6 Abbott and the Paradox of Personal Growth
Abbott has two hours and fifteen minutes of child care before his wife takes over. He and his daughter take a hot morning walk around the neighborhood at a gruelingly slow pace, returning home with quite a few acorns and a flat gray rock. Abbott prepares himself before checking the clock in the kitchen. He estimates the time by subtracting fifteen minutes from his most conservative estimate of the time, but then discovers that he is still ten minutes fast. The morning yawns before him. He reads a book to her six times in a row, wanting very much to set the author’s house on fire. The girl spills juice on the carpet, and Abbott blots it with his shirt. They look at a neighbor’s cat in the yard. They ruin a yoyo. They spin a propeller. They eat animal crackers. They play with a long-necked toy dinosaur whose wonderful scientific name, Abbott will learn later, has secretly been changed to a name not nearly so good. Abbott looks at the clock and calls out in pain. His four-and-a-half cups of coffee have been, according to the calibration on the pot, eleven cups of coffee. They make Remote Control dance. They find a ladybug, some brown pine needles that must have fallen from the Christmas tree. They sort beads by color, by size. They roll the beads down inclined surfaces. “Dad sit right here,” Abbott’s daughter says, and Abbott sits right there. “Hold this,” she says, and he holds it. “Do this,” she says, and he does it. “Not like that,” she says. What did Abbott used to do with his summer mornings? He cannot even remember, cannot contemplate the freedom, the terrible enormity of Self. Abbott’s wife walks into the family room and kisses his warm head and his daughter’s warm head. Then she sits on the floor in a playing position. Abbott gulps the rest of his tepid coffee and goes to bed. He can hear his wife and his daughter talking at the dining-room table. “What do you think we should name the baby?” Abbott’s wife asks. There is a pause before the girl says, “Cheetah.” Abbott approaches sleep with an ineffable sense of relief that he did not know, before having a child, what it was like to have a child—did not really know what it was really like—because if he had known before having a child how profoundly strenuous and self-obliterating it is to have a child, he never would have had a child, and then, or now, he would not have this remarkable child. Abbott’s wife, were she here, might say that it doesn’t quite make sense. Abbott might rub her hip lightly with the back of his hand. “That’s the thing,” he might say.
7 Abbott’s Dread
It can happen at any time, in any room of the house. Abbott is never safe, and neither, consequently, is his wife. This afternoon, as Abbott kneels in the kitchen, pouring kibble from a forty-pound bag into a plastic bin from which the dog is fed, a folded coupon falls to the tile floor, frightening the dog. The coupon is covered in a fine coating of kibble dust. Unconcerned, Abbott picks it up and hands it to his wife, who is in charge of coupons. “Here,” he says, unaware that it is a smuggled and coded message. She unfolds the coupon to determine its value and its restrictions. She snorts. “This expires in 2017,” she says. Abbott looks up from his task, spilling some kibble across the floor. He feels an unpleasant tingle at the back of his neck. Will there be dog food in 2017? Or grocery stores? Or legal tender? “Ever notice,” Abbott says to his wife’s back, “that when you say a future year out loud, it sounds kind of ominous?” The dog eats the hearty nuggets one by one from the floor. Abbott says, “Not when you see them written, but when you say them out loud. 2023. 2048. The plan is to cut carbon emissions in half by 2051. Congratulations to the class of 2040.” His wife says, “Let me try. Wait. OK. The treaty expires in 2074.” Abbott nods. “See?” he says.
