Yet isn’t the ultimate power imbalance between parents and children? For a child to write about a parent is one thing; for a parent to write about a child something else. And he still wants to be a good parent.
But what if this is not about his son, the father tells himself, but for his son?
Sometimes his students ask him who he writes for, who his ideal reader is, and it came to him recently—his best reader is his wife; his ideal reader is his son, though he can barely read yet, and certainly not the kind of things he writes . . . but one day.
He used to think he wrote for immortality. Once he had his son, he worried he’d lose that desire, that procreation was the more essential hedge against mortality. Maybe so, but now it occurs to him his son is the physical embodiment of posterity. The posterity whose judgment he yearns for. And cowers from.
This is how you tell him, he tells himself. How you tell him you love him. How you tell him you killed his sister. How you tell him he wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. Because she couldn’t be his “sister”; they couldn’t be “siblings.” They were alternatives, two sides of the same coin, both heads, but always and forever facing away.
And how you wouldn’t have it any other way. He is the child of abortion and the end of regret.
We had an abortion and then we had a child. But also: we had a child and then we had an abortion. The koan of their lives.
A writer he knows suggests it’s superstition, this reluctance to write about our children. “People don’t want to write about their children because they think that, if they do, their children might die.” But what if we write about our dead children, he wonders. The darlings we killed?
A writer’s job, they say, is to imagine the unimaginable, but he can’t imagine life without the boy. Our job, he tells his students instead, is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable—the unutterable made utterable by virtue of being written, whispered on a page.
* * *
But before all that, they do get a cat. Hypoallergenic! And not some hairless Dr. Evil model. The breeder sends them fur samples to tuck into their pillowcases, to Band-Aid to their forearms. If they have no reaction, they can have a cat.
They bring her home in the car, the kitten in her crate, the boy alongside, marveling at the trembling, trilling life in the box beside him.
“You have kids, and then they want pets—fish, rodents, pretty soon it’s cats and dogs, living together.” That same older colleague and friend. “You might have never had pets, or wanted them, but you get ’em anyway, for the kids. And then the kids leave for college and you’re left with the pets. You wanted kids and you end up with pets. And you’re grateful for the company! Except sometimes, you’re not sure if the kids come home because they miss you or the critters.”
“But why do we give in and get them the pets?” he wonders.
“Because we love to see them love! Can’t get enough of it. I used to think it’s because they can never love us enough. But that’s not it. Their love for pets is a promise that they’ll love their own kids. And buy them pets! The circle of frigging life . . .”
* * *
The first time the boy goes to sleepaway camp—just a week, just a few hours away—the house feels bigger without him, the days longer. It’s as if the space-time continuum has warped. When he Skypes with them, he looks older, as if he’s calling from the future.
Without him to animate them, his toys lay strewn about the floor as if across a battlefield, lifeless, soulless. I know how they feel, the father thinks.
The cat stalks from room to room, chirping quizzically, silently shedding.
She’s so furry, when she finally settles in a lap, she looks like a hen roosting. But before she lies down, she plumps them like a pillow, working her paws, rhythmically, a behavior said to derive from kittens kneading their mothers before nursing. Perfectly normal, the internet says. Some cats will do this—to men and women alike—all their lives. Suddenly he intuits the comfort of keeping a pet even after the child leaves home.
* * *
In a few years, when they nag him to do his chores, his homework, the boy will mock grumble: “Do this, do that, do the cat!” A running joke, one of a series of little repetitive riffs he does—overflows of language, verbal self-stimming. “Wonder where he gets that from,” the mother will say.
* * *
In a few years, the boy who couldn’t tie his shoelaces will learn to juggle. The boy who couldn’t ride a bike will want to surf. The boy who couldn’t climb a jungle gym will scale a climbing wall.
If this is a story about him, the father thinks, the boy is its hero—the one who changes.
They used to mark his height against a door frame. Now he stands back to back with his father. Soon he’ll be wearing the father’s hand-me-downs; in a few years he’ll be handing them back.
How do you protect something bigger than yourself? the father asks the mother in bed one night.
He’ll ride roller coasters his father refuses to go on. He’ll like bands his mother has never heard of.
He’ll know things they don’t know. Have secrets, and shames, of his own. Shut the bathroom door. Lock the bathroom door. Criticize their driving, their drinking, their swearing. He’ll be ashamed of them.
They’ll be able to go to the bathroom at night without tiptoeing. Go to restaurants that don’t serve mac and cheese. Now when they panic that he’s quiet-too-quiet, they realize he’s just reading, a miracle of stillness, lying on his stomach, just one leg swinging up and down like a metronome.
