Noise first became a problem when we began fighting. Sometimes Josy and I would take the baby monitor out to the car in the garage so Emily wouldn’t hear us yelling. We cooperated in that, at least, so we could hear Frankie if he woke up crying, catching our discordant vibe through the ether.
I can’t sleep, except in stolen snatches of disturbing dreams I can’t quite remember on waking. The rest of the night I disappear into a book or escape into late-night infomercials for products I would never use.
At three in the morning, television becomes a time machine. I revisit my days of eating cheese sandwiches while watching the paramedics from
Emergency
!, Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto. The cops from
Adam-12
are still keeping the streets of L.A. safe.
The Six Million Dollar Man
is still running at 60 miles per hour, though the special effects, so impressive then, make me giddy now.
At Josy’s urging I tried an anti-depressant for a few months, but I didn’t feel any different and I would wake in the middle of the night biting my tongue, sometimes till it bled. After Josy left, I flushed the rest of the prescription down the toilet in a rare moment of certainty and righteous anger. I told myself that Josy finally getting out might be the only anti-depressant I would ever need.
The only time to have a long, hot shower is after the kids are in bed for the night. I tell myself it’s relaxing, but lately it seems less so, like the running water is an excuse to sit on the bottom of the shower stall and cry without being heard. I am an actor during daylight hours, but I have no script. My audience of two wants to believe everything will be okay, almost as much as I do, but I don’t know how much longer the show will go on. Improv is so much harder than just saying the lines someone else made up for you.
When the hot water runs out, I step out of the steam cocoon of the shower stall and examine my body’s aging topography carefully. I probe the inside of my upper lip for that bump that comes and goes. It’s down now, but who knows what it will do by morning? I examine my neck with my hands slowly, like a man selecting coins from his pocket, going only by feel. I find no lumps. I wipe the mirror clean of fog with my towel and examine my throat. It looks too red to me, but that hasn’t changed in a long time. I wish now that they had taken my tonsils, almost the size of golf balls, when I was a kid. I came along just when that operation was going out of style.
I take a deep breath and hold it. My respiration used to be much deeper and slower, I think. I was a lifeguard during my summer breaks from college. I used to be able to hold my breath for much longer, swimming underwater all the way out to the line of buoys that roped off the common area for beachgoers.
I feel a familiar ache down the right side of my abdomen. It’s like a flashing red light in a car dashboard that won’t shut off, reminding me that I’m getting too stressed out. Soon after my wife left I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which was a tremendous relief because I was almost sure it had to be bowel cancer. My entrails tie themselves in knots, though I’m not sure what the ratio of figurative to literal is in that statement.
“I know what the problem is, now, honey!” I told her after my colonoscopy confirmed the best case scenario. “Everything is okay!” I smiled as if I was looking right at her, though she holding a phone to her ear on the opposite coast. I live in Poeticule Bay, Maine with a window to the Atlantic. Josy had run as far away as she could from me and our kids, all the way to the Pacific, short by nine blocks.
“No, John. You don’t know what the problem is,” she said.
That was the moment I knew she wouldn’t be back. I really was playing the part of steadfast, even courageous, father in a made-for-TV movie with Bill Pullman or Bill Paxton. I’m never sure which is which. “Us” is now just John and Emily and Frankie. For a long time I thought that Josy was my solution. She opted out of that equation.
Bob, my doctor, is more understanding than my soon-to-be ex, which really cemented my feeling that “us” — Josy and John — was over. Understanding is the greatest service my doctor has done for me, though that’s not his fault. I don’t have any problems Bob can solve with pills.
Oddly, telling yourself you have hypochondria, rather than a respected, telethon-worthy disease, is no comfort. All hypochondriacs are eventually right. Even the word hypochondria confused me. I knew “hypo-“ means “less.” I don’t know what “-chondria” indicates, though I’m guessing “time.”
