In the Middle of All This

by Fred G. Leebron

  “How is she?” Lauren asked, while Max swatted the air at a rainfall of Tootsie Rolls thrown from the trailing car of Potterstown tap-dance sponsors.

  “The same.” He wasn’t cold and he wasn’t bored, but still Martin wanted to ask if they could go.

  “Could you hold him for a while?”

  He took Max. “Kiss for Daddy?” he whispered. The boy pursed his lips and Martin held his cheek out, and the boy pressed his face to him.

  “Fire truck!” His son’s body jerked in his arms, hooked by the red blare, and the boy twisted for a better view. Martin could still feel the wet lip imprint on his cheek. It was awful to love your kids so much. It made you fear and dread death in ways you never had before. A friend of a friend who had been medically sentenced to a fast fade had pulled his two little girls from school and spent the last year of his life tied up with them in the living room, soaking them in. At the time Martin, a new father, had condemned the man’s selfishness. Now he felt only terrified.

  “Martin.”

  He turned to find the colleague who tormented them and her husband, the dean of retention, smiling obligingly. At his and Lauren’s interview dinner this woman had leaned across the table toward them, and cleared her throat. “You need to know we live in a river valley,” she’d said in her slight Austrian accent. “Your children will be sick throughout the year with pneumonia and bronchitis.” “This is supposed to be a recruitment dinner,” Ruben had put in, before Martin or Lauren could respond. “Why don’t you just tell them we’ve all grown radioactive from the nuclear power plant?” Now Martin could feel the various elements of his personality shutting down one by one: emotion, honesty, wit. He was all defense. Witch was so rooted in his mind as who she was that he could not recall the word for her name.

  “Annka,” he finally managed. “Arnold.” He offered a hand to the dean, a genial guy who had somehow stayed married to Annka for thirty-two years.

  “And this is?” Arnold pointed jovially at the back of the boy’s head.

  “Max.” Martin forced the boy around in greeting. “Say hello, Max.”

  “Fire truck,” Max said, wrestling back to catch the last of it.

  “So how are you, Martin.” Annka gave a pointy-chinned smile.

  “Fine, fine.” He jostled Max, almost using the boy’s torso as a shield.

  “This is a hard year for you, isn’t it,” she said keenly. “What with your review and your sister? A lot going on, huh?”

  “No,” he lied, “not really.” They rarely spoke, even though Annka was the other co-chair of the department. If there were no witnesses, she passed them in the halls as if they did not exist.

  “Happy to have the bastards back, are you?” Arnold teased.

  “The students? Sure, why not.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He popped him playfully on the shoulder.

  “How is your sister?” Again Annka’s sharp sympathy was intent on finding something to pierce.

  “Stable. She’s stable.”

  “Good. That’s really good, Martin.” She touched him briefly on the elbow, and he moved back, making sure she did not touch the boy. “And so good to talk to you.”

  “You, too,” he said.

  Already they were promenading down the sidewalk arm in arm, their heads practically touching, as they murmured whatever people like them murmur to each other. He held the boy close.

  “You all right?” Lauren said, reappearing from wherever she’d hidden herself.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  They set Max in his stroller, his eyes glazing as he chomped on a Tootsie Roll, and headed for the car. Martin and Lauren nodded at David and Cindy Lazlo, who indifferently waved to them, as Martin’s throat tightened. In the word colleague, he was certain, was an element of the noose, the collar.

  “Ride,” Max said, when they’d pulled into the garage and he’d hit the button to close them in. He took up Max and carried him inside and upstairs, while in the kitchen he could hear Lauren readying the bedtime snack. Easily—it would be one of those times when Max would let it be easy—he laid the boy on the torn pad of the changing table and took off his shoes and socks, his trousers and diaper.

  “Candy,” Max sang. “Cannnndeeee.” He didn’t seem to want any more, he just liked knowing that it was now in the house with them.

  “Who’s my boy?” Martin said. “Are you my boy? Who’s my boy?” He dabbed ointment on his bottom and diapered him, slipped him into pajamas. “Ride?” he offered.

  “Want to walk,” Max said.

  Martin stood him on the floor and the boy ran on tiptoes to the stairs, took each banister spindle in his hand as he stepped his way down, the hair on the top of his head fluffing up with static, his cheeks looking as if they were full of lollipops. Every time Martin looked at him, he just wanted to hold him, hold him, hold him. Let me go, Max was always saying. Lemme go. He was only two, for chrissakes.

  “Run around?” Max asked hopefully, his eyes turned up at him at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Okay.”

  Teehee, the boy choked, teehee, as they chased through the living room and over a corner of the kitchen and up the front hall past the stairs and into the living room and around again. And again. He kept waiting for Lauren to scold him about getting Max all worked up before bedtime, but she was doing something that he couldn’t make out. When he came around the fourth time on the boy’s heels, he saw the snack plate on the clean counter but he didn’t see her. Then she stepped from the little bathroom, and her eyes were red and she still had a clump of tissue in her hand. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. He pulled up short, the boy instantly squealing, stopping, too, and pulling at his leg.

  “What?” he said to her.

