The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  “Con needs help finding his father.”

  FIFTEEN

  In an effort at building a more honest and authentic relationship, from time to time Art smoked marijuana with his teenage daughter. He hadn’t begun out of any such hopeful motives; Linnea had simply come home and caught him lighting up in the kitchen. “Busted!” she said happily.

  “Oh well, ha.” Art was already a little messed over. His brain had that Swiss cheese feel. “I was just, ha.” He opened the refrigerator and closed it again.

  “You gonna share?”

  What else could he do but hand the pipe to her? He watched Linnea fire up the lighter and play it over the pipe bowl. “Careful. This is pretty strong stuff.”

  She spoke with difficulty through the smoke she was holding in. “S’not bad.”

  Art sat down at the kitchen table. He shook his head and its insides joggled. “This is just . . . Honey, I don’t know about this.”

  “Your eyes are all red. You are wrecked.”

  He tried sounding stern. “What do you think your mother would say?”

  “She’d say she was right about both of us.”

  It was funny enough to make them snicker and snort. Art took the pipe back from her. “Seriously, this isn’t a good idea for you. You can get kind of dependent on it. You can spend too much time just sitting around getting high and neglecting, ah, stuff you need to do.” His daughter’s expression was one of huge merriment. “You’re young, you’re still developing,” Art said. “It can screw up your . . . development.”

  “Yeah, can’t have that.”

  “And you really, really shouldn’t do other drugs. Or drink. If I catch you doing anything like that, I will pack your young ass off to Montana.”

  “No prob.”

  Of course she’d say anything. How would he know what kinds of shit she did? What were you supposed to do, lock them up? “Linnea! Don’t push me on this!”

  “All right, all right.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ll just be a little pothead.”

  “Don’t even be that.”

  “Use, not abuse,” she suggested.

  “And quit filching my stash.” He’d meant it seriously, meant it to come out seriously, but little laugh bubbles kept rising up in him, like carbonation. He really was hopeless. He should have read one of those books, How to Talk to Your Kids About Drugs. There was probably a chapter in there somewhere, “Special Situations.” He didn’t think he was the only parent who had to hold up their lame end of similar conversations.

  He wished he had the courage of his stoned convictions. Marijuana was a natural substance, a mild and harmless euphoric. Linnea already smoked it and did God knows what else. But now it was his job to worry about it.

  Although she seemed to be doing better lately, settling into school, coming home when she was meant to, well, more or less. Gradually, Art had been able to imagine a longer timeline than getting through the next few days or weeks. He didn’t envision and dwell on every calamity that might befall her every time she left the apartment, or at least he did so less often. Louise still called him every other week or so to fret and complain, but he was more used to her by now, and she only bored him.

  “What is she up to at school?” Louise demanded.

  “Geometry, Spanish One, Intro to American Civilization—”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She’s fine, things at school are fine. She sees a counselor, it’s all good.” He decided not to tell her about the plans for the zombie apocalypse. “She does her homework, she goes to class. I don’t know if she’s made a lot of friends yet, but she’s new, give it time.”

  In fact Linnea’s only friend, as far as Art could tell, continued to be Conner, whom Art disapproved of on the general grounds of his being male, and older, and fully capable of sexual misdeeds. He wasn’t going to tell Louise about him, either. “Everything’s going well, why do you keep worrying?”

  “Because worrying is what you do with children. You missed out on a dozen years of training. You’re still playing catch-up.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  “Art? If you think she’s doing just great, you aren’t paying attention.”

  “Maybe you could give her some credit. People do change.”

  “I’ll believe that when you get a real job.” No matter what he said to Louise, she was always able to serve it back up to him as new and tasty fare. “You think I don’t know about change? Didn’t I watch her change from a normal child into a nightmare? You think it didn’t break my heart? It did. You think I didn’t try to help her, to get her help? She didn’t want to be helped. She took pleasure in pushing me away.”

  “All right.” It was time to get off the phone, before Louise got too carried away with the vision of her own suffering. “I’ll tell Linnea you called.”

  “I had to give up on my own child. Not entirely give up, I mean, you always hold out hope. You say she’s doing better, that’s great. It’s probably easier for both of you since you’re so much more objective about her.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked unwisely. “‘Objective,’ like, I don’t care about her?”

  “I’m sure you at least think you do,” Louise said, and hung up.

  The next time Art smoked marijuana with his daughter, they were sitting in front of the television watching a reality show that Linnea enjoyed because it was “so sick.” The show was about girls Linnea’s age who got pregnant and had babies and then found out it was a big drag. Linnea and Art passed a joint back and forth and Linnea hooted at the television. She made fun of the teen moms for being dumb and for having dumb boyfriends.

  Art was encouraged by this. It seemed like a good opportunity for some sort of teachable moment. At the next commercial, he said, “You have to wonder, did they have any idea what they were getting into?”

