Don't Worry About the Kids

Don't Worry About the Kids

Stories

Jay Neugeboren

Dzanc Books
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org

copyright © 1997 by Jay Neugeboren

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published 2014 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-42-5
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers

Published in the United States of America

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.

For
Catherine

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the magazines that first published the stories—all now somewhat revised—contained in this volume:

Several of these stories have also been anthologized: “Don't Worry about the Kids” in
Prize Stories: The
O.
Henry Awards
1988; “Fixer's Home” in
The Twentieth Century Treasury of Sports;
“Romeo and Julio” in
Sarajevo, an Anthology for Bosnian Relief
; and “Workers to Attention Please” in the SOS Anthology,
Louder Than Words
.

Contents

Don't Worry about the Kids

Workers to Attention Please

The St. Dominick's Game

Romeo and Julio

Leaving Brooklyn

How I Became an Orphan in 1947

Minor Sixths, Diminished Sevenths

Fixer's Home

Department of Athletics

Connorsville, Virginia

The Year Between

Your Child Has Been Towed

What Is the Good Life?

In Memory of Jane Fogarty

Tolstoy in Maine

Don't Worry about the Kids

Don't Worry about the Kids

M
ICHAEL
IMAGINED
that he could see the fragrances coming at him in waves, that each wave was a different color. He sat in a small Italian restaurant in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, Langiello, the court-appointed investigator, across from him. Langiello was talking about his own marriage and divorce, about how he had begun living with his second wife before he had filed for a separation. It was crazy, he said, what love could do to you when it took hold.

Michael tried to smile, felt his upper lip quiver, stared at his plate. The gnocchi seemed to be carved from balsa wood, floured with potato dust. He thought of radio waves, outside the restaurant, shimmering in the air, passing through the metal roofs of automobiles, the brick walls of apartment houses, the windows of office buildings and storefronts. He inhaled, tried to separate the fragrances, to name them. He saw low smoky-green S-curves for basil, high rolling mountains of barn-red for tomatoes, graceful ripples of ivory for garlic.

“So you can relax, Mike, let me tell you right off that I think the present custody setup is lousy and that I'm going to recommend some changes.” Langiello smiled easily. “Okay?”

Michael nodded. He liked Langiello, liked the man's manner: the streetwise directness, the rough-edged tenderness. Langiello reminded him of the Italian guys with whom he'd gone to grade school and high school.

“I read the complaint you filed, and I read all the diary stuff you gave me. You've been through some rough times.”

“I suppose.”

“We never had kids, me and my first wife, but I feel for guys like you, when their wives use the kids against them. I mean, it's one thing if some broad tries to kick shit out of you herself. It's another if she gets your kids to start kicking too. How can you fight that?”

“I don't know.”

“Still hard for you to talk, isn't it?”

Langiello reached across, put his hand on top of Michael's. Michael felt like a child. Why? At the present time Michael had his children with him only one out of every four weeks, and he'd known that in filing for primary custody he would be blamed by them for stirring things up. It would be the same old story—their mother's story: that he didn't really love them, that he only wanted to prove he could get his way. He had been prepared for this. What had surprised him, though, was how tiring it had become to hold back, to
not
answer his children's accusations.
When did you stop loving your children?
The question was there, in his head, and the only thing more absurd than the question, he knew, was that in Langiello's presence he felt what he sometimes felt when he was with his children: the need to answer it.

“Listen. I was nervous too, before I met you the first time—all I remembered from when we were in high school, you being such a hot shot. I mean, two guys like us, two old schoolyard ballplayers from Brooklyn, we'll get along fine.”

The waiter appeared, asked if everything was all right. He spoke to Langiello in Italian. He wore a midnight blue tuxedo, fingered the dark lapel. Langiello and the waiter laughed together, and Michael imagined Langiello as a boy of seven or eight coming across the ocean on a ship, huddled inside a blanket.

Michael touched his napkin, thought of white drapes around an open wound, a scalpel in his palm. He saw the skin spread and bleed. He saw subcutaneous tissue, the layer of pale yellow fat below that. He saw muscles, like brown steak, thin tissues of white tendon being peeled away. The waiter was gone. Langiello was buttering a piece of bread. Michael smelled onions, parsley, sweet red peppers. He imagined Coleman, his anesthesiologist, staring into a green monitor, at hills and valleys of fragrances that flowed above and below sea level. Oregano. Grated cheese. Lemon. Michael wanted to reach out and touch the smells, to flatten them to the horizon. He wanted the moment he was living in to become a thin white line, to disappear.

“Tell me what to do,” Michael said.

“First thing?”

“First thing.”

