A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

  She speaks to them gently, slowly. “As if we’re idiots!” the mother fumes. As if we’re the last to know, the father thinks.

  The boy loses his first tooth (“Didn’t lothe it!” he insists, proffering it, shiny with spit, in his palm), lies in ambush for the Tooth Fairy until two a.m. They keep the tooth—“I paid for it,” the father says—and each subsequent one, along with a silky lock of his baby hair, because how can you throw them out, these parts, these relics? Into a box they go.

  * * *

  All the things they’ve imagined him growing up to be:

  A basketball player, a fireman, a chef.

  Allergic, friendless, autistic.

  * * *

  That first lock of hair—a wispy memory of curls. Now, the boy has a buzz cut—they both do—so the straps of his swim goggles won’t tear at his scalp, so the boy on his father’s shoulders won’t yank on his roots, like reins.

  * * *

  At the father’s college comes the day to teach Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” The abortion story that never mentions the word abortion. It’s a classic, a staple, the textbook example of subtext. He’s been dreading it.

  Half the class misses it, always. Their reactions when it’s explained to them range from a penny-dropping “Ooohh . . .” to grudging resistance (“Sure, that could be what they’re talking about, I guess”). He looks around their faces—the faces of those who got it—searching them this time not for critical acumen, but experience, recognition.

  But he also resists the story. Its discretion seems perversely coy. Why shouldn’t it use the word? (Why, for that matter, should the most famous fiction about abortion be written by a man?) He imagines a revision in which the redacted word is reinserted in every line of dialogue, where the young woman leans across the café table and says, “What are you talking about? Oh, you mean the abortion.” Where the waiter asks, “Anything to drink . . . with your abortion?” The bartender winks, “Abortion, huh? Tell me about it!” Where the other passengers waiting reasonably for the train stare out at the landscape and chorus, “Why, those hills do look just like pregnant bellies!”

  Fuck subtext! Screw subtlety! The story normalizes shame. He recalls a similar technique being used in the ’80s for stories about AIDS, stories that didn’t name the disease. He doesn’t teach those stories anymore, and he thinks if he did his students would wonder, WTF. He makes a mental note to stop teaching “Hills Like White Elephants,” to stop perpetuating the unspeakableness, to replace it with Alice Walker’s “The Abortion” or Anne Sexton’s “The Abortion,” or something, anything, by Grace Paley, said to have started writing stories while recuperating from—you guessed it—her abortion.

  * * *

  He used to tell his writing students: Kill your darlings.

  He doesn’t anymore.

  Or worse: Murder your darlings. Both/either are Faulkner’s line. Only not only his. Chekhov and Chesterton both had prior claims. Neither had children. Neither did Woolf. Her preferred form: Kill your little darlings.

  His wife points out that Faulkner actually has a character called “Darl” and doesn’t kill him. She thinks all this talk of “killing” is writerly posturing.

  “It’s called editing, darling.”

  “She said, cuttingly.”

  * * *

  Alice Walker has a line in her story—“Having a child is a good experience to have had, like graduate school”—which reminds him of Dorothy Parker’s quip: “I hate writing. I love having written,” which reminds him that Parker had an abortion herself and wrote about it and was mocked for her trouble . . . by Hemingway. As Parker once said of a lover, “Serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”

  * * *

  At pickup, the father stands apart in the schoolyard. Over­head, the aluminum flagpole twangs flatly, whipped by its halyard, a lonely arrhythmic tolling, frantic with desperation on windy days, exhausted and despairing on still ones. He’s always surprised by the source, glancing around anxiously as if for someone tapping to get his attention, belatedly looking up. It’s the sound of the emptiness before the bell, the doors thrown open, the kids streaming out, the playground filling with noise and motion. How he wishes the boy would come out first. He cranes to look over the crowd, the other parents scooping up kids, looking for his to appear from the shadows of the corridor. The boy’s always toward the end, wary of the crush of bodies, the scramble on the stairs, and always the father has a slow moment of dread that he won’t appear before the boy steps into the sunlight.

  We should get him tested, he thinks. When the only tests he should be taking are the kind you get foil stars for.

  * * *

  Afternoons, after his snack and before his show, the boy continues to do his exercises. His room is filled with brightly colored foam rollers, resistance bands, yoga balls.

  At bedtime, when they read to him and the story gets exciting, the boy cries, “Dun-dun-DUN!” (The sound of an ellipsis, the father tells one of his classes.)

  For months when he was little, it was Goodnight Moon over and over, until the father started declaiming it like a poetry reading, tasting every word. He likes to do accents—a drawl for Cowboy Small, a Welsh burr for Thomas the Tank Engine—and impressions: Jimmy Stewart’s hemming and hawing (“Wuh, well, goodnight moon”), Elvis’s deep twang (“Goodnight moon, uh-huh”).

  Now they’re on to chapter books, each evening a chapter or two, so that the books don’t quite make sense to the adults, taking turns to read to him, when they pick them up on alternate nights. It’s a little like how their lives feel—mysterious, discontinuous, not quite joined up. Cliffhangers unresolved.

  We should get him tested. Dun-dun-dun!

