One evening it’s just me and the little angels at the dinner table. Tabitha nurses Walker in another room. I have just tried, and failed, to settle the tenth dispute of the evening—who will sit in which seat—with a coin flip. At first they loved this new approach to conflict resolution: It was fair, it was interesting, it was new. And then I pulled out the coin to flip it:
“I get to call it!”
“No, Quinn, shut up, I get to call it!”
And off they went again, at the tops of their lungs—which they will do, I now know, until Quinn clobbers Dixie with a hairbrush or Dixie rakes her fingernails across Quinn’s chest or some near-mortal wound is inflicted. Earlier this very day, seeking solace, I described their strange case over lunch to a good friend who happens to be a social psychologist. “Do you know the data on siblings across species?” he asked, before I was even half done. I didn’t. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Half the time they kill each other.” He ran through a few species: Sand-shark siblings eat each other in their mother’s oviducts; hyena siblings eat each other the minute they get out. The blue-footed booby is especially ruthless: “If their siblings drop below eighty percent of normal body weight,” he explained, “they peck ’em to death.” That would be Dixie, whose teeth marks can now be found on her sister’s legs.
I glare at my children, they glare back at me. They think I am weak, I decide. They want to play hardball; they don’t know what hardball is. They will now learn. Yet another generous neighbor has brought us yet another extravagant dessert: a ginger and molasses cake, topped with whipped cream. But they are grounded: no desserts for a week. In better times I might sympathize with their predicament. I might toss them a crumb. At the very least I would sneak my cake later, alone. Not now. I cut myself a large piece and crown it with whipped cream, all the while feeling two pairs of eyes tracking me around the kitchen. Heaping great dollops of molasses and whipped cream onto my plate, I sit back down. Their own sad plates are decorated with cold, half-eaten vegetables.
I coat the first bite in whipped cream, swipe it once through the molasses, and, slowly, raise the fork to my mouth. Then I see Dixie’s face. Her lower lip trembles and tears stream down her sweet little face. It’s an involuntary response to a horrible realization: Daddy doesn’t care. He’s going to inhale his yummy dessert even though he knows Dixie can’t have any. It takes a few seconds for the sobbing to kick in, as she runs from the room.
“See what you did, Daddy!” shouts Quinn, chasing after her.
Through gritted teeth I shovel the ginger and molasses cake—but as I do I sense, uneasily, that I’ve read this story before. I wait until everyone is asleep and then dig it out of my bookshelves. Will This Do? was what British journalist Auberon Waugh called his memoir. On page sixty-seven I find what I’m looking for, Auberon’s description of his father, Evelyn:
On one occasion, just after the war, the first consignment of bananas arrived. Neither I, my sister Teresa, nor my sister Margaret had ever eaten a banana but we had heard about them as the most delicious taste in the world. When this first consignment arrived the socialist government decided that every child in the country should be allowed one banana. An army of civil servants issued a library of special banana coupons, and the great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three.
When I first read that passage, I thought: What a monster. Now I think: The poor guy. “From then on,” Auberon concluded, “I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.” “That was the only time,” I can imagine Evelyn replying, “when I treated my children with the barbarity with which they treated me.”
The next morning I wake up and go to the bathroom to shower and shave. Stuck on the bathroom mirror is a dark blue Post-it. The handwriting is unmistakably Quinn’s:
Meany Meany
You Are A
Meany
DAD
After that, all is silence. For the next week no one says a thing about the incident. I remove the Post-it, the girls behave better, they even get desserts. But of course no day passes without my wondering, however briefly, (a) just what damage I might have done, and (b) how the incident might play in, say, a memoir. On top of the risk that you might actually screw up your child is the risk that, even if you don’t, she’ll think you did and blame you for it. Finally one morning, as I drive Quinn to school, I look in the rearview mirror and ask, “You know that cake I ate when you couldn’t have dessert?”
“What cake?”
“You know that note you wrote and stuck on my mirror last week?”
“What note?” she asks. I remind her, but she has no idea what I’m talking about. Not the first clue. She doesn’t even remember her sister’s tears. “The problem with me,” she says seriously, “is that I only remember the stuff that is a long, long time ago. I’ll probably remember it in 3000.”
THE LAST TIME I’d visited the fairgrounds in New Orleans was the spring of 1977, when I was sixteen years old. A classmate of mine had a gambling debt of $8,000 that he couldn’t pay off—$8,000 being the equivalent today of roughly twenty-seven grand, real money for a high school junior back then. In what seemed at the time like a sensible strategy, he hocked the coin collection given to him at birth by his grandparents and came up with $2,000 cash. This he handed to me, along with instructions to go to the fairgrounds and lay it all on Albo Berry to show in the sixth. His nerves couldn’t take it, he said, and besides, he had math class. Albo Berry was racing on a school day, during seventh and eighth period, when all I had was film history—which could be skipped safely. And so I grabbed another friend and drove to the fairgrounds to lay two grand on Albo Berry to show.
