A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

  Perhaps this is why parents have another, the father thinks.

  An heir and a spare.

  Someone to hand down the hand-me-downs to.

  But it’s too late for them, and in truth it feels like tempting fate. It occurs to him, Could we make the same decision twice, now on the other side of having a child? Yes, he thinks, but also, if it was hard before, how much, how infinitely harder after having a child?

  Instead, it’s another summer, another clear-out. It reminds him of that famous short story, he tells her. The shortest in the world so-called. Often (though probably apocryphally) attributed to Hemingway. “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” More tragic subtext! What is it with this guy? “But what if the baby were just too big for them,” she says. “Or grew too fast,” he says. “Or just hated wearing shoes?” “Or friends—no, no, grandparents!—bought him ugly-ass ones?”

  “And they called him Papa!”

  What the father knows is if we lost our child, I’d never sell those shoes.

  That’s what they should call those resale places, he thinks: Lost Generation.

  * * *

  They only actually lost the boy once, not counting a few panicky seconds in stores when he trundled down a different aisle. They were in a hotel, the father had turned to say something to the mother, and when they turned back the boy was in the elevator, the doors closing like jaws. They’d stood there stunned, not as if he’d vanished, but as if he’d never existed, and then—Stairs? Wait here!—the father pounding to the next floor and the next and the next until the silver box slid open and the boy yelled, Peekaboo!

  * * *

  A couple from their prenatal class are expecting again. A cousin and her husband, too. Parents at pickup. They all know what to expect now—“economies of scale!” one dad jokes—but their children don’t. One little girl parrots what she’s been told in a conspiratorial whisper. “There’s a baby in my mommy’s tummy.”

  “A baby what?” he teases. “A baby mouse? A baby rabbit?”

  “No, silly! A baby brother or a baby sister!”

  A brother or a sister, he thinks, that old coin toss, but definitely a baby.

  It’s no different in kind to what he and his wife have said to the boy. You lived in Mom’s belly for nine months. It’s just how people talk, he knows. Baby talk about babies. Better than the old bullshit about storks or gooseberry bushes. Better than going into clinical detail.

  Only there’s no comparable formula, no script, for telling children about lost siblings. Or maybe there is for miscarriages, he doesn’t know mercifully. There certainly isn’t one for abortions.

  There’s no need, he supposes. An abortion can be kept secret, after all. It’s not an arrival, but a departure. Except, where’s the line between a secret—between privacy and discretion—and shame.

  “Will I have a brother or a sister?” the boy asked once. “Would you like one?” the father asked carefully. “God, no!” the mother said. “Phew!” They all laughed, profoundly relieved.

  The father remembers yearning for a sibling when he was a kid. Only children were rare then, in life and in all the books he read where siblings—Dick, Jane—were the norm. When he asked his mother recently why they’d only had him, she told him she had planned on a large family, but he was such a difficult baby, he put her off having more. Now you tell us! his wife lamented, laughing. But lying awake he thinks, now, of those other babies, his unborn siblings, unborn because of him—his fretting, his wailing, his sleeplessness—searches himself for guilt, as if rooting through pockets for change. Comes up with only lint.

  Unborn thanks to birth control, he assumes. He couldn’t ask his mother, even now, if she had an abortion, but assumes she would have told them before now if she had. Except if she’d had one, while he was a kid, it would have still been illegal just.

  Of course, you wouldn’t tell a kid about an abortion, the father knows, any more than any parent would share countless mysteries of grown-up life. But even when he thinks about telling a grown child, he still feels a hesitation. A hesitation born of shame, or more truthfully of fear, fear of judgment, which is perhaps what shame amounts to.

  And the most frightening judgment in the world—the last judgment, in a sense, the one that outlives us—is our child’s.

  And still we—even us, he thinks—routinely tell children, There’s a baby in there!

  Just a children’s story—simple and innocent. A story that might be true or only make believe. But one, if told often enough, that sticks. A baby! In there! Just like you! One that becomes childish when believed by the adults who tell it; believed by the adults our children grow up to be. Such innocence in adults seems suddenly grotesque to him. Big babies! He pictures the giant sculptures of infants by Ron Mueck he saw once: all cuteness rendered monstrous at large scale.

  The problem, he knows, is imagination. His old friend, his stock in trade. Imagination is what makes an embryo a baby, a fetus a child. We imagine the future. But, like everything else, there are two sides to imagination. Our hopes and our fears. But who wants to face the fears when we’re talking about a pregnancy. Only those who have to, he thinks bleakly. Otherwise, our very existence—we were all born after all!—biases us toward hope.

  So it’s a baby in there. As if saying so will make it so.

  Among the many synonyms he knows for imagine—to think, dream up, make up, devise, invent, create: to conceive.

  * * *

  In writing classes, he often advises his students to delete extra siblings. Do you really need them? Do they add to the story, or dilute it? If they don’t have a name, or any dialogue . . . He sticks out his tongue, crosses his eyes, draws a thumb across his neck. And everyone laughs.

