Somebody checks on me. Am I okay? I nod. Yeah, yeah. Never better. My new suit is uncomfortable and itchy around the armpits. Also, I feel like I can’t breathe. And I might throw up. I’m good.
When I crane my neck, I can see the edge of the coffin through the door frame. If I stay in the hallway, do I still get credit for having attended the funeral? Because I really don’t want to go in. Eventually, I am the only one left out there.
Beth comes out and tells me they’re about to start. If I’m going to go in, I should go in now. I do. I walk in, her hand on my shoulder guiding me forward. Eric is already seated in the front row. Ahead is the coffin and inside the open casket is my dad. I see him now and I want to turn back. We get right up to it and I stare at my father’s face, the last time I will ever see it. He looks okay. He looks like himself. I guess I expected to see some elemental change in him, some subtle but definitive signifier that says, “This guy is dead.” The fact that he’s inside a coffin does a pretty good job of that, I guess, but I thought there would be something else, some sort of mark. But there’s not. He just looks like Dad, and it feels wrong that he should look the same.
I’d heard people say the dead look like they’re asleep, but that doesn’t seem right to me. Sleeping people drool, and fidget, and fart. Dad looks like something other than asleep; he looks arranged. He looks like the idea of a person instead of a person, like the kind of thing God would have made in seventh-grade art class. I could reach out and touch him if I want to, but I don’t. I just need to stare at him a little longer because I am never going to see him again and I try to sear his face into my memory. It doesn’t work.
I have a hard time really remembering what he looked like that day. But I can remember the feeling of his hand on my head when I am six and we are at Indian Guides, and I remember his arm around my shoulder when I am eight at the Guinness Hall of World Records and we pose for a photograph in front of a statue of the world’s tallest man. The guy I see in the coffin has the same soft round face, the same brown dad mustache, and it surprises me that he looks so much like himself, the way I will be surprised years later when I study my own face in the mirror and find it belonging to the face of a forty-year-old husband and father—older than my dad will ever be. Sometimes I see his face in my own, and my own in my kids’. And sometimes I am overwhelmed with the strangeness and suddenness of time, how a lifetime can collapse into a moment.
The funeral service is quick. I sit in the front row with Beth and Eric. Susan is not with us because she will not understand. Afterward, people approach to shake our hands and tell us they are sorry for our loss.
The language of death is curiously proscribed. It is the one occasion when the spoken word actually resembles the language of greeting cards. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Maybe it’s better to have this script than to allow people to say whatever pops into their heads: “Great funeral. Where’re the sandwiches?”
When the service is over we get into a limousine for the long drive to the cemetery. It is the first limousine I have ever been in, and I have to pretend not to care, but I do care because it’s exciting to drive in a car this big. There are real glasses lined up along the side, beer and soft drinks on ice. Beth says we can have a can of Coke if we want. I say no thanks even though I think it would be pretty cool to sip a cold Coke from a real glass in a limousine the way I imagine Billy Joel probably does every day of his life.
Nobody says much as we drive to the cemetery, almost three hours away near Woodstock. I am bored and watch cars go by in the other direction. Maybe they are looking at our small funeral procession and wondering who died. Maybe they will think it was somebody important.
Somewhere along the New York State Thruway, we pull over at a rest stop to stretch our legs. There’s a small building with restrooms and vending machines. Eric and I spot a couple of video games shoved in the corner, including a fancy new fighter jet game that costs fifty cents. I notice somebody has already put one quarter in and point out to my brother that if we had another quarter we could play at a significant discount. When Beth comes out of the restroom, Eric tells Beth that I want a quarter to play the video game, and I am filled with shame for thinking about arcade games at a time like this. “Do you want a quarter?” asks Beth.
“No,” I say.
“You said you wanted one,” says Eric.
“I DID NOT!”
Beth turns and walks back to the car.
“Asshole,” I whisper to my brother.
He doesn’t respond, but I can tell by his silence that he is pleased with himself for ratting me out, the fucker. He walks to the car behind Beth and I check my pockets one more time to make sure I do not have a quarter.
The cemetery is small and bucolic. It is kind of funny to think of my father, the least cool man on the planet, buried here, so close to Woodstock, the seminal event of coolness for his generation. I doubt he could have named more than one or two popular musicians. The only thing I’d ever heard him listen to on the radio was a show called What’s Your Problem? hosted by an ancient-sounding guy named Bernard Meltzer, who offered dry legal and financial advice to callers. It is the least entertaining show in the history of radio.
I can’t concentrate on the ceremony. Instead I am fascinated by the machine that lowers the coffin into the hole. It’s some sort of winch. I’ve never seen one before and I have an urge to ask how it works, how the cemetery workers retrieve the straps supporting the coffin once it’s been fully lowered, if the speed is variable, and whether or not it can also raise coffins. Then it occurs to me that it would be really cool if the winch was powerful enough to not only raise coffins, but fling them.
I spend the rest of the ceremony imagining coffins being flung onto hippies.
Soon the whole thing is over. Dad is buried. We drive home. I return to school.
