Their only previous attaboys were during potty training, as poop coach and poop cheerleader.
PT’s really not as bad as all that. He almost forgets the sinking feeling all the way there. It’s not so bad. They’ve nothing to complain about compared to some he sees in the waiting room. When the therapist asks, he’s happy to say that, No, the boy isn’t fussy about his food, or the clothes he wears, or being hugged. More bullets dodged. But at the end when she’s writing down exercises for them to do at home—cross-crawl, bridges, crab walks, Superman, wheelbarrow, dead bug (“More games we can play!” he tells his son)—she adds almost casually they should consider occupational therapy, sensory integration therapy, auditory integration therapy. He might also look into orthotics, if his insurance will pay. She shows the way the boy’s ankle ligaments bow outward, and the father nods and says, sure, and how long does she think the boy’ll need them, and she says, “Probably for the rest of his life.” And he feels himself die a little in that instant—over orthotics!—remembering the boy’s first swaying steps, legs akimbo, arms overhead, tiny fists curled around their fingers. Dangling like a puppet.
He looks at his son and smiles brokenheartedly and says, “Okay, buddy, are you ready to go?”
“Roger-roger!” he says in the robot voice of a battle droid.
One day, the father thinks as they drive home, I’ll be dead and my son will still be wearing orthotics and thinking of all the lies his father told him.
* * *
Besides it’s not quite true that the boy’s not a fussy eater. All his favorite foods come with cajoling nicknames—give peas a chance, hav-a-cado, miso tasty.
His father’s specialty is “Mac Daddy”; his mother is “the Celery Queen.”
They urge him to Use the fork, Luke!
They watch the boy line up and file into kindergarten. It’s his first day. They stand on tiptoes to watch him bobbing down the corridor as long as possible. The father imagines he’s staring down it into the far future—junior high, high school, college! And then the door closes and they look at each other and wonder what they’re supposed to do now.
* * *
The mother goes back to work at the university press.
She’s always had a horror of being a housewife, a disdain for stereotypical domestic expectations—cooking, cleaning, laundry.
The father gets it, does his bit. It’s only fair, they agree.
But secretly he feels she should be grateful. As if he’s doing her a favor. As if taking out the trash is an act of love.
And secretly she disdains his efforts. His cooking isn’t cooking—his sauces come from a jar. His cleaning isn’t cleaning—just tidying.
They’re not always great about keeping these secrets.
The one they do keep, from each other and themselves: It’s not about housework. It’s motherhood hemming her in, the demands of the boy tangled up with the demands of society.
* * *
Still, he remembers a time years before, their first Christmas dating in graduate school. He’d had no money to buy her more than a token, but one day when she’d been at the library, he’d cleaned and neatened her cluttered, filthy apartment—folded, hung, filed and straightened, dusted, vacuumed, polished, scoured—until the whole place shone. She’d cried when she’d come in.
Their first Christmas with the boy, he was so tiny, propped in her lap surrounded by boxes and wrapping paper, it looked like she’d just gotten him as a gift. The kind she wouldn’t necessarily think to buy herself, her faded smile seemed to say, but it’s the thought that counts.
* * *
The father goes back to work. Not teaching, he’s been doing that all along, but writing.
He takes her advice of so long ago, writes about their loss.
A story. Or is it? He’s not quite sure himself.
One of the gifts of fiction, he tells students, is the cover it provides. A story can be 1% true and 99% made up, or 99% true and 1% made up, and the reader won’t know the difference, the writer doesn’t have to declare. It means he can tell the truth and take the Fifth simultaneously.
He likes what he produces, shares it with his wife—the one person who can tell fact from fiction—and she weeps. A good sign, he tells himself. He once told students his goal in writing: I am trying to break your heart. (Lyric of a Wilco song, he explains, in case they’ll think he’s cool, in case any of them has heard of Wilco.)
But it’s always her heart he wants to break.
It doesn’t occur to him that it’s already broken.
Instead, he thinks, maybe something good might come of all this. His career is in the doldrums, one slim volume five years ago, a themed collection based on the results of a DNA test, a story set in every region his ancestors hail from. (The ironies do not escape him, nor he them.)
So he sends the new piece out. Maybe it’ll be his big break, his New Yorker moment. He still feels owed something.
He sends it out, waits, as if for test results. When it’s rejected, sends it out again, as if for a second opinion.
And again.
And again.
And finally, a small, fine journal takes it, and he feels . . . sick. Defeated. Is this what it was all for?As if he’s sold his soul for contributor’s copies.
Though not his soul, he thinks bleakly. And worse than sold it.
“It’s not a tragedy,” his wife observes. “It’s about a tragedy.” But he’s not sure he knows the difference.
“You act like there ought to be some reward for all this,” she marvels. “What if it’s the opposite?”
