Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (4 page)

O
ur daughter was two years old now, so this was her first real Halloween. You can keep your children away from candy for the first two years of their lives. But eventually, once they’re old enough to recognize what Halloween is and why it’s there, the evil executives at Big Candy dig their hooks into them. All it takes is one little Reese’s cup. After that, they’re ruined forever. You may as well trade them in for new children.

I asked the girl what she wanted to be for Halloween.

“School bussy,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Are you sure? A school bus?”

“School bussy.”

“That won’t be easy. I’m not sure the CVS has, like, school bus costumes. You could be the bus
driver
.”

“School bussy.”

“A princess?”

“School bussy.”

“I got it: Supergirl.”

“School bussy.”

Federal mediators couldn’t have broken the stalemate. I went to my wife.

“Oh, I can make her a school bus outfit,” she said.

“You can? How?”

“Haven’t you ever made your own Halloween costume?”

“No. What am I—a Quaker?”

“It’s more fun to make a costume. What do you wanna be?”

“I have to be something? I don’t have to be anything. I’m a father now.”

“Oh, come on. You have to be something. Something clever.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we could put a really big penny on top of your head, and then you could be A Penny For Your Thoughts.”

“Is that a costume or an art installation?”

“It’s a suggestion. That’s all.”

I spent the next day exhausting every last ounce of creative energy trying to come up with a decent costume idea. The last time I had dressed up for Halloween was years earlier, when I was Popeye and my wife was Olive Oyl. I wore a red striped shirt and took a hollowed-out coffee can and wrote “SPINACH” on it. Then I drank beer out of the can and smoked weed out of the corncob pipe I bought from a nearby bodega. I could taste little coffee grounds in the beer. I ended up booting into the toilet at 2:00
A.M.
that night. It was a really solid Halloween. Thus, I endeavored to come up with a similarly acceptable costume.

Meanwhile, my wife went to the art store and bought all the yellow poster board she could find. She cut out the sides and the grille and the windshield of the bus, and pasted black construction paper cutouts onto the sides for windows. Then she showed it to me.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“It’s amazing,” I said.

“No, it’s not. The taillights need work.” There’s nothing that wives enjoy more than asking you your opinion and then immediately ignoring it.

She pasted on two red taillights, and I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t resemble a working school bus. If I had tried to do something similar, the child would have gone out into the street with an empty Asics box strapped to her head. This was the sort of thing only a mother could pull off. Once they’ve borne children, mothers can construct virtually any costume using scissors, felt, Elmer’s glue, and a leftover pen spring. They’re like the Special Forces of crafts.

The neighborhood we live in has no sidewalks, so weeks earlier my wife had purchased a big yellow plastic SLOW sign in the shape of a crossing guard that was thirty-two inches high, all in the name of slowing down passing motorists. She felt compelled to buy it after two teenagers in a van went tearing down the street while my kid was playing outside. I mouthed at the kids to slow down (I even made the classic “STOP” move with my hands, raising both palms like I was a palace guard halting an intruder). In return, one of the little fuckers leaned out of the window and extended a double bird, and then they both screamed, “FUCK YOU!” Then they hit the gas even harder, banked around the curve at the end of the street, and screamed, “FUCK YOU!” a second time. I turned crimson with Old Man Rage, vowing to throw rocks at the car if I ever saw it again. Not only was I pissed that they’d told me to go fuck myself, but I was also doubly angry that I had evolved into the kind of middle-aged dipshit who yells at kids to slow down. That should’ve been ME tearing down the street with a joint in one hand listening to “Rocket Queen.” I wanted to buy a shotgun and sit out on my stoop every night until they came speeding by again. My wife bought the SLOW guy sign instead.

At a loss for a decent costume, I noticed the SLOW guy wore a red cap. Then I remembered I had a yellow T-shirt. So, the day of Halloween, I scrawled “SLOW” in black marker across the front of it, and then I bought a three-dollar plain red cap from the drugstore. When fully assembled, the “costume” didn’t make me look like the SLOW guy. It made me look like
a
slow guy. The hat should have had a propeller on top. I became terribly concerned that wearing the costume made it look like I was making fun of special-needs children, especially when paired with a child walking around dressed as a shortened school bus.

