“It’s still sleepy time,” I mutter. “Is it time to wake up, Daddy?” “Not yet.” Miraculously, she falls back to sleep.
5:45. It’s still dark outside. I wake up to find Quinn standing in her pink slippers at our tent door, which she has unzipped. “Matts!” she shouts. “Are you awake?” I hear a cry from a distant tent: “Quinn. I’m awake! Are you awake?” “Matts!” shouts Quinn again. “I’m awake! I’m awake!”
Forty-five minutes later, the four of us are all stumbling off to a breakfast of Sugar Pops. John, if anything, looks worse than I feel. And yet neither of us feels deterred; the evening went pretty much as we’d expected. “I just heard that they do this at the Oakland Zoo,” he says.
“When’s that?” I hear myself saying.
THE SECOND RULE of fatherhood is that if everyone in the room is laughing, and you don’t know what they’re laughing about, they are laughing about you. A few months ago when I dropped Quinn off at school I had that peculiar fatherhood feeling of having just discovered in a crowded room that my fly was unzipped. From the moment I walked into her classroom, my mere presence seemed to remind her three lady teachers of some impossibly funny joke. They choked back giggles and turned away and pretended to be very busy organizing the dinosaurs in the sandbox and counting the graham crackers in the box. After a couple of days of this I finally asked one of them what was going on, and while she said, “Oh, nothing,” she meant, “You don’t want to know.” But her smile was indulgent; whatever I had done evidently had caused no offense. I should have just let it drop. Instead, I sent in my wife to investigate.
“They wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was,” she said, when she’d returned from fetching Quinn from school. “But it has something to do with something Quinn said about your…”
“About my what?” I asked.
She looked pained.
“About my what?”
“About your penis.”
“That’s all you can tell me?”
“That’s it.”
That evening, as I showered, Quinn rushed into the bathroom. This in itself wasn’t unusual. It’s a hobby of hers to open the shower door and spray water all over the bathroom. She likes to watch her naked father wash the soap from his eyes with one hand and prevent a flood with the other. But this time she also had something she wanted to say.
“Daddy has a small penis!” she shouted.
The phrase came a bit too trippingly off her tongue. Clearly, it wasn’t the first time she’d said it. I squinted down at her, menacingly, through soap bubbles.
“What?”
She took it up as a chant.
“Daddy has a small penis!
“Daddy has a small penis!
“Daddy has a small penis!”
As the little vixen spun out of control, I considered my options. To protest at all was to protest too much. I was as trapped as an elephant in quicksand or a politician in a gossip column. Anything I did or said in response would only make matters worse. Really, there were only two choices, silence or laughter, and so I laughed—mainly because stoicism is impossible when your three-year-old daughter is hurling insults more or less directly at your privates. “Ha ha ha,” I said, with what I hoped sounded like detached amusement. Sure enough, Quinn instantly lost interest in the whole subject.
Surprisingly quickly, my mere presence ceased to amuse her teachers. My vanity soon recovered, as it always does, and I’d very nearly forgotten all about the incident. But then, last week, as I walked through Quinn’s classroom door, the giggles resumed.
I went straight to my wife.
“Yes, they’re all laughing at you,” she said. “But it’s only because of the way you dress your daughter.”
Since Dixie was born three months ago, it has been my job to dress Quinn. I had heretofore regarded my performance of this duty, and indeed any other duty I happen to perform, as little short of heroic.
“How do they know I dress her?” I asked.
“Because when you were out of town last week, I dressed her. And when she walked into school last week they all said, ‘Mama must have dressed you today!’”
“What’s wrong with how I dress her?”
“Oh, please.”
“She looks fine when I dress her.”
“She looks like a street person.”
“Look,” I said, pointing to Quinn’s room. “There’s a war in there every morning. I do the best I can.”
“It’s a war because she knows you don’t know what you’re doing.”