* * *
He had a novel due, had been working on it for a couple of years when she got pregnant the first time. He has writer friends, several, who finished their books in a mad rush before babies arrived. So many that it had started to feel like a career move, a crafty means of defeating writer’s block. But after the abortion, he could never deliver the novel (not least because he sensed the dead metaphor stirring).
* * *
“Do you mind,” he asks softly. “My writing about it.” He’s trying again.
“About us, you mean.”
He nods.
“It’s your version,” she says. “Your side. I didn’t take it as the whole story. I assumed that was why it was written like that. That that was what all the breaks were for.”
He nods more slowly. (He’d thought he was writing it like LEGO: brick by brick.)
“Of course, I don’t know what he’ll make of it. When he’s old enough to read it.”
But that future seems so ridiculously distant, a time of flying cars and jet packs, as to be irrelevant.
* * *
For a while he encourages her to write about it too. They met in a writing class in college, though she hasn’t written for years. And for a while she does. He imagines a collaboration of sorts. But when he asks her weeks later how it’s going, she shrugs, says she’s stopped. He’s sympathetic at first—of course it’s hard to make time, of course it’s a hard subject to address. He offers to look at it for her, but she keeps shaking her head.
“I deleted it.”
“But why?” He can’t quite keep the dismay from his voice.
“Oh, I don’t know. Why do you care?”
“I thought it might help.”
“Well, it didn’t. Or it did. I don’t know! It helped to delete it. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that! I wrote it. I think I can delete it.”
Somewhere the boy is crying.
“I’ll go,” he says. “I’ve got it!” she says.
She leaves him alone to think about how he never deletes anything, keeps drafts, fragments, the worst drivel, on his hard drive, in dented file boxes that he lugs from house to house. Even that failed novel. Just in case. Of what, he doesn’t know. But the thought of destroying even one page horrifies him. And it’s just words, just paper!
And, suddenly, he does kno
w. In case of what? In case I change my mind.
Later, in the dark, they find each other’s hands under the covers. “You’ll keep writing about it?” He nods dumbly. Someone has to, but it feels fainthearted.
* * *
Someone asks to see photos of the boy, and he realizes the most recent one in his phone is six months old. “We used to take them hourly,” he tells his wife, and she makes a face: “Novelty’s worn off.” Now, they’re only dutiful about taking pictures at holidays and birthdays, for the grandparents.
The problem is, in the moment, it’s impossible to imagine the boy being any different, or remember him any earlier. The eternal now doesn’t need documenting.
An older friend advises: “Write it down before you forget it all.” The wife counters: “Maybe we’re supposed to forget trauma.
On his first trip away from home after the birth—a conference—the father mooned over pictures of the boy the way he used to pore over ones of his middle school crush. Heartsick and swooning. He bought an extra copy of In the Night Kitchen at the airport to read over the phone to a photo. Afterward the hotel bed seemed so vast, it had its own horizon. He stretched out on the crisp white sheets, sank into the down comforter, slept poorly, woke early, the photo smiling silently on the nightstand.
It comes to him he stopped taking pictures around the time they started PT. As for the fancy video camera, it’s gathering dust. An obsolete brick. Technology is developing faster than the child.
* * *
It’s the Age of Star Wars. The father had planned to wait, but the other kindergarteners have seen it. He can’t risk one of them spilling the beans about who Luke’s father is.
They watch it three times in a week, then all the sequels and prequels in quick succession. For months they talk only in quotes.
What an incredible smell you’ve discovered (on the potty).
I’ve got a bad feeling about this (before a shot).
Do or do not, there is no try (learning to swim).
Stay on target (peeing standing up).
I love you (at bedtime). I know.
The Force is what they have instead of God.
* * *
Never tell me the odds (when the father lies awake thinking of tests).
* * *
Other parents seem to know each other, to socialize, play tennis or golf. Little circles of them chatting at pickup. “The cool kids,” the wife calls them. That high school vibe. They were never the cool kids, either of them. They thought that was all behind them.
“We started late,” the mother says, “they’re all younger than us.”
“A lot of them are locals,” the father says. “Grew up here, go back to childhood together.”
“Sure. Sure.”
“And we’re friendly,” he says. “Well, you are. We’ll get to know them.”
But they don’t. These friendships with other parents, friendships based on parenthood, feel expedient, insincere.
“I sometimes think every other parent is better at it than us,” she says. That can’t be true, he knows. But what he suspects is true is that none of them ever killed a child. That’s how they’re better.
* * *
The boy’s kindergarten teacher has concerns. The mother comes home shaking from pickup. He doesn’t play with the other kids. He skips up and down flapping his arms at recess. He can’t put his things away at the start of the day or get ready to go home at the end. The other kids are so great at helping him though.
His wife hates the teacher. “I know what she’s hinting at. The A-word.”
For a moment the father looks stricken. “How could she know?”
“Precisely! What makes her qualified to diagnose autism.”
Ah, that A-word, he thinks. As if one shame were not enough, now they have two scarlet letters to bear.
