23 Abbott RSVPs
Regretfully, again, Abbott cannot attend. The timing is inopportune. Checking his calendar, Abbott finds that he has a prior engagement on the day in question. On that day, he needs to rise early with his daughter to play in the family room with buttons and beads for two or three hours. Some of the smaller buttons fit inside some of the larger ones, and quite a few of the beads are sparkly. It’s just not something he can miss. He cannot, he regrets, even stop by for a minute to say hi because he needs to go the Big Y to buy $117 of groceries, even though his wife went shopping four days ago. He needs to leave in the car the snack he lovingly prepared so that his ravenous daughter, who is somehow never hungry at home, will have to eat food from the grocery store, which means that Abbott will end up purchasing an empty box and an empty bottle in the checkout line for $5.58. When, later, he puts away groceries, he’ll just dump the box and bottle directly from the shopping bag into the recycling bin. He’s going to be busy securing the string of the helium balloon from the bank branch inside the Big Y tightly around the handle of the shopping cart because his daughter will absolutely flip out if the balloon floats away. He hopes you understand. The invitation sounds great, and three or four years ago Abbott would have been the first to arrive and the last to depart, but regretfully, Abbott needs to hear from both the checker and the bagger at Big Y about how much milk he’s buying. Three different kinds! While his daughter naps, Abbott will unfortunately still be occupied so he can’t sneak away or sneak anything in. He promised his wife he would install a plastic locking device on the toilet-seat lid to prevent his daughter from dropping pennies in the bowl and laughing. Moreover, the veterinarian needs a urine sample from the dog and, if Abbott is reading his wife’s note correctly, the cat. Regretfully, Abbott must also, throughout the day, construct and then dismantle the grandiose conviction that he is unappreciated, and this cycle of self-pity and self-reproach tends to be arduous and time-intensive. Abbott realizes the event could go on for quite awhile and be fun, but he’s afraid he won’t even be able to swing by later because the afternoon and evening are completely booked. He needs to go outside to play with pinecones, which always ends up taking way longer than you anticipate. Then it will be time to go inside to get some maple syrup rubbed into his hair, at which point he’ll be busy clenching his jaw and reminding himself over and over that stewardship is a privilege, that he lives an enviable life, that by any important measure he is a profoundly fortunate man. Abbott knows, regretfully, that he also declined the last four invitations, and that at some point you’re going to stop inviting him, but this day has been scheduled for a long time and there’s nothing he can do to change it. Before you know it, it will be bath time, and he needs to be there to squirt the plastic raccoon. After the bath, he’ll be going downstairs to pretend to look for something. If there is any time remaining in the day, which is unlikely, Abbott knows he should stop collecting acute and contradictory feelings for his wife, and spend just sixty seconds trying to imagine what it’s like to be her. Now that he rereads the invitation, Abbott sees that the event to which he has been invited took place last weekend. It is with sincere regret that he sends this regretful note so late. He hopes you had a great time, and he reminds you that he would love to get together in four or five years for a coffee or maybe a beer.
24 Abbott Goes In
That crinkle Abbott hears as he undresses before bed is caused by the numerous plastic sleeves of juice-box straws stuffed into the pockets of the shorts he has worn for three days straight. Eventually he might ruminate about fluorocarbons and landfills, the domestication of the modern man, preschool dentistry, the lunatic conjunction of juice and box, but first he needs to sneak into his daughter’s dark room. She lies on her back, way up on her pillow. The top of her head is pressed against the wall, and her face is turned severely to the side, away from Abbott. Her hands are fists at her throat. She is braced against sleep, as if against wind, a wave. Abbott’s eyes adjust, but Abbott does not.