You might think that I would have come away from this conversation relieved. It obviously could have been much, much worse. But a similar nerve had been struck, the one that is somehow more fully exposed in the male who must constantly defend his self and habits in a house of females. There was a time not very long ago when I didn’t think twice of wearing the same hiking shorts for a week at a stretch, or even once of going a year wearing only the shirts that happened to be stacked on top. This was not sloth; this was not indolence; it was efficiency. A minute more spent dressing than was absolutely required was a minute wasted.
In the three months that her appearance has been my problem I have done my best to instill Quinn with the same ideals. “Daddy, I’m awake!” she screams at some bleak hour when she is the first in the house to rise. I stumble painfully over the barricades and into her room and throw clothes on her before she has a chance to wake up everyone else, too. It’s true that I’m not thinking much about what clothes I’m throwing on her, but that’s because she’s three years old. She’s not supposed to care how she looks, so long as she does not look wildly dissimilar to every other three-year-old. Plus, my theory is that so long as she’s dressed to get dirty, the way small children are meant to, no one will notice that I haven’t the first clue how to do her hair.
But a fact is a fact and I can’t deny this one: In the past month or so, Quinn has become increasingly difficult for me to dress. Every morning for a month the first conversation I’ve had with her has sounded like this:
“Daddy, I want to wear a party dress.”
“It’s cold outside. Brrrrrrr! You should wear pants.”
“I don’t waaaaaaant toooo!”
“But I’m wearing pants!” (Spoken cheerily.)
“No! I hate you!”
With which she collapses howling in the corner of her closet, forehead pressed into the carpet like a Muslim at prayer. It’s been an odd experience. Quinn has throughout this difficult period acquiesced happily to her mother’s aesthetic judgment, but the moment I walk into her dressing room she revolts. If it’s forty-five degrees and foggy, she insists on wearing a skimpy dress. If it’s eighty degrees and sunny, she demands wool tights. When a day calls for pants and a T-shirt (as every day does, in my view), she calls for her hula-dancing costume and hollers until she gets it. By my lights, she is wildly unreasonable. By the lights of the women in her life, her mother and her teachers, she has finally and justifiably decided to resist my incompetence.
I have a tendency to prove, at least to myself, that whatever I happened to do in any given situation was exactly the right thing to have done. (Small penis syndrome, my wife now calls this.) This time, I surrender to a force greater than my opinion and try a new approach.
“I want to wear a party dress.”
“Sure! Pick a dress!”
“Okay, Daddy! And Daddy, I want to wear Mama’s lip gloss.”
“Sure!”
“Great, Daddy!”
And from there it couldn’t have gone more smoothly, except that the party dress hangs awkwardly, the lip gloss winds up as face paint, and her hair remains far outside my abilities to cope with. The truth is Quinn doesn’t look any better than she did when I muscled her into pants and a T-shirt. The origin of vanity is not the desire to be admired by others but the need to be in charge. The other thing just follows from it.
I ONCE WENT to visit Roald Dahl at his home in the English countryside. The author of C
harlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and other macabre tales for children had just publicly denounced The Satanic Verses as an irresponsible piece of self-promotion. He didn’t exactly endorse the fatwa that had just been issued against Salman Rushdie, but he came close, and I used this as an excuse to go and talk to him. He wasn’t well—he was more or less confined to an upholstered chair and wasn’t long for this world—but he could not have been better company. I remember next to nothing of what he said about Rushdie. What I recall was lunch. Several Dahls gathered, and a plate of ham cold cuts arrived at the table. Dahl said something about how closely the cold cuts resembled human flesh, and how he once thought of writing a story about children who are served cold cuts from the corpse of a missing friend. I expected someone at the table to complain, but instead his daughter giggled and told a story about how she had witnessed, firsthand, a butcher slice off his palm while running a shank of ham over a meat slicer. She went on to describe, to the delight of the entire family, how the slice of butcher’s flesh fit perfectly on top of the stack of ham. Exactly like the ham we were about to eat! Sixty seconds into the meal the Dahls were vying to outgross each other with tales of severed limbs and pulsing pink flesh, while happily munching ham sandwiches. With the possible exception of Mrs. Dahl, the entire family had preserved into adulthood a childlike delight in the grotesque.
