EmilyFridlund

I

8 My wife could take your skin off with one glance, she was that excruciating. She could call you to her with one finger. She could do long division in her head. Another thing she could do really well was sob, and I envied her this, assuming it left nothing to eat at her inside. It is easy to be wrong about a person you are used to. The day she left, she gave me an American flag packed in a clear plastic bag she broke with her teeth. I said, What, you’re going to war? And she said, You always wanted something to hang from the porch. She could be sweet and scornful at the same time.

A son is the same as a wife, save thisconfusion. These are the things my son will do: the laundry, thelawn, the bills. He has a head for numbers, like his mom, and figuresour finances on spreadsheets. Kyle is 19, and it seems like the agehe’s been all his life. I can hardly remember him being anythingelse but lanky and bearded and morose. Periodically his girlfriendMeg lives with us. She fills the freezer with cans of Diet Dr Pepperthat bulge threateningly—aluminum balloons—and burst. At night, Iscrape tiny brown ice flakes from our frozen dinners. I heat the ovento 350 and arrange cardboard dishes on a metal cookiesheet.

“No au gratin potatoes, Walter.”

Idon’t know when it started, but my son calls me by name. He says,Walter, there’s a call for you; Walter, wipe your face. He says myname like it’s a kelly-green suit, like it’s my botched attemptto be like other humans.

Because Kyle calls me Walter, Icall him Son. “Son, the potatoes come with the meal. You get whatcomes.”

“The smell of them makes me sick. Why don’t you eatthem for me before I sit down? Come on, Walter.”

He isstanding in the doorway, his shoulders covered in a brightly woventhrow. He is bare-chested, and I can see a few orange hairs flickerabout his nipples. In one hand he has a five-pound dumbbell he’sbeen lugging around for weeks.

I take out the steaming dinners andspoon his potatoes into my rice. My son makes me unreasonably soft,like there’s a rotten spot in me only he knows about. I coax him tothe table by setting out an open beer. When he sits down he balancesthe dumbbell up on one end next to his elbow.

“Can you getmy work socks in tonight?” I talk into my food.

“They can gowith the towels, I guess.” He eats his chicken with aspoon.

We stay until the cardboard dishes start to collapse,then stand without speaking and throw our meals in the trash. We eatbowls of cereal. Kyle shakes a box of powdered Jell-O into his wideopen mouth.

*  *  *

For a few months after his mother left, I drovearound the city on Kyle’s behalf, trying to find him a job. Thatwas early summer, just after graduation, when the days were as longas they ever were going to get. I was afraid it looked bad to have anadult son without any plans. I brought home applications fromComputer City and Walgreens, each folded in half and tucked neatly inmy lunch cooler. With my best handwriting and a new felt pen, Ifilled out my son’s personal information: Kyle Craige-Dodgson, noprevious retail experience. I passed these papers to him shyly,barely looking in his eyes, my fingers damp from gripping the pen.Nothing came of this, which was a worry at first, then a relief. Mywife used to call him Lazy Ass, but there is something comfortingabout Kyle’s laziness, the way a lolling cat can soothe yournerves. It pleases me to find him on the floor at the end of the day.He does half-hearted sit-ups and folds sheets. Sometimes he’s justasleep, the TV shuffling its faces around, the night coming down, soslow and quiet I’d be a fool to complain. You don’t get manychances to be happy.

Of course, he can be difficult—notfrightening like his mother, but frightened, which is worse. Try tosee this: a six-foot man with a curly red beard who won’t come outof the basement. Kyle has respect for storms. On green summer nights,he holds a radio to his head and paces the sweating cement in hissocks. I tell him, “Son, there’s no sirens. Come on upstairs.”But Kyle has a machine that calculates dew point and wind speed. Helooks me in the face and says, “Fuck you, Walter.”

On a nightlike this, I meet Meg at the back door. She is timid and avoids me byrubbing her eyes and yawning deeply: “God, I’m tired.” Hertimidity also makes her polite, so she sits down when I tell herto.

“Pears?” I hold out a squat yellow can with afoolishly beaming man on the label. “Or fruit cocktail withcherries?” I shake the other can in the air.

