Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  Slender and five-ten, with buck teeth and a boyish face, Gottlieb had known early on that his biggest asset with women would not be his looks. He took solace in the fact that he wasn’t man-titted or bald, like other Park Slope dads, but when he looked at his reflection, he often felt like a “before” ad, puny and concave.

  He caved too much. CC worried about the boys constantly, even though she tried to pass herself off as one of those jaded, couldn’t-careless mothers of two. Her anxiety bothered him less than her need for the boys, the way she seemed incapable of ignoring them, even when they were perfectly happy racing cars around the living room or watching Phineas and Ferb. Sometimes at the dinner table, he would recount a scene from The Office or a funny Daily Show bit, and CC would interrupt him so many times to chide the boys for slights he could not see that when he got to the punch line, she would say, “What?” and he would have to repeat it. When he did, she would cock her head, distracted, and say, “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s because you weren’t listening,” he would answer. Over time he had given up on getting her attention when the kids were around. But when he called her overprotective, she said she had to be; he was too distractible.

  He crossed his arms, thumbs under armpits, over his chest. His pecs weren’t so bad—definitely better than they had been a few years ago, before he started surfing. He had gotten serious about surfing only post-fatherhood, after having tried it briefly as a teenager on Long Beach Island over vacations with his parents. Gottlieb knew nothing about surfing but had begged his mother to buy him a board so he could try. The kid in the Ship Bottom surf shop sold them a wafer of a shortboard, designed for a much more experienced surfer, even though Gottlieb’s mother, to his great chagrin, said he had never done it. He’d gone out and tried to learn, but the teenage boys in the water were obnoxious, and the board was the wrong size for his body. He wiped out over and over again, not understanding what he was doing wrong, and years later, he’d looked back on the experience with such humiliation that he was reluctant to try again.

  In Wellfleet a few summers before, in part to get away from CC and Sam, he’d signed up for a lesson with Sickday, one of the local shops. He’d gotten lucky and found a great and mellow teacher, a fifteen-year-old prodigy who took him out on a halfway decent longboard. He was shocked to discover that he got the hang of it quickly, his balance better than when he was a teen. He had no vanity or self-consciousness and was able to take direction. It was like the line about youth being wasted on the young.

  After a few lessons, he began going out alone. He met affable old guys in the water, all on longboards, who gave him tips. He wound up buying his own board, a nine-six Walden Magic Model, later that summer and went out every day there were waves. One day at Newcomb Hollow, he caught a fast, clean chest-high left, and some of the guys hooted in support and threw him shakas. From then on, he was hooked.

  Gottlieb had grown up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the only child of a nurse and a professor. They lived in a modest ranch, while his peers had fancy modern houses. The Gottliebs weren’t poor, but Gottlieb—Danny back then—had always been conscious of the differences. He always had jobs in the mall while his friends went off to college prep programs or tennis camp, and his parents didn’t own a summer house down the shore, they rented.

  By the bank, Gottlieb could see Theo pulling Abbie around on her back. Theo was a good father and seemed genuinely taken by his kids. Some guys were like that; they came into their own when they became fathers. Even Andy, who drank copiously, had an easy rhythm with Francine, engaging in elaborate doll play. With only one child, you could enjoy being a parent. Andy and Joanne were “one and done,” as they called it. Andy had wanted no children and Joanne had wanted two, so as a compromise, they had Francine and Andy got a vasectomy.

  Gottlieb had never loved fatherhood. When they found out CC was pregnant, Gottlieb had dreamed of a girl. For the first five months, until the big ultrasound, he had imagined teaching a girl to throw, putting in barrettes, giving her confidence. He wanted a daddy’s girl who would adore him and measure all other men against him. Unlike fathers who got all “my boy Bill” when they found out they were having a son, Gottlieb was disappointed.

  Childbirth repelled him, and a few years later, when Harry came out, Gottlieb was careful to stay by CC’s head. Even now that the boys were semi-independent, he felt disconnected. (He and Andy had an ongoing riff about what the experts called the wonder years—“the plunder years,” “the torn asunder years,” the “I wonder why we did this” years.)

