  Max walked up and down the steps of the three houses on my right. Each time he got to the bottom step of the third house he turned to see if I was watching. I was momentarily distracted and looked away. He took off running. He was fast but I was faster. I ran, scooped him up and planted his wriggling body on my hip. I was frustrated and sweating from the exertion.

  I had planned to take them up to Fitler Square. At least there I got to talk to adults. Now I was stuck in my hot, airless house with three cranky children. Thank God I hadn’t said I planned to go to the Square. With Max, I made an effort to resist making promises I might not be able to keep if he didn’t behave. He remembered every promise I made and gave me a hard time if we didn’t end up doing exactly what I had said we would do. I tried to make it clear we were staying home because he misbehaved but he never took responsibility for the consequences of his own bad behavior. He couldn’t comprehend the logic of other people’s rules. I sometimes felt as if we spoke two different languages. We used the same words but they clearly didn’t have the same meanings.

  I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t give up with the abortive running away. Each time he pulled this stunt, everyone ended up mad at him. Why couldn’t he learn he couldn’t escape, give up and enjoy what he was allowed to do? I took all three kids inside. Max protested and Linda shrieked with understandable fury. I don’t think Seth really cared but he yelled in sympathy with Linda. She stormed upstairs. I put Seth in his playpen and set the bolts I had installed at the tops of the two outside doors. So far, I had always managed to unlock these before Pete got home but each time I set the bolts, the tension in my chest ratcheted up a few notches. Trying to balance Max’s need to escape with his father’s equally strong insistence on unlocked doors left me feeling like a rubber band stretched to the snapping point.

  Beside myself with frustration that my day was once again shaped by Max’s actions, I railed at him but stopped abruptly. Why did I bother? Nothing I said changed his behavior. I got the impression I baffled him with my dumb rules.

  I listened for furniture being moved each time I went down to the basement to put another load of clothes into the washing machine. There was a pattern to the sounds. First the worn red table that had been mine as a child was pulled across the living room floor and pushed against the front door. Then one of the heavy plywood cubes that my father had made was dragged and hoisted onto the table. Heavy, it made a distinctive clunk. When I heard footsteps following this noise, I went up to the living room and put everything back. When I appeared, Max dropped the small rocker he was carrying to complete his ladder to freedom. He looked angry but he never protested and he never stopped trying. I wished I could figure out what was going on inside his head. This day, I got all the laundry sorted and folded, even the white wash with its plethora of small white articles of clothing. There were only four orphan socks—a record of sorts. A twinge of hope struggled to root itself in my consciousness. Maybe Max had bowed to the reality of following rules.

  The door knocker banged. I ran upstairs. Afraid it was Pete, my heart raced as I unbolted and opened the front door. It was worse. A uniformed policeman stood on the marble step holding Max’s hand. The officer was wearing leather riding boots and jodhpur-like trousers. I glanced out at the street expecting a horse. No horse. A motorcycle with a side-car chugged at the curb in the space behind my car. The officer frowned at me. “You should keep an eye on your kids, lady. You’re lucky your little boy knows where he lives.”

  I was young but he looked like he should have been in grade school. It’s weird to have some kid call me “lady” and give me a hard time, uniform or no uniform. I curbed the impulse to make a crack about his missing horse and said the next thing that crossed my mind. “I wish you hadn’t brought him home in a motorcycle.” The officer’s frown deepened. He was wearing those curved sunglasses all the guys in the Air Force wore in pictures so I couldn’t see his eyes. I blurted out my next thought. “Where was he this time?�
�� I clearly shot to the top of his list of deadbeat moms.

  “At the drugstore. What do you mean—this time?” The radio on the motorcycle squawked with a garbled call. He gave Max a sketchy pat on the head and said, “Take it easy, Sport. Gotta answer that call.”

  “Thank you for the ride, sir.” The policeman walked around the sidecar, checked for oncoming traffic, threw his leg over the seat and roared off. Max watched with the starry-eyed look of a disciple beholding a long-hoped-for-miracle.

