Our Children Are Not Our Children

Our Children Are Not Our Children

  Five Tiny Tales of Our Times

  by Kevin Brennan

  Copyright © 2013 Kevin Brennan

  Your children are not your children. -- Kahlil Gibran

  Car Trip

  Dad, I have to go to the bathroom.

  You just went to the bathroom forty-four miles ago.

  Yeah, but we had orange soda and all and the bumps in the road are making me have to go again.

  There’s no place to go.

  But I have to.

  You can’t.

  It hurts.

  Just give him a minute on the side of the road, Bob.

  We don’t have time. We’re trying to make Carlsbad Caverns by sundown. You want to make Carlsbad Caverns by sundown, don’t you?

  I don’t really care if we’re there by sundown, Bob. Let the boy pee on the side of the road, for godssakes.

  No. No, I can’t do that. He has to learn.

  Learn what? Not to let his bladder explode?

  He has to learn to put up with a little discomfort, is all I’m saying. We can’t stop every time he thinks he needs to pee.

  I do need to pee!

  He says he does need to pee.

  I heard him. And I’m saying he can damn well sit there for a while and put up with it.

  But Dad!

  And sit there quietly!

  I need to pee pee too, Daddy.

  Oh, terrific. Now she’s doing it. See? He started a whole copycat thing.

  I can’t help it, Dad!

  I don’t see what the big deal is, Bob. Stopping on the side of the road for two minutes.

  You think you can get them both to pee on the side of the road in two minutes? I’d wager against that one.

  You’re such a pessimist.

  Really. She’s never peed in the open before. She’s three years old. He has that bashful kidney thing. It’ll take him two minutes just to get a stream going. You’re telling me you’d take that bet? Huh?

  It feels like somebody’s cutting me open with a hook!

  He’s in pain, Bob. You pull over now.

  No.

  Daddy, I’m gonna wet myself.

  Isn’t she wearing a diaper?

  She graduated from diapers. Shows how much you know about your own daughter. She’s a big kid now. She’s a big girl, isn’t she. Isn’t she. . . Boo boo boo, my little baby girl! So cute. Sooooo cute!

  Mom, I feel like I might pass out.

  Nobody’s passing out!

  I’m getting dizzy. . .

  If he passes out, he’ll pee in his pants anyway, Bob, so you might as well pull over.

  He’s not going to pass out, and if he does, he’ll be making the rest of the trip to Carlsbad Caverns with wet pants. I have a funny feeling he doesn’t want to see that happen. Do you. Do you!

  Why is Daddy yelling? I have to pee so bad, Mama!

  Are you happy now, Bob? She’s crying. He’s curled up in a fetal position in the back seat and she’s crying, and you’re working those muscles in your jaw the way I don’t like. I’ve told you that scares me. It makes me think you’re capable of anything.

  Oh, I am capable of anything, dear. You go right on thinking that. That’s what I want, matter of fact. I want you to really believe I’m capable of just about anything.

  Pull over.

  No.

  Anh. Ah, huh huh huh.

  Oh God, it hurts so bad!

  See what you’ve done, Bob?

  Don’t use that tone with me.

  I’ll use whatever tone I want when you’re being this pig-headed! And you’re still working your jaw muscles and now, oh that’s lovely, I see you’re clenching your fist too. Is that so you can punch me in the face, Bob? Huh? You feel like maybe you want to punch me in the face?

  Mom, can you die from having pee go backwards up your tubes? I feel like the pee is going backwards up my tubes now.

  Just try to be quiet, honey. Be calm. It won’t be much longer.

  I’ve never raised a hand to you in my life and you know it.

  You’ve thought about it. I see your clenched fists and your jaw muscles. I’ve noticed before. I remember the time when you hit the bathroom wall and knocked a hole in it, Bob. ‘Member that? I do.

  That had nothing to do with you. I was mad at a dripping faucet.

  So you hit the wall. Do you always hit things when you’re mad?

  Sometimes.

  Are you mad at me now, Bob? Huh? Am I making you mad when I tell you what a shit you are for not pulling over? Do you want to hit me?

