Kim Magowan Sorried
Sitting on the back deck, Daniel cracks open a pilsner with the crappy can opener that he keeps forgetting to replace. He looks through the glass sliding doors at his wife, whom he loves, who is cheating on him. Beth sits cross-legged on the living room floor, playing Sorry! with their three-year-old, Eliza. Several feet from them, his back to the wall, their son Gideon pages through The Little Blue Engine that Could. Gideon will not play games, or, more precisely, no one, not even Beth, will play games with Gideon. Any time a piece of his gets sent Home, he wails; his face folds into a fist. “Oldest child,” is Beth’s diagnosis, which Daniel (oldest child himself) takes personally: there go Beth and Eliza, calm and unruffled, while he and Gideon, the orchids, wilt and brood. Beth looks up and smiles, a wry shrug of a smile. Daniel nods, but can not bring himself to return it. What to do, what to do. The words cycle through his brain, a paralyzed version of that book Gideon has on his lap, about the determined little engine who chugs up the mountain, chanting “I think I can, I think I can.” It amuses Beth that this book drives Daniel batshit, though she worries about Daniel’s “bleakness.” Beth insisted he start seeing a shrink nine months ago. “Shrink”: it’s a noun Daniel takes literally. He imagines Beth trying, through elegant Anita Kopchik, to make Daniel’s moroseness smaller, manageable, something that can be folded into one of their cabinets with the nickel-plated knobs.