Masks and Mouths

 

We’d been in class a couple of weeks before I saw one of my student’s faces. Until this point, everyone had been following the mask protocol pretty well. I can’t remember who it was anymore, but they brought out a bottle of water or something, slipped the mask down and completely changed my perception of what they looked like. Under the mask: that knot of a nose, that burgeoning mustache, writhing lips over a chin looking like an elbow, something to be drawn into a shirtsleeve, not something to be loosed and wagged around. Everything below the mask had an underdone quality to it. This may have been the result of faithful covering or just the way we look. And then there were the teeth, askew, clawing at the air as if trying to find purchase on the emptiness that surrounds us all. Just as I was about to gasp, the mask went back up and the vision reconciled itself to the person I knew who sat in front of me twice a week from 10-12. That is, the student turned back into attentive, sleepy or furtive eyes. Without a face.

Later that week, I took my students from another class outside on a bold pretense, considering I teach English and there’s no reason to go outside that’s not flimsy or back-to-land sounding. But I’d convinced myself and, most of the time, that’s the only authority in need of convincing. We went out into the rawness of the afternoon sun and a student asked about masks. Here we were, six feet apart and outside. We could take them off right? Right, was my reply and, for most of the students, they came down. There were a few stragglers, but suddenly, I was looking at the chewing, cheeking, lisping humanity of my students. But rather than have another Poe-like epiphany when I was paralyzed by the moist gnashings of unmasked speech and riveted to the singular disturbing feature of what amounts to a hole in the head, I had a single impression: “my god, they’re all babies”, I thought. And I felt a sudden need to protect them or at least to treat them with all my kindness and patience. Their mouths, perhaps underused and silent, seem to speak their inexperience without moving.

The eyes have a deceit—it’s not intentional—but they are capable of holding back truths that the jaw and the mouth reveal in their nervous or flustered ruminating. They are also usually quite symmetrical—being mirrored by each other—and the mind naturally continues this symmetry all the way down the face as an assumption. But, in almost every case, the mouth acts against this symmetry. It might be that a mouth just isn’t symmetrically linked with the eyes or that mouths are just harder to balance, maybe because there’s only one. Whatever the case, the mouth, rather than the eyes, seems the vessel of our shared humanity. Perhaps this is why we kiss, rather than touch eyes. We carry around who we are like dogs carrying ravaged sticks. It may be that the eyes will give away a lie, but the mouth is where the lie will remain long after it’s told, sagging, pursing and drooling.

These students were people beyond the subdued expressions of their eyes. Their mouths suddenly began to twitch to life to communicate this; I think they were too polite to comment on everyone’s sudden change of appearance, but, thankfully, at least one observation was lobbed to me.

“Professor, you have a beard?!”

How incomparably older I must’ve seemed to them. Not of their fecundity, pale shoots stirring under the soil, but like something aged. What do they bury to age? Cheese? Wine? Certainly not pretty images, but I imagine they were just as vulnerable. I saw in the students, inexperience and eagerness, they saw in me—pirate bearded, crooked toothed, chapped—old indulgences, fatigue and sun ravaged skin. I’m sure they inwardly recoiled a little before remembering the archetype other teachers established before me: we are an ugly, time-ravaged lot. Often teachers are the first to give this impression to the youth. Their parents’ faces are too familiar to reveal it. Besides, unconsciously, they retain the memory of their parents’ faces from birth when they were still hale and, in the case of the mother, quite flushed with youth and purpose. I remember, in elementary school, musing on the ugliness of at least a few of my teachers. And here I was, equally aged and ugly before my own students, giving off faint fumes of stale coffee and out-of-country dental work, cheeks creased by lack of sleep and stress, shaven in strange places. And yet, this must’ve been expected in fact, if anything, I think it made me less intimidating for, suddenly, they all began to talk at once. It was as if the extra moisture from their mouths had pushed the saturation over the limit in the clouds above and it started to pour language, unimpeded, sighing, clicking, lingual, soft-palated language. For a moment, I left my mask dangling on my ear and then took it off. If nothing else, I was damn tired of breathing my own smell.    

Twilights

 

The sun has been worn down to a flat disk of copper, like a relic of an ancient civilization. That dull light that spins from the star is metallic and, one can almost believe, filigreed and intentional. We’re positioned between the coppersmith and his forge. To the east, the fires are mounting to the skies and plumes of ash roll into the morning fog. The sun comes up with a hissing sputter. The light is brazen and crepuscular.

I go up the hill to look at the house. 300,000 dollars too much and the carport is shared with the neighbors, making a bizarre continuous construction; the two houses like a very, very long double wide. 390,000 dollars with an old roof a 70’s brown carpeting to match the copper sun that hangs in the window. The mountains march right down into the backyard;  however, and when I leave, I see a pack of grey canines down under the shoulder of the road that are somewhere between foxes and coyotes. They came crawling out of an aqueduct that passed under the road, stopped to look up at me, the sky and the tangles of fruiting blackberry, and ran off.

It's hard to imagine that coyotes or foxes don’t have some kind of atavistic response to the firelight. They must know that it’s not really twilight all the time. But me, I just want to sleep all day and when I get up, I feel anxious, too alert.

I took my son to see the house. He hadn’t been napping, so I knew he’d sleep for the whole walk in the carrier. Initially, he’d cried and flailed his head, but when I cradled him and walked up the hill with deliberate, flipflop steps, he dozed off.

When I got to the house, I went up to look in the front windows. A battered washing machine and a utility sink in the converted garage. They should’ve left it a garage. But imagine it as a place to play or to work and it looks fine. The connected carport bothered me less. The neighbors had a bumper sticker “How Swede it is!” This superimposed on a Swedish flag. Scandinavians, even American Scandinavians probably keep to themselves. I remember the anecdote about the most popular television in Sweden (or maybe Norway) show being footage of a train passing through the country. No narrative, no music, no characters (other than the train). I imagine the neighbors—elderly—watching that nightly in their house, cozy, hyyge.

I went into the backyard. I figured that baby strapped to me would make my intentions clear or at least less minatory. Recently poured concrete. I could hear the realtor focusing in on that, as if a flat slab of concrete had any potential or meant anything more than being able to charge an extra 20,000 for backyard with slightly more order imposed on it. Another look in the windows, the bedrooms are small, wooden and frayed at the ends. Bare feet have stuck to these floors in weather less warm than in this late afternoon. Behind my reflection, the sun is like a lamp turned on inside with no apparatus, just a light, like the glare on a picture frame or the ghost of the flash in a pre-digital photo. There was a movement and I looked down, into the carrier. My son’s eyes are almost indifferent to color. They could be brown, blue, gray, green, but they have none of the haunting scowl so many babies affect. His eyes are lustrous and patient. They are open and easy to love, like the smiling babies on diaper packages.  

…

We were in Sacramento, on vacation, when the doctor called. She didn’t know what the lump is; neither did anyone else, so she’d made an appointment at UCSF. A rare thing to have gotten us in so early, so, at the end of the vacation, I drove my daughter the 300 miles home. Slept, dropped her off at my in-laws, and drove back 300 miles. I taught my class from the garage of my sister-in-law’s place in the morning and then drove to the Bay.

I was so anxious about being late, that we got into the city too early, let our guard down and went to 24^th Street to get burritos and coffee—the essence of the city to me, but I found I no longer knew the places for them. The server was nice at the taqueria, but I apologized to my wife for the burrito. The only thing I could taste was onion and unsalted tortilla. The coffee was dull and too strong, lulling and overstimulating, leaving us to miscalculate and race to our appointment, frantic before the doors of the hospital, running back and forth to the parking garage for things we’d forgotten.

I took it as a good sign that my daughter should be in the waiting room. It wasn’t her, but a girl wearing her pajamas, about her age and size with her same sleep-puffed face and tousled dirty blonde hair. My wife and I spoke to each other about her, using terms of endearment for our daughter but changing them slightly to fit this girl who was unaware of us as she played slowly by the fish tank, like she was the one under water and the fish were swimming around the chairs and magazines.  

The girl left and I quelled the returning anxiety by answering work emails from my phone. My wife bounced our sleeping son in the carrier. The room was quiet. One Russian mother called to her daughter who had a large hemangioma on her arm and seemed not to see the chairs placed in front of her, so close did she get to them before dramatically reeling back. Perhaps it’s a Russian trait, some kind of folk game.

While I held my phone and watched the girl step toward and away from the chairs, they called our son’s name, putting a long question mark after it. It was gratifying to hear it said aloud like that, a confirmation that we’d named him the right thing. Soon after we’d been processed, the doctor came into the small examination room. She gave our son a few palpitations, a few frisks, dandles, whatever. She commented on his size—big!—and then asked to see the lump. I appreciated that she admitted almost right away that she didn’t know what it was. It was like *touch*, *poke*, “Nope. I have no idea what that is.” She was aware that her knowledge had limits, a sign of being knowledgeable, strangely. But the others did the same. The next doctor invited in had curly hair and the air of being fun and communicative; someone you’d be glad to see at a conference or a crowded cafeteria. Maybe she reminded me of my friend Rebecca and I was projecting all these traits.   

The fun, Rebecca doctor was more animated and more intentional with her prodding. She gave blow by blow descriptions of what she was feeling, but couldn’t tell us anything new. “It’s squishy, but defined. It’s not hard but…It moves.” I was waiting for these descriptors to reach a critical mass of symptoms which would yield a diagnosis, but they just floated out, one by one, unattached, meaningless. “Consistent, lumpy, smallish…” It could’ve been charades of adjectives. She went out to get someone else.

