Sure, he’d been beaten as a child, locked in closets, burned with cigarettes, marked with a knife. He didn’t think too much about the specifics; they all too quickly became a boring, bathetic litany of horrors. It was the injustice that he remembered, the rage. The feeling he’d get when he read comic books, that if he could just turn all that injustice and rage into a rare and mystical power he could turn whole cities to dust.
Lisa was playing quietly with her doll again, oblivious to their difficulties. She always refused to put clothes on the thing, said she liked it better this way. Children were survivors. Jack himself had survived. He and Elaine had done okay with Lisa. She didn’t seem damaged.
Actually, what had seemed most unfair was the fact that Jack’s parents were such ordinary people. His mother kept a nice house. His father was a respected, small town lawyer. His parents argued, but not any more than others’.
Jack just didn’t do things right. It always came down to that. He had a younger brother, Billy. “Billy’s the kind of boy I like,” he heard his father tell a neighbor one time. “He does everything I want him to do.”
They stopped once to catch some sleep. Jack pulled off into a wooded area just across the Virginia border. It felt good to curl up with his daughter in his arms. Her soft breathing against his neck. She made him feel better, made some of the pain go away.
“You know it makes me mad when you cry like that,” his mother used to say. “But you just keep on and on.”
The painted features on Lisa’s doll had worn off a long time ago. For some reason that pleased her. She got her colored marking pens out and made new faces for the doll, a new one almost every week. It pleased her that she could make it wear any face she wanted. She gave it large eyes, a small nose, mouth a dark grim line. It had accidents, livid red wounds and blackened eyes, that sometimes took weeks to heal, that sometimes got worse. And after she’d rubbed the markings away you could see ghost impressions of the wounds. Every night before bed Lisa made sure the doll wore a long black smile.
“Now, you listen to me, Missy. You’re doing this on purpose!” Jack had almost fallen asleep at the wheel. He realized it was Lisa’s high-pitched scolding that brought him around. “It’s your own fault they hurt you!”
She was scarring the doll’s face vigorously up and down with the red marker, virtually obliterating its features.
“I assure you nothing like this has ever happened before in our school, Mr. West. Miss Reynolds is a fine teacher, one of our finest. And I know it won’t happen again.”
Jack wasn’t reassured, and in any case he had no desire to talk to Lisa’s principal. Like many heads of institutions, her main role was that of apologist for the staff, while pretending to give clients’ complaints a sympathetic ear. He’d seen enough of it over the years; adults loved to apologize for each other. It was as if they had to believe that everyone was well-meaning, and democratically equal in ability and honor.
He turned to Miss Reynolds, who sat slumped in a chair, one hand nervously brushing at a temple as if to rub evidence out of her thoughts. “You slapped my daughter, Miss Reynolds,” he said simply.
“I know. I feel terrible about it. It … it’s difficult to explain.” She twisted her hands together in a painful-looking contortion. Jack looked away.
“Look, I’m not trying to bulldoze you here. I’m not threatening a lawsuit. And I don’t think you’re a terrible person. I just want to know exactly what happened between you and my daughter.”
That seemed to make a difference. If anything, Miss Reynolds appeared overly anxious to unburden herself.
“Lisa is basically a lovely child,” she began. “Almost doll-like.” She paused, as if she realized she wasn’t getting to the point. “But she has a certain—stubbornness, I guess. You don’t realize it at first; it’s very subtle. But after a while you realize that she’s been doing just about whatever she pleases, and when you catch her, and give her a consequence, she’s terribly apologetic and, well, really too hard on herself about it. But then first thing you know it she’s back doing the same thing again. Punishments just won’t work for her; it’s like she wants them.”
Jack nodded. “Could you be more specific? It’s hard to know what you’re getting at.”
“I’m constantly telling her not to play with the blocks during reading group. But every day she gets up from her group table and walks over to the toy bin and gets them out. Then she sits down on the floor—she doesn’t play with them, just holds them. As if she were just waiting for me to punish her.”