But it was too late to change anything. Trick-or-treating time was getting closer and this was all I had. I was stuck with being the SLOW guy. No way was I going back to CVS to buy more crap. My wife threw on her costume (she was Lady Gaga, because you can put yourself in virtually any ugly outfit and declare your costume to be a Lady Gaga costume) and we were set to go. Then I realized that, while scrambling to accidentally dress myself as a retarded child, I had forgotten about the bags and bags of candy my wife had bought at the grocery store and then stashed out of my reach.

“Hey, what do we do about giving out candy?” I asked. “We’re not gonna be here.”

My wife grabbed a metal bowl from under the sink. “We can use this,” she said.

“Do we need a sign?”

“Probably.”

I raced to make a sign for trick-or-treaters, instructing them to take just two pieces of candy (my wife turned down my idea of adding “WE WILL BE WATCHING YOU” to the end of the message). Then I tore open the bags, dumped in the candy, and ate three peanut butter cups in the span of half a second.

“I see you!” said my wife.

“I’m a man, dammit! I’ll eat candy if I want to.”

“You have chocolate on your SLOW shirt.”

“Shit.”

Despite its flawless construction, there were issues with my daughter’s school bus costume. My wife had cut a piece of ribbon and bored two holes on either side of the bus. Then she tied the ribbon through each hole so that we could hang the bus on my daughter’s shoulders. When I put it on the girl, she turned and knocked the bus into the TV set. Its life flashed before my eyes.
Holy shit, no. Not the TV
.

“Let’s just put this on you outside,” I told her.

Once we got outside, it was clear that the girl had limited mobility with the box hanging on her. Every time she went down a concrete step, I became terrified that the box would trip her and she’d end up eating the curb. I had a clear picture of it in my head, watching her fall and seeing her teeth shatter and her lips tear open. Blood everywhere. Scars. Lifetime deformities. I couldn’t stop seeing it, so I grabbed her hand. She immediately recoiled. My palms were very hot and clammy and she was able to escape them easily.

“No hand!” she screamed. She was under three feet tall and already a far more assertive human being than I was.

“You gotta take my hand. I don’t want you tripping and falling and dying.”

“NO!”

She ran ahead and I saw my wife go after her, finally convincing her to take her hand, since a mother’s hands are dry and soft and pleasant.

There was a group of parents congregating down the street. The plan was for all of the kids to go trick-or-treating together so that all of the adults could hang out and, in theory, socialize. We met up with the group, and one of the neighborhood moms asked me about my costume.

“What’s your costume?”

“Oh, this? I’m a SLOW guy.”

“A slow guy?”

“Not, like, a retarded guy. I swear. You know how we put a sign outside our house because those asshole kids drive too fast?”

“Not sure I saw it.”

“Well, it’s like this little guy and he says ‘SLOW’ and he has a red cap. So that’s me.”

“Oh! Oh, that’s very clever.”

“Oh, thank you. And again,
not making fun of retarded people here
.”

With every subsequent conversation, I felt compelled to explain my costume immediately, as a preventive measure. I was already socially awkward around other parents, and this added a fun new wrinkle to my discomfort. The moms fell in together and began talking shop about bedtimes and their kids’ eating habits. Moms are excellent at this sort of thing.

Dads, on the other hand, interact like a dozen horses tied together at the head. I shook hands and stammered out a couple of empty
how you doin’
s, but I wasn’t giving it my full effort because I was still a relatively new father. And new fathers despise talking to other fathers. I withdrew. My daughter was bumbling around in her school bus outfit and I stayed by her because hanging with your kids is such an effective way to be antisocial.

Then I noticed another dad walk up with a giant wagon filled with cold beer and I saw salvation. I didn’t know the dad well, but I had failed to bring out any beer of my own, which was an incredible oversight. I made getting beer a priority.

But then the trick-or-treating started. The sun began to fall and you could hear joyous squeals from kids ringing out from all around the neighborhood. Little flashlights strobed around up and down the street, and I heard the older kids plotting which house to hit next. I held a flashlight out in front of my daughter, but the bus was still causing her problems and she was dragging her candy bag along the ground. My wife was busy cavorting with her friends so I was left to hunch down and make sure every step the girl took wasn’t her last. Meanwhile, the beer wagon set off in the opposite direction. I knelt down by the girl and tried to turn her around.

“Maybe we should go this way, dear.”

“No.”

“There’s more candy that way.”

“No.”