“Maybe a little ofboth?” Meg runs the roller coaster at Mall USA, so she’s deftwith people she dislikes. She is 20 and hasn’t seen her parentssince she left Culver in the 11th grade to get a job in the Cities.She treats everyone older than her like an employer.

Truth is, Iusually regret making her eat with me. She slides her pears acrossher plate, leaving shiny, transparent trails. She picks the fibersfrom her oranges. When I ask her about her day, innocently enough,she tells me about a man who vomited out of his bumper car.“Hmm,” I say, clearing the plates. “Interesting.” I avert myeyes from her slippery fruit.

She says, “Sometimes I get sicktoo.”

“You coming down with something?”

“Well. I’mpregnant.”

It seems important to keep clearing our plates, to dothis as long as possible. I take one fork at a time. I tend to theday-old crumbs on the table.

“Mr. Dodson?” She says my name ina rush, like she’s trying to get past it to something else. It’sprobably not the time to correct her.

“Dodgson,” I say, but Ihold off from spelling it out. Briefly I think about my sondownstairs, listening with all his machines to changes in theatmosphere. It would seem good and correct if the wind picked up, thebars on his machine pulsing its digital heart. I believe thatsignificant events should make someimpact.

“D-O-D-G-S-O-N.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

Iam generous with her. “Maybe. I think so.”

She pushes out herchair, smiling with just her mouth. I suppose her line of workrequires an official face. “Thanks for the fruit.”

*  *  *

Aftermy wife left, I hung her American flag from a pole on the porch andtried to summon some patriotic feeling. During Vietnam I was alwayshoping my number would come up. I was working at a factory thatproduced party balloons, doing quality control in a great shudderingroom that felt like a force of nature. They made me wear earmuffs andgloves. I looked for balloons without lips, balloons with rippedskins, until I was so bored and sad that war compared favorably. Backthen, I was insulted by the kind of man who wore an American flag onthe butt of his jeans. I was Kyle’s age, 19, and I felt thatkilling someone would be less ghastly than selling sticky rubbers tokids. It wasn’t just about balloons. It was more that I wanted todie, and war seemed the kind of place you could think that withoutbeing embarrassed.

The flag is wrapped around its pole likeit decided to curl up for the night. I try to unwind it, but it’scaught, so I unfasten the pole from the house and take the wholething inside. My wife would have scolded me for this. She had rulesabout indoor things and out-; a flagpole in the living room wouldhave made her distressed. She would have given me an exasperatedlook, a you-are-still-such-a-child-I can’t-even-yell-at-you lookbefore taking the flag and marching it back outside. This was thebest and worst thing about my wife: she felt sorry for me. When I putmy work boots on the mantel or fell asleep on her side of the bed,she’d groan and clench her teeth. Then she’d kiss me long anddeep, a sigh of disappointment.

A few days before she left, I foundher sitting on the bedroom floor in her swimsuit. Her breasts saggedinto points in the two pockets of her bikini top. “What are youdoing?” I asked. It was April then, the buds barely started on thetree tips. There were goose pimples on my wife’s arms. She said,“I’m going to Tucson.”

“Arizona?”

She sighed.“There’s something wrong with me here.”

“You lookgood.”

“Fuck off, Walter. I don’t. I don’t care aboutthat.” She had red lipstick and red eyes. “I feel likesomeone’s sitting on me. I feel like my ribs are in mythroat.”

In the living room, I unwind the flag on the carpetedfloor. Spread out like that, it looks like something I should layacross—a bedspread, a beach towel. It looks like somewhere I shouldsleep. Meg comes home late from work. I hear her fumble in thekitchen, and then she’s standing over me with a soda can againsther lips.

“Mr. Dodson.” Her ponytail is cockeyed, and it makesher head look off, swollen slightly over her ear.

“Oh. So thereyou are.” I’m on my knees, gathering up the flag between my arms.My body feels bent up and uncooperative. “Good day at MallUSA?”

“People are stupid, you know?” Meg tugs out her binder,but her hair is greasy and stays where it was. “This guy? He triedto climb out of his seat in the middle of the ride. A grown man, andhe’s up there with all these little kids hollering at the top ofhis lungs.”