“And what’s the usual punishment?”
“Oh, time out in the corner. But first thing I know she’s back at the toy box, sitting on the floor, the blocks in her hand. I’ll take away her recess time, or give her work to do, or try to distract her with another task. Nothing has ever worked. She says she’s sorry; she says she’s a bad person. Then she goes and does it again. Then sits there unmoving, like an old rag doll or something.”
“What happened today?”
“I … I suppose I was tired. I have this cold; I didn’t get much sleep last night. But I’m not making excuses; I know what I did was inexcusable. She’d been doing the thing with the blocks all day. So I thought I’d try ignoring her. It worked for a while; she didn’t know what to do. But then she started bringing the blocks over and dropping them into my lap. Then I didn’t know what to do. I moved her back to the corner, rather roughly, I’m afraid, and ordered her to sit still. This time she went back to the toy box, got the blocks, walked back to where I was conducting the reading group and dropped them on me again. Then stood there, waiting for me to punish her. I knew she’d found a new way, a new variation to get to me. Something happened to me then—I knew I couldn’t teach like that.”
Jack said very little the rest of the conference. He was careful to thank Miss Reynolds for being honest with him, and tried to say as little to the principal as possible. But the principal did manage to say one thing that got to him, in her condescending attempts to be nice and complimentary.
“She is a lovely child, Mr. West. A doll. She takes after her father.” She chuckled. “She’s just like a tiny version of you.”
Jack decided to find a hotel room in Indianapolis. They were both too tired to think straight, and at times Lisa seemed delirious. She had a cough, and he detected a little bit of fever. That scared him more than anything, because how could he dare take her to a doctor?
Rest might fix quite a few things. Besides, he needed the time to think. Stray ideas and images nagged him, but refused to fall into place.
It was a large hotel downtown. Jack paid for the room, momentarily leaving Lisa asleep in the car. He had parked in the hotel lot, at what he considered a safe distance from the other cars.
Then he ran back to the car and took Lisa up the back staircase. He had her wrapped in a blanket so that only her hand hung out, still clutching the mutilated cartoon-like doll covered with the colored markings.
There was no one in the corridor, so slipping her into the room was easy.
Elaine and Jack had had big plans for their little girl. She’d have ballet lessons, piano lessons, nothing but the best. All the things they had never had.
And Jack would treat her the way his parents had never treated him. She was his little doll; he couldn’t love her too much.
Lisa had a power like no one had ever seen before. It terrified people, shook them out of their complacency. Made them realize they were not the nice, well-meaning, normal people they thought they were.
As a child Jack wanted power, wanted to turn his rage into a magic that would make them all sorry they had been so unfair to him.
It wasn’t his fault. Even when he did things he knew he’d be punished for, it wasn’t his fault. Even when he did something and sat there waiting for them to beat him like some weakling, some passive rag doll, it wasn’t his fault. They didn’t have to accept the invitation.
Now his own daughter had power, and sur
ely there was something Jack could do with it. Make it work to their advantage. He just had to figure things out.
Lisa had smeared color on her fingers, her arms, her face. Like theatrical makeup, making her cheeks and mouth and eyes look as if they were bleeding.
Jack took the doll and dropped it on the floor. It gazed up at him, eyeless now, forehead and sockets and cheeks blended together with crimson. He propped Lisa’s head up on the pillow.
Then he went into the bathroom.
He was soaking a washrag for Lisa’s face when he first heard the rumbling. It sounded like thunder, but Jack remembered that the sky was clear.
He lathered the rag carefully with soap. The thunder was in the hall. He lathered and lathered until the pink washrag was almost completely white. There was a pounding of many fists and a scratching of many frenzied fingers and a screeching of a multitude of hysterical throats at their door.
He had to use plenty of soap; Lisa had so much color on her. And that wasn’t good for her. His beautiful daughter was a doll, his doll, and her skin was extremely delicate.
