Harmony (9 page)

“So why are you here, Josh?” Scott asks, after a long, quiet minute.

My dad watches him but doesn't answer. He's still annoyed.

“Because your wife talked you into it? Or because I'm some kind of mind-control genius, and I robbed you of your free will? Or are you here because you want to be here?”

“Obviously,” my dad says, “I'm here because I want to be here. But I don't think I ever agreed to relinquish all my personal property, for the good of the collective.”

“How about working together to create a new community? Did you agree to that?”

My dad shakes his head. “This just feels like a power grab.
You're in charge, and you're going to prove it by taking away our car keys, so we have to—”

“Oh, come on. You're acting like I'm just here—”

“. . . ask for permission before we can drive our own goddamn cars.”

“. . . to take advantage of you, and you don't—”

“We've given up a hell of a lot to be here, and—”

“. . . watch me like a hawk at every turn—”

Their voices have been getting steadily louder, and now they're pretty much yelling. For the past minute or two, Hayden's been making these little groaning noises, hitting the floor with his hands, and now he starts straight-up screaming.

I'm closest to him, so I sink down onto the floor and reach out toward him, without actually touching him, because I don't know if that'd freak him out more. “Hey, there,” I say softly. I don't know what'll calm him down; I don't have that little flashlight with me today. He puts his hands onto his head and starts pulling on his own hair, so I take hold of his hand and try gently to pull it away.

But then Tom is there, and Hayden reaches up his arms for him.

“Thanks, Iris,” says Tom, as he picks him up. He just holds on to him for a minute, jiggling him up and down, and then he walks toward the door. “Guys,” he says, turning his head toward my dad and Scott. “You're acting like kids. Pull it together.”

I listen to Hayden's yell getting softer as they walk through the dining room and out the screen door. I watch them walk past the kitchen window, on their way back to the cabins. Tom's holding Hayden against his chest like a baby, rocking him from side to side as they walk.

My dad and Scott are still standing where they were, sort of frozen in place, but I think the thing with Hayden took the wind out of their sails.

Finally, my dad takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “Hey,
look,” he says. “I'm sorry. I was sort of making a joke, but . . .” He shrugs. “Yeah, it was inappropriate. I'm sorry, man.”

Scott nods. “Yeah, I'm sorry, too.” He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Okay, here's my thinking about the car thing. There are going to be times when someone needs to take one of the vehicles, and the owner of said vehicle might not be easily available. You know, we're out in the woods, and we're walking around without cell phones. I just thought it would be simpler—and safer—if we made sure that the cars were available to any adult who might need them.”

“Yeah,” says my dad. “I get it. That's fine. It makes a lot of sense.”

“Good,” says Scott. “Look, this is hard, this whole thing, and we knew it would be. We're all out of our element. But . . . you know. It's not going to work unless we trust each other. Right? I've gotta be able to look at you and say, ‘I trust this guy with my life.' And I don't know if I'm there yet, either, but I'm working on it.”

“Yeah,” says Dad. “You know what, though? I can do you one better. Never mind about trusting you with my life . . .” He picks up the platter of French toast, and starts walking toward the dining room. As he walks past me, he swoops down and kisses me on top of my head, then sends a smile to Scott over his shoulder. “It's more than that, dude. I trust you with my kids.”

As he walks out to the serving table, I'm right there next to him. My dad with the French toast, and me with the maple syrup.

Sometimes, it seems, you and Josh make dates so you can fight. Not consciously; it's not like you decide to put on makeup and weather the children's complaints about having a babysitter (whose presence will cost you eighteen dollars each hour you're out, in addition to any other expenses you may accrue during the evening), so that you can sit in a restaurant and try not to cry. But more often than not, that's the way it turns out.

It makes sense; there aren't a lot of other times when the two of you get to talk, without being interrupted. You've forgotten the layout of the field, maybe, the map of where the land mines are. Or you've been carrying something heavy without even realizing it, waiting for the moment of relief when you can simply drop it on his head.

Tonight, you're at a bar in a neighborhood far from your own; it's a fairly crappy area that's supposed to be moving up: not the next hip place to be, but maybe the one after that, or at least that's what one of you read somewhere. You came because there was a noodle place you wanted to try, two doors down from where you are now, but you ended up leaving because there was an hour wait
and nowhere to sit down. You feel tired and old. It's just before Halloween, and all of the staff are dressed in costume. Your waitress has impressive cleavage and a bloody third eye on her forehead. It's hard to know where to look.

