by Ben George
So we did it. We drove from Chicago to Ann Arbor and installed Cassandra and Isaiah at my parents’ house. My parents loved Isaiah. They’d clearly begun to crave grandchildren, and their grandparental instincts swelled instantly. They pulled all of my and my brother’s old favorite books from the attic and scooped the boy onto their laps and read to him; they finger-painted with him; they played Tangrams; they took him for walks in the woods. My mom got a little kiddie pool for the backyard, and Cassandra and Isaiah would spend all afternoon and evening back there. Cassandra made soup and all kinds of complicated vegan foods in the kitchen and washed her clothes with a hose and hung them up to dry on the old rusty playground equipment in the back.
We had a basketball hoop in our driveway, and my friends and I started showing young Isaiah how to shoot. We called him “Zeke”—Isiah Thomas’s nickname. The kid—Zeke—had the sunniest disposition, and he was a natural athlete. I’d make a hoop with my arms and let him dunk the ball through.
I also started in pretty quickly trying to find Cassandra a job. Between me, my friends, and my parents, we found a few solid leads, solid enough that all she would have to do was show up for an interview and the job would be hers. These weren’t dream jobs, but they were decent-paying jobs that a young single mother might be happy to have, like working the register at a Birkenstock store, or hostessing at a vegetarian restaurant, or taking phone orders at Bell’s Pizza. But every time we had an interview set up for Cassandra, she managed to miss it. She got lost on her way there, or Isaiah was nursing and she couldn’t leave him right then, and on and on.
Finally, one day I drove her to an interview, though she had her own car—I just wanted to make sure she actually went to it. She got the job, receptionist at a yoga center. They asked her to start work the next morning. I drew a careful map with clear directions so she’d have no trouble finding the place, and even set her alarm clock to wake her in plenty of time to get to work. The plan was for my dad and me to split the day looking after Zeke, and then on days we weren’t around, Zeke could go to day care. But the next morning, I woke up and Cassandra was just lying in bed playing with Zeke. I charged into the room, a bit indignant. “Oh my God, you’re two hours late for work and it’s your first day!” And she just said, “Oh, I decided not to go.”
If you knew Cassandra, you’d be surprised if I told you that she never smoked pot. She just had this total glassy, dreamy air to her. She was completely unperturbed by real-world situations. In a lot of ways, she was like a child.
I was so frustrated—with her, with myself, with the situation. Cassandra kept putting all of her decisions in my hands, but then she wasn’t actually doing any of the things I was telling her to do. I realized that things that were easy for me, like showing up for work on time—or showing up at all—were not easy for her. It became clear that she wasn’t going to get a job.
It wasn’t that Cassandra was lazy—it’s just that she didn’t want to do anything but hang out with her two-year-old son, which I guess was pretty understandable. She was also exhausted all the time, and really, I began to understand just how difficult it would be to raise a kid on your own. That shit is relentless when you have two parents, but all alone, it’s brutal. For me, the allure of playing dad began to wane. I was stuck babysitting a lot. When I tried to take Zeke with me to the basketball court, he didn’t understand that he couldn’t come on the court when the grown-ups were playing, and I had to take him home. I’d be changing diapers while my friends were all out playing disc golf. Every night, I’d be on the phone with one of them: “Man, forget the bar—bars are too smoky—why don’t you grab some beers and come by my folks’ house and chill with me and Zeke.” Most days I’d be trying to get some kind of important work done on the computer and play Hungry Hungry Hippos at the same time. The hippos always won.
Suddenly I felt a desperate need for an out. My parents recognized that Cassandra had no intention of finding her own housing—and they were ready to have their house back, and I was ready to have my life back. My generosity, my “wisdom,” my stab at playing dad revealed itself for what it was all along: a theme-park ride, a novelty, a selfish gift.
So, naturally, I hatched a new, even more ill-conceived plan, and tried to hook Cassandra up with my friend Brande, so he could take her off my hands.
I knew Brande was into Cassandra, and he was great with Isaiah, so I kept making plans for all of us to hang out together, then ducking out at the last minute. This worked excellently at first—Brande took over all of the dad responsibilities I’d felt saddled with, and Cassandra enjoyed Brande’s kindness and attention. There was actually a momentary romantic spark, and I saw everything unspooling beautifully. I even started calling Brande “Big Daddy” because Zeke adored him so much, and because Brande had this lovable roly-poly quality to him. But Brande was living at home with his own mom, and they were barely making ends meet as it was. Brande’s mom quashed everything quickly. “There’s no way they’re moving in here with us!” she said. Besides, I don’t think Brande was interested in taking over as dad for good, and I don’t think Cassandra was into him as a long-term boyfriend. One of the lowest moments of this whole strange saga was when Cassandra said to me one day, not angrily, just plainly, “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. You don’t have to try and peddle me off on your friends.” I felt horrible; I’d had no idea that my crappy, diabolical machinations had been so transparent. But that’s how Cassandra was—seemingly out of it but actually extremely sensitive and aware.
