In fact, as I foisted on the boy the very salt-laden cheesies and whizzies previously meted out in one-ounce rations, my solicitation soon got on his nerves. I had a tendency to hover, and Kevin would shoot me the kind of daggers you fire at a stranger who sits next to you on a train when the car is practically empty. I was proving an unworthy adversary, and any further victories over a guardian already reduced to such a cringing, submissive condition were bound to feel cheap.
Although it was tricky with a sling, he now took baths on his own, and if I stooped to wrap him in a fresh towel, he shied, then swaddled himself. In fact, on the heels of having docilely submitted to diaper changing and testicle swabbing, he developed a stern modesty, and by August, I was banished from the bathroom. He dressed in private. Aside from that remarkable two weeks during which he got so sick when he was ten, he would not allow me to see him naked again until the age of fourteen—at which point I’d gladly have forfeited the privilege.
As for my incontinent outpouring of tenderness, it was tainted with apology, and Kevin was having none of it. When I kissed his forehead, he wiped it off. When I combed his hair, he batted me away and rumpled his locks. When I hugged him, he objected coldly that I was hurting his arm. And when I averred, “I love you, kiddo”—no longer recited with the solemnity of the Apostle’s Creed but rather with the feverish, mindless supplication of a Hail Mary—he’d assume a caustic expression from which that permanent left-hand cock of his mouth was enduringly to emerge. One day when I avowed yet again
I love you, kiddo
, Kevin shot back,
Nyeh NYEE nyeh, nyeh-nyeeeeh!
and I gave it a rest.
He clearly believed that he had found me out. He had glimpsed behind the curtain, and no amount of cooing and snack food would erase a vision at least as indelible as a first encounter with parental sex. Yet what surprised me was how much this revelation of his mother’s true colors—her viciousness, her violence—seemed to please him. If he had my number, it was one that intrigued him far more than the twos and threes of our dreary arithmetic drills before his “accident,” and he side-eyed his mother with a brand new—I wouldn’t call it quite respect—
interest
. Yes.
As for you and me, until that summer I’d become accustomed to concealing things from you, but mostly thought crimes—my atrocious blankness at Kevin’s birth, my aversion to our house. While to some extent we all shelter one another from the cacophony of horrors in our heads, even these intangible unsaids made me mournful. But it was one thing to keep my own counsel about the dread that had descended on me whenever it was time to fetch our son from kindergarten, quite another to neglect to tell you that, oh, by the way, I broke his arm. However wicked, thoughts didn’t seem to take up space in my body, while keeping a three-dimensional secret was like having swallowed a cannonball.
You seemed so far away. I’d gaze at you as you undressed at night with a spectral nostalgia, half expecting that when I crossed to brush my teeth you’d step through my body as easily as through moonlight. Watching you in the backyard teaching Kevin to cup a baseball in a catcher’s mitt with his good right hand—though in truth he seemed more gifted with pizza—I’d press my palm against a sun-warmed windowpane as if against a spiritual barrier, stabbed by the same vertiginous well-wishing and aching sense of exclusion that would have tortured me had I been dead. Even when I put my hand on your chest, I couldn’t seem to quite touch you, as if every time you shed your clothes there were, like Bartholomew’s hats, another L. L. Bean work shirt underneath.
Meantime, you and I never went out just the two of us anymore—to catch
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
grab a bite at the River Club in Nyack, much less to indulge ourselves at the Union Square Café in the city. It’s true that we had trouble with sitters, but you acquiesced to our housebound nights readily enough, prizing the light summer evenings for coaching Kevin on fourth downs, three-pointer field goals, and the infield-fly rule. Your blindness to the fact that Kevin displayed neither interest nor aptitude in any of these sports nagged me a bit, but I was mostly disappointed that you didn’t ever covet the same
quality time
with your wife.
There’s no purpose to talking around it. I was jealous. And I was lonely.
It was toward the end of August when our next-door neighbor leaned on our doorbell with censorious insistence. I heard you answer it from the kitchen.
“You tell your kid it’s not funny!” Roger Corley exclaimed.
“Whoa, slow down, Rog!” said you. “Criticize anybody’s sense of humor, gotta tell the joke first.” Despite your jocular cadence, you did not invite him in, and when I peered out to the foyer I noticed that you had only opened the door halfway.
“Trent just rode his bike down that big hill on Palisades Parade, lost control, and landed in the bushes! He’s knocked up pretty bad!”
I’d tried to stay on amicable terms with the Corleys, whose son was a year or two older than Kevin. Though Moira Corley’s initial enthusiasm for arranging play dates had waned without explanation, she’d once displayed a gracious interest in my Armenian background, and I’d stopped by only the day before to give her a loaf of freshly baked
katah
—do you ever miss it?—that slightly sweet, obscenely buttery layered bread my mother taught me to make. Being on congenial terms with your neighbors was one of the few appeals of suburban life, and I feared that your narrowing our front door was beginning to appear unfriendly.
“Roger,” I said behind you, wiping my hands on a dish towel, “why don’t you come in and talk about it? You seem upset.”
When we all repaired to the living room, I noted that Roger’s getup was a little unfortunate; he had too big a gut for Lycra cycling shorts, and in those bike shoes he walked pigeon-toed. You retreated behind an armchair, keeping it between you and Roger like a military fortification. “I’m awful sorry to hear about Trent’s accident,” you said. “Maybe it’s a good opportunity to go through the fundamentals of bike safety.”
“He
knows
the fundamentals,” said Roger. “Like, you never leave the quick-release on one of your wheels flipped
open
.”
“Is that what you think happened?” I asked.
“Trent said the front wheel started wobbling. We checked the bike, and the release wasn’t only flipped over; it’d been turned a few times to loosen the fork. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to conclude that
Kevin
was the culprit!”
