Little Children (2 page)

Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she’d booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren’t any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession’s glutted with tenured old men who won’t step aside for the next generation. While the university’s busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you’re unusually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet’s booming, and kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn’t even cover the rent.

Sarah could see that it was all true, but she didn’t really mind once she adjusted her expectations. Graduate school didn’t have to lead anywhere, did it? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile just to spend a couple of years reading and thinking, reawakening her mind from a long stupor induced by too many espresso drinks and lame one-liners? She could just get her master’s, maybe teach in a prep school after that, or join the Peace Corps, or even figure out a way to climb onto the Internet gravy train like everybody else.

What did her in was the teaching. Some people loved it, of course, loved the sound of their own voices, the chance to display their cleverness to a captive audience. And then there were the instructors like herself, who simply couldn’t communicate in a classroom setting. They made one point over and over with mind-numbing insistence, or else they circled around a dozen half-articulated ideas without landing on a single one. They read woodenly from prepared notes, or got lost in their muddled syntax while attempting to speak off the cuff. God help them if they attempted a joke. The faces looking back at them might be bored or confused or hostile, but mostly they were just full of pity. That’s what she got from her two semesters of teaching: enough pity to last her a lifetime.

Broke and demoralized, Sarah quit school and landed back at Starbucks, this time with a seriously diminished sense of herself and her future. She was a failure, a twenty-six-year-old woman of still-ambiguous sexuality who had just discovered that she wasn’t nearly as smart as she’d thought she was.
I am a painfully ordinary person
, she reminded herself on a daily basis,
destined to live a painfully ordinary life
.

As if to illustrate this humbling lesson, her old lover Amelia walked into Starbucks one chilly afternoon that fall. She looked absolutely radiant, with a strong-jawed Korean husband standing proudly beside her, and a plump, wide-eyed baby strapped to her chest in a forward-facing contraption. The two women recognized each other right away. Amelia froze in the doorway, exchanging a searching look with Sarah across the length of the floor.

Sarah smiled sadly, trying to acknowledge the strangeness and emotional richness of the moment, but Amelia didn’t smile back. Her face—it was fuller, less girlish, with a touch of fatigue around the eyes—didn’t betray the slightest sign of desire or regret or even simple surprise. All Sarah could find on it was a familiar look of pity, as if Amelia were just another bored freshman who didn’t know what the hell the teacher was going on about. She whispered something to her husband, who cast a quick, startled glance at Sarah before mouthing the word,
Really
? Amelia shrugged, as if she didn’t understand how it was possible that she even knew this pathetic woman in the green apron, let alone that they’d once danced to Aretha Franklin in their underwear and collapsed onto a narrow bed in a fit of giggles that seemed like it would never stop. At least that’s what Sarah hoped Amelia was remembering as the perfect little family retreated out the door, leaving her to fake a smile at the next person in line and explain for the umpteenth time that there was no such thing as “small” at Starbucks.

That
, she would have explained to the other mothers,
was my moment of weakness
. Except that it wasn’t really a moment. It lasted all through that winter and into the following spring, which was when Richard stepped up to the counter one tedious morning—he was a regular, a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed beard and an air of quiet authority—and asked if she was having as bad a day as he was, which for some reason felt like the first kind thing anyone had said to her in years. And that was how she’d ended up at this godforsaken playground.

Sarah knelt down and began slowly gathering up the vast assortment of crap that had been disgorged from the diaper bag. She knew she should have asked Lucy to help—at three, a child was old enough to begin taking responsibility for the messes she’d created—but asserting this principle was hardly worth the risk of provoking another tantrum.

Besides, the less help she got, the longer she could stay on the ground, away from the accusatory faces of the other mothers, letting the sharp edges of the wood chips dig even deeper into her kneecaps, inflicting a dull pain Sarah thought she probably deserved and might even begin to enjoy in a second or two.

Her copy of
The Handmaid’s Tale
was lying cover down, on top of
The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist
, and the sight of the two books filled her with an odd sense of shame. She felt a sudden burst of kinship for those medieval flagellants who used to walk through town, publicly thrashing themselves to atone for their sins. Pretty soon she’d be packing a whip in the diaper bag.

