Interference & Other Stories (6 page)

The narrow passage is walled with mints, gum, lollipops and candy bars. I manage to convince him that it's all yucky, bad for him, that it will give him a tummyache, all the while feeling like a hypocrite because since I quit smoking I always have some gum or candy in my pocket. Then he turns to the film, batteries, cigarettes, and tabloids. I explain to him that cigarettes are also yucky. A headline reads: “Man With Split Personality Weds Self.” The woman ahead of us pushes our groceries back with her forearm, tumbling stacked cans, and whacks a wooden stick between our orders. When Jeffrey grabs a bag of disposable razors, I take it from him. He squeezes shut his eyes, his face gets red, and he howls.

Four bags. Sixty dollars. I write the check.

Today, because he is still howling, we make it past the dozen inverted jars of twenty-five-cent jawbreakers, Super Balls, tin rings, stale peanuts, and Slime in plastic bubbles.

“Watch!” I say. “A magic door!” It hums open. Jeffrey yells, “Magic!” and we're outside.

“I want the pony!”

I love this part. The look on his face is a plea but a confident one. I've never refused him. I remember giving my own father that expectant look; and when I dig down deep in my pocket past the car keys and the secret candy, I am my father; and when I lift him under his arms, I can feel my father pick me up and swing me briefly through the air; and when he's in the saddle and I've dropped a quarter in the slot, and the pony bucks and begins to rock, and I see his face first fearful then delighted, I am my son.

I put him in the saddle, worried as always that he'll fall off, and I wonder why the stirrups are so low that by the time your legs are long enough to reach them you're too old to ride. “Hold on tight now.”

But this time the quarter drops and nothing happens.

“The pony not go!”

The pony's tail has been bobbed by vandals or just by kids playing hard, but there's a knob of it left for me to grip and rock the pony back and forth. It's hard for me to reach both Jeffrey to steady him and the pony's tail to rock it hard enough to convince him everything is okay. “Watch where you're going!” I tell him when he grows suspicious and starts to turn around. When my shoulder starts to hurt, I tell him to say, “Whoa!” When I lift him down he says, “Thank you, pony.”

He doesn't want to sit in the shopping cart. “Then you must hold Daddy's hand,” I say. “There are too many cars.” The parking lot is jammed: cars are circling, looking for spaces; horns are blowing; people pushing carts are trying to navigate among the cars. I change my mind, lift Jeffrey up and put him in the seat, ignoring his protests.

“Sir! Sir!” A short fat man in a white V-neck T-shirt is coming toward us, one finger held up before him. “You mind if we follow you and grab your cart? There's none left.” A boy is with him, about ten or eleven, also fat.

The four of us enter the chaos and make it to the car. When I've loaded the bags, the man thanks me, and the boy takes the cart. I carry Jeffrey, quiet now, around to the other side to buckle him in his car seat.

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” The fat man is yelling at a large red Mercury backing toward the boy who's standing frozen with the shopping cart. The windows on the Mercury are down, and the music is loud. The car is shining; even the tailpipes are polished. It stops, rocking; the driver has slammed the brake.

“Hey! Who the hell you think you're talking to?” The driver, a lean young man in tight black jeans, no shirt, is out of his car and moving toward the fat man.

“I just didn't want you to hit my son, that's all.”

The boy stands still with the cart and watches. The young man, even with the boy's father now, puts one hand on his chest and shoves him against the car beside mine, bending him backward over the hood. “What else you got to say to me, huh? You got a big mouth. What else you got to say to me?”

The man, his hands crossed in front of his frightened face, says, “Nothing. I'm sorry. Sorry.”

I see the boy turn away. He doesn't move, just stands there with the cart until the shirtless man gets back in his gleaming car, slams the door, and revs the engine. I see the father catch up to the boy and put his hand on his son's shoulder and the boy shrug off his touch and walk ahead very fast, fat jiggling, pushing the cart, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. I see myself, having done nothing, not doing anything, and not saying anything now to the heavy man who stands still, looking down, before he follows after his son.