When the crashing and tearing began in the next room, the sounds so like animal sounds but still so human, so adult, Jack almost turned to see what was happening. He was crazy to think hiding her would work. Whatever she had was strong enough to draw them to the room. He didn’t turn to see what was happening. He couldn’t. He could not bring himself to walk into the bedroom, to see what all those adult fists and nails and teeth were doing to his beautiful little girl. Instead, he began thinking of numbers, arithmetic. He started wondering how many guests a hotel of this size could hold, and how many of them could fit into that one little room, taking turns, fighting each other in their mystical need to get to that small broken form on the bed. And soon he could no longer wonder at all. Soon he could scarcely think.
He had to get the rag just right, the right amount of soap, and just the right temperature. He’d always wanted to be the perfect parent. He loved Lisa very much. And it must have worked out; she was so well-behaved. Even now; her love for him filled him with such satisfaction, the sense that all wrongs had been righted. Vengeance had finally come. Such power. Such good behavior.
She hadn’t even cried.
LITTLE CRUELTIES
He had changed. Sometimes he didn’t recognize himself. His voice sounded wrong—the timbre was unfamiliar, the vocabulary wasn’t his, the opinions were unrecognizable. And he did things he could not have imagined.
Again and again, Paul came back to the incident with the chicks. It had been only a little thing, a small cruelty. Something he could never feel proud of, certainly, but not an act that deserved such intense shame. Ten years ago, for Christ’s sake. Joey had been only five. He couldn’t have taken care of the chicks, anyway. He wasn’t old enough. He was old enough for resentment, however. He’d always been old enough for that.
It had been their last Easter in the old house. Joey had wanted chicks. Paul had explained very carefully how they had no place to keep pets like that in the city—their yard was too small, and he didn’t want animals smelling up the basement or the garage. They had a nice old urban home; they didn’t live on a farm, for Christ’s sake. And he was too little to take proper care of them anyway. Mom or Dad would end up taking care of them and that wasn’t very fair, now was it?
Joey had cried so much that weekend that Eve had finally given in, going out the Saturday before Easter and coming back with the three yellow chicks. Paul hadn’t even known about it until Joey’d brought the basket in for him to see, all excited and thanking him profusely, climbing up on his lap—basket and chicks tipping precariously—to kiss him sloppily on the cheek.
Paul had been furious, but he couldn’t say no. Joey was too excited. Besides, Paul couldn’t let himself be the bad guy.
It snowed in April that year. Freakishly late, and heavy. The yard and the hill behind the house were white ice. The chicks were sick, losing feathers, near death. Joey had failed to take care of them, just as Paul had predicted. He didn’t take any pleasure in that; it was just simple fact.
They were suffering. Paul felt terrible about it—it was his responsibility. He was Joey’s father, after all. He had to do the right thing. He got up at dawn, dressed warmly, and sneaked into Joey’s bedroom to get the chicks. They were so sick, he would take pains to remember, that they barely made any noise when he picked up the box. Joey was dead to the world, the covers twisted tightly around his legs. Paul stopped for a moment, set the chicks down, and freed his son.
He walked up the slight hill in his heavy winter boots, the ice-covered snow crackling with each step. The chicks began to shiver, but remained silent. When he reached the top of the hill he found he couldn’t go any farther, and he also couldn’t see himself setting the chicks gently down into the snow. It was a failure of nerve. He’d wanted to do the right thing. He suddenly tossed the box over to the other side and turned away. A cat, maybe a dog, would take care of them.
On his way back into the house he thought about fraternity pranks he’d heard about in college. Pig embryos left in a sorority house. Dead dogs mailed to opposing football coaches. A snowball of frozen chicks. But he’d wanted to do the right thing.
It was ridiculous to think that the death of chicks might diminish him somehow.
Paul told Joey that the chicks had died during the night and that he’d disposed of them. The boy cried most of the next day. “I wanted to bury ’em,” he’d said between sniffles. “They were mine.”
“It’s too cold outside. The ground’s frozen.”
“Then how did you do it?”
Paul couldn’t look him directly in the eyes. “I’m a grownup man. I can shovel better than you can.”