A third doctor came in, and this one was the sage. She wore her lab coat loosely, like a scarf worn for panache. Her hair was salt and pepper and she wore a serious expression that had no need for pedantry. Without being told anything, she opened her hands like she like someone going to catch an easy pass. She laid them on my son’s back and closed her eyes. Nothing. She just shook her head.

How could this be so baffling?

“Should we get it biopsied?” One of the doctors asked. The others seemed to agree to this without inculpating themselves. There were no ‘yes’s, no ‘no’s. Just a miasma of suggestion. A few calls were placed down to the Mission Bay campus and, through connections, we got into the fine needle aspiration clinic at 4pm on Friday.

We left still feeling pretty hopeful. We talked about meeting Mikey or maybe getting something to eat later. The firelight hadn’t come down to the Bay and the late afternoon sky was open and blue between the cornices of Victorian gingerbread, the banks of a river. We drove down Divisidero, then to Hayes Valley, then around Potero, then the parking lot confines of Mission Bay and the UCSF buildings that no one who lives here ever has to pass by, new and out-of-the-way as they are.

“Do we take babies?” The receptionist asked another receptionist, who, in turn, came over to ask us to repeat why we were there. The temperature takers at the door swiveled around to see us, the anomaly. The ones with the baby. The first receptionist made a call. It was quick. He said no more into the receiver than “Do you have a kid?” and then “Yeah; OK.” He turned to us. “Yeah, they’re waiting for you. 2^nd floor.”

I can’t go much beyond this hospital and this floor because the narrative stalls there. The Trinty and Shasta forests caught on fire. The cinders exploded into the air, cooled to ash and muted the light. The Delta variant cases kept going up. Mandates came back. Everything crept back up to the edge of closing down and hovered there, just before quarantine. I still feel like I’m still standing in that second examination room because I haven’t really moved in time since then. Leaning against the wall, useless, worse than useless, in the way as the door opened and I had to move to avoid the pathologist. He had been sad to see us. I remembered this from when my daughter had to have her blood drawn; no one wants to do babies. I forgot how much you don’t want them to be hurt, that useless urge to protect them. We must’ve talked for half an hour before he tried to get the tissue he needed and got none or maybe next to none: not enough. The pathologist, who told us he had small kids of his own, who said one had something like this and he hadn’t even taken him in for it, had me hold alcohol pads while he tried to mark the lump with a blurring marker, marked and remarked as the lump floated under the surface of the skin. He tried again. My son with the lustrous, uncolored eyes cried his hiccupping baby cries and the needle pumped up and down. Enough gore to paint all five of the slides laid out. But it wasn’t enough. He looked through the microscope there in the room, wheeled the lens up and down and explained that he didn’t know what it was. There wasn’t enough tissue to really know. But, he’d take a look and get back to us or maybe I should call him. Yeah, in fact, call him.

I left a message days ago.

…

I completed my circuit around the house, passing through the carport, patting my son’s back. I stood there a moment, under the long, adjoining roof to take him out of the hazy light, hoping the enforced dimness would put him back to sleep. I looked down again and his eyes were closed, his forehead back against me. I kept patting and walked out into the red-golden light and down the driveway, back to the eucalyptus swale where I’d seen the fox-coyotes. On someone’s lawn, there was a fawn, still with the spots, browsing in the wildflowers. I stopped patting and watched her knobby walk into the forest. She must have way of knowing that the light won’t stay like this. All these animals, they must already be used to these things we just can’t accept.      

Fathers Day

 

My son turned one month old today, on Fathers’ Day. At home there’s been a lot of noise and figuring out who is doing what. Often my wife and I are trying to do the same task while another, more pressing one, goes unaddressed. We’re in the kitchen, say, and a pot starts to boil over, but a diaper needs changing. While Gina is taking off the diaper, I’ll start looking around frantically for wipes. Of course, the pot, meanwhile is overflowing copiously, snuffing out the flame. Unlit gas is spraying into the apartment. Either that, or we’re both going for the diaper or the burner at the same time and, for some reason when I get to it, I find I’m reluctant to relinquish the task I’ve chosen for myself. Stubbornly, I continue reaching for the burner knob even after I’ve seen that Gina’s going to get to it first. Meanwhile baby wails are filling the house. It’s always something.

So, I go to the library. It seems easier to leave the house, to thoroughly divide the household tasks which result entirely from our children. If I take my daughter to the library, for a moment I only have one responsibility and, alone, there’s no risk that I’ll run into anyone when attending to this responsibility. I won’t have to share it. That’s not to say we don’t get into trouble at the library. I’ve got to order another copy of Chicka Chicka 123 because my daughter tore half a page out of it. She’s also doing this thing where she loves to rub the pages excessively between her thumb and forefinger as she turns them. Not only is the resulting rubbing noise annoying—especially on the heavy, glossy paper they print kids’ books on—but it crumples the paper something awful. I have to smooth everything back out before we return the books and some of them still look like something that’s been relegated to the back of a fifth-grader’s desk for an entire school year.

The best course of action is to get the books and get out; then we go read them in a neutral zone: a place with nothing else to rip or crumple. We live next to a plaza with grass and benches which affords a pretty nice place to read. Sure, there’s usually someone swearing very loudly to themselves lying prone on the grass nearby and there’s all kinds of gnarly things to be found among the stalks of the ornamental plants, but I figure exposure to that sort of thing is just part of growing up and learning about the lousier aspects of existence. So, we sit there, on the decrepit bench, reading our haul from the library book-by-book, my daughter picking out the ones she wants to read first. As I read, I imagine my wife at home happily feeding our infant son and perhaps reading a New Yorker (I brought back a few throw-away copies the last time I was at the library). The reality may be quite different, but it’s got to be easier for her without the two extra toddlers banging around the place: my daughter and me.

I find that when I get into the plaza to read with my daughter, I’m inclined to read the whole pile. Eight, nine, ten books. I’m happy to sit and read with her as long as I can because the primary thing I miss as the parent of two young children is being able to do one thing at a time. Every morning, I wake up at 5 so I can try to focus on one task, namely preparing for the coming semester, before everyone else wakes up and the crying, feeding, changing, meal preparing, deciding what to do, packing up the car, remembering to bring the 300 things we need to leave the house, making sure everyone is changed/used the bathroom, etc. etc. routine can begin. You can’t call that routine; it’s just treading water. The issue is that I’ve defined work my entire life as something done with dedication. A project with a start and finish with maybe a little flow between. From the first book over 200 pages I read as a kid, to the papers I wrote for graduate school and hiking the Appalachian Trail, all of these things required that I focus on them and tune out distraction. I got pretty good at that and the result seems to be that I can sit—without moving anything but my fingers—in front of a computer and work for hours on end, or, at least, I could. With one kid, I was still able to sneak out the back and go to work for the day. When my daughter was an infant, there wasn’t much I could do to feed her, so I assumed the ‘breadwinner’ role, coming home late from night classes and basically rolling into bed after looking in on her sleeping form. For weeks, I barely saw her awake. And when I went to work? You guessed it, I sat down and plowed through the tasks without interruption. But now with two kids—God, how would a single mother do this? You’ve got one who doesn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time and when she gets up, if unsupervised, some kind of substantial mess is going to result. The other one, needs not only constant attention, but constant holding, comforting, rocking, swaddling, changing and nursing. When he does go to sleep, it’s for 20 minutes, and that’s usually only when you’ve got him strapped to you, so you have to move in this very awkward way to keep him steady—yeah, there’s that, too, his neck doesn’t actually support his head, so you’ve even got to constantly provide the support. Again, that’s fine on its own, but with a two-year-old it becomes a totally different ask.

I can’t sneak away from this. I’d be terrified of what I’d come home to. It’s summer vacation. I couldn’t have planned it better to be in a position to help as much as possible. A few hours to work every morning will eventually see the completion of the three classes I’ve got to plan, but, what’s beginning to happen with never being able to commit to a single activity and stay with it is a sort of erosion of interest and, even, of personality. I find that I’m having to reconsider who I am in a way I haven’t had to do since I first left home.

I know that sounds dramatic, but think about it, we base who we are on the things we’ve done, the things we want to do and the way we react to what’s happening in between—also known as the present. When you’re constantly switching from one short task to another (there is something Sisyphean in changing a diaper that, before being completed is soiled and, thus, needs to be changed again) you don’t have time to remember the past—not 10 years ago, but that morning— and you don’t have time to contemplate the future. For example, I think about what I used to do when preparing to travel to a new country. I’d buy the guidebook, maybe the most well-known national writer in translation and get reading, annotating and anticipating. Before visiting Romania, I must’ve read three or four books about the place. Now, if it were possible to go somewhere, as soon as I opened the Wikitravel page, I’d have to leave it to go attend to something, by the time I got back to it at night, I’d be too tired to care. Which brings me to the present. I know that important things are probably still happening in the world right now, but nothing seems relevant to me—none of it even seems to concern me. It’s like it’s all just going over my head. My reality is these two kids. Their demands are what I need to do, all day, every day.  

I like sitting in the park and reading kids’ books because that’s attending to what is needed of me. Listening to the news so I can offer my commentary on Armenia’s recent election is something I do to please myself. It’s not required of me, therefore, I don’t have the time for it. The only thing I’m able to react to is the crying at my ear, the picked up band aid that is approaching a mouth, the overflowing trash (mostly dirty diapers) and the sink that’s always full of dirty dishes.

