I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (3 page)

The father I’ve invented for myself is sitting at the kitchen table, shirtless and drinking iced tea. He’s eating pistachios, his fingers are stained red. It’s the summer of 1982. I’m twelve years old, and I’m hot and sweaty and just coming home from pretending my bike is really a palomino named Goldie. There’s a pile of stubbed-out Luckies littering the ashtray, there’s a Lucky hanging from his mouth. It’s been a long day towing cars out of ditches and painting cars in a sunless, claustrophobic garage. His hands have been scrubbed with a brush and some Goop, his shoulders are stiff, the tendons in his neck are tight, he’s got a headache, his back hurts, he looks tired.

Hi, Daddy, I say.

My father smiles. Hi, sweetheart, he says. He pats the seat beside him. He says what’s new with you?

R
ecently, the boy showed me his feet. They were disgusting. They oozed, but they also looked dry. He said his feet were itchy and that they hurt. It hurt to stand, he said. It hurt to walk. He said he needed crutches or, even better, a motorized wheelchair. His feet smelled horrible, bringing to mind that Pablo Neruda poem about the blood of the children and how it’s like the blood of the children. No metaphor can begin to describe the atrocity, no comparison can come close. The same idea was applicable here: the boy’s terribly smelly feet smelled like terribly smelly feet.

What happened to your feet? I said. How did they get to be like this?

The boy said he didn’t know.

We showed his feet to our next-door neighbor, a Vietnam veteran, who in one glance made a diagnosis: “My God! That’s trench foot! I haven’t seen that since Vietnam!”

The boy was interrogated. He blinked under the harsh light, but he didn’t flinch. He only said his feet hurt, and he didn’t know how or why.

I know why. Though this boy has a dresser full of clean socks, fresh socks, neatly folded socks, he one day decided he’d wear again the pair he’d already been wearing. He got out of the shower and put those dirty socks back on. That night, he wore them to bed. The next day, he wore them to school.

If you ask the boy why, why would you do such a thing, he’ll shrug. He’ll smile. He’ll say he doesn’t know.

The boy with trench foot is my son. He was born on April 20, 1992, a few days before the L.A. riots. His birthday is also Hitler’s birthday and the day of the shootings at Columbine High School. Other upsetting events around April 20 include the end of the siege of the Branch Davidian complex outside Waco, Texas, and the bombing of the federal court building in Oklahoma City. This bothers the boy. He believes that so many bad things having history on or around his birthday doesn’t bode well for him or his future. He thinks it reveals a flaw in character: his own, of course, but also mine.

You know this boy. He was the one at the first T-ball practice who cried because he didn’t know how to run the bases. At T-ball games, he sat tucked away far in the outfield, pulling up the grass, watching dreamily as the ball rolled by. You made assumptions about him. Thin and nervous. Asthmatic child of a chain-smoking mother. The kind of kid who’d stay pale all summer long.

But he might have surprised you. Though the boy didn’t much care for T-ball, he refused to quit, no matter how many times I recommended it, no matter how much I encouraged it, not even when I offered him five dollars and a Happy Meal. I didn’t want to believe his commitment to the sport was because of determination or spunk. We’re not that kind of people. The boy sucked at T-ball. He knew this. Everyone knew this. I figured he played because of the postgame snacks: the Popsicles, the Rice Krispy Treats, the Dixie cups of purple Kool-Aid.

You also saw me at the T-ball games. I sat alone in the bleachers, the mother separate from other mothers—the sick, weak, puny antelope cut off by the rest of the herd. Those other mothers? They didn’t invite me to their after-game picnics. When the sign-up sheet for bringing in the postgame snacks went around, it passed by me. None of them asked if we were signing up for soccer, and would I like to join the carpool.

At the time, it occurred to me I was being snubbed, though I wasn’t good at figuring out why. Every once in a while, I glanced up from the novel I was reading or the crossword I was puzzling or the menthol cigarette I was smoking to hear female voices shrieking at my child: “C’mon! You can do it! Run, run, run! Hustle, hustle, hustle!”

