The Throwback Special (2 page)

“But this was real, I could tell. And I was upset. I wasn’t glad about it.”

“Why would you be?”

“Exactly,” Robert said, laughing. “No. What?”

“Exactly,” Charles said.

“It’s not like I was happy when my own daughter broke her arm.”

“Robert. The idea of normalcy in human thought is something of a controversial concept, but I can absolutely assure you that your response was normal.”

“But still, I felt something weird. A twinge.”

Charles closed his eyes, placed his forehead against the cool smudged glass. “A twinge?”

“A small one,” Robert said, flailing for comfort in the enormous chair. With a calm voice Charles asked once again about the nature of the twinge.

“Not happiness!”

“What?”

“Not gladness,” Robert said, pulling the chinstrap hard against his chin. “Maybe, I don’t know, a kind of satisfaction?”

“Satisfaction at her broken arm?”

“Not satisfaction. Not that at all. Not satisfaction. Come on. She was really hurt. I felt terrible for her, and I was upset. She fell asleep in the car, Charles. Just passed out. Her body kind of shut down. I don’t know, a certain kind of pleasure. But
not
pleasure. Maybe a twinge of vindication? It’s hard to describe. Not joy. I wanted to talk to someone about it. That’s why I was glad you came early.”

“I always come early.”

“This is a kid who just assumes everything is going to go exactly the way she wants it to go. She just knows everything works out. Maybe all kids are like this. Are all kids like this? She gets taken from the pool to the playground
to the large inflatable climbing structures. She gets ice cream at all hours of the day. She has a thousand stuffed animals. We don’t have a real pet, Charles, but the vacuum cleaner is clogged with hair. All day long I say No. No, no, no, but as I’m saying it, I’m reaching for my wallet.”

Charles scanned the parking lot. Where was Tommy? Where was Gil? Where were Vince, Derek, and Steven?

“I drive her around looking for rainbows. We listen to princess music. Her booster seat has all these features. She hands me trash. ‘Here,’ she says, handing me fruit strips and chewed straws. I wipe food off her
forehead
and her
neck
, and I’m the bad guy, the mean dad. She has an idea about the way the world works, and this accident—falling off the monkey bars—was kind of a small—I don’t know—corrective. I wasn’t pleased, and I certainly never would have intentionally—”

“What?”

“—and I can’t imagine I wouldn’t have tried to catch her if I had been a step closer. But I did feel, for just a second, this awful sense of certainly not gladness but maybe
approval
. Because I thought that it would be a good lesson?—do you see, Charles?—about the way the world actually works. You know,
gravity
. The body. Force times velocity. There’s not always some soft fairy bed of moss to—”

Charles said that he wanted to make sure that he understood clearly.

“I thought it might challenge her worldview,” Robert said. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to talk to someone
about it. I wanted someone to tell me that it was normal for me to feel not glad, but you know, satisfied. Not satisfied.”

Charles turned away from the window and sat in a chair across from Robert. He cleared his throat, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Listen,” he said. “What I do know about children is that it’s important—some experts believe it is quite important—for children to negotiate risk and danger on their own, or else they might later be—or so it is thought—inordinately risk-averse and timid, too reliant upon parental intervention. Are you saying, Robert, that you felt satisfied that your daughter was negotiating risk in a developmentally healthy way?”

“Not exactly.”

“Aren’t you saying that, Robert? Isn’t that the fairly normal thing you’re saying?”

Robert said that it wasn’t.

“Yes, it is,” Charles said. “You’re saying that, for your child’s sake, for her own happiness and success, you would like her sense of reality to correspond more accurately to—”

“It was a different kind of twinge, Charles. It was like a twinge of justice. It was nearly the same feeling you get when you see very powerful people get indicted for corruption. When you see them duck into the backseat of a police car with handcuffs on. With the officer’s hand on their head?”

Charles stood again, and returned to the window. He saw one of the Michaels—Fat Michael—get out of his car
and stretch. The hem of his shirt slid up, exposing an inch of his toned and hairless abdomen. Fat Michael was in fact remarkably lean and muscular and well proportioned. His nickname was a typical masculine joke, a crude homemade weapon that indiscriminately sprayed hostility and insecurity in a 360-degree radius, targeting everyone within hearing range, including the speaker. Charles had shared the linebackers’ hotel room (the “Fracture Compound”) with Fat Michael two years ago, and he remembered that body with admiration and repulsion. Fat Michael’s level of fitness made Fat Michael a walking rebuke of everyone else’s lifestyle choices. He had those veins in his arms, and the kind of torso that tapers from chest to waist. He was a beautiful affront. He had engineered himself, his physical being, in his forties, to make others feel rotten, and what kind of person would do that? Without knowing it, Charles pinched the fat above his belt buckle. In the parking lot, Vince jogged over to Fat Michael—Charles thought Vince’s strides seemed exaggerated—and the two men shook hands, then stared at the ground, talking, scuffing their shoes. Charles envied their inane pleasantries in the cold.