25 Abbott and the Antique Tractor
Sure, they could drive across the neighborhood, but it’s more fun to walk. It’s good exercise, and it’s also nice to be outside in the summertime. Abbott dresses his daughter and gets her ready to leave. “OK, here we go,” he says, opening the front door. He feels nearly euphoric. That noise in the front yard is the squirrels. “Let’s go see the tractor,” he says. A neighbor told him there’s an antique tractor parked in the field directly behind the neighborhood, and he thought his daughter might want to see it. His wife, too. All of them. Here comes Abbott’s wife with that belly. Abbott looks at her and feels the stirring of ancient, mutually exclusive impulses. His wife regards the girl’s outfit. It’s probably right what she’s probably thinking. She says, “I don’t really … For one thing, I have never even seen those pants.” Abbott shrugs and says, “She picked them out.” This isn’t true. “Ready?” he says. “Let’s get going. Tractor!” “Wait,” his wife says. “Did you put sunblock on her?” Abbott nods his head in the manner of someone who could later deny having nodded. His wife looks right at him and says, “You did?” Abbott almost imperceptibly shakes his head. His wife says, “So you didn’t?” Abbott nods again. His wife says, “Could you put some sunblock on her?” The girl says, “Tractor.” Abbott closes the door. His wife says, “Does she have a new diaper?” Abbott’s eyes become glassy and unfocused. He breathes audibly from his mouth. He feels unhappy and old and sleepy. “And I am sorry,” his wife says, “but these are not summer pants. See, they have a lining.” Abbott attempts to say that the girl chose the pants, but he’s too tired to repeat the entire lie, and he falls silent. “She’s already sweating,” his wife says. “I’m not trying to be a bitch,” she adds. Abbott tells his daughter they have to return to her room, and the child erupts. Tears actually seem to shoot forth from her face, as from the faces of animated characters. He picks her up and carries her through the house, knowing these days will soon seem, in comparison, like the easy days of a carefree summer. The girl keeps kicking him in the abdomen. Much later, prepared for the family outing, they walk back through the house together. Abbott’s wife has packed some snacks and drinks. “OK, let’s go see that tractor,” she says, opening the door, accepting the tremendous burden of enthusiasm. Outside it is humid and resplendent. In the driveway there are, it turns out, two feathers, a berry, several chunks of tar, and a lot of pebbles. The girl begins to collect the items, and Abbott carries what she cannot hold in her hands, which is almost everything. Overhead, planes cross the sky, and Abbott’s daughter stops to watch every one. “Plane,” she says, pointing. “Plane.” “Check out this weird bug,” Abbott’s wife says, pointing to something in the grass. The family checks out the weird bug. Neighborhood children ride by on their bicycles, captivating Abbott’s daughter. Her naptime is looming. The tractor is an impossible dream. Nobody in Abbott’s family will see an antique tractor today, if ever. Abbott’s wife seems to have accepted this fact with grace and maturity. It occurs to Abbott that she may have known it all along. Abbott and his family have still not left the premises. “Who else is hungry?” Abbott’s wife says. She sits on the blacktop and opens the bag of snacks. Abbott’s daughter yelps and runs across the driveway to her mother. The way she runs. Abbott watches, trying to memorize it.
26 Abbott and the Families of Trapped Miners
Despite Henry David Thoreau’s admonition that “If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another,” Abbott nevertheless clicks tonight on an interview with the families of trapped miners. What he learns is that these families of trapped miners, like the families of trapped miners throughout the devastating history of mining, are tired and sad and recklessly hopeful. One woman whose husband is trapped holds six-week-old twins. She says she woke in the
night because she heard his voice.
27 The Labors of Abbott
Returning home from a spectacularly unsuccessful quest to buy a couch, Abbott stops with his wife and daughter in the parking lot of a strip mall of premium outlet stores in Northern Connecticut. He’s not shopping, though. What he’s doing is cleaning vomited raspberries out of his daughter’s car seat with antibacterial moist wipes. He is reminded of the exceptionally strong mythical hero who had to clean out the dirty stables. He is trying not to be reminded of the exceptionally strong mythical hero who had to perform the same bad job over and over. The moist wipes are cool and pleasing, with a faintly stringent odor, redolent of bactericide. The considerable mound of red-tinted towels is striking, nearly pretty, on the black tar. He glances up once to see his daughter running across the searing lot wearing yellow socks and a sagging diaper, looking very much like a child whose parents do not file federal income taxes. Abbott’s wife chases the girl listlessly, pregnantly, in the heat. In one hand she holds the ruined clothes, in the other the clean clothes. In her uterus she carries another uncivilized human child. She appears to have no hope of catching the girl, much less of clothing her. Like a mythical hero, Abbott returns his attention to the car seat, the numerous crevices of which are coated in sweet-smelling gastric compote. She really ate a lot of raspberries. He removes the seat from the car and discovers that it is dripping somewhere from its center. There are brown birds in the parking lot picking off pieces of discarded bagel and croissant, then flying back to a crevice behind the Liz Claiborne sign, where they live and raise their children. They appear to be uninterested in his liver. Time has more or less stopped. Abbott’s sweat drips down into the vomit, and he arrives again in paradox. The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.