I watched my son stroll to first. He plopped his bottom on the base, possibly exhausted, but more likely bored. “Get up!” those other mothers shrieked. “Where’s your fighting spirit? Where’s your hustle?”

I watched them pound their fists in the air like they were banging on a door or joining Communists in solidarity. I marveled at their enthusiasm. It was nice they cared, but it was a T-ball game, for Christ’s sake, played by five-year-olds. I’d light up another smoke and get up from the bleachers to go sit someplace quieter, like my car. I waited for the T-ball game to end so I could go home and wait for T-ball season to end.

What you don’t know is when T-ball season ended, the boy was bellyaching again. What surprised me was why. He was sad it was over. He liked T-ball. He liked his name in white letters across the back of his shirt. He liked how the players lined up to slap hands with the other team. He liked how everyone was nice, saying way to go, good job, good game.

 

 

 

 

 

T here are other moments from which you know him, this boy, my son. He was the boy in kindergarten who freaked out a little girl by insisting he was her husband, she was his wife, they were married, and they would never get a divorce. This same year Monica Lewinsky was news, and when the boy asked me how to spell “sex,” I told him, never figuring he’d go to school the next day and write it all over his alphabet journal, sometimes in large letters, sometimes in small, and sometimes upside down. This same year the boy’s father and I got a divorce, and the boy reverted to thumb-sucking and took up grinding his teeth.

You might remember him from first grade: he’s the one who ate glue. He and I were so broke that year that when he found a ten-dollar bill in the street, I took it from him, thrilled I could put gas in the tank. This boy believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny long after all the other boys and most of the girls wised up. The summer between second and third grade, he was the boy you saw on the United flight, Denver to Pittsburgh, the Minor Traveling Alone to spend summer with his father, and when the boy boarded that flight, he didn’t look back, breaking his mother’s heart.

Think back to fourth grade. There was the boy on the play-ground the bigger boys knocked down. The game is called Push, and the object is to push this kid down, and every time he tries to stand back up, you push him down again.

Tell those guys you don’t like that, I suggested. Or go tell the teacher. Or stay down. They’ll get tired and go away eventually.

The boy wanted to know if he should hit anyone. He said that’s what the Vietnam vet next door told him to do.

Absolutely not, I said. We are not people who use violence to resolve conflict.

The boy said I didn’t understand.

Why are those guys even pushing you down? I asked, and the boy said they just were. But why, I asked, there must be a reason, it can’t be arbitrary, and the boy said it was. Well, hang in there, I told him.

But the boy preferred a war vet’s advice. The boy came to like the way his own hand can curl into a fist. How that fist can bloody a nose.

 

 

 

 

 

This boy, my son, is eleven years old. Standing four-foot-eight and weighing seventy-three pounds, he shows no natural athletic ability, no physical coordination, though he has other amazing talents: wiggling his ears, curling his tongue, raising just one eyebrow. Supersonic hearing enables him to eavesdrop on conversations taking place behind closed doors.

He’s also a cruel mimic. “I’ll be Mom,” he says, and he puts his hands on his hips and bops his head. “I am absolutely bone weary!” he cries. He’s made his voice squeaky and shrill and, for some reason, southern. It’s not how I sound, though I recognize the furrowed brow and bunched-up lips. “I mean, what I wouldn’t do for a hot bath, a soft bed, and a stiff . . . cocktail!”

The boy has no interest in, or sense of, fashion, though he dislikes when I refer to what he’s wearing as an “outfit.” He’s aware of Eminem, but prefers to push Matchboxes in the sandbox or sit in his room building fantastical flying machines out of Legos. His morning breath will gag you, but he doesn’t have B.O. His skin is unblemished. He has dimples and his father’s high forehead. He wears glasses and longs for contacts, though I don’t approve of giving contacts to a person who can’t remember to flush the toilet. He’s a good-looking boy who is going to be a good-looking man. He’s aware of it. He’s not above using it, especially on the nuns at Holy Trinity Catholic School who let him turn in his homework late and the female bakers at City Market who give him extra cookies. His eyelashes are so long they bend against the lenses in his glasses. His lips are pouty and red. He can look mournful, desolate, despairing, and in need of comfort, though it’s unclear to me whether this is what he intends or just what I think. The boy has never thrown a tantrum. He’s never slammed a door or said I-hate-you-you’re-a-horrible-mother-I-wish-any-woman-was-my-mother-but-you! Without self-consciousness, he holds my hand as we walk through the parking lot. His hands are sticky no matter how many times I tell him to wash them.