  “Nothing.” She sniffled, gave a sour laugh. “Elizabeth left a message.” She swallowed. “She sounded pretty upset.”

  “All right,” he said slowly. It was too late to call her.

  “She didn’t say anything in particular.” She took the sponge and wiped the clean counter. “She just sounded awful.”

  He looked at her, the boy still squawking. “Could you take him so I can listen to it?”

  “You won’t sleep,” she said.

  Outside, someone knocked at the door and Max raced to answer it, and Sarah fell through, laughing, her friend’s father red-faced and glowing behind her in the night cold. Martin had enviously smelled booze at the parade.

  “Pleasure, pleasure.” The father waved at them, as he backed himself into the night. “Kids had a wunnerful time.”

  “Thank you,” Martin and Lauren both called.

  “Thank you!” Max said.

  Then the door shut, and the two of them were alone in the house with the answering machine and the woundup, sugar-struck children.

  “Go on up and get ready for bed, honey,” Lauren said gently.

  “Do I have to? Grace’s family was gonna go home and stay up and make popcorn and stuff.”

  “NOW!” Martin roared, his own anger stunning him.

  Sarah’s face flushed and crumpled, and she hustled upstairs. Max whimpered.

  “What was that all about?” Lauren wanted to know.

  “I want to listen to the message,” Martin said quietly, trying to reach for the boy, who swayed immediately away. “She’s my sister.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said.

  “Now,” he said.

  But the answering machine was in the kitchen, and Max was in the kitchen and Lauren was in the kitchen, and Lauren set Max in his chair and sat with her back to Martin and began to read, and he wanted to rip out the answering machine and carry it away and slam the door and listen in utter peace. Carefully he undid the wire from the phone and unplugged the machine from the wall and took it into the study, his face furiously blushing, he felt so embarrassed and ashamed and upset. He softly shut the door and plugged the machine in and sat on the futon sofa and set the device on his lap and hit PLAY.

  “Bad meeting with Sparks,”
she was saying, as if she’d begun to talk before the machine had cued the cassette. “I asked her about adopting a child, and she said absolutely not. I can’t seem to …” Now she was gently sobbing. “I can’t seem to have anything I want. I just want a child. Really that’s all I want, and Richard is never here.” Steadying breaths. “It’s all right. I’m all right. Doing fine, really. Call when you can. Bye.”

  Nothing in particular? He thought that was pretty particular. He yanked the plug from the wall and sat without any red or green light blinking at him. She should just leave Richard, but he could never tell her that. Sometimes you just had to hold on tight as the world fell out from under you and all you had was nothing, nothing. Lie to yourself, he coached his students when they tried to understand a leper colony or female circumcision. Tell yourself that it’s the everyday. And then you can see it better. Then you can embrace it and be with it, even if fundamentally you can’t accept it. But that advice was more naive than they were.

  He and Lauren were observer-participants. Each summer they traveled to a culture to live in it: the basket weavers in the Carolina low country, the snake handlers in the Kentucky hills. But back home every fall, they played their interview tapes and studied their notes and wrote their articles. When Elizabeth had first called to tell him what the bone specialist had found, when he’d sat on the stairs with the phone to his ear and the children swirling through the living room and Lauren gone at the office and she’d said, It isn’t good, and he’d felt the stairs through his jeans, felt the air through his shirt, his forehead, he saw it in his head, a wall going up between them, she over there in London, not good, dying, he over here, safe, kids for the moment healthy, wife for the moment healthy, he for the moment healthy, watching that wall go up, shutting her out as if she were just another project—What exactly are you saying? Can it be managed?—his voice as formal as a teacher’s, the children churning, tugging, wringing him, and finally he tore at the wall. How is Richard? he said. Richard is shattered, she said. And he said, I don’t know what to say, I am so sorry, what can I do, I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything.

  “So what do you want to do?” she said.

  They were lying in bed, the room as dark as the inside of his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can do it, you know. I can do it. I’d be glad to do it.”

  “It’s not about you being glad to do it. It’s not about you being able to do it. It’s doing,” he grimaced at the cliché he was about to let escape, “what’s right. What we ought to do.”

  “It’s what we ought to do,” she said.

  “Have their fucking baby? She didn’t ask us to have their fucking baby.”

  “We can do it,” she replied quietly.

  “I don’t even know Richard. Richard is still too much of a mystery.”

  “So you’re saying she’s going to die.” Her voice was bitter, reproachful.

  “What else do you expect me to say? Shit, we’re all gonna die.”

  “If we told them we could do it, they’d leap at it.”

  “It is too fucked up,” he said.

  “This whole thing,” she said, “is fucked up. Maybe if we talked to your mother or Martha …”

  He groaned. Martha was so surrounded by her own sacrifices that she couldn’t possibly attend to anyone else’s. His mother?

  “We’re going awfully fast here.”

  “It will take nine months,” was all she said.

