Something Happened

'I have nothing to do,' he answered whenever we told him to go away from us and do something else.

We often felt grotesque. People saw him with us all the time. He had that lump in his throat. He would not speak to other lonely little boys we spotted for him and tried to introduce him to.

'Look, here is Dicky Dare. He is a nice boy and just about the same age as you. Why don't you go play with him?'

He would not want to.

'Why not?'

(He did not want to be associated with another kid who had no one else to play with. He admired the kid who had wanted to fight with him at play group and wished that other boy liked him enough in return to want to become his friend.)

When people we knew asked helpfully if he would like to meet someone to play with, we had to tell them no. We could never tell them why. We couldn't explain that he would not cooperate. (We had a lump in our throat.)

'I can't stand it,' my wife would grieve, and be about to cry. 'He looks like a ghost. He's so unhappy. I can't stand to see him this way. It breaks my heart.'

'Me neither,' I confessed.

The only good days I had that summer were the days I spent in the city at my office. It broke my heart too. He wouldn't roller skate or ride his bike. I began to lose my temper more easily. (I was ugly.)

'Go play,' I ordered him curtly at the beach one day when I could control my temper no longer.

He blinked.

'Bob,' my wife cautioned.

'Huh?' he asked.

'Are you deaf?'

'I didn't hear.'

'Yes, you did. Go play.'

'With who?'

'There's a kid sitting there near that fat lady.'

'Daddy. Please.'

'He looks your own age. He looks like he wants to meet somebody to play with.'

'I'm playing here.'

'With what?'

'Sand.'

'Sand,' I mimicked nastily, and pointed toward the shore. 'Or I'll drag you over there by the arm and ask him for you.' (Having made that threat, I had to mean it. There was an article in a women's magazine that month advising parents to be firm with balky children. There was an article in another women's magazine advising us to be sympathetic and indulgent. I didn't care about either magazine. I was mad. My wife was trying to warn me off with a look. I paid no attention. It was a matter of face now between myself and this poor, bewildered little boy.) 'Would you like that?' I threatened.

His face was chalky. 'I won't be able to speak.'

'You're speaking now.'

'I've got a lump in my throat. I want to vomit.'

'You'll have a lump on your head,' I could not restrain myself from wisecracking. 'Get going. You can vomit later.'

He rose reluctantly and went with slow, wobbling steps to do as I had forced him.

'You see?' I whispered to my wife, fearfully and penitently, craving immediate absolution. 'He's going.'

'I think it's horrible.'

'He's doing it.'

He was speaking to the other boy, a wan, yellow-haired kid who shook his head without looking up and gave a labored, long reply. His mouth moved funny. I was sickened. The fat woman glared. My boy walked back to us with knees that seemed to bend with pain and he was almost in tears as he told us in a blocked, stammering voice that the other boy stuttered badly and had said no, he did not want to play.

'Well, I did what you wanted!' my boy spat out at me bitterly, giving me a quick, stabbing glance, and sat down in the sand again a good distance away. His eyes were steaming at me with anger.

I felt frustrated and enraged.

Everything was going wrong for me, one thing after another, even my wife's snatch (God dammit).

That summer my wife had a sensitive snatch, a recurring vaginal inflammation, and I (even she, until I tried) didn't even know if I would be able to get laid properly when I came out for those dragging, intolerable weekends. (I could have done much better staying in the city. I was doing better. I was getting all I wanted.) I did not have much else to do out there at the beach that I enjoyed, except make eyes at other wives and josh suggestively with very young girls. So I kept losing my temper with him and trying to help him. (I'd lose my temper when I'd see myself fail. I was filled with such depressing feelings of rejection and impotence at my inability to cheer him up, to alleviate his wretched agony and isolation, to have him succeed at doing something new.) I kept commanding him gruffly to attempt doing things that he did not want to do and was probably physically unable to do because of the rigid tension impairing his balance and coordination and because of the lump in his throat.

Because I felt he was afraid of the ocean, I made him go wading with me, and he almost drowned when a large wave broke suddenly and knocked us both down, tore him from my grasp, and sent him rolling and tumbling helplessly toward shore in the deep, swirling, tumultuous surf. When he stumbled to his feet finally (as I struggled feebly against the backwash in an effort to reach him and save him), he was holding his breath, and his eyes were clamped shut so tightly that both knuckled halves of his flushed face looked like clenched and crimson fists. He would not open them until I had taken his hand again and led him to shore. I have visions of that episode still.

'You know, Daddy,' he said to me, 'I was afraid to open my eyes. I didn't know where I was and I was afraid to open my eyes and look. I was afraid that when I opened my eyes I would be all the way out there, and I didn't want to look.'

I was surprised he talked to me, surprised he still trusted me enough to confide in me. (He could have drowned or been battered to death or paralysis right then and there. He might have been swept away from me out to sea by a suction of rushing water in a matter of three or four seconds. Once I helped lifeguards save a baby in an inflated tube that had been carried out thirty yards from shore in an instant. I might never have seen him alive again. I have always been afraid of death by drowning. I might never have been able to forgive myself if I had lost him then. My wife might never have allowed me to. I would have had to divorce her, leaving her with a Derek who was destined by birth, we are told, to turn out mentally defective and my daughter, who has been of small aid and comfort, which might not be such a bad thing for me to do even now. I do think about divorce a lot and I always have. Even before I was married I was thinking of getting divorced. I can picture my next wife: she would be younger, prettier, dumb, and submissive. She would be blond, short, chubby, and cheerful and would be very eager to please me in the kitchen and the bedroom. In short order I would find it impossible to be with her for more than an hour or two at a time, and I would have to divorce her too. I'm glad he lived. Getting married was my idea. I enjoy fucking my wife. She lets me do it anyway I want. No Women's Liberation for her. Lots of male chauvinist pig. I couldn't bang her freely even when there was no soreness because he was always hanging around the house in the daytime and was apt to be lying awake at night. I often tried to chase him away from us just for that. If we locked him out of our bedroom we didn't know if he was camping discouragedly just outside the door, where he could hear. I was surly much of the time and did a lot of growling at everyone.)

I did such monstrous things to him. They seemed so necessary at the time. I did not know what else to do. I couldn't get rid of him, and he knew I wanted to. He did go bike riding one day and he fell against a wooden fence and bruised a knee so badly he had to walk with a limp for a week and got a long black splinter in his forearm that I had to poke at and dislodge with a sewing needle (and felt like vice personified doing so. I debated darkly with myself whether or not to take the two-week summer vacation I had coming to me. My wife made me; she said she would be unable to endure it any longer at the beach without me and that she would come back into the city. So I took it. And there were days on my vacation that I would have paid the company twice what I was getting just to be allowed to come in and work). I couldn't even get drunk anymore. I couldn't get high on martinis at cocktail