  Linnea pinched the end of the joint open so it would draw better. “You mean, do I realize that being a teen mom would put a crimp in my exciting, fast-paced social life? Yeah, I do.”

  “Well that’s good. I mean, good that you know . . .” He had to stop attempting heavy-duty parental conversations when he was drug-addled. Maybe he wasn’t the best person to be giving lectures about the serious, long-term responsibilities of family life.

  “Besides, don’t worry, if I ever got pregnant, I would definitely have an abortion.”

  “That’s not the point. Let’s back up a minute.”

  “The social life thing?” She gave him a cracked smile. “It’s OK. It’s not like I have these great expectations.”

  “How about, ‘Don’t get pregnant,’ and the best way to do that is not to have teen sex.”

  “No kidding. This is like, kaput.” She dropped the stubby remnant of the joint into the ashtray. On television, one of the teen moms’ moms was hollering about the teen mom letting her baby drink soda pop from a baby bottle. Why did these people agree to be filmed? Did they think they’d end up looking good?

  They both watched a while longer. Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating. Linnea yawned. “These guys, they’re so stupid, they all should have been sterilized. So if Beata got pregnant, what would you do?”

  “Huh.” It was an unwelcome thought—that is, he hadn’t bothered thinking it.

  “I’m sorry, that’s not the right answer.”

  It had been embarrassing enough to talk about his daughter’s sex life; he surely didn’t want to discuss his own. “That would be up to Beata,” Art said, meaning to put an end to the discussion.

  “So if she said, ‘I want to be your baby mamma, let’s do this,’ you’d go along?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it. It’s not going to happen, anyway.” Beata took birth control pills. Or so she said. Was it somet
hing he ought to worry about? A pregnancy trap?

  “You could have a little boy. Name him Jerzy or something else Polish. Then I’d have two half brothers. Just from different halves.”

  She didn’t say anything more, and Art was afraid of saying anything more, so they sat in silence, watching the teen moms and their hapless, adorable babies.

  Things were going just fine with Beata. Weren’t they? He thought so. This fall they were both teaching the usual patchwork of courses that made up a part-timer’s life, the usual composition and remedial composition, at night classes and refugee centers and adult education programs and online courses. They were both busy with their comings and goings and with the mounds of grading. Sometimes they were able to manage a quick meal and a tryst at Beata’s apartment in the Sunset. On weekends Beata usually came up to Marin and stayed overnight, and she cooked big dinners and they watched television, and there wasn’t pressure for something more.

  At least there didn’t seem to be. Beata didn’t complain or hint around that she wanted him to take her on expensive wine country tours, or they should move in together, or any other change in their routine of modest entertainment and good old reliable sex. When she wasn’t around, he didn’t have to worry about her. Was that so wrong?

  But he wasn’t always the best judge of women, what they wanted and what he was supposed to do about it. Usually they blindsided him with accusations, the things he had failed to notice, the offenses he so willfully committed against their needs, their natures, their exquisite sensibilities. Louise had turned this sort of denunciation into a minor art form, but Art had to admit, he had heard similar speeches elsewhere.

  The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you’d signed up for a credit card without knowing it. Once, the two of them sitting at opposite ends of his couch, each of them hunched over their laptops making frantic grade entries, Beata had asked him what he wanted to be doing in ten years. “Fishing up at my cabin in the Sierras,” Art had said.

  “No, I mean doing with your life.”

  “I don’t know. Retire.” He hadn’t thought about it. He seemed unlikely to be doing anything that much different. “Win the lottery.”

  “I want to be entirely new,” Beata announced. “New work, new house. Everything new and amazing.”

  “Go for it,” Art had said, humping to get his grades turned in before the online session closed. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time, and Beata had not said anything more. At least he didn’t think she had. Among the other things Beata had not said were that she wanted to have a baby, or get married, or any combination of these. Surely he would have remembered something like that. But of course such things were seldom spoken outright. They were implied, assumed, conveyed through an indirect language that everyone expected him to speak fluently.

  Linnea wasn’t in the habit of offering observations about Beata, and Art didn’t know why she’d done so now, aside from teenage brattiness, and wanting to unnerve him, and if so, good job. He’d almost forgotten the half brother back in Ohio. And the stepfather, and the dead girl, the stepsister, well, he hadn’t forgotten them, but it was too distressing to think about them. What a lopsided stumpy mess people made of a family tree these days. The last thing any of them needed was some new little sprig grafted on.

  Then it was only a few days before Halloween, and Beata surprised him in a different way, which he guessed was the nature of surprises. She called and said she wanted them to go to a costume party together. A friend of hers in the city was hosting it. “You’re kidding,” Art said, though he was pretty sure she wasn’t. “You mean, dress up?”

  “Yes, that’s usually what people mean by costume.”

  “Who is this friend?” Art asked, stalling for time. He wasn’t a big Halloween fan. In San Francisco, you were talking serious drag queens.

  “She is a friend from college, she lives in the Mission. I think you should meet some of my friends. I would say, I should meet yours, but you don’t have any.”

