I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

by Diana Joseph

  But you can’t say anything about how weird Louis is in front of the boy. Because if you do, he’ll turn self-righteous and P.C., he’ll scold you for your insensitivity. He’ll say, “I would really appreciate it if you didn’t refer to my friend as ‘The Shrieker.’ His name is Louis, and he has Tourette’s syndrome. He’s also lactose intolerant. Your making fun of him just adds to the problem of hate in this world.”

  But neither dairy products nor neurological diseases were the reason Louis couldn’t sleep over, nor was it because he’d be a bother. All he’d do is sit up in the boy’s room, eating cheese-free pizza and Oreos, drinking cans of Red Bull, shrieking, and playing Halo on the boy’s Xbox 360. The two of them would stay up all night.

  It’s that it was my thirty-fifth birthday. Al walked to Cub Foods and came back with a dozen roses. My mother sent two ten-dollar bills in a card. The boy gave me presents: A tin of Last Supper After Dinner Mints. A rubber pretzel. A silver ring. A Hopalong Cassidy shot glass.

  “Do you like your presents?” the boy asked.

  I said yes. To prove I meant it, I gave him one of the tens.

  He seemed pleased. He said he thought I’d like that stuff. “Let me know when you’re going to use that shot glass,” he said. “I want to be there when you do.”

  Then he said, “So why can’t Louis come over?”

  Then I said, “Boy, what the hell do you want from me? Are you purposely trying to make me crazy?”

  Then the boy revealed that he’s clever when he wants to be. Instead of asking why Louis couldn’t sleep over at our house, he asked if he could sleep over at Louis’s. My policy on the boy wanting to go to someone else’s house has always been yes. Of course. Absolutely. Bye-bye, boy! Have fun!

  “Happy birthday, Mom,” he said as he was walking out the door. “Enjoy that shot glass!”

  The boy is now five feet, four inches tall and weighs one hundred ten pounds. Heightwise, he’s bigger than me and he’s probably stronger, but he’s not heavier. My extra weight plus the element of surprise means I can wrestle him to the floor every time. He’s got an application in at Cub Foods for the position of stock boy. Until that comes through, he’s broke. But he’s resourceful: in a pinch and desperate for cash, the boy takes a few video games, CDs, or DVDs to the pawnshop.

  The boy and I have different opinions about which one of us is smarter.

  His dietary habits are disgusting. He eats grilled cheese, pepperoni pizza with extra cheese, and Oreo cookies crushed over chocolate ice cream. His skin is clear, his hair is shiny, his eyes are bright. Something he does in the bathroom causes the toilet to clog. This happens so often that he made a sign to warn the next sitter that there’s a problem. DO NOT FLUSH, it says. DO NOT POOP.

  Except for the time and energy devoted to mirror gazing and smoothing down his hair—he has some unfortunate cowlicks—the boy’s personal hygiene is tragic. His room smells like boy, which means it smells hormonal. Like burnt metal and overripe fruit, like sweaty socks and Axe body spray. If he is not told to change his sheets, the boy will not change his sheets. If he is not reminded to brush his teeth, he will not brush his teeth. If he is not shamed into showering, he wouldn’t think of showering. It takes telling him he stinks, or that he looks grubby, or saying what are you, a Frenchman?

  He’ll say you’re not nice, you’re mean, are you xenophobic, but he’ll take a shower. He’ll be in there for weird amounts of time: either less than two minutes or more than forty-five.

  My life was easier when he was little. I liked him best when he was five months old. Before he had speech and mobility. Before he had opinions of his own and beliefs that weren’t mine. I could spread a blanket across the living room floor and put him on it and that’s where he stayed until I picked him up and put him somewhere else.

  These days, some of my biggest concerns are with his politics, his vision for the future, who or what he is versus who or what he might become. Sometimes I wonder about him. Some of the things that come out of his mouth give me pause.

  The boy says he opposes gun control, for example. Considering his DNA—a father who belongs to the NRA, a grandfather who had me and my prom date pose for pictures in front of the living room gun cabinet—there’s no doubt about it: a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur runs through the boy’s veins. It’s why he believes there should be a law requiring everyone to be armed at all times, even little kids.