You're on the downhill side of the fight now, though you're still pissed off, and it would be easy to bring it back to life. “About” is a deceptive word when it comes to marital arguments, but it's probably fair to say that this one was about money, or perhaps about lack of communication about money. He's the one who has more of a sense of the big financial picture—how much money you have, and how long it will last, and how much more you need—but you're the one who takes care of paying the bills and handling the everyday expenses, and this lack of coordination sometimes leads to conflicts. Like tonight, when you passed him a handful of cash and an ATM receipt, and he was surprised to see how low the checking account balance had gotten.

Money is nobody's favorite topic these days. Tilly has just started at a new school: private, special-ed, and very, very expensive. And the question of who's going to pay for it is still up in the air.

The language of the law is important here; that's the key to getting the city to pay her tuition, fingers crossed. Every child is entitled to a “free and appropriate” education, and if the local public school system can't provide a classroom that makes sense for Tilly, then they have to arrange for her to attend a school that does. Even if that means paying full tuition at a private institution.

They don't make it easy, though. You've hired a lawyer and an educational consultant, and you've shown up for all of the required meetings, which manage, somehow, to be both boring and emotionally fraught. You're prepared to go to court to fight, though you're hoping it won't go that far. And you understand the opposing side of it, really you do; it sounds outrageous, on the face of it. But you're so tired of the way that it's set up to make you feel like you're trying to
pull a scam. As if all of
this
—having your child observed and evaluated, finding experts who can testify to all the ways your child isn't normal and can't just go to the school down the street, like everyone else—was something you'd been planning since she was born.

I don't actually want this
, you'd like to say.
Nobody actually wants this.
You look at them across the table, these tired, skeptical women who work for the city (who are certainly decent people, fundamentally, and who probably never thought their jobs would entail denying therapeutic services to children who need them), and imagine telling them,
This is a last resort—you know that, right?
You imagine cutting through the bullshit and just saying out loud what all of you know:
You don't want to pay for my kid to go to a special-ed school? Well, too bad for both of us. It wasn't our first choice, either.

But that's not the way it's done. And until the matter is settled, one way or another, you and Josh are responsible for paying the tuition, with all its built-in services. It's not cheap; you've had to remortgage your house and dip into your retirement savings. But the school itself is a lovely place. They
like
Tilly, which is a refreshing change; more than that, they seem to
get
her. There's a whole team of people working together to help her make her way through the battlefield of fifth grade. And when things don't go smoothly, they know how to handle it. You can—
finally, finall
y—leave your daughter at school in the morning and be reasonably certain that if you get a call at 10 a.m., it'll be because Tilly has a sore throat or forgot her lunch, not because she had a meltdown
again
and the teachers are even closer to the ends of their ropes than you are.

The waitress drops off your drinks, and you smile at her forehead. There's a big screen showing '80s videos, probably ironically, but you don't care. It's good music. You're watching the video for “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung, and it's totally ridiculous—there's a disco ball and a snake, and the lead singer is wearing something that
wouldn't look out of place on your grandmother in Boca—but it's also your life, your past. For a minute, you have the ability to be in two places at once: you're forty and pissed at your husband and too old to be in this bar, but you're also twelve and sitting in your childhood living room, watching MTV like you're going to be tested on it. Like it might actually teach you something. You're practically taking notes. The way they're dancing, the way the women have applied their lipstick: this is one way a life can be. In a few minutes, Van Halen or Cyndi Lauper will show you another way, and you'll see what you think of that one.

“Take your baby by the wrist,” the guy sings, and then, without warning, the screen goes black. Whoever's in charge—someone younger than you, certainly—has had enough.

“Hey,” you complain. “I was enjoying that.” And that's something, you saying that. The words cost you a little something. Your voice is still faintly acid, but you're including Josh in what you're thinking. You're willing to let him move back into your orbit. He shrugs, without meeting your eyes; it's kind of half a gesture.

After a minute, the music jerks to life again on the screen, and now it's Bryan Adams's “Summer of '69.” You look at Josh, smiling without quite meaning to, and you know exactly what he's going to say. “Well,” you begin, and you wait for him to catch up. You speak together: “Mr. Bryan Adams, you got no complaints.” And you're laughing helplessly, both of you together, because it's funny, and because the fight has to end sometime, and because you've been together for more than half your lives.