Of course, dirty dishes give you nothing to talk about with anyone—hell, even other parents don’t want to hear about this stuff; they’ve either lived it or they’re living it and no one wants a reminder. Meanwhile, I’m not cultivating any new interests. I’m not learning anything new. I’m forgetting things I did know because my brain has been reduced to a state of distraction, constantly anticipating the next interruption as it is. At the end of the day, when there’s a rare moment with both kids are asleep and I try to talk to my wife, I find I have nothing more to say other than “uuuugggh”—which doesn’t make for scintillating conversation, so I close my eyes, finish my beer and try to remember something about what it was like before. It’s difficult to settle on any particular memory, but I remember that I used to be able to think about what I was going to do with a Saturday afternoon—I mean, I really used to be able to entertain ideas. Quite incredible really. Given that know, just to have the time to remember these things is almost more than I can muster.

I didn’t see how far removed I’d become from my early thirties persona until my daughter picked up a comic book my wife and I had been gifted about a young couple in love (I think perhaps the young couple was supposed to be something like us, but I can’t recognize either of us in their naïve simplicity). In the comic, the whippersnappers are going through their daily routines and, in doing so, express their love for each other in simple, indirect ways. Reading the book now, I don’t pay any attention to this, but rather to the fact that these people are able to do so many elective things with a single day. On some pages, they read, go out to eat and watch a movie all in the same day. Being able to do even one of those things would feel like I’d entered the twilight zone.

Right after I’d had this realization, I started to look for more profound meaning in other quotidian things I find myself reading—since I’m now limited to the quotidian medium, lacking the brain power to read anything else in 3-minute spurts (I’ve been reading a history of Byzantium for about six months now). Invariably, this should come full-circle and find something quite relevant and earth-shaking from my daily forays in the library with my daughter. The book was in the Arthur series. In it, Arthur, an unidentified and somewhat androgenous animal (a rodent, maybe?), finishes a school year and goes on vacation with his family. It rains the whole time the family is on vacation, but they manage to have fun despite this. Or rather I should say, Arthur and his sister DW have fun because… his parents? They don’t matter at all. They’re not even stock characters with predictable “parental” lines and dad jokes. They’re only there to make the business of going on vacation believable for a ten-year-old audience. They’re a requirement. They’re only there because other kids have parents that are also always heaving in and out of the fog of domesticity like something so staid and predictable it’s ceased to have any meaning independent of what you’re willing to grant it. The parents in this book were horrifying because, in a dramatic way, they had no agency. Arthur and DW had more interaction with the scenery than with these parents. The parents were more like the car that took them on vacation, necessary to mention, but nothing more. The teacher who appears only on the first page of the story has a name. The parents are never more than “mom” and “dad”: archetypes hollowed out by time. Reading this, I saw that I, too was fading into this level of existence that is far too concerned with just being and cares very little for becoming, in fact has no capacity for such concerns. There is no time to become anything other than what I’ve already committed to—the parent of these children and I can see how, in the future, to them I will take on the same inevitable and furniture-like qualities I guess all parents eventually take on.        

Is there a way to prevent this? Is there a way to imbue myself with a more profound personality? One that can withstand the onslaught of raising children? Maybe, but I have to ask myself if it’s worth pursuing at this point. It would be like so many other projects I’ve nearly taken on since my daughter was born and, in the end, had to ditch because I realized (as I always do) that my role is no longer at the center of the stage. The most noble thing I can do, is to step back and focus on equipping my kids with what they need to grow up to make their own impact on the world and, hopefully, have their own kids so that they can realize one day just how profoundly they took their parents—especially me— for granted. Indeed, I think the only way I ever would’ve understood what my parents did for me was to have kids of my own and read them Arthur books. But that’s the wrong view, anyway. I should be thinking about it from my daughter’s perspective and all I can tell you is that she loves that Arthur book and I don’t think it’s because of the parents’ diminished roles. She likes it because she likes Arthur, because the story arc has some tension and because I read it to her. I’m the one that makes that book stand up and talk and, maybe that’s better than all the other things I could be committing myself to. Scattered as raising two kids may be, it certainly feels more important than any other project I’ve ever embarked on.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to write this, and that’s something a two-dimensional, static book character probably couldn’t manage. Although, all the credit goes to my wife who nursed the baby, did the dishes, folded the laundry, bathed and got the baby to bed in the span of time it took me to write this—and dammit I wrote fast! 

Dream Reading

 

I wade into the white noise blaring from the computer in the evening. The room has an infant scent that’s like Halloween candy—sweet, waxy, new. Even though I make no noise, there’s a mewling coming from the cradle. My son, two weeks old, is on the verge of waking up in there and I tiptoe over to my side of the bed and wince each time undressing makes the slightest sound. I make it into bed without waking him. My wife’s asleep. My son’s asleep and, the next room over, my daughter’s asleep. I close my eyes and stare at the back of my eyelids in the dark and listen to everyone’s breathing as best as I can through the white noise.

When an hour has gone by and I still haven’t gone to sleep, I try to copy my wife’s breathing. At first, it’s lulling to know that I’m breathing as one would who is in such a deep state of sleep as she appears to be, then I remember that our bodies are different and that her breathing is matched to her, not me. I stop and my thoughts go back to the approaching fall semester and all I have to do to prepare. Great ideas occur to me on the improvements of my classes, but I don’t write them down; I don’t even get up because to do so would break the spell of this strange anesthesia I’m under, like the original twilight sleep. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness, but neither am I fully awake.

Sometimes, when I’m very tired and I try to read, I fall asleep knowing I’m holding the book, but, asleep, I know I’m holding the book and I have reading dreams. That is, the content of my dreams comes to me as strange things I’m reading. These dreams have no visual element other than text, but the text somehow creates pictureless ideas.

The sleep I’m having now feels like one of those reading dreams, but I’m reading the room, hearing the sounds of it, even looking at it as I remember it when I closed my eyes. The computer screen shows a waterfall. This accompanies the roaring sound I’m hearing. The computer light is periwinkle and electric, like static popping under a blanket. The corners of the room lie in shadow. I feel the weight of the blanket on me. My legs are warm; I move them apart from each other. I begin to hear strange things in the repeating white noise. The falling water has begun to sonically blur. It sounds like the rush of wind heard when biking down a steep hill and then it turns into a hiss, sort of like static but without seamlessness of static. I hear it stop and start. It’s a sound I’ve seen before when watching falling water. If you focus on one part of a waterfall, the whole thing looks like it’s falling in jerky stop motion. The sound is like that and, if I could look up at the screen, I bet I’d see that now, too. But even dream reading the screen feels like too much work and I continue not to focus on anything in particular until gradually, a sound shapes itself from the distance: an opening, a throat clearing, an “ahem”. It clarifies. The first few hiccupping sounds of my daughter’s crying. Am I dream reading this, too? I strain my ears for it. A loud car growls by outside. When it’s passed, I can clearly discern the cries that are punctuated by a taking in of air and sound, mostly, like letting it out through the glottis, like a swallow in reverse.

I realize that I’m completely awake and I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Getting up after just lying there for hours comes as something of a relief. As least now, I have something to do. I wade out of one white noise soundscape and into another. When I open my daughter’s door, the sound of pouring rain runs out and bifurcates with the waterfall sound in my bedroom everyone else is asleep in. There’s a lambent night light, like a small church candle in a monastery niche, more revealing the darkness than relieving it. Another hiccupping cry. I shut the door after me and close myself into the sound of crying rain.

“What’s wrong?” I ask my daughter, standing at the railing of the crib, her hands tightly wrapped around it. She doesn’t answer, but when I reach down, she releases the railing and allows herself to be carried upward. I bring her to my shoulder and her thirty pounds rests squarely against me, like a backpack swung around to the front.

I lean back into the rocking chair, but I’m too tired to sing, really too tired to hum, so I just rock and feel drowsy. I rock and after a while I’m dream reading again and it’s like my daughter is the one rocking me, she’s just doing it backwards. This is a strange feeling and it makes me feel like I’m not holding her tightly enough, so I force myself a little more awake. I open my eyes and see that she’s wide awake. Her eyes are taking in everything, although she’s perfectly still. It’s strange that she doesn’t talk to me. She just stares, like she’s trying hard to remember something.

I try a few songs. Eventually, they become half-hearted humming and when, after 20 minutes her eyelids haven’t even begun to close, I tell her I’ll lie down next to her. She tenses, but lets me put her back in the crib. Lying down, she keeps her eyes open. I pull over a beanbag to rest my head on and, from the small foam pad by her bed, I push my arm through the slats of the crib and gently pat her on the back. My arm is somewhat cinched in, but it’s not completely uncomfortable: I’m still lying down; I’m not holding her anymore, I can even pat without too much discomfort. I close my eyes and the sound and the dull golden light of the nightlight seem to wash over me—only they are much more soporific this time. The room has a close humidity, that isn’t dampness—it’s the kind of summer night I remember from June in Michigan when the air is totally still and the stars and fireflies are all hung together in the motionless air and there’s a kind of sublimination that seems to happen between the body and the air. It’s not sweating but the gradual turning into the same languid night air the surrounds one.

I realize I’m falling asleep. I open my eyes and see that my daughter is still awake. I wonder if she’s forming the kind of memories that I’m tapping into right now. I wonder if in the future when she’s unable to sleep, if she’ll lean into this memory, into this room and, thinking of what she’ll think of in the future for a sleep mnemonic, I fall asleep.

I wake up with the dust motes rising from the carpet into the morning light. I feel better rested, having slept on the floor than I would’ve if I’d slept alone in a comfortable bed and I find myself looking forward to the day as I once did when I was young and it was summer. My daughter is still asleep and the white noise is still going in each room, though now this hiss of the falling water sounds a bit primitive in the daylight.

Precipitous Delivery

 Early in the morning, May 20^th, we drove over to Blue Lake to pick up some vegetables.

