Abbott Awaits (13 page)

Abbott struggles with number seven. Reading doesn't count, and it hasn't for many years. Mowing? Dropping rocks in a grate? One thing Abbott does often in his spare time is calculate the age he will be when his children graduate from high school, from college. The age he will be when they have children, if they have children at the age he had children. There are small discrepancies in the online life-expectancy figures, but Abbott is able to conjecture that he will become a grandfather shortly after his death. Give or take a few months. But browsing actuarial tables is not a
hobby
, or at least not a healthy one like gardening.

Just a normal afternoon until it isn't. Until they're lying naked on the bed, testing a hypothesis. This is the thirty-seventh week. They're the first people in the history of pregnancy to try this, they're certain. And now Abbott's wife's belly is like Cape Horn—it's treacherous, but it's the only available shipping route. Abbott and his wife circumnavigate; they go the long way around, and several times their hopes are nearly dashed upon the hard, venous outcropping. They persevere, sweaty and storm-tossed. They are lucky to be alive. Something occurs, approximate to intercourse. The bottom sheet rends and pulls up, exposing the mattress. Ejaculate shimmers on Abbott's digital wristwatch. The laughter, they fear, will wake the napping girl.

Abbott, his wife, and his daughter are having a nice time in the family room with a big green ball. They are sitting in a triangular formation, rolling the ball back and forth to one another. The girl is doing well, though Abbott is not even thinking about her motor development in relation to average children. He's just playing ball with his family, formulating a cocktail. “Mom throwed the ball!” the girl says. “And Dad catched it!” “Hey, that's right,” Abbott's wife says, raising her eyebrows at Abbott. Abbott interprets his wife's glance to mean she is impressed with the girl's verbal ability. Abbott has never told his wife this—he's never told anyone—but he has a vision of himself as a father who, in the most gentle and loving and supportive way, corrects his children's grammar. At the dinner table, say, buttering a roll and explaining, affably, the uses of
lie
and
lay
, for instance, or
which
and
that
. His intention is certainly not to demean or humiliate, and neither is it simply to instruct, really, but to share his passion and respect for the amazing system of English, its intricate rules and odd exceptions. In his mind, the strictures of grammar and syntax become a kind of fun family activity, with everyone very lovingly
and entertainingly pointing out everyone else's errors. And they're all laughing and passing the corn and making up funny examples of dangling modifiers. And in this way the children are thoughtful practitioners of our language, and their sense of language, and hence thought, is (lovingly) honed. And it's not actually the children's childhood that Abbott is imagining. He's imagining the children as adults so honed and remarkable that people want to interview them, and in these interviews they speak fondly (and correctly) of the family dinner table of their youth, the father who presided warmly over speech and usage. It sounds authoritarian, they know, but it wasn't like that. It was fun. The father didn't belittle them; rather, he found a way to bring the family together around clauses and phrases, subordination and antecedent. You just have to take our word for it. His tone was remarkable. The game continues, the green ball rolling across the carpet, Abbott's wife and his daughter laughing and exclaiming. “You throwed it!” his daughter says, referring to herself. “That's right,” his wife says. Abbott knows how difficult it will be to pull this off. If he misses his mark—even slightly—he's a tyrant. “And Dad catched it,” his wife says. She reaches over and pats Abbott on the knee. “Right, Dad?” she says. Abbott throws the ball into the air and grabs it hard with two hands. He sticks out his tongue and makes his eyes wide. He rubs the ball on top of his head, making strands of his hair stick up. “That's right,” he says, “I did.”