28 Abbott the Activist
It’s late and still awfully hot when Abbott inadvertently discovers, on the Internet, a petition to prohibit the painting of hermit crab shells. The petition is beautiful, Abbott understands, precisely because it is futile. He suspects that he would not like to be in the same room with any of these 298 dissenters, but he loves them virtually and from afar. There is distant thunder, and Abbott can hear the clicking of the trembling dog’s toenails on the wood floor. He does not want to know what time it is. The miracle child is asleep in her bed, clutching a stuffed pony. He signs the petition with the letters of his keyboard, perhaps augmenting his modest file at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Then, galvanized still, he changes the light bulb in his desk lamp.
29 Abbott Takes the Garbage Out
It’s not as if Abbott is never struck by the sublime grandeur of existence. It’s not as if he is never moved by the simple fact of being alive on this magnificently unlikely planet. Just this evening it happens as he is taking out the garbage. He places the cans by the curb, and when he turns to walk back to his house, the hazy summer light through the spruce trees brings him to a stop in his driveway. When language too quickly catches up, perhaps five or six seconds after he is halted by the splendor, the word that comes to Abbott’s mind is gratitude. He is grateful to be alive, grateful to be a witness to beauty. So far, so good. But then Abbott recalls, as he not infrequently does, Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of the young Sudanese girl who has collapsed on her way to a feeding station. It appears that her head is too heavy to lift off the sand. In the background a vulture waits on the ground with what looks in the photograph like patience. It’s not an intrusive thought if you summon it, if you keep it close. The image abrades him like a hair shirt. The inevitable substitution of his daughter for this Sudanese girl does not increase Abbott’s gratitude; rather, it warps the gratitude into guilt and sorrow, which are, like gratitude, insufficient to the problem. Abbott looks away from the hazy summer light through the spruce trees to his house, a 1955 ranch with vinyl siding and a Cape roof. What kind of fool would cherish this? What kind of fool would not cherish this? Carter’s suicide note said, among other things, “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.” He was survived by a wife and young daughter, who suffered for his response to suffering. Is Abbott afflicted by a problem of psychology or a problem of philosophy? Are these discrete problems? Are these rhetorical questions? Back inside the house, Abbott, reaching irritably, wonders if he has a responsibility to enjoy his life, given the material conditions of his existence. Preoccupation with suffering does not alleviate suffering. Preoccupation with suffering actually causes suffering. Therefore, it is both practical and ethical to ignore suffering … Perhaps a minute after his euphoric epiphany about the grandeur of existence, Abbott is standing at the kitchen counter, picking at scraps from the dirty dinner plates, not honoring or being at all conscious of this food and how it arrived on his family’s plates. He’s not even conscious of putting food in his mouth or chewing or swallowing. He’s certainly not hungry. You’re not, he knows, supposed to eat while standing. Might Abbott be obliged to take some delight in his existence? Deprivation ceases to have meaning if we do not recognize and enjoy that which is deprived. This is either correct or incorrect. Determined to make a sincere attempt at delight, Abbott returns to the driveway. Fortunately, the sunlight is still hazy and still shining through the spruce. He stares at the light and the trees and exhorts himself: There, now, look—enjoy. He attempts to risk delight, as the poet instructs. Perhaps it is a risk; perhaps it takes courage. Abbott fails to achieve a powerful sense of gladness. After eight or ten seconds he thinks, I am not thinking of the Sudanese girl. The mowers make the evening hum. There’s a high branch, he notices, leaning heavy on a power line.
30 Abbott and the Bowl-Shaped Field
If he weren’t an untenured humanist at the flagship campus of a state university system, what would Abbott most like to be? He’s thought about this question and now he has an answer: He’d like to be a field scientist with a useless research project. While he does make himself click on the headline about the man who threw his three young children off a bridge to get back at his wife, he also, it should be noted, permits himself to click on the headline about the husband-and-wife team that has studied fireflies for the past eighteen years. During this time they have amassed copious data on the life cycle and mating habits of several species of lightning bugs. It’s not much of a surprise to learn that the males with the brightest and longest flashes have the most reproductive success. In some species, the females return a blink two seconds after the male’s blink; in other species, the interval is four seconds. The research is wonderful because it is so unnecessary. All it does is create knowledge. Abbott loves science without application or consequence. It’s no mystery why they aren’t divorced, these scientists. Or why they haven’t stabbed or poisoned each other. For eighteen summers they have been conducting research in the same place in Pennsylvania. They sit on a jutting rock and look down at the fireflies blinking in a large bowl-shaped field. No vivisection, no monkeys, no Pentagon grants. They just observe and record the data. The man says the first night of each summer they never do any science. They used to try, but they gave it up. He says all these years and it’s still an amazing sight. His wife agrees. It’s like the sky is turned upside down, she says.
