ii.
Most days are all right. Some are better. Good, even. Though they’re good in retrospect, good when compared to the mediocrities. This one’s turning out bad, though bad, of course, has a sliding scale. It isn’t bad like the day you learn you have cancer, so perhaps there’s a better word. Trying, maybe. The day is trying. As in trying to get to all right. Or trying my patience. Trying to get out of whatever it is I’m in—a slump, rut, trying to achieve all right. Middling, even. But the word that keeps coming to mind is bad. Sadie’s sick, and I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t life-threatening. I’m almost entirely sure of that.
By the time, I arrive at my parents’, the anger from my ride has faded, but it’s resolved into a headache. Or not a headache so much as a heavy, clamped pressure in the front of my head. After I park the car, I amble across the porch and go inside and find my daughter as I’d expected: slumped against my mom on the couch, resting her head, staring with glazed eyes at an episode of Caillou on TV.
Caillou is my daughter’s favorite show. She likes the Elmo portions of Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and I guide her toward these, but she always requests Caillou. It’s the type of show kids are drawn to. Bright vivid colors. Easy to follow plotlines. Commonplace dilemmas for the characters to navigate. It’s wholesome, value-oriented, yet my wife and I hate it. The main character, Caillou, is a bald four-year-old with a high whiney voice and a vast number of complaints, ranging from another child in his daycare class copying his every move to leaving his treasured sweater at the playground overnight and fearing crows will eat it. At some point in every episode, his parents explain the error of his ways, and Caillou sees they’re correct and apologizes, and everything is resolved in a cloyingly loving fashion. The world in which Caillou moves is eternally safe, eternally warm, eternally forgiving, which is what a child needs. Daniel Tiger is similar in structure and message, but the reason I accept Daniel Tiger graciously and not Caillou is that Caillou is impossible to tune out.
“How are you, sweetie?” I say.
I bend over and pick Sadie up. She places her arms around my neck as I lift. She wraps her legs around my sides. I sit on the couch with her.
“How is she?” I ask my mom.
Sadie buries her head in my chest and coughs.
“But Ro-SIE!” Caillou chides his sister. “I’m playing with that! It’s mine!”
The behavior’s accurate to life, but I can’t help thinking that boy’s a little bitch. I close my eyes a moment, try to concentrate as my mother speaks. I don’t need to look around the room to see it. I can sense all the objects around me. The television’s in the same place it’s always been: in the corner by the front windows. It’s a larger model now, flat screen, sitting atop a low hardwood cabinet. The love seat is next to it, running perpendicular along the wall. The love seat has changed, too. It’s no longer the navy blue, pink floral piece I flopped on in my youth, but a higher-end model with dark brown, billowy cushions. The couch matches. It’s pushed against the adjacent wall with an opening where the front door stands. Since I moved out, they’ve painted the walls mint green, hung a series of landscape photographs behind the couch. They’ve pulled up the dingy pink wall-to-wall carpeting, opting for red-hued oriental rugs. In front of the sofa stands their a coffee table, hardwood with glass panels, stacked high with magazines, cookbooks. The cookbooks are my mother’s obsession. She has hundreds, not just on the table but in a bookcase in the dining room. It doesn’t matter whether she makes the meals from them or not, she likes to look.
“Fever down…” she’s saying. “Advil…short nap…half hour.”
I open my eyes but can’t focus. Caillou’s dad is saying something. It isn’t words to me, just sounds, his voice is as grating as his son’s. I want to punch him—a cartoon character. He’s perpetually clad in a green sweater, perpetually affable. I despise perpetually affable people. I never believe it’s genuine. I’ve met a number of nice people in my life, and even they have off days. I don’t like his mom either. She’s onscreen now, perpetually chipper, which is as bad as perpetually affable. She wears a baggy red sweater and has strange boobs. She’s a woman, or a representation of a woman, so of course she has boobs, but I can’t stop staring. Not because I’m boob-obsessed but because hers are drawn weirdly. Is it just me? Why do I notice her boobs? I try to think of other female cartoon characters. Most of the shows my daughter watches are populated with animals. But what about the humans? Have I ever had problems with the way other boobs are drawn? I can’t think of any, which I assume means I’ve never noticed. My daughter likes Frozen. We watch it often, and I’ve never glanced at the characters’ busts. Do they have them? I can’t remember. So, it has to be Caillou. It looks like his mother never wears a bra. Her breasts point in opposite directions. And why is Caillou bald? His sister has a full head of red hair, so why doesn’t he? He doesn’t look ill. Alopecia? Am I being an asshole? Probably.
I turn away from the TV, consider asking my mom to repeat herself, but I’ve gleaned enough from the tidbits. Caillou goes to commercial, and even then, I can’t focus. I’m thinking about the doctor’s appointment, the timing of it, arriving right beforehand, not having to wait long in the lobby, navigating the route across Old Gloucester Road during rush hour. All I want is to zone out, but I have responsibilities. I didn’t want to go to the doctor’s for my flu shot. Now I have to go again. Sadie’s sick, but my mother doesn’t seem concerned. Over the years, she nursed my siblings and I through all manner of colds and flus, cuts and bruises, and the only time we’d gone to the hospital was when something serious happened—when I’d been running around the neighborhood in bare feet and sliced open my heel and needed stitches; when my youngest sister Jane fell on the metal bleachers at the baseball field and required the same; when my other sister Liz had opened a bottle of my aunt’s partner’s blood-thinners and consumed the vial. My mother had nursed my siblings and I through chicken pox. We’d caught them at the same time. I’d had the worst case. They were all over my scalp, around my neck, inside my throat, but my brother developed scarlet fever and had seizures. I was there when it happened. We were home from school. He’d developed a rash and fever and started to shake. I called my mom and she rushed in and cleared the area. My brother thrashed. His eyes rolled back in his head, his body flailed, like a live fish on dry land.