  “Especially little kids,” he said, “because what if someone tries to kidnap you when you’re walking to school. What do you do then?”

  “Well,” I said, “you employ the techniques you learned regarding Stranger Danger. You shout ‘No!’ and ‘I don’t know you!’ and ‘You’re not my daddy!’ while you run away. That’s what you do.”

  “Uh, Mr. Stranger?” he said, sounding creepily like Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois. “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Stranger, sir, but you are not my daddy? I don’t know you? Please don’t touch my private parts, Mr. Stranger, because if you do I will have to shout ‘No’?”

  Then he pointed his finger like a gun at some invisible Mr. Stranger’s private parts, squinted one eye, clicked the trigger, blew on it.

  “What was that?” I asked him, and “Who are you?”

  He said he was a concerned citizen.

  Another time he told me he doesn’t like skateboarders because they smoke weed. White people who have dreadlocks are on his list of people he doesn’t like because, he said, they smoke ganja. He said there is only one way to explain people who dress like vampires and those freaky people from the Society for Creative Anachronism who wear capes and swordfight in the park: they’ve been smoking reefer.

  But he reserves his deepest animosity for hippies.

  “Hippies?” I asked. “How can you hate hippies? Hippies are harmless. That’s how we know they’re hippies. What’s a hippie ever done to you?”

  He raised his eyebrows. He snorted. He asked did I think smoking dope was harmless?

  I thought it would be best if I kept my mouth shut.

  “Have you ever heard of a little thing called ‘Marijuana is a gateway drug’?” he said. He said hippies are high on dope, they’re wasted out of their gourd, and it’s why they’re hula hooping and listening to Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead all the time. He said hippies need to know the answer is soap, not dope. He was smirking, his tone was smug, self-satisfied.

  When I wondered out loud if it was hypocritical for a boy with hygiene such as his to even have an opinion about the bathing habits of hippies, he asked did I want him to be a doper, and jeez, he showers when he’s dirty, which is why he doesn’t go outside, so he doesn’t get dirty, and besides, what about global warming? Shouldn’t we be trying to conserve our freshwater resources?

  Then there’s the day the boy arrived home from school and immediately wanted to know would I make him a grilled cheese sandwich. When I asked how was your day, he revealed his plan to live in a house that has a hot tub, central air, and wall-to-wall carpeting. He said he hated National Public Radio and its supporters, and when he got his license, there would be no more NPR in the car.

  He talked and talked. He said he hated Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, but he loved cash money, Donald Trump, high-stakes poker, and the gigantic tub of cheese curls you can only buy at Sam’s Club. He said someday he was going to have a Lamborghini, he was going to have a Viper, he was going to have a Jaguar, he was going to have a Porsche, could he have another grilled cheese sandwich? He talked so much, so fast, and he seemed so chatty and hungry, that I thought maybe he’d encountered some hippies on the way home, maybe they held him down and blew pot smoke in his face, maybe the boy was stoned.

  He wasn’t. It had been Career Day at school, and that’s what got him riled up: the future. His future. He was excited about his future. After listening to some of the speakers—an investment banker; a certified public accountant; Jacob’s dad, who owns a Saturn dealership—he decide
d that when he goes to college he will major in business, he will specialize in purchasing and acquisitions, he will make a buttload of money, and it was all I could do to keep from putting down my foot and dashing his dreams and telling him over my dead body you’re going into purchasing and acquisitions.

  “You’re just a child,” I said. “How do you even know about purchasing and acquisitions? Who have you been talking to?”

  I thought maybe he’d been talking to his grandfather, that my father had gotten to him somehow. Or else Nancy Reagan and that this-is-your-brain-on-drugs public service announcement. Or my brother the cop. Or that maybe the boy had fallen asleep with Fox Television on in the background, and while he was sleeping, certain unpleasant ideologies threw down anchor in his subconscious.

  “So does this mean you’re a Republican?” I said. “Over my dead body. Not as long as you live in my house.”

  The boy wondered out loud if it was hypocritical when a Democrat makes her son into a political prisoner. “You’re mean,” he said.

  “And another thing,” I told him. “I won’t pay for you to be a business major. Not one dime.”

