Dance Real Slow (8 page)

Later, Calvin and I eat spaghetti for dinner. I cut his into inch-long pieces, but he complains, saying he hates it that way, refusing even a forkful. So I switch plates, instead giving him tangly, wig-like strands that whip up and slap sauce onto his cheeks. Our glasses are filled red, mine with inexpensive chianti and his with cranberry juice.

“It would be nice if you'd draw a thank-you card for Dr. McLure,” I tell Calvin. “Or you could color him one of the pictures in your animal book.”

“I'm keepin' that book.”

“You can keep it. But maybe we could give one of the pictures to him. Don't you think?”

“No,” he says, adjusting himself on the phone books that allow him to reach the table. Here they are thin, a paucity of names, so he needs three. Two white and a yellow. “ 'Cuz then you'd have to tear it out.”

“Yeah, but, Cal, it's only one page. Didn't you think it was kind of Dr. McLure to help you out—so we didn't have to throw away the man-o-war?”

He does not answer.

“Well, I'm leaving it up to you. But I'm going to be very disappointed if you don't do something for him.”

Still, no response. He cocks his head slightly, to the left. I am annoyed because I really don't think he will do anything for Dr. McLure.

“You know what? I'm going to take this back to him.” I lift the man-o-war jar from the chair between us, raising it like a trophy above my plate of diced spaghetti. Calvin slides down, running to my side, arms pointed stiffly upwards.

“Gimme it.”

“Nope. I'm taking this to Dr. McLure and telling him to pour out all the formaldehyde he gave you. That you didn't appreciate it, anyway.”

Of course, Calvin cannot reach the jar. He tries to climb onto my lap, but I scissor my legs, knocking him away. He becomes frustrated and panicky and starts crying.

“Now you're really not getting it.”

After several more moments of tears, he steps back and then forward again, punching me in the thigh.

“Hey, that did it.” I walk over to the door, Calvin now sprawled out on the kitchen floor, chest heaving. He knocks over a chair and then begins to wail uncontrollably.

“Okay, that's enough.”

Placing the jar on the counter, near the window, I move back to Calvin. He kicks at me, wildly, and I grab his feet, holding them at arm's length.

“Calvin,” I say, slowly, in a stern tone. “Stop.”

He does not. So I yank him to his feet and smack him, solid, on his ass, which, strangely, causes his sobs to halt briefly before he runs from the room, crying even harder.

The dinner dishes cleaned and stored, I sit on our front porch and read the
Tarent Times
, the town's only daily newspaper. Most of the stories are national, taken from the AP or UPI wires. There is a serial killer in California, near Los Angeles, who stabs his victims in the throat with a six-inch ice pick and leaves Coca-Cola bottle caps over the bloody holes, earning him the nickname Coca-Cola killer. Hurricane Felicia is stalled a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida, trembling, preparing, and the United States Weather Service is quite sure she will slam into land, somewhere above Fort Lauderdale, within the next twenty-eight hours. They are hoping by then Felicia's winds will have diminished, pruning her to a tropical storm. Locally, a gooseneck trailer truck carrying several enormous elm trees from Montana jackknifed on Mercer, where it funnels into two lanes. A crew took four hours to lift the cab from its ditch, inching a chain and pulley rig, carefully, deliberately, so as not to snap loose the logs. There is also an announcement, boxed in the lower left corner of the front page, banning leaf burning.

It has turned breezy again and soon it will be winter. Our first full winter in Tarent. Mrs. Grafton is removing laundry from a clothesline she has strung between two
thin poplars. The earth climbs, leaving the sun a smear of wax against the butterscotch stalks of wheat. Mrs. Grafton cannot see me now, it is too dark, too dark even for me to read. I am wearing a T-shirt and my arms are cold, so I cross them on my lap, sandwiching them between my belly and thighs. Calvin is no longer crying, or at least I can no longer hear him. It is very quiet, with only the sound of barn swallows, the light tap of wood against wood as Mrs. Grafton drops her clothespins into piles, and the occasional shush of a passing car.