The afternoon winds had already picked up, although it wasn’t nine o’clock yet and the air was ocean-current cool. Driving east, it warmed slightly when the foothills blocked some of the wind, but most of it made its way through the narrow valleys that wend their way alongside rivers and streams in the eastern portion on the county, bringing the meltwater out and the salt air in.

The vegetable pick-up was for ten and we arrived in town before nine with no clear destination. We stopped by the tennis courts and my daughter Esmé took her bike once around the nets before abandoning it for an errant tennis ball, which we threw back and forth for a while the sun warmed the courts and a team of a sort of ping pong-tennis hybrid moved in an occupied a quadrant of the court. We all stopped, mesmerized by the plink and plunk of their miniature rackets and balls.

The breezes slackened and the sun warmed us into more exploratory movements. We wandered out past the horse corral, over the pedestrian bridge that spans a dry creek bed and up to the foot of a lumber mill which no longer runs but is chromatic enough to appear functioning despite the closed fences and the weeds springing through the parking lot.

Parked in front of this derelict mill, was an abandoned Mercedes, missing a back door. I climbed in. Gina, my wife, didn’t like the look of the thing, and, once inside, I had to agree. There’s something interloping about even being in an abandoned car: a place that only one or two people have spent substantial amounts of time in, molding it to their shape and personality. The mill, on the other hand, was too general to have this kind of feeling. It would be hard to interlope in a place that had been created for a large-scale purpose but sitting in the back seat of someone’s car was like finding a photo in the trash and trying to put oneself behind the viewfinder, imaging why it was taken in the way it was and why it’d been thrown out. 

While I was taking my time thinking about all this, Esme’ had climbed into the car with me and we were sitting in the back pretending to passengers in some great cross-country road trip when Gina hurried us out of the broken-down and doorless car, it was time to get the vegetables and get to our appointment at the pool.

When we got back home from the pool and half an hour of playing crocodile, I wasn’t too surprised to find a pool of water in the hallway even though we’d showered, and changed back at the locker room. Somehow, going to the pool, one brought puddles of water home, even when you didn’t cross the threshold with wet flipflops and dripping bathing suits.

However, this puddle was more viscous looking than pool puddles and standing over it, Gina mentioned that it had come from her. This was no errant pool water. It was amniotic fluid perhaps coaxed forth by our time in the pool and the similarity of the surroundings. Either way, here it was. No contractions, no other signs of labor, but enough of a sign to call the hospital.

On the phone, the nurse asked the requisite questions and it came back that we’d have to come in. As usual, feeling nothing myself, I dithered, inquiring if maybe I should stay and let Esmé have her nap, after that I could take her in the bike trailer to her grandparents and, only then, would I ride over to the hospital to check in on things. I liked the idea of riding a bike to important life events: weddings, births, etc. Luckily, Gina isn’t nearly as nearsighted as I am and requested that I stop what I was doing and get everything together.

I still probably took too damn long, but eventually, we ended up in the car driving a few miles over the speed limit only because I felt I had a good excuse.

At Gina’s folks, I puttered around getting the car seat out, still in no real hurry. Esmé, two years before, had been induced and the entire process was about 48 hours in the hospital. I saw no reason to hurry for something that worked in long stages and, with such dubious reasons for even going. Water breaking? Wasn’t that a Hollywood reason to go to the hospital? Did anyone’s water even break in that crazy-making way? It certainly didn’t for us. Not last time, anyway. I drove to the hospital like a grandmother driving home from church, still half-convinced that what I’d seen on the hallway floor at home was from the pool.

We went into the same tirage room we’d been in years before, the one we’d slept in while we’d waited for the induction drugs to start working. Gina got the once-over and they were about to let us go when the nurse got the call from the doctor—check the cervix.

Four centimeters. Well, this was slightly unexpected, but…um…encouraging. I guess it was good that we’d packed these bags and dropped Esmé off; yes, maybe it would be a good idea to stay. But, still, let’s take a nice long walk. After all, we’ve got a sitter now and really no reason to stay here. Might as well go out and get a coffee or something.

We moved into the delivery room. The same room we’d been for 14 hours the last time we’d been here. The room where I’d read, talked, encouraged, lapsed into silence, hid in the corner, cheered and cried out “it’s a girl!”. It was a great room, but like the empty mill, it had been designed for an institutional purpose and didn’t maintain one’s memories—I guess that’s an argument for giving birth in a car; until you have to sell it, anyway.

I was prepared to toss my stuff down and stride out the door, but, the hospital has its requirements and we had to fill out the intake forms and give preferences, listen to options, etc.

We were still moving through the bureaucratic rigmarole when Gina started to feel sick and then started moving around the room looking for things to hang from. She started to moan and I stood by, uncertain when things would get serious enough to act. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I didn’t want to look uncaring either, so, I just followed her around like a Charlie Chaplin character miming someone, making quiet suggestions of encouragement, mostly to myself. Still wondering if we were going to be able to take that walk. 

Luckily, a nurse came in and, by the look on her face, gave me reason to abandon the idea of doing anything but staying in this room. It was good to understand where we stood. I started to give my encouragement a little louder now, with a little more confidence, but still mostly to myself. By now, Gina was moaning loud enough to drown me and pretty much everyone else out. The nurse saw me in the corner shouting encouragement to myself and suggested that I offer a sort of guided meditation, listing body parts to relax. I couldn’t tell if Gina thought it was a good idea or not because when I said things like “Relax your hair; good! Now, relax your ears” she just moaned louder, but when I got to ‘relax your shoulders’ and saw them flop down, I thought perhaps it was helpful, so, I kept going.

I got so wrapped up in finding new things to relax each time a contraction started, I didn’t notice the room gradually filling with nurses. I did notice that Gina’s moans and had turned to screams because I could barely hear my own guided meditation which by this point had digressed into more of an anatomy lecture as I thought of more and more esoteric parts of the body to relax like uvula and hyoid bone.

One contraction went on for so long I was hoping to get my guided meditation down to relaxing tarsals and metatarsals, but when I was still on ‘sternum’ the doctor walked in briskly with a whole coterie of nurses in tow. There must’ve been about 20 people in the room. I wondered how many had come over from idle curiosity, as Gina was now screaming loud enough to almost command an audience. We’d only been in here for about an hour and I wondered how long she’d be able to keep it up without losing her voice. Then the doctor, leading the assemblage of nurses in a chorus, squatted down like an umpire behind home plate and shouted “push!”

“Push?” I looked down to see how things were progressing and saw there was reason to push. The baby was already on his way out. This wasn’t Hollywood, it was faster. We’d gone from “I think my water just broke” to “Push!” in about two hours. Most movies are longer than that.

It took a while for my excitement to catch up. I’d been so ready to be standing on the sidelines for the next six hours or so, that I needed to remind myself that this was my wife and my child right here both happening now. I took up the refrain “Push!” I shouted, maybe a little too loud, checked myself and then switched to “breathe!” because it didn’t seem so demanding. But when I realized that breathing wasn’t going to get the baby out, I switched back to “push!”, but I stopped jumping up and down and clapping my hands when I said it.

In a few minutes and what I can only imagine to be indescribable pain, it was over. Gina looked up at me, dazed, but still fully in possession of her faculties.

Still dazed Gina looked up at me and asked “Is it a boy or a girl?” With Esmé, I’d been able to help in a way that wasn’t just cheerleading. I’d seen her come out and announced “it’s a girl!” to the room. This is the great thing about not knowing the sex, it gives the partner a purpose, but, even in this respect, I’d dropped the ball. Everything had happened so fast: I’d been so caught up in yelling “push” and so relieved when the baby came out, I hadn’t bothered to look at the genitals. “I don’t know,” I admitted. The doctor looked up from her work anticipating the placenta and turned the baby over in her hands so I could see the penis. “It’s a boy!” I yelled, although I was pretty sure that Gina could see for herself.  At that moment, it was like everything came back together again. The three of us—me, my wife and the baby— had all been put in these disparate roles in this somewhat socially circumscribed task of childbirth, but, the news that the baby who’d just shot out was a boy was so remarkable, the three of us, my wife, my son and me, cried. The doctor, seeing that we were in this vulnerable position, asked the boy’s name and it was like we all said it at once: Luca.

…

Later that evening, when we’d been moved to the postpartum room, I drove out to get dinner and, leaving the hospital, I felt like an astronaut drifting out into space further and further away from the earth and from warmth, love and life. I passed the exit for the 299, the highway that heads out to Blue Lake and thought about the ordinary morning we’d had walking past abandoned mills and climbing in empty cars and I saw that perhaps it had been the emptiness that had resulted in Gina’s labor. When the cold becomes too intense, we seek out warmth and when the world feels depopulated, perhaps we seek to fill in the absences. It felt that way, anyway, driving down the near-empty highway at night, the father of a baby boy who already felt too far away.

…

We got home the next evening after staying the requisite 24 hours in the hospital for all the tests that ferret out the various maladies that might not be immediately obvious. Luckily there were none. It was impossible not to continually compare the experience to the way it’d been when my daughter had been born. I kept finding myself saying inane things like “I don’t remember this.” As if having a single child is enough to turn anyone into birthing center expert. Luckily, they kept us fed and often enough someone would come in and see how we were doing. The whole experience really gave me sympathy for nurses who are constantly having to barge in on other people’s life-changing moments and ingratiate themselves to the mood. Here we were beaming with happiness and the nurses who were probably having all kinds of ordinary non-beaming-with-happiness kind of days, were having to acclimate themselves to our level of joy. I know I’d find this very hard to do every day.