“He was scared, right?” I drop the flag in a wadon the couch.

“Everybody’s scared. It’s a scary ride.” Sheruns a hand through her hair, then sniffs her fingers. “What makeshim think he’s different?”

*  *  *

Soon Meg starts wearingshirts like hockey jerseys and eating all the best things in thehouse: frozen pizzas, Oreos. She watches football with me on Sundayafternoons and knows when to say “bump-and-run.” I like herbetter now than I did. She burps when she drinks from her soda can,popping up her eyebrows every time, and she reminds me of mygrandfather. She sighs like he did and rests her small white handagainst the fly of her jeans. I suspect there is something differentabout her body, but I can’t say what. For a long time, it’snothing you can see, just this look on her face like she’sswallowed something without chewing it first. Like she’s waiting tosee if she’ll choke. Then one day she’s big as a boat, and itstartles me to walk into the living room and find her moored on thecouch. I have to keep myself from staring. I have to fasten my gazeon a clump of brown hair she holds between her teeth.

Megspits out the hair and says nothing. She is devastated by her body.She looks like a small provincial country occupied by rebel hordes. Itell her she looks nice because I’m afraid for her.

“Oh.Well.” She doesn’t give me her official face. She smiles in a waythat makes me think she hasn’t considered it first.

Then Kylecomes in—barefoot, wearing black biking gloves—and she turnsofficial again. It’s not her Mall USA self, but a girlishness sheassumes just for my son. She rolls her eyes at him when he wedges hisway in between the armrest and her body. She nudges him with herelbow, managing to look—as teenage girls do—simultaneouslysuperior and deprived.

Kyle rolls a hefty dumbbell onto her lap.“Lift it.”

“Whatever.”

Kyle is grave. “I’ve moved upto ten pounds. Walter, you try.”

I watch Kyle drag the dumbbelloff Meg’s lap. She says he’s hurting her. He calls her“wimp.” When he gets the thing in his hand, he purses his lipsand squints his eyes in exaggerated exertion. They’re always actinglike this, like they’ve been forced to sit next to each other inclass and they don’t know whether they should fight or showoff.

I say, “Let’s see you, Son,” but he sets the dumbbell onthe floor and shakes out his wrist.

“Naw. I’ve done my repsalready.” He pushes up his sleeve and flexes his bicep. “You cantouch it; it’s real hard.”

I don’t know if he’s talking toMeg or me. We both reach out and poke at his arm, prodding the littlelump that is awakened there. For a second I feel thrown off, as ifKyle is the pregnant one, and we’re feeling him for signs. Then hisfist trembles and he brushes us away.

“Oh, what a strong man!”Meg grabs at his hand as he tries to tuck it under his armpit. Theywrestle for a moment on the couch, Meg reaching around the dome ofher belly. Kyle is giddy and confident, and so it seems he’s workedall this out: Meg’s pregnancy, her need for him, her colossal body.He tries to shirk her off, and still she snatches at his arm, holdingon till he cringes with pleasure.

*  *  *

For a few weeks at the endof the summer Meg stays with us every night. She takes half-hourshowers after work and makes Dr Pepper popsicles in the ice tray,splintery brown cubes she sucks between her fingers. When she getstoo big to share Kyle’s bed, I offer her the one in the masterbedroom. I stay in Kyle’s room—in a sleeping bag on his boxspring—and Kyle gets the mattress on the floor. I’m in charge ofdinner (I try casseroles now and Hamburger Helper), and Meg does thedishes because she says we leave spots. Kyle makes the shopping list.None of us take out the trash; it molders under the sink—a dense,vegetable stink—until someone drags it out into the backyard. WhenI lose the toothpaste cap, Meg scolds me and Kyle backs her up, so Ican’t tell anymore which parts we’re supposed to play: who’sthe parent, who’s the wife, who’s the child. In the evenings wegather in the living room, where we watch Nova and fall asleep. FirstKyle, then Meg, then me, the TV universe bending into flexiblestrings and vibrating softly.