Once you have a small child you can see the full appeal of the Dahlian imagination. To a small child the adult world is grotesque. For a start, it’s all ridiculously out of proportion: To a child every grown-up is a monster. Then there are all these events that occur in the grown-up world that a child, in trying to get her mind around them, distorts wildly. I went out of town on business last week. “Are you going on an airplane?” Quinn asked, before I left. “Yes,” I said. “Are you going to an airport?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Are they going to put chickens in your luggage?” she asked. I had to think about that one. Then it struck me: check-in luggage/ chickens in the luggage. How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child’s vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.
I had taken Quinn to a birthday party around the corner from our house in Berkeley. The highlight of the birthday party was to be the appearance of Mickey Mouse. Mickey was meant to be kept a secret. The children would gather and play for a bit and then Mickey Mouse would burst through the doors and surprise everyone. But it’s hard to keep a secret, especially a good one, from Quinn, as it is so tempting to use any prospective treat as a bribe. To coax her into her car seat I had told her that if she ceased to struggle she would get to meet Mickey Mouse. In the flesh. She seemed pleased by the idea.
We arrived at the birthday party. Quinn overcame the shyness she always experiences when she enters a crowded room and was soon playing with the other children. But there is no such thing as equilibrium in a room full of toddlers; something bad is always about to happen; and what happened was that the father of the birthday girl came over to say there was a problem with Mickey. The company that farmed out Mickey to children’s birthday parties had just phoned: Mickey was ill. The company had called around looking for a substitute. They had found one, but he lived six hours away. He was on his way, but he’d be late.
You had to admire the commitment. In six hours you can get from our house in Berkeley to Reno, Nevada. Some poor guy who lived, in effect, in Reno had tossed his Mickey Mouse costume in the trunk of his car in the wee hours of that morning and was now hauling ass across the country to humor a room full of three-year-olds. And he wasn’t even the real Mickey Mouse. He was an understudy.
An hour or so later Quinn was off on one side of a large deck playing with a dollhouse. The other kids and adults mingled on the other side. I was munching a raw carrot and glancing across the deck every four seconds to ensure Quinn hadn’t fallen off. Suddenly, onto the deck, between Quinn and everyone else, burst Mickey Mouse. He wore all the official gear. But still there was something off about him. In the first place, he wasn’t alone. Trailing him was a ghoulish assistant, clutching balloons and sweating so profusely that one of the children turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, the man went swimming!” Together the two of them looked as if they had jogged, not driven, from Reno.
But the real problem was Mickey himself. He wasn’t the cute little Mickey you think of when you think of Mickey Mouse. He was a large man, stuffed into a small costume that didn’t quite fit. His giant mouse head tilted this way then that, as if partially severed. His white gloves failed to disguise the thick black hair on the backs of his hands. Even his black mouse slacks looked to be loaners; bending over hurriedly to greet the first child he saw, he flashed a rear, vertical smile. The first child he saw was Quinn.
I tried to imagine this scene from Quinn’s point of view. The fact is that while she had pretended to be delighted that she was going to meet Mickey Mouse, she had never actually heard of the creature. God knows what she thought she was getting into, but it wasn’t a six-foot rodent with a greaseball sidekick. Instantly—so quickly that Mickey didn’t have a chance to lay his hairy mitts on her—her face dissolved in terror and she began to scream. Not a playful scream. A Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho scream. I raced across the deck, clutched her in my arms, and spent the next five minutes consoling her. When she’d calmed down she squirmed away from me and ran into the house.
“Where are you going?” I hollered after her.
“To find Mickey Mouse!” she said.