There’s a TV show from the 1980s that I saw only a handful of times but always really loved called Quantum Leap. Remember that show? Each week’s episode would revolve around a different person caught up in a difficult and complicated situation that he or she couldn’t fix. The star of the show, Scott Bakula, would actually be zapped into that person’s body—become that person—and he would make things right, and then once he’d done his job, this lightning bolt would envelop him and he’d be beamed away into the next person’s body, the next tricky mess. I know I like to see myself in that light, making one Quantum Leap after another after another. That’s why Quantum Leap always appealed to me so much: it’s one thing to be down with O.P.P.—you know, Other People’s Problems—and do your best to help them, but it would be another thing entirely if you could actually inhabit someone else’s body and fix everything up yourself. Then you could really help some people. I’m sure, in the end, it’s not the best way to handle things; at the very least it’s kind of a bullying way to look at other people’s problems. But I guess that’s me—wanting the ball in my hands, wanting to run the show, like Isiah Thomas.
Not long after Cassandra told me that I didn’t need to peddle her off on my friends, she decided that she and Zeke would pack up and leave town. She’d been talking to Zeke’s dad, Rainbow Bear, on the phone, and they were going to try to get back together. Rainbow had moved to Hawaii, naturally, and Cassandra and Isaiah were headed there to meet up with him. It was one of those things where it seemed clearly sad and hopeless, and at the same time I didn’t want to talk her out of it, because it meant that they’d be gone and I could resume my own directionless life. Cassandra, in telling me this, was nothing but sweet and kind and totally appreciative of what my family and I had done for her, but I felt miserable.
I worked with Zeke one last afternoon on his perimeter shooting. That evening when Cassandra and Isaiah left, I watched them pull out of the driveway with all their possessions piled into the backseat, and saw them wave out the window, smiling but with scared eyes. They drove off down the dirt road, bound for I-94, completely on their own, not even sure where they’d sleep that night. Their taillights disappeared out of sight over the crest of a hill, and for twenty minutes or so I stood at the end of the driveway and cried. Then, once night had fallen, I turned and went inside.
FAULT
RICHARD BAUSCH
There are six people who either are now or have been in my care as child to fat
her. The sixth is Lila, from my second marriage, the only one I’ll name, since she’s two years and four months old and is not yet fully formed as a mind and a set of passions, though she is possessed of a very sharp and obvious intelligence—and like any proud parent, I can point out all those places where it shows. For instance, if you’ll indulge me with allowing one: very early—and she’s the only one of my offspring to have done this—she grasped the word “yes,” and took to using it correctly, in context, before she was much past one year old. With my other children, those years ago, I realized that any inflection of a question led to the answer “No,” mostly, of course, because one has to say it so often in those first years. (“No, that’s hot.” Or, “No, don’t hit your brother.”) So, knowing this, I took to using that knowledge, both for the entertainment of friends and, as they grew, for the delight of the older children. I would put the most complex matters into a question for the baby, within hearing of others—in a grocery store line, or at a restaurant, or in someone’s living room.
“You believe in the ineluctable modality of the visible, right?”
“No.”
“You believe in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, right?”
“No.”
It was a stunt that worked every time. People would turn and look—this toddler apparently discussing philosophy, aesthetics, politics. Even religion. “You believe in an all-powerful God who will reward the Republicans, right?”
“No.”
With Lila, for some reason, this never took hold. She started letting me know very early that she had the concept. I’d ask a question having to do with something practical. “You want more milk?”
“Es,” she’d say, with an emphatic nodding of her head.
The first time it happened, I couldn’t quite believe it. The normal infant response, I had come to believe from experience, would be a reaching of the hands, or maybe a smile. She actually nodded her head twice, and said the word, without pronouncing the “y.”
“Es.”
I marveled at this, and started looking for other contexts. Watching a movie has always been a big thing with my children and me, and we did a lot of it through the years when they were small. For instance, I have seen The Wizard of Oz at least a hundred and fifty times, and quite probably many more times than that. One bright winter morning, when it was too cold and windy to go out and the drafty house we lived in then made it necessary to stay close to each other, I sat Lila under her blanket on the little sofa across from the TV and asked her, “Do you want to watch a movie?”
She nodded vigorously.
“Es.”
I said, “How about Aladdin? Want to watch that?”
“Es.”
So, laughing, feeling the delight of communicating in this direct way with this eleven-month-old baby, I put the movie in. The word “Aladdin” came to the screen, in gold script, and because I simply believed that she must be able to do it, I said, “Can you say ‘Aladdin’?”
She looked directly at me, bald and clear-eyed and fat-cheeked, with almond eyes so green they seemed, in that light, black, and with a perfectly serious and straightforward expressive little shake of her head she said, “No.”
I laughed very hard, and I couldn’t wait to tell her mother about it.