“Maybe you should make a checklist,” Mary Ann told her. “Tape it to the door so it’s the last thing you see before leaving the house. That’s what I do.”

I am not long for this playground,
Sarah thought. She looked up and forced herself to smile.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s a really helpful suggestion.”

EIGHTY-ONE…EIGHTY-TWO…

Kathy called from the cell phone around four, when Aaron was napping, and Todd was nearing the end of his third and final set of push-ups.

Eighty-three
…

“Hi,” she said, the answering machine broadcasting her staticky voice throughout the downstairs. “How are my two favorite boys? Did you have fun at the pool?”

Eighty-five
…

“Todd, I’m not going to be home until six-thirty. One of the POW interviews ran late, and I’ve been playing catch-up all afternoon. Sorry about that.”

He groaned, trying not to break rhythm…
Eighty-seven
…he’d been hoping to get a run in before dinner…
Eighty-eight
…leaning to the left…
Eighty-nine
…better straighten out…

“The hamburgers and Smart Dogs are in the fridge, you just need to make the salad and marinate the peppers and eggplant in some of the good olive oil. All right, I guess that’s it. Be a good boy for Daddy, Aaron. Mommy loves you. Bye.”

Ninety-two
…his arms were shaking…
Ninety-three
…really wanted to go for that run…
Ninety-four
…fucking POWs…
Ninety-five
…Smart Dogs, what a stupid name…
Ninety-six
…gonna be hell to pay in a few years…
Ninety-seven
…when all these kids wake up and realize that they’ve been eating these crappy vegetarian hot dogs…
Ninety-eight
…two to go…
Ninety-nine
…all you, baby…
One hundred
…Yes!

He sprang from the floor, his body humming from the surge of bliss that three sets of a hundred push-ups each never failed to inspire. Sure, there were lots of things in the world that sucked. Kathy working late, for instance, screwing up his exercise plans. How she was always so tired when she got home, and guilty about being away from Aaron all day. And the way she acted like it was all Todd’s fault, which it was, to a certain extent, but what was the point of reminding him all the time?

On the other hand, lots of things didn’t suck. Long summer days with nothing to do but hang out. Afternoons at the pool, surrounded by young mothers in their bathing suits. And the way his body felt right now, the blood pumping into the muscles, the excellent soreness in his triceps. And when Aaron called out for him just then, right on time, there was something beautiful about that, too, the way a little kid needed you for everything and wasn’t afraid to say so.

“Hold on, little buddy,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

Most mornings Aaron woke up bright-eyed and affectionate, bursting with puppyish energy for the new day. Afternoon naps, necessary as they were, tended to produce the opposite effect. He emerged from his bedroom dazed and sullen as a teenager, his jester’s cap flattened and comically askew, sodden diaper hanging halfway to his knees. Even the most innocent question—
Would you like a snack?
—could send him over the edge, into a screaming fit or bout of heart-broken sobbing. Months of trial and error had taught Todd not to say a word. He just set Mr. Crabby into a chair, handed him a sippy cup of milk and an Oreo, and cranked up
Raffi in Concert
on the boom box.

While Aaron zoned out at the table, Todd started his dinner preparations, drying the lettuce in a spinner and whipping up a fresh batch of balsamic vinaigrette. Then he got out the cutting board and set to work chopping the eggplant and peppers into grillable chunks.

“Tingalayo!” he absentmindedly sang. “Run, my little donkey, run!”

“Daaaddy.” Unlike Raffi, Aaron was bitterly opposed to singalongs. “You stop.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

If someone had told him ten years earlier that he would one day be a full-time househusband grooving to children’s music while he fixed dinner, Todd wouldn’t have been able to recognize himself in the image. He was a frat boy jock back then, a big fan of Pearl Jam and Buffalo Tom. Raffi wasn’t even on his radar screen, and now the guy was the single biggest musical presence in Todd’s life. He and Aaron listened to the live album at least twice a day. It was the sound track of their summer, no less central than
Nevermind
had been for Todd and his Deke brothers during the spring semester of sophomore year. It had gotten to the point where he knew Raffi’s between-song patter word-for-word, and could recite it along with the CD.

