The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

by Kris D'Agostino

  “I love weddings,” he says. And that seems to settle it. We are going.

  My mother returns to the kitchen.

  Law & Order comes back on and we all sit watching for a while without speaking.

  “I’ve seen this one,” our father says. “I’ve seen them all.”

  He reaches his hand out again and touches my arm. This time I don’t pull away.

  THE WANT AD comes to me through the hazy, dull afterglow of a long day at the John W. Manley School, a fug of weed smoke around my head. The ad stares at me from its newsprint frame, gray and black and inky. I sit on the toilet in the third-floor bathroom. I am careful to ash the joint into the sink. I must stretch forward, leaning off the bowl in an effortful manner, to do this. The real estate section is scattered on the floor before my feet. I’ve also circled a few houses in what I think might be the family price range. I intend to bring these listings to my mother’s attention.

  I hold smoke in my lungs. I read and reread the job description. A production assistant is needed at a well-known film company in Manhattan. A company responsible for several of my most favorite dramedies of the past few years. A company whose aesthetic vision has been clearly proven time and time again in the cinematic arena. When the lights go down in the theater, I’ve come to know and find comfort in said company’s opening credits logo. A clockwork horse galloping across a green field while dramatic violins swell and flutter magnificently. Seeing this, I breathe a sigh of relief, knowing there is a good chance the film I’m about to see won’t suck. Or at least it won’t suck much.

  Here was a place where scholarly examination of film would be encouraged, fostered. No longer would I have to dream of seeking out like-minded cinephiles. I would be surrounded by them on a daily basis. I would be paid to debate the merits of the Die Hard franchise. I would find comrades to help bolster my love of schlock horror. Here would be others who understand the importance of bad filmmaking, its critical and paradoxical relationship to all art in general. Lunch breaks would be spent sharing Netflix queue suggestions. Work functions would involve dutifully attending prescreenings, followed by Q&As with the director in secret locations where only those on a list would be allowed admittance. Hobnobbing with producers and industry assholes. Sundance. Telluride. Cannes(!).

  I cough on a particularly jarring pocket of smoke. My eyes water. I use my circling red pen to ensnare the ad with several unnecessarily bold rotations.

  Later, by the blue glow of the computer screen, I e-mail my résumé, along with what I think to be an extremely passionate cover letter enthusiastically conveying my love of film coupled with my desire to work for said company to the exclusion of all others. I click Send. I lay my head on my pillow, nervous and excited, hoping for an interview. Hoping for good things. Hoping maybe I’ve found a place where I belong, a place where it all makes sense, a place full of people whose brains operate in the same way as mine.

  ELISSA GRADUATES FROM high school over the weekend. The whole family attends the ceremony. I sit in the gathering summer heat, under a bright sun, and watch her walk. A few hundred people are gathered, seated in rows of folding chairs. Digital cameras flash. A few murmurs go up as she passes. Our grandmother weeps. The valedictorian, a redhead with a face full of freckles, stands proudly, gives a speech about following your inner voice, the true essence of being. This is the way to happiness, she tells the gathered multitudes. This is the way to happiness. My father laughs. Covers his mouth with his hand and laughs.

  I’M SHOCKED, LITERALLY, when I learn about the interview. I turn the key in the ignition of the hatchback and wait while the engine gets on its feet. The radio has been giving me problems lately. It will only turn on if I pinch together two wires dangling from the underside of the center console. Wally showed this trick to me. I’m still confused as to what exactly happens when these two wires are made to touch. Regardless, I’m sitting in the car, checking my voice mail. A young woman’s voice is on the message, pleasant and airy, with something of a southern tinge. She identifies herself as Charlotte and would like to know if I’m available to “come on down” to the offices of the well-known film company at the end of the week to meet with Mrs. so-and-so about the production assistant position. As I listen to this young woman and her delightful news, I bring the wires into joyous union to jump-start the tape deck and am met with a jolt of electricity.

