Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  “Which ones?” asked The Mother, holding up two sets of plastic knives.

  The Father turned towards her and he stared first at the two bags of plastic knives, one colored blue and the other colored pink. They both disinterested him. He turned then to The Mother, anchoring himself to the blue of her eyes and as she waited for a response, in his thoughts, The Father drifted back and forth, knocking against the edges of his imagination like an old rowboat, rocking to and fro, moored to some grievous obligation.

  “We’ll take them both; blue for the boys and pink for the girls. And what about cups?” she asked.

  “Red,” said The Father.

  “Red cups?” asked The Mother, already reaching for a packet of blue and pink. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Red everything,” said The Father flatly.

  The Mother ignored him, filling the trolley with plastic blues and plastic pinks, cups and spoons and knives and forks and little plates, with princesses for girls and racecars for boys.

  “I’m having a few girls over tonight for some drinks. I think they’ll be bringing their husbands so there’ll be someone for you to talk to. It’d be good for you to make some friends. You’ll like these people. Fiona, her husband is an Engineer I think. I think his name is Steven or Shane or Simon or something. It starts with an ‘S’, definitely, I’m sure of that.”

  “I’m fine” said The Father, his sight trailing down the length of the aisles, imagining that he was looking into a tunnel, and at the end of that tunnel, there was a finite point where nothing existed, none of the thoughts in his head and none of the pain at the tops of his shoulders, and none of the twisting and churning, in the depths of his belly.

  “You should put in an effort,” said The Mother.

  “I don’t need any friends. Not now.”

  “Everyone needs friends babe.”

  “Not the kind you make,” he said, under his breath.

  As they walked through the supermarket, The Mother continued to take things from the shelves and ask The Father for his opinion without even looking in his direction or listening for his response, her eyes always fishing for the next thing on the next shelf or in the next aisle, casting away from The Father’s rocky demeanor, and her ears, swaying to the catchy melody, playing in the speakers overhead.

  “You know in the group,” said The Mother, pausing to inspect the minute details written on the back of a bottle of sauce. “A lot of people have been talking about that retreat. You know the one I mentioned?”

  The Father didn’t respond. In his head he knew the idea was stupid. And any other time other than recent, his itch to be right would have had him weighing in on this debate and how ridiculous it was, packing up everything and going to some idiotic retreat, to be cuddled and coiled, and being made to feel like a victim, so as to be bettered, by sugary proverbs, salted confessions and spicy affirmations.

  Instead, he found his attention wandering to a mother and her two children. And they, the children, would have been no older than his own. And he watched so attentively as if, from a distance, he was witnessing two ferine beasts in the jungle, expecting at any second, one to feast upon the other. As that was the violent nature of children.

  “I’m not saying we should do it now,” The Mother said, referring to the retreat. “There’s the money issue of course. But once you get some more clients and get the coaching going again, you know?”

  She was speaking. But to The Father, her voice was no more pertinent than the bothersome hum of whiny pop music coming from the speakers above. His focus was on the two children and how they walked side by side, the older child, maybe four years old, getting excited every few steps, pulling on the hand of her little brother so his balance would tip and he’d almost fall. He watched them, wondering why their mother paid no notice, why she hadn’t stepped in.

  And he looked at her, how like his own wife; her dawdling attention was humming along to the music from the speakers above while her eyes searched for a saving of five cents or more. And then he looked back at the children and he could see that the young girl was getting tired of just holding hands. The way she jerked on the little boy’s arm, it looked as if at any second, she might just fling him into the corners of one of the aisles.

  “I think it’s about two weeks. But that’s fine I mean, you wouldn’t even really notice me gone. Not that we have the money of course. I just think, you know, something like this….”

  Why the hell wasn’t she doing anything? Couldn’t she see? One was about to hurt the other. What the hell was wrong with her? He should shout. He should just make a sound or something, anything that would break her from that absent spell.

  “I need it,” said The Mother. “I deserve it.”

  The lady stopped and bent over to scour through items on the bottom shelf. Her children followed, washed about behind her as The Father did, behind his wife, as if they were held to her by an invisible cord.

  And the lady, she couldn’t see how the young girl had now taken her brother by the waist and was lifting him high into the air, almost falling backwards over her wobbling legs. And as the boy shrieked desperately, his sister squeezed tighter around his belly, shaking him left and right so the air squashed out of his lungs, making his plight sound little more than a complaining wheeze.

  “Cut it,” said the children’s mother, her hand reaching blindly behind her to ring one of them by the ear.

  The little girl continued, picking her brother up in her arms and yanking him to and fro, almost severing his spine with the gust of her zealous swing. Beside her, other children walked past, holding small plastic dolls in their arms and swaying them to and fro and dragging them along the ground by their curly locks.

