I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (12 page)

His dietary habits are disgusting. He eats grilled cheese, pepperoni pizza with extra cheese, and Oreo cookies crushed over chocolate ice cream. His skin is clear, his hair is shiny, his eyes are bright. Something he does in the bathroom causes the toilet to clog. This happens so often that he made a sign to warn the next sitter that there’s a problem. DO NOT FLUSH, it says. DO NOT POOP.

Except for the time and energy devoted to mirror gazing and smoothing down his hair—he has some unfortunate cowlicks—the boy’s personal hygiene is tragic. His room smells like boy, which means it smells hormonal. Like burnt metal and overripe fruit, like sweaty socks and Axe body spray. If he is not told to change his sheets, the boy will not change his sheets. If he is not reminded to brush his teeth, he will not brush his teeth. If he is not shamed into showering, he wouldn’t think of showering. It takes telling him he stinks, or that he looks grubby, or saying what are you, a Frenchman?

He’ll say you’re not nice, you’re mean, are you xenophobic, but he’ll take a shower. He’ll be in there for weird amounts of time: either less than two minutes or more than forty-five.

My life was easier when he was little. I liked him best when he was five months old. Before he had speech and mobility. Before he had opinions of his own and beliefs that weren’t mine. I could spread a blanket across the living room floor and put him on it and that’s where he stayed until I picked him up and put him somewhere else.

These days, some of my biggest concerns are with his politics, his vision for the future, who or what he is versus who or what he might become. Sometimes I wonder about him. Some of the things that come out of his mouth give me pause.

The boy says he opposes gun control, for example. Considering his DNA—a father who belongs to the NRA, a grandfather who had me and my prom date pose for pictures in front of the living room gun cabinet—there’s no doubt about it: a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur runs through the boy’s veins. It’s why he believes there should be a law requiring everyone to be armed at all times, even little kids.

“Especially little kids,” he said, “because what if someone tries to kidnap you when you’re walking to school. What do you do then?”

“Well,” I said, “you employ the techniques you learned regarding Stranger Danger. You shout ‘No!’ and ‘I don’t know you!’ and ‘You’re not my daddy!’ while you run away. That’s what you do.”

“Uh, Mr. Stranger?” he said, sounding creepily like Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche DuBois. “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Stranger, sir, but you are not my daddy? I don’t know you? Please don’t touch my private parts, Mr. Stranger, because if you do I will have to shout ‘No’?”

Then he pointed his finger like a gun at some invisible Mr. Stranger’s private parts, squinted one eye, clicked the trigger, blew on it.

“What was that?” I asked him, and “Who are you?”

He said he was a concerned citizen.

Another time he told me he doesn’t like skateboarders because they smoke weed. White people who have dreadlocks are on his list of people he doesn’t like because, he said, they smoke ganja. He said there is only one way to explain people who dress like vampires and those freaky people from the Society for Creative Anachronism who wear capes and swordfight in the park: they’ve been smoking reefer.

But he reserves his deepest animosity for hippies.

“Hippies?” I asked. “How can you hate hippies? Hippies are harmless. That’s how we know they’re hippies. What’s a hippie ever done to you?”

He raised his eyebrows. He snorted. He asked did I think smoking dope was harmless?

I thought it would be best if I kept my mouth shut.

“Have you ever heard of a little thing called ‘Marijuana is a gateway drug’?” he said. He said hippies are high on dope, they’re wasted out of their gourd, and it’s why they’re hula hooping and listening to Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead all the time. He said hippies need to know the answer is soap, not dope. He was smirking, his tone was smug, self-satisfied.

When I wondered out loud if it was hypocritical for a boy with hygiene such as his to even have an opinion about the bathing habits of hippies, he asked did I want him to be a doper, and jeez, he showers when he’s dirty, which is why he doesn’t go outside, so he doesn’t get dirty, and besides, what about global warming? Shouldn’t we be trying to conserve our freshwater resources?