Probably there was some law forbidding minors from betting on horses, but it wasn’t taken any more seriously than the other laws in New Orleans that separated children from the grown-up world. So long as you didn’t make the enablers feel as if you were going to attract the wrong sort of attention, they let you do pretty much what you wanted. Two grand was attention-getting, however, and we decided the only safe way to get it down on Albo Berry was in small, childish chunks. The moment Albo Berry’s race was announced we each took $1,000 and dashed around madly, placing $5 bets. We wound up with four hundred tickets, but we got it all down, then took a seat in the grandstand to watch the race.
They were already off; a bunch of horses had broken from the pack, Albo Berry not among them. Indeed, for the longest time Albo Berry went unmentioned. It was as if he existed only in a dream. But then, as if he knew what was at stake, he made his move. Coming hard on the outside, he passed all but two other horses. By a nose, Albo Berry showed. We spent half an hour running around collecting what came to several thousand dollars in small bills. Armloads of cash made us conspicuous, and so we made quickly for the car. Only then did a grown-up—the guard in the parking lot—take notice. We were a step too fast for him. He peered into the car window as we whizzed past, and my friend heaved all the money up into the air, so that, for that moment, the inside of the car looked like a ticker-tape parade. We made it back to school just in time for baseball practice.
Now, for the first time in thirty years, I’m back at the fairgrounds, with a seven-year-old daughter holding one hand and a four-year-old holding the other. I hadn’t planned to teach my children how to bet on the ponies on this trip. But my brother lives down the block from the racetrack, and the three of us went to visit him for lunch, and one thing led to another. Before you could say “trifecta,” we had them on our shoulders and were walking over to the races. Just one race, I told them, and then we’d leave. For old times’ sake. They might learn something.
“You promise we can we bet real money?” asks Quinn.
“Yeah, Daddy,” says Dixie, “can we bet real money?”
“You can each make one smal
l bet,” I say judiciously.
“You’ll have to make it for us,” says Quinn knowingly, “’cause we’re too little.”
Through the turnstiles we plunge and make for the viewing area to decide which horse to back. But before we do, we bump into Al Stall, who’d been a year behind me in school and who has, it turns out, spent most of his time since then training racehorses. I haven’t seen him since high school, but it feels like yesterday, and he ushers the kids into the space reserved for horses. He wants them to see Winsky, a sleek, tan, four-year-old mare, his horse in the race. As they inspect the animal, the jockey appears, followed by Winsky’s owners, and so they inspect them, too. They listen as Al talks a little bit about his horse, the favorite. Al doesn’t sound worried. Al doesn’t look worried. Al, truth to tell, looks as if his horse has already won.
“I want to bet on Winsky,” says Quinn firmly.
“Me, too!” says Dixie.
“If we win, you girls have to join us in the winner’s circle!” says the owner.
We rush out to lay some dough on Winsky. “Daddy, what’s the circle?” asks Dixie, but I’m too distracted to answer. They’ve replaced old tellers with new betting machines. It’s now more complicated for a forty-six-year-old man to place two $5 bets on a horse to win than it was thirty years ago for a sixteen-year-old to lay two grand on a horse to show. I waste ten bucks printing out two erroneous tickets before finally getting my hands on tickets for Winsky to win. Grabbing them from me, the girls race outside to watch their horse up close, from the rail. The weather is clear, the track fast. As the bell rings and the horses bolt from the gate, I wonder: This is what fathers are for? To take children to the places they aren’t supposed to go, so that they can do the things children aren’t supposed to do? If Mama’s the law, I’m the blind eye.
For roughly fifty-one weeks a year, I’m a bit player in my children’s moral education. This week is the exception, when we visit New Orleans for Mardi Gras. For seven days I’m more or less in charge and use them to cultivate the aspects of their characters that they’ll need to make it in the modern world: guile, greed, charm, and a deep appreciation that what you know is less important than who you know. Mardi Gras might just as well have been created to teach small children how to compete in the more ferocious sectors of our nation’s economy. Beads, in the brief moment they fly through the air, become so valuable that grown men will trample one another to get them and young women will disrobe. Three hours later they’re worthless again, but that’s not the point. The point is how to get as many of them as possible.
Last year, when she was six, Quinn draped the beads she caught around her neck. This year she takes what she catches and squirrels it away furtively in a camouflaged Army duffel bag beside her. “If they see you have lots of loot they won’t throw you anything,” she explains hurriedly, and then resumes her quest for more beads. Dixie is only four, but even she seems to be coming along nicely. As I haul home a fifty-pound sack full of beads, she says, “Daddy, you want me to tell you why they gave me so many things? ’Cause I was making a sad face.” Every small child in America should be flown to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Those who excel should be offered jobs by Goldman Sachs selling bonds. Those who fail should be taken to the racetrack, to see if they are perhaps better suited to trading.
The race starts, a mile and forty yards. There is no drama to it. Winsky, on the inside, takes the lead and never surrenders it. She wins so easily that, if I were one of the other horses, I might just canter back to my stable and shoot myself. My daughters leap around: They won! “How much did we win, Daddy?” they ask but then are distracted by their new best friends, Winsky’s owners, trainer, and jockey, who guide them into the winner’s circle. They pose for a group photo, Quinn and Dixie front and center, as a man with a television camera races back and forth filming them from every possible angle, beaming their smiles into every offtrack betting parlor in the land. Quinn sees the camera and waves.