“Eat.”

Langiello skewered a strip of scungili on his fork, talked about how his father had brought him to the restaurant when he was a boy. Michael felt frightened, in need of reassurance. He tried to visualize himself earlier in the day, taking the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, entering the hospital, greeting receptionists, nurses, doctors, residents. He saw himself in the operating suite, putting the X-rays on the viewbox, hanging his clothes in the locker, walking into the operating room. Bach's Suite Number One, his favorite, was already playing. His nurse helped him scrub up, tie his gown, put on his slippers. She held a pair of gloves for him, stretched the wrists wide. Langiello talked about the diary he kept while he was going through his own divorce, about how crazy things had been.

Michael closed his eyes, could feel the thin skin of latex coat his hands like a film of talcum. The hip was exposed, draped inside a white rectangle less than a foot square. He prepped the area, watched his fingers, smooth and white like a dead man's, work inside the wound. His fingers retracted muscles, moved to deeper muscle, cut, cauterized. His resident suctioned blood. He told the resident to be careful of the sciatic nerve, to move it aside gently. If you harmed it, the woman would have a dropped foot forever after. Bach became Mahler—the Andante Moderato from the Second Symphony. They were using his tapes today, not Coleman's. His fingers worked on. Mahler became Bach: Preludes and Fugues on harpsichord. Landowska.

He held an electric saw as if it were a pistol, cut through the bone, removed it. With a mallet, he banged a reamer into the middle of the bone, inside the hip, put down his trial prosthesis. He removed the remaining cartilage, drilled holes, cleaned them with a water pik, washed out the femur, the socket. He mixed cement, white and creamy like Elmer's glue.

He chewed his gnocchi now, imagined a piece lodging in his throat, Langiello leaning across, grabbing his jaw, prying his mouth open, reaching in with a hooked finger. He saw himself suturing heavy tendons with violet thread. He smelled potatoes, butter, sausage.

Langiello asked about his brother, about how it felt to have a brother who was crazy. Michael wanted to protest, to explain that Jerry was not crazy—that he was retarded, perhaps, damaged, disabled—but he told Langiello that he had stopped by the day-care center before coming to the restaurant. Jerry was heavily sedated: two thousand units of Thorazine a day, Benadryl for the side effects. Michael was concerned about Jerry's eyesight: the corneas were becoming filmy, glazed. He must remember to call later, to suggest an exam, a change in medication. He imagined the top of Jerry's head, sliced open, lifted up as if on hinges, and he saw himself standing on a stepladder, pouring a mixture of glue and corn meal into Jerry's head.

“You said he's been like that most of his life, that he was never really normal.”

“That's right.”

“I don't mean to pry. It's just that I like to find out these things—so I can get the big picture, you know what I mean?”

Michael had long ago stopped believing in the diagnostic terms the doctors used: autism, schizophrenia, manic-depression. Who would ever know what had actually happened thirty-nine years ago—genetically, neurologically, in utero?

Michael saw himself closing the wound, binding the skin with a staple gun, laying on the dressing. Langiello asked Michael to describe his marriage and Michael gave Langiello a few sentences, then talked about how hard things were on the children, about how he wished he could get them into counseling. Langiello nodded sympathetically, said that he might be able to make a recommendation, that he didn't think their objectives were far apart.

“Then you
agree
with me?” Michael asked. “You really do think I should have the children with me more?”

“Sure. Only you have to remember that I don't have final say. I do my investigation, I file my report, I make recommendations if I want.” Langiello smiled. “But don't worry. We have leverage. My uncle just happens to be the judge, or did I tell you that already?”

Michael felt his heart surge, pump. He tried to show nothing.

“You got some time?” Langiello asked.

“Time?”

“Afterward. You got any appointments, or are you free?” “I have time. I left the afternoon open. I don't have to be back in the city until four-thirty.”

“Good. So how about after lunch, we walk around the neighborhood? I'll show you where I was born—where my old man had his store.”

If Jerry were reasonably calm, Michael thought, he would bring him here the next time. Jerry loved Italian food. If they succeeded in getting through the meal without incident, he decided, he would bring the children the time after that. Michael looked down, knew that the spirals on the gnocchi were there so that they would resemble seashells. He ate. He told Langiello that he would love to walk around the neighborhood with him, and while he talked he thought of the ocean, of Brighton Beach, of sand castles. He saw himself on the beach with Jerry, smoothing down a spiral runway that ran from the top of the castle to the bottom. He set a pink ball at the top, watched it circle downward. Jerry clapped. They dug out tunnels that let in the ocean. They built moats. They mixed water and sand, and let the mixture drip onto the castle's turrets.