  * * *

  All this reading at bedtime, the father thinks, as he browses the children’s section of the bookstore. All this reading to aid sleep. He wonders, as a writer, how he should feel about that, the ingrained cultural association of reading with sleep. Isn’t it all a little Pavlovian, he muses, watching the heads of his students bob and sink over their books.

  But he does it anyway, of course, hunts for those magical tomes that will lull his child. And when he finds one, it sends him to sleep too.

  Except maybe it’s not the books. It’s like a contact high, the mother reckons. Like being tagged in the playground. Sleep is infectious. The boy slumps against him, and he lays back, sets the book aside, feels himself sinking, his body like sand sifting and settling.

  For years to come, the father will occasionally yearn for that same warm weight, dense with sleep, draped across his shoulders and chest, recall a voice from somewhere: It calms them.

  * * *

  Going on a Bear Hunt. Another old favorite.

  Bear up. Bear down. Bear with.

  The mother bore the baby, bared her breasts, bears the brunt.

  What does the father bear? Apart from the car seat, the diaper bag, the umbrella stroller, the pack-and-play?

  * * *

  At night when the boy wakes with nightmares, it’s the father who goes in to him. (“I nursed him,” the wife murmurs. “Your turn.”) The frame of their bedroom door glows like a portal when the boy turns his light on. The father makes up a story about one of the boy’s stuffed toys, a little black bear with a stitched-on muzzle. He can’t remember who gave it him; it’s not even one of his favorites. The father calls him “Nightbear,” explains that the bear’s job is to stay awake when the boy’s asleep and ensure nothing gets out of his nightmares to hide under the bed or in the closet.

  “How?”

  “He scares them away.”

  “He’s scarier than a nightmare?”

  “He’s a nightmare’s nightmare!”

  “Scarier than . . . zombies?”

  “Of course. He scares ’em . . . to life!”

  “Scarier than pirates?”

  “Aye! He . . . shivers their timbers!” He finds a rib to tickle under the covers.

 
“Nightbear,” the boy sighs, when he’s caught his breath, holding tight to the toy now that he knows what it’s there for. The father eases out of bed, adjusts the shades. Outside it’s pitch-black, as if the dark has been painted on the glass.

  “Do you have nightmares?” the boy asks sleepily, and the father can only nod.

  In the glow of the night-light, the boy thrusts the bear out to him.

  “You keep him,” the father manages.

  * * *

  But generally the boy sleeps heavily—“like a baby,” they can joke now—his body splayed and abandoned as the pile of clothes on the floor of his room. So heavily it’s as if gravity is higher in his bed, the father thinks. So heavily, it’s as if—like a black hole—no consciousness can escape its pull. Overhead pale stars fade on the ceiling, plastic planets tremble on their threads.

  Except once during sex they were startled by the boy’s rustling wakefulness—“It’s . . . ALIVE!” they whisper-screamed to each other—and now some part of them always listens for him when they touch.

  * * *

  It’s the Age of Harry Potter. The child flicking spells—Expelliarmus, Expecto Patronum—off a chopstick like drops of water, the mother and father casting fake ones back and forth in a duel.

  Fettuccini alfredo!

  Pasta fagioli!

  Hakuna Matata!

  Carmina Burana!

  Ginkgo biloba!

  In Vino Veritas! (They clink glasses.)

  In Loco Parentis!

  Is that a spell, she asks, or a curse?

  * * *

  At college, his class roster reads like a list of baby names circa 2000. Three Dans, two Matts, an Ellie, an Amy, an Emma. Laura, Lara, Lauren. A Michelle and a Rachel, who both go by Shelly. Jake and Jacob, Ryan and Bryan. A Kate and a Cat. So many choices, so many of them the same.

  The first time she was pregnant with the girl, they joked about names. (Brie? Cheesy!) The second time they didn’t pick until the boy was born.

  * * *

  At the boy’s school, the talk is of observations and accommodations, of sequencing and processing, of IEPs and 504 plans. There were teacher conferences; now there’s a learning team. When the talk turns to executive function, the father isn’t sure if it refers to the boy or the school.

  Through the window the flag flails silently against a cement sky.

  * * *

  Emails arrive daily from the PTO asking for volunteers. To chaperone field trips, to serve as lunch monitors, recess monitors, after-school tutors, assistant coaches. All of them well meaning, civic-minded, the right thing to do. And yet it infuriates him to be asked. Aren’t I doing enough, he wants to say. Isn’t it hard enough without doing your job too? Don’t I have enough to feel guilty about?

  * * *

  The latest physical therapist, at least, is pleased with the boy’s progress—his muscle tone, his core stability, his bilateral coordination. “Way to cross that midline!” She’s so good with him—patient and smart, but also genuinely warm—another caregiver it’s impossible not to fall in love with. The father feels her praise is for both of them, for all the work he and the boy do together at home. He blushes when she calls, “Good boy!” Of course, she’s too good for an affair, like a saint or a nun, and like the other PTs built with the kind of firm solidity he finds more admirable than attractive (though he occasionally fantasizes about the boy’s swim teacher at the Y, also wonderful with him, and great-looking in her red lifeguard suit, a tattoo twined around one calf). And then it comes to him that he’s attracted to them all because he thinks the boy would approve, that they’d make good mothers. And it feels like a double betrayal.

