The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  “Yes, exactly,” said a girl in a badly dyed Cleopatra bob. “When guys do this — and they do it all the time,” she said in the general direction of the pimple-faced gamer, “it makes us feel like we’re shut out. Shut down. Not allowed to participate in the … in the … What’s that ten-dollar word you taught us at the beginning of term, the one for ‘public sphere’?”

  “Agora,” called out another girl, an Indonesian in a hijab.

  “Yeah, yeah. It makes us feel like we’re shut out of the agora … the agora of ideas. Like we have no place in it. Because we’re women.”

  “Yeah, I can totally see that,” said a guy in porkpie hat who hadn’t spoken up all term. This kid, reader, let me tell you, with his air of above-it-all nihilism, well, I had pretty much written him off as some sort of arse-picking layabout. But what he said next kind of floored me. “It’s like that quote from Pericles that you gave us back in September,” he stated. “How we consider people who don’t share in public life not to be people who just keep to themselves, but useless people. And that’s the crux of it. Women just don’t want to feel useless when it comes to matters that have nothing to do with their sexual parts.”

  “That’s exactly it,” said Cleopatra in her bob. “And it certainly excludes us from … What did Kant call it? The ‘realm of ends’?” She dug Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals out of her bag and went flipping. “Like it says here: For the esteem which is a rational being must have for it, only the word ‘respect’ is a suitable expression. Autonomy is thus the basis of the dignity of both human nature and every rational being.”

  Oh, reader. I could’ve wept.

  We were soon out of time, on account of me being so late for class. As they all packed up, I tried to make eye contact with Sebastian. I could tell he was delaying it, fighting the urge to face me man to man. But as the last of the students trundled out, he did turn to me. His expression was still so cryptic, so inscrutable. His blond hair fell over one eye and his skinny-jeaned legs were crossed, one Ked-clad foot over the other. He looked deeply forlorn at the prospect of settling this big decision once and for all. To stay or to go.

  I have no map to give you, I wanted to say as we stood there, not speaking. I have no map to give you, Sebastian. I wish I did. But this is the territory we tread, for better and for worse. We are philosophers, you and I, and this is the territory we tread.

  He turned and left without speaking to me. Hustled up the aisle and out the door. He’ll have to make up his mind, I thought. He’ll have to decide his next move, and soon.

  I returned to 4 Metcalfe Street. As I slipped off my Payless and hung up my tweed, I could see through the kitchen’s archway the pad of canary paper and the capped uni-ball sitting on the table, waiting for me. You would think that, after what happened in class, I’d be ready to attack my Proper Apology with renewed keenness. But what we had talked about, my students and I, was already dissipating inside my mind, and I felt another funnel cloud of procrastination swirl up to replace it. I stared at the pad and pen for a moment, but then headed upstairs to my third-floor office to check email first.

  There was a message waiting there, from Raj.

  Hey brother,

  Just writing to see how your new script is coming along. I’ll be packing up here in a few hours to head back into the city, and I just want to give the boys an idea of what we’re shooting tomorrow afternoon. So if you could fire the script off to me when you get a chance, that’d be great.

  Looking forward to it.

  Raj

  I rubbed my temples in slow, tight circles. Puffed out my furry cheeks in a big, arduous sigh.

  Okay.

  I got up and headed back downstairs to the kitchen.

  Squeeze, dash, shake-shake-shake, pour.

  I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the blank pad.

  Squeeze, dash, shake-shake-shake, pour.

  I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the blank pad.

  Squeeze, dash, shake-shake-shake, pour.

  I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the blank pad.

  And then I just started writing. Oh, reader, I have to tell you. What came out then, in my frustration, was pure unadulterated drivel. I mean, a total slurry of stream-of-consciousness bullshit. I wasn’t even thinking while I wrote; my hand moved across the page as if divorced from my mind. I had tried to conjure up everything I had thought and felt over the last forty-eight hours, the realizations and the shame, what we had talked about in class, and what should have been stewing in my brainmeats since, but what flowed from my pen was the ghastliest doggerel imaginable.

  It went on for five paragraphs across two pages. I stopped myself midway through paragraph six, flipped back to the beginning to read the whole thing over, that blazing blue mess. Oh God, it was garbage. This was what I thought, my PEI accent once again warping the rhotic: Oh my gawd, it’s just g’yarrbage!

  The front door opened then, and Simone appeared back in the house. What was she doing home so soon? But then I looked up at the clock on the wall. No, no, this was her usual time to come home from school. Where did the afternoon go?

  She came into the kitchen. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey there,” I replied. “How was school? Things okay with … uh … Katie?”

  “Caitlin? No, we hate each other now,” she said simply, setting her bookbag on the counter and pulling her ponytail free of its scrunchy.