The corn on the cob is locally grown, and it is delicious. The dinner begins with five cooked ears on the table. Abbott and his wife eat two ears each, leaving one for their daughter. Abbott's daughter can't eat from the cob, or won't, or Abbott won't let her, so Abbott cuts the kernels off with a paring knife. This will not, though, be a story about wounds of the flesh. Abbott positions the ear vertically on his plate, much like a holder sets a football for a field-goal attempt. He presses the top of the ear with one hand and slices down the cob with the other. The girl does not like to eat the corn as a spoonful of kernels. She prefers large
plaques
of corn that she can pick up and eat with her fingers, so Abbott has to slice deeply and forcefully into the cob. The corn and the plate are slippery with reducedfat butter, and the ear shoots off the plate, directly toward Abbott. With startling celerity, Abbott pushes straight back from the table, rising to his feet in a crouched position, arms up, legs bowed slightly to avoid the free-falling corn. He looks, at the end of this maneuver, something like a gymnast who has just nailed a dismount. A gymnast with a paring knife. His chair capsizes loudly behind him as the corn passes between his legs
to the floor, where the dog, its fear trumped by appetite, begins to lick it. One instant there is Abbott's lap, the next it is gone. This is certainly Abbott's most athletic deed in years, and his initial response, as he stands from his crouch, is pride. He sure evaded that corn. He still has it, the quickness, the reflexes. But then he hears the dog gnawing the cob, and he sees his daughter's empty tray of food. He feels the upturned, surprised gazes of his wife and daughter. He notices, too, that the clothes he sought so athletically to protect are old, faded, and lightly stained. And Abbott knows—right now, not later—that his very pregnant wife, were she to be the only thing standing between the darting corn and the dog-patrolled floor, would leap or dive like a soccer goalie to preserve her offspring's dinner. Abbott rights his chair. With his foot he nudges the dog and the corn out of the way and sits down again. He has the right to remain silent, but he waives it. He speaks down to his plate. “I didn't even
think
,” he says, either confessing or absolving, but in any case telling the truth.

Tonight Abbott cannot find his paint-can-opening tool, so he uses a flathead screwdriver instead. With a dusty garden stake he stirs the paint, even though he had it mechanically stirred earlier in the day. He places the gallon can on a folded sheet of plastic to protect the floor. All of the office and nursery furniture is out in the hallway. He removes the cardboard sleeve from the bristled end of a new two-inch cutting brush with an angled tip and wooden handle. He splurged because he's tired of bad brushes. He dips the brush, rubs one side against the lip of the can, and begins to cut above the floorboard. The paint looks light, but he knows it will darken as it dries. He moves slowly along the walls, cutting around the trim of the floor, the ceiling, the two windows and two doors. (Then around the light-switch cover, the outlet covers, and the overhead light.) The brush is excellent. He uses a damp paper towel to scrub his mistakes from the glossy trim. The cutting takes an hour and a half. Abbott keeps thinking he'll get up for a beer, but he never does. The steady deep breathing from the monitor, turned low. Abbott's movements sound strange because the room is empty. He is reminded of other empty rooms, other
painted walls. He wouldn't go back if he could. How many men tonight are painting nurseries, feeling unique? When he's finished cutting, he wraps the brush tightly in a plastic bag. He pours paint from the gallon can into a sturdy plastic tray, then blots the drips from the side of the can with a paper towel. He takes the plastic covering off a yellow roller cover and pushes the cover firmly onto the roller. He slides the roller back and forth in the tray, coating the yellow cover in paint and evening out the coverage. Then he rolls a vertical strip beside the door, overlapping his brushed line. The previous paint job is a bit rough and uneven, and Abbott knows that if he really wanted to do this right, he would spend a night sanding the walls smooth. And he might prime the walls before painting. He rolls three more strips, ceiling to floor, reaching the corner. The humidity makes the paint runny and slow-drying, so he keeps this first coat light, and he watches for drips. He puts his face close to the wall and turns his head to find the right angle in the light. Abbott's wife makes her way past the furniture in the hallway and walks into the room. “This looks great,” she says. He nods, inspects. “It will dry a little darker,” he says. “I'm glad we didn't choose the other one,” his wife says. “Me too,” he says. “You think maybe just one coat?” she says. “No,” Abbott says. “It'll need two.” His wife says, “Can you bring in that chair for me?” Abbott walks out to the hallway and returns with his heavy wooden desk chair. He puts the chair in the center of the room, and his wife sits while he finishes the first coat.

