9780805071146

Chapter One

"Sesame."

"Buckle your high chair first."

"Sesame."

"It's coming on right now. See? They're thanking viewers like you, so just buckle."

"Cheerios."

"I've got 'em. Can I buckle you?"

"No!"

"Then you buckle."

"I buckle."

"Good. Great. Good job. Here's your breakfast."

"Potty."

Ben's shoulders slumped. Negotiating with Molly was as taxing as dealing with his suppliers and customers. More taxing, actually. Adult rules remained constant, but Molly's changed from week to week.

He slid the high-chair tray out, squeezed open the plastic buckle, and lifted his daughter out. In the kitchen, he pulled down her pajama bottoms and eased her onto the blue-and-white potty stool. She immediately produced great quantities of fluid. This moment was still a miracle to him, for she was only a month out of diapers. The transition had been sloppy, and just when he and Susan were concluding that they had rushed her, Molly turned a corner and entered the sunny valley of sphincter control. It had gone faster than he remembered for his other daughters, insofar as he could remember anything about their early development. Molly didn't even wear a diaper at night now. In the crib, her unconscious would scream at her for ten hours to hold it! Then, on rising, she might dawdle for an hour before saluting the new day. She, at two and a half, had a stronger bladder than he, at forty-four.

"Wipe in front," Ben said.

She took the toilet paper he had given her and pressed it against the side of one buttock. "Here?"

"No. Wipe in front."

She switched hands and pressed the paper against her other buttock. "Here?"

"No. In front."

Back to the first buttock. "Here?" This was her great dawn comic routine.

"Shall I do it?"

She immediately wiped in front, rose, and pulled up her pajama bottoms. Ben put her back in the high chair and stood in her line of sight to the TV. She buckled. He gave her a fresh helping of cereal, then rinsed out her potty bowl in the toilet.

Now, with luck, he could eat his breakfast and read the paper. He grabbed a box of Just Right from the pantry shelf. From the feel of it, there was enough for only one serving. He put it back and searched the shelves, rejecting the several boxes of Chex cereals because Ralston was too big in town already. He finally settled down at the table with a bowlful of Shredded Wheat. After two bites he looked down. It had been years since he had eaten Shredded Wheat. It was like chewing a bird's nest. He imagined tiny beaks poking up from it. Who invented this stuff? How in the hell had it been a success?

Karen, their fourth-grader, came into the kitchen, dropped her backpack on the floor, put an English muffin into the toaster, and asked where the funnies were. By this time, Ben was deep in an "Ask the Doctor" column, trying to determine if the tendonitis described there was what shot through his right elbow every time he picked Molly up. The funnies were in the section of the paper he was reading, but he gave it to Karen and told himself he would return to the column later.

"Can we get a bunny?" she asked.

"No."

"I'd take care of it."

"You have a hamster."

"Yeah, and I take good care of him. I'd take good care of the bunny, too."

"No."

In his experience, no one could take care of a bunny. They were effluent machines. He remembered how Andrea's bunny had nipped his knuckles whenever he changed the soggy newspaper in its cage. He remembered the sound of the pellets dropping onto the fresh paper before he was halfway up the basement stairs.

Karen abandoned the subject, mainly because Pam, rounding the corner from the bottom of the stairs, tripped over her backpack and snapped at her. Molly, drawn to all discord, shouted nonsense from the den.

"Every morning," Pam complained. "Every morning I trip over that butt-ugly backpack."

"So you should have learned by now," Karen said coolly. She took a dainty bite of her English muffin.

Pam poured Just Right into a bowl and left the empty box on the counter instead of throwing it away. She sat down across from her father. When she saw that Karen had the funnies, she writhed in protest. "Every time," she said. Without looking at her father, she said, "Can I sleep over at Jennifer's tonight?"

Ben couldn't think of a good reason to say no. "What else do you have planned?"

"Why?" Pam snapped. "Don't you trust me?"

Karen made a noise in her throat that could have been caused by a fragment of muffin. Pam ignored it.

"Just remember the new rules," Ben said.

"Yeah, yeah."

