American Home Life by David Barringer

LITERATURE

american home life

onest, funny, and smart, David Barringer makes brilliant comic work of contemporary suburban fatherhood. Henry Doran stays home while his wife, Tina, works as a family doctor, but the real stars are the kids: Lilly (“tall and lean, a second-grader, all limbs and a Broadway ego”) and Lance (“a solid sensitive firstgrader who loves facts about animals”). The literary equivalent of a TV sitcom, American Home Life tackles the domestic, the tragicomic, and the imminently futuristic (talking appliances, chore cards, implantable I.D. chips, corporate schools, kids who refuse to pay taxes, gay guinea pigs, drunk pollsters who spend the night, and shock bracelets that force you to lose weight). The prose is clean and sharp, the family issues are urgent, and the observations are timeless. But it’s the kids who steal the show.

“Fans of David Foster Wallace will rejoice.” —Wisconsin Review

—Laura Williams on Johnny Red, The Ann Arbor Paper

“Edgy, funny, heartfelt, with a smidgen of George Saunders and a touch of Aimee Bender, Barringer’s American Home Life is an original American confection: bittersweet, satisfying, and true.” —Dave Housley, Barrelhouse

“Sets a new qualitative standard for critical discourse.” —Steven Heller on American Mutt, Print Magazine

“A literary force to be reckoned with. Barringer’s work reminds me of the offspring of Larry Brown and George Saunders, with more pathos.” —Nathan Leslie, The Pedestal Magazine

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sonewpublishing.com 9 780977 815128

SO NEW

ISBN-13: 978-0-9778151-2-9 ISBN 0-9778151-2-9

PUBLISHING

David Barringer has written for Emigre, I.D. Magazine, Eye, Playboy, Details, Nerve, AIGA’s Voice, Epoch, The Detroit Free Press, The ABA Journal, and others. His fiction has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and the StorySouth Million Writers Award. In 2005, he published his first novel, Johnny Red, and a book of design criticism, American Mutt Barks in the Yard (co-published by Emigre and Princeton Architectural Press). www.DAVIDBARRINGER.com

david barringer

“Eloquent and sharp, a pleasure to read.”

american home life a novel david barringer

american home life is a novel in comic episodes starring the Doran family: Henry & Tina, Lilly & Lance.

david barringer

2007

SO NEW PUBLISHING

“I don’t like what I’m reading,” said my ten-year-old daughter, frowning over my shoulder at this manuscript displayed on the monitor. “Someday, I’m going to write a book. And I know everything about you.”

Fw On seeing a library poster about tutors, my son said, “I’m lucky to have my brain as a tutor.”

Fw I am lucky to have my children as tutors. I will never know everything about them. I have written a book.

AMERICAN HOME LIFE BY DAVID BARRINGER © 2007 ISBN: 978-0-9778151-2-9 All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, without express written permission from the copyright owner, except for the purpose of critical reviews or for promotional means that benefit the author. Some pieces first appeared in: Flak Magazine, Del Sol Review, Wisconsin Review, Opium Magazine, Hobart Magazine, Quick Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Barrelhouse, Ballyhoo, and Words Words Words. Special thanks to Opium, Hobart, Barrelhouse, Quick Fiction, and Monkeybicycle for the Pushcart Prize nominations. “Poll” was a Notable Story in the Best American Non-Required Reading of 2005. Type is set in Eidetic Neo and Vista by Emigre. This book was printed in the U.S.A. Contact James Stegall at So New Publishing (sonewpublishing.com).

David Barringer has written for Emigre, I.D. Magazine, Eye Magazine, Playboy, Details, The American Prospect, Nerve, AIGA’s Voice, SpeakUp, Epoch, The Detroit Free Press, The ABA Journal, and others. In 2005, he published his first novel, Johnny Red, and his first book of design criticism, American Mutt Barks in the Yard (co-published by Emigre and Princeton Architectural Press). Visit www.davidbarringer.com. Send an email to dlbarringer@gmail.com.

OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

Johnny Red American Mutt Barks in the Yard Twisted Fun Terminally Curious We Were Ugly So We Made Beautiful Things The Human Case The Leap & Other Mistakes The Dead Bug Funeral Kit (& Buggy Book of Eulogies) The Writer’s Specimen

“A picaresque novel part Animal Farm, part love story, a little bit memoir of self-discovery, and many parts post-modern wit, Johnny Red is eloquent and sharp, a pleasure to read. Rather amazingly— bafflingly, really—Barringer has created a believable world where life’s big questions are asked and answered by poultry. Poultry with rich inner lives and a drive to find fulfillment.” Laura J. Williams, The Ann Arbor Paper “The entire content {of Emigre 68, American Mutt Barks in the Yard} is devoted to a provocative critique of design culture by an unknown designer/writer, whose essay sets a new qualitative standard for critical discourse.” Steven Heller, Print Magazine “A big part of American Mutt’s appeal is that no one has ever written about graphic design in quite this way. The title sounds more like a short story, and at times I found myself reading it as if it were a fictional exploration of a designer’s consciousness. When I did, its energy, relentlessness, emotion, and abundance of detail made sense, as did its literary style.” Rick Poynor, I.D. Magazine “The Leap & Other Mistakes displays a writer with great range and skill. These stories run the gamut from light-hearted parody to existential head-scratchers, from satire to quiet but smart character studies. What they all have in common is their keen awareness of human nature, their skilled execution, and their engaging originality. Barringer surpasses so many other writers in his ability to consistently reach the reader on multiple levels. A smart young author.” Martin Brick, Wisconsin Review

THANKS, LOVELEEN. THANKS, LITTLE TIGERS. THANKS DAN & MIKE. LOVE & HUGS ALL AROUND.

