I sit down and think about Louie. A form of displacement my mother is better at. “Think sun and sand,” she’ll say, shivering in the middle of a storm. “Think happy thoughts,” she’ll say through a curtain of tears. I think Louie. I think Max. I think Louie. I think Cheryl. I think Jake, who floats up clearly defined without any kind of emotional excess baggage I have projected onto him. I haven’t known Jake long enough to have acted badly. Yet. With Louie I’ve already two-timed him with Jake. But Louie’s got Cheryl. I groan. This displacement stuff can work, though, unlike my mother’s experience, it doesn’t always make you feel better about yourself. It depends on what you displace to. I displace to Louie again. I call Louie. He answers on the fifth ring just as I am about to hang up. He’s out of breath. “I’ve just got in,” he explains. “Going downstairs on crutches is murder.”
“Why don’t you try it on your rear end.”
“Not that I haven’t. Tonight I’m wearing a good suit.”
This information I tuck away for future obsession. Louie wearing a suit to have dinner with his mother is a subject I can work over and over like a chain of worry beads. But right now I have other worries. I tell him about finding Max in bed reading Playgirl magazine.
Louie laughs.
I am indignant. “It’s not funny,” I say.
“It’s great,” he says.
“Great?” I am starting to get mad.
“Great your story has come out. Gee, if I wasn’t on crutches I’d run to the store and get a copy.” He pauses. “Maybe if I change, so I can go down on my butt …” he considers.
“I’ve got a copy for you,” I say, “but right now I’m more concerned with Max.”
“You’re worried?” Louie asks, incredulous.
“Yes, I’m worried. It’s not actually reading material rated PG.”
Louie laughs again. “Kids do this, Katinka. I was checking out skin magazines when I was younger than Max.”
Which probably accounts for your getting Cheryl pregnant I think but do not say. “These are naked men,” I explain, hating myself for making the distinction since I try to believe in an ideal world where sexual preferences mean as much as whether you take Newsweek or Time.
“Role models,” Louie says.
“Not funny.”
“Katinka, don’t make a mountain out of a molehill,” Louie says.
Don’t be stupid, I’m about to say. I catch myself. “Don’t be stupid” is what I used to say to Seamus all the time when he was being stupid. Which was a lot. But Seamus had a Ph.D. All of a sudden I feel as if I’m talking to someone whose fly is open or who has peanut butter stuck to his teeth and I’m too polite and embarrassed to point it out.
Louie goes on to tell me how much he misses me, my body in bed, my face when he delivered me the mail. He feels terrible about having to drop out of my class, which he was really beginning to like since I am such a gifted teacher. His sweet talk displaces my sour fears about Max. At least temporarily. He’ll see me soon he promises. He’ll find a way. In fact he’s got an idea. Maybe he can arrange a sleepover tomorrow night with me. Sal and Rosalie have a golden anniversary party to attend. He can take a cab to Cambridge after they leave and make it back the next morning before they get up. It’s not that he doesn’t come and go as he pleases, he explains, it’s not as if he doesn’t have independence. But with his broken leg and all, well, his mother makes such a fuss.
For a moment my hope soars. Why not? It seems forever since I’ve been able to make a fuss over Louie up close and personal. I think of his body, imagine myself in his arms. But old desires make way for new maternal instincts. “Not with Max here,” I explain.
“Why not?”
“Why not?” I repeat. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Sometimes, Katinka, I don’t understand you at all,” Louie sighs.
I get off the phone, shaking my head at the limits of Louie’s child-rearing philosophy. He has no sense, I decide, because unlike me he has no child to be sensible about. Unlike me he has no child to practice on. Then I remember his hospital bulletin board papered with dozens of photos of his young cousins. There are children in his life. Perhaps what divides us is not class but how we’d raise a child. Are those things linked, I wonder? Do working-class parents have a more casual attitude to kids than working middle-class parents? I reach for literary examples: Dickens, Sue Miller, Rosellen Brown. A worm of anxiety starts to twist. I am relieved when the phone rings. It’s Jake calling between meatpackers and developers. I tell him about Playgirl ’s finally coming out. “That’s wonderful,” he says. I tell him about Max reading Playgirl. “That’s terrible,” he exclaims, “you must be sick with worry.”