The pulse in my left ear was suddenly much louder one morning. It was annoying, then worrying. I listened to my pulse like a clock ticking down, like my heart’s works were unwinding. I got up from the couch where I had been watching TV and plunged into the medical books I’d bought from a garage sale, wondering how common cancer of the eardrum could possibly be. I found nothing much there and was getting anxious so I called Josy about it, forgetting the time difference and waking her up.
“Is it a whiny tone?” she asked, her voice raspy and, I had to admit, sexy.
“No, that’s tinnitus, a steady high-pitched sound in the ears.” Then I realized what she really meant. “Thanks, Josy. Go back to sleep,” I said, and hung up.
I went to see Bob about it. The fact that I was suddenly aware of my heart pounding with each beat didn’t seem like a good sign, but he seemed unconcerned, careless even.
“This kind of thing just happens,” he shrugged. “There isn’t anything to be done.”
The room suddenly came into sharp focus. Bob’s stethoscope seemed shinier and the floor seemed dirtier. “There isn’t anything to be done,” he had said offhandedly. This possibility of there being
no
possibilities was a new idea to me. We are so drowned in our self-empowerment and self-help culture, we’re sure we can overcome any difficulty if we just concentrate and…what? Be magic? Fish don’t see water, but we are self-help fish in a deluded sea and we do not notice the daydreams in which we swim.
“There isn’t anything to be done,” I said, as if trying to find my bearings. “There isn’t anything to be done,” I said, testing an unfamiliar phrase from a guidebook.
Bob quirked an eyebrow, but I lit up, ear still pounding but happy. The cure for the melancholia of the abandoned and soon-to-be divorced isn’t a nervous fling with a new date discovered on an Internet site. That’s distraction, not displacement. My listening ear began to heal my broken heart in that moment. In between the beats, I heard the words: The cure is to first, give up.
Beat
. Give in.
Beat
. Let go.
“There isn’t anything to be done!” I felt much better, or at least free. I felt light for the first time in a long time.
Soon, I promised myself, when I hold Frankie, I won’t wish Josy were here to hold him, too. I’ll keep him to myself and love him twice as much. When Emily comes down to breakfast, sullen and looking for a fight, I’ll be ready with pancakes, sweet maple syrup and a smile. Soon, I won’t be faking that smile.
The self-help fish pretending to be a brave man will be free, instead. There isn’t anything to be done, so I’m free to open my arms to embrace the new. Not all old things are treasured antiques. Some things, once broken, can’t be fixed.
The Sum of Me
S
tay-at-home dad.
40.
Broke.
This is not the future I did not plan. The future I did not plan, but thought somehow would take care of itself, is not taking care of itself. Squeegee kids aren’t broke like me. They aren’t still paying for a vaccuum they bought on credit last Christmas. Credit card debt is kicking my ass, or was, until my dad intervened and I discovered there are prices to be paid which are much higher than the interest on VISA.
I have no excuses and, like the rest of my generation, no clue. My wife, Cecelia, has a nursing job at an old folk’s home and I take little freelance editing jobs here and there. My main occupation is to watch our two boys and rub Cecilia’s feet when she gets home after a long shift. We have her tiny retirement investment plan. The statements go unread because neither of us read Bewilder, an alphanumeric language only understood by people in the financial services industry. We hope it works out.
My father learned his financial skills from his parents during the Depression. Grandpa was an Episcopalian preacher in Poeticule Bay before the roads were paved, when everything arrived by boat. The congregation often fed the minister’s family with cod and lobsters rather than feed the collection plate a few coins. Dad scraped up a little money here and there and somehow became what it seems no one can be anymore: The mythic Self-made Man.
Dad would lie in bed and plot his escape from poverty while his brother counted pennies into a mason jar each night. Childhood was so short then, it was almost imperceptible. They did escape. My father’s generation had smaller dreams and the discipline and savvy to make those lies true. They made something of themselves and I have no idea what that might feel like. Instead of selling things, my wife and I had kids and bought stuff off the TV because that was our little slice of the American dream. We trusted the Future, but the banks killed it and the government never arrested anyone for Future’s murder.