“Robert,” he said, without turning around. Like certain zoo animals, the adolescents he worked with often did not want to be looked at directly. “When your daughter fell to the ground and then began crying in an authentic way, what did you do?” Charles knew this line of questioning was a substantial risk, but in his professional opinion it was justified. Also, he wanted this conversation to be finished.

Robert said that he got down on the ground with his daughter and brushed the wood chips out of her sweaty hair.

“I see,” Charles said. “And did you hesitate?”

No, he did not hesitate. He tried to calm her down. He told her everything would be fine.

“And then what did you do?”

Robert said he asked his daughter if she could walk to the car, and she nodded. He said he told her she was a brave kid. He picked up the curtain sash that the child uses as her long imaginary braid. It had fallen off of her head. He dusted it off and tied it back around her head. Charles knew the curtain sash to be a warning sign, but he let it slide. Robert said he walked with his daughter for a while, and she was holding her arm completely still. She was trying not to cry. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her lips were trembling. She was as white, Robert said,
as a sheet
. He said he carried her most of the way, as gently as he could. It was like carrying a horse. “You know,” he said, “a baby horse.”

“A foal, yes,” Charles said, nodding. “And then?”

Robert said he called a doctor to get advice about where to take the child. Then he took her to an emergency care facility, where she got X-rays and a sling. The next day he took her to an orthopedist to get the cast.

“Yes,” Charles said. “Right. Do you see? Do you hear yourself?” Charles said he saw nothing to worry about. Nothing whatsoever. He said, with a hot wave of self-reproach, that ultimately Robert was responsible for his
actions, not his thoughts. Charles, though, had recently begun to suspect that people might not even be responsible for their actions.

“Thank you, Charles,” Robert said, sinking farther into his chair. “I appreciate that.”

But Robert had not gotten what he wanted. What had he wanted? How could it possibly be true that he was not responsible for his thoughts? If he wasn’t, then who was? He rubbed his thumb across the velvety interior of the chinstrap. The orthopedist, the nurses—they had looked at Robert as if he were abusive. He had taken a child to the playground without a net, without elbow pads. And the cast! It was pink and purple with
glitter
. The girl got to choose the colors and patterns, even the toppings. She had been scared before the orthopedic appointment, and Robert sat on the edge of her bed and talked to her soothingly about how it would be fine, even fun, to have a cast. Everyone could sign her cast and draw pictures on it. He told her they could put a bread bag on it so she could take a bath. Pretty neat, right? Then the next day she gets this pastel waterproof Disney arm accessory, and she swims and bathes and doesn’t let anyone else near the cast with a pen or marker. Girls on the street stare at her with that glazed envy that young girls stare at each other with. The cast glitter rains through the house, sparkling in nests of synthetic animal hair. Water flushes out the dead skin, so her arm doesn’t get itchy at all. She never once has to ram a fork or chopstick into the cast to try to reach the agonizing itch. And when they cut the cast off? It really tickled,
a lot. The girl had laughed and laughed. Then she got some stickers. She got to keep the cast as a souvenir. It didn’t even smell bad. Robert took her out for ice cream with her curtain sash trailing down her back. She wanted to keep wearing the cast, so Robert taped the two pieces together with clear packing tape. Then he offered, for a reason he would never understand, to make a
neat bedside lamp
out of the cast. Would she like that? A lamp made from the cast? She answered affirmatively in a series of terrible, terrible baby noises.

Well, but at least he had not lied to her. He had told her the awful truth. He had said everything was going to be fine, and it was.

THE HOTEL PARKING LOT,
in which there were no trees, was covered by a thick layer of leaves. The leaves had blown from afar to reach their final resting place. They decayed pungently in pulpy clumps the color of old pennies, impervious now to wind or leaf blower. Beneath this wet stratum of decomposing vegetative matter were the faded arrows, directing traffic flow circularly toward the check-in portico, primarily a nonfunctional architectural gesture of welcome, and only rarely utilized by Old World Europeans and those of very advanced age. The lot was divided by berms, mounded and sparsely coated with bark mulch and cigarette butts. Lights on poles defined the perimeter.
Power lines transected the airspace above the lot. There were few cars in the large lot, and all seemed to have been parked to maximize the distance between them.