 

 

 

 

 

Last night at dinner, I tried to comfort the boy. He had to write a paper about an event that took place on the date of his birth. He didn’t like the assignment.

I’d done some research, and though the results weren’t stand-up-and-cheer, I thought he might feel a little better. We were eating spaghetti when I told him Ron Howard’s brother, Clint, was born on April 20. The siege on Londonderry, an exciting moment in British history, happened on April 20, and April 20 is also the date President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a swamp rabbit while on a canoe trip in Plains, Georgia. I encouraged the boy to think of his birthday as 4-20, which, as legend has it, is California cop code for public cannabis use. All the clocks in Quentin Tarantino’s film
Pulp Fiction
are stopped at 4:20, and 4:20, I’m told, is teatime in Amsterdam. In fact, I said, as I passed him the Parmesan, since your favorite subject is social studies, you’ll enjoy this: there’s a subculture, an entire group of interesting people in places like, say, Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Boulder, Colorado, or Berkeley, California, who’d be thrilled to have April 20 as a birthday since it is also the day they celebrate an international event called the Hash Bash.

The boy thought about this. Then he stuck his pinky finger in the Parmesan. He sniffed it, sighing like a cynical and weary cop in a rumpled suit and fedora hat who’s seen it all one too many times. He touched the tip of his pinky to his tongue. “It’s marijuana, all right,” he said. He was shaking his head like he regretted what he was about to say, but it was something that had to be said. “What we have here is a 4-20, and it’s my own mother.”

There are times when I can’t help but take it personally, can’t help but wonder if he would book his own mother on a misdemeanor parking violation, never mind felony drug charges; that he’s out to get me, he’d stomp over my body to get at the last moldy heel of bread.

Then the T-ball mothers appear. A whole herd of them.

“Where’s your hustle?” they ask.

“You gotta show some better hustle!” they shriek.

I don’t own a pair of sweatpants, but that’s what these women are wearing, and their hair is swept up in ponytails, each fastened with a bow. They’ve been planting perennials, but there’s no dirt under their fingernails. They smell like vanilla and also like bleach.

They want to know where is my team spirit.

The boy does things I can’t imagine and will never understand. Why spend hours constructing a diorama of
The Call of the Wild
and then forget to turn it in? Why score in the ninety-ninth percentile in the math section of your achievement test, then flunk math? Why eat three and a half pounds of crab legs during Red Lobster’s all-you-can-eat crab leg promotion, then say you feel sick, that you’re probably going to puke in the car on the ride home, but can we first stop at Toys “ ” Us? Was it because that old guy in the booth next to us nodded with such approval? I saw him give you a thumbs-up when the waitress brought out another pile. Is that why you did it?

The boy smiles. He shrugs. He says, I don’t know.

Look, I tell the T-ball mothers. Childhood is oppressive. I determine what the boy’s eating and when. I tell him when he’s going to bed and when he can get up. I tell him when he can speak and when he must remain silent. There are certain things he’s forbidden from ever saying, including
Not spaghetti again!
and
Dad would let me.

But wouldn’t you agree that motherhood is equally oppressive? Because of the boy, I can’t drop fifty bucks on a pair of shoes. I can’t fly to Paris on a moment’s notice. I can’t stay out all night. I can’t even get liquored up when I need to.

The T-ball mothers join hands and sing. The tune is familiar but they’ve changed the words. “The bad mothers on the bus cry wah wah wah.” They smile and say, “Motherhood is a beautiful and sacred thing. You gotta go, go, go!”

My own mother used to say I was going to drive her to drink. When I was the boy’s age, I did my Christmas shopping at Thrift Drugs, where I bought my mother a paperback copy of Christina Crawford’s memoir,
Mommie Dearest.
That book would be made into a film in which Faye Dunaway, in the title role, rants and raves about how she doesn’t much care for wire hangers.