My best friend Bradley, whom I have not seen since Dad died, strides up to me at the bus stop, holding out his hand for me to shake. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, the way he was undoubtedly instructed to do by his parents.
How odd, this formality. Two twelve-year-old boys shaking hands at the bus stop. I want to laugh as I pump his hand and say, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance” in a bad British accent. But instead I thank him, then we both kick some wood chips and find ourselves, for the first time in our lives, with nothing to say to each other.
When we get to school, nobody calls me “dead dad kid.” It’s unclear whether they even noticed I was gone. Movie restrictions are put back in place. The cereal in our cupboard is once again the cereal of lesbians and the constipated. A year later, Beth marries a friend of Dad’s who is really into doowop music, and they move to Georgia.
A malpractice suit lurches through the court system for years.
For the rest of my childhood, the back of my mind holds the tantalizing promise of blood money. I try not to think about it because it feels dirty and wrong, but I can’t help it. What if I wake up one day and I’m rich? What will I do? The answer is obvious: I will buy a black Trans Am like Burt Reynolds had in Smokey and the Bandit. Or, perhaps by the time the lawsuit gets settled, there will be jet packs. If so, I will buy one and become awesome. I will also buy a pinball machine and a waterbed.
When the case is finally settled years later, I am an adult, and my brother and I agree to put almost all of the money into a trust for Susan. There will be no jet packs. I will not be awesome.
The other night, I told my son, Elijah, that I would be leaving town for work for a few days. I had been gone for several days the week before, and when I tell him I am leaving again, he starts to cry. (Martha thinks he cries too much; I don’t. I cried a lot, too, when I was nine.)
“You’re gone too much,” he says. He’s right. I am.
I tell him I hate leaving so often, but I will be home in a few days and when I get back from this trip, I will be home for several weeks in a row.
“Promise?” he asks.
“I promise,”
I say.
He hugs me around the neck and says through his tears, “You’re the best dad a kid could ever ask for.”
It is the kind of thing that would make me turn the channel if I saw a kid say that on TV. But this is my kid and my life and it is such an earnest, heartbreaking moment that I almost burst into tears myself. I mean, doesn’t he know what an asshole I am?
Doesn’t he know how much I resented him when he was a baby, crying in the night? Or, now that he’s older, doesn’t he notice when I am so immersed on the computer that I don’t listen to the stories he tells me about his day? Doesn’t he know that I am sometimes glad to be far away from him and his sister and his mother, all by myself, in a hotel room where nobody needs me for anything? I’m not the best dad a kid could ever ask for. I’m not even close.
I stifle my own tears and hug him back, telling him he’s the best son a dad could ever ask for. (I am careful to say he is the best “son” a dad could ever ask for, not the best “kid” because that would imply favoritism with his sister, which would be wrong. Because she is my favorite. That was a joke. Now I feel awful for making that joke. Not awful enough to remove it, though. See? Proof that I’m an asshole.) Then I kiss him good night and tell him I love him, just as I have told him every day since he was born.
On the way out of Elijah’s bedroom, my mind flashes back to that night when I felt the need to flee my dad’s car after telling him I loved him. Now that I am older and a father myself, I find my point of view shifting from me, the child, to imagining myself as my father, in the driver’s seat, watching a boy not much older than my son is now, running away, embarrassed. Through the windshield I watch him dash up the sidewalk, and the words lodge in my throat—I love you, too. I watch as he disappears into the house, the front door closing behind him.
CHAPTER 10
i hate my baby
We are four months into parenthood and I hate my baby. When friends ask how it is going I always answer the same way: “Terrible.” They think I am kidding but I’m not. So far, being a dad sucks.
The main problem is the sleep deprivation. Martha and I are always awake. Every day, all day. I feel as though I have been awake for eight months out of the last four. I have grown to know the wee hours of the night in an intimate and hostile way, the way I might get to know a prison cellmate.
I cannot think. I cannot function. I am suffering. Martha is suffering, too, but I do not care. Right now, I am immune to anybody’s suffering but my own. Of course, I knew sleep deprivation would be a problem heading into parenthood, but I did not realize that when people said, “You won’t get any sleep,” what they were actually saying was, “You won’t get any sleep.”
Elijah almost never stops crying. He cries every night from about ten o’clock until four in the morning. He cries at six-thirty in the morning, again at nine, noon, and periodically throughout the day. Obviously, babies are supposed to cry, but not all the time, right? Why does he cry so much? What does he want? Why is my baby such a dick?
When the middle of the night comes, as it must, and his cries come, as they must, we lie in bed arguing over whose turn it is to get up with the baby. It is always the other person’s turn.
“Your turn,” we say to each other while he wails.
“Your turn.”
“Your turn.”
“I got up last time.”
“I got up two times in a row before that.”
“I’m not getting him.”
“I’m not getting him, either.”
Ten or twenty minutes might go by like this, neither of us willing to move, the tension growing between us with each wailing exhalation. They say if you just let babies cry, they will eventually cry themselves out. This is not true. Not only will babies not cry themselves out, but the act of crying actually slows down time itself—the more you let them cry, the slower time goes. That’s why it took eight months to get through four.