The nurses also seem to be on rotations shorter than their shifts. I know nurses work long shifts, but it seemed like every five or six hours, someone new was coming in and introducing themselves to us and we’d have to watch as they measured our happiness and gave a commensurate response. By the time the last one came in, I was too weary of watching them mirror my elation to really respond to their questions with anything more than monosyllables. It almost started to seem like they were more excited than me, which I didn’t think was possible.

When they finally let us out it was late in the afternoon and we had to deal with the added strangeness of daylight after being inside all day while strapping a floppy-necked infant into a car seat. The whole process of taking an infant home from the hospital is so awkward, I imagine there would be a lot of money in any idea that could make it feel cozier somehow, like, I don’t know, baby taxis or something.

Gina’s folks were waiting for us with Esmé at home and what we’d been waiting for all day—this new sibling meeting which seemed to cement the four of us as a family—was almost too ideal to feel real. We set Esmé up with a Boppy cushion to hold Luca and she gently smoothed his hair and repeated ‘hi Luca!’ with a toddler’s candor and interest. I’m sure at some point, she’ll get jealous of him, but watching her smooth his hair on the couch with a radiant smile on her face, that moment is hard to imagine.

…

It was initially difficult to settle down. I felt like I had 100 things I’d fallen behind on while in the hospital and the house was a mess. There were also these two babies that needed to be cleaned up and put to bed. Gina was almost too exhausted to stand and I had no idea how I was going to be of much help. I kept walking around in circles, picking things up and setting them down in the wrong place.

I managed to get my daughter to sleep and to pick up a little. Gina was in the bedroom with our new son, hoping he might sleep for more than two hours at a time. I sat in the living room having a beer, thinking with this new pace of life, an evening beer would probably be my only respite from family, work and social obligations. After the beer, I meant to go in and read, but I fell asleep almost immediately.

I couldn’t have been more than two hours later when I woke up to Gina shaking me awake. “Esmé’s awake!” She whispered at me. I was so tired, it took me a minute to remember that Esmé was my daughter. I stumbled into her room and discovered that she needed a diaper change. In my exhausted state, I accidentally emptied the contents of the diaper on the floor, then I did the same thing somehow in the bathroom. Then, in her crib, Esmé hit her head and started crying.

After half an hour, I finally got her quieted down long enough to crawl back into bed and then be awakened again by her cry coming over the baby monitor. This time, I grabbed a pillow and a blanket.

…

Our first night as a family, I slept on the floor of my daughter’s room and my wife slept—if you could even call it that—feeding my son, in various positions, crib-side. When Esmé woke me up on the floor in the morning, and when I heard baby cries coming from the next room over I cried out “welcome to your new life!” to Gina. I was smiling when I yelled it.  

 

 

 

Security Deposit

 

When I was a kid, we had an illustrated bible that featured a vertiginous scene of Korah being swallowed up by the earth. The spine of the book is probably broken over this page because I used to look at it so much. It represented the essence of fear to me, an inescapable danger that could thrust itself upon you from the most innocuous of places. I studied this picture to try to understand where this danger came from. I pored over the flailing limbs, the trailing robes and streaming, Samsonesque locks, the gnarled fingers clutching for purchase in the crumbling soil. I knew the story was, in some way, about punishment, but I didn’t know for what. So, it seemed to me like a fate that could befall anyone. One moment you’re walking along and the next, you’re falling into an endless darkness so vast and entire it’s textured and soundless. The worst part about this fate? No one knows what happened to you. On the surface, you’re just gone.

…

We often talk about the students who ‘slip through the cracks’. And, when we hear this phrase, I think we all envision someone being failed by the educational system. You see a student, struggling with material, with time management and then, for one reason or another, they throw in the towel. Maybe there’s a catalyst. Maybe a teacher is rude to them; maybe they fail an important test or maybe their ego has been dealt one too many blows and they decide they’d be better off out in the world where at least the blows pay off—if only in minimum wage.

We think of slipping through the cracks as being a result of frustration, but we overlook the fact that slipping through the cracks can be totally outside one’s control. I may have had every intention of succeeding. I may have been on the path to victory, but forces outside my control grew and grew and subsumed my efforts. This, too, is slipping through the cracks. According to literary terms it is also tragedy, which is defined as a situation in which “A noble character confronts an obstacle, but succumbs to it after a struggle.”  

A few days ago, the cracks were at my feet and now, one decision later, they have precipitously risen up around me; they are becoming walls. It is only from this precarious situation that I can understand how easy it is for others to slip through when the cracks position themselves under your feet and how difficult it is to conceive of the danger, when they are distant, benign and not the canyon I am struggling to stay out of.

…

I probably should’ve stayed home with my family, but it was a beautiful afternoon and I’d been inside all week working on the computer. I wanted to get some exercise and, besides, my wife and daughter had plans for a park outing with another mother/daughter duo. No one expected me to go. Why not cut out for a long afternoon bike ride?

The ride to Blue Lake from Arcata is like express forest bathing, something like a forest Slip’N’Slide. You climb over a ridge by the green waste center which is sweltering with woodsy dampness and gradually rise to a sunny crest before plunging back into a dim, redwood and Spanish moss grove that feels like a pond bottom. Climb out of this and you’re in pasture, a narrow but sunny valley. From here there’s another drop into a dim forest corner before climbing back out and into another bright pastoral vale. It does this about twice more before you ride over the Mad River into the village of Blue Lake.

There’s nothing to really do in Blue Lake, so I checked out the Little Free Library and compulsively organized the books when I didn’t find anything to take. Then I biked over to the convenience store to get some water since I’d forgotten to bring a drink.

My phone rang while on my way over. It took me a moment to realize it was ringing and I fumbled with it a little. By the time I’d gotten to it, the call had gone to voicemail. I checked it. My landlord sounding gloomy, but it was his phone voice, the voice of an older generation which, for some reason, does not like to emote over the phone. My dad is the same way. I called back. He told me he had something for me. When could I come? I told him I’d be back in about an hour, wondering what pack of batteries or replacement bulb or cleaning solution he’d picked up for me this time. I hung up, drank my water, stared at the mountains a moment, felt the sun shrink the skin on my forehead and warm the tips of my ears and then I turned the bike around and rode back, the same way, dipping in and out of the sun and forest pools.

I chastised myself a bit before I left. Making threats about what I would think of myself if I forgot to call the landlord when I got back. Lately, I’ve been forgetting little, unimportant, things like that. So, in order to remember, I kept dredging the memory up during the bike ride. “Call the landlord when you get home.”

I remembered and we met in the backyard. I was oiling my bike and he came striding across the lawn, head sort of down, like his pate, rather than his face wanted to talk to me. He held an envelope. And he seemed like he wasn’t altogether sure what he had come out for. He stretched out his envelope hand and I thought, what is he paying me for?

The landlord is an older guy. He occasionally has trouble getting around. We live side by side on a parcel of field just outside town. I’ve helped him with odd jobs around the house. He’s particular, though and each time I’ve helped him, he seems to hesitate before asking for help again. He explains that he wants to hire someone, but no one ever seems to be up to his standards. I’ve never seen a worker around for more than a single day. On nice days, I enjoy doing a little yard work, so I try to help. I always decline money but he’s always forced it on me, even for a short job. I guessed it made him feel better. I didn’t mind. But I couldn’t remember any recent work I’d done that he’d be paying me for now.

A gift probably. Since my daughter was born a few years ago, he’s bought her gifts for holidays, for her birthday. Little things we don’t need, but gestures. He’s shown that he cares about her and we appreciate it. He calls her ‘Sissy’.  

I was thinking about all this when he tells me he’s giving me 60 days to vacate.

He’s joking. Of course, he’s joking. I may have smiled.

No, no, 60 days, there have been breaches; he’s given it a lot of thought. 60 days.

A joke, right? We’ve been model tenants. Paid on time, usually early just so we wouldn’t forget. No noise, no late nights, no guests except our parents dropping by. He plays with our daughter. Calls her his friend. She’s two for God’s sake. We clean the fucking house, polish the goddamn doorknobs, do all we can to not upset him because he’s incredibly particular and he knows this.

I don’t mention any of this, but ask for clarification in a mild way. I’m still unable to think of this as real.

Again, let’s be clear, breaches were made. Peccadillos, yes, but breaches. We hung the coat rack without asking for instance.

This makes no sense. He must be drunk or something. The three things he’s brought up now all happened in previous years. Why now? Where was the tipping point?

He says the ‘renter safe’ faux wallpaper was an issue, but we put this stuff up before our daughter was born, so over two years ago. This makes no sense.

A verbal agreement, he stammers and, suddenly, I understand. When we moved in, he said he preferred one, but two would be fine, if we were quiet, gentle on the place. It had occurred to me that he might not be thrilled about us having kids, multiplying in there as it were. But the place was big enough and I figured his limitation had been about adults. I’d told him we were having another kid and, yeah, he hadn’t offered congratulations. In fact, he’d been almost uncharacteristically incredulous. It had been almost rude.

Verbal agreement, he mutters again and turns to go. Leaving me with 60 days.

Kicked out. Not me, not my wife, but my daughter. My little girl. The house she came home to from the hospital. Her home, she’s the one being kicked out. What kind of a start…

And it wasn’t the landlord, it was me! I failed. I failed. I FAILED. My little girl. When we sing “baa baa black sheep” we replace ‘the little boy’ with ‘the little girl who lives on Bay School Lane’. Her home has been fucking SUNG to her since she was an infant and now, because I failed to see how easily it could be taken away, she’s lost her home. Her room. Her living room playtime. Her bathtub splashings. Her kitchen highchair flung food. Her sleeping in bed with mom and dad. No, it’s not the landlord’s fault. It’s mine because I should’ve seen this threat. I should’ve mitigated it. I should’ve left before this happened. But, I was blindsided. The earth had opened beneath my feet. No one would know what had happened to me.