She stopped at a nearby house that had fifty-three steps leading up to the front door. She may as well have declared her desire to scale Everest. The front stoop was tiny, almost as if it were designed so that a simple outward push of the screen door could wipe out hordes of trick-or-treaters.

“That’s too many steps, sweetheart. The other houses have candy too.”

“No.”

“What if we take the bus off of you so you can climb those steps safely?”

“No.” Gather together a hundred of the finest lawyers and you wouldn’t have as formidable a negotiating entity as a two-year-old.

I took her hand and gingerly walked up the stairs, the beer wagon getting farther away with every step. Midway through, my daughter slipped and I held her hand tight as she dangled in the air and righted herself, as if she were hanging from a cliff. The school bus outfit continually banged against the flagstone steps and eventually I stooped down to keep it raised as the girl ascended the staircase in full. The descent looked precarious.

We got to the top and I said a big “HI!” to our neighbor, a nice woman who held out a basket that had a handful of peanut butter cups scattered among all the Smarties and lollipops and Jolly Ranchers. The girl went straight for the shitty candy. I tried to steer her toward better options.

“You sure you don’t want one of these peanut butter cups? Ooooh, Baby Ruth! I haven’t had one of those in ages!”

“No.”

“You sure? It’s chocolate. MMMMM, CHOCOLATE.”

“No.”

She grabbed two generic lollipops and we carefully descended the steps. I was already tired and this was only the first house. Then one of the older girls in the neighborhood—who babysat the girl from time to time—walked up to me. She was surrounded by a group of friends. My daughter stared up at them in awe.

“Hi, Mr. Magary.”

“Oh, hi.”

She looked down at my daughter. “Do you want us to take her around?”

“Her costume’s a little rough to handle.”

“Oh, I can just take that off.”

She bent down and lifted the bus away with no resistance from the girl. Before I could say anything more, she was leading the girl from house to house to pile up candy. I stood there with my flashlight and watched my daughter go off into the distance, the world filling up around her as the collective wail of all the kids in the neighborhood grew louder and louder the more they ate. I could hear the girl’s laughter close by and I could feel the knots in my shoulders begin to slack. Then I got a tap on the shoulder and wheeled around to see my neighbor. He had the beer wagon.

“You want a beer, Drew?”

“Hell yeah. Thanks.”

He handed me the bottle and looked over my costume.

“So what’s the costume?”

“Oh, me? I’m a slow kid.”

He laughed. “That’s tasteful. Cheers.”

We clinked bottles and melted into the group of other dads, and after a while I stopped worrying about whether I looked like a lame asshole with kids and instead luxuriated in being one. And when we got home, there was still plenty of candy in the dish waiting for me.

M
iss Rhonda was the local ballet teacher—a short, cheerful woman who loved teaching little girls to dance more than anyone has ever loved doing anything. Once a week, my daughter went to Miss Rhonda for ballet class. I use the term “ballet” loosely here because you can’t force two-year-olds into pointe shoes and demand they lose five pounds before
Swan Lake
dress rehearsals begin. You can only hand them costumes and let them run around a room to Disney music.

Prior to meeting Miss Rhonda, the girl didn’t give a shit about princesses or princess culture. She was all about school buses and car washes. Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It’s the closest they’ll ever get to being inside a working spaceship. The girl loved school buses even more, as demonstrated during the previous Halloween. One time, I bought her a big plastic school bus that was fourteen inches long. It cost five bucks. She named the bus Charlotte and slept with the thing every night. I tried to take it away from her once because she kept banging me in the shins with it, and when I did, she screamed like a mother having her child being led away by social services.

I took her inside a real school bus once and it was like a grown man being led onto the field at Yankee Stadium. She was awed. She treated the rows of cheap green vinyl seating like church pews, making a point of sitting in every single one. I made sure to show her the hump seat in the back, the one that rests over the rear wheel well.

“That’s where the awesome kids sit and write out dirty Mad Libs,” I told her. She nodded in reverence.

The day of her first ballet class, I ran into a mom who asked me if my kid liked princesses.

“No, she likes buses,” I said, proud the girl had resisted the whole phenomenon. She wasn’t a sucker like the rest of her peers. Her interests were
real
, not some byproduct of corporate brainwashing. “I don’t think she really cares about princesses.”