  The boy said he was going to report me to Amnesty International.

  After another late night of Halo at Louis’s house, the boy came home shortly after two o’clock this afternoon. He seemed agitated, excited, distressed. He was out of breath and bare-foot. There was a long scratch on his face, and there were smaller ones on his arms and legs and ankles. “Where are your shoes?” I asked him. “What happened to you?”

  He held up his sock. He pointed at a small dark spot. “That’s blood,” he told me. “Blood.”

  “What happened?” I asked again.

  “The cat,” he said. “Louis’s cat.”

  Only half an hour before, Louis was still asleep, but the boy was awake, and he was bored, and he didn’t know where Louis’s mom was, so he figured he’d get his stuff together and walk home. He was in the process of packing up his Xbox 360 when Louis’s cat came flying out of nowhere. Louis’s cat landed on him, hooked its claws into him, his arm, his leg, his foot, his face. The claws were like razors. Louis’s cat hissed and snarled, and after the boy wrestled it off of him, he flung it across the room. He ran but he went the wrong way, he couldn’t find the door to get out of the house. Louis’s cat was chasing him, and it got him, it backed him into a corner, hissing all the while in a very intimidating and upsetting way. The boy didn’t know what to do. He yelled for Louis, but that guy can sleep through anything, and he didn’t want to kick Louis’s cat because it was little, and it’s a cute little cat when it’s not attacking people, and besides, kicking it would be cruelty to animals, and he’d already thrown it across the room once, which he felt really bad about. The boy hates when people are cruel to animals.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” he said.

  That’s when Louis’s other cat pounced on Louis’s vicious cat. Both cats were howling and snarling and hissing, and Louis even slept through that racket. But the boy recognized this as his one chance to escape, and he took it. He fled out the back door and didn’t stop running until he got home.

  “My shoes are back at Louis’s house,” the boy was saying. “I left my Xbox 360 back there, too.” He was still a little breathless. “What?” he said. “What? Why are you looking at me and smiling? Don’t look at me.”

  I denied that I was looking at him.

  “Stop looking at me!” he said. “Why are you looking at me and laughing?”

  “I’m not laughing!”

  “You’re laughing at me!” he shouted.

  The boy stomped off to his room, he slammed the door, and normally, I wouldn’t put up with the shouting, the stomping, or the slamming. But I felt bad. Because I had been smiling, and I did laugh, and I know that an unempathetic mother has been the downfall of many a man who might have otherwise been great. I knocked on his door and told him I really love that Hopalong Cassidy shot glass he gave me. Did he want to see me do a shot?

  He said no.

  I felt even worse.

  My thirteen years of parenting this boy can be summed up in three sentiments:

  I adore you.

  What the hell do you want from me now?

  I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!

  I’m sorry, I could tell him. I’m sorry I laughed at you, and I’m sorry you don’t live in the house where all the kids in the block like to hang out. I’m just not that kind of mother, and usually, I’m not sorry about it, but sometimes I am. I’m sorry I didn’t serve you a wider variety of foods, because if I had maybe you’d eat something other than grilled cheese and pizza. But I’m especially sorry about the summer of 1996. Sometimes I wonder if that’s where things went wrong.

  That summer I was pretty depressed. My marriage to the boy’s father was scabby and scaly and covered with warts; I was broke and unemployed and unhappily living in a state that bordered Utah. Getting out of bed and staying out was an achievement that warranted Oreo cookies. But there came a time when Oreo cookies were no longer an incentive. I was twenty-five years old; the boy was four.

  Each morning when I got up, I poured the boy a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of milk, and I turned on his cartoons for him to watch. Then I went back to bed so I could wallow in my misery in comfort. At noon, I got up, fixed the boy a turkey sandwich and another glass of milk, and because I knew I really needed to spend some quality time with my son, I watched his cartoons with him until I dozed off on the couch. At four o’clock, I woke up for The Oprah Winfrey Show; at five, I heated up some fish sticks for dinner. If he’d been good, I allowed the boy to drink one can of Pepsi. After seven, when long-distance rates were cheaper, I called everyone I knew who might be sympathetic to my misery. It was not a long list.