Finally, one of us surrenders, throwing off the warm blankets so as to let as much cold air into the bed as possible. “I hate you,” she will say to me or I will say to her, and it won’t be said in a whimsical, “aren’t we cute,” Ally McBeal sort of way. The hatred we have for each during those cold hours when somebody must tend to the hellion she created is a visceral, concentrated hate. It is to normal hate what a diamond is to a lump of coal. The only thing preventing us from strangling each other in moments like these is the knowledge that doing so would mean even more time alone with the baby for whichever one of us is left.
“Your turn,” says Martha. It is always my turn. GOD DAMN IT! I get up to comfort my stupid baby.
I find him on his back in his crib with his little feet kicking against the air, arms punching, his face splotchy and red like a bruised tomato. I pick him up and feel his lumpy body strain and heave and complain at the injustice of it all. I know, buddy, I know.
Each night, I pace the hallway with my son leaning against my shoulder and jiggle him as we walk. “Shh, shh, shh,” I whisper in time with my jiggles. “Shh, shh, shh.” Sometimes I do it to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns N’ Roses—anything to distract myself from the mindless, somnambulistic task at hand.
Constant movement helps. Constant movement and Martha’s boobs, which are sore from overuse, her nipples tender and stretched out. They’re starting to look like cocktail wieners.
Maybe he’s hungry. He can’t be hungry. He just fed an hour ago. Maybe he’s wet. He’s not but I change his diaper anyway. Does he need to burp? Pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. No burp. Burp, damn it! PAT, PAT, PAT! Burp. More crying.
We pace. Pace, pace, pace.
We jiggle. Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle.
I go downstairs and turn on the TV. Every channel is an infomercial. Infomercials for exercise machines and Proactivacne medication and no-money-down real estate seminars. I used to think that the reason companies showed infomercials in the middle of the night was that that was the only time the companies could afford to buy airtime. Now I know the reason they show them at that hour is because everything looks desirable when you are delirious from fatigue, and the act of picking up a telephone and ordering the Amazing Thigh and Ab Rocker (two easy payments of $19.99) is the closest you will come to human contact. At this hour, the Amazing Thigh and Ab Rocker actually starts to seem like a pretty good solution to most of my problems.
I keep the sound on the television low and jiggle my son. I do loops from kitchen to dining room to living room to kitchen. I cannot look outside because it is like the North Pole in December out there. It is beyond night out there. It is the night of night. It is the kind of postapocalyptic darkness that tells you people are about to start eating other people. Better to close the blinds, stay inside, and spend some quality time with my new friend Body by Jake.
I try my hardest to stay down there, in the radiated darkness, so that Martha can sleep. Eventually, though, his crying drives me back to bed. He wants the boob.
Martha can barely rouse herself to consciousness to give it to him. She turns to her side and lets him suck until he falls, mercifully, to sleep, his little body wedged between us in bed. This presents a new problem; I can never fully fall asleep with him there. I am terrified I will squish him in the middle of the night, flatten him like a cartoon steamroller.
Half an hour later he is up again, crying.
We do our best to cope, but our best is terrible. “You take him!” we shout at each other every twenty minutes when his constant crying has made putty of our brains and we either have to keep passing him back and forth or else throw him out the window.
When I am dragging my feet through our impossibly creaky house I am reminded of something we were taught in the Lamaze class we took. Our instructor, a cheerful and chubby woman named Patti, told us never to shake our baby. This was emphasized several times. “Never shake the baby,” she said over and over again.
We even had to watch a video about it.
The video showed us what happens when a full-grown adult shakes a newborn. The baby’s brain rattles inside its little head like a lump of Silly Putty in its plastic egg. All kinds of terrible things happen as a result. The video shows paralyzed babies and babies with brain injuries and developmental problems and shows us the weeping mother of a baby who died, the result of a boyfriend’s bad temper. They have a name for all of this abuse: Shaken Baby Syndrome. It is a curious name to me because the name makes it sound like something that just kind of happens, like a tropical storm.
“Never shake the baby,” Patti says again.
God, I want to shake that baby. When he is crying at 3:47 a.m. and he will not shut up, shaking him not only seems like the logical thing to do, it almost feels like the moral thing to do. Just a few quick shakes to startle him into silence. How good it would feel to hold him by his little shoulders and rattle him around until he pipes the fuck down.
But I don’t do it.
Because I am a saint.
Occasionally, I see an article in the newspaper about parents who abuse their children. Before I had a child, I used to think, How could this happen? Now, I find myself wondering why it doesn’t happen more often. Why aren’t parents throwing their kids into Dumpsters every day? And why, God, why do people have more than one? Because after you’ve done this once, there can be no possible excuse for doing it again. The thought occurs to me that if parenthood is this hard for everybody, infanticide would be as common as public urination. The human species would have died out long ago. Therefore, our experience cannot be common. Clearly there is either something wrong with us or there is something wrong with him. Maybe our kid is a lemon.
You're Not Doing It Right Page 10