My uncle is still alive, too. He gambles his ample retirement fund with various Vegas casinos and heart by-pass specialists. Dad and Mum were snowbirds. After she died, he gave up on Poeticule Bay, Maine permanently and moved to Boca. He watches the sunrise and the sunset, takes pictures of pelicans wheeling over the water like pteradactyls and ponders his only son’s squandered potential.
“We never needed much, certainly not near as much as kids today think they need. I still don’t need much,” Dad says. “If it comes down to it, I could live off a greased rag for a month.”
Dad’s speaking to me over the phone, but he sounds like he could be talking to himself. I guess that’s true since, while he talks, I’m thinking of my boys and how all their friends have iPods now. The future is finally here and the party rages on without my kids.
Dad graduated from pennies to folding money, mason jars to stock portfolios. When I was a kid asking for a few dollars to buy something, his answer was always the same. “Why do you think you need that, boy?”
I was not deprived exactly. Dad provided clothes, food and shelter. But my wants? My wants eclipsed the sun. I wanted to fill my room with books and toys and music because that is how you buy happiness. Less is not more. Less is less.
My father wanted my childhood to be as short as his was and my room to be as bare as a monk’s meditation chamber. I denied him that satisfaction so long, I still don’t feel like a man. And yes, he still calls me “Boy.”
Dad owned Poeticule Bay’s only hardware store. Early each morning he went off to work freshly shaved and optimistic. Each night he shambled home to supper, miserable. By the last spoonful of dessert he resolved that tomorrow would be better. What I did not understand then was that the tomorrow he was thinking about was the far-off tomorrow, the arthritic future wandering Floridian beaches alone collecting shells.
Retirement is not in my future. I have fitful dreams of being a writer. That is the same retreating mirage I saw on the distant horizon when I was eight. There are haphazard moments of clarity when I compose eagerly. Then I turn on the TV and fall asleep. Words with promise have died. Clever lines form skeins of sentences. I reach in spasms. I worry I’m already too late. The bills mark time.
Awake and rubbing my eyes, I am smack in middle age on the brink of last chances. I am halfway between those early promises and the sum of me. That distant horizon still recedes. I am not a bestselling author whose book is soon to be a major motion picture. I’m not even a grown-up.
Yet.
In this frame of mind, I made excuses to Dad why I could not load the whole family in a jet and wing off south for a visit. I let slip that I could not come because my wife and I had to pay off credit cards. I said too damn much.
Dad called back at seven the next morning. My debt had been gnawing at him through the night. The kids were still in bed so I was, too. “Time you got up, boy! I suppose Cecilia was at work an hour ago!” He’s not big on preambles.
Why don’t I have call display on the phone by the bed? I didn’t tell him I was up till three last night writing. That would just be another mistake to hold on to and bring up at Christmas. Is the book done
yet
? When do we see it in stores and how much will you be paid? How much, boy?
That
doesn’t sound like much.
I thought about telling him the kids were painting each other with glue again and that I had to hang up. I didn’t, though. I listened because he was talking about giving me money. His was a generous offer of an interest-free loan to kill the credit cards and raise the possibility of a future without debt.
I’ll owe
him
.
Instead.
Again.
I said I’d think about it, like I had a choice.
Later, when I looked upon my innocent boys’ debt-free faces, I had to remember to build a smile. Each grim facial reconstruction soon fell from my lips and I had to rearrange my face again. When they want the latest robot dinosaur, will my card be maxed out again? Will their memory of me be The Failure Who Always Said No? How different is that from the Self-made Man who says, “Why do you think you need that, boy?”
What will happen when they grow up? When they go to college and fall into the same — or a deeper — debt trap, I will pull them out of that hole
if I have a rope
. No money? No rope. No hope. There lies the soul of shame’s pain.
Each New Year’s Eve, Cecilia and I say
this
will be the year we “get some breathing room.” We’ll save money…somehow. We’ll win the lottery or I’ll sell my novel or…something. What’s likely to change since we aren’t doing anything different? We never speak of this secret aloud for fear that, like some magic curse, the danger will only be made real in the speaking.