Pam and her tight circle of five eighth-grade friends had lately redefined "sleepover" in bold new terms--so bold that the parents of the circle had had to meet on a recent Saturday morning to establish rules. Ben was the only man there. After too many cups of coffee and far too many anecdotes from the women about their own teen years, they hammered out this code: one sleepover per weekend, on Fridays only (Saturday sleepovers left the kids still groggy on Monday); no getting into a car unless a parent was the driver; no staying out past midnight; no sneaking out of the house after curfew and roaming from one end of Aberdeen to the other; and no male visitors dropping in through basement windows or old coal chutes.

For every stipulation there had been a violation, each catching Ben slack-jawed. His innocence had confounded him. Shouldn't he, with an older daughter--a senior, now coming quietly into the kitchen--have known this was possible? But Andrea had never had sleepovers patterned after Mardi Gras. She had never mixed Scotch and grape Kool-Aid over the laundry room sink. She had never run wild with older boys late at night on the grounds of Concordia Seminary. Instead, Ben remembered quiet visits by demure friends, one or two at a time, with a few giggles and, at worst, spilled hot chocolate. Andrea had long black hair and a narrow, almost gaunt face. He watched her taking her large vitamins and wished she smiled more.

Molly shouted in the den, but she was just interacting with the TV, well ahead of the new entertainment curve. Andrea joined them at the table, and Karen looked up from the funnies.

"What was your bunny's name?" she said.

"Alfred."

"What happened to him?"

"Dad made me give him to a day-care center." Andrea reached for the front section of the paper and gave him a look.

The truth was worse than she knew. Alfred had died in transit. Ben's surprise had been monumental as he had opened the van gate and beheld the bunny, immobile, lying on his side on fresh newspaper he had managed to soil on this, his ultimate journey. Andrea was sitting in the front seat. She was in seventh grade at the time and had agreed to the donation without much of a battle. Biting his lip, Ben asked her if she had said good-bye. She said yes, but she said it again, over her shoulder. "Good-bye, Alfred." She could see only the top of the cage. Ben scooped the cage up, shielding the corpse from her view with his body, and took it to the entrance, luckily situated around the corner of the cinderblock building. Here he faced a new challenge. The day-care center was open, the eager kiddies inside. He could hardly go forward with the transfer of ownership he had so carefully set up. He kept walking to the rear of the building, where, with a "Good night, sweet prince," he heaved the entire load into an open Dumpster. He lurked there for an appropriate interval, then returned to the van with a full report on the apple-cheeked joy of the youngsters.

He looked across the table at Andrea. She had checked out, as she often did. Her face was flooded with emotion from a private world. He felt a shock of worry for the way she was turning out. The odd thing was, he didn't know how she was turning out.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked, determined to get to the bottom of her.

Her face cleared. "I smelled ammonia when I walked by a chem class yesterday. It made me sad and I couldn't figure out why. Now I know. It reminded me of Alfred--the ammonia in his pee." She looked closely at her father. "Hey, I agreed to give him away. I wasn't enjoying him anymore. All he did was scratch me."

Ben managed a smile. "How are the essays coming?"

Andrea shrugged. "I'm done with Amherst's. Mrs. Sloak is looking at my Swarthmore one. That leaves five. One of them is a bunch of large theories about life that we have to deal with. I hate that. The one for Bryn Mawr has to be about some woman I admire--someone I know."

"Do Roberta," Pam mumbled over her cereal. Karen laughed. Ben gave them his frowning smile--his standard expression for the many occasions when they were bad but funny. Roberta was yet another female in Ben's life--his secretary, as painfully loyal as she was excruciatingly asexual. She had been with him from the beginning, from the day eighteen years ago when he had surveyed the St. Louis economy and declared, "What this metropolitan area needs is a nut dealer." Roberta had just begun a promising career in the lower rungs of middle management at Southwestern Bell when she dropped into Ben's lap, an orientation destined to remain figurative for two reasons: Ben's nearly unblemished loyalty to Susan and, sufficient all by itself, Roberta's personality, which Andrea once labeled "extraterrestrial."

