The Book of Dads Read online

  During most of the time I spent putting this book together, I lived in Portland, Oregon, and it’s one autumn Saturday there, on the first day of rain in what often turns out to be seven or eight months of mostly unrelieved, mood-darkening wetness and gray, that I have to learn this lesson again. In a lull I decide to walk the dog to the park. We’re almost there when the rain kicks up again, lightly, at the same time that the sun is pulsing luminously just above the horizon—a paranatural event in Portland, which is almost never cloudless once the rain sets in. The park has a wide flat field, and when the rain pauses again, an entire dazzling rainbow, stem to stern, appears off in the distance. I can’t remember whether I’ve ever seen a whole one before, maybe once or twice. But I know I’ve never seen two simultaneously. And there above the first rainbow is another, a pale doppelgänger, almost like an afterimage, but visible nonetheless.

  When I get home with the dog, there is just enough light to rush Lucy into the backyard for a peek. Once she’s seen the pair of rainbows, she insists, for some reason, on bubbles. So Meg and I get out the giant purple dollar-store bottle and take turns blowing soapy orbs out across the lawn. “Bubbles!” Lucy erupts. Chasing them seems to be just as much fun for her as the first time she ever did it. The dog gets in on the act, too. There the two of them are, prancing after the bubbles, sometimes making it in time to touch one before it bursts, but usually not. That doesn’t stop them. Dusk is coming on but there is time for a few more rounds. All the bubbles, I notice, have a life, a trajectory of their own. They float up. They hover on a gust, teasing, right at their zenith. Then they drift down, vanishing when they’re pricked by a leaf or a blade of grass. But oh how brilliant while they rise.

  —Ben George

  THE NIGHT SHIFT

  BEN FOUNTAIN

  It’s a blur, a lot of it, those first few years, and so much of it seemed to happen in the dark. There is truth to the rumor that children do occasionally sleep through the night, but they also get thirsty, get hungry, go to the bathroom, have great ideas, throw up, and get the willies just as grownups do, and anyone who thinks that children aren’t attuned to the more insidious forms of longing and dread simply hasn’t been paying attention. They feel everything, and one way or another we usually hear about it.

  There was a night that first summer when our son John could not be consoled, and it played out like a kind of baby opera: he howled, and the more he howled the more desperate he became, and so he howled even louder. His rookie parents, twelve weeks into their first season, quickly ran through their thin bag of tricks, so sometime after midnight I said to my wife, “Hook him on.” “Now?” “Now.” We slid him into the baby pouch and attached him to my chest, and I set off into the night to walk him to sleep.

  It was summer, which in Dallas, Texas, means night temperatures just shy of molten and the roar of bug life like tinnitus in your ear. When John realized what was happening he fell nearly silent and had a look around. “What’s this?” he as much as asked, and having registered that it was an awfully odd hour for a walk, he went back to howling. And so we roamed the leafy sidewalks of suburban Lakewood, chest to chest, his head snug just beneath my chin, the two of us sweating like miners. The hiss of lawn sprinklers tracked us through the neighborhood. The streetlights threw my pregnant-lady silhouette fore and aft, a shifting blob of protoplasmic mass. I think I blushed, tramping the sidewalks with this screaming child. I was as embarrassed as a person can be in the dark; it was like parading a siren around the neighborhood, or a small bomb with a very loud fuse. Surely somebody was going to call the cops, but no, only the occasional civilian car cruised past, yawing and weaving as the driver processed this very strange sight, a man walking the streets at two a.m. with a baby strapped to his chest.

  With time John’s howling began to lose conviction, but freight trains and ocean liners don’t stop on a dime. It took miles for him to wind down completely, and even then he stayed awake, calm but alert, gravely looking about with the large, liquid eyes of a sensitive sea creature. His thoughtfulness made an impression on me; we tend to ignore the huge amounts of time that babies spend quietly contemplating things, but like monks or fakirs that’s mostly what they do.

  I want to think, and maybe there’s a chance I’m right, that we came to a kind of understanding on that walk. The moist night seemed to cup us in its hands—the heat, the softly roaring cicadas, the meditative rhythm of footsteps and breath all aligned in such a way that life made sense. John’s baby-sumo body gradually sagged into mine. We both seemed to know a little peace just then, and because we came to it together, through each other, the joint nature of it seemed significant. Even after he fell asleep I kept walking, as if by going a couple of extra miles I could lock in this good thing between us.

  Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, matériel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, and so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do. In my early twenties I watched my sister with her two young daughters and thought, “Forget it, I’ll never be able to do that.” The skill set was daunting enough—changing a diaper, say, while the kid’s thrashing around like a rabid ferret, or extracting a splinter with a surgeon’s finesse—but it was her nonstop selflessness that intimidated me, how she gave so much of herself, always, every day, a perpetual gusher of soul and spirit that left me exhausted just watching it.