Like every father I know, my pride in the abilities and accomplishments of my children is deep; it is also, of course, quite ordinary. One of them is a very good motorcycle mechanic who can play guitar beautifully, and, like his father, remembers every joke he’s ever heard, even the bad ones. He is also unfailingly kind, direct, and shrewd about people—though, also like his father, he can be fooled by his own best hopes for others, and tends in an argument to lean toward the doctrinaire. Two others of the grown children also play music; one of them is seriously writing songs, and the other is pursuing a career as an actor, though this one, too, writes songs and is also writing poems and a novel. Another has taken an MFA degree in fiction, and is a story writer. They are wonderfully talented and very smart. Still another of the grown children lives and works in Manhattan as a manager of a ticket-sales firm, has been interested in making movies, and possesses demonstrated talent at that, along with a marvelous and unbeatably quick wit.
That one also does not speak to me anymore.
Over the years, I have had, like most men, good days and bad ones. I have failed probably more often than I have succeeded. Each time, I hoped to fix the perceived failure. Someone once said that every child born is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being. I think that’s a dangerously false vision, since a perfect being by definition cannot ever be human. I once heard a character of mine say, in a story I was writing, “It is a terrible fate to have to be raised by a human being.”
“Human it is,” Boccaccio tells us so tolerantly, and with the gentle smile of his prose, at the beginning of his great book.
But I did want to correct things, fix things, be better with each child. I feel it now, with Lila. I want to be better than I ever was—more patient, more involved, more loving.
I remember my father, trying to help me, more than thirty years ago now, telling me to take a switch to my oldest child when that child was acting up; he told me that he had done that with me when I was small, and that I’d scream, and he’d say, “I can’t hear you.” And I’d scream louder. He told me that I had run out into the road, after he’d repeatedly told me not to do so. And this switching was to impress upon me that I was not to run out into the road. He wanted me to think of the switch every time I came to the edge of the road. As he talked about this, his eyes glittered with pride; it was clearly something he was certain he had done right.
I was appalled; I stood there quite quiet—speechless, really—understanding with an inward jolt that he was sincere, and did not know how I truly felt about it. But I did not say anything to him about it. What would have been the point? His job was done; he was advising me about mine. I just said, “Well, next time I will,” or words to that effect—something to get us beyond the subject of discipline.
It was then that I began to see what kinds of things people visit upon each other out of love. But as that boy with the switch marks on the backs of his legs, I did apparently stop going out in the road. And perhaps a year after that conversation with my father, I met my dear friend Roland Flint, a fine poet, whose life’s dividing line was the day his little lost boy, Ethan, ran out into the road in front of his house.
Now comes the part where I cleverly change names and disguise myself in fictional gestures. You will not recognize me, nor will you be able to identify any of the principal characters.
Beckworth, at fifty-five years old, believed in the life he had led, and thought of himself as more blessed than most. This was in the winter, a little more than two years after his youngest son, Sean, now twenty-three, was diagnosed with a rare form of melanoma. The whole family had gone through the terrors of that two months—three operations: the one that led to the diagnosis in the first place, the sentinel lymph-node test (one lymph node showed microscopic cancer), and then the surgery to remove a large number of lymph nodes from the neck. That last operation showed that none of those lymph nodes and no tissue around the original incision contained any cancerous cells. Sean had come through it all with bravery and intelligence, and was making a good life for himself in New York. But there was a kind of frenetic quality to family get-togethers now that no one quite noticed, or Beckworth didn’t, anyway. It was as if all of the members of his household were fighting to keep this darkness that had so recently threatened them at a remove. Sean was fine; he was visiting with his fiancée, a young bright woman everyone in the family loved. Everyone had gathered for a day’s celebration, the week before Christmas. As had become the custom, Sean and his older brother, Tom, had made a bonfire in the two-acre field that was the backyard. The light from the fire went up into the misty chill of the night, and the brothers and sisters—three of them, Carol and Jeanne, and Charlotte, the youngest—
were gathered in the light, with Sean and his fiancée, Mary. Everyone was drinking beer or wine except the two youngest girls.
Beckworth saw Sean make a leap through the fire, across the edge of the pit where it burned, and said, in alarm, “Hey, that’s too close. Don’t do that again.” Tom, who, after a two-month stay with Sean and Mary in New York, had recently come back to the house to live, said something about Sean’s drinking too much, and walked away from the fire. “I’m going to bed,” he muttered.
Beckworth did not see Sean and Mary follow him. The others were still enjoying the heat of the fire, and watching the sparks of it lift into the increasing mist. There were several friends of the grown children present, and Beckworth had that feeling he had often enjoyed of being at the warm center of a light that he had brought forth. This was a pride in having his family around him, and he supposed—if he thought about it at all—that it was a fairly common sensation. Hearth and home. He might’ve made some joke about it. He was entertaining, talking, being funny for the people standing around in the dimness, some of whom he did not even know.
He had lost track of Sean and Mary and Tom, and was surprised by the fact that Charlotte was suddenly far across the yard, standing on the back deck of the house, shouting, “They’re fighting!”
Sean’s a very deeply smart person, with an unbeatable wit, but like his brother and his father, he has also always shown that old inherited tendency to be doctrinaire whenever discussion of cultural matters and history and politics goes around the family table. In this instance, Tom had begun to notice that Sean was becoming especially contentious whenever he had anything at all to drink.