  Mama, I made pee pee in my pants.

  [Minute upon minute of road hum.]

  See? Everybody’s quiet now. We’ll make Carlsbad Caverns by sundown.

  Baby Teeth

  Maybe Beverlee’s mother could have spared her daughter the later pains and aggravations by getting her those braces when she was a little girl. Her baby teeth were all gone and the adult teeth were coming in badly. The poor doll’s two front ones looked like the blades of blunt tin snips, crossing at the vertical midpoint as they tried to compete for the same space; they wanted to weave an ivory maypole. Beverlee didn’t seem to know that anything was wrong, was not troubled by any unendurable pain (not that her mother could tell, anyway), never asked for braces, neither complained of inordinate teasing at school nor delivered advice from the health care professionals there that she should have them. In fact, everything about her daughter was normal in all visible respects, aside from those awful teeth. It was highly probable, Beverlee’s mother believed, that as little Beverlee grew, her head would adapt to her teeth, or vice versa, and she would turn out just fine.

  More to the point, braces were too expensive. We can’t afford them, she told herself. Not if I still want to go to France and Spain and Italy and Liechtenstein next summer.

  Beverlee’s mother had a friend in Liechtenstein.

  Oh, it was to be a grand affair, a summer in Europe, with Beverlee in the care of two female graduate students who lived next door. It was her well-earned present to herself for having survived a full year of post-divorce difficulty. Sorrow, anger, and barely repressed vindictiveness. She had even toyed with suicide, if one can be said to toy with it, but only when maudlin on wine. On the other shore of that year, all was well again and the trip loomed like the grand prize on some heavenly game show.

  “Fmama,” Beverlee said. “Fcan I go out to fplay?”

  “Of course you can, sweetheart. But wrap up. It’s cold outside.”

  “Fthank you, fmama.”

  Well, she thought in retrospect, how was I to know that poor Beverlee was one of the most unusual cases of dental misalignment the doctors had ever come across? I could only go by what I saw, and what I saw was a little girl with a little girl problem, the kind that lots of little girls have. The kind I even had as a little girl (and I’ll never know if my braces really did any good or whether that’s just what you did in those days). And, how was I to know that the graduate students next door would more or less forget that Beverlee was alive over there in our house, what with their partying and their sexual overindulgence all hours of the day and night (from what I later heard). Hmmm? How was I to know all that. At least I left Bev some money of her own, and she was a smart enough little thing to use it wisely, a ration, as it turned out, of two dollars a week. She did fine on the Wonder Bread with butter and sugar. Just fine. Lost twelve pounds, as a matter of fact, which she could spare, I always told her. And nothing awful happened, really. The toilet backing up was only a minor tragedy.

  And Europe. Europe was beautiful that summer. The barge trip on the Loire. The burgundy wine. The late suppers. The most interesting men.


  When Beverlee’s mother returned from her trip, she was met by Beverlee’s eager face and the smell of raw sewage.

  “Fmama! I fmissed you!”

  It seemed as though her teeth had grown two more inches in ten weeks. She was hardly recognizable. And not just her teeth. Her ribs stuck out and she had the flattest, most lifeless hair. Her complexion was the tawny of a Depression era newspaper.

  “Next year, honey, maybe we’ll send you to Grandma’s in Ohio. You’d like to ride the bus all by yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess so, fmama.”

  Many years later, Beverlee took a job with generous health benefits, including comprehensive dental, and indulged in a long and complicated series of operations to correct her condition. Massive faciodental work, maxillary reconstruction, bone grafts. A tough job, considering her spectrum of problems. Bev had alveolar atrophy, after all. She had impacted teeth, crossbite, temporomandibular joint disease, retrognathia, nighttime bruxism, and malocclusion. They put her in dental journals, with her eyes covered by a black bar.

  When it was all over with, she left town without so much as a kiss on her mother’s cheek. Ran off with a boy from England, where teeth were generally less perfect than at home and the people were generally kinder too.