  I was in awe. I wondered where she found the strength, and what kept a person from being emptied out. When my own turn came, I learned that a person can, in fact, get emptied out, but I also found some measure of that selflessness, a deep behavioral pull that took hold of my life and made it a very different thing. After those first few weeks of burping and bathing and midnight feedings I realized with a shock that I could do it—was doing it, and more or less automatically, as if the mechanics were wired into me. Your own child is a force of nature, maybe the strongest you’ll ever encounter; if you want proof, see what happens when you and your spouse are leading up to sex and your kid starts crying in the next room. So here was an instinct that trumped even the mighty sex drive, and it started working on me in a weirdly backward way.

  At that particular time in my life I had a law job with an office, secretary, bosses, clients, the whole bit. I doubt the job was any more soul killing than most such jobs, but it did give me a better sense of my father, of what he’d dealt with and become during all those years of being a man out in the world, working for a living. So I was that salaryman now, but like virtually all salarymen everywhere I had secret ambitions to be something else. When John was born, more than one colleague clapped me on the back and cried: “We’ve got you now!” And I assumed they were right, that with a kid to support I was locked into the salary life for good. But in time that assumption got turned on its head. Food, clothing, shelter, stuff, the material things of life do matter, and they all cost money, but I began to sense other, equally pressing obligations. These other obligations, they seemed to have something to do with ultimate choices, with living genuinely, seriously, not treating life as a game. I began to realize that it’s possible to lead an eminently responsible adult life and still be doing nothing more than marking time. The harder choice—the one we resist—that’s usually the choice required of us, and becoming a father put that home truth right in my face. I wanted my kid to have all the normal comforts of American li
fe, but I was gradually coming around to the belief that the best thing we can do for our children, better than wads of disposable income or trips to Disney or the coolest technology that credit can buy, is for us, their parents, to be whole in ourselves. That was my inarticulate sense of it at the time, this urgent but notional ideal of wholeness or peace, and I guessed that it would come—imperfectly at best, intermittently if at all—only by living most of my days a certain way.

  “What pattern of existence,” as Toni Morrison once framed the issue, “is most conducive to honesty and self-knowledge, the prime requisites for a significant life?” I’d thought that becoming a father would excuse me from the harder choice, from the work, and by extension from a way of life that would require more of me than marking time, but I was wrong; seeing my son’s face every day obliged me to try this harder thing. Because they know it, who we are; our children will find us out no matter what. To the extent that we compromise, fudge, live falsely, they feel it as surely as the weather on their heads, and sooner or later they’ll dish it back to us in spades. It took time for me to accept the situation, and more time for my wife and me to gather our nerve and rearrange our lives, but eventually I quit the law and began a new career as a suburban house husband and unpublished writer. My wife would go off to work every day and make money; I would stay home, raise the kid, and run the house, and for a certain number of hours each day I would sit down at the kitchen table and try to teach myself to write.

  Presently our second child arrived, a girl this time, Lee. Five years of practicing law had brought me to a better understanding of my father, and as I moiled through a second and then a third year at home I believed that I was starting to understand my mother. At the very least I was gaining a new appreciation for her, for how she managed to stay as sane as she did through her thirty-year saga as housewife and mom. Running a house, raising kids—this is hard work; maybe the hardest. The pay is abysmal, although I trust this won’t be news to anyone. The hours are long, and you’re always on call. It’s not for the squeamish, not with all the bodily functions involved, and though there are people who make the job look easy, they’re either insanely gifted or faking it. As I remember, my mother was exhausted much of the time, and so I became, too, to an extent I’d never been on the salary job, and if these depths of fatigue seemed strangely familiar to me, then that was the echo of my mother’s life coming in range. I asked her once, “How did you do it?” She’d raised four children, yet I had all I could handle with two. She shrugged, snorted, looked out her kitchen window, simultaneously pleased and impatient with the question. “There was no other choice,” she finally answered. “It had to be done.” No, I reflected later, there is always a choice, and she made hers every morning for thirty years, regardless of whether it crossed her mind.

  I’m inclined to believe it’s a good thing, young fathers gaining a better appreciation of their mothers. Where you were seeing the world with one eye, now you start to see with two, and for me doing the work was what it took, undertaking the endless rounds of meals, baths, diapers, doctors, walks, games, naps, and everything else about children you can cram into a day, along with the comic subplot of keeping the physical plant of the house marginally functional and intact. Something was always breaking down, something else limping along, and some third or fourth or fifth thing merely a pain in the ass. There were plenty of weeks when the yard had to fend for itself. Laundry was an ongoing phenomenon, the sheer tonnage of dirty clothes that could appear overnight. I reflected on our modest family of four and decided that a couple of extra people were living in our attic, that was the only explanation for why the hampers were always stuffed.

  For all the fullness of these days, they could be lonely. My children were good company, but they were still children, and maybe the isolation was somewhat more acute for me as a man. By the time Lee was born we’d moved to north Dallas, where the dominant culture is hard-core conservative and luxury consumption always in style. In the aggressively upscale world of north Dallas, house husbands were about as rare as igloos or rappers, and though people were generally nice, they didn’t know what to make of me, those churchgoing soccer moms, those hard-charging executive dads. Was I a pedophile? a drug dealer? a Democrat? It probably didn’t help that I drove a bright gold 1970s muscle car.