When he hired Roberta, Ben was less nervous about her social skills than he was about her aspirations. Why was she willing to shift down to an executive secretary position? As it turned out, she proved to be perfect, an under-salaried partner in essence. He tried to make up the monetary inequity with bonuses and surprise vacations (she traveled abroad frequently with a female cousin living in Indianapolis), and also more personally, with frequent invitations to join the family for dinner, where her behavior provoked deep wonder. Roberta's speech was blandly polite, becoming peppy only when she produced folksy cliches that gave Ben the feeling she was much older than he, when in fact she was younger. ("Dancing in the hog trough" was one of her favorites; Ben had no idea what it meant.) And Roberta responded to speech with an unnatural delay. Ben had watched each of his children be frustrated by this quirk into puzzled silence, and he had explained it to them afterward, so that they wouldn't blame themselves.

"So," Ben said, "sounds like seven applications now."

"Yeah," said Andrea. "Another fee. Sorry."

"That's all right. What school have you added?"

"Williams. I'm obsessed with New England lately. Probably because of the play."

Ben nodded, though his understanding was imperfect. Andrea was directing a student production of Our Town, scheduled for an early December performance. He had thought it was set in Kansas.

Karen looked up from the funnies with a peaceful smile. "I love Calvin," she said. Andrea gave Ben a small smile, a parent's smile, as if they were both raising her.

Pam shoved her chair back, gathered some of her dishes, and carried them to the sink. She went to the drawer where Ben kept his wallet. "I need twenty dollars," she said--not to him, but to the world in which she was forced to dwell.

"Ooh," said Karen. "That reminds me. I need a check. Picture day."

"It's on the counter," said Ben. "It's stapled to the form." He looked at Pam. "What's the twenty dollars for?"

"Jennifer's birthday."

"I can't contribute twenty dollars for all your friends on their birthdays. I just can't."

"It's not for all my friends. I never said it was for all my friends. I said it was for Jennifer."

"I'm good for ten." This seemed both overgenerous and stingy to him.

Pam snatched a bill angrily from his wallet. "All you've got is twenties. I'll owe you." She slammed the drawer closed. "Where's my brown sweater?"

Andrea said, "Mom brought some cleaning home yesterday. It's in the hall closet."

Pam left the kitchen and began thrashing in the nearby closet. Then she stomped up the stairs. Ben expected to hear the jet-engine roar of her hair dryer next. Instead, her shoes clomped on the bare wooden steps going up to the third floor study. Susan was about to be interrupted.

Susan wrote books for children. She had published one book five years earlier--a "young adult" novel for readers twelve and up, but not too far up. It was a strikingly quiet event--two or three reviews, small sales, and no apparent impact on the youth of today. Since then she had written two rejected manuscripts for that same age group. Her failure, which she acknowledged more openly than Ben ever would have, had led to some changes in her writing.

First, her current manuscript, whose subject she kept secret from Ben so that he could be surprised when he read it (he had a secret too: he was growing increasingly nervous about reading it), would be for younger children, kids from eight to twelve. Second, she had studied several books about writing, and one of these effectively removed her from the breakfast table. The book recommended that the writer go directly from bed to desk because the writer freshly released from sleep was a pure writer, uncorrupted by humdrum reality--high-chair buckles, bunny grudges, and the like. When Susan summarized the theory for Ben and said she would like to try it, he agreed.

The regimen was about four months old now. Susan would slip out of bed every morning at five-thirty, go right to her study, and emerge three hours later wearing the dreamy smile of postcoitus. As for Ben, he looked back wistfully on the eighteen-year era when Susan rose ahead of him and did almost all of the morning labor. And he couldn't help envying her for having work that was free of economic pressure. He bore sole financial responsibility for six people. He knew he wasn't alone in the world in this regard, but sometimes, as a pure idea, it floored him.

In the den, Sesame Street's Eastern European enumerator was going at it. Molly yelled "Count!" Karen, hunched over the funnies, imitated the count's peculiar laugh.

Pam clomped back down the stairs and stormed the closet again. "Oh, excellent!" she yelled. "Excellent!" Ben quietly noted the wisdom of Susan's shift from writing books for and about people like Pam to writing books for and about people like Karen.

Andrea stood up and took her dishes to the sink, then went to his wallet drawer. "You've got two fives here. Can I take them for held hockey snacks?"

"Sure," said Ben. So Pam had lied. He would take it up with her later. As Andrea returned his thinning wallet to the drawer, he had a sudden fancy that his pockets were full of little birds, constantly flying out with a noisy flurry. Each flight made him flinch. But he would pat his pockets and think, "There are plenty of birds left."