  Yes, Beverlee’s mother thought on occasion, often when checking the mailbox for a postcard from England, which she imagined would be decorated with pretty stamps bearing the Queen’s cameo:

  Maybe the braces would have been a good idea. In hindsight.

  Taking Off

  And so it’s off to Mount Shasta for the assault on the summit. Checklist. Lightweight pack, lightweight sleeping bag, lightweight freeze-dried food. Water packets. Climbing boots. Detachable boot spikes. Socks. Silk body suit (including balaclava), Gore-Tex gloves, climbing lines, carabiners (lightweight), pitons, hooks, ice hammers, crampons, bivvy sack, sure-fit harness. Propane burner. Mess kit. First aid kit. Chalk and chalk bag.

  That should do it.

  The wife and kids there in the living room arranged like a disassembled Russian matryoshka doll, tallest (the wife) descending to shortest, the little girl. In between the boy, eldest, not much shorter than the wife, and the older girl, substantially shorter than the boy yet also substantially taller than the little girl. There they stand with those drippy poodle eyes, gazing at him as he packs up his gear and mumbles his checklist audibly. There’s no room for error. If something important is left out of the pack he could die. If he experiences a lack of concentration while slinging from one ice wall to another, he could die. If, although he is in full concentration while slinging from one ice wall to another, one of his colleagues — teammates is probably a better word — should experience a lack of concentration, he could die. The mountain is ruthless, the ice indifferent. Gravity is on the other team. He is nothing but a stone.

  “Will you be all right, Daddy,” says the little one, Skipper.

  “Fine, sweetie.” Knock wood. “Daddy will be fine.”

  The wife can’t abide the fib of it and turns away with the back of her hand pressed against her eye and her mouth twisting down. We’ve been through this before, he thinks. Before my assault on Mt. McKinley. And before my assaults on Mts. Whitney, Izaak Walton, Ruskin, Morrison, and the unfortunately named Bloody Mountain. And the assault on Nevado Yanama, Peru, that brutal 17,000 foot Andean disaster on which one man in the outfit died and another was rendered paralyzed. Yes, he thinks, we have been through all this before and she doesn’t seem to understand.

  The boy speaks up, ignoring his mother. “When can I come on one of these climbs, Dad?”

  “When can you come, Dale?” He can’t hide the snicker in his voice. “Maybe when you can bench press twice your weight and make your way up that rock face in the park without equipment. Maybe then, Dale. We’ll see. You need the finger and hand strength. You need the muscle tone. Like me. You see how much I work out.”

  Hopeless. The boy didn’t have it in him. His very name a setback.

  “Dad?”

  Now it was the older girl’s turn. Nadia. “What if you don’t come back this time?”

  It was always like this. Always, upon his preparing to leave, they begin to dread his failure to return. Why was it that when he was present they didn’t make such a fuss? His presence didn’t seem to have a beneficial effect on them until it appeared to be threatened, in danger, and this, he realized, was a feeling that he savored. Now you get it. Now you see how important I am around here, don’t you. You and you and you and yes, you too.

  “I will be back. I have to come back, don’t I. You guys couldn’t make it without me, huh.”

  “Pfffff,” the wife utters or mutters, or something.

  “Daddy,” says Skipper (and he tried not to think of her name as Skip Her, which was a joke they used to have when she was still in the womb), “Mommy says you have a big fat insurance policy so we’ll be okay if you don’t come back. You don’t need to worry about us.”

  He casts a look in the wife’s direction so as to hurl a telepathic barb. He knows what that comment was all about. And out of the mouths of babes too. There’s been talk in and around the home about his usefulness, his effectiveness, his worth, his value. Some brainwashing has been going on in his absence.

  “Honey,” he says, kneeling in front of her so he can be eye to eye, “honey, you see, the thing is, I do worry about you guys. I really do. Because no matter how much insurance Daddy has, the gap left behind if he doesn’t come home would be so big and dark and cold that you guys wouldn’t be able to be happy ever again.”

  “We won’t be at the funeral,” says the wife. “I’ll tell you that much right now.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m not dressing my kids up and taking them to a mortuary to see the bent and bashed up corpse of their father lying in a discount coffin.”