I allow that I am. Though I am getting over it. That’s a sign of mental health, he says, that I don’t dwell on my mistakes. Still he says he’ll give this problem some thought. He agrees Zenobia will have to know. He hopes the damage won’t be permanent. He’ll check with someone in his office whose husband is a child psychiatrist. He can’t wait to see us, he says. He’s going to take Max and me to brunch on Sunday. We set up the time. “Oh boy, what I would really like is to spend the night,” he says, “but with Max there it would of course be inappropriate.”
* * *
It’s Sunday morning and Max and I and Jake are driving along Soldier’s Field Road. “It’s your pick,” I told Max earlier. “We’ll eat wherever you say.” His pick turns out to be the International House of Pancakes because they offer something called a Rooty Tooty Fresh n’ Fruity special he has seen advertised on the TV that has been running almost nonstop in the room where he sleeps. Though Jake kindly invited Daniella, Max had declined on her behalf. She wouldn’t be able to appreciate a Rooty Tooty special, he explained. I didn’t remind him that when I first met Daniella she was lapping up my mother’s consommé and leg of lamb. Poor Daniella. I know how the varying degrees of being loved can affect your appetite.
Max sans Daniella is belted into the back. Jake and I sit in the front. Across the frozen river a steady line of cars twists along Memorial Drive. On summer Sundays the street is blocked off and turned into a paradise of skaters, walkers, runners, bicyclers, dogs, and baby carriages. Maybe I can take Max here when the weather gets good. Maybe Zenobia will win another prize and ask me to baby-sit. Or more likely when she discovers what I’ve done or didn’t do, she’ll keep Max outside a ten-mile radius of me. I won’t think of such things now I tell myself. If they awarded medals for avoidance, I’d be on that plane to Amsterdam.
The heater in the car has finally warmed up and is toasting my feet. Max and Jake are giggling over the same silly jokes Max and I have already giggled over. I lean back against the seat and feel enormously contented, the way I felt as a child on Sunday car trips with my parents when we would sing camp songs and spot out-of-state license plates and stop at roadside stands for lobster rolls.
I must say that despite a few false starts I am really settling into parenthood. Last night my mother and Arthur invited Max upstairs for dinner and a video of The Lion King. To give me a break. To give me time to read manuscripts. To write. To wash my hair. They understand what it’s like to have a youngster underfoot. The demands. The exhaustion. This from parents of only daughters who, they both acknowledged, were dreams until puberty.
I had a quiet and lonely dinner. The healthy chicken breasts and cauliflower that I had intended for Max topped off by reheated pizza. Max is no fool. Even reheated, the pizza won the taste test. I critiqued some manuscripts. I turned on my computer. I turned it off. I washed my hair, which I had planned to give a deep body cream rinse treatment but didn’t feel energetic enough. I read a chapter in a child-care book about separation anxiety. Then went upstairs to watch the end of the movie with Max. “What are you doing here?” my mother asked. She studied my face. My symptoms must have been pretty obvious because she nodded. “I understand,” she said.
I wish I understood, I think now. What I do understand, however, is that separati
on anxiety applies not to Max but to me. Except for my age, I am a textbook case. I want to cling to Max, to pull at his parka the way an about-to-be-separated child might hang on to his mother’s skirt. I reach over the front seat and touch Max’s sleeve. Jake explains to Max about playing licenses and they find Illinois, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont by the time we pull into the IHOP parking lot.
Inside, the waiting room is packed. The restaurant is packed. Everywhere is the smell of eggs cooking, of bacon sizzling, of maple syrup and melted butter. Why is it that food smells so good in inverse proportion to how good it is for you? My mouth waters, an automatic reaction that no amount of cholesterol consciousness can blunt. We leave our name with a waitress in a short-skirted teal uniform displaying an IHOP badge over the left chest pocket. She has a saintly pink-glossed smile despite the hordes of children and their families clamoring around us. “It won’t be long. Our dining room is huge,” she comforts. And I can see beyond her table and around the corner that she is right, that in addition to the cozy booths off the waiting area there’s a larger space crowded with tables and chairs the size of a banqueting hall.
