“Can’t I stay up?”
“Wish I could let you, but I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Federal sleeping statutes.”
“Please.”
“Out of my hands.”
“Please?”
“You know if I could do anything at all, I would.”
“But I don’t want to go to bed.”
This reminds me that it’s been roughly forty hours since I’ve been in a bed. This is, of course, the great dream for a kid, staying up all night. Were I to tell Franklin that I didn’t go to bed at all last night, his eyes would get huge. Wait. You’ve seen the undiscovered territory, the world after bedtime?
“Sorry, pal.” I pull the covers up over his chest and ruffle his hair.
He grabs my arm. “Don’t leave.”
My Kid Is a Plagiarist
He’s stolen all of my best-loved stuff:
the quivering jaw, endless drinks of water,
clutching for arms as Daddy tries
to retreat to the TV; but this isn’t
new work, he has to know,
the boundless fear
of being left
alone in bed
in the dark
forever.
When I picture those bullies at Baghdad Elementary walking Franklin to the edge of the playground my mouth goes dry. I comfort and kiss him, then check in on the older one; but Teddy’s post-kiss now. Too tough. Squirms when I try. Reading, he waves me off, “’Night Dad,” without looking up. I find a cup on his dresser though; this will work.
At the top of the stairs, I slip off my shoes. Walk quietly downstairs, half a step, half a step, half a step onward. Edge into the kitchen with the cup…and that’s when I hear it.
Leaning in toward one another at the table, Lisa and Dani
are clearly not talking about children anymore and I only hear a snippet, but it’s more than enough to make me Chuck-spicious. They’re whispering-but I hear the words “so romantic”-Dani covering her mouth, shaking her yellow head as Lisa tells her something vitally important…something that causes them to stop talking and straighten up when they see me, causes Dani to look at me like an accident victim, or so I imagine. I can’t say how I know they’re talking about Chuck; I just know. Because the other line I heard, just before I came in here, from my wife’s frothy best friend was this: Oh my God, are you gonna do it?
My mouth goes dry. “Do what?”
“Nothing.” No eye contact. “We’re just talking about Karen’s candle party.”
“Oh.” I put the cup in the sink and have no choice but to leave again. I sulk into the living room to watch TV with Dad, who watches the box nonstop now, and who is going to be crushed when I tell him we’re canceling cable. It’s quiet from the kitchen. They must be whispering.
And the night speeds up: the back door closes; Dani goes home; the boys fall asleep; Lisa drifts upstairs to retreat into her social-networking life; and here we all are, alone in our dying house-
“You know who else threw a nice ball?” Dad asks me. “Dan Fouts. But I don’t know how he played with that beard. You ever have a beard?”
These are the loops you learn to live with when you live with someone suffering from dementia. Perhaps it’s no different than the rest of our lives, the shit circling back around on us: bearded QBs and recessions and death and blue-eyed Chucks come to take your wife. And weed, which took a long twenty-year swing back into my life.
Dad wields his trusty remote, turning it-to another sports channel, as if on that one, it might be 1970. In the quiet I notice
the tapping upstairs has stopped. I guess Lisa and Chuck are done blog-fucking, or whatever it’s called, or else they’ve moved agin to the TM intimacy of their cell phones. It’s surreal, imagining what’s going on up there. I wonder if Chuck wrote anything about the sorry putz who came in to Lumberland today to build a tree fort for his kids. Dad and I watch the top ten plays of the day, and he tells me once more about Dan Fouts’s beard.
“Itchy,” I say.
“Yeah…that’s what I think,” he says, as if I’ve read his mind.
When I finally go upstairs, Lisa’s in bed, just closing her phone. She’s wearing her giant, unsexy, population-control pajamas, made of burlap, fiberglass insulation, razor wire.
“Sorry. Were you on the phone?”
“Just checking my messages.” She picks up a magazine and starts reading. I stare at her dainty little red phone, which sits closed on the nightstand agin. I think about throwing it out the window. I think about going online to check tonight’s browsing history, but hell, I know who she’s chatting with, what she’s browsing for. I think about telling her the truth about the house, but I’m worried it will be the final nudge for her…I think about climbing into bed and begging her to make love-smack-smack-zero-population-growth pajamas be damned. I think of asking her to quit this, whatever it is. It’s all so…shitty. I know it’s shitty. She knows it’s shitty. We both know it’s shitty, going broke, going down the drain. I don’t want this. I don’t want to spend every night tailing her online like some Internet P.I. I don’t want to be sneaky and I don’t want to catch her cheating or thinking of cheating or wishing she could cheat. And hell, if she does cheat, I’m not even sure I want to know about it. I’d rather be the blithe idiot: get up in the morning, go to a job, come home, help my kids with their homework and go to bed with my wife, clueless. Especially now-with
this noose tightening around my neck and the sense that it’s all getting away from me…I only want comfort. Peace. I don’t want to have to work on my marriage; I just want to have it.
But it’s all…broke. We’re broke, Lisa and me-something important cracked in us. And I have no idea how to fix it, any more than I know how to keep from losing our house, or for that matter, how to build a tree fort. All I know is that I have a check in my pocket for less than ten thousand dollars, a check that represents the last threads of the money we always assumed would serve as our safety net, and that might be the stupidest thing we did-not starting a poetry-business website or buying shit on eBay or taking the six-month stay of financial execution, not emailing old boyfriends or getting high at a convenience store-no, the truly stupid mistake was believing that when we fell, a net made of money could catch us.
And just like that, I know what to do. “I’m going to the store.”
She doesn’t even roll over to answer. “What for?”
“Milk.”
I drive. Sigh. Park outside the 7/11. Stare at the sign: red stripe, green stripe, orange stripe. I watch people come and go. These are my people-hungry, cold, desperate. No one shops at a convenience store for convenience. They shop there out of desperation. I fiddle with the radio. Find a lunatic radio show where the loons are talking about the United Nations taking over our country-New World Order and Mao suits-and as I listen to the paranoia seep from the Bose speakers, I think we’re all losing it, suffocating in our paranoia-and then I wonder if my fears about Lisa and Chuck are symptomatic of this paranoia pandemic and that’s when I switch over to sport talk, where they’re rating college quarterbacks, and now I’m onto a Dad-loop because I actually think of calling in to ask if there are any quarterbacks now who play with beards and maybe I’m going crazy.