For the next hour or so she enjoyed Mickey Mouse in a way that was new to me and I assume also to Mickey. Mickey Mouse, to Quinn, was not an endearing character. He was a serial killer. This was Disney with a twist of lime. She’d sneak right up to him and then, when he noticed her, dash away screaming bloody murder. It was strange to see. Her mother and father can’t bear scary movies, and I’ll bet money that when she grows up she won’t like them, either. But in her current state of mind she likes nothing more than the toddler equivalent of a horror flick. If she weren’t so much like every other small child, she’d be considered insane.
ONE OF THE many surprising things to me about fatherhood is how it has perverted my attitude toward risk. It is true that there are many kinds of risk—emotional, social, financial, physical. But I can’t think of any I enjoy taking more than I did before I had children—unless you count the mere fact of having children as a kind of celebration of emotional risk. Otherwise, I’m rapidly becoming a wimp. There are little risk-averse things I do now that I never did before and little risk-averse feelings that I have now that I never had before. To wit:
Item: The other night Tabitha and I went to see Minority Report. It’s the sort of movie that just a few years ago I would have cheered and Tabitha would have at least tolerated. But in the middle of the film a small child is abducted from a public swimming pool. That was enough to ruin it for Tabitha and to make me feel we ought to just skip dinner afterward and go home and make sure nothing terrible had happened to our children. This is obviously neurotic. I don’t know a single case of a small child being kidnapped at a public swimming pool in Berkeley, California, while her father holds his breath underwater, much less from her bed at night while being guarded by babysitters. But I am no longer rational on this subject. My emotions are easily manipulated by cheap dramatic tricks involving the suffering of small children, and by the current media hysteria about what is in fact an ordinary rate of child murders. I think I could still sit through the scene in Richard III when the villain has the two little princes smothered in their beds. Anything closer to twenty-first-century American life ruins my day.
Item: I no longer enjoy rolling the dice in the stock market. I never enjoyed it all that much, but what pleasure I took in it vanished with Quinn’s arrival—well before the stock market collapsed. With her arrival, for the first time in my life,
I began to worry a bit about money. I have no reason to worry about money, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it. When people talk about the mood in the financial markets they tend to assume that the market drives that mood. But of course it doesn’t, not entirely. A few years ago a piece in the Michigan Medical Journal argued that the reason the Internet bubble reached such ridiculous heights was that huge numbers of investors were now taking drugs that lowered their inhibitions. With a third of the U.S. investing population on Prozac or some other mood-enhancing drug, the paper concluded, it was no wonder that so many people believed the market would simply keep rising.
Small children are also a mood-altering substance with financial consequences. Their effect on the human mind is the opposite of Prozac. At any rate, my own current financial taste for cash and bonds seems to be at least partly a response to parenthood.
Item: I am no longer as open as I once was to helping out people I don’t know, especially when those people need a bath. Several times a week I have a vaguely hostile response to a stranger that I would not have had if I didn’t have children—for instance, when I see a bum loitering in the park near our house. I find it less amusing than I once did when people knock on my front door to ask me to join some religion or sign some petition. I used to pick up hitchhikers every now and again, but I wouldn’t think of doing it today. In general, the probability that I will extend myself to a stranger in need, always slight, is now zero.
Item: Not long after our first child was born, but well before September 11, 2001, I began to experience a mild fear of flying. There was a time in my life when I could, fairly blithely, hop out of an airplane with a parachute on my back; now I can’t get onto an airplane without melodramatic feelings of doom. When I travel, I carry pictures of my children for the sole purpose of having one long look at them the moment after the engine dissolves into flames and the plane enters its final dive. These occasional spasms of terror are as pathetic as they are undeniable. The only explanation I can come up with—other than that I’ve become a pussy—is that I can now imagine an elaborate narrative triggered by my tragic death. Before I had children I had no particular reason to fear dying, because I had no particular notion of the consequences of my death. If I had died in some absurd accident it wouldn’t have mattered all that much. Now, because of the children who would be left without a father and the wife who would be left alone to care for them, my life seems more important, even though, in some respects, it is actually much less important (having, as I do, fewer years to lose).
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