  He got up, his bedside scotch glass empty, and went to the window and drew up the shade. It was so late that even the streetlamps in front of the school were off, just the one mustardy light at the corner still lit. From the dark school yard came hollow echoes of practically invisible guys playing basketball. Why the hell were they always there? How often he’d stood here trying to see them, only hearing the thump of the ball and a call or a shout. Mornings, he’d look out at the little kids who got dumped off early each day, waiting under the overhang out of the rain and the dark, or improvising solitary games in the slow sun, or cupping their hands to their mouths, holding momentary clouds to their small, cold faces.

  “Martin,” she said from the bed, where he could now clearly see the pale shape of her face, the pallor of her bare elbows. “We have to do something.”

  “All right.” He looked up at the empty night sky as if wishing to be struck by anything that could take him outside of himself. “I’ll figure it out.”

  In the morning they stood on the sidelines with all the other parents and grandparents and toddlers and cheered the Possum eight-and-under girls as they kicked the ball up and down the field against the Raccoon team. Max kept trying to run onto the field, and they kept holding him back, his feet striking at their shins. Two fathers, who in their high school football jerseys and baseball caps might have been brothers, lurched in front of them and bellowed happily at their daughters. Then one of them pulled out a dollar bill and waved it.

  “If you get a goal, Ashley,” he shouted into the field, “I’ll take you to McDonald’s.”

  “Hey, Shawna,” the other guy hollered, dangling a dollar bill of his own, “score and I’ll give you this.”

  The two men turned to each other and threw back their heads and laughed.

  Lauren took up Max, and with Martin they sidled off to where a set of grandparents sagged, sipping coffee as they took in the action.

  “There she goes,” Lauren said quietly, and she and Martin watched as Sarah skipped to the ball, hopped at it instead of kicked, and skipped back to position.

  “Would you just look at that kid,” the old guy next to Martin snorted to the old woman as he nodded at Sarah. “She can’t even kick the ball. She doesn’t even know where she is.”

  “Why don’t you—,” Martin started, but Lauren was already pulling him away.

  “So she’s no good at soccer,” Lauren said. “It’s no big deal.”

  “No kidding,” he said.

  But it was also how Sarah was with the trainer bike and the trainer roller skates she’d asked for and gotten in the summer—she tried them once and then refused to have anything further to do with them. I’m going to be the oldest girl in the world who can’t ride a bike, she’d declared. They could never tell whether she just couldn’t do much of anything, or she wouldn’t. Across the field she ran, her arms flapping and her knees knocking into each other. When the whistle blew, Martin felt only relief that the game was over. Once, Lazlo had been out watching his goddaughter play, and Martin told him he was worried about Sarah’s development. For a moment Lazlo had watched her silently, then he turned and ran his eyes over Martin. “You know, Marty,” he said. “I bet you weren’t terribly athletic yourself.”

  Lauren touched his hand.

  “You’re letting it get to you,” she said.

  At the Wal-Mart afterward Lauren let Max and Sarah ride the fifty-cent spaceship while Martin ran in and bought a new cassette for the answering machine. Once home he lifted out the cassette with Elizabeth’s message and put it in the accordion file folder with the printed copies of all the e-mails she’d sent him in the last year and all the Internet research he’d done for her and all the info and receipts and tickets for the London trips past and future. Then he went outside and raked while Sarah climbed around the plastic slide set and inside Max sedated himself with television and Lauren cleaned the house. When he was sick of raking leaves, he climbed the breezeway stairs and stood the rake in the garage and walked into the kitchen and took up the phone.

  He dialed the work number first because that was where his mother always was. She couldn’t escape it, and often it seemed to him she didn’t want to—it was the only thing she could trust to be unending.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Hello, me. I see you found my hiding place.”

  “Elizabeth left a message last night.”

  He swore he could feel her tighten before she even said any
thing. “And?”

  “I don’t know. She was having a miserable week.” He took a breath. He tried to tell her what Elizabeth had said. Then he said, “Of course Richard was probably at one of his Epiphany things, and that couldn’t have helped—”

  “She should just move back here,” his mother said.

  “Well, whatever. I think we need a plan.”

  “You’re not serious,” his mother said. “She doesn’t want to have any plan from us. She’s so good at tending to herself. All that alternative junk she does—”

  “You are so judgmental,” he said.

  “Me, judgmental? Me judgmental!” He heard her voice climbing and choking. “How about the fact that she blames me for all of this? If it wasn’t how I raised her, it was how I fed her. If it wasn’t how I fed her, it was what I took when I was pregnant with her. Don’t you call me judgmental—”

  “She said that to you?”

  “She says that to me every time I talk to her. Every time. She says it helps her to let everything out whenever she feels it.”

  “Oh,” he said. He sighed. “So what do you think?”

  “What do I think?” his mother said. “Why should it matter what I think? You know what I think. It’s too … too … it’s just too impossible. Richard’s never there. She’s doing only unconventional stuff. I think it’s very …” She was groping for words. “Very desperate, I guess. What do you think?” she said.

  He shook his head, as if she could see him. “I think there are more sides to this than we’ll ever know.”

  “Well, no kidding. There’s the other line. Was there anything else?”

  “How’s Dad?” he remembered to ask, his father’s own slow-moving, late-in-life cancer like a kind of overdue bill Martin too easily continued to allow to slip his mind.