“Now wait just one minute!” you said. “That’s one hell of a—”
“Trent rode that bike yesterday morning, no problem. Nobody’s been by since but you, Eva, along with your son. And I want to thank you for that bread you sent over,” he added, lowering the volume. “It was real good, and we appreciated your thoughtfulness. But we don’t appreciate Kevin’s tinkering with Trent’s bike. Going a little faster, or around traffic, my kid could’ve been killed.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions here,” you growled. “That release could have been tripped in Trent’s accident.”
“No way. I’m a cyclist myself, and I’ve had my share of spills. The release never flips all the way over—much less turns around by itself to loosen the spring.”
“Even if Kevin did do it,” I said (you shot me a black look), “maybe he doesn’t know what the lever is for. That leaving it open is dangerous.”
“That’s one theory,” Roger grunted. “That your son’s a dummy. But that’s not the way Trent describes him.”
“Look,” you said. “Maybe Trent had been playing with that release, and he doesn’t want to take the rap. That doesn’t mean my son has to take it instead. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some work to do around the yard.”
After Roger left, I had a sinking feeling that the Irish soda bread Moira had promised to bake me in return would never materialize.
“Boy, I sometimes think you’re right,” you said, pacing. “A kid can’t skin his knee anymore without it having to be somebody else’s fault. Country’s completely lost touch with the concept of
accident
. When Kevin broke his arm, did I give you a hard time? Did it have to be somebody’s
fault
? No. Shit happens.”
“Do you want to talk to Kevin about Trent’s bike?” I said. “Or should I?”
“What for? I can’t see he’s done anything.”
I said under my breath. “You never do.”
“And you always do,” you said levelly.
A standard exchange—not even exceptionally acrimonious—so I’m not sure why it flipped something in me, like Trent Corley’s quick-release. Maybe because it
was
standard now, and once it hadn’t been. I closed my eyes, cupping the back of the armchair that had walled off Roger Corley’s outlandish accusations. Honestly, I’d no idea what I was going to say until I said it.
“Franklin, I want to have another child.”
I opened my eyes and blinked. I had surprised myself. It may have been my first experience of spontaneity in six or seven years.
You wheeled. Your response was spontaneous, too. “You
cannot
be
serious.
”
The time didn’t seem right for reminding you that you deplored John McEnroe as a poor sport. “I’d like us to start trying to get me pregnant right away.”
It was the oddest thing. I felt perfectly certain, and not in the fierce, clutching spirit that might have betrayed a crazy whim or frantic grab at a pat marital nostrum. I felt self-possessed and simple. This was the very unreserved resolve for which I had prayed during our protracted debate over parenthood, and whose absence had led us down tortuously abstract avenues like “turning the page” and “answering the Big Question.” I’d never been so sure of anything in my life, so much so that I was disconcerted why you seemed to think there was anything to talk about.
“Eva, forget it. You’re forty-four. You’d have a three-headed toad or something.”
“Lots of women these days have children in their forties.”
“Get out of here! I thought that now Kevin’s going to be in school full-time you were planning to go back to AWAP! What about all those big plans to move into Eastern Europe post-glasnost? Get in early, beat
The Lonely Planet
?”
“I’ve considered going back to AWAP. I may still go back. But I can work for the rest of my life. As you just observed with so much sensitivity, there’s only one thing I can do for a short while longer.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re serious! You’re seriously—serious!”
“
I’d like to get pregnant
makes a crummy gag, Franklin. Wouldn’t you like Kevin to have someone to play with?” Truthfully, I wanted someone to play with, too.
“They’re called
classmates
. And two siblings always hate each other.”
“Only if they’re close together. She’d be younger than Kevin by at least seven years.”
“She, is it?” The pronoun made you bristle.
I shrugged my eyebrows. “Hypothetically.”
“This is all because you want a
girl
? To dress in little outfits? Eva, this isn’t like you.”
“No, wanting to dress a girl in
little outfits
isn’t like me. So there was no call for you to say that. Look, I can see your having reservations, but I don’t understand why the prospect of my getting pregnant again seems to be making you so angry.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Anything but. I thought you’ve enjoyed being a parent.”
“
I
have, yes! Eva, what gives you the idea that even if you do have this fantasy daughter everything’s going to be different?”
“I don’t understand,” I maintained, having learned the merits of playing dumb from my son. “Why in the world would I want everything to be different?”
“What could possess you, after it’s gone the way it’s gone, to want to do it again?”
“It’s gone what way?” I asked neutrally.
You took a quick look out the window to make sure Kevin was still patting the tether ball to spiral first one way around the pole, then the other; he liked the monotony.
“You never want him to come with us, do you? You always want to find somebody to dump him with so we can waltz off by ourselves, like what you obviously consider the good old days.”
“I don’t remember saying any such thing,” I said stonily.
“You don’t have to. I can tell you’re disappointed every time I suggest we do something so that Kevin can come, too.”
“That must explain why you and I have spent countless long, boozy evenings in expensive restaurants, while our son languishes with strangers.”
“See? You resent it. And what about this summer? You wanted to go to Peru. Okay, I was game. But I assumed we’d take a vacation as a family. So I start supposing how far a six-year-old can hike in a day, and you should have seen your face, Eva. It fell like a lead balloon. Soon as Peru would involve Kevin, too, you lose interest. Well, I’m sorry. But I for one didn’t have a kid in order to get away from him as often as possible.”
I was leery of where this was headed. I’d known that eventually we would need to discuss all that had been left unsaid, but I wasn’t ready. I needed ballast. I needed supporting evidence, which would take me a minimum of nine months to gather.