Thanks, Mom.

WELCOME

American Home Life

Breakfast

Note

Charity

Government

Hooky

Form

Sales

Tooth

Bore

Meat

Crash

Cool

Fortune

MeChip

Solicitor

Superheroes

Honeymoon

100

Legend

103

Poll

105

Counsel

109

Obliged

115

Time

119

Cuff

127

Buster

145

Fact

157

Wasp

165

Speed

169

Death

171

Story

177

Drive

183

News

191

Epilogue

197

onday. First day of the kids’ summer

Breakfast

camp. They’re asleep. We’re late. Late for gluing gemelli noodles into representations of mommy and daddy and spraypainting them as gold as Elvis jumpsuits. Late for searching for sticks and pine needles in the lawn skirting the church parking lot, flora detritus destined to simulate porcupine quills on cardboard toilet-paper tubes. So here we go, summer camp for six- to seven-year olds. They’ll be home by lunch. For breakfast, let them eat Cheerios. I check my email and shout at the ceiling. An upstairs toilet flushes, and I cry, “Let’s go, People! We got summer camp!” My AOL welcome screen encourages me to guess the identity of a female celebrity from her elementary-school photo. It is Catherine Zeta-Jones. I can see

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this, but I don’t know how. Something around the eyes coupled with the satanic grinchy curls at the corners of her preadolescent mouth. A second-grade Catherine Zeta-Jones smiles a charmingly toothy smile beside my emailbox, its yellow flag erect and full of itself. “Let’s go, People!” I hear no padding of little feet on the ceiling. “It’s summer camp! We’re gonna be late!” Wait. There is crying. Lance has wet the bed. I know this. “Dad?” Lilly, the sympathetic but duty-bound messenger, whispers from the top of the stairs. “Dad?” The message is peepee sheets. I know this. I will pull the form-fitted sheets from around the four corners of Lance’s mattress, and I will curse this one-poop-forwardtwo-pees-back pace of potty training as I carry the bundle of peepee sheets to the laundry room. I can’t believe the years I’ve been screwing around with bed-wetting. Tina says it’s physical, we have to give them time, they can’t control it. Still. How long does this last? I shut down Catherine Zeta-Jones. She’s married to Michael Douglas. So is it Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglas now? And does the son of Spartacus change the peepee sheets? It’s Monday. I cannot get my kids to summer camp on time. I must pour the Cheerios into little plastic baggies and let them suck juice boxes in the back seat. “Good-bye.”

Tuesday. Scrambled eggs. “Let’s go, People!” I reorient the pan on the electric burner. “Summer camp, Folks!” The spatula has a big blue cushiony handle. It was designed by Michael Graves for Target. “Time to wake up!” I insert the edge of the spatula and lift the island of

cooked egg and tilt the pan and let a tributary of eggy goop flow onto the exposed stainless-steel surface. “Breakfast! Breakfast! Breakfast!” Out of the speakers of the boom box I keep in the kitchen, in which I am living thirty-eight-percent of my life, the hiphop rap group Outkast sings, “Ain’t nobody dope as me. I’m just so fresh and clean. So fresh and so clean, clean.” In this corner, unshowered, wearing khaki shorts and a University of Michigan baseball cap, the two-hundredand-ten-pound contender: Suburban Dad! The kids take their seats. “All right, Folks, we’re late again, so let’s focus on eating. Focus, focus, focus.” Lance, standing in his chair, wiggles his soap-bubble butt in a herky-jerky approximation of . . . of something. I don’t know. He just does it. His butt snaps and pops in his little blue shorts as he sings, mockingly, “Focus hocus pocus.” Lilly barks, “Let’s shake our booties, People.” I am speechless.

Wednesday. I declare it Marines Day in honor of the few and the proud. Today, we’re the few and the proud. Our enemy is Fatigue in the Face of Daily Life. Our objective is to transform Chores into Games, Work into Play. The few and the proud are, today, going to eat whatever we can find in the yard. Because we live in the first phase of a subdivision under construction, the kids can nab, out of the backyard breeze, fast-food wrappers and cola cups and uneaten bananas discarded by rough-carpentry men working in nearby lots. Also, we have new landscaping. Look at the leaves, the roots, the pill bugs. Back in the day, Henry Ford insisted his employees—many of whom had left the farms

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to work in his factories—plant vegetables in their yards. Now look at us. I should alert the Department of Homeland Security. We spent $10,000 on new landscaping, and we got an emergency buffet. I explain this morning’s new protocol to the kids, and they say, “Gross!” As I define the term “self-reliance” and distinguish edible versus inedible plant matter, they suspect—I can see it on their faces—that I’m not kidding. Lilly assumes a stern no-nonsense tone, the same tone she adopted last night when I pretended to put Mommy in time-out. “Are you serious?” I insist that I am. “Today,” I repeat, “we are going to eat what we find in the yard.” Open to possibility, my children consider their prospects. They decide that in light of the usual experiences that are prescribed for them, eating stuff in the yard is not only a departure; it’s an adventure. My children rush to the nearest windows and peer outside at the salad bar our lawn might actually be. I see that it’s time. They’re ready. I open the front door. Smiling tentatively, unsure whether they’re tall enough and old enough for this particular amusement ride, my children step over the threshhold of the front door. And they meet, at their feet, their breakfast. A normal breakfast is laid out on the front porch. Cereal. Juice. Napkins. Grapes. “You can still eat grass if you want,” I say. “Do horses eat grass?” “Horses eat grass,” I tell Lance. “But people don’t,” Lance clarifies. “People don’t eat grass. Horses, they—horses eat grass, but people, we don’t eat grass.” “That’s right.” They sit on the cement step. Excited, they are oblivious

to the chilled foggy air. We hear saws whining, hammers pounding. The brakes of a cement truck complain. “This is the best breakfast ever,” says Lilly. She really says this. Lilly is a drama queen at sevenyears old. The world is hers, and she is perpetually surprised by parental unwillingness to accept this fact. “Focus, People,” I say. “We’re kinda late for camp.” Lance speaks around his mouthful of toasted oat rings. “Wur alwave lade.”