* * *
He’ll still need a “bop” sometimes, as he calls it, an arm-flinging, wrist-flapping, kicking up of heels. A caper, a gambol, a rumpus. Leap of faith, and jump for joy. Sometimes they’ll even join in, breathless with love.
* * *
They finally sort through all those photos.
The boy in costume: at Halloween, but also at pageants and plays, wearing his mom’s shoes, his dad’s glasses, a cape with his first underpants. (Subsection: funny hats—pilgrim, cowboy, hipster, etc.)
The boy with famous figures: dinosaurs, mascots, waxworks, LEGObama. (Subsection: cute critters—otters, sloths, manatees, etc.)
Taking in the sights: the Lincoln Memorial, the Mall of America, the Magic Kingdom, and the M&M’s store.
With food: gawping at birthday cakes and ice cream sundaes big enough to swallow him; wielding Popsicles like light sabers, hot dogs like baseball bats, crab legs like pirate hooks.
And in the background always the same wan extras—her hair still long, that dress, those glasses, cargo shorts!—so young they look ancient.
* * *
In a few more years, he’ll travel places they’ve never been, form opinions they’ve never held, mention friends they’ve never met. Fall in—and out—of love with one, move in with another. There might even be a child—a grandchild!—or an abortion, and how will his parents feel then? And what will it matter?
“What if you can’t help?” his wife asks him again. “With any of it.” They’re out for dinner, the boy at a sleepover. “Oh, you can for a little while, but you can’t forever. Can you handle that?”
It’s their favorite restaurant, the place they go for occasions—holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. They came when she was pregnant, and when she wasn’t. When the boy was in a car seat, a high chair, a booster.
He nods, takes her hand. “Only this is forever.” And she rolls her eyes, because of course she does. Because the more the boy changes, the more they stay the same.
The boy will come back to visit, he tells himself. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. To look in on us, as he used to look in on his own parents.
The old house, the hometown. The box, he thinks, we’re in it now.
* * *
The occasion this time is his book, it’s finished, coming out soon. She orders a nice bottle. People are going to assume it’s all true, she says, that I actually had a drinking problem.
T
hey’ll think worse of me, he says.
Maybe. She tops them up. But you deserve it.
She raises her glass; he waits for her toast.
Finally, she grins. Fuck shame, and he nods, clinks. Fuck shame.
* * *
But that’s not quite right, he thinks later. Toasts aren’t true, only what we wish were true, prayers with drinks. Sure, for the longest time he thought shame had fucked them. And of course, sometimes, often, he wishes there were less shame in the world—for the poor, the weak, the othered. Yet other times he wishes there were so much more—that the bankrupt businessmen, the paid-off politicians, the faithless preachers, all the profiteers and hypocrites who fill the news felt it more, felt it at all.
“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself,” according to Anaïs Nin (herself the author of several abortions).
But what if it’s not a lie? And what if the someone is you?
It makes him think of Barb, opining one misty morning: “Shame just makes you human. Isn’t that the lesson of the Garden? Sure, God creates. But Adam and Eve only become human when they fuck up, when they know shame. And you know who doesn’t know shame? The innocent. No shame in the womb.” The low winter sun was beginning to break through, casting her shadow in the fog behind her. “You know what the French call us, yeah? Faiseurs d’anges. Ooh-la-la! ‘Makers of angels.’ Better than baby killers, right? But still wrong. We’re not making anything; they’re already angels. Beings of faith. Not yet fallen, not yet human.”
Because shame makes us human.
Another thought experiment. Another possibility. Another what if.
Barb, herself, of course, isn’t human but made-up. A lie someone told you. Named not for Barbara Bush as she claims, but for her series of pointed zingers. For a character trait. Did you wonder? Did you guess? How easy it is to imagine a life.
She might not be real, but she might be right. Maybe shame just means we’re alive. I could have died of shame, we say, but we don’t. You’ll live to regret it, we say, and we do.
All this talk of shame, he thinks. All these doubts and regrets. And all—miraculously, paradoxically—worth it. Because what comes to him now, when he writes of his son, what he feels most profoundly and purely is pride. The other side of the coin.
They had to explain to the boy what the toy cash register was, but he loved its jangling spring-loaded drawer, filled it with treasures. Susan B. Anthonys, Sacagaweas, JFK half-dollars. Plastic coins, wooden coins, chocolate coins. Replica Roman coins, doubloons, pieces of eight. Ancient Chinese coins with the square holes, heptagonal British change, Mardi Gras favors. Euros, pesos, loonies. Tokens from Chuck E. Cheese.
The Sacagawea dollar is the only coin the father’s ever seen with a child on it—a sleeping baby peeking out from the sling on his mother’s back. The only way to get two heads with one toss.