  “Fuck,” I say. I immediately jam my fingers into my mouth. What comfort this maneuver might result in is beyond me. The phone flies from my hands and is momentarily lost in the pile of tapes and paper on the floor of the passenger seat. The tape deck fires up, blasting Red Headed Stranger. I fumble the phone out of the chaos and quickly press 7 to save the message. When I have properly composed myself, I call the offices of the well-known film company. I speak with Charlotte and inform her that Friday works perfectly for my schedule. She pencils me in for eleven thirty. The added bonus is that Friday is the last day of work, with a two-week break following before the start of the summer session. I’ll have to take the day off to get to the interview, which means I’ll have to miss the last staff meeting of the year. This does not bother me.

  It’s all coming together.

  ON WEDNESDAY, I sit with Arham and the hours go by. The lap desk is cluttered with stacks of laminated index cards. I show him a picture of a man skiing.

  “Skiing!” he says.

  “Good job, little man,” I tell him, rubbing his head. I show him a picture of a woman swimming.

  “Swimming!” he says.

  “Excellent,” I say. I give him a piece of cookie, which he swallows without even chewing. I show him a picture of a man running.

  “Driving!” he says.

  “Running,” I say, correcting him. I put the picture down and pick it back up again, reintroduce it. Arham looks. He scrunches up his eyes.

  “Running,” he says.

  “Nice job,” I say. I pat his head. He giggles.

  “Pee, pee,” he says.

  At 3:40, through the colored paper, I see the yellow buses beginning to arrive. I take Arham by the hand and lead him to number 52. I make sure he has his backpack, his lunch box. I make sure he finds a seat toward the front because he gets carsick sometimes. I wave good-bye to him.

  “See you tomorrow,” I say.

  “Bye-bye,” he says, waving his hand.

  I take a personal day form from the office and fill it out for Friday. I go to Ceci to deliver the request and clock out. She is sitting at her desk with an unhappy face.

  “Just the man I was looking for,” she says.

  “Something up?” I say. I feign ignorance.

  “No more excuses. This Friday. Graph presentation. It’s our last staff meeting of the year before camp starts.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “This Friday I’ve got—”

  “It’s not a choice,” Ceci says, cutting me off.

  “That’s what we tell the kids,” I say.

  “I know.”

  I take a breath.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll do it. Fuck.”

  I crumple the personal-day request behind my back.

  THE NEXT DAY, I leave work early to accompany my sister to another ob-gyn appointment. More pamphlets. I flip through one chronicling the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases. I flip through one chronicling fetal development from conception to birth. I look at diagrams. I learn that around the sixth week, the baby will have an umbilical cord. A head, eyes, a liver. Until the tenth week, it will be called an embryo. Afterward, a fetus. This is when the vital organs begin to work. This is when the baby’s heart pumps. By the nineteenth week, the fetus can sometimes be seen sucking its thumb on the ultrasound.

  Elissa holds my father’s hand while we wait. It is embarrassing that he is with us, dressed in his bathrobe, but our mother insisted. “It’ll be good for him” has become the mantra of our house.

  There are two couples in the waiting room with us. Young couples, seated in chairs, fli
pping through their own pamphlets, glance over at us from time to time. I wonder what they are thinking.

  I take my cell phone into the bathroom for some privacy and call Charlotte at the well-known film company.

  “I was supposed to come in for an interview tomorrow,” I tell her, “but something’s come up. I need to reschedule. Any way we can do it first thing Monday?”

  Charlotte puts me on hold so she may consult her calendar. Muzak plays in my ear and I take advantage of the break to urinate. I try to pee as quickly as possible. She clicks back on the line as I’m flushing the toilet and I try to get back out into the hallway before she can decipher the sound.

  “You’re in luck,” Charlotte says. “We have a couple of other interviewees scheduled for Monday. How’s one thirty?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Perfect. Thank you very much.”

  “See you then,” she says.

  I return to the waiting room. I try to put a beautiful, freckled face to Charlotte’s voice and am quite pleased with the mental image I concoct.