8 Wonderful Life
The Internet, Abbott reads tonight on the Internet, is now believed by experts to be one percent pornography. Somewhere, no doubt, confetti settles onto tumid organs. When Abbott browses the Internet, he imagines all that porn lurking inside the monitor, directly behind the screen he is browsing. It’s in there, it’s in his computer. Just a flimsy scrim of tragic news headlines dropped between his torpid gaze and all that nudity and unorthodox penetration. He imagines that one small transposition of letters in a Web address will produce a beaver, an anus, someone peeing on someone else. This thought, like so much of American life, renders him titillated and despondent. Abbott is not a prude about porn. Or, to put it another way, he is a prude about porn. He just wonders if the consumption of pornography can legitimately be considered a component of human flourishing. All that loneliness and credit-card debt. The thesis of Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life is that humans are an entity, not a tendency. “We are a thing, an item of history,” Gould writes, “not an embodiment of general principles.” After a thorough analysis of the 530-million-year-old fossil record in a limestone quarry called the Burgess Shale—and of the mass extinctions of species that occurred after the quarry was formed—Gould concludes that the evolution of human life was spectacularly unlikely, a lottery win. “Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning,” Gould argues, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.” With great mental exertion and a decent night’s sleep and no ambient noise, Abbott can hold this concept precariously in his mind, like an acrobat balancing a chair holding a sequined assistant. But when he tries, in his mind, to add the proliferation of Internet pornography to Gould’s thesis on historical contingency, the strain becomes too much and he nearly blacks out in titillation and despondency. What an awful miracle. Abbott knows from Keats that the fancy thing to do is to reside in Paradox without any irritable reaching. But he also knows that he is, above all else, an irritable reacher, and about as capable of reform as a trembling dog. (There is rain on the roof, song on the monitor. He could just type in wild sluts, get it over with.)
9 Abbott’s Imaginary Letter to an Imaginary Nationally Syndicated Childhood and Parenting Expert
Here’s one for the Puzzled Parents mailbag. Most mornings, Abbott explains, he gets up early with his young daughter while his wife, a pregnant insomniac, tries to sleep in. He prepares breakfast for his child and then sits with her at the table while she eats. Well, it is nice time together, but the truth is that Abbott on most mornings is listless and taciturn. Sometimes—understand that it is very early and there is no nanny and he’s so tired and it seems increasingly unlikely that he will ever be consulted for a fascinating story on public radio—he has his head in his hands. The girl eats and chatters across the table while Abbott grinds his eyeballs with his palms. But occasionally, and for reasons he doesn’t understand, Abbott is fun and funny at breakfast. He makes faces and voices, he hides behind cereal boxes, he pretends to spit out bad-tasting food, he flaps his arms and flies around the table. Hold on, he’s getting to his question. Abbott’s daughter loves it when this strange father appears, though she can never depend on his appearance. Abbott is troubled by his inconsistency. He knows that a parent’s consistency is vital, that children thrive when they feel a sense of steadiness and reliability at home. His question, then, is whether he should desist with the infrequent jollity and just be consistently sullen and unresponsive at breakfast. He is Yours Sincerely, Piqued in the Valley.
10 Abbott and the Jacobite Revolts
Abbott sits on the edge of his daughter’s bed after she wakes from a long nap. The girl is happy and full of song. “My body,” she sings, clapping her hands. Her fingers are splayed and so extended as to bend slightly back, so that only her palms touch when she claps. “My body, my body,” she sings. She looks to Abbott both tiny and enormous lying beneath her sheet. She is flushed and sweaty. “Dad,” she says. “My body, my body.” Abbott does not know where she learned this song. “It does sound like body,” he says. “It does.” His daughter sings, “My body, my body.” “It does sound like that,” he says. “But it’s Bonnie.” His daughter sings, “My body, my body.” Abbott says, “It does sound like that, honey, but it’s Bonnie. Bonnie. Bonnie.” His daughter says, “Dad.” “Like an nnnnnnn sound,” he says. “Bonnie.” His daughter claps her palms and sing
s a jumbled line about the sea. Abbott sings:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean
My Bonnie lies over the sea
My Bonnie lies over the ocean
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me
Abbott’s daughter says, “Be careful, Popo.” She makes her stuffed pony climb the wall. Quietly she sings, “My body, my body.”