Max is jumping up and down with excitement. He pulls off his parka and hat and stuffs them into my arms. “Can I play video games?” he asks. The games, housed in what look like juke boxes with flashing lights and neon colors, ring the wall. “If it’s okay with Katinka,” says Jake.
“Sure,” I say. After three days of permissive child raising now’s not the time to disagree. Be consistent the experts advise. I’m not sure Berry Brazelton had in mind my version of consistency. It’s the letter of the law not the spirit I am quoting from. Jake fishes in his pockets and comes up with five quarters. I dig in my pocketbook and find three more.
“All right,” Max exclaims. His face turns hangdog. “My father says these are a waste of money and never lets me play,” he confesses and runs off before we can make a moral stand.
“I figured Max would say that,” Jake laughs. Once I confessed to Jake about Playgirl, I couldn’t wait to unscroll my catalogue of lesser sins. Jake found the pizza mild, the colored sheets hilarious. We squeeze onto a vinyl-clad circular bench with a mountain-shaped backrest which looks like a larger version of a sofa for Victorian wallflowers. As soon as Max’s back is turned toward the video screen, Jake takes my hand. “Harriman can be so pigheaded. Some of his restrictions I agree with—violence and …”The and trails off and I know he is diplomatically avoiding the word pornography. That he is sensitive to my feeling touches me. I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. “… but hell, what kind of harm can an occasional video game and pancake do?”
Not much. Games and pancakes are neutral. Naked men in Playgirl less so. First, do no harm is one of the first lessons med students learn. Something that should be taught to all students, especially those of us learning how to bring up a child. I watch Max. His hair at the back of his head looks electrified. His shoulders are hunched over his game. I play my own game. The murmur of the pancake eaters, the pressure of Jake’s hand form a backdrop against which I can project the people in my life. I move them around as if I am trying out furniture in a model room: two men and a woman. Louie, Jake, and me. Two women and one man. Cheryl, me, and Louie. How about two men and a baby, a variation on the name of a movie I meant to see. I know from my writing and from my own life that these arrangements of characters, these configurations of men, women, and children are infinite. They’re scenes in a kaleido-scope constantly shifting until finally there’s a pattern you can settle upon. As a writer I can set up my cast of characters and push them around. In my story, I know more about them than they know about each other or themselves. In real life, I have knowledge that is always incomplete. Who knows what about whom? Jake knows about Louie, not Louie specifically, but the fact that there might be someone else. Louie doesn’t know about Jake. Both Louie and Jake know my feelings about Max. I know the secrets about Louie’s aborted baby. About Jake’s ex-wife’s baby-to-be. In my story I know the end before I start. In my life the outcome is a mystery.
A waiter approaches the bench. He unfurls a paper on which is penciled an endless list. “The Barnes party,” he announces. “The Barnes party,” he repeats.
We are seated at a table in the large dining room. Our table’s in a corner in front of the window that overlooks the parking lot. “We could wait for a booth,” Jake suggests.
“This is fine.”
We study our menus, which tower over our heads. Though they state Nobody Does Breakfast Like IHOP Does Breakfast, they display more photographs of steaks and club sandwiches, pickles and fries than of pancakes or sausages. I check out the tables nearest us, which are reassuringly plattered with bacon and eggs, waffles, and pancakes oversized like the menu. Our order is taken by Mitzi, who has a dollop of whipped cream on her teal collar and whose eyeshadow is aggressively aquamarine. She winks at Max, obviously warming up her kid-friendly act. “What does your cute little boy want?” she asks. Max is too busy trying to figure out his choice of fruit-topped buttermilk pancakes in the Rooty Tooty special to notice this. A look that passeth understanding passes between me and Jake. We don’t correct her. We’re thrilled that she thinks Max is our kid, that we’re a normal family out on a normal Sunday outing having breakfast at this shrine of normality. We play house so well it’s taken for the real thing. Another look passes between us, two people burned by alternative lifestyles who yearn for conventionality.