  Both Sam and Harry had turned out to be mama’s boys. From the beginning, their relationship with CC was physical—the nursing and rocking. Even now that Sam was six, it hadn’t changed. To watch CC with her sons was to watch a love story that didn’t include him. They draped and kissed, licked and sucked, hugged, climbed, wrapped. Often in the middle of the night, Sam got into their bed, and he nuzzled CC like a lover until Gottlieb was almost falling out. Sometimes he finished the night on the couch.

  He was jealous of her for getting the kind of physical affection from the boys that he had dreamed he would get from a girl. They appeared more Asian than white, and when he was with them, he often felt like a stranger watching someone else’s kids. CC said they looked white, but he disagreed. He was convinced that people glanced at him oddly, not understanding what a white guy was doing with those Korean kids. On a rational level he knew this thought was ridiculous. Many Park Slope kids were half-Korean, half-Jewish—CC called them SoJews, a play on the Korean vodka Soju—but he thought it nonetheless. Sometimes he searched the boys’ faces for signs of his own physiognomy, to no avail.

  Often on the way home from work, he would walk around the block once to delay the moment of opening the door, the moment when CC would throw Harry into his arms, head into the bedroom with a glass of chardonnay, and say, “For the next half hour I’m not here.” Weekends were worse than weekdays. Saturday was Mom’s Day Off, and Sunday was Let’s All Be Together: IKEA, biking in Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum, and birthday parties. He had buddies from Princeton, hedge-fund guys in Westchester or Greenwich, who golfed on Sundays. A Park Slope father could never get away with that.

  At night, after the boys were in bed and CC was sleeping next to him, he would lie in the dark and wonder at his dread. He would blink in the blackness, trying to figure out how to dislodge the rock sitting on his heart. It wasn’t about money; he didn’t know what it was about. But it was there all the time, following him to the film school he ran in Gowanus, to the playground, and to date nights—a term he despised—as he sat across from CC at handcrafted wooden tables eating locally sourced produce. His boys were strong and smart, his wife hot and funny. He wanted to be like the agent Dicky Fox in Jerry Maguire, who said, “In life I’ve failed as much as I’ve succeeded. But I love my wife, I love life, and I wish you my kind of success.” Yet as hard as he tried, he couldn’t feel that family was a kind of success.

  The worst part about being a failure at thirty-nine was that Gottlieb had experienced the misleading thrill of having been highly successful at twenty-four. At Princeton he had majored in visual arts with a focus on film and then entered the graduate film program at NYU, where he turned out to be a standout in his class. He did a feature-length film as his thesis, a romantic dramedy called The Jilt, and submitted it to Sundance. It not only got in but also won the Audience Award for narrative feature. The movie had a limited release and made some money, and he found a directing agent in Hollywood who was able to get him some commercial directing jobs, as well as a Texan ex-linebacker screenwriting agent named Topper Case, who said he should start working on a spec.

  Gottlieb wrote one romantic comedy that didn’t get made, but he got a rewrite job on a remake of the seventies comedy Bye Bye Braverman, about a bunch of men attending a funeral. The movie was never produced. There were half a dozen other rewrite jobs but he was unable to sell any of his specs. Out of frustration, he shot
one himself, a horror movie on hi-def, and though it was popular on the festival circuit, no one wanted to distribute it.

  When it became clear that he couldn’t support himself as a director or screenwriter, he took a job as a film professor at a small college on Long Island. His students were a mix of talented and less talented, and the commute was exhausting. He got the idea to use his teaching skills and NYU degree to open a film school for aspiring young directors. A decade later, Brooklyn Film Academy, which he ran out of an industrial building on President Street, was netting him half a million a year. He found himself in the odd position of having created a business profitable enough to make it easy for him to stop writing screenplays.

  “So where are you guys from?” Lisa the hot mom asked him as they watched their children spin on the floats.

  “Brooklyn,” he said. “Our whole neighborhood comes here. What about you?”

  “Outside Boston. My parents have a place here. So we come whenever we want. Marley loves it.”