  When the nurse comes out and calls “Moretti,” we all stand together and are herded through the door and down the hallway into the examination room. Shortly, Dr. Fine joins us.

  “James,” he says when he sees my father, “it’s good to see you.” The doctor seems to completely ignore my father’s attire, his disheveled look. “You’ll have to bring me up to date with the myeloma. Kathy told me a little. I’m sure it was rough going.”

  “It could come back at any time,” my father says.

  “Positive thoughts,” Elissa reminds him. My father looks at her, then back at the doctor.

  “I’m feeling okay,” he says.

  On the screen the baby floats, suspended in darkness, a glowing, giant head with feet and arms. One day it will run through a playground and I will put it on a swing. I will push it as high as it wants to go. I will be an uncle. One day soon I will be an uncle.

  Dr. Fine is satisfied with what he sees.

  “Everything looks good,” he says. “Your blood pressure’s still a little high, but we’ll see. If it stays where it is, we’ll be fine.” He wipes the jelly off Elissa’s stomach with a cloth. She sits up, pulling her sweatshirt back down.

  “I’ve been having some heartburn,” Elissa says.

  “Been sneaking anything you shouldn’t be eating?” the doctor asks.

  “Not really,” Elissa says.

  Dr. Fine chuckles. “Take some Tums,” he says. “And stay away from junk food. Stick to the list. You should know better.”

  “Okay,” Elissa says.

  “As far as I’m concerned, this baby is arriving on schedule and perfectly healthy,” Dr. Fine says.

  OUTSIDE, THE CITY is all muted colors and sunset. We drive up First Avenue. We turn left onto Ninety-Sixth. We head crosstown past prewar walk-ups and luxury condos. I count doormen. I count old ladies walking poodles. I count buses.

  “If it’s a girl, I want to name her Harper Lee,” Elissa says.

  “Harper Lee Moretti?” my father asks.

  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Elissa says.

  “And if it’s a boy?” I ask.

  “Easy,” she says. “James Jr.”

  My father accelerates through a yellow light and coasts out onto Riverside Drive.

  << 22 >>

  I park the hatchback. I throw it into neutral and contemplate leaving the emergency brake off. Maybe it’ll roll away. I look around. Garbage covers most of the seats. Tapes scattered about. Classic rock, gangsta rap, seventies synth prog, grindcore, power violence, doo-wop, bluegrass, folk, stoner rock, psychedelic pop, twee pop, sludge, drone, doom, black metal, thrash metal, horror-movie soundtracks, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Sharp Minor. Sometimes I buy so much music I don’t even have time to listen to it. Entire albums sit neglected for months.

  It is a dark, gloomy day and I just want it to be over with, I want nothing more than my two weeks of vacation time. My brief respite before the dull tedium of camp ensues. My graph presentation and five-minute lecture to the staff is the one thing standing between freedom and me.

  I dig out the folder containing my work from the pile of crap occupying the passenger seat. I scan it one last time, making sure there are no typos. I have decided on a chart showcasing Arham’s repertoire of behavior expression throughout the year. It’s a doozy, even I have to admit. I glance at the index cards I’ve prepared to guide my “lecture.” My opening paragraph:

  Throughout the year, I have observed Arham Sarkhar on a daily basis, in a classroom setting designed for ABA therapy. I have noted the amount of time Arham has received ABA therapy and the change in his behaviors over the ten-month school year. The behaviors I observed were play skills, communication skills, self-help skills, motor skills, social skills, computer skills, eating behaviors, receptive language, expressive language, and imitation. I then calculated the amount of time Arham received ABA therapy, the independent variable, and the change in the behaviors over that time, the dependent variable.

  Basically, what this means is that over the year, I’ve collected data from every exercise I’ve run with Arham. Every flash card I’ve shown him, every letter I’ve had him write, every person I’ve made him say hello to while maintaining eye contact. I’ve marked down every correct response he’s delivered and every time he’s made a mistake. I’ve compiled this data into one big, massive graph to show, in essence, how much improvement he’s made since September. It is a document of just how close to “normal” Arham has crept since I started working with him.