“Boys and girls, do you know the song about the five little ducks?” Pause, while the audience roars its assent. Then a mischievous chuckle. “Well, this is a different one.”

Unlike a lot of parents he encountered, who claimed to despise the music their kids made them listen to, Todd wasn’t afraid to own up: He
liked
Raffi. The music was infectious, the guy himself gentle and unassuming. There was no posturing, none of the bullshit theatrics that made rock stars so wearying once you reached a certain point in your life. Raffi wasn’t going to get strung out on smack, abandon his wife and little daughter, then blow his brains out, just to make some sort of point about what a drag it was to be rich and famous.

“Daddy?” Aaron was holding his index finger in front of his nose and sniffing it with a dubious expression.

“Yeah?”

“Well…”

“What is it?”

“Somefing smells like poop.”

“Oh, Aaron. How many times have I told you—”

“I didn’t touch my diaper,” he said, shaking his head in fervent denial. “I really, really didn’t.”

Train Wreck was an activity perfectly suited to the mentality of a three-year-old boy. This brutally simple game, which Aaron had devised himself, required nothing more than pushing two engines (Gordon and Percy from
Thomas the Tank Engine
) in opposite directions around a circular track set up on the living room floor, and making happy chugging noises right up to the moment when they met in an inevitable head-on collision.

“Spdang!”
Aaron shouted. This was the sound effect that always accompanied the crash. “Take that, Gordon.”

“Ouch,” Todd groaned, as his engine tipped onto its side. “That hurt, Percy.”

Aaron laughed uproariously at Todd’s aggrieved tone and half-assed British accent. If they’d staged a hundred train wrecks, he would have shouted
Spdang!
a hundred times and cracked up with undiminished glee at Gordon’s hundredth declaration of injury. (Todd was always Gordon, and Gordon was always the injured party.) That was one of the sweet, but slightly insane things about being three: Nothing ever got old. If it was good, it stayed good, at least until you turned four.

For whatever reason, Todd didn’t mind the brainless repetition of Train Wreck half as much as he minded reading certain books five or six times in a row, or playing multiple rounds of some stupid game like Candyland. Maybe it was a guy thing, but there was an undeniable satisfaction to be found in the spectacle of two solid objects smashing into one another.

Spdang!

Ouch.

The game ended abruptly with the sound of a key turning in the lock. Aaron let go of Percy and scrambled to his feet, staring at the opening front door as if something too wonderful for words were about to be revealed.

And Kathy was wonderful, of course, even at the end of a long workday, releasing a tired sigh as she dropped her overloaded tote bag onto the floor. She was the kind of woman who always surprised you with the realization that she was just as lovely as you remembered, though it hardly seemed possible in her absence.

“Mommy!” Aaron gasped, ripping off his jester’s cap and flinging it over his shoulder. “You’re back!”

“My little boy,” she said, dropping to one knee and holding her arms out wide, like a poster of Jesus Todd remembered seeing in a Sunday school classroom many years before. “I missed my sweetie so so so so much.”

Aaron sprinted across the floor into his mother’s arms, burying his face against her chest. She stroked his fine hair so tenderly that Todd had to look away. He found himself staring at the engine in his hand, as if there were a personal message for him in Gordon’s peevish expression.

That hurt, Percy
.

“You got some color, didn’t you?” Kathy shook her head unhappily as she examined Aaron’s adoring face. “Did Daddy forget the sunscreen again?”

After dinner on weeknights, Todd studied for the bar exam at the municipal library. He could have easily done this at home—he and Kathy had set up a comfortable, relatively soundproof office in their small sunroom—but it had become a psychological necessity for him to get out of the house on his own for a couple hours a day. Walking briskly past the shops on Pleasant Street, Todd savored the sensation of being a free adult out and about on a warm summer evening, unencumbered by a stroller or the tyrannical demands of a three-year-old.

Besides, he had trouble concentrating in the home office. He was distracted by the knowledge that Aaron and Kathy were somewhere nearby, giggling or cuddling or whispering endearments to one another, not giving him a second thought. As touching as it was, there was also something alienating about the explosion of mother/son passion that lit up the apartment every night. It was as if Todd became a nobody once Kathy got home, just some stranger inexplicably taking up space in the house, rather than a loving parent who’d devoted his whole day—
his whole life
—to ensuring his son’s safety and happiness.