Thursday. Granola. Granola with almond slivers and coconut, pistachios and dried cranberries. I made it last night for a good quick breakfast this morning. I shower. We have a glass-walled shower. The glass is textured but transparent. Lilly, awake and ready to demand the attention that is her daily due and birthright, has found my boxer shorts I set out on the countertop. The boxer shorts, her birthday gift to me, feature lobsters. Red lobsters levitate against a turquoise background, as if the participants in a Maine lobster event had spontaneously elected to launch their meals into the sky. Lobstering skyblossoms, blossoming sky-lobsters. Lilly holds the lobster shorts to the shower wall and says, “Are you scared? Are you scared of the lobsters?” I turn and press my bum cheeks to the glass and say, “Are you scared?” Lilly shrieks with delight. Later, contemplative, she says, “When I get older, maybe I can show you my butt.” In our house, this is what passes for a father-daughter moment.

Friday. Spinach waffles. I used to lace their whole-wheat waffles with spinach when they were ignorant toddlers. I try it again this morning, but they are older now, persnickity. They regard their green-striped zebra waffles

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with suspicion, then disgust. We frisbee them into the kitchen garbage bin, which is near the pantry, which is where the kids are now putting fingers to pursed lips as they compare the cartoon games on the backs of a dozen boxes of cereal. Last night, at gymnastics, while Lilly tumbled and cartwheeled in graceful cadence with her classmates, Lance achieved nirvana bouncing on the trampoline and leaping over the pommel horse. The other boys in his class seemed spastic and ADHD, as if their mothers realized they wouldn’t be ready for any other sport until they learned to fall down. The girls ignored the boys. Even the youngest girls were aloof veterans; their seriousness elevated them above the boys’ antics. In the car on the way home, Lilly and Lance signaled their return to peaceful sibling commerce by inventing new names for us. Lilly was Aunt Daffodill, I was Uncle Tony, and Lance chose the name Romeo Bear. “Uncle Tony?” Lilly had asked. “You mean me, Honey?” I clarified. “That’s what I said. Uncle Tony. Anyway, Uncle Tony, in school, they told us about George Washington and the First Lady. But was it really the first lady? What about the Indians and pilgrims? Were they all men?” I laughed. “No, Lilly, what the teacher meant—” “I’m not Lilly!” screamed Lilly. “I’m Aunt Daffodill!” This morning, by contrast, they’re in a serious mood. On the drive to summer camp, the kids are chatty, thoughtful. No potty talk. No fighting. Just some hard thinking going on behind those young eyes. From the back seat of the Explorer, the kids are students directing questions to Professor Doran, their father, who is fumbling with the next CD. “Mommies have babies,” says Lilly. “And tall people get born. But tall people have mommies. How do tall people get in. . . ? How does a baby. . . ? How did the first. . . ?”

I am patient. I am quiet. I listen to Lilly struggle to find the words. Part of being a father is knowing when to let your children work without aid. The work of expressing her thoughts is as important for Lilly’s growth as the thoughts themselves. If I put her thoughts into words for her, she wouldn’t learn anything about how to do it on her own the next time. Plus, I am patient and quiet because I know what’s coming and am using this time to craft my own response. Lilly is about to ask how babies get in the uterus. In our house, we say “uterus,” not “tummy.” “Tummy” causes trouble. If a kid thinks babies grow in mommies’ tummies, the kid figures he or she can have a baby, too, since he or she has a tummy just like a mommy does. The kid wants to know what you have to eat to have a baby grow in his or her tummy. The kid wants to know if it hurts when you have to poop the baby out. No, no, no. No “tummy” in our house. We say “uterus.” And only a grownup mommy has a uterus. Kids buy that. “Mommies have mommies,” Lilly is saying, continuing her valiant effort to find the right words to form her question, “and then those mommies have mommies, but. . . . Who was the first mommy?” Whoa. I grip the wheel and stare blankly into traffic and let my mind riffle through memories of old college lectures and the recent issue of Scientific American. This isn’t the sex question at all. This is the life question. This is Eve or Evolution. Creationism or Darwinism. God’s first seven days versus the Big Bang. How am I going to explain this? Because once I start tracing evolution backwards, I face an insoluble dilemma. How do I identify the first mommy in the long foggy spectrum of evolutionary transition? Is the first mommy human, protohuman, ape? How do I explain evolution in a way that reassures my children that, tomorrow morning when they wake up, they won’t suddenly turn back into monkeys? Kids have