Abbott moves to the refrain:
Bring back bring back
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me, to me
Bring back, bring back
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me
Abbott’s daughter says, “Open the window?” Abbott gets up and opens the blinds. “It’s light up,” she says. “Yes,” he says. “Sunny out,” she says, even though it clearly isn’t. Abbott commences the second verse, which he did not even know he knew until he was singing it:
Last night as I lay on my pillow
Last night as I lay on my bed
Last night as I lay on my pillow
I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead
Abbott swallows the last word. Who taught his daughter this Scottish folk song about Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), who in 1745, after two decades of exile in Italy, returned to his homeland to regain the English throne for his family, only to be routed by the Redcoats and forced to escape the country disguised as a servant girl? Not that she learned it all that well, but still. He sings the chorus one more time, dramatically. He’s trying to win back his daughter’s attention because she has scrambled down the bed and is flipping through a book about a coyote. “My body, my body,” she sings. “Nnnnnn,” says Abbott, who in all honesty has a spotty grasp of English monarchical rule and who does not until twenty minutes later conduct Internet research on the song’s origins while ignoring the girl’s demands for grapes. “It’s about really missing a lady who is gone,” he misinforms his daughter, who is running away from him and down the hallway, “and who may have suffered some kind of misfortune on the water …” Later that night in bed, Abbott’s wife, aggrievedly not asleep, says she simply cannot stand children’s music and that she will go insane—and she really means insane—if she doesn’t cleanse from her mind this detestable song featured on one of their daughter’s new CDs. Abbott can empathize. He has had trapped in his skull for the past twenty minutes a vaguely tragic but ultimately unintelligible song called “Hinky Dinky Dee.” His wife thrashes the sheets. “Here it is,” she says. “I’m giving it to you.” She sings a frantic refrain:
My body my body
My body can do lots of things
Look at me don’t you see I can move so easily
My body my body
11 Abbott and the Highchair
Abbott is out in his driveway washing his daughter’s highchair with a hose, a sponge, and a soapy bucket. Neighbors walk by and say boy do they remember those days. They say he can wash their cars when he’s done. They say he should start a small business. The neighbors stop with their leashed dogs and tell stories of rotting fruit and yogurt beneath the seat cushions, the mysterious stenches, the revolting discoveries. Oh they don’t miss that. Abbott says these highchairs really do get disgusting. The neighbors say they literally gagged. You just don’t understand it, they say, until you have children. I know, says Abbott, it’s bad. One woman whose name Abbott thinks is Laura says her husband is taking it easy for a couple days after the vasectomy. Abbott changes the setting on his new hose attachment from SHOWER to JET, and he blasts the highchair so hard it rocks back on two plastic wheels. Desiccated raisins fly like shrapnel. A small, personal rainbow glistens in the mist at the face of the new hose attachment.
12 Abbott Hogs the Mood
Like many others before him, Abbott discovers, once married, that marriage is a battle—clinically, a negotiation—over the possession of the Bad Mood. A marriage, especially a marriage with children, cannot function properly if both its constituents are in foul temper, thus the Bad Mood is a privilege only one spouse can enjoy at a time. Who gets to be in a Bad Mood? This is the day-to-day struggle. In the Perfect Union, the Bad Mood is traded equitably, like child care or household chores. There is joint custody of the Bad Mood. If one spouse is grumpy for an entire weekend, the other spouse might take the Mood for the workweek. If one spouse is low-spirited during that unpleasant stretch from Christmas to the New Year, the other spouse might claim Thanksgiving, Easter, and the Fourth of July. In the typical marriage, however, one spouse tends to possess the Bad Mood disproportionately. This is called Hogging the Mood. Abbott peacefully acquired his wife’s Bad Mood in a long line at the Big Y during a late afternoon last February, a Thursday, and he has not given it up in four months. It is a testament to his wife’s good nature that she did not, initially, try to reclaim the Mood, as she had every right to do. She is pregnant, after all, and sleeping poorly. For the first few weeks, even a month, she let Abbott have it, no questions asked. Like a friendly librarian, she has always had a lenient overdue policy, and besides, Abbott suspects they have a tacit understanding that he requires the Bad Mood slightly more than she does. Although they have never kept a record—at least he hasn’t—he is reasonably certain that he has been majority owner of the Bad Mood during the marriage. Also, he supposes that she imagines there will be some attractive mood compensation package for her patience and goodwill. But as the weeks and months pass, Abbott senses that she is growing anxious to repossess the Bad Mood. She tries sex, and she tries withholding sex. She tries lighthearted humor and then lighthearted threat. We can, she says, do this the hard way or the easy way. She says broken kneecaps. Eventually she employs guerrilla tactics, surprise raids, quick and deep mood plunges designed to buoy Abbott’s mood and achieve marital equilibrium. But he holds fast. He wants the Bad Mood—he feels he needs it—and giving it up after holding it so long begins to seem arbitrary. He has had it this long—why cede it now? Many times he feels himself veering close to enjoyment or contentment, but then, realizing the risk, he retreats to the center of the Mood. And then this afternoon Abbott returns home from the hardware store and sees his young daughter running out to the driveway to meet him. She says “Dad” over and over again, grabs his leg like a child in an advertisement for life insurance or home mortgage. She smiles up at him, jumping, chanting “Dad,” as if he has been a good father. Abbott kneels to pick her up. He puts his arms around her neck and whispers something affectionate into her ear. Her curly hair tickles his face. When he looks up, he sees his wife watching them from the kitchen window, and that’s when he loses it.