While I buckle the belts of his car seat, Jeffrey asks me, “Why that man was shouting?”

“I don't know, Jeffrey.” I walk around and get in the drivers seat.

“Daddy, why that man was shouting?”

“Because he's angry.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, Jeffrey, I don't know why the man is angry.”

“But why you don't know?”

“Because I don't, that's why!” I shout at the ceiling. I start the engine and release the brake.

Jeffrey is screaming now, and when I turn, angry and out of patience, and see his face, I know this is not a tantrum. Tears pour from his eyes and his face is white with fear. I pull the brake back on, lean back, and touch him.

“Daddy's sorry. Don't cry. Daddy's sorry. Wait,” I say, “I have something good for you.” I push myself up high in the seat so I can reach down deep in my pocket.

S
oon after he turned four, Roger surprised his parents by asking them if it was fun to die. His father hesitated. His mother said to him, “Well, what do you think?”

Roger stood at the bottom of the stairs, hugging the newel post. He shrugged. Then he asked them who was going to die.

His parents, when they looked at each other, passed back and forth what each hoped the other would read as amusement and pride, but each had felt, and hidden, a chill.

“Well, Big Guy, everybody has to die sometime,” the boy's father said, kneeling close to the child. But this time when he looked at his wife, looked to her for some help, he saw that he'd annoyed her. “What's with the look?” he wanted to say, “What am I supposed to tell him?”

But it had been the tone of her husband's remark, his manner more than the substance of his reply, that had irked the child's mother. He had made a hard truth even harder somehow, as if with a cheery inflection and a wave of the hand even this mystery of mysteries was solved. She had heard this tone in his voice before, on the phone, responding to a customer's difficult question. “Clients,” he called them. She felt alarmed in ways she didn't fully understand yet. What was he selling the child then? Did he even know? Of course he was talking again, a little too rapidly, with the air of one expanding on his main point, though he wasn't, really.

”…and your mother and I are both healthy and young. Is that what you're worried about? You don't need to worry about that, Mr. Big, not for a minute, you hear?”

She kept her face turned from her husband so the child wouldn't have to see her hesitate when his father looked to her for agreement. She looked straight at the child and could tell by the way he shifted his gaze that she'd been wise to do so. She tried to radiate a general reassurance and strength, to focus it like a ray and beam it at the child's face.

This was disturbing. It was all wrong what her husband seemed to be saying. She felt such a fundamental revulsion to his voice that, right there in front of the child, she wanted to scream at him to shut up. She felt that her child was being hustled and silenced, fooled and numbed. A response was required, but for now she could only acknowledge her anger and, for the child's sake, hide it. Partly, she was simply too disturbed to speak, at a loss and grievously astonished. Without knowing precisely why, she understood that all that had seemed substantial now threatened to unravel.

The boy looked back at his father who winked, patted him on the cheek, and stood up. He watched his father turn to his mother with no look on his face, none, nothing, and walk right past her and out the front door. The boy thought this was odd because they only ever used the front door when people rang the bell; otherwise, they used the back and went in and out through the kitchen.

His mother knelt, on both knees, and hugged him. She didn't speak. Sometimes she did this—squeezed him a little too hard. It was like the times his father clamped his thumb and finger on his chin to make him pay attention. Then he wanted to get away, go dig in the dirt or draw a picture. She released him and he ran upstairs.

 

Earlier that morning, the garage had called to say that the Toyota was ready. They'd planned on driving there together so one of them could drive it back, but Russell was out of the driveway and headed there in the company car before he realized he had decided to pick it up himself. He wasn't sure how, but he'd figure it out when he got there. There would be a thick rope or a chain or something he could borrow from the garage. It wasn't far. He let out his anger in the solitude of the car, speaking to his wife as if she were there in the passenger seat, holding up his index finger to make a point or chopping the air with his right hand for emphasis.