The thing that always killed him was the jester’s cap. All day long Aaron treated it like his prize possession—he ate, played, and napped in the cap, and would burst into tears if you so much as suggested he take it off to go in the pool—but the moment Kathy stepped into the house it came flying off like some worthless piece of trash. Todd was pretty sure it was Aaron’s way of announcing that the entire day up to that point—the Daddy part—had been nothing more than a stupid joke. Now that Mommy was back, the real day could begin, the precious few hours before bedtime when he didn’t feel the need to say a toddler’s version of
Fuck You
to the world by walking around in a jingling pink-and-purple hat.

Todd knew he shouldn’t take it so personally. It was ridiculous for a grown man to feel slighted by a little boy’s attachment to his mother. He’d studied psychology in college and was well versed in the nuances of the Oedipus complex and the concept of developmental stages. He knew that Aaron would outgrow his all-consuming attachment to his mother in a few years; by adolescence he might even pretend not to know Kathy if she passed him in the mall. But all that was in the future. In the present, Todd felt jealous and excluded and even a little bit angry, and the only cure for it was to get the hell out of the house.

The skateboarders were out in front of the library, and Todd stopped in his usual spot to see what they were up to. There were four of them tonight, boys between the ages of ten and thirteen, dressed in knee-length shorts, baggy T-shirts, and fashionably retro sneakers. They wore helmets, but left the chin straps unbuckled or loosely dangling, rendering them more or less useless as protective gear. A few days earlier, Todd had pointed this out to the king of the skateboarders, a scrawny, loose-limbed daredevil known to the others as G., but the kid had responded with one of those blank looks they specialized in; he hadn’t even bothered to shrug.

Graceful and fearless, G. was a natural athlete who seemed to possess an almost mystical connection with his board. He jumped stairs and curbs, surfed metal railings and retaining walls, and almost always landed on his feet. His more earthbound friends limited themselves to practicing the most basic maneuvers, though more often than not they ended up sprawled on the ground, moaning softly and rubbing their sore butts.

Todd wasn’t sure what kept him coming back here night after night, watching the same group of kids performing the same small repertoire of stunts over and over again. Part of it was genuine interest, a kind of remedial education in what had become an essential boyhood skill. He had never learned to skateboard himself—as a kid, he’d been more focused on organized, competitive sports—and wanted to be able to instruct Aaron when the time came, the way Todd had been taught by his own father to ride a two-wheeler. About a week ago, he’d gone into Jock Heaven, intent on buying a board for himself, but he’d chickened out at the approach of the salesman, as though it were somehow unseemly for a thirty-year-old man to be purchasing a skateboard for his own use.

If Kathy had seen him loitering here beneath the beech tree, one arm resting on top of a green mail storage box, studying the skateboarders like some sort of self-appointed Olympic judge, she would have offered a simpler explanation—i.e., that he was procrastinating, jeopardizing his own professional future and his family’s long-term financial prospects. And she would have had a point: The only thing worse than having to retake the bar exam was having to study for it again, like an actor memorizing lines he knew he’d forget the moment he stepped onstage. But if all Todd had wanted to do was waste time, there were a multitude of other ways to do it (he knew them all). He could read magazines in the library, surf the web, browse the stacks. He could buy an ice-cream cone and eat it with luxuriant slowness while sitting on a park bench, or feed a bagel to the bad-tempered ducks over at Greenview Pond. He could even wander over to the high school and watch the varsity cheerleaders practice their routines, which were a helluva lot sexier than they’d been back in Todd’s day. But he didn’t do any of that. He always just came here.

Todd had been watching G. and his friends for weeks, sometimes for as long as an hour at a stretch, but he’d never received the slightest acknowledgment from any of them, not the most grudging nod or muttered hello. They had a walled-off, wholly self-contained attitude toward the world, as if nothing of importance existed outside of their own severely limited circle of activity. They kept their eyes low and communicated in grunts and monosyllables, barely looking up when one of their number nailed a difficult landing or took a particularly nasty spill, or even when some cute girls their own age stopped to watch them for a while, whispering and giggling among themselves.