A young instructor named Cassie, wearing the official Gymboree T-shirt, escorted us out onto the floor and instructed us to sit in a circle with the rest of the class. I kissed my daughter’s new unicorn horn and made little hisses and buzzes in her ear—the kind that are supposed to help soothe fussy babies. But she was a toddler now. She wasn’t buying any of that shit anymore. She wailed on and I began to fear that she would keep bawling and bawling until her fucking head exploded. I offered her a pretzel rod from a ziplock bag of now-warm snacks that had been sitting in my jacket pocket for three days. She smacked the pretzel out of my hand and kept on crying. I whisked her over to a corner, where she wouldn’t be overwhelmed by all the other people around.
“Do you hear the music?” I asked her. “Isn’t this fun?” I kept waiting for the part where I could get up and go read a magazine.
She let up crying for a second and I sensed an opening.
“See?” I said. “It’s not so bad.” There was a giant cylindrical pad over in the corner of the room that looked like a padded log. Everyone loves logs! I pointed at it. “Look at the log! I bet you get to play with it.”
“Eeee!” she said happily.
“There’s my girl! You’re you again! Come on. Let’s sit.”
We sat back down and Cassie the instructor summoned us all to attention. Just the sound of a new voice was enough to get my daughter to ignore her lump and focus on something new. Teachers at all levels have a remarkable ability to get the attention of a roomful of children. I can’t do that. If I try to gather up a group of drooling one-year-olds, they end up farther apart than when I started. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and our children. I had a name tag on. Name tags make any gathering six times more awkward and horrible.
“I’m Drew, and this is my daughter.”
“Welcome, Drew!” said Cassie. “So nice to see a dad here today.”
She jacked the boom box up to Oasis-concert volume and busted out all kinds of dirty used blocks and rattles for the kids to play with. In a matter of minutes, our cozy little circle of parents and toddlers broke apart as the kids rolled and crawled and spazzed out in different directions. I looked around at all the little padded ladders and trampolines, and I wanted a ray gun to shrink me down to half my size so that I could go play around on them. Then Cassie busted out the superlog and my daughter’s transformation into a happy child was complete. Cassie lined the kids up on one side of the log and made them roll it across the room. Half of them stumbled and did soft faceplants on the floor, which I found highly amusing.
Then the child of the woman in the elevator started to cry and I felt a wave of triumph pass over me. I looked down at my daughter and she was now fully recovered from getting her skull dented. She had no memory of the incident, and she never would. We could start fresh. We could always find a way out of pain and unhappiness.
For the grand finale, Cassie dragged out the Gymboree-standard parachute, which had clearly not been washed in over a decade. All the little kids and parents gripped the diseased edges, lifting it up (with the parents doing the bulk of the work), then pulling it back down very quickly so that we could all hide under it, as if we were huddled inside a makeshift FEMA tent shelter. Then we got out from under the parachute and let the kids crawl out to the center so that the parents could shake it, the kids rolling around inside the chute like marbles in a dish. Cassie busted out an economy-size bottle of bubbles and blew them into the air while we all sang . . .
There are bubbles in the air, in the air There are bubbles in the air, in the air
There are bubbles way up high
Way up high in the sky
There are bubbles in the air, in the air And my daughter floated out of class as if trapped inside by a bubble herself. There were other children who didn’t make it through the whole class because they freaked out. Oh, but I had outlasted them all. I had struck a blow for confused fathers everywhere. I won.
But we took the stairs back to the car. No way I was fucking with that elevator again.
SLOW GUY
Our daughter was two years old now, so this was her first real Halloween. You can keep your children away from candy for the first two years of their lives. But eventually, once they’re old enough to recognize what Halloween is and why it’s there, the evil executives at Big Candy dig their hooks into them. All it takes is one little Reese’s cup. After that, they’re ruined forever. You may as well trade them in for new children.
I asked the girl what she wanted to be for Halloween.
“School bussy,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Are you sure? A school bus?”
“School bussy.”
“That won’t be easy. I’m not sure the CVS has, like, school bus costumes. You could be the bus driver.”
“School bussy.”
“A princess?”
“School bussy.”
“I got it: Supergirl.”
“School bussy.”
Federal mediators couldn’t have broken the stalemate. I went to my wife.
“Oh, I can make her a school bus outfit,” she said.
“You can? How?”
“Haven’t you ever made your own Halloween costume?”
“No. What am I—a Quaker?”
“It’s more fun to make a costume. What do you wanna be?”
“I have to be something? I don’t have to be anything. I’m a father now.”
“Oh, come on. You have to be something. Something clever.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we could put a really big penny on top of your head, and then you could be A Penny For Your Thoughts.”
“Is that a costume or an art installation?”