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those fears. They come up with these questions. They take things literally and spin out consequences to their natural conclusions. “Is great-grandpa a monkey?” they’ll ask. “Was the first mommy a monkey and the first daddy a human?” Oh, boy, I think, braking to a stop at a red light. Why couldn’t we just talk about sex? I have to hold up my end of the parental bargain. So I jump in. “A long, long, long time ago,” I begin. And I try to explain about fish and dinosaurs and animals changing and growing into other animals. “But Daddy?” asks Lance. “What, Honey?” “Dinosaurs died a long time ago.” “Yes, Honey.” It isn’t that long of a ride to summer camp. So I skip on to gorillas and chimps and humans leaving the jungle for the plains and deserts and farms. “Humans left the gorillas,” says Lilly, “and the gorillas didn’t know they were going to leave so soon.” I praise my kids for their amazing questions. These are great questions. These are hard questions. Grownups are still thinking about these questions. “When you grow up,” I say, “we can talk more about these questions because they’re so complicated.” I want to give my kids some kind of a preliminary answer, not just a brush-off, and so I return to monkeys and mommies and humans, and I say it was so long ago that no one wrote down who the first mommy was because they didn’t have any paper. “But when they wanted paper,” says Lilly, “they just cut down a few trees. Paper comes from trees.” I explain that they didn’t know that back then. “But,” observes Lilly, “they had sidewalks and chalk at least.”

“No, Honey, they didn’t have sidewalks,” I say. “But that’s a very good thought.” And then I think a moment and realize she’s had an excellent thought. So I add, “You’re kind of right. They had stones, and they could make marks with little stones on big flat stones.” “Yeah,” says Lance. “But Daddy?” “What?” “Dinosaurs died a long time ago.” “Yes, Honey. Dinosaurs died a long time ago. There are no more dinosaurs. I promise.” “And gorillas shared bananas with humans in the trees,” says Lilly. “Yes, Honey.” “Dad,” asks Lilly, “how did the first trees grow? From seeds? Where did the first seeds come from?” I tell her she has great questions this morning. I remind her that the great questions have hard answers, and sometimes the great questions have no good answers at all. “We can talk more later,” I say, exhaling in relief at the sight of the community church in which the secular summer camp is held. “We’re almost at camp, People, and we’re late, late, late. So get your bags ready. It’s time to rock ‘n’ roll.”

Note

y children, Lilly and Lance, are young. In my heart storms a love bigger than three gods. So I ride the bumper car of my typical weekday knocked and pulled and thrown by minor emergencies, taking care of small things that can wait, responding to small children who cannot. I am concierge, cook, counselor, custodian, security guard, groundskeeper, and bell hop in Hotel Doran. My customers demand immediate service and constant satisfaction. The contract in their little minds calls for three meals a day, snacks, as many treats as they can weasel out of me, and a traveling audience whom they can summon with brisk calls to bear witness to their homework and applaud their art. Tina and I share a study on the second floor (she’s a family physician; I’m “the doctor’s wife,” as a friend once joked),

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but my main study is on the first floor near the lobby. The kitchen is the nerve center of the hotel, and it is five strides from my study to the kitchen. I do the cooking and balance the checkbook and start a morning load of wash that I forget about until lunch. Tina and I are a contemporary fifty-fifty parenting unit. She works tenhour days, brings home the checks so we can both pay off our school loans, and manages the weekend chores and the back-to-school shopping and the scheduling of haircuts and doctor’s appointments. We fight over money and chores and disciplining the kids. I shirk my duties and sulk in grumpy bouts of injured male ego as much as any man who wears an apron over his armor. When women take over the world, what will the men do? Exactly. And so I am in business—family business—and I take it personally. Meanwhile, during the day, I work as quickly as I can under threat of being summoned by that brisk call, that wailing alarm, that resounding airquake born of the mouths of babes to fissure cracks in the drywall and shatter wine bottles in the rack. The solitary moments I steal at my desk are like oases in the desert of my day, shimmering mirages of creative fulfillment that dissolve in the glare of household emergencies, but which linger in my mind, paused and held and sustained in thin air until I can mop up the milk, microwave the noodles, sign the permission slip for the field trip to the nature center, and race back to my chair before the inspiration fades, the phone rings, or a guest notices that the warmed and moistened face towels have grown cold. Lilly tinkles the ivories on this old out-of-tune upright piano we have. Lilly loves to sing and dance and play the piano. She is eight now and sings everywhere she goes: in the pantry picking out cereal, in her bedroom after school, in the bathroom during her nightly shower routine (the initial phase of which features an appearance by yours truly as the spider hunter; I rustle the shower curtain

and swat leggy critters waiting in ambush on the cliffs of mildewy tiles). Often we spend an hour belting out madeup songs, holiday tunes, and love ballads. She loves to hold a note in competition against me. When she wins, she has a look of world domination. She has the vision of Alexander the Great, the determination of Joan of Arc, the nerve of Liza Minelli. She takes dance lessons in jazz, ballet and tap, and she reports that her teacher considers her “graceful.” Her ego pirouettes. In the last six months, in keeping with her plans for conquest, she has become interested in musical instruments other than her vocal chords. The piano has sat there, in a corner on the first floor, since we moved into this house two years ago. My mother’s friend wanted to be rid of this second unused piano that had come with her condo. The piano was last tuned the year Jimi Hendrix died, and you can hear the influence. My strategy has been to let Lilly improvise on the keys, test out the pedals, and experiment with the sounds until she feels the tremors of desire in her heart and asks for lessons. This, she has done. I am proud of her. The immediate victims of Lilly’s enthusiasm are the guinea pigs, whose cage sits on the floor beside the piano. I like to think of these two guineas, both male, as gay partners suffering through bad show tunes. We adopted them when the preschool folded last year. The preschool acquired the guinea pigs during the 2000 presidential election, and the preschoolers had named them Al Gore and George Bush. In our care a year later, they were rechristened Brownie and Flash. Poor Brownie, constipated and stiff, has retained much of his Al Goreness, while Flash, in name and color, reminds me of the sheriff’s beagle, Flash, from the Dukes of Hazzard, which then reminds me that George W. Bush sounds an awful lot like the sheriff of Hazzard County, Roscoe P. Coltrane: “G’mon, Cheney! Hot purshoot! Goo goo goo!”