Inside, I do not see Calvin. I don't want to see him because I am still angry, not only with him, but with myself. For overreacting. And for teasing him with the man-o-war, telling him that I was going to take it back to Dr. McLure. I read some more, in the living room, with a low-hanging floor lamp dispersing jaundiced yellow. After an hour I head upstairs, stopping at Calvin's room before retiring to my own. The only light is from the moon, coming in through the window, and I flip on a hallway switch. Calvin's animal coloring book is creased open near the center of the floor, to a picture of a hippopotamus, partially greened. His crayons and markers are scattered about, the farthest one, a burgundy, at the door. The bed is empty, stripped. I see his quilt, blue with astronauts and space ships, leading from the closet, where Calvin is lying face-down on the floor, sleeping, the quilt wrapped like a serpent about his body. Shoes and clothing rail a twisted pathway to a stuffed panda at his stocking feet. Calvin is making gentle noises, a soft, raspy snore rumbling from deep in his throat.

Because he is my son and because I love him more
than anything else in the world, more than I can imagine loving anyone else, more even than I loved his mother, I crawl in beside, my torso jammed deep into the closet, with my legs stretched over a hooked rug. I wrap my arm around Calvin, gingerly, and soon it tingles and becomes numb, but I do not move, leaving it resting over his tiny body like a wreath. Calvin's eyes flick, his wispy lashes brushing my cheek.

“Cal, how come you're sleeping in here?”

He is tired and answers slowly. “I just wanted to,” he says, remaining still. “That's all.”

Kate's labor was not a long one; it was not as excruciatingly painful as she expected, she told me later. Calvin came early, by almost a month, and I was in Cleveland at the time for my father's four hundredth coaching victory, an early February game against Stanford. The Eastern Ohio athletic department presented him with a plaque and gold watch at half court afterwards. Bruce Cutler, the school's sports information director, had a message on his answering machine saying that my wife's contractions had begun at 7:50 p.m., twenty minutes after tip-off. I received the news at 10:20 and left on a flight soon after, drinking watery Scotch from plastic cups the entire way. By the time I got to the hospital, in Ann Arbor, it was over. Kate was asleep.

She had been tucked in tightly, so only the peaks of her shoulders rose above the line of the blanket. Her round face smooth and bright, the silent mask of a worker. Freshly washed hair, light as split oak, spilled over the pillow, breaking slightly, delicately, as it dumped down on the mattress. I took her hand and lifted
it to my chest and then my mouth, rubbing her fingers between my lips. I told her I was sorry I had not been there and that I loved her very much.

When I first saw Calvin, he was blotchy and red and I asked the duty nurse if he was okay, if he was supposed to be that way. She assured me he was fine, just fine, and I could hold him in the morning if I liked.

The hospital cafeteria was closed, so I sat in the doctors' lounge drinking vending-machine coffee. Kate's parents had not yet been notified. Her friend Denise left it to me. Denise had driven Kate to the hospital, had called Bruce Cutler's machine, had stayed with Kate until just before I arrived. Kate's parents could wait a few more hours, I remember thinking, and then I went back to her room. I climbed into bed beside her, squeezing close, my arms drawn across her chest like they are now against Calvin. The bed was short and narrow and sometime in the early morning I rolled off, cracking my face against the floor. My chin was sliced open, leaving a crescent-shaped flap dangling underneath my jawline. I stood in the bathroom blotting at it with clumps of Kleenex, toilet paper, and then a wet towel. There was blood sprayed over the front of my shirt, speckled and black. Shuffling, I made my way into the hall with a soppy towel clinging like a giant, distorted goatee.

Kate sat in a wheelchair holding my hand while they sewed eight stitches into my chin. She laughed a little and then told me about the delivery, about how easy things had gone. Then the two of us went to see Calvin. I cradled him carefully against my sternum while Kate ran her fingers along his mushy arm, and watched me.
I still had blood dried to my body and cheeks and a clean white bandage, thick with gauze, stuck to my chin.

Twenty-six months later, in our bedroom, I stood watching Kate. She was folding her clothes and stacking them into neat piles on the end of the bed.

“I was too young when we got married, Gordon,” she said. “I still am too young.”