II

The thingabout the baby is she isn’t a baby at all. We see this right away.She is serious and disapproving, watching us blunder about her withbottles of formula, with nests of wet diapers. We take to hidingthings from her. When we misplace her pacifier, we give her atoothbrush instead. We try to convince her that this is what babiesdo, suck on the bristly ends of little sticks, but the baby won’tbite. It’s not that we don’t like the baby; it’s that shedoesn’t like us.

“Agg,” she says a lot, her face agrim frown of disappointment. She turns to us when we speak,listening with all her might for something she can endorse. She lookslike a disgruntled old man, her ears red, her scalp bald andsplotchy. Whenever I’m alone with her, she assesses my parentingwith an intractable glare.

We’re out of clean spoons, and I offerher mashed peas from a fork, but she closes her lipsprimly.

“Come on,” I say. “It’s how everybodyeats.”

She knows better. She knows that five-month-old babieshave toothless mouths unsuited for metal tines. I find a woodenbaking spoon, and she licks green mush from its tipgrudgingly.

She’d make us feel better if she’d cry. WhenKyle was a baby he used to scream in his crib all night, banging hiselbows against the wooden bars. We resented him in the usual ways,his mother and I, rolling our eyes and humoring him with songs aboutcrowded barnyards. This baby humors us. Once I found Meg bent overthe crib—the baby’s jumper in a twist around her head, thebaby’s naked body doing an underwater swim through Meg’s hair.Meg was crying and the baby was not. “I’m doing my best,” Megdefended herself, and the baby said, “Hmmm.”

I suspectthe baby has things to say that she’s holding back. She parcels outa word at a time, polite baby talk, but her expressions are complexsentences.

For instance, she wrinkles up her nose at me, saying,Come now, wash your hands; use warm water and pat your fingers dry sowhen you touch my soft baby skin you won’t alarm me.

She clenchesher jaw in the parking lot, saying, No sirree. If you leave me in mystroller while you pay the parking meter, who knows where I’ll bewhen you get back. I may consort with criminals. I may offer myselfto kidnappers and feral dogs.

*  *  *

She is hardest on Kyle, thoughhe doesn’t know it yet. When he holds her, he’s fond of movingher limbs up and down like levers. He cranks her arms, bending herelbows open and closed as if testing to see if she works properly.She looks at him like he’s an idiot, like he’s a very crazy manwho must be indulged with the greatest of patience. When she can’ttake any more, she puffs out her baby cheeks and drools on hissleeve.

“Agg,” Kyle says, using the baby’s language.He’s proud of her words and is always looking for contexts in whichhe can use them. “Blah.”

Kyle’s look of distaste is in fact alook of pleasure; the baby’s is real. She reminds me of my wifewith this look, and I pray that the baby will never learn to talk,never wobble onto her feet so she can walk away. She disapproves ofus, but for the time being there is nothing she can do. We takepictures of her, posed helplessly in our arms, while we can.

We call her “the baby” to her face to makeourselves feel better. Does the baby want upsie-upsie? Is the baby asleepy-head?

*  *  *

Once, we take her to the park so she can seeeverything she can’t do: climb the jungle gym like the neighborhoodboys, wade barefoot into the lake with the little girls. We take herrowing in a rental boat, and I make a show of pulling at the oars.Look at this, I say, rowing fast and hard, propelling that boatacross the pond until I’m wet with sweat and panting heavily. Lookat this, Kyle says, standing up and waving his arms. He rocks theboat under his feet so we bob and toss through the green skim ofmilfoil. The baby, quiet on Meg’s lap, is unimpressed. For a fewminutes she watches us in her bored and haughty way, and then she’sdistracted by a goose hissing nearby. Look, look! I want to say,rowing the boat in circles around the lily pads, sinking the oarsinto the slick fronds so they come up laden. I want to say, You’renothing at all, you’re 18 pounds in someone’s arms, you’re adead weight that would sink to the bottom of the pond and drift overcarp and rotting cattails. I want to say, We’re all you’ve got,but Meg talks first, saying, “I’m hot. I’m fuckingdying.”

Kyle and I stare at her. We despise her for noteven trying to look good in front of the baby.

Kyle says, “Westill got 20 minutes with the boat.”