Twenty-two minutes after they strolled into the fairgrounds, they’re back in their car seats, waving $5 bills and looking for something to argue about. The experience has struck neither of them as noteworthy. The problem with lucking out with your children is that your children don’t appreciate their luck—and the lucky feeling is more than half of the pleasure. You go to all this trouble to get them an education, and they promptly forget the lessons. On the drive home I explain to them that it isn’t common for two little girls to walk into a racetrack in the middle of the day for a single horse race and wind up in the winner’s circle, holding winning tickets, with the horse’s jockey on one arm and the horse’s owner on the other. Not to mention getting serious screen time on every OTB network. It takes some effort, but by the time we arrive home, each little girl has been convinced she has something worth saying about her field trip—only it isn’t the same thing. Dixie, running to the back of the house to find her mother, squeals, “Mama, I made five dollars at the round field!” Quinn races up the stairs, finds her grandmother, and shouts, “Nana, we were on national TV!”
I’D DRIVEN AN hour from home to give a talk, and was up on a stage with my cell phone off, when Tabitha left three messages. In the first, she said Walker was having trouble breathing and so she was taking him to the doctor; in the second, she was on her way from the doctor’s office to the emergency room; in the third, she was on the emergency-room pay phone, either crying or trying not to cry. “He has RSV,” she said mysteriously, and added that he was strapped to a gurney and waiting for an ambulance to take him to a place that handled infants with RSV, whatever that was. Her cell phone wouldn’t work there, she’d been told, and there was no number on which I could reach her.
And so I found myself doing eighty-five across the San Mateo Bridge, toting up in my mind how little I’d done in my son’s eleven weeks on earth to keep him alive. Seventy-six nights and I’d spent zero in the same room with him, unless you counted the night of his birth, and the few times I stayed up until midnight to feed him a bottle of pumped breast milk before handing him over to his mother. Eating was another thing he’d done almost entirely without me: eight times a day, or more than six hundred daddyless meals in total. His diaper needed changing about as often as he ate, yet I’d done that seven times, and remembered each event. He slept sixteen hours a day, leaving eight in which he needed to be tended. Roughly three of those went to feeding and another to bathing and changing clothes—two more of his activities I’d managed to avoid entirely. That left him just four hours a day of what might be called discretionary leisure, or about three hundred hours total, of which I’d occupied no more than thirty.
Those were the raw stats: They shocked even me. No matter how you spun them, they suggested a truly awesome paternal neglect. (Seven out of six hundred diapers!) It had to be some kind of record, at least in the modern era of fatherhood. The achievement was probably in some small part due to what might be politely called an attitude problem. When asked to take the baby, even for just a few minutes, I instantly become a corporate executive sentenced to a long jail term. I race around the house cleaning up my affairs, wondering what needs to be done before I’m removed from society. But the larger part of my neglect arose from changes in the structure of our family life, brought about by the addition of a third child. Once a collectivist farm, we now had more in common with a manufacturing enterprise, beginning with a ruthlessly efficient division of labor. Mama took care of the baby; Daddy took care of everyone else, or paid other people to do it for him. Family productivity remained stable and, amazingly, Mama didn’t complain about the arrangement. Many times in the past eleven weeks, I expected to be chastised for doing so little but instead found myself appreciated for doing anything at all. On those rare occasions, I was no longer a father doing his duty but an assembly line worker who has rushed down the conveyor belt to rescue a fellow worker who has fallen behind. A company hero. Worker of the month.
On this afternoon, the assembly line finally ground to a halt,
its gears gummed up with paternal guilt. It took ninety minutes to get home, drop the girls with our endlessly generous neighbors, and speed back to the hospital. There I find Walker with two tubes up his nose, another in his left foot, and wires taped to his chest. Dried blood stains the blanket by his feet, where nurses have tried and failed to insert an IV drip. He looks bad, but his mother looks worse. She hasn’t slept properly in months, and she’s spent the last five hours watching this baby she’s been caring for poked and prodded with needles and strapped down on gurneys. Four different people had offered her four different explanations of RSV, but the hardest piece of information she’d come away with was that she should expect Walker to be in the hospital for at least a week. “Don’t worry,” she says, reading my mind. “I’ll spend the nights with him.”
Thirty minutes later the door closes behind her, and she’s gone. It’s just him and me, for the first time, really. Except for his sad little wheezing sounds and the beeping of the machine that measures the amount of oxygen in his blood, the room is silent.
RSV, it turns out, stands for respiratory syncytial virus. From the point of view of Berkeley’s infants, it might as well be the bubonic plague. The hospital floor has twenty-eight beds, and twenty-five of them are occupied by infants with RSV, who share one other trait in common: older siblings in school. School-aged children are the rats of our time. After a day of happily swapping germs with their peers, my children apparently returned home with what probably felt to them like a mild cold, and kissed their baby brother—who promptly lost his ability to breathe. There’s little that medicine can do for him except attach him to a machine that measures the oxygen in his blood, and, if he’s about to suffocate, attach him to an artificial respirator.
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