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, much homework tonight?”

  “No, not much.” She went to the fridge and pulled out the milk jug. After she’d poured herself a glass, she approached the table and nodded at the marked-up pad in front of me. “What are you working on?”

  “Ah, it’s … Dah …” I aspirated with great hopelessness. “It’s supposed to be my apology to the world,” I told her. “You know, for threatening that woman on TV last week.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. My videographer friend, Raj, is supposed to film me delivering it tomorrow, for YouTube.” I pressed my lips together in grim frustration. “I’m afraid it’s not going very well.”

  “You’re working on it here?” Simone asked, sipping her milk. “Not in your office?”

  “It was going even worse up there.”

  “Can I read it?”

  I hesitated, but then motioned to the pad in a Be-my-guest gesture.

  Simone leaned over the table, and I watched as her green eyes — almost identical to Grace’s — strolled back and forth as she read. I wondered how much of this incoherent claptrap she was absorbing. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and I watched as her thirteen-year-old face creased in concentration.

  She let out a sudden kind of snort. “Well you can’t say that,” she said, pointing at the second sentence in the third paragraph.

  “Why not?”

  She just leaned back and gaped at me. “Because it’s sexist.”

  “What? Wait. No. Where?” I read the sentence again. “No, no. That’s not. I mean, what I meant was …” But then I sputtered out. I wasn’t sure what I meant.

  “Here, why don’t you do this,” Simone said, taking the seat next to me. “Why don’t you get rid of this whole offensive part here,” and she pointed at the first clause in the sentence, “and then take this part,” and she pointed at the second clause, “and move it all the way to the top, here,” and she pointed to the middle of my opening sentence.

  Hhrmm. This didn’t seem right. But then I just went ahead anyway, scratching out below and scribbling above. When I finished, I looked over the change.

  Huh. Wow. It did read a lot better.

  I looked into Simone’s now proud face. “All right, smarty- pants,” I said, “what else?”

  “Well, I love this part here,” she said, tapping the third sentence in the second paragraph. “It’s really sweet. But Ms. Varn, in Language Arts,
says that if we’re going to make ‘big statements,’ we should always back them up with examples.”

  “Examples.”

  “Yeah. So are there girls or women in your life where this,” and she tapped the sentence again, “would apply?”

  I thought about it. “Well, there’s you, obviously. And Naomi.”

  “And Mum,” she chided.

  “Yeah, and your mother, too.”

  So Simone took the pen from me and wrote these in the bit of space above the paragraph. As she finished, another question sailed into her head. “What about your mum?”

  “I never knew my mother,” I told her. “She walked out on my father and me while I was still in diapers.” I swallowed hard. “She didn’t want to be a mum.”

  “Oh,” Simone said in shock, as this came as genuine news to her. She touched me on the shoulder. “That’s so sad.”

  I just nodded my agreement, in silence. But then we had a talk about it, and she even helped me to work that into the text — and to do so without it being all self-serving and weird.

  Soon we were really cooking. Oh, reader, the edits and changes just kept piling up. It became hard for the uni-ball to keep pace with our thoughts, and so I journeyed to my office to fetch my laptop. I returned with it to the kitchen table and Simone began reading the script out to me as I typed, and we polished and rejigged even more as we went along.

  We were just starting on a seventh paragraph when the front entry door opened again.

  Naomi came tearing into the house. “Daddy Daddy Daddy!”

  I stood from my chair but then squatted, squatted to her eye level, and she came flying into my arms. I swept her up like a big twister and held her tight. Swung her madly as she pythoned her arms around my neck.

  Hoh. Hoh.

  “I missed you so much!” she screamed.

  Hoh. Hoh. I’m so glad you’re here, Naomi. I’m so happy that you’ve come along, that you’ve graced us with your existence. I am. What would I ever do without you? The fact that you exist makes me feel like I’ve finally joined the human race. You make me feel this. You … and Simone … and … and …

  I tore my gaze away from our squeeze to see Grace there, framed in the kitchen’s archway and glaring at us. I set Naomi back on the floor and she slid down my shin, sat on my foot, and wrapped her arms around my calf. “Can I have a horsey ride?”

  “Not right now, sweetie,” I said, stooping at the waist, picking her up, and parking her on my hip.

  I took one step toward my wife. Was she still mad, reader? Oh, you better believe she was. Grace stood there stiff as a brass statue, arms folded over chest, mouth pinched, eyes narrowed into an umlaut above her pert, sharp nose. I envisioned a brief exchange between us — Hey there. Hey. — but then I decided to forgo the pleasantries. There was no point, what with that look on her face.