“Oh, she will,” said the mom. She had a gleefully ominous air about her, as if she enjoyed the prospect of my future suffering.

Over in the corner of the church basement, Miss Rhonda kept a long rack of princess dresses, including favorites like Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, etc. All the little girls grabbed at the dresses like it was the first night of eliminations on
The Bachelor
, and my daughter followed suit. All she had to see were kids her age grabbing at the dresses to know she desired them.

From that day forward, the girl was all princesses, all the time. The Disney Princess people have made marketing inroads into every facet of American existence, and I was now forced to deal with all of them. They have princess stickers on
grapes
. They aren’t special grapes, mind you; they’re just grapes that happen to be marked up 200 percent. Suddenly, I saw princesses all over the place, hiding in plain sight. It’s like when you buy a car and then suddenly see nothing but that particular car every time you go out driving. I wanted to refrain from buying her so much princess crap, but the girl just seemed so
excited
by it all. I didn’t want to kill her buzz. No parent ever does. Suddenly, the whole culture had seduced not only my child but my wife and me as well. We bought all the princess movies. We bought all the princess games. We bought all the princess Barbie dolls. The girl forced me to personally dress the dolls on several occasions.

“I don’t think this Princess Jasmine halter top will fit on Princess Aurora,” I told the girl. “It’s been tailored for a more . . . uh . . . buxom princess.”

“Just do it!”

“Why are her hands so rigid? It’s like she’s dead. I can’t get any of the fabric past her wrist.”

There was no stopping the girl’s descent into Princessmania. She loved all the princesses and she loved Miss Rhonda. Certain people have the touch when it comes to dealing with children, and Miss Rhonda had it. She knew which princess was each student’s favorite at any given second. She offered to make princess dresses for my daughter. She even invited the girl to her end-of-summer party at her house. We ate that shit up. I felt like I had gotten in with the Mob. Miss Rhonda had tapped our child for greatness. We were IN. And while I despised the entire Princess Industrial Complex, I wasn’t above flattery. When a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it’s because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends.
Let’s see little Brandy Reynolds down the street get that kind of audience with Miss Rhonda!

At the end of ballet season, all the parents were invited to come watch the students perform a recital. The theme of this recital was Pocahontas, one of the lesser Disney princesses but also one of the most attractive. Miss Rhonda dressed all the girls in Native American outfits and gave them headdresses made out of construction paper. She lined the girls up in an imaginary canoe and had them pantomime rowing down a river. As they heaved and hoed, Miss Rhonda suddenly stopped them.

“STOP!” she cried. “I hear the paleskins coming!”

I whispered to my wife, “Did she just say ‘paleskins’?”

“I think she did,” my wife whispered back.

“Is that racist? I mean, she’s talking about white people, so that’s okay, right?”

“Shhhh!”

The girls stopped pretending to row, and Miss Rhonda commanded, “Now say, ‘What do you want, paleskins?’”

And all the girls shouted, “WHAT DO YOU WANT, PALESKINS?”

I turned to my wife. “Holy shit! Now they’re all saying it!”

“Shhhh!”

Then Miss Rhonda assumed the role of the bad guy from the Virginia Company.

“I’m going to take all your land!” she shouted at them.

Well, the little Pocahontases weren’t about to take being colonized lying down. They jumped up and chased Miss Rhonda all over the room while doing an Indian war chant, patting their mouths and making the stereotypical BABABABABA sound, which was just breathtakingly inappropriate. I gritted my teeth and prayed that no members of the Sioux Nation would stumble by the church basement window to see it. It was a revolution in miniature, and Miss Rhonda couldn’t quash it with smallpox-infected blankets the way real settlers did.

Every month, my daughter latched on to a new princess to worship. She got so into Snow White that she would play the DVD and pantomime every scene in it. At night, she demanded that I tell her the story of Snow White getting lost in the dark and frightening forest, then she demanded I tell it again and again and again.

“And then Snow White got lost in the dark and frightening forest,” I said. “And all the evil trees tried to eat her.”

“No, no, no! They were nice trees!”

“They were?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Because in the movie, the trees look pretty angry.”

“No, when she wakes up, all her animal friends are there.”

“Yes, and then all of the nice rabbits and deer showed up and Snow White was happy.”

“Tell it again!”

“No.”