  The little girl smiled as she squeezed more acutely, the pretend baby in her own arms. And the heady weight seemed almost too much as her brother slid out of her clutch and down her body so that her coiled embrace latched around the young boy’s neck. And though his arms and legs were free, he couldn’t shake himself of her grasp. He couldn’t free himself of her game.

  “Do something?” The Father thought, staring in the lady’s direction.

  “I wanna do it” The Mother said, turning decidedly, seeing The Father eyeballing a young slender woman, bending over not a foot or two away from where they stood, his eyes, so blatantly and rudely sketching out the curve of the woman’s buttocks, no doubt stripping her naked in his mind, if she wasn’t already, and fucking her like the cheap slut that she probably was. “What the fuck?” she said, kicking the trolley. “Ya get a good look?”

  “I’m not looking at…” shouted The Father, realizing the coincidence of his stare. “The kids,” he said

  “Oh sure. That’s why your tongue is hanging out of your mouth” The Mother said.

  “Fuck it,” he said, shaking his head and pointing to the two children who were looking at him now, with the same strange caution as their mother who at first, felt no more disgust to his salivating stare than she would, the welcoming lick of a scruffy hound. But who then, when her eyes caught his, pulled her children close and shivered as her hands clutched onto theirs, remembering instantly who he was, having seen him on the nightly news.

  As The Mother and The Father walked past, the lady cupped her children to her breasts, her hands like two great wings, enshrouding them from harm, as if whatever spark of evil were in their daughter, might carry on their breaths like the flu and be passed to other mothers and fathers who would in turn pass it onto their own children.

  “I hate the fucking looks,” said The Father, looking straight ahead but feeling every head turning in his direction and spying on his celebrity. “Why don’t they mind their own business?”

  “Babe, calm down,” said The Mother. “Just ignore them.”

  ”What do you mean calm down? No fuck ‘em. If I wanna be irate, I’ll be god damn irate, alright? Fuck ‘em. If I wanna be a prick for the sake of being a prick, then I’ll be a mother fucking prick. And if I
wanna deal with my own shit!” he screamed, into the direction of staring faces, “then I’ll deal with my own shit, any way I please. Anyway I fucking can” he said, trampling upon The Mother’s public concern. “One birthday cake, please. Chocolate, with lots of strawberries” he said, half acknowledging the helpless expression on the young attendant’s face.

  For a second, it looked as if the girl had an itch of her own, to offer some kind of condolence or, as if she had come across a wounded mongrel, to ignore its pained grumblings and to reach past its gnashing teeth and scratch tenderly and lovingly behind its ear, until its back leg started kicking and it forgot about the thorn in its side.

  But that second passed.

  “We’re so sorry for your loss,” said a woman, pressing her two hands upon The father’s back and tapping lightly with one hand, as if the well of his pain and suffering could be chipped away like some pesky mollusk with a gentle rapping against his knuckles. “It must be…..well, you know,” she said, knowing very little.

  “I don’t know,” said The Father.

  “You don’t know what my love?” The Woman asked.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you want,” he said, knocking The Woman’s hands free. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of you want. Fucking leave us alone.”

  “We just want what’s best,” said The Woman, trying to reach for his hands again.

  The Mother stood in the distance, watching with a strange worry, as if she expected some bestial defense, something of which she would have to apologize for, profusely.

  Behind The Woman, The Father could see her husband, gripping his children tight as if they were the fine reeds in a river bank, that which kept him from being swept away by the flurry of another man’s torment.

  Everywhere he looked, he saw heads turning in his direction. Some were with shock and awe drawn upon their faces while others were hidden behind their cell phones, filming his every step. He wanted to spit in their faces, to smash their cameras and phones into tiny pointed pieces and to take the jagged edges and push them into their faces and scream and piss and curse and spit and vomit and to shout, “Fuck you, you sick twisted fucks. I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t want your fucking stares. You’re sick. You’re depraved. And I hope it happens to you.”

  And that’s what he had wanted to say the whole time since it happened, more than anything else. “I hope it fucking happens to you. And I hope your face is on the fucking television and in every fucking newspaper and everywhere you fucking go, some asshole and cunt will stick a fucking camera in your face and ask you how you fucking feel when all they want is to see you cry and to hear how much you fucking hurt. I hope it happens to you.”

  That’s just what he thought.

  “I hope it happens to you.”

  But he couldn’t scream and he couldn’t shout. And now, with his souls squeaking as his feet drudged along the floor as if he were slushing through brown, mephitic sleet, more than anything, he just wanted to go home.

  “What do you think?” asked The Mother, holding up a small colored bag with two muffins inside, the children’s favorite.

  “You should just get one,” said The Father.