  Data collection is the most important thing that happens in an ABA environment, I have been told this many times at the John W. Manley School. For Ceci, graph interpretation is the equivalent of a fat, long line of cocaine. She lives and dies by graphs. Those little dots and lines light up her eyes and jack her heart rate to aerobic levels. Ceci is in it for the long haul, addicted to the children she teaches. Never losing the drive to get them ready for the cold, hard world that they will someday attempt to join and that will, in the end, reject them.

  It starts to rain as I head up the sloping brick walkway into the building.

  In the conference room there are at least thirty people. Every teacher. Every assistant. Ceci. Georgie. Angela. They are all here. In the corner there is the usual table of doughnuts and coffee and orange juice we are given at every staff meeting. Outside the windows, I can see it is now pouring, a torrential rain running in thick, fast rivulets down the street.

  I position my first transparency on the overhead projector, bringing it into focus for everyone to see. I begin. I tell the room about Arham Sarkhar, my student. I tell them he will soon be four years old. For Christmas I brought him a pair of kids’ Nikes because I was sick of seeing his mother send him to school in his sister’s old ballet slippers. I tell them Arham loves hugs. I tell them he is missing three front teeth that have yet to come in. I tell them he never fails to smile when I let him know he is doing a good job. I tell them he tries to get out of doing work by pretending he has to urinate. I tell them that over the year, Arham and I have been through a lot together, including an incident where he hit me in the side of the head with a rock during yard time. I tell them that while I don’t know all the children at the John W. Manley School as well as I know Arham, I know they are all special and amazing. I mean all of this. I enjoy Arham’s company more than I think I let myself believe and I am proud of the progress he’s made. A pang of sadness creeps through me because in the back of my mind, I know he’s fucked for life. I know most likely his parents won’t stick to the tedious regime and structure his education requires. Eventually they will give up sending him to special schools, they will tire of running exercises with him. They will have more important things to deal with. Their other “normal” children will require the bulk of their attention. Arham will be neglected. He will retrograde to the way he was when he came to the John W. Manley School. He will sit in front
of the television all day and smile and not ever know that he was once doing so well.

  I explain the graph I have made and talk about what the numbers mean. I cite specific areas where Arham has made the most progress. His one-to-one correspondence, for example, is amazing. I have sat and listened to him count to 157 without missing a single number.

  When I finish, everyone claps and the rest of the staff meeting unfolds swiftly.

  Ceci corners me at the breakfast table, my mouth full of chocolate-glazed.

  “That was great, Cal,” she says. “Really. Just so good.”

  “Thanks,” I say, swallowing half a doughnut as quickly as I can. For a second it gets stuck in my throat and I need to swallow again to get it down. Ceci hands me a glossy folder, an information packet for Pace University’s master’s program in applied behavior analysis.

  “I went ahead and gathered up some info for you,” she says.

  I take the folder from her. The cover depicts a group of smiling students seated in a circle across an idyllic campus green.

  “I’d love to promote you,” Ceci is saying. “Get you on track to be a head teacher. But school policy is you have to be enrolled in a program somewhere. Start working toward your certification.”

  It’s nice to hear her compliment me. Maybe working at John W. Manley could be rewarding in the long run. It feels, at the moment, like a good place to be.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You said that last time I brought this up,” she says. “I’m just trying to help. You mentioned you could use more money.”

  “I could,” I say.

  She pats my shoulder and walks out of the room. I watch the way her ass moves inside the cream-colored skirt she’s wearing. I think about how tonight when I get home, I’ll lock myself in the third-floor bathroom and picture that skirt while I jerk off.

  I eat two more doughnuts and wait for the buses to arrive.

  I TRY TO let Arham have fun today. I don’t run any exercises with him. We spend most of the morning playing Connect Four. He has no idea how the game works, but he gets a big kick out of dropping the checkers. He bursts out in uncontrolled fits of laughter every time he lets one fall. I let him give me lots of hugs. We walk through the halls, telling everyone we see to have a nice break.