Each child wounds you in a different way.
Your ten-year-old locks himself in the bathroom with his best friend. Half an hour later, he comes out with his eyebrows shaved off, looking like a child from Planet X or someone undergoing chemotherapy.
“Jesus Christ! Don’t you have a brain in your head?”
These are words you swore you’d never use. “What am I going to tell people?”
He shrugs.
Your six-year-old makes up poems in the bathtub. He is more like his mother than he is like you, and that draws you to him. He’s been splashing and making singsong rhymes for half an hour.
“The cat ate the bat. The dog licks the hog. The ho-ho kissed the yo-yo. Ya, ya, yaaaaaa!”
He stops splashing and calls for you. You stand in the doorway, drying a plate. He’s lying with his ears underwater to hear how the words sound. When he rises, his body all wet and flecked with soap and his hair slicked back, it reminds you of his birth.
“Listen, Daddy” (he’s very serious):
“Soon the earth will cool. Then the moon will rule.”
“What?”
“Soon the earth will cool. Then the moon will rule.”
You almost drop the plate in your rush to find a pen and paper. “Did you make that up?”
“Yes,” he says, “it’s my poem.”
Later, the ten-year-old (who knows everything) tells you the six-year-old learned it at school. But it doesn’t matter. It is his poem now.
Your son never made his bed or cleaned his room properly, never took time to put things back where they belonged. Like that crystal radio set your father had given you. Your son did something to it — let dust or moisture enter — and the signals faded. Then he threw it (not really — throw is your word) into the bottom of his closet.
Twenty years later, you run into his latest ex-girlfriend at the mall. It’s a familiar scene — one you’ve acted out before with his ex-wife and other former girlfriends. She has the look of devastation and abandonment. You make small talk, hoping that she understands that you’re not like him, that it isn’t your fault.
She clings to your kindness, but it’s a false intimacy. When she heals, she’ll be worse than a stranger.
You wonder what they see in him, why they give so much. And then you remember the first night after you brought the radio set home from Chicago, when you found him awake at midnight, wrapped in his blanket by the open window (he thought the reception would be better that way), the set in his lap playing a tinny, far-off tune. He was looking out past the street lights and the rooftops to who-knows-where. You wanted to be with him always.
When I was seventeen, I used to ride with my stepfather on business trips from Traverse City, Michigan, down to Detroit. Traveling in the middle of the night to avoid the traffic and steering clear of the freeway, we’d pass through the little towns of Farwell, Clare, Buckley, Cadillac, and Manton.
My job was to keep my stepfather awake by talking. To make sure that I would, he gave me “stay-awake pills.” I knew nothing about drugs then and thought the green and blue tablets with the little x in the center were as inconsequential as aspirin. Later, I found out that they were hefty doses of amphetamines.
At the time, I thought the intensity of those car trips was due only to the adventure of darkness and strange hours, and the experience of spending so much time alone with my stepfather.
I was expected to keep the conversation going, but there was so much I didn’t feel safe sharing: secret hatreds and jealousies, my dreams of being a writer, self-loathing and self-love, my relentless fear of and hunger for sex. All these pushed against my insides and crept up my throat as we drove into the middle of Michigan.
Though I could keep things in — barely — I could keep nothing out. Everything penetrated: from the dark, piney woods to the small rattle of the car door. Leaves blew across the highway and I felt them on my skin. A semi roared by and I felt it in my teeth. All-night truck stops were like visits to another planet: cool and blue outside under the mercury-vapor lights, while inside, men who never slept blinked their glazed lizard eyes under the bright fluorescents. I stared at Coke machines or candy dispensers. So much texture. So many colors. Back on the road, the darkness was alternately soothing and lonely.
As miles went by, my stepfather became a different man than the one I knew and feared in daylight. Stubble grew on his cheeks and his neck was creased and flabby. He looked mortal, I realized, smaller than me, and weaker. I could kill him with a blow. The passing light of street lamps or the headlights of another car made his face soft and vulnerable, as if he were dreaming. I don’t know why, but I loved him then, more than at any other time.
I began to talk. And talk, and talk. Not about school, or work, or my friends, or home. I played back the night to him, told him how the flares of the oil wells by Midland and Saginaw were like burning ships on the ocean, how the fence posts looked like people and what their names were. I counted aloud the number of tires on the semis and how many seconds it took from the time I first heard the truck approaching until it faded away. I felt like I was thirty, fifty, a hundred yards ahead of the car, turning the night into words. There was the sensation that riding in this car was the only reality I had ever known. My other lives were faraway, imagined.
I’m not sure what my stepfather made of all this. I know it kept him awake. I know he smiled, and when he spoke there was something in his voice I rarely heard: tenderness.
After a day or two in Detroit, we’d return home, arriving at dawn, rousing my sleepy mother and sisters. In their flannel nightgowns, they’d look soft and domestic, and I’d feel like we were jaunty sailors, returning from a long voyage: the mile-eaters, the night-conquerors. I never wanted the adventure to end, could never stop talking about it. My mother would smile, my sisters giggle.
Then he’d pick a fight over the way I unloaded a box, or the way my shirt wasn’t tucked in, or how I hadn’t closed the door right — it didn’t matter. It was the old war.
I grew to anticipate the fights. Knowing it was coming took away something from the high, but added something, too.
Two weeks before I left for college, we made our last drive together. I took an extra pill and settled into the contours of the trip, savoring the familiar feelings and sensations.
But this time something new came up. It began as an idea, then turned into an urge. I kept pushing it out of my mind; it was disgusting, ludicrous. But as the miles passed and I got deeper into the drug and the night, it began to make more and more sense — the only thing to do. Here is what I wanted to do: I wanted to reach over and slip my hand — Crazy, I said to myself — under the steering wheel and pat him between the legs.
There was nothing sexual about it. I didn’t want to excite or impassion. Only to confront the undoable. I only wanted to say, “Don’t worry. It’s OK. I won’t hurt you.”
I didn’t do it. We would have had a car wreck, or worse. But I wonder: Would he, could he, could anyone possibly have understood what I was offering? Would I, if the roles were reversed, have understood?
Part of me is still traveling with my stepfather out on that road. Lately, though, it’s not clear which one of us is the child. There’s a moon coming up behind the woods. Its light makes zebra stripes across our hands and faces. We are close. Close as I’ve ever been to another man. There’s a bag of potato chips on the seat between us. Now it spills, and while reaching for a chip, my hand brushes his thigh.
This story originally appeared in Yellow Silk.
— Ed.
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