…

My wife drove up to find me standing in the backyard, holding the notice and she knew by my demeanor. She’d always had the inkling that something like this would happen. Now it feels like we’ve lived the last three years at the edge of a knife blade and I’m wondering if this has been true. Have we always had this Damaclean sword hanging over us?

We went into the kitchen and began the sort of talk that feels like pumping up a tire with a substantial hole. We berated the landlord for his heartlessness and then ourselves for the little signs of his unreliable nature we’d overlooked and then back to the landlord for not even giving any kind of warning and all the while my wife’s pregnant belly heaved in agitation and my daughter tried to play with us, but our frantic talking subsumed everything. Another aspect of falling through the cracks is that once you begin to fall, the flailing tends to precipitate you. In an hour, everyone was worn out and thoroughly miserable. My daughter was crying and irritable, dinner had been forgotten, the house seemed to have filled with an obscuring fog and we went through the bedtime routine like robots. I could find no purchase on the night and slid down into it, eventually to sleep.

I was ready to tell everyone, to sound the alarm. “Extra, Extra Crooked Landlord Throws Out Two-Year-Old and Six-Month-Pregnant Woman!” Also, did I mention I’m a teacher. It’s not like I’ve got some munificent roll of money I can throw at this problem. The more I considered telling people, I began to realize how ashamed I was. ‘Evicted’ they’d say. ‘Booted out’ they’d whisper. “They must’ve done something to deserve it.” I saw how people’s imaginations would run roughshod over the way we lived. They’d see tangled clotheslines, rusty bikes, loud fighting, my daughter running around with no clothes—I swear, it’s potty-training technique!—and just all kinds of general squalor. This for a family that hates to see dishes piled in the sink. This for a family that scrubs the kitchen floor by hand. Having a two-year-old is messy, but no one has done a better job cleaning up.

Let me get back to the narrative. There’s too much injustice and it keeps derailing my thoughts into these poorly punctuated chasms. This is the flailing part I warned you about.

So, I didn’t tell anyone, but my wife, in her pregnancy, couldn’t help herself. She called her mom. Her mom appalled, called everyone she knew. Who knew of an open place? Who had friends who could help move? Who know someone who rents? In a college town, she was a valuable resource, but, of course there’s a housing shortage here and a surplus of studio apartments and roommate situations. An influx of students who have to stay inside. You might not see them, but they’re there behind the blinds and the sagging low-income housing façades. Was there any room inside anywhere?

There is! Frank—a pseudonym—has a lead. “Leads,” my wife told me the next day. “We have leads!” and, already she’d begun to find hope in this hopeless situationand her enthusiasm was catching. So, Frank, a friend of the family, knows, G. a farmer who lives near us. He’s renting. What or where isn’t certain, but we can arrange a showing. He and Frank are friends. Furthermore, Frank stops to talk to R. one afternoon. R. knows G. very well and R. declares that we are good people and that he’ll talk to G. at once and put in a good word. These are reticent farmer types, so it’s difficult not to feel somewhat vindicated when even they are taking umbrage at your predicament. I imagine them leaning over fences and shaking their heads maybe even eyeing their pitchforks.  

Monday, two days in. The clock is ticking now. 58 Days left. We went to see G.’s place. The appointment was for 4:30. The weather had clouded and dampened. A light drizzle was falling like something squeezed from a rag. I don’t know whether I’d expected anything, but my wife wanted to. It was clear from her rushed demeanor, she meant to make this work. This place was our ‘in’. With R. and Frank’s recommendations, if we liked it, we could take it. A peaceful transition, almost unnoticed in the grand scheme. It was even in the same general area.

We drove up at 4:30. And G. came out in farmer’s coveralls, carrying a bunch of hay. Here we were, Joseph and Mary being shown the stables. The house wasn’t separate from the main house, but built into the back. G. opened the door and rather than hurrying out of the drizzle into the shelter it afforded, we gingerly moved into the cold and the heavy smell of mold and mildew. It was a basement smell, a smell of damp neglect. The carpets had cigarettes burns and were faded and shaggy, very little light reached into the rooms. The bathroom had a massive water stain that had spread across the floor. The bedrooms were odd, on the bottom and the living room and kitchen were upstairs. Everywhere, it was sad, like a place you’d find yourself in your early twenties after a long party, the last to leave, hungover on Sunday morning. It was the kind of place you’d never be able to clean. It would always feel soiled. My wife and I looked at each other, nodded tacitly and thanked G. No, we weren’t this desperate yet.

We drove home in silence, the mold still swirling in our sinuses. It’d been so long.

“I’d forgotten about this,” I said.

“You mean how dirty these places can be? I know,” my wife shook her head.

“It was different before having kids. We could’ve lived there. We probably would’ve lived there.”

“Imagine brining a newborn to that place,” my wife said, and she began to cry softly, as if in imagining it, she’d done it somehow. I stared ahead, unable to say anything.

The other potential option—the only potential option— was a bright, sunny apartment near downtown. It had a balcony that faced the mountains and a beautiful open floor plan. When we watched the video walk-through I found myself longing to carry boxes up its capacious front stairs, to wrestle with my daughter on its clean carpets. To sip coffee early in the morning on that east-facing balcony while the apartment woke up. A modern TV dad.

But the rental company was notorious for their negligence and their demand for co-signers, based as they were in a college town they assumed everyone had parents who were doing well enough to foot the bill. A closer look at the ad revealed that the occupant would have to make three times the rent. Three times! How could they ask this? Who makes this much other than people who don’t live h—ah, of course. If it wasn’t a co-signer, it was for people coming from out-of-town, incomes from Silicon Valley on sabbatical. It hadn’t been more than a few days and already all the weight of the renter’s situation was crashing down on me: very few options, dirty places, high rents, cosigners and price gouging.

As luck would have it, my last check showed a project I’d been delayed on being paid for. The sum had come all at once. It was enough. If they only asked for a single check stub, I could prove I made the astronomical sum required to live in an apartment in a small town, six hours from any major city.

We worked quickly to get all the required paperwork in and the $30 application fee and then began casually calling.

“Just wanted to make sure there was nothing else you needed…”

“I believe my wife’s application needs to be attached to mine somehow…”

“A convenient time to come and see…”

While we were working this angle the calls continued to come in from all the sources my wife’s mom had put on the housing hunt. Nothing. Nothing. No one renting. One place in McKinleyville, maybe one in Eureka. Sure we could do it, but, we’re looking into this place…

The next Thursday, twelve days in. 48 Days left. The rental agency called back and set up a showing with my wife for Friday. I called them back, after taking a glance at my schedule. Could we do it now? I’m not sure if this made me sound desperate or serious. These days, it’s a fine line. The rental company agreed and, in an hour I was making my way over to see the place through a mid-afternoon fog of rain. I’d put on new shoes, just in case I needed to appear more professional than I was.

From my car, I watched the agency representative open the door and go up the steps. I looked down at my new shoes for assurance, pulled on my hood and ran into the rain and into the apartment, up the carpeted stairs into an oasis, even in its empty state. A clean open floor plan, a living room that breakfast bared into a kitchen and stretched out a little beyond its bounds in a somewhat futurist balcony. Even in the rain, the place was streaming light. No yard, no sound of the ocean at night and neighbors who might not appreciate the newborn we’d be bringing home soon, but all of this seemed secondary to the idea that no one would suddenly take up the idea that we were unwanted tenants and kick us out. The rental company had an interest in keeping tenants who were clean and paid on time. Following the rules here would mean we could stay. Goodbye insecurity. Goodbye yawning gulf beneath my feet. I ran my hands over the mottled walls and felt solidity. I clapped my foot down on the wooden floor and found purchase. I asked the representative what the next step was.

“Well, if you want it, we can set up your payment today.”

I tried not to beam too brightly. I’d been under the impression that there were others in line. But, of course, that’s always the impression, right? I drove home through the rain muttering ‘thank God’ to myself. 

…

But in the days to follow, during the transition, I grew homesick. I woke up before dawn listening to the distant cyclic roar of the ocean and imagined it replaced with the roar passing trucks and loading dock shutters being pulled up. I woke up and looked out the frosted windows at the expanse of lawn and imagined it replaced with a view into someone else’s living room window or down into a cyclone-fenced courtyard. I went out to look at the mountains and imagined them replaced with a row of impassive homes. Meanwhile, my wife began to dismantle the house we’d brought our firstborn home to. She took down the nursery decorations she’d put up before the room had been inhabited. She packed away the extra pots and pans. We sold the washer and dryer to the bed of a Toyota pickup that carted them away for a few bills. We emptied the place of any signs we’d ever lived there. We took down the record of our existence while we still slept with the memories. My dreams turned threatening. I was stalked by nameless things that could find me no matter where I hid. I was irresponsible and very late for important engagements. I started waking up early and lying in bed, listening to the house that would soon stand empty again. Since I’d moved from my parents’ at 18, I’d never lived anywhere so long and now perhaps the cycle of moving would begin again. My wife kept telling me that our equanimity had been disturbed. What had we intended, to rent this place forever? There was a time when we’d hoped we could buy it, but we’d given up on that idea ages ago. And now, back to an apartment and a year lease and what beyond that? The rent for the new place wasn’t really tenable. It would be a small drain on our savings, but a drain nonetheless. The fund for our future would begin to slip away. I looked out the window and listened to the house and felt those days ticking past. Only the clock had been reset. One year to go. 363 Days. And the earth began to grumble, waiting to turn in its sleep and split open—hopefully somewhere far away from here.