  “He showed me his gun, Mom. But he wouldn’t let me hold it.” He looked up with a rapt expression, wanting me to share in his wonderful experience. “It’s really big.”

  His innocent wonder made me sad. He looked up at me. “Were you worried?”

  “Not yet but I would have been when I found out you were gone. I thought you were in Linda’s room playing. How did you get out of the house? The doors were still locked.”

  He held out his hands. Two creosote splotched splinters stuck out of his right hand and a smaller one poked out of the ball of the left thumb.

  “Where did those come from?”

  “Linda’s telephone pole. Can you take them out?”

  What he called Linda’s pole was in the next yard and a long way from the ground. It was still unbearably hot but dread made me shiver. “Show me how you got to the pole.”

  Linda glared at me when we went into her room then cringed and started to cry when she saw the horror on my face. Max had gotten out by going hand over hand along a thin guy wire supporting the phone line between the house and the pole. The end of the wire at the house was loosely attached to a small eyelet screwed into soft salmon brick. The line was easily sixteen feet above a brick-paved areaway.

  I fought to keep from howling in concert with Linda. “You could have been killed.”

  I looked at him feeling helpless. He was a beautiful little boy. His eyes were large, utterly guileless and the same intense blue as his father’s. He wouldn’t be four years old for another three months. At times like this, I was torn between the instinctive need to save him from himself and the equally gripping wish to have a life where I got time off.

  I shook my head and slumped against the wall wondering how I would get through the rest of that day, let alone the whole week. It was only ten-thirty and I already felt as though I had been carrying an enormous weight up an endless succession of hills stretching far beyond the horizon.

  Max patted my leg. “It’s okay, Mom. I knew I wouldn’t fall. I wasn’t afraid.”

  “I know. That’s what scares me the most.”

  I sat with Linda. I knew she had suggested the guy wire as an escape route for Max. I couldn’t blame her. He was a never-ending blight on her life. The trick was helping her understand I knew how she felt and that I empathized with her without saying anything negative about Max. It wasn’t easy. Then I had to try to impress on her that helping Max escape from the house was not going to get rid of him permanently. If anything, it might injure him so badly he would take up even more of my time.

  Linda and Max had nothing in common except their last name. Linda was an inherently social person. Pete had coined her “the rabble rouser.” It was an apt name. If we had been able to go to Fitler Square, she would have been playing with other children now instead of sitting in her own room feeling helpless because Max refused to follow any rules. I did my best but her parting shot blew any sense I might have had that what I said made a difference. She looked at me through eyes narrowed to little more than slits and said, “Why is Max the only one you love? Why don’t you care about Seth and me?”

  Chapter 15

  Nursery school was a godsend. I piled the three children into the car each morning after breakfast, took Max to school in West Philadelphia, drove back into Center City and across to Sansom Street then left Linda at kindergarten and had three hours with only Seth. He was a joy. He sang made-up songs as he played peacefully. A woman who adored him cleaned my house every Thursday. Life was definitely improving.

  Pete flatly refused to go to the monthly meetings at Max’s school. I felt naked each time I showed up alone at what were supposed to be meetings with both parents. The psychiatrist who presided over the initial screening was there sporadically. The social worker and psychologist usually ran the parent conferences. The first few times we met they spent a lot of time quizzing me on why Pete had chosen to avoid the discussions of Max’s progress. It gradually dawned on them that I didn’t know and their carping was making me feel defensive. The psychiatrist explained their concern. “We need to talk with the father on a regular basis. One of our most telling assessments is having the child act out family dynamics.”

  “How?”

  “We have a doll house. We give the child small dolls to represent his or her family. We even make sure the dolls have the correct hair and eye and skin color. Max knew exactly what you and his siblings did all day. His big sister argued with him. His baby brother was carried around and took naps. You fixed cuts, cooked food, washed clothes and drove him to school. You never hit him. When you’re angry, you stamp your feet and clap your hands. Is that right?”