  He knew the name Marley would be considered corny in the Slope, where people named their kids Jones and Cassius. Rebecca was staring at him from the beach with her mean eyes. Her body was all right for a mother of two, but she would be hotter if she didn’t frown so much. He had tried to get CC to explain her appeal as a friend, but the best she could do was something about her honesty and sarcasm.

  “Do you guys stay here the whole summer?” he asked Lisa.

  “No, just two weeks. I don’t get a lot of time off work.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a waitress.”

  Gottlieb nodded, his eyes darting down to her figure. He flashed on an image of himself ejaculating on her breasts. He masturbated daily, mainly to Internet porn, when he could find the privacy to do it. There was gobs of material on hundreds of thousands of sites—XVIDEOS, YouPorn, EmpFlix, Tube8. His favorite was xHamster (“just porn, no bullshit”), where you could search under any category you wanted. Squirting, anal, flashing, funny, hairy, hand jobs, group. One night he typed “pain crying” into the search field. He saw the headline ASIAN GIRL CRYING AFTER ANAL FUCK and clicked. The girl looked young. A man barked at her. He imagined CC as a teenager, growing up in Queens, and quickly closed the screen.

  His favorite kind was tittie porn. He liked all kinds of breasts. Big, small, puffy, even a little saggy. CC had a complex about her tits being small. She was wrong. She was a healthy B, and he would tit-fuck her all the time if only she’d let him.

  During his freshman year at Princeton, Gottlieb had been known for his constant need to masturbate. Once, Andy was talking to him in his dorm room and grabbed a towel off the dresser to wipe his face. Gottlieb called out, “That’s my cum rag!” Horrified, Andy dropped the towel and bolted down the hallway to the bathroom to wash his face. Andy told the other guys the story, and for a while they all called Gottlieb CR.

  It was the only nickname worse than Gottlieb, which Andy had started calling him soon after they met. Gottlieb hated it, the hard Germanic vowels, but the sobriquet caught on, and now it was his name, like Stifler or McFly. Without trying and through no fault or behavior of his own, he had become one of those last-name guys.

  “What do you do?” Lisa asked him.

  He cleared his throat, not sure whether to give the modest or immodest version. “I’m a screenwriter.”

  “Really? Wow. I’ve never met a screenwriter.”

  In the past, when asked what he did, Gottlieb would have answered, “I run a film school.” It was only recently that he had begun to refer to himself as a screenwriter. That spring he became despondent, convinced that if he didn’t write a new script, he never would. He joined a local writing space as a step toward Getting Serious, and he took notes for an idea he’d had a long time but never pursued: a black comedy about a guy who tracks down his childhood bully to get revenge. He spent March and April working on a treatment, but when he started writing the script, the words didn’t flow, and he gave up on it.

  One day he called Andy and asked if he wanted to read the treatment. Andy had been in the improv comedy group at Princeton and had always been funnier than Gottlieb. Gottlieb didn’t like the idea of asking for help, but he was stuck, and with Andy’s career doing so well, he thought it might be useful to take him on as a partner.

  Andy called the next day with his ideas. They holed up at the Shanahans’ apartment on President Street and reworked the outline, refining all the comedic bits, making the characters stronger, adding reversals. They had long conversations about male-bonding movies and watched The Hangover, Old School, Sideways, Step Brothers, and Tommy Boy. By the end of June, they had the entire treatment but not the ending. Gottlieb wasn’t sure whether the protagonist, Mikey Slotnick, should get his comeuppance. Andy said no, but Gottlieb was afraid the character would be too irredeemable by Hollywood standards if he didn’t pay a price.

  One morning when Gottlieb arrived at Andy’s apartment, Andy announced that he had cracked the ending. He said they should use All About Eve as a model. Mikey Slotnick starts to experience good luck after he’s ruined the life of his ex-tormentor Dirk Thomas. Andy’s idea was this: In the last scene, Mikey gets confronted by a young guy he tormented in high school, and he realizes that he wasn’t only bullied; he was a bully, too. Gottlieb loved the ending-as-beginning idea and thought it set them up perfectly for a sequel. They rewrote the final part of the treatment and polished it and e-mailed it to Topper just before they both left for Cape Cod.