Prologue

I’d thought the worst had been in the initial confrontation and relating the news of what had happened, but, as it turned out, the actual move was quite jarring. We spent two days, before and after work, throwing things into unlabeled and mismatched boxes: the toaster with a pair of socks, pictures with the bathroom stuff. Even when we’d emptied the house of all our smaller possessions, there was furniture. The bed and the crib had to be dismantled. The mattresses carted out. I couldn’t get the computer to fit back in the factory box and, in a fit of pique, broke the huge white box down and shoved it into the trash, spilling cardboard and Styrofoam everywhere. My wife and I were continually bumping into each other and muttering while crossing from room to room. She’d begin a sentence: “Could you take…” and it would disappear with her into the bathroom. I’d shout ‘what?’ but of course, the answer would but swallowed in the same manner, as she spoke into the shower she was scrubbing. I’d have to drop what I was doing and go into the bathroom. And, of course, by then, I’d be annoyed.

I was much worse at this because I talked constantly, saying things that didn’t need to be said aloud.

“How’d this drawer get crumbs in it?” I’d ask myself.

“What?” My wife would ask from the other room.

“Well, this drawer, it’s got—”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Nevermind!”

It was the antithesis of communication. Something that perhaps would be worthy of study given that we were unable to convey a single piece of valuable information to each other all weekend.

There was also the landlord, skulking through the clipped phrases of this unintelligible conversation. He kept rearing up whenever we’d begin to feel a kind of assurance that everything might work out.

“Look,” I’d yell. “There’s another stain on the linoleum. Think he’ll notice?”

“God. He’s going to make us replace the whole floor. You know how anal he is!”

“But I looked it up, linoleum yellows when it’s not exposed to the sun. He’s the one who had that rug there, remember?”

“What you do with the—”

“WhAT?”

Friday, we got it all out, ever last stick of furniture. It was piled like an avalanche in the new place, ruining any sense of refuge the place had ever offered. Our home was now empty—only the smell remained to connect us to it and our new apartment was a mess of bags and boxes that looked like it would take weeks to untangle.

I set up the crib in my daughter’s new room and my wife put up the decorations and books so at least my daughter’s corner of the world would look like it had been successfully transported.

She’d spent the afternoon with her grandparents while we’d been dragging bookshelves and couches around. She hadn’t eaten well; she hadn’t napped and now, coming into this utterly disorganized apartment for the first time—her new home—she was overwhelmed and cranky. I think she may have also picked up on our nervous energy. Even the new carpet cleaning solution smell in the air couldn’t cover the sweat of nervous exhaustion that has an awful sweetness to it, like old beer in the sun.

My wife’s parents stuck around trying to help, but there was no dent to be made in the mess and beginning any kind of task unraveled into hundreds of other tasks. I tried to throw something away, but I didn’t know where the trash was. I went looking for it and found it was overflowing. I didn’t know where to take it out and crammed the piece of trash into the already overflowing basket—which was in the wrong place—feeling like an utter failure.

It seemed like giving my daughter a quick bath might be a way to welcome her to the new place. My mother-in-law offered but within minutes some of the worst screams I’ve ever heard my daughter make were issuing from the bathroom. I tried to put things in the kitchen away, but all the cabinets were in the wrong places and I knew I was making a mess. I tried putting the peanut butter in three different places while my daughter howled down the hall. I wanted so badly to comfort her, but I knew I’d go in there probably still holding the peanut butter jar, smelling of exhaustion sweat and when you’re upset, this is the last person you’d want trying to offer solace. I stayed in the kitchen, making a mess.

After my in-laws left, we calmed our daughter down and she and I played a game on the floor of her room, feeding her stuffed animals different pretend foods, until she seemed to be getting tired. I put her in her crib and lay on the floor singing looking up at the ceiling, using the song to calm myself. I could hear my wife out in the kitchen, rearranging all the stuff I’d made a mess with. I took assurance in the idea that she’d know what to do with the peanut butter I’d left, in utter defeat, on the counter.

When my daughter fell asleep, I decided to take a shower. We didn’t have any shower curtains, but I noticed I could angle the spray to the inside corner and sort of hunch down there without making too much mess. I balled myself in a standing fetal-position and tried to relax, but I could see the water was still splashing off on the floor and I was making another mess so I gave up on the idea. In front of the mirror I noticed my face wasn’t so exhausted as agitated. The expression on it bothered me, so I strode out into the hallway.

For a moment, there was a sense of peace to be savored. My daughter was sleeping. Her white noise machine was cascading with the sound of rain. It was also raining outside and I could hear the real sound eclipsing the recorded one. It was nice to be dry and inside during the rain, even if everything was a mess. I turned and went back into the bathroom to finish drying when a walloping, caterwauling sound came braying out of a hidden amplifier. An alarm, am alarm buried somewhere within the confines of the apartment was squalling, louder than a car alarm, it was like a burglar alarm on a bank.

“!WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!# XAH!< XAH!< XAH!<XAH!”

Those unearthly characters are the only way to do justice to this sound and its violence and it was issuing from just outside my daughter’s room!

But what was it? What had set it off? Was there some kind of burglar alarm that we’d tripped? Had the apartment only now because aware of our interloping presence and decided to take some kind of action? I stood there like a moron, frantic, yet having no idea where to begin looking or what action to take. My wife, who’d been in bed, was, once again, a little more decisive.

“It’s the fire alarm!” She hissed and started waving a towel at the flashing alarm directly over my head. I grabbed a towel and joined in. We waved and slapped at the alarm until it quieted, belted out a last XAH<! and then fell back to its former disanimation.

We waited breathlessly outside my daughter’s room. No cry? No calls for mom? Worried, we both peeked in. She was still asleep. Earthquakes would’ve been noisier than that thing and she’d slept through it. A testament either to how exhausted she was or, perhaps proof that everything would work out because in unexpected ways, we are all rewarded for our attempts to save ourselves, no matter how fruitless they may seem.

Saturday, I woke up exhausted after the rushed move. Not so physically drained, but just mentally tired of dodging emotional bullets. Today marked the end. The day we would cut ties with the old place and I didn’t know what to anticipate.

When we walked into the old place for the last time, I found that it already held very little meaning for me. I think this is the value of stuff. Condemn possessions all you want, but after moving around for years and constantly selling what few items we’d acquired at moving sales, I think both my wife and I were grateful to realize that our stuff—the stuff we’d had in storage for years, the carpet we brought back from Georgia, the books I mailed from my folks’, pictures for the wall, hell, refrigerator magnets,  had absorbed some of the blow of separation. The fact that we were able to reconstruct my daughter’s room with her crib, carpet, dressed and stuffed animals was amazing. In the old days, we wouldn’t have been left with anything.

Now, looking around the empty house that had once been filled with this stuff and associated memories, I saw nothing more than a job to do. Drawers needed to be cleaned, floors needed to be scrubbed. We had to try to get those stains out of the linoleum. I knew the landlord (who by this point, through repetition of his name, we’d taken to calling ‘him’ or ‘he’, depending on the syntax) would be merciless and any, I mean any little discoloration or scuff would only prove to him that we had indeed been horrible tenants and that he was justified in giving us the boot. My hope was that with a little elbow grease we could leave on reasonably good terms. That he’d see the place and think—"hmm, they cared about it after all.” Maybe that would give him something to think about before evicting the next well-meaning tenets. Not likely, but at least it’d make me feel a little better.

My wife is nearly a compulsive cleaner and there are certainly well-intentioned and clean people who would’ve found themselves with a much bigger job than we did that day. Still, when you’re cleaning for a single audience and one who you expect to give everything the white glove test, you can’t be too thorough. Cleaning didn’t really feel better, it was anxiety inducing. We’d find little, almost microscopic things and wonder, “will he take this into account?”. We tried to talk to ourselves about normal wear after three years, but it wasn’t convincing. It felt like each thing we couldn’t make sparkle like new indicated some kind of shortcoming in our characters—or at least I felt this way, I hope my wife didn’t.

There was also this dulled feeling of indignation. I’d been trying to forgive the bastard because I hate carrying a grudge, but when I saw my pregnant wife bent over the toilet bowl, scrubbing like her life depended on it, I couldn’t help but to want to just call ‘him’ up and say “You know what? You’re so damn particular, do it yourself. We shouldn’t even be doing this. We should be waking up on this Saturday morning, drinking coffee in the living room and going outside to enjoy this beautiful day, not stuck in here breathing bleach fumes.” But then I reminded myself that we’d soon be ending our relationship and this was the last obligation we had. Better see it through.

After a few hours of scrubbing, I was surprised to realize we were finished. We still had a mountain of stuff to unpack and my daughter had spent another afternoon with her grandparents. I wanted to get back to her and to our new house and leave this unpleasant memory behind. By this time, we were standing in an empty house, the same one I’d come to when we’d first came to look at it more than three years in the past. All the life that had taken place within its walls had gone somewhere for me. Maybe it had gone to the new place, maybe it had gone into something intangible, something in my memory, but it wasn’t here anymore. Not so for my wife. The last thing to do was to call the landlord and do the ‘walkthrough’ that he’d requested. I hadn’t seen him since the day, two weeks ago, he’d given us the boot. I didn’t want my wife to be there for this ‘walkthrough’—which, by the way, isn’t anything you’re legally required to do—because I didn’t know what he was going to try to drag our noses through before losing us as whipping boys.

I took out a last load of trash and came out to find my wife crying next to the car. To her, it was still the house she’d brought her baby home to. I got that. To her, it had been a nest. Even if the tree hadn’t been hers, the twigs, branches, moss and whatever else goes into those things had been hers, or had at least been meticulously arranged by her. Probably up until that moment, it hadn’t seemed like anything anyone even had the power to take away and here it was, already gone.