  There was a certain crispness in her tone. So here it was: the voicing of discontent, the required changing of his ways. He guessed it had to happen. “Can I go but not dress up?”

  “Not allowed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? How am I supposed to get a costume together?”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if I gave you a month. You would still do it at the last minute.”

  The whole idea was dismaying him. “Honestly, I usually don’t do Halloween.”

  “Make an exception.”

  “Do you already have a costume?”

  “Yes, and it is a surprise.”

  “Don’t you think you should tell me? I mean, shouldn’t we match or something?”

  “I will look amazing, and you should too. Saturday night, come pick me up at eight. Oh stop groaning. Be fun.”

  Art hung up the phone. He was not feeling fun. This was a test of some kind. He would have to be a good sport, enter into the festive spirit of the occasion. He wondered what Beata might have told her friends about him already. He didn’t like the idea of them looking him over, comparing notes, deciding if he measured up. He wasn’t a great party person at the best of times. Usually he hung on to a drink and communed with the host’s bookshelves.

  “What do you think I should be?” he asked his daughter. “A vampire, maybe?”

  “Everybody goes as a vampire.”

  “Right. Skip it.” Anyway, the vampires in television and movies these days were all young and handsome, more like your average brooding fashion models than the undead. “I’m supposed to look amazing.”

  Linnea hooted at that. “Just be something completely different than normal. That’s the whole idea.” She was fixing herself breakfast, a bagel with peanut butter and banana slices. She was good about feeding herself, which was a lucky thing, since he had never really gotten it together when it came to cooking. Beata made a point out of cooking for him. He should have been more wary about that.

  As if he had just thought of it, he said, “Hey, isn’t it the zombie apocalypse today?”

  “Yeah. I decided not to be a zombie. They already have too many of those.”

  “Oh.” Cautious now. “Were you going to be anything else?”

  “Maybe I’ll be a zombie slaughter victim. That’s easy, you just lie there. Con and I are going to hang out on Halloween,” she added, overcasually.

  Art was still trying not to visualize her as a victim of slaughter. “Hang out, what? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just hang.” She rolled her eyes. Dumb Daddy.

  “Honey, I don’t want him over here when I’m not home, and I’ll be at the party.”

  “Did I say we’d be here?” Linnea applied another scallop of peanut butter, as if it was icing, and gave the bagel a critical, appraising look. “You know, I didn’t even have to tell you. But I don’t want you to worry if I don’t get home until real late.”

  “All right, but . . .” He tried to climb down from the ledge, decided instead to jump to the next one. “Does Conner smoke pot? Or do anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  “I didn’t hear a yes or a no in there.”

  “He used to. He doesn’t anymore, but it’s not like he took some vow not to. We need more peanut butter.” She threw the empty jar into the trash under the sink. “I have to go, I’ll be late for Zombie Home Room.”

  After she’d left, Art poured another cup of coffee and sat on the couch, attempting to sort through his worries. He didn’t know what he could do about the Conner situation except make vague, fatherlike noises of concern. He had to admit, he pretty much allowed Linnea to do as she pleased, as long as she didn’t run entirely off the rails, get herself hurt or arrested. He hadn’t lied to Louise; things were
better, if being a typical pain-in-the-ass kid was better. But how could she be all right, really? How could you tell? Her counselor said she was not “forthcoming.” She evaded questions, the counselor said. She gave flip answers. Yes, she did. Art recognized this as self-protection, but of a worrisome kind, as if the girl carried herself through the world like a full glass of water.

  And what was he supposed to do about Beata? It had been so pleasant not to have to do anything. Now she wanted him to up his game and be more (or less) of one thing or another. Whatever that was. He wished he knew. The Halloween costume was going to be a tough call. Obviously, some effort was required. It wouldn’t be enough to put on a football jersey, or a funny hat.

  He had to teach most of the day, but he managed to get to one of those temporary costume shops that opened in malls. He looked through racks of limp and picked-over outfits: pirates, Frankensteins, Klingon warriors, various ghouls. He could be an alien, a biker, a cowboy, or, somewhat confusingly, a cactus. There were furry suits in fluorescent colors that he guessed were meant to represent Muppets or cartoon figures; they looked unclean and possibly contagious.

  Finally he found something he thought would do: a caveman costume, a leopard-print tunic and britches. It came with a foam club, a wild black wig, and a sinister rubber mask. It was newer-looking and there was a reasonable chance he would not contract scabies from it. The tunic left one shoulder bare, but he thought he could wear some kind of shirt underneath if he wanted to. Or maybe just throw the bathroom rug over his exposed arm and pretend it was a fur. The mask was Neanderthal in inspiration, with a huge, jutting forehead and flattened nose. Art thought the idea had possibilities. It showed him to be a man with a sense of humor. And it sent a certain signal—namely, he wasn’t one of those guys who would let himself get pushed too far by girly discontents.