While the earliest shoes that we have found are nine thousand years old, some scientists believe that humans began making rudimentary shoes as early as thirty to forty thousand years ago. Bombs date back at least as early as 1281 AD, when the Mongols lobbed powder-packed ceramic balls at the Japanese. (The shards are extant.) Two nouns, separated for centuries, finally conjoined. Two concepts made one. Do not talk to strangers, Abbott will one day warn his children. Nor to people with shoes. He sits in the coffee shop with his daughter in his lap. Her eyes are still swollen from crying. He scans the crowded room and does not see any bombs. Because he's modern, he knows this means one of two things: Either there are no bombs in the coffee shop, or there are bombs in the coffee shop.

This afternoon Abbott's wife shuffles into the living room and announces that their daughter's bed is covered in mold. “Right through the pillowcase,” she says, “through the pillow, onto the sheet, through the sheet, onto the mattress pad.” Abbott gets to be the calm one today. He thinks for a moment. “I bet it's because we put her to bed with wet hair after her bath,” he says scientifically. His wife seems uninterested in causation. “Smell this!” she says, thrusting a pink pillowcase into Abbott's face. He smells dutifully. The odor is quite bad, but he believes they'll all get through this. He believes they'll be stronger for it. “Moldy bed!” she exclaims. His wife's hysteria creates in him a powerful sense of tranquility that borders on drowsiness. This means the marriage is working. “Is it mold or mildew?” he asks, yawning and slumping deeper into his soft chair. He means to diagnose, not jest. “Social services won't care!” his wife says. “I bet it happens a lot,” Abbott says, “but it's one of those things that people don't want to talk about.” His wife appears to consider this remark. “My God,” she says, “we are horrible parents.” “No, we're not,” Abbott mutters. “We're average parents.” His wife flees the
living room with the offending linens, and her wild exit plunges Abbott into a deep, narcotic sleep. Hours later, he will learn on the Internet that mold and mildew are essentially the same thing, and also that they are much different.

The original
Curious George
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941) is making Abbott uncomfortable as he reads it to his daughter for the first time (morning, family room, carpet, sun, heat, coffee, triceratops). Perhaps it should be on a higher shelf at the library. Or perhaps it should have a warning sticker. Not
banned
, of course, Abbott would never say that. But the book is a surprise. Prior to this morning, Abbott and his daughter have read only George's entertainingly dramatic and noncontroversial adventures:
Curious George Makes Pancakes; Curious George and the Dump Truck; Curious George in the Snow; Curious George's Dream
. Now this, though, the original, in which the man with the yellow hat comes to the jungle and exploits George's preternatural curiosity to capture him in a bag and forcibly remove him from his home. And later, in the big city, George has occasion to smoke a pipe—a
pipe
—and then he gets thrown into prison. Not jail—prison. There are
rats
eating George's food. The pages of the old book are ripped and faded. Abbott's daughter loves the story. George escapes prison but then ends up at the zoo. Abbott tries to read quickly and quietly; he mumbles, points to squirrels out the window.
But the girl's attention is fixed on George's trauma. Abbott's wife calls on the cell phone from the Big Y as Abbott hoped she would. These days, they have their best talks on the phone. “I'm sorry about last night,” she says. Abbott says he is too. He says, “Don't stand on that chair, honey.” Abbott's wife says she had a strange dream when she finally fell asleep last night and she was going to tell Abbott about it this morning but she forgot and now she can't remember the dream. “Maybe you'll remember it,” he says. “Do you need anything from the store?” she says. “I don't think so,” he says. Abbott's daughter wants to read the original
Curious George
again. “I ran into a woman from yoga,” Abbott's wife says, “and she was telling me about this family fair coming up, and I said thanks, we'd definitely consider it, but then afterward I realized it was on the day we're having the baby.” “Yeah, so,” Abbott says. “So,” she says, laughing. Abbott's wife asks Abbott what they're doing, and he says they're reading the original
Curious George
. He tells her about the pipe. “This is just a hard time,” Abbott's wife says. “Just a minute, honey,” Abbott says, “I'm talking to Mom.” Abbott's wife says, “One of these days. You know?” Abbott says, “I know. I know.” He does not know what his wife means. He thinks she could mean any number of things, and he thinks he agrees with all of them.