Eventually, she asked me to download the soundtrack so that she could act out the movie on her own, without the pictures to guide her. All I had to do was say no, but again I didn’t. I still liked the cheap sugar rush you get from buying your kids stupid crap. I downloaded the soundtrack, and over the next few weeks, the girl would have me play it front to back and watch as she acted out every scene. I got to be the Huntsman and pretend I was gonna stab the shit out of her multiple times, which I found inappropriately cathartic. My daughter also took special care with the scene where Snow White bites into the apple, dies, and rests in a glass coffin. The girl was all about resting in that glass coffin. One day, while we were playing in the basement, she explained the blocking needed to perform her Snow White routine.

“I’m going to die,” she told me.

“Okay,” I said.

“And then you’re going to come and kiss me on the lips.”

“Yeah, no, that isn’t gonna happen.”

“And then we can get married!”

“HOLY CHRIST, NO.”

She grew serious for a moment. “Dad, am I gonna die?”

“Like, you personally? In real life?”

“Yeah.”

“Not anytime soon.”

“Are
you
gonna die?”

“Me? Not anytime soon.”

“But when?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when I’m eighty? Hopefully, we’ll all be cyborgs by then.”

“What’s a cyborg?”

“The point is . . . you don’t need to worry about dying anytime soon. That’s the fun of being your age.”

“Okay. Well, I’m going to die now.”

“Okay.”

She lay down on the couch as the chorale for Snow White’s funeral pageant began playing. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still, pursing her lips just a touch.

At a certain point, you learn to get over yourself as a parent. Diapers are gross, but you get over it. You go to bed at 9:00
P.M.
every night because you’re lame, but you get over it. And sometimes, your child will innocently want you to kiss her on the mouth, clearly not thinking of such an act the same way you do. You get over it.

The girl looked very pretty in her official Disney Snow White dress, lying pretend dead on the couch. The dress had poofy blue shoulders and cheap gold trim along the sleeves, with a sparkly red top and a silken sheath of yellow polyester for a skirt. The Christmas prior, my mom had bought her a pair of blue Snow White shoes, with blue heels that blinked with every step and a little heart-shaped picture of Snow White adorning the toes. She had her eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest now, and for a moment, I thought about what it would feel like if she really were dead, if that were really her corpse resting on the sofa, with a choir chanting, “To be happy forever.” She was so beautiful and perfect lying there, the thought of it was unbearable. I wanted her to wake up, to live again.

I leaned in and gave her the tiniest of pecks. The girl’s big fat brown eyes popped open and she smiled as if she really had been brought back from the grave. I led her out into the center of the room and spun her around as the finale played. In my head, I was fast-forwarding two and a half decades to her wedding day, seeing her resplendent in a white gown and leading her out onto the parquet floor of some random hotel ballroom, with her new husband—a strapping young lad who needed to kiss my ass for YEARS before finally winning my grudging approval—looking on. I could nearly touch the moment.

A few months later, I was about to take the girl to Miss Rhonda’s class and she resisted.

“I don’t wanna go,” she said.

“You don’t?” I asked. “Don’t you like ballet?”

“No. It’s boring.”

“What about princesses?”

“Princesses are for little kids.”

“Well, what do you like?”

“Alicia!” She pronounced it “
Ah-LEE-cee-ah
” in a fabulous Spanish accent.

“Who’s Alicia?”

“FROM
GO, DIEGO, GO!
”

“Seriously? That show is awful.”

“I wanna be Alicia for Halloween!”

So Alicia became the next phase. And then puppies. And then secret agents. And then some other thing. I’ve lost track at this point. We never went to Miss Rhonda’s class again.

On a shelf in our basement, we still have all the remnants of her infatuations: Charlotte the bus, the dresses, a toy car wash my brother-in-law constructed for her. Each group of toys represents a phase in the girl’s life that she’ll never repeat, a person she’ll never be again. Sometimes I miss those versions of her. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to listen to some dwarf song while I’m working because I want to get a whiff of the memory because the memory is the only real connection you have to that version of the child. Even a photo is hopelessly inadequate. I look at the photos now and find it hard to believe those phases ever existed. I need something tangible to unearth the feeling: a song, a dress, a magic wand, whatever. In my head, sometimes I can hear that choir at the end of
Snow White
still singing, and I can see the girl lying stone-dead on our couch. I miss seeing her like that. I miss having the chance to save her.