It's from
Fargo
, the line you just quoted; Steve Buscemi says it, and the actual line is “José Feliciano, you got no complaints.” (No telling how you both misremembered the “mister” part, because you've checked on YouTube and it's not there.) But it's also not from
Fargo
; it also belongs to the two of you. It's part of your pop-culture patois, the rag rug of song lyrics and catchphrases and
Simpsons
references that you've laid out together to stand on. It's a type of shorthand, a way of marking up the map. Whatever's happening right now? It isn't new. We've seen it before, and we'll most likely see it again.

Someday, you imagine, when Josh is dead and the kids are elsewhere and you're living in some old-age home, the staff will talk about you, the crazy woman with all the non sequiturs. No one who's young at that time will know any of the references; they'll think you're making it all up as you go along. You'll be entertaining, at least. You'll tell the woman who brushes the knots out of your hair that you're not going to pay a lot for this muffler. You'll tell the man who helps you from bed to wheelchair and back again that it's time to make the donuts. There will be no one there to understand you, to catch your eye and speak the well-frayed words along with you. “I'm all lost in the supermarket” might mean “Thank you” or it might mean “I don't understand how I got here.” “My name is Inigo Montoya” might mean “My legs hurt” or “Please, can I hear some music?” or “Pay attention: it happens faster than you think.”

There's a story you used to tell, a funny little anecdote from your courtship: one night, when you and Josh had been dating for about three years, you went out to dinner together. You'd been talking about marriage; you both knew it was an inevitability, but you'd made it clear that you wanted there to be some kind of proposal. (You ruined it, basically; that's your take on it now. You were impatient and you cajoled and you gave him no freedom to take his time and plan something on his own. But that's a different story.)

Anyway, you'd gone out to dinner, and there was a period of comfortable silence after you ordered. During that time, you created a little fantasy that this was going to be
it
, that he was going to pull a ring out of his pocket and say something sweet to you. You were ready; you sat up straighter, you ran a hand through your hair. You imagined all the phone calls you'd be making later, all the people
you'd need to tell. And then, when Josh finally opened his mouth, what he said was: “I think I might be allergic to dust.”

Hilarious, you thought later: a Dave Barry column brought to life, illustrating the way that men's brains work differently from women's. But here's the thing: it turned out that he actually
was
allergic to dust, and he coughed every morning for the next eleven years, until you bought a foam mattress. The conversation in the restaurant was a marriage moment, not a proposal moment. And you were still too young and untested to recognize the difference.

You know this by now, right? Life is never what you expect it to be. Sex has more to do with salt than with sweetness. The sky is white as often as it's blue.

“Fried pickles,” Josh says, looking at the menu. “Is that good, do you think?” His voice is carefully casual, and you take the question for what it is: a promise, a tiny gift. A hand reaching out, an offer of a small-but-tangible happiness that the two of you can share.

You have an answer immediately, as easy as “Mr. Bryan Adams,” but this one is yours alone. “What's life without risk?” you ask. It's the first part of a call-and-response that dates back to your college days.

He's ready with the next part: “How bad could it be?”

And you bring it home: “You've gotta do
something
.”

This is the man you married: for the first two months that Tilly was at her new school, Josh worked every night to create a “mystery dessert” to put in her lunch. Tilly would give him vague yet terribly specific instructions—“something with green apple frosting” was one—and he'd figure the rest out from there. At least two or three times a week, he'd end up going out to the supermarket at ten o'clock at night, hunting down specialized ingredients. For the green apple frosting, he ended up buying flavored syrup from the cocktail mixers aisle. But he was fully prepared to melt down Jolly Ranchers, if necessary.

By the time the waitress returns to take your order, the two of you
are chatting easily. Nothing has changed, nothing's been settled, but you know now that the rest of the night will be okay. You'll drink your beers and eat some greasy bar food, and you'll talk about Bananarama. (“Did you know that one of them is married to Andrew Ridgeley from Wham!?”) When you've had enough, and you're sure the kids will be asleep, you'll go back home and pay the sitter and sit together for a while on the couch. Sex is a possibility, though not a certainty. Eventually, you'll lie down together in a bed that keeps you both safe from allergens, and you'll rest your aging bodies together.