The boy would insist on putting coins in slots—vending machines, pinball machines, parking meters. Once, the car CD player. Noooo! He loved coin-operated telescopes at scenic lookouts, those pressed penny machines that for fifty cents flatten a coin, stamp it with a new pattern. In museums, he ran to put coins in donation boxes, could watch them spiral into a gravity well for minutes on end, lazily circling, then racing faster and faster. Ever on edge, never falling, until the final plunge. He’d pour change in until the bowl shrieked and sang with rolling coins, chasing each other like bicycles in the Olympic velodrome.
They always had change—the father’s pockets swaying heavily, the mother’s purse bulging lumpily—for fountains, for wishes. So many wishes, there was hardly anything left for his piggy bank.
All those coin-spangled fountains and wishing wells. Scooped out after hours by someone in rubber boots. Even now he shies from explaining what happened to all those wishes.
Once, on the walk to school, a flash of copper, like a beacon. The father had paused, caught between the instinct to pick it up and the shame of seeming cheap. A penny isn’t much to stoop for, and yet—he heard his father’s voice, a child of the war: They all add up. And then, as he hesitated, the boy ducked down and snatched it up. “Lucky!” he announced triumphantly, face as shiny as the head on the coin. And the father nodded, smiled, momentarily won over by his conviction.
When did I stop picking up pennies? he wondered. How long has it been? What would they have amounted to?
And, of course, once the boy swallowed a coin. They blame Hanukkah gelt. He claimed he was lying in bed, flip, flip, flipping it, and it just fell in his mouth.
The nurse was reassuring, or as reassuring as anyone can be when saying, Check his stool. But they never did find it.
* * *
He was wrong about that coin not giving a fuck, the father realizes all these years later. If it did, if it could, it would surely spin forever, hang in the air revolving end over end over end, never, ever fall.
* * *
Horsing around one afternoon, he bites his tongue when the boy head-butts him.
His mouth fills with blood.
The taste of pennies is how it’s always described in fiction.
But he’s never tasted a coin, he realizes. Is this what they taste like? Blood.
* * *
Through the window, dusk is descending. The light seems less to fade than to soften and melt into the earth under the weight of shadow. The bare trees are etched, branches like a vast, delicate network of veins, against the pink-tinged sky.
Bedtime! Good night, Sweet Prince! They chase the giggling boy upstairs.
All the years of ritual—undressing and dressing, diaper changes, potty time, bath time, tooth brushing, reading, hugs and kisses—are so exhausting. If they don’t fall asleep beside him, whoever is on bedtime duty stumbles downstairs, announces wearily, “And that concludes today’s parenting.” Until the next day, and the next and the next. As if it were a curse and not a blessing. As if it really were forever.
Acknowledgments
It turns out that it also takes a village to publish a novel. Mine includes my “Rock of Agents,” Maria Massie; my superteam of editors, Naomi Gibbs, Carole Welch, Helen Atsma, and Lauren Wein; and all the dedicated, talented professionals at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Sceptre who backed the book. Sincere thanks to all of them, as well as to my former editors, Jenna Johnson and Janet Silver, for a couple of significant drinks.
The opening section, “Chance,” first appeared, in slightly different form, as a short story in Glimmer Train back in 2012 and later in Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories, New Stories from the Midwest 2015, Catamaran, and The Drum. I’m grateful to the editors of all those publications and to a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which enabled me to enlarge the original story.
While many books, articles, and sources informed my work, I’m particularly indebted to the insights of Sidonie Smith, Jane Hassinger, Lisa Harris, and Bernie Klein. The quotation on page 212 is from Anne Enright’s Making Babies. With respect to the book’s material more broadly, a line of Lorrie Moore’s seems apt: “This story has a relationship to real life like that of a coin to a head.”
Many other thanks are owed, but I’m especially grateful to the following for their kindness along the way: Lisa; Seth and Deb; Joanna, Susan, Shan, Imogen, Sam, Karl, Rachel, Lisa, Josh, and Mary S. and Mary P.; Holly, Rajani, Beth; Daryl, Tim, Lindsay, and Mary Y.; Margaret, Chris, Rachel, Marissa, Christina, and Tricia. I’m forgetting the names of several others, though not their generosity.
Finally, of course, this book would not have been possible without the love and support of my family. Thank you for bearing with me, bearing me up, and simply bearing me.
About the Author
© Lynne Raughley
Peter Ho Davies’s novel The Fortunes won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Booker Prize and a London Times bestseller, as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. His fi
ction has appeared in Harpers, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and Granta and been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories.
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A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself Page 12