The rain had begun, its inaugural drops fat and hostile. Vince and Fat Michael stood on a berm, staring upward with attitudes of appraisal and discernment. Vince’s hand still ached from Fat Michael’s handshake. Vince, whose grip was moderate, had attempted, mid-shake, to match Fat Michael’s firmness, and consequently his greeting had been, he knew, restive and undisciplined. At what point, Vince had occasionally wondered, would daily life cease to consist of a series of small threats? What age must he achieve before the large cucumber was stripped of its dark power? Vince and Fat Michael were comparing forecasts for the weekend. Each, as it turned out, had a favorite meteorological website—chosen by chance and maintained by habit—and neither could quite accept the validity of rival predictions. Ignoring the real weather, they squared off about the conjectural weather. Vince scaled the berm to get taller. He suspected Fat Michael’s site was dot-gov. Their forecasts were similar—rain was virtually certain—but each man might as well have been talking to the other about acupuncture or St. John’s wort. Fat Michael rubbed his hands vigorously with antibacterial sanitizing gel.

Others by now had arrived. Tommy, Carl, Gil, Myron, Gary, Chad. Carl, in a galling violation of an unwritten but commonsense rule of the group, emerged from his extended cab pickup wearing his jersey from last year, that
of Giants nose guard Jim Burt. As always, Gary drove in slow circles around the lot, blasting his horn and shouting community-sustaining threats and maledictions. A small school of men darted away from Gary’s car, over two berms toward Derek’s green sedan. After parking, Derek had lifted the hood, and he stood bent at the waist, peering down. Andy, sitting far away in his car with the engine still running, saw the men converge on Derek and his raised hood. The men spread out on the perimeter of the engine, gripping the edge of the car, like zealous spectators at a dice table. There was just enough room for everyone around the warm and possibly defective motor. Their duffel bags lay at their feet. Andy, who may or may not have been hiding here in his running car, turned on his wipers to watch them. They all stared down, nodding. Oh, pistons, oh, hoses! Derek was of mixed race, which is to say he was black. He was the only black man in the group, though Andy had noted that Derek’s skin was a couple of shades lighter than the skin of Gil, the Floridian. So powerful was the allure of annual interracial acquaintanceship that Derek almost always had a cluster of men around him, even in foul weather. And now this black man’s car’s hood was raised, creating an irresistible synergistic force, the dream of multiculturalism fused with the dream of automotive expertise. The rain was nasty now, cold and slant. Carl’s Jim Burt jersey was obviously getting wet, forcing his cohorts to decide whether and to what extent Carl was an asshole. Other men arrived, and attended to Derek’s engine: Jeff, Wesley, and Bald Michael, whose
nickname, unlike Fat Michael’s, was more or less accurate and nonironic, though still unkind. Andy watched as the engine summit drew to a close. Derek, always so resourceful, closed the hood and guided the men through the rain toward the protection of the check-in portico. They bowed their heads like monks. Gary, still driving the lot in festive, hostile circles, passed these men, honking and brandishing a shiny blue helmet through his sunroof. “Gentlemen,” he yelled, “gird those puny loins!”

Andy turned off his wipers. He remained in his car with the engine running, pretending to inspect the bottom of his cleats. He held a shoe in one hand, and with the other he used a ballpoint pen to scrape at imaginary dirt around the studs. He had cleaned the cleats carefully earlier in the week, and of course he had cleaned them after the last time he had worn them, a year ago. They were very clean. He wasn’t ready to go inside yet, and he was trying to give the impression to any possible witnesses that he was busy and content here alone in his parked and running car. Through the curtain of rain on his windshield he thought he saw George, the public librarian, doing calisthenics on a berm. George was someone Andy did not want to see. George’s thin gray ponytail was just ridiculous, never more so than when trickling out of a football helmet. Whenever anyone asked George how he was doing or how his year had been, he always replied the same way: “Just doing my thing.” Then he would talk, in a slow and agonizingly thoughtful way, about budget cuts at both the state and local levels, the power of information, the marketplace
of ideas, the future of the book, the public’s appetite for memoir, the digital divide, and, worst of all, the First Amendment. Andy hated talking to librarians, and he did not want to be hugged. He cut his engine, not unlike an animal playing dead. He worked earnestly and with renewed vigor at the pretend mud in his cleats. A sudden vaporous notion—he should not have come—dissipated before it could condense into conviction. He kept his head down, hoped George would menace someone else with his idealistic interpretations of devastating factual evidence.