“I don’t think I believe you. You buried ’em? Good?” His son moved closer. Paul never failed to be surprised, almost appalled, by the directness of the little boy.
“Yes, I … I buried them.” From the way Joey nodded, Paul knew he’d believed that, at least at the moment. But the doubt was still obviously latent in his son.
Paul was up at dawn the next day, raking gloved fingers through the top layers of snow that still covered the shaded hill. Every few minutes he found a clump of wet mud and leaves, or dog shit masquerading as one of the rancid little corpses, but the dead chicks eluded him. He thought maybe he’d been lucky and a neighborhood animal had in fact eaten them or dragged them away.
He gave up when he saw Joey’s bedroom light come on. In a few minutes the child would be down in the family room for his morning cartoons.
Later Paul would think that all these actions were not normal for him. If he’d just had time to think about it, plan it out, then maybe he would have behaved better. As it was, he could not recognize himself. He could not fully accept the things he was doing.
Two days after the thaw, he saw Joey playing with the desiccated chick corpses in the backyard, passing them from hand to hand like lumps of gray modeling clay. Paul had to restrain himself from going out and stopping it, from explaining how dead things bore germs, how dead things might make a little boy sick.
Joey had to know what his father had done. But they never talked about it; neither of them could even bring it up. Paul had just wanted to do the right thing.
What Joey would never understand, what none of them seemed to understand, was how much it pained Paul to hurt his son. It happened too often, he knew, and always in such little ways, but it wasn’t as if he wanted the hurt to happen. He just couldn’t stop the little cruelties from happening to Joey (even when he seemed to be so much a part of them), any more than he could stop the little cruelties from happening to himself. Sometimes Paul didn’t understand the situation, and so Joey was punished unnecessarily. Sometimes Paul did something—like take a particular toy away from his son, or deny him a trip to a neighbor’s house, or devise a particular kind of punishment—that was meant to help the child grow up. But sometimes it backfired, and on reminiscence it appeared to be a cruel thing.
But Paul had tried to do the right thing-—he’d done the best he could. That was the way of things; that was the way the world usually worked. For Christ’s sake—he loved his son.
In any case, the city was no place for animals.
Sometimes he imagined he heard his son crying in the night.
Little cruelties. It was the small malevolences, the tiny hatefulnesses, the lesser portions of ruthlessness which had always made Paul’s life in the city seem a little sour, and which finally led him to move his family out of the old house on Parker Street.
Joey hadn’t wanted to go—all his friends were there, friends he’d be starting first grade with. Paul tried to be reasonable, but how many close friends could a six-year-old have, anyway?
Eve hadn’t liked the idea either, but was willing to go along with whatever Paul thought was right.
Paul had no doubts.
He didn’t know what it was about the city that made people act the way they did—whether it was because of overcrowding (he thought often of those experiments in which mice were packed into a confined space), or lack of contact with the ground (you spent 99 percent of your time on concrete or asphalt), or the deterioration in municipal services (on how many mornings was the first thing he smelled garbage?), or some sort of degeneration of the species. But every day he saw more and more tense people, more and more crazy people.
He saw people trapped in the middle of traffic jams, going berserk when someone cut in front of them—ramming the other car repeatedly with their own, getting out and trying to drag the other driver out through a window.
He had neighbors who couldn’t keep a sprinkler head, or a hose, or even a trash can for more than a few months at a time, before it was stolen or destroyed. Security lights didn’t make any difference, and small nightly destructions had become so commonplace you didn’t bother to distinguish the sounds.
Every day someone was insulted. Saying it made it sound banal, but Paul had become convinced that the little insults people had to endure each day—the “We can’t do it, it’s not procedure,” delivered by a minor government official, the “How many other stores have you stuck?” from some anonymous bill collector on the phone, the “You have to do something about your weight,” from an employer—were dragging people down gradually to the level of the animals. People stepped on you, and there really wasn’t a lot you could do without getting yourself into a great deal of trouble.
City Fishing Page 12