Jake puts down the menu. “Why don’t we all have,” he lowers his voice, “what our little boy is having.” It’s worth two more Rooty Tooty specials, his voice implies, just to be able to say that.
When Mitzi takes our menu away with more winks and promises that the food will be “out in a sec even though the kitchen’s kinda frantic,” we sit back content.
“I knew this would be a nice place,” Max says.
“You’re right,” Jake agrees with a conviction surprising in one who eats at Biba, agonizes over wine, cooks from Julia Child, and subscribes to Gourmet.
I sit back and enjoy the din, the smells, waitresses running back and forth, and babies throwing their spoons from their highchairs, grandparents doting and mothers rubbing sticky cheeks with Wash ’n Dris they’ve stashed in floral-covered diaper bags. Jake is asking questions about Max’s school. About how math is taught, about starting oral French in the third grade. He’s good at interrogation, at eliciting a telling response. I wonder if he ever considered trial law over real estate. The literature’s got to be better—“Murderers I’ve Known” over “Tenancy by the Entirety,” which, alas, I still haven’t read.
Max is telling Jake how his class is going to be putting on a production of Hamlet in the spring. There will be five Hamlets and five Ophelias so everyone will get a turn to be a star. They’ll divide up the lines. With the same costumes and makeup the audience will never be able to tell the difference, except for the Hamlets and Ophelias who are taller and fatter than the other ones.
Jake laughs. “I’d like to see that!”
“The tickets will be free,” Max says. “So you can come.”
“Then I will.”
Max is going to be one of the Hamlets, he explains, though for a while he was seriously considering the Ghost. He’s not sure yet what he’ll have for lines. Since all the Hamlets want to do To be or not to be, they’ll probably have to draw straws.
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” says Jake.
“And bring Katinka,” adds Max.
“A good idea.”
“My grandpa is going to marry Katinka’s mother,” Max continues, maintaining such an air of studied casualness I’m not surprised he’s been picked for one of the Hamlets, “but they’re too old to have a baby.”
“They already have children,” I point out, “not to mention the world’s best grandchild.”
“I know,” Max says with becoming immodesty. He pats his hair down, which as soon as he removes his hands springs back up. “Maybe y
ou and Jake will get married and have a baby, too.”
“Max!” I exclaim.
Jake laughs. “You have pretty good ideas, Max. No wonder you’re one of the five Hamlets. You’re pretty smart.”
“My grandfather says if I stay smart I can go to Harvard.”
“Without a doubt,” I say. Something your step-grandmother-tobe will love, I think.
Our food comes and we fall on it like starving lumberjacks. “It’s just like what I thought,” Max says, awarding five forks and four stars.
In between bites Jake regales us with a bunch of food jokes in descending order of corniness. I wonder what book he picked up in the supermarket checkout line. We all finish everything on our plate. This surprises me since love is supposed to make you lose your appetite; maybe parental love increases it. For a while, I ponder this. Now that I think of it, I’ve also been doing a lot of eating with both Louie and Jake. Not that I’m ready to declare love for either of them. My feelings aren’t that clear. Except with Max.
I study this object of my love. Max’s lips are ringed with a clown mouth of maple syrup. His cheeks look rounder, redder, more fully fleshed. Not that we aren’t all more fully fleshed after a breakfast like this. I push my chair away from the table. I slip my hand up my sweater and unbutton my jeans. Jake leans back in his own seat and sighs contentedly. His cheeks which I admit I first found squirrelly are now looking almost as cute as those of Max. “I knew this would be really good,” Max says. “I just knew it. Sometimes when you see an ad on TV, you can’t believe it, everything looks fake, but this…” He gestures at the remains of his Rooty Tooty special which consists of a few crumbs in a puddle of sauce and the hull of a strawberry.
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