  Ice hooks shooting from her eyes. Titanium (lightweight).

  “We can always discuss a closed coffin, dear. And anyway. I’m not going to die. I’m an experienced climber.”

  “There’s always fate,” says the wife.

  “What’s fate, Daddy?”

  He kisses each child on the forehead before hauling his pack up onto his shoulders. Laden with gear, he approaches the stiff, columnar wife who has her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Leans toward her, as best he can with all his gear, and tries to project a warm embrace that comes off, in the end, more like he is trying to smell her.

  The girls wave at him as he leaves the house. The boy stands with his arms at his sides, cool eyes on the ground. And the wife. The wife is as white and particulate at the top of the stairs as a pillar of salt.

  Fate, he says to himself, backing out, is the force that describes exactly what you are and/or have been or will be and will have, in relation to and contradiction to that which you always wanted but will never have, or be.

  No matter how many mountains you might (bitterly) assault.

  Overexposure

  The Naked Man thought of his nakedness not as an affront but as a gift, an honor, a feast. It was his mortal trove, everything he was born with in one convenient, easy-to-carry package. It had served him well. He tried to teach this to his children, and, as a lesson, sent them from time to time out into the world without their clothes. Watching naked from his picture window, he admired them as they waited for their school bus, naked, unperturbed, and proud in spite of the cold. Max’s little ding-dong wanted to take refuge by retracting into his inguinal canal, but he appeared to take no notice of it. Susie, meanwhile, had a goose-bumped muffin seam so pale that it rivaled the white of rhododendron blossoms.

  Now, after much trial and error, the other children and the bus driver and even the school administration were used to these naked days.

  In fact, it hadn’t always been so.

  The very first time The Naked Man sent his children to school without dress, he received a summons to come and collect them and to face the principal. All
the way over, in the car, naked, he kept telling himself, “The principal is your pal,” which was really a mnemonic device to remember how to spell principal the school executive versus principle the fact, doctrine, rule, or code by which to live. In this case, though, the mantra seemed little more than wishful thinking, since the voice of the receptionist who had phoned him was noticeably tense. The principal will become your pal.

  As soon as he entered the office, The Naked Man found Max and Susie sitting behind a glass paneled wall, wearing huge gym shorts and orange school-pride T-shirts. Such a shame, he thought, because their little nude bodies are actually beautiful and now they look like absurd dolls dressed up in their dad’s underwear. They seemed delighted to see him. Their eyes brightened and they made polite half-efforts to stand and come to him before somebody unseen, off to one side, shouted at them, “Children!”

  The Naked Man entered the office. There, the receptionist who had just shouted, and who was probably the one who had phoned, screamed at the first visual contact made with his adult penis. Which The Naked Man felt was not something he had responsibility for, her reaction, because it’s certainly more polite to greet a person by looking into his eyes rather than at his genitalia. Above and beyond that, his penis was strictly standard issue, nothing particularly elephantine nor pygmean, though circumcised, pleasantly shaped, and well-colored in his opinion.

  The receptionist’s scream brought the principal rushing out from his inner sanctum. He too found it impossible to greet The Naked Man with a look in the eye and a handshake. His gaze went straight to the cookies.

  “Mrs. Ploetze, are you all right?” he blurted, going to her behind the desk as Max and Susie snickered. The Naked Man might have said, if he didn’t care about the impression he was making, that it was obvious she was all right. She was merely sitting there with bulging eyes and flushed cheeks, waving a manila envelope before her face. Now the principal turned to The Naked Man and began to wag his finger.

  “Now see here,” he said. “You can’t just walk into a public school buck naked. And you can’t send your children to school that way either. We live in a civilized society, dammit. Civilized. There’s no room for nudity in it. We don’t want to look at your, your, your —” and here he seemed to search and struggle for the right word that would express his outrage but hit the nail on the head anatomically, in case there should be any misunderstandings as a result of inaccuracy. “Your cock.” He nearly gagged on the hard consonants of it. His tongue seemed to cleave to his palate. “Do you hear me? Do you understand, sir?”