  So mostly I hung out with my kids. I’m lucky, I was there to watch them grow up, but as full and demanding as the days were, it’s the nights my mind goes back to, all our wanderings through the house fetching water, hunting medicine, fleeing nightmares. There’s nothing fun or sexy about sleep deprivation, but I can’t say that I was unhappy, most of those nights. I felt useful. I was serving a need. In a world filled with unimaginable pain and suffering, here were a few small problems I could do something about. We had all the usual troubles that keep families awake at night, the earaches, the coughs, the bouts of throwing up, the strange noises and fears of burglars and ghosts. Sometimes John would call for water, but what he really wanted was comfort of a different kind. “What happens when we die?” he would ask, eyes drilling me over the rim of his tippy cup. “What if there’s nothing after we die, what if it’s all just black?” During Lee’s first winter her energy would surge precisely at eleven o’clock at night, and the only way to get her to sleep was to put her in the stroller and do laps through the house. I had a route: den, living room, dining room, kitchen, den again, and onward—we had so little furniture in those days that it was clear sailing the whole way. Eventually she would sleep, but if I stopped too soon she’d snap awake when I moved her from the stroller to the crib, which meant starting the long march all over again. And so around and around we went, a bit like characters in a Beckett play. Can I stop now? Should I put in ten more laps? I suspect that Beckett was peculiarly attuned to the tedium inherent in domestic chores.

  Meanwhile my daughter’s internal clock kept to its nocturnal track, and as a toddler she formed the habit of climbing down from her crib in the middle of the night and trotting out to the den, ready to start the day. Such a strange, funny, busy little kid; it seemed not to occur to her to be scared of the dark. If I managed to roll out of bed and follow her down the hall, I’d find her perched on the couch with her passy in her mouth and one of her stash of stuffed bears in her arms, patiently waiting for the rest of us to join her. So I’d gather her up and carry her back to bed; I don’t remember us ever speaking, those nights, only a sweet, comfortable silence, a hush halfway back to sleep. She seemed to understand when I held out my arms that it wasn’t yet time to be awake, but if I didn’t go right away, if I hesitated in my bed and fell back asleep, she would still be in the den the next morning, slumped over asleep on the arm of the couch.

  Lee was the night owl, John the early riser; whipsawed as we were between the two, those early years passed in a haze of exhaustion. I wonder now if I was fully conscious some days, just as I wonder why I think of those nights as much as I do, why they seem so close, so essential. Maybe it has something to do with the sensory imprint of the memories, the shadowy blues and grays, the deep quiet, the way we always spoke in low voices, whispers. In the silence, the soupy, pixelated dark, things seemed not so much stripped down to their essence as terrifically compressed, charged with an extra density and weight. That sense of compression, of space reduced to a pressurized niche, seemed to stop the normal drift toward numbness and distraction. A small space just large enough for a parent and child, where even the slightest gesture mattered.

  No, I wasn’t unhappy those nights, but then you have to get up and deal with the day. Sleep, like any other necessity, takes on the allure of the most extravagant luxury when it’s in short supply, and since a good night’s sleep was often beyond my means I became a master of the stealth nap. I stole sleep when and where I could, though this was sleep lite, more in the nature of low-grade dozing or a semi-sentient trance, consciousness simmering along on autopilot. Making indoor tents and forts was usually good for a nap, a few minutes of “pretend” sl
eep while the kids were making improvements to the tent. Getting shot in the war could lead to a couple of blissful minutes, and I was always willing to be buried beneath whatever came to hand, leaves, Legos, sofa cushions, shoes. Once they made me disappear under a mound of (unused) Huggies. Or we could do some slow-motion wrestling, where I’d lie on the bed and make myself as heavy as possible, the very paradigm of passive resistance as John and Lee strove mightily to push me onto the floor.

  These were some things a young father did to get through the day. Lack of sleep is a flu you can’t shake, the funk that comes of eating junk food for a week. If it persists you go a little crazy—time speeds up and slows down, brain function reverts to reptilian levels, and your body aches all over. Maybe this is how the elderly feel all the time. When we’d see our DINK friends—double income no kids—they seemed like beings from another world. They looked so fit, so rested. Their hair was perfect. They were perpetually tanned and mellow, and always seemed to have just returned from vacationing in some far-flung, paradisiacal place. With so much time and energy to lavish on themselves they began to seem childlike to me, stunted, not quite adult. I could feel pretty holy in those days about my chronic frazzlement and lack of sleep, and not a little resentful—do all young parents carry around this sort of galled pride?—but even now I wonder how many of us ever truly grow up until we have kids of our own. Maybe it takes parenthood to force us out of ourselves; maybe that’s what maturity is in the deepest sense, living and doing for someone else, practicing the forms of empathy day in and day out. Maybe that’s what it takes to be whole in ourselves—first we have to be forced out of ourselves.