Our Children Are Not Our Children
Page 2
“What you seem to fail to understand, Mr. Treisburnt, is that not seeing it doesn’t make it go away.”
“That is hardly the point.”
“You have one, I’m sure. At least, one’s implied by the knob apparent behind that layer of — what is that, gabardine?”
Here, Mrs. Ploetze released an audible sigh or moan, as if she had always noticed Mr. Treisburnt’s implied knob there under his gabardine trousers and indulged in fantasy scenarios involving his knob and her muffin seam, because power, even that of a suburban grade school principal, is a mighty aphrodisiac.
“These are worsted wool, sir, and there’s no need to insult me. Of course I have one.”
“A-ha. So.” The Naked Man felt that he had scored a strong debating point. “If we all know that you have one, isn’t it meaningless to keep it hidden behind your worsted wool slacks?”
They were at an impasse.
The Naked Man understood that he would never be able to bring Mr. Treisburnt over to his side of the nudity issue. Nor Mrs. Ploetze, who alternately looked at The Naked Man’s genitals and at the implied knob in her boss’s crotch as if she had found herself lost in the woods.
It was a bit chilly in that room, now that he had a moment to notice.
Without resolution for the time being, but proud nonetheless, The Naked Man walked his children out of school and had them disrobe once again, beneath the tall, silver flagpole and the snapping colors of freedom above.
Day Care
The mom and the dad both worked, and they worked long hours. The mom was a clerk at the DMV, assigned to the camera/electronic thumbprint desk. The dad was a suit salesman at The Men’s Wearhouse. Each morning they would prepare for their workdays, the mom dressing in her too-tight uniform that made her hips bulge like an inner tube aneurysm in a bike tire (insignia badges stiffened her sleeves), the dad slipping into one of the many suits he had requisitioned from the store. He was expected to look as good as the men buying suits wished to look, so this was a side-benefit of working at The Men’s Wearhouse. He had a lot of ties and accessories too. Nice shoes and belts. Silk hankies.
The mom had to leave before the dad because the DMV was open at eight, whereas The Men’s Wearhouse did not open until nine-thirty, at least in the particular mall where the dad’s store was located. He did not know when other Men’s Wearhouse stores opened in other locations, and it did not matter to him. All he knew was that he was expected to arrive at nine for pre-opening prep (the folding of shirts, the picking up of straight pins from the dressing room floors), and then to unlock the doors promptly. Meanwhile, by then, the mom was already working hard at the DMV, taking poor photographs of drivers as they tried to hold their smiles for longer than was comfortable. Sometimes she would tell them to raise or lower their chins to ensure that a bad picture was taken. It was one of the few things that made the work enjoyable. She would allow some people to keep their glasses on so that the flash reflected off the lenses, while at other times, randomly, she would require of them to take their glasses off, especially if they had deep dark rings under their eyes. Whenever she took a picture of a driver she would wonder whether this very picture might one day turn up on the local news when that driver was involved in a terrible accident or a hostage taking or a murder/suicide incident. You never knew.
The mom and the dad happened to have twins, a pair of girls three years old. Unfortunately, twins had not been expected when the mom was pregnant, so the mom had to keep working when they came along, rather than quitting her job at the DMV, which had been her plan. It was the global economy too, and money was tight. They could never seem to get ahead, the mom and the dad, mainly because the DMV did not pay very much and the dad worked primarily on commission, so that he made very little money if he sold fewer suits. Men did not buy suits every day of the week. Even if The Men’s Wearhouse offered tremendous value for designer label quality.
The dad drove a Lexus IS F sedan (leased), befitting a well-dressed man. The mom had her sportier Range Rover Evoque (five-year bank loan). Other debts and encumbrances, which the mom and the dad had obligated themselves to long before the twins came along, made it impossible to afford day care, as well as many of the incidental expenses associated with caring for children, so what the mom and the dad had to do was radical.
There was a small room in their condominium, a walk-in closet, actually, without windows, without electrical sockets, without sharp corners, and with a locking door. The closet rails were too high for the little twins to reach, even if one of them stood on the other’s shoulders. The floor was carpeted. The only possible danger in the room, if you asked the dad or the mom, was the lack of ventilation. However, there was a space under the door, and the dad reasoned that the worst that could be imagined as a result of the poor ventilation was not suffocation but lethargy. And that was not such a bad thing.
The twins did not seem to mind the way they came to spend their days together locked in the closet. At least they had each other, and they were able to play with a few soft toys the mom and the dad put in there with them. And to snack on some crackers and carrot sticks and drink a little juice from their Sippy Cups. They were able to pee pee and poo poo in a little portable Tot-Potty.
Here’s what the mom and the dad didn’t anticipate.
One day, the man who owned the adjacent condominium decided to have a stand-off with police over a search warrant he didn’t feel should be executed. Who was to know such a thing could possibly happen right next door, with the twins locked in the closet at home? The stand-off occurred after nine and well before quitting time for either the mom or the dad, and in the course of it the police tried to evacuate the adjacent condominiums, one of which was occupied by the twins. But the twins did not respond to the order to evacuate, partly because they couldn’t hear it in their closet and couldn’t have unlocked the door from inside, and partly because they wouldn’t have known what was being asked of them anyway. When the police thought they had evacuated the neighbors, they began to deal with the man next door in a more earnest way, finally lobbing in tear gas canisters much like the FBI had done in Waco, Texas, many many years before. Apparently, though, there is a problem with that kind of tear gas canister, or suspects, when cornered by such methods, think their only way out is to set a fire, but whatever it is, a fire erupted next door and nobody knew the twins were in their closet.
Eventually, the man next door came out with his hands up, but by that time the fire was breaking through the roof and licking at the treetops and clouds. The fire department went in.
As it happened, the mom came home before the dad to find water hoses trained on her own condominium roof, which had become involved because it was so close. She did what any concerned mother would do who had locked her children in the closet of a burning building. She raced past the firemen and tried to get into the condominium. She was chased and tackled to the ground, and the only way she could get the firemen to let her go was to cry out that her children were locked in a closet inside and they would die if she didn’t let them out.
It seems ironic that the driver’s license photographs of the mom and the dad wound up on the eleven o’clock news that night. They found themselves in jail on child endangerment charges, and the twins — lethargic but healthy — were entrusted to compassionate foster parents who drive an older Dodge Caravan.
Cover photograph Leva Vincer/Shutterstock.com
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Yesterday Road - A Novel
Coming this fall to Amazon.com and everywhere ebooks are sold
In this “coming-of-old-age” tale, Jack Peckham finds himself on a journey into his distant past, helped along the way by Joe Easterday, a young man with Down syndrome, and Ida Pevely, a middle-aged waitress with her own mountain of regrets. Jack has a hundred grand in cash that he can’
t explain, since he can’t remember yesterday much less forty years ago. Setting out from Northern California for “points east,” he gets lost, carjacked, abandoned, and arrested, but he’s always homing in on the one object of his inner drive -- home. With humor and plenty of unexpected turns, Kevin Brennan’s second novel is a lyrical and poignant story of memory and identity, of how it is the whole of experience -- pain and regret along with love and pleasure -- that gives life its fullness. We all tow our histories behind us as we make our way down Yesterday Road.
Read Chapter 1 here.