13 Abbott Suffers the Pang of Vindication
Here in the corner of the basement, searching in and among cardboard boxes for a paint tray and rollers, Abbott finds the water. Six gallons, perhaps not hidden, but certainly stashed. His initial confusion gives way to satisfaction, which gives way to disturbance. This is not an argument one wishes to win. As long as Abbott’s wife is nonchalant about apocalypse, as long as her arguments derive from unexamined notions of hope and progress, as long as she does not surreptitiously buy emergency supplies, the household can exist in a delicate but sustainable balance. He’s the one who fears the cataclysmic demise of Western Civilization, not her. But now this dreadful evidence, this unwelcome glimpse inside her. How difficult to know someone, and how undesirable. Six gallons. Abbott walks across the basement to check on the three gallons he has hidden in the opposite corner. There they are, beneath a broken trampoline, looking insufficient. He wonders if she is twice as scared or just twice as diligent.
14 In Which Abbott Fails to Complete a Pretty Basic Task
When Abbott comes in from mowing, he finds his wife cutting his daughter’s hair in the middle of the kitchen. The girl is sitting in her highchair with a towel around her shoulders. She holds still; her face is grave, stoic. Abbott’s wife is biting her lip in concentration. She is using the family’s one pair of scissors, which is also used to cut paper, cardboard, fabric, wire, rubber, rope, dog-food bags, plastic packages of batteries, and once,
in the middle of the night, aluminum. “I didn’t know you were going to do this,” Abbott says, wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a paper towel. Abbott’s wife mists the girl’s hair with a spray bottle Abbott has never seen before, not once. Abbott feels like an interloper. He tries to fade to the dark perimeter of the small kitchen, but there isn’t one. “When did you learn how to do that?” he says. Abbott’s wife leans down and closes one eye to check if the back of the girl’s hair is even. She’s so capable, so confident. So skilled and courageous with her dull scissors. “It’s not like I know how,” she says. “I’m just doing it.” The ring of locks around the girl’s highchair looks to Abbott ceremonial or ritualistic. Abbott would no sooner cut his daughter’s hair than remove her appendix. He has never even considered that her hair would need to be cut, but of course her hair needs to be cut. What is the appropriate response to your daughter’s first haircut? Why is he sad and afraid? Abbott’s wife makes one more tiny snip and then circles the highchair, gently pulling strands of the girl’s hair. “There,” she says. “That looks great.” Abbott nods. It does look good. He emerges into the center of the room and puts his hand on the girl’s head. “No, Dad,” she says. “Would you mind sweeping up this hair?” his wife asks. Abbott slinks to the closet for the broom and the thing that you sweep things into. “Do you want to see?” Abbott’s wife says to their daughter, holding up a mirror. Abbott sweeps the hair into the thing and holds it. Golden ringlets is what they are. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he says. His wife says, “Just toss it.” Abbott walks to the trash can, opens the lid, and sees the coffee grounds, a leathery carrot, some wet noodles, and a diaper. He closes the lid. Abbott’s wife holds the mirror, brushes loose hair from the girl’s neck. “Well,” she says, “why don’t you take it outside and spread it to the winds?” Abbott says, “Really?” “It’s an organic substance,” his wife says. Abbott takes his daughter’s hair outside. He walks through the pachysandra and onto the lawn, smelling the cut grass and exhaust. The cat dashes across the yard, reminding Abbott that he has a cat. The birds are making a racket in the trees, and Abbott squints up into bright sun. Then he looks back down at the golden hair against the green plastic. He walks back through the pachysandra and into the house. His wife and daughter have moved to some other room. He can hear their voices. From a kitchen drawer he takes a sandwich bag. He pours in the hair, seals the bag, and places it behind a cookbook on top of the refrigerator, where it will remain either forever or until Abbott’s wife removes it.
Abbott Awaits Page 2