  Over time, however, as that list grew even shorter, I started spending more and more time in AOL chat rooms. Those chat rooms must’ve cost fifty bucks a minute because they added thousands of dollars to my Discover card bill. I once found myself in one chat room where, weirdly enough, all the men were named Dom, every single one of them. Dom Jacob. Dom Wilson. Dom Tyrel. Having grown up around a lot of Italians, I understood “Dom” was short for “Dominick,” and when I tried to initiate chat room conversations with these many Doms, they seemed irritated.

  You’re a pushy little wench, one Dom typed. I think you need a spanking.

  Another Dom told me to shut up, he didn’t give me permission to speak, and when I said look, buddy, I don’t remember giving you permission to speak, either, so why don’t you shut up, he said I didn’t have the personality of a submissive, he was reporting me to the moderator, and I was banned from the Story of O chat room forever.

  One morning, after I’d been up all night in a chat room devoted to people who were professional vampires—What do you mean, “professional”? I kept asking. Do you mean I could hire you to bite someone’s neck? Do you charge extra to break the skin?—I rose from bed to pour the boy’s Cheerios. Maybe I was still half asleep—I couldn’t have been awake, at least not entirely—because I saw the boy standing in front of the television, sucking his thumb and staring up at a face on the screen. The face was a blue rectangle, with black dots for eyes, and a black line for a mouth. It took up the entire TV screen. The face was talking to my son, its mouth opening and closing, its black dot eyes blinking. Tell her you need to go outside and play, the Television Face was saying. Tell her to take you outside to play.

  It’s embarrassing that my vision was not God or an angel or a saint, it wasn’t even brought on by magic mushrooms or serious psychosis. It was my own guilty conscience delivering me a life lesson through the medium I understood the best: TV. I obeyed the message I received from the Television Face. “Get your shoes on,” I told the boy. “I am taking you to the park.”

  You’d think he would have been happy, but the boy didn’t seem happy.

  It was too hot to go outside, he said. It was to
o hot to walk. He didn’t like going to the park. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay home. He wanted to watch cartoons.

  I knew what he meant. I don’t like to go outside, either. I have never seen a reason to go outside unless it’s to get in a car that will take me to another place to go inside. When I was a child, my mother swept me outside with her broom. Out, out! she’d say, and I’d go outside, I’d go outside and sit on the front steps, waiting to be let back inside.

  “You’re going,” I told the boy. “The Television Face told Mommy to take you outside, so you are going outside! You’re going to do all the things normal children your age do! So get your butt on that swing and start swinging! Now!”

  Years later, the boy still resists going outside. He says he doesn’t like the sun. He says it smells funny outside. If you tell him that funny smell is the smell of the outdoors, clean air, he’ll say it makes him sneeze, it gives him a headache, and if he needed to smell the outdoors, he’d take a whiff of Fresh Scent Tide.

  At nine o’clock p.m., the boy emerged from his room. He’d washed the blood off his arms and leg and he seemed to be in a better mood. He announced he was starving, he asked if I would fix him two grilled cheese sandwiches, he said he and Louis had been IM’ing.

  He wanted to know if Louis could sleep over tonight.

  Is this boy for real? Is he normal? Does he have the skills he needs to survive? He’s so different from me. When I was his age, small children were left in my care, and I rooted through their mother’s medicine cabinets in search of a small white pill called Valium. Because I didn’t like to be in my room, I popped out the window screen and climbed out. I smoked pot with the high school senior across the street. But I also combed my hair and wore clean underwear and took some pride in my appearance.

  It seems to me that any human boy who will be old enough to vote in less time than it would take for me to pay off a new car should know to brush his teeth every day without my having to tell him to. The boy should know to go outside into the bright sun-shiny daytime, he should want to go outside, he shouldn’t want to be so pale. He should prefer interacting with others to endless hours of slack-jawed, mouth-breathing video-game playing, and he should, over the course of a summer, pick up a book and read it. His mother is a college English professor married to another college English professor. A boy who is being raised by two college English professors should have a deep and profound love of the written word. But the boy says he doesn’t like to read, he hates Language Arts, he hates books and having to write book reports about them. “I think reading is a waste of time,” he says.