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Although the plump fuzzy creatures need minimal care, Tina grew up in a strictly petless household, and I was not surprised when her father offered to seal the little guys in plastic bags. Tina said, “No, thanks,” and I was proud of her for defending their alternative lifestyle. Brownie and Flash suffer seasonal urges which they attempt to relieve upon each other. Tina was combing Brownie with a wire brush when she discovered that the consequence of Flash’s frustrations had hardened into a white crust deep in Brownie’s fur. This explained the great ruckus we’d heard the previous night. “G’mon, Brownie! Gimme that booty! Goo goo goo!” While Lilly goes berserk with “Spoonful of Sugar,” decisively killing the mood for the amorous guinea pigs but giving Brownie and Flash enough material for a pleasant afternoon of bitchy critique, Lance awaits a friend who is coming over after lunch. A tall narrow living-room window carves sunlight into a parallelogram, and in the warm planes of geometric sunlight sits Lance, legs crossed, reading a book about birds of prey. Some birds of prey lay eggs days apart. So the chicks hatch on different days. “The first chick to hatch will kill and eat his brothers and sisters,” says Lance, “if food is scarce.” Lance loves learning facts about animals. He remembers that sea lions can grow to twenty-three feet in length, that a shrew has poisonous saliva that paralyzes lizards twice its size, and that polar bears, seals, eagles, alligators and crocodiles have a second set of clear eyelids. So a firstborn bird of prey may kill the late hatchers and eat them, if food is scarce. Lance concludes, “That’s not very nice. They don’t even get to explore the new world.” Lilly and Lance are happy to explore the new world, to hear reports from the farthest reaches of the known universe, even if that means I have to hug Lilly for an hour at bedtime and devise increasingly elaborate assurances that her mother and I are not going to die

in the night. I explain that all animals have a lifespan, that the human lifespan is over eighty years and can be up to a hundred, that you should do what you want to do every day because you only have one life, and that there’s nothing to be afraid of because it’s the same as like when before you were born. But I’ve got it wrong, again, and I accept, with the proper humility, my misinterpretation of her concerns. “I’m not afraid of me dying. I’m afraid of you and Mommy dying and leaving me with no one to talk to.” When Parent and Child explore the new world together, Death will occupy a position at the front of the classroom. Inevitably, Death breaks the glass of his encasement and makes a scene stumbling about in a loose robe. Death acts like a rude uncle drunk at a holiday party, groping everyone regardless of age or gender, and we can ignore the truth no longer. Everyone has sex, and we all die. So there it is. Out in the open. Sad, depending on your point of view, but true from every direction. Friends arrive. The girls float in giggle bubbles up to Lilly’s bedroom. The boys accelerate in straight lines, changing direction only after thunking into a wall, and thus make their violent progress downward to the basement. I’m trying to work, my brain is zippy, too many little things going on, but that’s life, and it keeps me from sinking too deeply into bunkers of self-pity. With Tina healing the sick, drugging the needy, and cracking the whip to keep at bay the fat cats of economic disaster, in whose salivating jaws the morsels of our skulls wetly rest, cheek on tongue, I do what I can to earn my keep in the Doran Circus.

Charity

y son jabs his allowance card into the lunch kiosk. “Honey, please,” I say from the kitchen table. “My god, it’s not a video game. Watch it.” The kiosk emits a gentle bleep. The tiny screen at my son’s eye-level flashes “NOT ENOUGH.” “Dad,” Lance whines. “Well, go do something,” I say. “Vacu-suck the front hall. Make your bed. I don’t know. How much do you need?” Lance pokes the kiosk. “Two chores,” he reports. “I need two chores or a two-chore chore.” I don’t want him to be late. He doesn’t want to miss the bus. I gulp my coffee and squish the last crescent of bagel into my mouth. I point to my drained cup and crumby dish and grunt and point to the sink and point at Lance and read dull impatience in his face and go through the whole pointing thing again with greater emphasis and louder grunts trying not to choke to death during my desperate misunderstood pantomime. I finish chewing and swallow before enlightenment dawns in Lance’s eyes. “Dishes,” I say. I tongue sticky bagel from my teeth.

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“Sink,” I say as Lance trips over his backpack in his sprint from the lunch kiosk to the kitchen table. He drops my dishes straight into the washer, skipping the sink rinse, and as I enter my PIN into the little wall-mounted deal next to the phone cradle, I announce that I am deducting half a chore because of the sink-rinse oversight. I slip his card through, and he takes it, and I say, “But if you work fast, you can still make it. I say vacu-suck. Hurry and vacu-suck, and then what I don’t know. You’re running so late already. How about this is ridiculous.” Lance’s watch warns us that the bus approaches from the southwest. EPUT is three minutes. EPUT is Estimated Pick Up Time. I have written gently worded but still-unanswered letters suggesting they—the school, the company, whoever’s in charge of language—insert a hyphen between “Pick” and “Up” so that it reads “Pick-Up Time” because I’m sure a school, even a corporate-sponsored one, would want an insistence on proper grammar (and I mean real English grammar, not corporatespeak chock full of horrible writing approved with justifications like “Marketing thinks it plays better” or “the CEO hated his English teacher”) to be part and parcel of its institutional image, especially given the tremendous drop in public confidence in both the concept and reality of the corporate-sponsored school, as reported in recent polls. “Dad!” Lance screams. He’s panicking. He slings the backpack upside down over a shoulder. Folders and his epad scatter and thump at his heels. “Jesus Crisis!” he wails. He’s about to cry, but then he laughs, but then I laugh, and so he goes back to starting to cry and then he just cries. “Look, come on,” I say, restocking his right-sided pack. “Just pick your lunch, okay? Relax and just get ready to pick your lunch because we gotta move, okay? You can’t be late.” I punch in my PIN and slip his card through with twochores worth of allowance credit.