  * * *

  When people used to ask him, after his first book came out, which was his favorite story, he used to demur, say it was like asking someone who their favorite kid was, this before he was even a parent. At least, he thinks now, that’s one choice he doesn’t have to make.

  But then, of course, it comes to him, a belated shiver: We did have another.

  * * *

  Pregnancy, he recalls his wife complaining, is so fucking public. Literally making your fucking public, its consequence at least. People, strangers, feel free to comment on your body, to ask when you’re due, to touch your belly. She hated that, the invasion of privacy, the presumptuousness, the taint of the salacious. And babies are public—everyone craning to see into strollers, offering congratulations, parenting tips. Feeding them, changing them, getting mad at them—all often public. It’s mostly well meaning, he tried to tell her. Until it isn’t, she said, until it spills into people feeling like they have a stake in your pregnancy, your baby, a right to an opinion, a judgment. They know one thing about you, and they think it’s everything.

  The only people who like it, in her view, are the celebrity moms. They get to pretend they’re normal and still get all the attention. She loathes the way they make it look so easy. You know they all have live-in nannies. Baby wranglers, he nods. Stunt moms, daddy doubles, prop babies! And then they all get to write kids’ books!

  Celebrity abortions not so much, she notes dryly.

  Babies in fiction tend to be props, is something he’s also told classes. More objects than characters until they can talk. Never quite fully alive on the page.

  * * *

  (As it happens, his proposed summer school class is on fiction by celebrities. Franco, Ringwald, Hawke, Fisher, Penn, Duchovny, Hanks. The new classics! They need the money; he needs to make sure the class will fill.)

  * * *

  Each spring, when the studio photographer comes to school to take portraits of the kids, she comes with baby animals for the kids to pose with. One year it’s chicks, another rabbits. The boy cradles them, beaming.

  A baby rabbit, they read together in some children’s book, is called a kit.

  A baby mouse is called a pinkie.

  A baby in the womb, he tells himself
firmly, is called a zygote. Or an embryo. Or a fetus.

  But can you tell a child that? Better to say it’s a “maybe” in there. Or maybe the old bullshit—parsley beds, cabbage patches, watermelon seeds!—was best after all. Stories like Santa and the Easter Bunny that we grow out of.

  * * *

  Gooseberry bush and parsley bed, he googles, were nineteenth-century slang for pubic hair.

  The stork myth likely derives from their migration and return nine months later. It was popularized by Hans Christian Andersen. Except in Andersen’s story, to punish children who have taunted them, the storks deliver dead babies.

  As for the old line about getting pregnant from swallowing watermelon seeds, it reminds him of an older female friend who once described giving birth as like “shitting a watermelon, studded with razor blades.”

  Very soon now it’ll be the Age of Games—The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game—all the young-adult apocalypses. “YApocalypse Now,” the father calls the genre, a favorite of his undergrads too. (Not literature, he tells them. Won’t last. Who’s going to want to read it after the actual apocalypse! But, of course, they don’t believe in posterity, even though they are posterity. When they ask him what he writes, he tells them: Pre-apocalyptic fiction.)

  In every one of these futures, children are tested, over and over. And in these stories, parents and children die. That’s really why he can’t stand them. He hasn’t been able to read books or watch movies with child-in-peril plots since he became a father. He knows he’d die for his child if it came to that—willingly, eagerly—because how to go on living without your child?

  No wonder we’re so protective, he thinks. Our own lives are at stake. It’s our blood in that brimful cup. No, you couldn’t go on without your child.

  Unless you have another, in which case you have to.

  But the closest he’s come to protecting his child from death was carrying him to the basement during a tornado warning. They built LEGOs together while winds tore overhead and the sky turned jade.

  * * *

  The mother’s pet peeve, by contrast, is all those impossibly perfect TV babies. The ones who sleep through fistfights, rough sex, lengthy exposition. The ones who never cry when the bad guys are closing in—Oh please! They’d be so dead in real life!

  * * *

  Terrorists, hitmen, zombies. He’d readily die at their hands for his child. And kill for him, too? He thinks so.

  For instance, that story, that line—“I’m cunting”—that’s not quite how it happened.

  In reality, the father had been asked to pick a favorite word in reply to some writers’ thread. He’d gone for “fountain” because, as he explained, the boy had just pointed out a tree in leaf, said it was “like a fountain.” His first simile!

  Someone had tweeted back: Another smug parent. Reminds me of my favorite word—cunt. Some British guy—they use the word more loosely there, often in reference to other men. (An awkward bit of contextualization—what his students call an “info dump,” though they’d probably be relieved to know he didn’t use the word about a woman as in the earlier version.)