  “So have you written anything that I might have seen?” Lisa asked him.

  “Probably not. I wrote this indie comedy awhile ago.”

  “Really? What’s it called?”

  “The Jilt.”

  “I know all about getting jilted,” she said. “Is it something I can rent?”

  “Yeah. It’s on Netflix . . .” he said, and then murmured, “. . . Instant.”

  There was a burst of movement by the shore. He heard a grown man’s shout, jarring among the giggles and jubilant yells from the kids. He saw Theo lifting Harry by the armpits. Oh God.

  Gottlieb raced over, making huge splashes as he ran. Harry coughed up water. Theo pounded him on the back, and then Harry wailed, an assuring, loud, clear-throated wail. “What happened?” Gottlieb shouted, grabbing Harry. Joanne and Rebecca were standing, looking panicked.

  “He wandered in,” Theo said with a frown. “Nobody was watching, and he went under.”

  “He was right in front of us,” Rebecca said, “and then he wasn’t.”

  Gottlieb could feel them blaming him. There was an unwritten rule of parenting that you were responsible for your own child unless you expressly instructed someone else to watch him. He hadn’t said anything to the women about watching Harry when he went out in the deeper area with Sam and Francine, and he should have. Harry was active, more mobile than Sam had been at that age. Of course he had wandered in. He wanted to be with his daddy and big brother. It had been stupid not to keep an eye on him.

  “How long was he under?” he asked Theo.

  “I don’t know,” Theo said. Andy was paddling in on his float. Joanne spoke to him in low, urgent tones.

  Gottlieb raced Harry onto the shore and wrapped him in a towel. His eyes seemed alert. He hugged the boy tightly, convinced that if he gave him enough attention now, it could make up for the attention he hadn’t paid before. “It’s all right,” he said, rubbing his son’s back. “It’s all right, big guy.”

  “I looked at the beach, and I didn’t see him,” Theo said, “and then he was waving his arms above his head.”

  The hot mom had come in with her daughter, plus Sam and Francine, and Gottlieb realized that he’d forgotten the older kids in the commotion, which only made him look more inept. “Is he okay?” Lisa asked.

  “Yeah, yeah. He went under, but he’ll be all right.”

  “Maybe you should take him to Outer Cape Health Services,” Rebecca said. It was an urgent-care center on Route 6, affili
ated with Mass General.

  “But he’s fine,” Gottlieb said. Harry was squirming out of his arms to play with a shovel. Even if they didn’t go to Health Services, he would have to tell CC. He could hear her angry tone, her lack of surprise that he had blown it with the kids.

  He felt guilty for having given the mom so much attention. Maybe Harry had orchestrated this, seen him out there with the tattooed hottie and gone in the water to get his attention, sensing a threat to his mother. Children were cock-blockers, perpetually halting the event that had facilitated their creation.

  What would he tell CC when she asked why he hadn’t noticed? If he told her he was talking to a woman, then she would wonder all sorts of things. He would never cheat on his wife, if only because he felt so certain she would know.

  Karen

  “That’ll be three seventy-five,” said the counter girl at the Sedutto stand on Governors Island.

  “Three seventy-five?” Karen Bryan asked incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “For a small?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t want a small!” Darby said. He was six and doughy, not a kid who needed larges. “I want a large! An extra-large.”

  “We don’t have kids’ sizes,” said the girl, who spoke with a hostile outer-borough accent.

  Karen rummaged in her wallet. All she had left were two singles and a little change. She’d burned through nearly all her cash in three hours on the island. “Do you take credit cards?” she asked.

  “Ten-dollar minimum.” A line was forming behind Karen. She felt like Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment. She looked over her shoulder to see whether John Lithgow might be there with extra cash to buy a cone for her, but as far back as she could see, it was nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.

  She’d been hemorrhaging money this summer—the most expensive time of year to be a parent. There was Garfield Temple camp tuition (twenty-five hundred dollars); the sprinkler she’d bought at Target so Darby could play on the stoop without dehydrating; summer clothes and trunks; the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar ConEd bill; day trips to Riis Park and Jones Beach with inherent junk food and parking costs; the farm at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills.