In my stories I’d been some kind of wild man, some bumbling lothario wielding his incompetence, mistaking his sister-in-law for a prostitute, knocking over the casket at the funeral of his boss, battling suburban angst and sexual constraint in a fictionalized autobio psychodrama. My success at selling that renegade message opened up a sustainable commercial existence, the very existence I’d been trying to avoid. Instead, I embraced conformity, routine, homeownership, marriage, and parenthood, in exchange for neighborly niceties and a sleepy, toothless rebellion in the pages of a crusty political magazine trying to be hip. I worked as an illustrator now, or what might be referred to as an “editorial cartoonist.” I’d also done other types of unclassifiable commercial whore work, promotional posters for a Swedish reggae festival, fabric patterns for a hip-hop clothing company. I had a handful of regular clients from over the years, a hotel soap manufacturer, a Canadian HMO, a fried chicken chain in the Philippines whose in-house art department called when they got totally overwhelmed, although it had been a while, actually, since I’d done any of that crap.
Magazine work asked less of me, and paid more, and at times could almost be fun. I’d done drawings of Anthony Weiner, the Arab Spring, bedbugs, the uprising in Syria, Walmart slaves, Obama as a jug-eared mullah, Obama in his Bermuda shorts in the Rose Garden burying tiny flag-draped coffins, the whole clown car of Republican kooks who’d been rolling across the country all year—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt, Rick Perry, and several of Mitt. In one he’s waving from his yacht, and in another he’s wiping his ass with an American worker, and in yet another he’s burying his loot in the Caymans. I’d also done full-page drawings for longer features, assigned by Adam, my art director: Somali pirates, Gitmo prisoners force-fed on a hunger strike, and a dozen covers—“The CIA in Damascus,” “Stop Eating So Much Meat,” “The Breast Issue,” “Our Complicated Relationship with Drones.” I could make a living if I worked fast, on three things at once, and didn’t mind the art department yanking my chain.
At midnight Beanie got hungry, and at three A.M. he made a sound like a cat being run over by a car, for an hour without stopping. At six he got up for good.
“I hope you have a better night tonight.”
“Please don’t talk about it.”
I regretted having called. They were at the park now, in unrelenting heat and humidity. I sat on a low brick wall by the flagpole, the Place of Good Reception, overlooking the sweep of the harbor, the bridge in the distance, seagulls curling in arcs under high pressure and plenty of sunshine, the temperature a breezy seventy-eight degrees, a skosh below the seasonal average.
First thing this morning they went off to gymnastics camp, where we’d enrolled Kaya for the next four Saturdays, and met a nice blond lady who knelt beside Kaya when Robin tried to leave, and a dark-haired unsympathetic woman collecting the pizza money, and a teenage gymnast, holding a sobbing girl, about Kaya’s age, in a pink tutu with a blue lump on her forehead and an ice pack on her wrist.
Kaya had enjoyed the trampoline but not the rope thing. Then some boy shoved her, waiting in line for a cookie. She’d let another boy lie on top of her during circle time, they bumped heads, and now she had a swollen lip. She quit after lunch and said she’d never go back.
Robin’s parents had made it to dinner last night after all, but it seemed that Dave hadn’t changed Iris’s clothes, and her hair was dirty. The last time I’d seen my mother-in-law, she’d used mascara to draw on eyebrows, and wore eye shadow that looked like fireplace ash, and had a bruise from a fall discoloring one side of her face. Every time she walked into a room Robin would walk out, as if an alarm had gone off, explaining loudly that one of the kids needed a cracker, and her mom would sit and tell me how fat people were in Florida, or call Robin’s stepfather Dan, or tell me she had a baby in her belly that was painful sometimes.
Robin mentioned the urinary tract infection her mom had, a result of Dave’s neglect. He’d done his best to nurse her along, while also resisting and denying the obvious. By the time he’d finally given in and had Iris tested, she’d been tying her blouses in front for a year because she couldn’t figure out how to button them. I’d gotten used to the pantomime at dinner, nodding and smiling when she abandoned her fork and pawed through her plate.
Dave and Iris had worked hard all their lives, and this caretaking and dementia were their only retirement. He didn’t have religion or children or close family of his own, but he’d confided in me that after Iris died, he planned to take a bicycle tour through the wine regions of Tuscany. He enjoyed the light-tasting Chianti of Florence, as well as the more full-bodied pinot chiefly associated with Pisa. He’d already done the research.
“I need to talk to her nurses,” Robin said. “I have to call the house when Dave’s not there.” I could hear Kaya singing in the background. I could picture the bench where Robin sat at the park by a sweltering playground. “If he’s home, they won’t say anything.”
It was the song Kaya had been singing in the kitchen before I’d left. “Shakira, Shakira!”
“They’re not nurses,” she said. “They’re probably corn farmers. Or soldiers. When did the war end in Sierra Leone?” I said I didn’t know. Kaya yelled for Robin to watch her climb.“He’s so incapable of dealing with his grief.”
Actually, I thought Dave was holding up pretty well, considering. The steroid he took to suppress whatever was choking his lungs had terrible side effects. His face was bloated and his skin had turned red, thin, and fragile. His beard had gone white. He looked like Santa, if Santa started drinking every day at lunch, which Dave did.
“How come this morning at an air-conditioned gymnastics place for seventy-five bucks an hour she wouldn’t get off my lap, but we come here in a million degrees and she can’t stay off the monkey bars?” I figured it was because she knew the layout, but kept it to myself. “I got so mad at her for quitting. I started screaming, ‘You never try. Why is that?’ I’m sitting outside gymnastics, sweating my ass off, holding Beanie, she can literally see my head from the window, and twice she came out crying, saying she missed me. I just wanted to close my eyes for five seconds. You know how you say I never admit I’m wrong? Well, I was wrong, and I’m not just telling you I abused her to make you feel guilty. I went too far.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I had to shove him into his stroller so I could deal with her, but he wouldn’t let go, and I pressed down so hard I thought I broke his rib cage.”
“Jesus.”
“At lunch, the nice counselor let her sit on her lap, but the mean one told her she was a big girl and should stop crying. I’m going to find that one and explain to her that it doesn’t do any good to tell that to a four-year-old.”
“You tell Kaya that all the time.”
“That’s different.”
“Why is it different?”
“Because she woke me up five hundred times last night. Oh, here she is. You woke me up five hundred times last night.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“You don’t sound sorry.” It was true: Kaya didn’t sound sorry. I looked out at the bay, the sky, the seagulls, thankful for the distance between us.
“I’m locking her in her room tonight.”
“With what?”
“I’ll buy a hook.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I wouldn’t do that to a dog.” Two sailboats tacked at the same angle as they cornered around the jetty.
“She’s not used to being ignored in the middle of the night. One peep and you’re there, hovering over her. Maybe now she’ll finally get sleep-trained. Now she’ll learn to spend the night in her bedroom alone.”
“You’re going to sleep-train her in one night?”
It went on like this for a while.
“It’s you, you feed and flirt and sing and have conversations at three A.M.—”