“I can’t do this every time. You gotta keep up on your chores. I’m not kidding. This is getting ridiculous.” Some box of something brightly colored slips out of the slot of the lunch kiosk. If only the eyes could absorb nutrients through the colors on that box, the American child would be home free, healthwise. Lance whips the box to me, and his watch blares an alarm that sure sounds like BUS BUS BUS BUS but is really just some concocted shriek that seizes up your brain instead of triggering rapid leg function, which makes no sense to me at all. You’d think they’d test-group these things. Q: How does this alarm make you feel? A: Like hating the people who made it. Q: Do you feel like getting a move on? A: I feel like getting a stomp on you and your damn alarm in vengeful tribute to the human desire to be left alone. I tuck the gaudy overpackaged food container into his backpack and zip him up and say, “Let’s rock,” and we run down the hall and I yell, “Door!” We rush through the voiceactivated swinging-open front door and down the porch steps and onto the driveway. Lance’s watch informs us that the bus is arriving at our stop. For crying out loud, we can hear the whine of the brakes and see the double-jointed doors whoosh open and clack in a security Sta-Open® lock. The Sta-Open® lock now prevents the bus doors from snapping shut prematurely and pinning children in its jaws like it did to six neighborhood kids, one of whom’s sister, who used to babysit for us, wondered bitterly why it took six kids to get the corporatesponsored school to issue a recall and investigation and product retool, and I said, in sympathy with her bitterness, “It wasn’t the quantity, it was the quality. The sixth kid was a vice president of regional snack-kiosk marketing’s kid. That’s what did it.” And she said, “No shit?”

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And I said, “Shit.” And then I also told her that those new in-home kiosks, you know the new ones? And she said, “Yeah, the lunch kiosks.” And I said, “No, no, the new ones, the ones where you can do your ATM money and donate to a charity and give to a political campaign or whatever?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if we have one yet.” And I said, “Well, if you get one, watch out. Because they say every time I use my home ATM for getting money, the bank donates a dollar to the charity of my choosing. And that seems nice, right? But then I check the monthly statements, and I see my service charge fluctuates every month to equal the charity donations, with a little extra thrown in. Get it?” And this young babysitter then decided that in her present situation—standing in the doorway waiting for this man, Mr. Doran, me, to count cash into her palm—she’d detected similarities with creepy sexual situations depicted in reality video games and Japanese anime and that this was the moment to clam up and stiffen her posture and to project knowingness and inaccessibility and sever the exchange with money in her purse and purpose in her walk, all of which she did and did effectively and left me feeling awkward and ashamed and yet amused, too. I laughed. What a world. What misunderstandings. What barricades we love to throw up against each other, necessary or not, justified or not. Just in case. Why not? It’s that kind of world, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it. And Lance fights his way through the aisle and staggers as the bus jerks forward and pulls prematurely away— foretelling another lawsuit in its future—and he waves good-bye from the seat he’s finally found to sit in. Or maybe it’s not Lance but someone else’s son waving through the

tinted security bus window. And maybe this boy is waving just because I’m waving and he’s merely obeying the ritual impulse. Or maybe he’s waving thinking it’s funny that he’s able to get me, a grown-up, to wave. Or maybe he’s waving thinking it’s funny that I think he’s my son when really he’s not and we’re waving at each other in this fraud, this con game, and he’s the master in this con game, this joke. Or maybe we just wave to each other because this is one of the few moments in the entire day when you can wave to someone and not have to worry that your friends will think something bad or weird or creepy about it and seize the advantage to laugh at you. I worry it really is Lance waving at me behind that dark window, and so there’s no way I’m stopping waving and breaking the connection. No way I’m not waving until the bus rolls to the end of our street and rounds the corner and disappears behind the line of boulevard trees. So I’m waving. Alone. The only parent in the middle of the street. For crying out loud, what’s with this bus? It’s taking forever. This is my exercise for the day. Thirty minutes on the treadmill or fifteen madly waving to my son diminishing into the distance inside the slowest product-liabilitiest bus in the county. My neighbors are peering through home-office windows, judging me. I know it. Or if they’re not, they might be, or could be, grousing at flat-screen monitors hooked up to video cameras mounted under eaves like wasp nests. “What’s he got to prove, making us look bad letting our children take themselves out to the bus? Is self-reliance no longer a virtue in this country?” So here I am. Waving, waving. And, still, here I am. A presence. Because in this situation, when you think about it, what else does a parent have to give?

I’

Cool

m worried about my son. I think he’s the cool kid. The girls all say, “Hi, Lance!” And they don’t just say it. They sing it. “Hi, Laaaaance!” The first syllable dips low—“hiiiii”—in order to leap to the high held note of “Laaaaaance.” Low, HIIIIIGH. Low, HIIIIIGH. Get it? “Hi, Laaaaance!” Does Lance acknowledge them? Sort of, sort of not. He flips up his hand like he’s catching a baseball someone tossed to him. This is his wave. It’s subtle but sufficient. He’s shy but composed. He’s not going to be the boy who calls back, “Hi, Suzeeee!” This kind of boy is doomed to be a friend. All the girls will claim him as such and only as such. But girls do not sing the names of friends. They sing the names of boys. But do they want these boys, or do they just want to sing?