"Ten minutes," Andrea announced. Karen automatically rose, reading the funnies, and continued to read them as she headed up the stairs. Ben would have to learn about his possible tendonitis later. Andrea put all the dishes in the dishwasher and wiped the counter clean. In the hall, she said to Pam, "Train leaves in ten minutes," to which Pam replied, "That's such a Dad sentence. What are you, an old man?"

Ben went into the den to check on Molly. She was watching an old Kermit the Frog sketch. Sesame Street these days was a mix of old and new skits. A rap song with quick cuts might be followed by a gentle narrative he had watched with Andrea fifteen years earlier--like this one, in which Kermit was interviewing Jack of Jack and Jill.

Ben wanted to call out to Andrea to see if she remembered the skit. It might bring a rare smile to her face. He would ask Karen, too, and he might even ask Pam, just to see if she was capable of speech that didn't flame from her mouth. But the girls were in a hurry. He heard their footsteps in the front hall, two of the three called out good-bye to him and Molly, the front door closed, and they were off to their three separate schools. In the sudden quiet, the house seemed to settle a bit.

Molly was almost done with her cereal, so Ben stood up to make her some toast. One of her rules was one course at a time on her tray. He was itching to get to work. He listened at the bottom of the stairs for a sign that Susan might be wrapping it up. As second best, he grabbed the wall phone and punched the buttons that would take him to his voice mail. Roberta often left messages there on the days he left work before she did, as he had done yesterday. There was one brief message about a cable from India.

Ben smiled. The cable would be from Nathan Ravindranathan, cashew processor par excellence. Ben had gotten his name from the International Tree-Nut Dealers Directory and had sent him three identical letters, figuring at least one would reach him despite India's notorious mail system. The cable was a good sign. A bit old-fashioned, but Ben was used to that in his dealings with third-world suppliers. Ben was on a quest for a cheap cashew, inspired by the comparative bulk prices in the local supermarket: cashews, $5.99 per pound; peanuts, $2.39 per pound. Between those extremes was a land waiting for him to plant his flag. People loved cashews. The kidney-shaped nuggets were like a drug. Ben believed with strange certainty that some untried route existed, some undiscovered passage that would bring a cost-effective, quality cashew to America. The route would begin on the Indian subcontinent, perhaps with Nathan Ravindranathan.

He spied Karen's picture-day check and form, forgotten on the counter. He would drop them off on his way to work. He didn't mind. Karen might see him in the hall, and she would say, "Hey, Dad, what's up? It's weird seeing you here." As he imagined this, he realized with a pang of loss that he was basing the little drama on an actual moment with Pam in grade school. If he showed up in Pam's middle school now, she would spit on the floor.

Susan came down the stairs and into the kitchen.

"Pam interrupt you?"

"No," she said spacily. Her eyes hadn't yet come to rest on anything. "I mean yes, but I was done. I had a good morning."

"Good."

"I moved some stuff from one chapter to another, and then I took part of what I moved and moved it back to its original chapter."

"Uh-huh."

"It changed everything."

"Good."

Susan stared out the window over the sink. These comments were typical of her daily report. Ben had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

"Roberta won't be here for dinner," he said.

Those words brought Susan back into the world. "What is that, the third turndown? Does she have a life all of a sudden?"

"I hope not," said Ben. "I like her the way she is."

Susan smiled vaguely. "I need to take a shower. Ten more minutes?"

Ben agreed, though Susan's "ten" meant twenty. He remembered why he had come into the kitchen and put a slice of bread in the toaster. When it popped out with a clatter, Molly automatically yelled, "Toast!"

"That's right."

"Toast!"

"Coming at you."

As he lightly buttered the slice, Ben thought of the picture book he had read to Molly the night before. To her surprise, he had read it twice, but the second time was really for himself. In it a kind-faced farmer dressed in overalls rocked his baby to sleep on the front porch. (The farmer's wife was already asleep upstairs.) Once the baby had fallen asleep, the farmer held his dog in his arms and rocked it. Then he rocked his hen, his sheep, and his pig. With farm equipment he rocked his cow and his horse. He rocked the whole farm to sleep. He worked hard, this farmer, tending every creature.

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The Error of Our Ways

0805071148

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