“You don't just abandon the poor kid to his own devices with shit like, ‘I don't know. What do you think?' You don't give a good goddamn what the boy thinks, and he knows it. Besides, he asked because he'd reached the limit of his understanding. When else does a boy ask a question like that? Tell me. I don't think you understand about boys. Maybe that stuff works with girls. I don't pretend to know. I just don't think you understand about boys.

“Of course! Of course you have the right to say anything you want to him. Of course he's your son, too.” He was hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “So say something to him is all I'm saying. Don't duck with these child psychology tricks you learned in teacher's ed. I respect him as a little man, that's the difference. You don't respect him.”

He kept his eyes on the road and refrained from gesticulating as he approached an intersection where a panel truck was waiting for him to pass. In the rearview mirror he watched the truck turn and go in the other direction. He turned his attention back to the ghost of his wife, but felt too self-conscious now to continue. He hoped there would be a length of chain and maybe an old tire to put between the two bumpers. That would work. Leave a little slack in the chain so he could make the turns, and fasten an old tire to the rear bumper of the tow car to protect both cars on the way back. His anger dissipated as his plan took shape.

He slowed and pulled into the service station. The Toyota was parked outside the repair bay, with one mechanic leaning under the hood, giving hand signals to another who sat behind the steering wheel with the door open and one foot on the ground, occasionally gunning the engine.

Now what, he thought. I thought they said the car was ready.

 

Beth sat in the bright dining room where the shadows of potted palm and ficus emphasized the morning sun, but she couldn't think there, and she couldn't sit still. She needed to walk to think, but with Roger upstairs in his room and Russell gone god knows where, she was trapped.

She went in the kitchen and lit the burner under the kettle, but as soon as she lifted a tea bag from the canister she changed her mind, put the lid back on, whirled around, and turned off the stove. She couldn't find a way to start to think about what had just happened. She had seen how profoundly different she and her husband were, and it frightened her.

She stood looking out the windows above the sink at the sugar maple in the side yard next to the driveway. Once before, when the world had seemed to spin madly out of orbit, threatening to fling her from sanity, to dislodge her by the centripetal force of grief, she had hugged that maple and held on. Now she filled a small plastic tumbler from the faucet and watered the African violets and geranium on the windowsill, staring out at the tree and remembering.

It had been right around the time that she'd weaned Roger, hoping it wasn't too early to do so, and feeling alternately guilty and resolute about it, just as she had while he was nursing: one moment he was so serene he'd fall asleep at the nipple, the next he was biting down so hard she almost slapped him, reflexively. “No!” she would exclaim then, through sudden tears, and detach herself, ashamed of how angry she felt, but damned if she was going to be “gnawed upon,” as she put it to her husband.

On that day three years ago, when her husband came to tell her of her brother Jerry's death, she had just returned from a walk, a habit she'd acquired while pregnant; “my walk,” she called it, marveling that although the route was always the same, the walk, her walk, was always different. The season, the weather, the light, her mood, her outlook, her expectations for later in the day—any number of variables combined to make her every circular walk trailblazing and unprecedented. Some days, where the road curved past the fenced meadow, just before she came upon the broad pond, cows would drift down the hill to the fence to greet her; other times she would round the curve to see the whole herd near the fence, and then they would walk away as if they'd all agreed, earlier, to shun her. Now her walks were tethered in her mind to her brother because of the happenstance of her hearing the news there, in the side yard, under the sugar maple, as she returned home.

She had seen her husband coming toward her, and she smiled and walked a few steps farther before she stopped and touched her hand to the tree. He was walking toward her with a resolve that suggested he might walk right past her and keep on going to somewhere far away, as if he were hiking, reluctantly but resolutely. Very nearly marching, it had occurred to her, and by the time he drew near enough for her to see his face, she already knew something was terribly wrong, and knew that it wasn't the baby since there was no panic in his movement. Days later she would shoo away the thought, and more than once, that she had seen mostly impatience on his face, a man who had to clean up a mess and had better things to do.