I tired to comfort her, but I felt awkward because I felt like ‘he’ was watching from the house next door. I tried not to look up at the cold, impassive windows of his place that seemed to record everything that happened. I tried to offer assurance, but I just wanted her to go. I wanted to get this over with.

She drove off and I called him to say I was ready. I went back into the house and inadvertently walked into my daughter’s room. The physical aspects of the place may have not meant much to me anymore, but the smell of her room. It was her smell, or maybe the smell of the room and imparted something to her. So many nights I’d stumbled in here out of a soundsleep to find my little girl standing at the railing of her crib, holding astuffed animal in each hand, reaching up. How many nights had I bounced on the yoga ball in here singing the same songs over and over in a breathy, whispery voice waiting to see her eyes close? How many mornings had I come in here and heard “dada?” as she peeked over the top of the railing? And how many times had I, after getting up to go pee, come in here just to look down at her because, in my sleep, I had missed this tiny little girl, or had worried that the blankets might have gone over her head? I smelled all of that and stepped out into the living room as the door opened.

“Hey Jonny,” the landlord began, cordial enough. He seemed relieved. I think seeing the empty place gave him hope. Perhaps he thought we were going to try to hunker down and challenge him on the eviction.

I returned his greeting in a perfunctory way. I wanted to make sure I didn’t start thanking him or something.

Before he’d come over, my wife and I had been so worried that we’d gone from room to room taking pictures, just to document how nice the place was, how clean, worried that he’d try to make us buy a new house because the linoleum was faded or the carpet hairs didn’t stand up straight. I was ready for him to pick apart everything we’d done, but he strode from room to room oozing appreciation.

“Ok, you cleaned this. Looks good. And this, well no big deal. And there’s this, oh good that’s been cleaned, too.”

I followed him around, unsure what the hell my role was supposed to be. Curator of the museum of my life? A sort of museum in reverse that shows the absence of artifacts? I dully explained how I’d removed our impression everywhere.

“Yeah, we scrubbed here pretty hard. Took each drawer out. Oven cleaner, lots of it.” Mostly, I just stood in the corners of rooms and watched him poke around, feeling like a kid whose work was being inspected.

A brief note about that:

When I was a kid, we had carpeted stairs. My job had been to vacuum them with a little handvac. My dad, if he was home, would always demonstrate how the grit that had been tracked in would get kicked to the cervices of the stairs and how it had to be picked out with your fingers. The vacuum cleaner couldn’t get it. Even after I’d begun to do this picking, somehow it always looked like I hadn’t. No matter what I did. It seemed there was always a little grit in the crevices. The job always looked unfinished. What bothered me more than anything was the expectation that my efforts would be incomplete. My dad always seemed to expect that I wouldn’t pick crevices at all. Any remaining grit was an indication of this oversight. It was Sisyphean. The job frequently had to be redone. I didn’t mind doing it again, so much as the implication that I’d done it half-assed the first time. When you’ve genuinely tried and had your effort dismissed, this has got to be the most aggravating feeling in the world.

I was prepared to feel it in this moment and then, suddenly, as if transported back to the moment when we’d moved in, I found myself standing outside, talking in a casual way. It was done. Here were the keys.

I guess he wanted to get rid of us as much as we’d wanted to get rid of him. I knew in the morning he’d come in and probably redo the entire job, but I didn’t much care. Let him do what we wanted. It was his house now. I walked down the street, away from the open rural area where we’d lived when our daughter was born, where she’d learned to crawl and walk, where she’d said her first words. Where we’d become a family.

The wind was coming off the ocean and, with no trees to stop it, it brought the brisk temperature of the ocean floor with it. The sun was powerless to stop it, but gradually, as I walked away and reentered the bounds of the town with the houses and trees and other wind-blocking impediments, the wind died down and the sun warmed my back, the trees, the sidewalks. In a yard, there were daffodils, in another wild sweet pea. The world beyond the windy confines of the old house was growing and I was happy to be rejoining it.

I stopped to delete the landlord’s number from my phone so, when he called a few days later to inform me he’d be keeping our security deposit because the place hadn’t been cleaned to his satisfaction after all, I didn’t even know who was talking. Much less did I care what he was saying.

 

 

Skittles

 

It’s my first day back to work and I arrive at the café just after they open at 7:30. The sun is still glowing behind the hills and the air is brittle with the cold. I get my coffee and go back to work at my seat, pausing occasionally to stop and watch the glow over the hills increasingly slightly. We’re back in the purple tier so I have to work outside, which is fine.

By 10am, it’s warm enough to have taken off my jacket and gloves and even my sweater is beginning to seem extraneous. But stationary work outside isn’t a warming activity and I am still nursing a ball of cold somewhere at the bottom of my lungs that the coffee and the sun still haven’t completely dislodged.

The mid-morning rush comes and makes its customary noise. The guy with the dogs arrives and turns on his radio. Democracy Now. A few people cluster around him to listen and to chat about whatever lunacy’s going on far from here. I check the inauguration date on my computer between responses to new students, gearing up for whatever, I guess. The radio is turned off, but the group remains, mostly sitting rather than talking. The day has warmed nicely. Even the other solitary workers look pleased, hammering away at their computers.

After 11, the place really quiets down. Most who’ve planned on coffee have gotten it for the day and usually lunch traffic is pretty light. By this point, I’m either quite focused on a task or just trying to be, hoping to finish, or at least begin, an important task before I go home for lunch—knowing as I do that I seldom get much accomplished in the afternoon when I work at home. Even through the closed door, I can hear everything happening in the house: cries, admonishments, encouragements, blandishments, little running feet and narrated meal preparation. Sometimes, I put my headphones on, but then the music distracts me. I get my real work done in the morning, at the café.

But since it’s the first day back, I don’t really have to worry about afternoon work. There isn’t any to do, maybe another handful of assignments to comment on for the students already getting to work, but even that could wait until tomorrow.

I’m considering packing up when a dog comes up and pushes his nose against my leg and then against my backpack on the ground. Behind the dog are a couple with a very large stroller with a baby lost in it somewhere and a young boy, probably about six with the kind of hair cut that looks like it was buzzed about a month ago and has grown out into a formless, dirty blond puff, the kind of haircut that I can’t help but to associate with hyperactivity and Kool-Aid stained lips for some reason. The mom is a typical young mom who has completed accepted the role and vanquished all of her own desire except maybe on New Year’s and the rare night out with friends. The dad is unreadable. He’s got a bandana on instead of a mask, but even this mask statement seems to say nothing. He doesn’t look exceptionally happy, but neither does he look nagged or cajoled into being in front of this café on the holiday. Both parents are carrying grocery bags. The baby is a baby with close set eyes, looking a little like a siamese cat, taking everything in quietly.  

The boy has a handful of Skittles that he must’ve got out of one of those 25-cent machines—or perhaps the bag ripped all the way open and now he’s carrying them. When his mom stops to get their purchases (there’s a grocery store in the shopping center) in order, the boy sets the Skittles down on one of the café tables. The table wobbles and five Skittles or so bounce merrily around on the sidewalk for a minute, like ballbearings or something in Home Alone to exaggerate the chaos of a scene. To this the mom gives an agonized sigh.

“You weren’t supposed to put ‘em on the table! uuuhhhh!” This sigh comes out in an ‘I-can’t-believe-the-shit-I-have-to-put-up-with’ kind of way. The puffball hair deflates a little. From where I’m sitting it was obvious that the kid’s Skittles were getting sticky and that he’d set them down to regroup and now he’s got his mom practically lamenting that she’s brought him into the world to commit such egregious mistakes. She goes inside to see if there’s a cup she can put them in—why the kid can’t just pick the Skittle back up is unclear. While the mom goes in, the dad mumbles through his mask.

“Fuck. Why’d you have to set those down?”

This doesn’t come out in anger so much as in abject hopelessness, as if in setting the candy on the table, the kid has just reaffirmed that he is once again the most clueless dope in the world and that he is no more an asset to his parents than leprosy would be.

It’s such a small thing. Nothing that I could call out, but I want to cry for this kid. I can feel his shame blazing off his hot little ears, sticking out from that bushwaked hair. The dad is not belligerent; in fact he retreats back to obscurity, but the kid moves off and sits on the curb, not crying, probably accustomed to this kind of treatment. When his mom comes back outside carrying a cup from the café; she has to cajole him back. It takes a while, but he gets up and accepts the cup of Skittles. I notice the dad says nothing. It’s like he’s not even part of the picture. He’s just barely there.

The family, like so many others plods down the sidewalk to god knows where, the Skittles rattling around in the cup, Skittles that now won’t be tasted, all their flavor having been blanched by the dad’s irritation.

I sit there for a few more minutes thinking this is what childhood was like. This complete unpredictability, the slightest shift in temperature and you’ve pissed someone off or trigged their gall. It’s something I’m glad to have escaped as an adult, constantly feeling like you were at the mercy of other people’s mood. When you’re grown up, you can choose to avoid perpetually bad-mooded bastards or choose to ignore their claim on your emotions but, as a kid, you don’t have the same choice.

…

A few days later, I’m back at the café, trying to focus on my work, but distracted by two little boys who show up from time to time with their mother who buys them apple juice in glass bottles. The boys linger near the table, but they’re too active to stay with their drinks and their mom. They look around on the sidewalk and at the edge of the parking lot. They slide. They shove each other. One of them reaches down. The other one grabs for what he’s holding. The mom has to intervene.

“What is this?” she asks looking at what the boy has reluctantly dropped into her hand.

“A Skittle!”

She throws it “You can’t eat Skittle you find in the parking lot.”

I hear it bouncing back over the asphalt; lost again.