Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“I will,” Frank promised. They shook hands as they left, and Chase gave him a somber look and a nod. He also had no idea that Frank might have played any part in him getting together with Diane. There was something satisfying in that.

ONE AFTERNOON WHEN CHARLIE WENTdown to the White House’s daycare center to pick up Joe, the whole staff of the place came over to meet with him.

“Uh oh,” Charlie said as he saw them converging. Joe was meanwhile looking studiously out the glass doors into the playground.

Charlie said, “What’s he done now?”

What a pleasure it was to say that. He knew that the part of him that was pleased was not to be revealed for the moment, and suppressed it. The result was probably a certain defensiveness, but that would be natural no matter what he was feeling; and in truth his feelings were mixed.

The young woman in charge that day, an assistant to the director, listed Joe’s infractions in a calm, no-nonsense tone: knocking down a three-year-old girl; throwing toys; throwing food; roaring through naptime; cursing.

“Cursing?” Charlie said. “What do you mean?”

A young black woman had the grace to smile. “When we were trying to get him to quiet down he kept saying, ‘You suck.’”

“Except some of us heard it differently,” the assistant director added.

“Wow,” Charlie said. “I don’t know where he would have heard that. His brother doesn’t use that kind of language.”

“Uh huh. Well anyway, that was not the main problem.”

“Of course.”

“The thing is,” the young woman said, “we’ve got twenty-five kids in here that we have to give a good experience. Their parents all expect that they’ll be safe and comfortable while they’re here with us.”

“Of course.”

The quartet of young women all looked at him.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Charlie promised.

Then Joe crashed into him and wrapped himself around his right leg. “Da! Da! Da! Da!”

“Hi Joe. I’m hearing that you weren’t very nice today.”

Joe stuck out his lower lip. “Don’t like this place.”

“Joe, be polite.”

“DON’T LIKE THIS PLACE!”

Charlie looked at the women beseechingly. “He seems kind of tired. I don’t think he slept very well last night.”

“He seems changed to me,” one of the other women observed. “He used to be a lot more relaxed here.”

“I don’t know if I’d ever describe Joe as being what you’d call relaxed,” Charlie said.

But it was no time for quibbling. In fact it was time to extricate the Quiblers from the scene of the crime ASAP. Charlie went into diplomatic mode and made the exit, apologizing and promising that it would go better in the future. Agreeing to a meeting time for a strategy session, as the assistant director called it.

On the Metro home Charlie sat with Joe trapped between him and the window of the car. Joe stood on his seat and held the bar on the back of the seat before him, rocking forward and back, and sideways when the train turned, into Charlie or the window. “Watch out, Da! Watch out!”

“I’m watching out, monkey. Hey, watch out yourself. Sorry,” this to the man in the seat ahead. “Joe, quit that. Be careful.”

Charlie was both happy and unhappy. This was the Joe that he knew and loved, back full force. Underneath everything else, Charlie felt a profound sense of relief and love. His Joe was back. The important thing was to be gung ho, to tear into life. Charlie loved to see that. He wanted to learn from that, he wanted to be more like that himself.

But it was also a problem. It had to be dealt with. And in the long run, thinking ahead, this Joe, his beloved wild man, was going to have to learn to get along. If he didn’t, it would be bad for him. Over time people had their edges and rough spots smoothed and rounded by their interactions with each other, until they were like stream boulders in the Sierra, all rounded by years of banging. At two years old, at three, you saw people’s real characters; then life started the rounding process. Days of sitting in classes—following instructions—Charlie plunged into a despair as he saw it all at once: what they did to kids so that they would get by. Education as behavioral conditioning. A brainwashing that they called socialization. Like something done to tame wild horses. Put the hobbles on until they learn to walk with them; get the bit in the mouth so they’ll go the direction you want. They called it breaking horses. Suddenly it all seemed horrible. The original Joe was better than that.

“You know, Joe,” Charlie said uncertainly, “you’re going to have to chill out there at daycare. People don’t like it when you knock them over.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I knock you over, ha.”

“Yes, but we’re family. We can wrestle because we know we’re doing it. There’s a time and a place for it. But just the other kids at daycare, you know—no. They don’t know how tough you are.”

“Rough and tough!”

“That’s right. But some kids don’t like that. And no one likes to be surprised by that kind of stuff. Remember when you punched me in the stomach and I wasn’t expecting it?”

“Da go owee, big owee.”

“That’s right. It can hurt people when you do that. You have to only do that with me, or with Nick if he feels like it.”

“Not Momma?”

“Well, if you can get her to. I don’t know though. It might not be a good habit, or…I don’t know. I don’t think so. You can ask her and see. But you have to ask. You have to ask everybody about that kind of stuff. Because usually rough-housing is just for dads. That’s the thing about dads, you can beat on them and test your muscles and all.”

“When we get home?”

“Yeah, sure. When we get home.” Charlie smiled ruefully at his younger son. “You get what you get, remember?”

“You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit!”

“That’s right. So don’t throw any fits. We’ll make it work, right Joe?”

Joe patted him on the shoulder solicitously. “Good Da.”

But this was only one of many such occurrences. Charlie began to dread the trip down to the daycare center to pick Joe up; what would he have perpetrated this time? Fitting a Play-Doh hat to a sleeping girl; climbing the fence and setting off the security alarm; plugging the sink with Play-Doh and climbing in the little “bath” that resulted…he was very creative with Play-Doh, as a sympathetic young black woman named Desiree noted, trying to reduce the tension in one of these postmortem sessions.

But reducing the tension was getting harder to do. The woman in charge asked Charlie to take Joe in to their staff doctor for an evaluation, and that led to an evaluation by a child psychiatrist, which led to a sequence of unilluminating tests; which led, finally, to a suggestion that they consider trying one of the very successful ameliorating drug therapy regimens, among them the paradoxical-sounding but clinically proven Ritalin.

“No,” Charlie said, politely but firmly. “He’s not even three years old. A lot of people are like this at his age. I was probably like this then. It isn’t appropriate.”

“Okay,” the doctors and daycare people said, their faces carefully expressionless.

Charlie was afraid to hear what Anna thought about it. Being a scientist, she might be in favor of it.

But it turned out that, being a scientist, she was deeply suspicious that the treatment had been studied rigorously enough. The fact that they didn’t know the mechanism by which these stimulants calmed certain kids made her coldly contemptuous, in her usual style. Indeed, Charlie had seldom seen her so disdainful of other scientific work. No drug therapies, she said. My Lord. Not when they don’t even have a suspected mechanism. The flash-freeze of her disrespect—it made Charlie grin. How he loved his scientist.