I say, “We’re justgetting started.”

Meg rearranges the baby on her lap,heaving her up and putting her back like she’s considering heroptions. “Listen!” She sounds whiney. “I’m hot. I need to getthe hell out.”

Kyle blinks at her. “Get out,then.”

Meg turns on him. “We’re in a lake, what do you wantme to do? I’ve got the goddamn baby.”

She seems surprised tofind herself yelling, and the baby does too. They glanceapprehensively at each other, like old rivals who’ve beenpretending to get along for the sake of decorum. They both have theirhands in fists.

When we get to shore, Meg deposits the baby in myarms so she can go buy herself an iced latte. She holds the waxed cupin one hand and a plastic straw in the other, spinning fast circlesin the ice. Periodically, she tilts the cup into her mouth, the ice sticking, then sliding in a swift blow against her teeth. She lags behind on the walk back, chewing the ice and the rim of the cup and the tip of the plastic straw. By the time we’re home the cup is in shreds and she won’t go in the front door. She sits for a long time on the hood of her car, jiggling her heels against the bumper.

She bends the straw into an accordion and fits it in her mouth. I know she will leave soon and not come back.

* *  *

Once when Kyle was a boy, my wife bought him a puppy. At first it was just a drooling, piddling, wiggling lump—a Rottweiller mix with crooked ears—but its development was so fierce that within a week it knew to sit for its food and wet the papers by the door. Within a month it was rolling over on demand, andit seemed that its education could go on and on, that it could learn anything we chose to teach it. It seemed the puppy became a dog so fast that it might become something else after that: a circus performer, a kindergarten student.

A human is different. A human lies there in your arms, month after month, feeble, sucking her own fingers. A human baby stays a squirming lump of flesh—uncoordinated, uncooperative—and needs you to lug her around and fill her with food and scrape excrement from her thighs. A baby stays this way so long, it seems improbable that she will be something else any time soon, impossible that she will grow long and thin, her bones knobbing out from under her skin, her legs capable of carrying her. It seems unlikely that she will ever be anything but this: passive, inert, yours.

*  *  *

Kyle tucks the baby under his arm and carries her around the house. He sets her up on the table when he’s writing out the bills, giving her a ball-point pen that she bangs against her knee. He props her against the bathroom mirror when he brushes his teeth. He doesn’t lug around his dumbbell anymore, not since Meg left for design school in Duluth, not since he discovered that the baby works just as well for building up his muscles. He balances her little bottom on his palm and raises her high above his head. When she wobbles up there, he makes a grab at her with his other hand and brings her gracefully into his chest.

In the kitchen, Kyle slides the baby around in a laundry basket: over the crinkly linoleum and under the table, where she drapes herself in his undershirts while he finishes his lunch. He stuffs his whole sandwich in his mouth, bulging out his eyes, peering down at her in her blue plastic cage. He puffs out his cheeks and sprinkles a few crumbs on her face, trying to impress her.

“Agg,” he murmurs through his food, doting, adoring. “Agg agg, hmmm.”

“Wow,” the baby says.

“What?”

“Wow.”

The baby has never used an English word before, and Kyle regards her with alarm. He looks at her like she’s cursed him, like she’s making fun of him, like she’s a defiant puppy that learned to talk.

He swallows hard, wiping his face. “Honey, it’s me. I’m the baby’s Daddy.”

And the baby says, all sarcasm and scorn: “Wow.”

“Walter?” He looks up at me, sitting with my Velveeta sandwich across the table.

I do my best to reassure him. “It’s just another sound she makes. She has no idea what she’s saying.”

*  *  *

It only happens once. We lose the baby somewhere in the house. She crawls off when we’re watching Nova, and we spend 20 minutes looking in closets and under beds. She’s just a baby: she has stout, flabby arms, and legs she drags around like an amphibian sea creature. There are no pads on her feet—just soft, pink flesh—and still she manages to get away.

Kyle loses his head, rifling through the laundry basket and tossing boxer shorts across the room. He puts his face in the baby’s Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas like he’s a dog taking in her scent. He wraps the pajamas around his neck and stalks down the hall and back, too upset to look for her effectively.