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After we pass by the girls or they pass by us, I’ll say, “Who’s that? Is she in your class?” And he’ll keep looking at the sidewalk or kicking a rock and say, “That’s Claire. That’s Aubrey. That’s Crystal. She’s in my class. She’s on my soccer team. She’s Owen’s sister.” I’ll catch him talking to them later. Usually they talk, and he listens. But he talks, too. He stands there with his baseball hat on skewed, never all the way to the front or all the way to the back. If I imagine the brim is a hand on the clock of his head, then it’s always either exactly ten after or twenty to. I was a kid once. Why didn’t I think to wear my cap so distinctively? Because I was too self-conscious, that’s why. And, once I decided to override my inhibitions, I expressed myself without control, recklessly. I just wasn’t used to it. Being cool was like playing the blues. If I had to ask, I was a dork. With little Lance, his cap finds its natural home. Like an animal, it seeks equilibrium with its environment. Like an electron, it hunts for a unique stability. Lance fixes his cap one-handed, a small touch and it’s perfectly off-center. My wife’ll adjust his hat. On impulse, I’ll adjust his hat. But coolness is a matter of fine subtleties, and Tina and I have been privy to neither its grace nor its expression. One touch, one finger, and the cap’s back where Lance wants it, back where it belongs. And he doesn’t appear self-conscious about it. He just quietly asserts himself with small gestures, small glosses on the pose. But it’s not, to be fair, a pose with him. No one else wears his hat this way, not his classmates and not his friends. I drive them to school, I go to school parties, I go to the field trips to zoos and nature centers. So I would’ve noticed. I’ve seen which kids mimic each other’s clothes and slang. I’ve seen which kids are helpless. And I’ve seen which kids chart their own paths without fuss or self-doubt. They just do it. Naturally. Like my son. Who is seven, by the way. Christ, I’m worried about him.

I pick him up from school, and a girl says, “Hi, Laaaaance!” I don’t recognize her. Or maybe I do. It’s hard to tell kids apart at this age. Their features slide around every day. The cheeks puff and stretch, the nose swings left to right, the eyes float to the sides of their heads. They morph and twitch and sag. They’re like characters the animator is still messing around with because this film will be a lifetime in the making. This girl’s loose blonde hair lifts in spikes and dances, probably due to the static charge of her shiny pink backpack, over which her hair flows down like lightning against the clouds. She’s waiting for her mom, whom I hope arrives quickly with a tissue. “Who was that?” I ask Lance. “Dad, I told you,” he scolds me. “That’s Crystal. She’s in Mr. Geiger’s class.” “Oh. So how do you know her?” “She talks to me at recess.” “Ah.” I’ve noticed that some girls chase boys at recess. The girls who chase are not—one can tell at this stage—the girls you want to get involved with. They’re the fast girls. Or they will be the fast girls. Nabokov knew. Even before bovine growth hormone in the milk started giving girls early periods, he knew: with some girls, you can tell by the time they’re seven and eight. And as a parent, I think, “Yikes.” Luckily, Lance is not the kind of boy the girls chase. The chased boys—not to be confused with “chaste” boys—are not the boys any girls should be chasing. They’re often the cool boys, but they’re just as often bad news. They are the boys who, like sharks of the playground, smell the blood of peer pressure miles away. These future quarterbacks and fraternity sergeants-at-arms will be first to kick the nerd and first to kiss the girl. Competition, not compassion, is their gig, and, here in the lower, heavier atmosphere of second grade where thoughts hang suspended in the

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humidity of developing minds, the fast girls can’t tell the difference between cruelty and kindness or don’t know there is any. Lance, thankfully, is a compassionate kid, and the girls who gravitate toward him respond to the warmth of this quality. But there is more to it than this. Girls, after all, do not sing the names of sensitive boys. Lance is confident and smart, and although he is quiet, he knows how to talk to girls and does talk to girls. Let me emphasize: he can TALK to GIRLS. The chased boys and the sensitive boys cannot. The chased boys have neither vocabulary nor respect. The sensitive boys have neither familiarity nor confidence. Most chased boys are crude egotists. They are not afraid, but they are ignorant. They make up for their ignorance with arrogance. Most sensitive boys are paralyzed. A female creature looms so large in their imaginations that she casts a shadow over his very soul. Before her presence in the classroom, on the playground, or at a birthday party, he shrinks in size. He cannot speak because he does not believe she will ever hear him. He often forgets he still possesses a mouth. Lance, to his benefit, has grown up under the wing of an older sister. He talks to his sister and her friends every day. He is accustomed to the attentions of girls, to their ways, to their speech patterns and the pitches of their voices. He hears them talk. He plays with them. He wrestles with them. He reads books with them. He sees the insides of their bedrooms, their closets. He knows what goes on in the bathrooms. This is knowledge inaccessible to many boys, and the experience is unappreciated by most boys who do have access. For Lance, the girl world is familiar. He is still shy in many ways, but he is not afraid. He can TALK to GIRLS. This, for young boys, is real power. The power of speech. Girls want to sing the names of powerful boys, especially when the source of their power remains a mystery. I’m standing in line for ice cream, and a girl calls, “Hi,