  “Yes. I know it sounds silly but it works. I also yell at him.” I paused. “You didn’t mention his father.”

  “No. That was the problem.” He frowned and looked down at the paper in front of him. “Max couldn’t figure out what to do with the father doll. That in itself wasn’t too far from the norm. Fathers are often gone during the child’s waking hours. But Max appeared to be obsessed with the father doll.”

  “Obsessed how?”

  “We asked him to imagine different times of day so we could get a sense of the family dynamics. He quickly positioned the rest of the family then shifted his father from place to place and became increasingly anxious because he couldn’t decide what to do with him.”

  I nodded.

  “That doesn’t surprise you?”

  “No. Pete hates being accountable to anyone. He’ll walk out the door and disappear without saying where he’s going or when he’ll be back. Sometimes I don’t even know he’s gone. He could be gone for an hour or all day. A couple of times he was gone all night. This makes Max crazy.”

  “Crazy how?”

  “Max wants absolutes. Pete’s unpredictable. The first thing Max does each morning is check to see if Pete is still in bed. If he is Max watches him for a few minutes…”

  “Just watches? He doesn’t try to wake his father?”

  I laughed. “No. Max seems to have figured out his father is not a morning person. I get the impression Max is just assuring himself Pete is there.”

  The social worker asked, “What does he do if Pete isn’t in bed?”

  “Asks me where he is. If I don’t know, Max follows me around and keeps asking. Each time the phone rings he comes running and wants to know if it’s Pete. Eventually he gets mad at me.”

  The psychiatrist frowned. “Why get mad at you?”

  I had to think for a minute. “I get the impression he thinks I’m in charge of everyone in the family. I keep track of the kids—why don’t I do a better job with their father? But it’s probably just because I’m available.”

  The psychologist said, “How do you feel when your husband walks out and doesn’t let you know where he’s going?”

  “Irritated—and insulted. I don’t know why he does it so I read it from my perspective. I wouldn’t walk off and leave him with the kids. I think it’s thoughtless and rude.”

  “Have you told him how you feel?”

  “Often. He just brushes me off.”

  “Does he understand it’s hard on the children?”

  “I’ve told him that too but he still does it.”

  “Why? Didn’t he want children?”

  Startled, I said, “I was the one who didn’t want children. Pete wanted six kids.”

  “Why?”

  I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t comfortable stating assumptions that fringed on psychology. I was tempted
to shrug and say I didn’t know but this was something I had been thinking about recently. I looked down at my lap and mumbled, half hoping this would soften what I said. “I’m five years younger than Pete is. I think he mistook polite and even-tempered for soft and malleable. Any show of capability on my part scares him.”

  The social worker looked interested. “Has he said anything that makes you think this?”

  “The other day he said ‘Every time I think I’ve got you under control, you squirt out around the edges.’”

  The men looked shocked. The social worker’s mouth twisted into a smile. “An honest man. What triggered that?”

  “I’d just replaced the washer on the kitchen faucet. It’s no big deal. I’d seen my dad do it dozens of times. I thought Pete would be pleased.”

  The psychologist was frowning again. “How does this relate to the wish for six children?”

  The social worker chuckled and said, “Six kids would keep her too busy to do anything on her own.”

  The psychiatrist frowned and said, “Are you saying he’s a misogynist? Sorry, that means…”

  I cut him off. “I know what it means. And, yes, I think he is although it hadn’t occurred to me until my friend, Mary, commented on it.”

  He had the grace to look embarrassed at his assumption I wouldn’t know the meaning of a technical term. “You think he wanted six children to keep you under his control?”

  “Yes. Along with insisting we had to move the minute I got comfortable, made new friends and began having any sort of life separate from his. I guess that sounds egocentric. His need to move may have nothing to do with me. I may be confusing the end result with the reasoning behind his actions.”

  “What made you think it’s a possibility?”

  I told him about the timing of the move from Concord that lost me a semester’s college credits.