Then there’s the day the boy arrived home from school and immediately wanted to know would I make him a grilled cheese sandwich. When I asked how was your day, he revealed his plan to live in a house that has a hot tub, central air, and wall-to-wall carpeting. He said he hated National Public Radio and its supporters, and when he got his license, there would be no more NPR in the car.

He talked and talked. He said he hated Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, but he loved cash money, Donald Trump, high-stakes poker, and the gigantic tub of cheese curls you can only buy at Sam’s Club. He said someday he was going to have a Lamborghini, he was going to have a Viper, he was going to have a Jaguar, he was going to have a Porsche, could he have another grilled cheese sandwich? He talked so much, so fast, and he seemed so chatty and hungry, that I thought maybe he’d encountered some hippies on the way home, maybe they held him down and blew pot smoke in his face, maybe the boy was stoned.

He wasn’t. It had been Career Day at school, and that’s what got him riled up: the future. His future. He was excited about his future. After listening to some of the speakers—an investment banker; a certified public accountant; Jacob’s dad, who owns a Saturn dealership—he decided that when he goes to college he will major in business, he will specialize in purchasing and acquisitions, he will make a buttload of money, and it was all I could do to keep from putting down my foot and dashing his dreams and telling him over my dead body you’re going into purchasing and acquisitions.

“You’re just a child,” I said. “How do you even know about purchasing and acquisitions? Who have you been talking to?”

I thought maybe he’d been talking to his grandfather, that my father had gotten to him somehow. Or else Nancy Reagan and that this-is-your-brain-on-drugs public service announcement. Or my brother the cop. Or that maybe the boy had fallen asleep with Fox Television on in the background, and while he was sleeping, certain unpleasant ideologies threw down anchor in his subconscious.

“So does this mean you’re a Republican?” I said. “Over my dead body. Not as long as you live in my house.”

The boy wondered out loud if it was hypocritical when a Democrat makes her son into a political prisoner. “You’re mean,” he said.

“And another thing,” I told him. “I won’t pay for you to be a business major. Not one dime.”

The boy said he was going to report me to Amnesty International.

 

 

 

 

 

After another late night of Halo at Louis’s house, the boy came home shortly after two o’clock this afternoon. He seemed agitated, excited, distressed. He was out of breath and bare-foot. There was a long scratch on his face, and there were smaller ones on his arms and legs and ankles. “Where are your shoes?” I asked him. “What happened to you?”

He held up his sock. He pointed at a small dark spot. “That’s blood,” he told me.
“Blood.”

“What happened?” I asked again.

“The cat,” he said. “Louis’s cat.”

Only half an hour before, Louis was still asleep, but the boy was awake, and he was bored, and he didn’t know where Louis’s mom was, so he figured he’d get his stuff together and walk home. He was in the process of packing up his Xbox 360 when Louis’s cat came flying out of nowhere. Louis’s cat landed on him, hooked its claws into him, his arm, his leg, his foot, his face. The claws were like razors. Louis’s cat hissed and snarled, and after the boy wrestled it off of him, he flung it across the room. He ran but he went the wrong way, he couldn’t find the door to get out of the house. Louis’s cat was chasing him, and it got him, it backed him into a corner, hissing all the while in a very intimidating and upsetting way. The boy didn’t know what to do. He yelled for Louis, but that guy can sleep through anything, and he didn’t want to kick Louis’s cat because it was little, and it’s a cute little cat when it’s not attacking people, and besides, kicking it would be cruelty to animals, and he’d already thrown it across the room once, which he felt really bad about. The boy hates when people are cruel to animals.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said.

That’s when Louis’s other cat pounced on Louis’s vicious cat. Both cats were howling and snarling and hissing, and Louis even slept through that racket. But the boy recognized this as his one chance to escape, and he took it. He fled out the back door and didn’t stop running until he got home.

“My shoes are back at Louis’s house,” the boy was saying. “I left my Xbox 360 back there, too.” He was still a little breathless. “What?” he said. “What? Why are you looking at me and smiling? Don’t look at me.”

I denied that I was looking at him.

“Stop looking at me!” he said. “Why are you looking at me and laughing?”