Laaaance!” Lance catches an imaginary ball, and the girl waves back. I ask, “Is that Crystal?” Lance socks me in the thigh. Ah, yes. Crystal is blonde. This is Aubrey. No, wait. Aubrey’s mom has red hair, and the mom by this girl has long black hair. Not Aubrey. Oh, yeah. Of course. This is Dahlia. Dahlia from Lance’s first-grade class last year. She must be in a different class this year. Dahlia has an Indian father and a Caucasian mother, although Dahlia’s inherited traits are concealed by her smooth wide face, light brown hair cut short, and skin the color of tea with plenty of sugar and milk in it. She’s also dressed in white tennis shoes, a pair of Old Navy capri pants, and a pink T-shirt with sequins spelling out “Princess.” She’s a cute spunky little kid and, if I remember correctly, kind of a tomboy. Pretty tough. At least she was last year. She’s gone girly-girl this year. But she proves she hasn’t lost all of her boldness because she steps over to Lance and shows him the charm bracelet she got over winter vacation. “We went to Disney World,” she says, and it is the first thing she says, after, of course, “Hi, Laaaaance!” At first, Lance looks around, confirms his place in the ice-cream line, checks for other kids he might know. His surveillance happens very fast, but a look of concern sweeps over Dahlia’s face. She’s worried. A great many things and people compete for the attentions of a cool kid. When Lance seems comfortable with his place in the world, he grabs Dahlia’s forearm and leans in close to inspect the bracelet on her wrist. Dahlia is beaming. She feels the victory like a bright sun in her chest. She stamps the sidewalk because she doesn’t know what else to do with the extra energy. Last year, she would have punched Lance or run away. I’m standing on one side of a sidewalk canyon, and they are on the other side. The sidewalk concrete has been broken in half, cleaved by the root of a long-gone tree. It’s like a miniature San Andreas fault line or a science-fair model

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of how the Rocky Mountains were formed. I leave the kids alone to talk and mumble to each other, and Dahlia shrieks now and then, and I examine the tops of their heads, the lines of hairs across the whites of their scalps. I want to think about melting snow running down mountains, but instead, I just think about primates picking nits from each other’s fur. Even cool kids remind one of chimpanzees. It’s over when our turn is up for vanilla cones. We squirm at one of the plastic outdoor tables, under an umbrella squeaking as it rotates in the wind, and Lance, without turning around, knows that Dahlia is leaving with her mother. Neither kid says anything to the other. “There goes Dahlia,” I say. “I thought maybe she’d come sit with us.” “She’s got piano lessons, and her grandma’s coming to make chicken tikka,” Lance explains. “I thought she said, ‘chicken tickle,’ but it’s chicken tikka. It has spices or something.” “Ah,” I say. And I am impressed enough to ask no more. So this is little Lance. I wonder if, pretty soon, I will no longer be able to reveal to Lance anything about the world he doesn’t already intuit or hasn’t already tracked down. Any minute Lance will sit me at the kitchen table and ask me what “fuck” means. He won’t be asking because he doesn’t know. He’ll be asking because he wants me to know he knows, and he doesn’t want me to sweat bringing up the subject with him. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I had some small part in making Lance this way. I did, didn’t I? I established and guarded the circumstances in which he could trust his thoughts and express his feelings, cultivate a sober sense of himself, a self of many expressions, and bloom with the confidence of a critical mind. You may think it’s too early to talk like this about second-graders, but believe me: these kids are like little adults. They don’t know everything, but what they do know they don’t forget.

Their minds have lots of empty space, and information rises up like skyscrapers. The cities of their brains have not been compressed to accommodate ever larger populations of rules and customs. Not yet anyway. There is still blue sky everywhere. Possibility soars. The world as you and I know it is, for them, outer space. It has allure and mystery and wonder. And they are eager to explore it, absorb it, and spit it back at you. Lance will do this over and over and over again, until I will have nothing left to say to him. He’ll reassure me that this isn’t true. “Oh, come on, Dad,” he’ll say someday. “You taught me everything I know.” And while you and I laugh as we choke on the sentimentality of that clichéd exchange, let me point out that that is the kind of cool kid Lance is and will be: the kind who both knows he’s cool and dismisses the significance of it. His coolness doesn’t lose its temperature when he gives generously to others. It can afford the exertion and avoid the descent into the cold. So, as Lance, the cool kid, grows up, will I never have to worry about him? There is all the usual stuff still in play. Natural disaster. Unforeseen consequence. Inexplicable suffering. Professional disappointment. Sudden disease. I haven’t lost everything. I’ve still got Broken Heart. Cool versus Broken Heart? Come on. The rest of us at least expect that one. The cool never see it coming. They never expect the girls to sing someone else’s name. So when Dahlia, the Homecoming Queen, with twinkles in her eyes and sparkles in her crown, presides from the convertible Cadillac, waves a lazy wave, and calls out, “Hi, Peteeer. Hi, Donaaaald. Hi, Aleeeex,” then . . . the sky drops. Fire consumes the land. The heart erupts like a canyon of rock. And I will be there, palms open, ready to catch the fallen, ready to lift him up, and ready to let him go, again.

LITERATURE

american home life

“Fans of David Foster Wallace will rejoice.” —Wisconsin Review

—Laura Williams on Johnny Red, The Ann Arbor Paper

“Sets a new qualitative standard for critical discourse.” —Steven Heller on American Mutt, Print Magazine

“A literary force to be reckoned with. Barringer’s work reminds me of the offspring of Larry Brown and George Saunders, with more pathos.” —Nathan Leslie, The Pedestal Magazine

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ISBN-13: 978-0-9778151-2-9 ISBN 0-9778151-2-9

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david barringer

“Eloquent and sharp, a pleasure to read.”

american home life a novel david barringer