  “I didn’t know,” I told her. “I didn’t know. About Cheryl Sneed. Grace, I didn’t … I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “Simone texted me about it on Sunday night.” Her features very slightly softened. “I can’t … I just can’t believe it.”

  “I don’t really believe it myself,” I said.

  Her face softened a bit more. “But you want to hear the strange thing? After I found out, I told my parents — and they said they always suspected that’s what was going on. Based on how you were acting all week, they figured you didn’t know the real reason everyone was so pissed off at you. They didn’t say anything to me because the idea seemed so … so outlandish. But it actually was the case. They said it must have been awful for you to learn the truth, and that I should go easy on you.” Her face coarsened again. “They’re always taking your side of things.”

  God love them, Roland and Sharon. They’re good people. But then something occurred to me. “Wait — you’ve known the truth since Sunday night? Then why are you only coming home now? And why didn’t you answer your phone when I called?”

  “Because I was mad, Philip,” she replied. “I’m still mad. And I needed my time, okay. I needed my time with that anger. So if I wanted two days to be under my parents’ roof and lie on my childhood bed and think all this through, then I was going to take them. Okay?”

  Must be nice, I thought. Must be great that I provide you with that kind of luxury.

  But then I shoved those thoughts aside. Get the fuck out of my head, I told those thoughts.

  “You hold so much resentment toward me,” she said, as if she’d read my mind. She said this as our two children studied us closely. “You hold so much resentment toward our set-up here — this house, the fact that I don’t ‘work,’ and all the rest. It gnaws at that big brain of yours, all day long. Doesn’t it?”

  “It really doesn’t,” I retorted. “Not … not all the time, no.”

  “But a lot of the time,” she conceded with a sarcastic tilt of her head. “It does, doesn’t it? And what I want to know, Philip — what I’ve been struggling with for the last two days — is why would you bottle all that up? Why would you hold these feelings, this bitterness, inside you until you just couldn’t hold it in anymore? I mean, we’ve lived in this house for six years. Why would you go along with a domestic arrangement, a financial set-up, that you didn’t really agree with? Why would you go along with all that, and with,” and here her eyes flickered, almost imperceptibly, toward the ceiling, toward our bedroom, “other things, if you’re not really comfortable with them? Why would you do that? Why?”

  “Because I love you,” I said. The words came out deflated, and a bit sad. “And despite all the trouble we’ve been having, I know this ‘arrangement’ really is your dream life.”

  “It is,” she said. “What we have here is exactly what I’ve always wanted.”

  “— and I’d do anything to give that to you, okay? I would agree, Grace, to just about anything. I would put up with just about anything,” and here thought of my financial turmoil, our miscues in the boudoir, her frequent and impulsive alluding to my failures as a father, husband, homeowner, “if it meant being with you and our children.”

  Well. She didn’t quite know how to process that. Her face didn’t soften further, but it didn’t exactly stay stern either. It sort of vacillated between two looks I couldn’t read.

  “And how’s that working out for you?” she eventually asked.

  “It is,” I replied, “a rather unfortunate situation. But it’s better than the alternative.” And here, I thought of the alternative — say, a crumbling rental on the Danforth, all my work equipment set up permanently in the living room, a bottle of Grant’s whisky on the windowsill, and no relationship, no relationship whatsoever, with my own offspring. “This is my life,” I said. “I love you. I love the kids. And this,” and I gestured dismissively, despairingly, dis­paragingly, to 4 Metcalfe Street, “is just my life now.”

  We fell silent for a while. Grace appeared — perhaps for the first time in our marriage — genuinely unhappy that I was unhappy. She seemed perturbed by the realization that my go-along-to-get-along attitude might obstruct rather than facilitate the life of Riley she was so desperately trying to live. Was that fair? Am I just being a soggy old martyr? And I wondered: Was she less furious at me for saying these things to her, or more? I wished, then, that I could better read that expression on her face. I wished that I had a crystal ball so I could stare deep into our future together.

  “Um,” Simone said from the kitchen table, breaking the silence, “did you want me and Naomi to go?”

  It was as if Grace and I came out of a trance, together. She turned to her daughter. “No, it’s fine, okay. It’s fine.” She nodded quizzically at the laptop and scribbled-up canary paper. “What are you two working on?”

  “Well,” I said, desperate to change the subject, “now that I know the truth — about what really happened last week — I�
�m scripting an apology, a proper one, for Raj to film. It hasn’t been going very well, so I recruited Simone. She’s been a tremendous help to me.”

  “I want to help, too!” Naomi exclaimed. “Noam sayin’?”

  “Can I take a look?” Grace asked.

  So I set Naomi down and then resumed my place at the laptop, scrolling up to the Word doc’s beginning. Grace leaned over my shoulder and began reading, tapping the keyboard’s down arrow as she did.