Despite a lack of formal education, my mother is bright. She reads, keeps herself informed. She’s always made sure she knows what to do in situations. For years, we had an instructional poster taped inside the cupboard that showed how to do the Heimlich maneuver. There were illustrations for how to do it on an adult, a child, oneself. I remember that picture best—the woman who did it on herself—a chair tilted down at her abdomen, thrusting up, the distressed look on her face, the pale-colored blouse she wore, the blue skirt. My mother also read parenting books, so she understood how to handle herself at times like these, and she’d known not to hold my brother down or try to stick a spoon in his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue. Instead, she guarded the edge of the bed, so he wouldn’t fall off and let the seizure play out. Only when it passed did she call the doctor.
My mother is full of love. Despite my mood swings and occasional furies, I am, too. I’ve inherited this from her. When Sadie was born, I treated her with the care my mother gave me. I’ve retained memories of that warmth—my mother making sure I had hats and gloves in winter even though I lost them; making sure my lunch was packed and if I forgot it, running it up to school for me. I’d seen my mother with Jane, too. I was twelve when she was born, and my parents doted on her, and I’d watched them dote. I mimic that behavior. I improvise songs for Sadie, as my mother had done for Jane. There’s a bath time song about splashing in the tub and a song for changing diapers with a square dance cadence, and songs for bedtime, gentle lullabies. I sing other songs, real songs, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World.” But I prefer to make them up on the fly.
Whenever she’s sick and needs care, I let her fall asleep on my chest and lie there, resting. I don’t put her in her crib but stay on the couch and doze while she sleeps on top of me. I want to be close to her always. I never want to let her go. I want to fold her into my arms and keep her there, with the heat and warmth of her body, this body that came from my wife’s and my own. I want the sickness to seep out of her and into me. I can take it. My body can fight it off better than hers. But often, it seeps out of her and into me, and we both catch whatever she has. It doesn’t matter. I hold her now in the comfort of my parents’ living room and feel the heat coming off her. Caillou is coming to an end. The tinny flute of the outro sounds, the credits roll. I glance at the clock. Four-thirty. Sadie’s appointment is at five.
“You ready to go,” I ask.
She shakes her head.
I turn to my mom.
“Do you have her lunch bag?”
Sadie has a blue owl lunch bag she brings to school. It’s insulated, made of cloth. It has two white circular patches with black buttons in the middle for eyes, a brown triangular piece of cloth sewn between them for the nose, a white semicircle beneath with red polka dots for the belly. Justine stitched her name above the owl’s eyes, since the brand’s popular and another girl in her room has the same one. We pack it with yogurts and muffins and bananas and strawberries and cream cheese sandwiches, and sometimes we give her pancakes or waffles, which we heat in the mornings and dollop with maple syrup. The loose food—pancakes, muffins, and waffles—are stuffed into Tupperware containers with her name laminated across the lids. We have four plastic cups with lids, two green, two purple, that we rotate.
My mom goes to the kitchen. The Tupperware containers are drying in the dishrack. My mom’s cleaned the containers, and I appreciate this. A few less things to wash when I finish making dinner. We have a dishwasher, but we only run it when it’s full, and I unloaded it last night, which means I’d have had to wash the containers by hand if she hadn’t. I’m planning to make pasta. Justine made a batch of sauce, and we have meal-sized portions stored in containers in our freezer. It’s the easiest meal to make—boiling water, defrosting sauce, dumping a box of pasta, and if Sadie’s hungry, she likes it and I won’t have to make a separate meal for her.
I slump against the doorway in the kitchen, holding Sadie, as my mom snaps the Tupperware lids, fits them in the bag, zips it. She hands the bag to me. My mind’s tired. I hate when my mind gets tired like this. The doctor’s going to ask questions, and I’m not in any mood to answer. I want to be home. I want to get dinner on and sit and let the stress of the day roll off. The hours between four and six are the worst in the day, the hours when I feel drained, the hours I’m most likely to snap. But I hold it in, for Sadie. Not that I would snap at my mom. My mom has come through again.
“Thanks,” I tell her. “Thanks for everything.”
I say this every time I leave their house. And I mean it. Whether it’s my mom or dad or both of them, I mean it. There’s no way of expressing my gratitude. They take care of her, good care. And if Sadie’s sick and I can’t be there, I want them. I pause a moment and look around. “Where’s dad?” I say. I hadn’t thought to ask before. He’s usually home this time of day, but I’ve been so caught up, I hadn’t thought to ask.
“Dentist,” she says.
I laugh.
“I guess it’s that kind of day.”
I hold Sadie in the crook of my right arm, her bag dangling from my hand. There’s something else I want to say. I look around the room. The kitchen’s small. A white stove in the corner next to the back door; a light brown table stacked with all manner of dried goods to my right; to my left, a large refrigerator packed with meats and cheeses, orange juice, milk, produce.
What is it? Something I needed. I turn and head for the door.
“Thanks, again,” I say.
The fridge has long been a source of humor for me and my siblings. The way my mom keeps it stocked. The fridge is new, like the living room furniture, purchased after I left. But she’s always kept it stocked, even when we had a smaller one. We’ve cracked jokes over the years about World War III, our house being a hub. The foodstuffs aren’t only in the kitchen, though, but stacked on shelves beneath the basement stairs—canned goods, jars of pasta sauce, boxes of spaghetti, brown sugar, white sugar, flour, cases of beans. There’s always food in the house.
Then it hits me. I’ve opened the front door but stop. My mother’s followed me into the living room.
“Do you have any twice-baked potatoes left over from Sunday?” I say.