“I’m not laughing!”

“You’re laughing at me!” he shouted.

The boy stomped off to his room, he slammed the door, and normally, I wouldn’t put up with the shouting, the stomping, or the slamming. But I felt bad. Because I had been smiling, and I did laugh, and I know that an unempathetic mother has been the downfall of many a man who might have otherwise been great. I knocked on his door and told him I really love that Hopalong Cassidy shot glass he gave me. Did he want to see me do a shot?

He said no.

I felt even worse.

 

 

 

 

 

My thirteen years of parenting this boy can be summed up in three sentiments:

I’m sorry, I could tell him. I’m sorry I laughed at you, and I’m sorry you don’t live in the house where all the kids in the block like to hang out. I’m just not that kind of mother, and usually, I’m not sorry about it, but sometimes I am. I’m sorry I didn’t serve you a wider variety of foods, because if I had maybe you’d eat something other than grilled cheese and pizza. But I’m especially sorry about the summer of 1996. Sometimes I wonder if that’s where things went wrong.

That summer I was pretty depressed. My marriage to the boy’s father was scabby and scaly and covered with warts; I was broke and unemployed and unhappily living in a state that bordered Utah. Getting out of bed and staying out was an achievement that warranted Oreo cookies. But there came a time when Oreo cookies were no longer an incentive. I was twenty-five years old; the boy was four.

Each morning when I got up, I poured the boy a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of milk, and I turned on his cartoons for him to watch. Then I went back to bed so I could wallow in my misery in comfort. At noon, I got up, fixed the boy a turkey sandwich and another glass of milk, and because I knew I really needed to spend some quality time with my son, I watched his cartoons with him until I dozed off on the couch. At four o’clock, I woke up for
The Oprah Winfrey Show
; at five, I heated up some fish sticks for dinner. If he’d been good, I allowed the boy to drink one can of Pepsi. After seven, when long-distance rates were cheaper, I called everyone I knew who might be sympathetic to my misery. It was not a long list.

Over time, however, as that list grew even shorter, I started spending more and more time in AOL chat rooms. Those chat rooms must’ve cost fifty bucks a minute because they added thousands of dollars to my Discover card bill. I once found myself in one chat room where, weirdly enough, all the men were named Dom, every single one of them. Dom Jacob. Dom Wilson. Dom Tyrel. Having grown up around a lot of Italians, I understood “Dom” was short for “Dominick,” and when I tried to initiate chat room conversations with these many Doms, they seemed irritated.

You’re a pushy little wench
, one Dom typed.
I think you need a spanking.

Another Dom told me to shut up, he didn’t give me permission to speak, and when I said look, buddy,
I
don’t remember giving
you
permission to speak, either, so why don’t
you
shut up, he said I didn’t have the personality of a submissive, he was reporting me to the moderator, and I was banned from the Story of O chat room forever.

One morning, after I’d been up all night in a chat room devoted to people who were professional vampires—
What do you mean, “professional”?
I kept asking.
Do you mean I could hire you to bite someone’s neck? Do you charge extra to break the skin?
—I rose from bed to pour the boy’s Cheerios. Maybe I was still half asleep—I couldn’t have been awake, at least not entirely—because I saw the boy standing in front of the television, sucking his thumb and staring up at a face on the screen. The face was a blue rectangle, with black dots for eyes, and a black line for a mouth. It took up the entire TV screen. The face was talking to my son, its mouth opening and closing, its black dot eyes blinking.
Tell her you need to go outside and play,
the Television Face was saying.
Tell her to take you outside to play.

It’s embarrassing that my vision was not God or an angel or a saint, it wasn’t even brought on by magic mushrooms or serious psychosis. It was my own guilty conscience delivering me a life lesson through the medium I understood the best: TV. I obeyed the message I received from the Television Face. “Get your shoes on,” I told the boy. “I am taking you to the park.”

You’d think he would have been happy, but the boy didn’t seem happy.

It was too hot to go outside, he said. It was too hot to walk. He didn’t like going to the park. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay home. He wanted to watch cartoons.