  * * *

  At Halloween, the father wears a wolf head. He is the Big Dad Wolf. The mother has a moose hat complete with antlers: Mommie Deerest. These will be their costumes every year for a decade, while the boy will be Nemo, an astronaut, a Jedi, Harry Potter, Robin Hood, Mr. Spock.

  The father didn’t grow up trick-or-treating. He used to find Halloween unsettling, with its focus on monsters and evil. There seemed something unwholesome about exposing kids to that, to death. But now he gets it, that it’s a celebration not of fear, but of its opposite: trust. He trails the boy around the neighborhood, holding his breath as his son negotiates the crowds, his costume, unfamiliar porch steps, but also watching in wonder as total strangers open their doors to him with enthusiasm and kindness. He tells the boy, when he takes his hand, that the cold makes his eyes water.

  It’s better than Easter, at least, when all the other little shits outrace the boy for eggs and he comes home in tears.

  * * *

  Sometimes they vie for the title of “sparent,” the non-essential parent. I’m the sparent. No, I’m the sparent. But is it self-deprecation or selfishness? he wonders.

  Once she wails, You’d both be better off without me! And he clutches her as if to stop her leaving there and then, tells her he can’t imagine life without her.

  It’s true—he can’t imagine being the father without the mother.

  It’s true, but also a rebuke. Don’t you dare imagine life without me, he wants to tell her, without him.

  And yet without the boy . . . could he imagine his life without her then? Shit, he can barely remember their life together before the boy. It’s impossible to imagine them without him. Without him, what would they have?

  * * *

  What about that time we forgot it was Halloween? she asks after the boy has counted his candy, gone to bed. How could we? This was another town, another state, early in their marriage, long before the boy. Kids had come to the door, and they’d been caught empty-handed. Horrified, they’d ransacked the kitchen for granola bars, cooking chocolate. When even those were gone, they’d switched off every light in the house, huddled in the dark, as children knocked on the door, listening to the silence, and then walked on. They had held each other, stifling laughter, slid to the floor in an embrace, fumbled each other’s clothes off.

  The wife costume. The husband costume.

  Now look at us. Mom jeans. Dad bod.

  Trick-or-treat? She smiles sadly.

  * * *

  They should get him tested. Instead they’re testing their marriage.

  * * *

  He drives babysitters home at night, sits in his car to watch them safely enter their apartments, feeling like a stalker himself, gripping the wheel, fighting the urge to follow them into their childless lives. It’s not them he wants—in person he feels more tender toward them than aroused—but their freedom. He’d hit that. He resents the money he pays them, only because it feels like they’re already richer than him.

  * * *

  The boy’s favorite show, the Sunday evening ritual after his bath, is America’s Funniest Home Videos, which he calls “America’s” and demands as if it were a human right. “They wouldn’t show it if anyone really got hurt,” the mother reminds the boy every week. She means it as both comfort and warning; he regards her as a killjoy. The father’s tailbone throbs in sympathy watching all the pratfalls, but he tells himself maybe it’ll make the boy less physically cautious. When they all go to a friend’s wedding, the boy is delighted, and then bitterly disappointed. He expected someone to fall over on the dance floor, destroy the cake at least. Breaking the glass is a poor substitute. He yanks on his little tie in frustration. “What’s the point of weddings if something doesn’t go wrong!?!”

  The mother and father look at each other, straight-faced.

  * * *

  At home LEGOs speckle the carpet like confetti.

  * * *

  Early in their relationship, they had all the usual uncertainties. “Just” friends or friends with benefits? Dating? Exclusive? Boyfriend and girlfriend or partners, a couple?

  Even when they got married, he realizes, it hadn’t seemed quite settled, life changing, irreversible. They’d done it at a courthouse near her mother’s place—a small, quick affair, before moving across the country. After
a one-night honeymoon, they went on as before, already living together. They hadn’t bothered to register—their friends were even poorer than them. Cash was fine, they told family, less stuff to pack. They didn’t even have a new toaster to show for it. He’d looked at the ring on his finger and thought, “Huh, now I’m a guy who wears jewelry.” Did they feel married? they asked each other. They didn’t not feel married. And she didn’t much like his efforts to “perform” marriage, to play-act it, hated him calling her “wifey,” even in jest, called him “hub” with a cringe, hated everything that smacked of sitcom marriage.

  There was an awful, awkward breakfast at the B&B where they spent their wedding night when the other guests learned they’d just gotten married and burst into applause. And they blushed—bride and groom! Marriage was mortifying.

  Even his proposal was casual, impromptu. They were on an outing—a beautiful day in the park, a picnic, wine—everything so right it felt like inspiration. “What do you think? Should we get married?” And she shrugged and smiled and said, “Sure. Why not?” As if it were a dare! And he liked that she didn’t need a ring, tied a grass stem around her finger, with a little emerald knot. “I’ll cherish it forever,” she said. “You better,” he said.