JULY
1 Abbott Bumps His Head on the Glass Ceiling of the Capitalist Imagination
This morning Abbott is sitting on his back deck having coffee and reading the newspaper with Ted, Margot, Oliver, Vince, and Chester, who are all imaginary people. Not friends, exactly, because Abbott does not have the time or energy to maintain the friendships. Acquaintances, let’s say. Abbott says, “OK, everyone, listen to this,” and he begins to read aloud a very interesting imaginary article about two identity thieves, ages sixteen and seventeen, who hatched and executed a bold scheme whereby they obtained the credit card information of numerous wealthy Americans and then used the cards to make generous (but not exorbit
ant) donations to worthy charities (children, animals), consequently putting the prosperous cardholders in the awkward position of contesting the transactions and retracting desperately needed donations to heroic nonprofit organizations. Shame as a lever. And if these fraud victims did not contest the charges, then in essence no crimes had been committed, and the kids would go unprosecuted. Abbott considers this article a kind of moral-political-spiritual Rorschach test, and he stops reading after five paragraphs to elicit comments from his acquaintances. Margot is laughing. She has her head tilted back and her mouth open with her buck teeth pointed upward as if to take a big bite out of the sky. She is gorgeous and buzzing. She pats Abbott on the forearm and says, “You just made my day.” Abbott has a gigantic crush on Margot. If he were not married to a real woman and if he didn’t have dried applesauce on his neck and if Margot were not always off backpacking through terrifying countries, he thinks he might propose to her this instant. But then Ted with that ridiculous facial hair says that he just doesn’t think that the end ever justifies the means. Abbott shares a meaningful look with Margot; he rolls his eyes, and she sticks out her big red tongue. Ted says that these two fellows—he actually says fellows—broke the law and must face the consequences. He provides a brain-numbing series of examples and hypothetical scenarios to illustrate means/ ends ethics. And while he is genuinely sympathetic to all Robin Hoods … that’s when Vince interrupts to say that these naïve hackers have an undeveloped political consciousness. Margot says, “They’re sophomores in high school, Vince.” Vince says, “So?” Margot says, “Can’t you just admit that it’s kind of cool?” Vince swats her question away with a wave of his hand. He says that injustice is systemic. You can’t just strike rich individuals, he says. You have to strike institutions and systems. These kids’ actions are meaningless in the context of the larger struggle. Ultimately, they have done nothing to alter the access to the means of production. This is Vince’s answer to everything. He is right, of course, but Abbott still wishes he would shut up. The deck furniture is imaginary and it is nice. This lazy expanse of Sunday morning is definitely imaginary. Oliver exclaims, “String those kids up and televise it!” This represents his full intellectual response to the matter. Nobody knows why Oliver is even allowed to be here. Then it’s quiet for a moment, and everyone turns toward Chester, the fatalist. Generally, Chester does not speak unless prodded. “So, Chess,” Margot says, “what do you think?” Chester looks up from Sports, the only section of the paper he says still has the capacity to surprise. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he says fatalistically. “Sure it does,” Margot says. “Just keep reading the article,” Chester says, returning his attention to Sports. Abbott finds his place at the sixth paragraph and resumes reading out loud. As it turns out, twenty-two of the twenty-four wealthy fraud victims contested and withdrew the unlawful donations. Charity officials, quoted on condition of anonymity, found it difficult to hide their disgust. After a two-month investigation, the FBI apprehended the teenaged perpetrators at a skate park a few blocks from their high school. There was, apparently, something wrong with their plan at the level of conception. They are still being held and interrogated by the FBI, and will likely face charges of larceny and fraud. Said one law enforcement spokesman, “These little wiseguys are in a whole heap of trouble.”
Abbott Awaits Page 4