  “The guy’s calling me a cunt!” he’d raged, to his wife, in front of their child, until she shushed him. He’d taken her advice, not replied, but he’d looked the guy up, tracked him down, found his address, fantasized about what he’d do if he ever went there. He was offended, of course, but also something worse, something primitive. As if it wasn’t just him who’d been insulted, but somehow the boy attacked. Only fantasies, of course—however bloody (“I’ll cunt you, motherfucker!”)—but then it was only a tweet.

  What might he do in real life?

  And this guy only called him a name.

  It’s the same rage he felt at the clinic. Or related to it. Brother to it. Sister.

  “Everyone’s a critic,” his wife reminded him. “Everyone’s a critic of everything.”

  And this is also what the internet is for, he thinks. If online porn universalizes shame, social media universalizes judgment. Both exercises in self-gratification.

  (On the other hand, maybe it was being called “smug,” when he feels so abject as a parent, that really set him off.)

  * * *

  And then there’s another school shooting. They’re numbingly frequent, but this is the first since the boy started school. And the father feels powerless. What if you can’t die, or kill, to protect your child? What if you’re not that lucky?

  The school principal emails tips for how to talk to a child about bad news. They sit the boy down. They’re nervous, but he’s calm. They have lockdown drills at school, he explains patiently, he knows what to do. They didn’t know about the drills (they don’t read all the principal’s emails). They’re relieved, and appalled. But the boy is calm, matter-of-fact. He is reassuring them. As if it were all perfectly normal, mundane as a fire drill, sensible as looking both ways before you cross or not talking to strangers.

  The father is not calm. He rages at the politicians sending their thoughts and prayers. (Here’s a thought: Did your prayers get answered last time?) Rages at the NRA flacks talking about the Constitution (Rights! What about wrongs? Let’s talk about wrongs for once.)

  It’s the shamelessness that incenses him.

  He fantasizes about protesting a gun store. Standing outside with his own bloody placard showing gunshot fatalities, the number of gun deaths. Shouting “Baby killers” at customers, coming and going. Demanding a waiting period for gun purchases as long as for abortions. Demanding that gun buyers look at photos of gunshot wounds before purchase. Flinging spray patterns of fake blood on the walls of the store.

  Enough! his wife tells him. How’re you any better than them with all these bullshit fantasies of killing and dying. For our child! Your job is to live for him. Isn’t that hard enough?

  He nods, chagrined. Though secretly he remains certain that in the event of the cabin losing pressure, when oxygen masks drop from a panel above, he’ll secure the boy’s first, before his own.

  * * *

  When they were growing up, he and his wife, their parents told them not to waste food. Shamed them. Don’t you know there are starving children in India/Africa/China? As if cleaning your plate would help them.

  Now, they teach the boy to recycle, to compost, not to waste paper, not to waste water. Or there won’t be enough when you’re older. As if the end of the world were his fault, when what they mean is that they won’t be there to save him from it. Another shame, generational this time.

  All those kids’ books about dinosaurs, it comes to him now, are past-apocalyptic fiction. All those plastic raptors, all those plush tyrannosaurs. Barney! C’mon, kids, let’s go see fossils in the museum! On the way, we can burn some in the car! Stu-pendous!

  “We used to want things to be better for our kids,” his wife whispers. “Now we raise them on mass extinction.”

  His own father, the boy’s grandfather, begins to fail. His memory is going and then his body, as if he’s forgotten his body, how to make it work. He clutches seatbacks for balance, shudders tables and shelves. On family visits the father watches the grandmother bend down and tap each of the grandfather’s feet one after another to remind him which one to move when he walks. He sees the grandfather freeze in perplexity before his armchair, unsure of how to turn, arrange his limbs, lower himself into it.

  There are tests (the grandmother resists them). There are exercises (the grandfather forgets to do them). There is equipment (canes and walkers, white plastic grab-handles for the bathroom). There are doctors and nurses and physical therapists and helpers (to cherish and complain about). There are hospitals and facilities and homes (to tour and put their names down for).

  “Second childhood,” the grandmother calls it. She hasn’t slept through the night in a year.

  Sometimes he takes the boy on these visits. Later he doesn’t. He promises the grandmother he’ll bring her grandson again when the grandfather is in a home. He uses this as lever
age.

  The grandfather is no good with babies, never once held the boy as a baby. It made the father think about their relationship, when he was a boy and the grandfather was a new father. But the grandfather is better with toddlers—playful, teasing. Got your nose! On a visit before his body begins to betray him, he cuts a small, neat hole in the lawn with a trowel for the boy to golf. He rummages in the attic for bald tennis balls, fraying shuttlecocks, deflated soccer balls. Treasures to the boy, relics of his own childhood to the father. In the evenings the grandfather gets impatient, snappish, but afternoons in the garden, the two fathers watch the boy together.

  “You have kids?” the grandfather asks once, companionably. By now the father has learned not to contradict him when he’s confused. He plays the part as required—old army buddy, office mate, school chum—mostly by nodding and listening and prompting.