They talk with the teacher after class. The father squeezes behind his son’s low desk, his legs trapped, as if in stocks. Waiting for the teacher to pelt him.
The boy doesn’t participate in class. He doesn’t like to color, to draw. He’s very polite, mind you. Always says “No thank you.”
“Bartleby,” the mother says. “I gave birth to Bartleby.”
The teacher blinks. “The other kids are great with him though,” she says. “They’re so accepting at this age, little angels.” She beams, beatifically; tiny, bright teeth like a string of pearls.
Is this when he starts hating other kids, the father wonders, because he does. His wife hates the teacher, but he hates the kids. All those happy, healthy, normal fucking kids, running and shouting and playing and climbing, while his boy stands and watches. Stands and watches happily—too pure for envy, too content to feel a lack. How long will that last, the father thinks. How long will I let it? Oh, those loathsome little fuckers.
It shocks him that he loves his own boy so fiercely, hates the others so much.
But, for the sake of the boy, he makes himself set up playdates, welcomes them into his home—the know-it-alls and the why-nots, the finicky and the sugar fiends, the toy snobs and the feral snoops—even as he makes up mean nicknames for them—Ivy the Terrible, Whiny Tim, Will-to-Power, Mimi-me. He can barely bring himself to be civil to their parents when they drop them off, pick them up.
Later, he seethes with resentment when the playdates aren’t reciprocated, even though the boy hardly seems to notice.
* * *
We should get him tested, the mother and father say to each other. We should, they agree. But they can’t. They’ve been afraid of tests for so long. All his life.
* * *
They mark the time now by TV shows. Wonder Pets!, SpongeBob, Dora. These are his phases. These are his pals.
* * *
For show-and-tell, the father helps the boy take his hamster to kindergarten. The kids sit in a circle, and the hamster skitters around in its plastic ball. The kids giggle and shriek and call to it, though the father’s pretty sure the poor thing is just trying to run away. He hopes the hamster will make the boy more popular. He hopes the other kids won’t kill it. “Oh, they’re great with animals,” the teacher assures him.
When the parents asked the boy what he was going to call the hamster, he wanted to give it his own name until they explained that might be confusing.
“Hamilton?” the mother suggested.
“Chewy!” the father urged.
“Russell,” the boy decided. (Too late they’ll learn the hamster is a girl.)
* * *
All the tiny shames of parenthood. When your child swears. When your child cries. When your child hits or bites or farts or lies. Not his first word, not quite, but among them, sung out—a happy yodel—from his perch in the grocery cart: WINE! Tiniest and worst of all—when your child is weird. When he screams at the hand dryer in a public bathroom. When he avoids eye contact. Yet the child feels no shame—such innocence! And our job, he thinks, the job of parents, is to teach it to them. And he would, gladly, all the tiny shames, if only they might be spared the larger ones.
* * *
Summer comes, a break from the worries of school, but also a chasm of time. They fill it with camps—Junior Jedi, Wizarding 101, Dino-might! In every one, the boy will play some version of dodgeball (laser dodge, bludger ball, meteor storm), make soda geysers with Mentos, bring home a sandwich baggie of slime.
And every day after camp: the town pool, shimmering like an oasis in the distance. The boy’s a natural in the water—no balance issues here. Plus, he blends right in with all the other kids skipping on tiptoes across the hot concrete, shivering and shaking off water. All summer he smells of chlorine, grins at his father from under a hooded towel, lips purple from Popsicles, eyes raccoon-ringed from goggles. While he plays in the fountains, the father relaxes, gets in a few laps. The coconut scent of suntan lotion in the water takes him back. But then one day the lifeguards whistle everyone out. There’s poop in the pool! The panicky stampede—crying kids, thrashing limbs, flying sp
ray—is like something out of Jaws. The father’s heart seizes, but the boy is already perched on his towel, hands over his ears to block the whistling. He still insists on his statutory Creamsicle, slurping it mournfully as they watch the lifeguards vacuuming the water. The father is so grossed out, they only go back the day after Labor Day, the last day before the pool is drained, to watch the local dogs dive in.
First smile, first laugh, first words, first steps. First tooth, first haircut, first ice cream, first movie. All of it leading to this: First Grade.
The first time they left him with a sitter, they only made it as far as the coffee shop down the street, only held out for a single jittery hour.
The first time they flew with him—to visit his grandparents—they made sure to pack an extra change of clothes in their carry-on in case he threw up. When he did, it was on the father.
The first time they meet with his first-grade teacher, she has concerns. She’s been talking to the kindergarten teacher, it’s clear. Words like “skipping” and “flapping” appear again as if in quotes. But it’s all innuendo, insinuation. She can’t say the word, probably isn’t allowed to. (On the poster behind her, A is for Apple.) The word she uses instead is last. To start, to finish, to join in, to get ready.
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself Page 4