I search as methodically as I can. I pluck back the curtains and check under the couch, pressing my palms into the carpet so they come up mottled. I sink my arms into the closet coats, into the wool and fleece, all those wintery fabrics closing in on me. Hangers catch against my throat. My wife could find anything lost, a can opener in a baking dish, keys in a flowerpot. She’d know exactly where a baby would be, and she’d go there as well, to that secret place where no one else could find them. I fight past hoods and sleeves to the very back of the closet, where it is dense with obsolete clothing. Children’s snowsuits, clingy cocktail dresses.

I push out of the dark and try to be practical. I ask Kyle, “Did you check in the kitchen? In the cabinets?”

“You think she’s in a soup pot?”

“How about behind theradiator, where the dog hid his balls?”

“Fuck you, Leroy.” Kyle presses the pajamas to his face. He strides up and down the hallway in his helpless way, as if the baby’s disappearance is a storm to wait out. I go into the bathroom to escape his dread.

And there she is. In the bathtub, standing behind the half-drawn curtain with its grey mildew blossoms. She has one hand on each metal faucet, tugging thoughtfully, humming to herself. She’s pulled off her diaper, and her bare ass is the same creamy white as the porcelain.

“Oh!” For an instant, she embarrasses me. I’ve an impulse to close up the shower curtains and let her go about her business. I’ve an impulse to back away and let her undress, let her draw her bath, soak her bald body in warm water, wash the dirt from her fingernails, shampoo the down on her head, dress, call a cab, and get away. I say, “I’m sorry,” and she looks up, startled, distraught. She looks at me like my apology is not enough, my presence a disappointment beyond words.

Then Kyle swoops in and lifts her up under the armpits, so her face breaks. “C’mon!” she says, and I can see her considering her options: she thinks about kicking her legs, biting his cheek, pounding his arms. She decides to reason with him instead. “C’mon,” she suggests, pleading at first, then indignant. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”

Kyle folds her into his arms, and though she struggles to sit up, to raise her head, he holds her on her back like she’s a newborn. “C’mon!” she says, but Kyle is trembling all over, and he will never listen to her.

III

Meg comes by on one of the last cold days of a very cold spring. The flag flicks in the wind, and my wife’s hyacinths bulge out of the ground like bumpy green grenades. Meg, in my doorway, has her fists in her jacket pockets, her hood blown up and flattened against her cheek. She looks for all the world like a little girl who’s come to ask my son to play.

“Mr. Dodson?” she says, and I find myself nervous to see her. I hang my body in the doorframe, two palms against the cool wood, looking down at her as best I can.

“I—” She smiles in a flash. “I just wanted to see how everything’s going.”

“Right.”

“She’s getting really big?”

“The baby?”

“Yeah.”

I feel defensive. “She’s still little. You know.”

“Talking a lot?”

I sigh, closing my arms over my chest. “Some. All in her own time.”

Meg peers past me into the dark of the house. She unpeels the hood from her head, and I see a smattering of acne on her chin, red and glazed in a shiny make-up. “Can I see her?”

I hold my breath for a half-second. “Well. Of course.”

Inside I tell Meg to wait by the umbrella hook. It’s where my wife used to have the UPS man stand, or the pizza boy when he came with a warm cardboard box balanced on a palm. Meg backs into the radiator and touches a zit on her chin with the tip of her pinky finger.

I slip into the baby’s room and peer into her crib. She’s sleeping with her knees curled up against her chest, several strands of orange hair plastered to her forehead. She opens her eyes when I touch her, blinking blearily. She sits up, raises a hand to her head, and carefully brushes the hair from her face. She tugs her shirt over her exposed belly. When I pick her up, her legs swing down over my hips and bump the backs of my thighs.

Back in the entryway, I pass her over to Meg. “The baby. Here.”

“Oh!” Meg looks frightened by her. The baby hangs from her arms.

The baby says, “Agg.”

“Look at you!” Meg breathes. “You’re all grown up!”

And the baby—weary, worn out—says, “Come on.”<

Emily Fridlund earned her MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she now teaches. She has stories forthcoming in Quick Fiction and The New Orleans Review.

Originally published in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review