We were married during the spring of Kate's senior year at Michigan, my second year of law school. She had wanted to be married—or to have a wedding, anyway. An event: white and pink and hers alone. And then she wanted a family. But she could close off her emotions with a simple, easy twist, like a faucet. Now it was time to get on with her future—the part that mattered. Calvin and I were baggage she could no longer tote. From us, she had graduated.

She told me she wanted to travel, to see more of the country, of other countries, that her father had offered to finance the trip. She was tired of Ann Arbor, of the people and of the town. She needed to be alone, away for a while, and then maybe things would change. In fact, she said she truly hoped they would change. Last, she volunteered to take Calvin, as someone might volunteer to take a pet, but she was not sure how much time she could spend with him. She believed he would be fine staying with her parents in Dallas. Thank you, I said, calmly, reasonably. He would remain with me.

That Sunday she left, driving the convertible BMW her father had given her after she finished school—weighted heavy with only the things she needed in her new life: skis, Walkman, a snorkel with which to breathe.
She had kissed Calvin goodbye twice, the second time on the stairs, telling him to be a good soldier and to listen to his father.

Earlier, because memories do not always follow a particular order, Kate said we had fallen out of love. I told her I had not, but she only nodded, saying I just didn't realize it yet. Love could be lost quickly, painlessly, and sometimes, she said, without one's knowing it.

Calvin stood in the window and watched her leave, waving his dumb little hand in a fury, as if she was only going on some vacation to see her sister or her aunt. After the car pulled from the driveway, free, she never once looked back, never saw Calvin still erect, his stupid, stupid hand moving faster, in shorter flicks. And I, too, had lost love. Quickly, painlessly, almost without knowing it. Then I took Calvin into the kitchen and fixed him a bowl of Lucky Charms soaked spongy in milk.

It is late and Calvin has turned away, his head resting against a crumpled baseball jacket. Again, the man-o-war is on the windowsill, blazing white in the moonlight, casting pale tiger stripes against Calvin's bed. I kiss him dryly on the ear and then stare up at the compressed row of his clothing hanging like fringe.

Mom lasts another three weeks, until the middle of October, which was much longer than I expected. But the smell has gotten bad again, rank and oniony, and it is time she be given a proper burial. I tried to talk to Calvin about it, but he is indignant and will not listen, plugging up his ears and shaking his head whenever the subject is broached. And so I am parked at the entrance of Tarent's town dump with the man-o-war jar sitting on the seat beside me. The hollow, tinny sound of a hammer striking pipe echoes from somewhere inside the yard's tall, chain-link fence.

Just beyond the car, there is a gate that has been left open, with an enormous chain and padlock, fastened to itself, hanging off to one side. I take the man-o-war by the bottom of its jar, letting the now flimsy coat hanger dangle loose. The man-o-war sloshes about in its murky brine—broken shapeless pieces resembling a thick tangerine gelatin. I'm looking for serenity, a nice, nonthreatening spot where the man-o-war can decompose in
peace. At the near edge of the fence there is a rusted-out car bumper propped between two tires that are worn so deeply, tiny wires have sprouted through their surfaces. Underneath the bumper is a Quaker Oats container, soggy and brown with age. This is where I pour the man-o-war, slowly at first, until wet clumps roll with force, slapping down like dough. As I stand, it becomes difficult to see the man-o-war, some of it vanishing into the Quaker Oats container, while the rest melts into earth.

After dinner last night, while Calvin helped Mrs. Grafton beat the dirt from her rugs using a small baseball bat, Kate called. Although it would have been easy for me to shout out to Calvin, to tell him that his mother was on the phone and he should come inside, I did not. I told Kate that he wasn't feeling well and I had put him to sleep. It was her first call to us, to Calvin, in nearly four months, and I did not want her to get the idea that Calvin would just be here, at the other end of the phone, whenever she felt like calling.

“I'm at my parents' place in Dallas,” she said. “I'm leaving for New York in the morning, but only for a couple days on my way to Bali for three weeks.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Yeah. Hey, do you think he's really asleep? I mean, maybe he's still up or something. I'd really like to talk to him.”

“No, he's definitely asleep. I'm not sure what he's got, a bug or something.”

“Hmm.”

We were silent for a long time, ten seconds or so,
until finally Kate said, “Gordon, kids grow a lot in a year and a half, don't they?”