Tim Horvath - Understories

Pete crouches, remembering how strange the acoustics of these plastic catacombs can be, and he’s about to dive in even though he’s not sure he can squeeze through the turns, but then he simply bellows her name and his tunnely voice must have found its way through because he can see her make her way toward him.

As he waits he wonders what he’ll say next to Hanh’s mom because probably rattling off more revamping schemes will seem both egotistical and daft. Maybe he’ll chortle, “Well, it looks like both of our kids are bullies!” But no, bully is charged, like terrorist or sex offender , and he doesn’t want to label her son, just as he wouldn’t want anyone to label Sasha. Even if it might be accurate — there are, are there not, bona fide terrorists and sex offenders, and so, too, the universe must have its portion of bullies and he suspects Sasha might be one. He and Bethany can’t for the life of them figure it out — her hair is Bethany’s auburn-brown, her eyes are his, and the nose phases between the Nanas’, but when it comes to behavior, the nucleic acids throw them for a loop. Just last week a boy got a lesson in gravity off one of those dome-shaped metal structures at recess, not a banner way to start kindergarten.

He’s always considered himself an “identify the cause, then troubleshoot” kind of guy, but when it comes to Sasha, all that’s out the window. He’ll just take the solution, thanks. But the divorce! Wouldn’t it be nice to just point to the divorce and be able to say, “That’s it!” like collaring a criminal out of a lineup? But it’s more like global warming, a lot of disputation about the root causes. Because the truth of the matter is that the bullying predated the divorce. It started back in play group, with the inescapable reality that Sasha was brute-factually larger than her peers and, unless adults intervened, could rearrange reality quite handily. There were plenty of things she couldn’t do, but running headlong at Samantha Crisp or extracting Ben Mulcahey from a swing were not among them.

She sounds asthmatic when she emerges. “Da. . ddy!”

“What, honey?”

She grabs him and starts to pull him toward the hopscotch. Oxlike, she gets him off balance and he actually stumbles a little bit. He regains his ground, reinstates proper Dad-mode. “Hold on, hon. What was going on with that boy in there?”

She’s breathing too heavily to answer right away, or she is exaggerating to not have to. “That. . boy. . was. . the. . monster. . in. . the. . maze. And I. . was. . the maze. . solutioner.”

By now, the boy has been flung like a dishrag over the shoulder of his equally diminutive mother. The monster is a mewling mess; the maze solutioner is. . funny, cute. He’d like to tell Bethany about this, but she won’t appreciate it coming from him. He says, “It’s time to go apologize.”

“Why, Dad?” she says, and for a moment his heart breaks, because her panicky expression evinces that she knows she’s done it again.

There was a time when the postfight debrief would’ve been more of a hearing, more nuanced: “What happened? Are you sure she did that? Are you sure he did that?” Now he’s gotten lazy. It’s easier to just say “Sorry,” to hoard responsibility even if it ought to be shared. Sasha’s gotten used to it, too, he knows. He sees how quickly she dons the expression of guilt, as if it is the most natural one in her repertoire, her default.

Spotting Hanh, who’s flailing crazily, he observes, “That boy’s going through a rough period, isn’t he?” He sounds like Bethany, he realizes. But euphemism feels sweet on the tongue, and he can see something ease in Sasha, the frogs on her feet no longer resisting.

“Why is he doing that?”

“I’m not sure, honey. We’ll go see him afterward.” He brings her over to the maze monster, whose mother has the frazzled look of someone he thinks would say, when asked, that she loves being a mom, just not today. “We wanted to apologize,” he announces. “Sasha?”

But she is twisting, still studying Hanh. “Sasha, do you have something to say to this boy?”

“It’s all right,” says Mom. “We needed to go anyway,” says Mom. She is dangling her son and whispering to him and squirting liberally from the Sanitizer, the superhero that Tru has set up with Purell so that it glops out of a hole cut out of his rippling, muscular chest. From his mother’s shoulder, the boy stares placidly at Sasha like he is observing a ferocious animal through Plexiglas.

“Sasha,” Pete tugs her arm. But they storm off. “We’re sorry!” Pete calls out.

Maybe, he thinks, going over to commiserate with Hanh and his mom will be the best bet. Maybe if she can see another bully up close, it will be like Scared Straight. It will be like holding a mirror up to her, and maybe he can use her budding inner Narcissus to send a message.

“Would you like to meet Hanh?”

“Hanh?”

“Hanh,” he says, as if he’s an old college buddy of his who’s just showed up.

They stroll over. Hanh is lying on his back and his muscles are all scrunched up, so that he looks like someone on television who would lift and then eat a car. “Well,” Pete says. “Looks like the weather’s got everyone bent out of shape.”

“I actually thrive on this weather, I think,” she says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. I’m a rain forest girl. The Pacific Northwest, Bolivia. I like rain. I just have to figure out how to make it work with El Crankodillo. There are more negative ions in the air,” she adds. “Or positive ions. Or something.”

“Ah ions.” It comes out as one word, black-and-white, whereas hers are akin to the Matisses he sees in this video game he’s been playing. He tries to picture where Bolivia is on the map. Again he channels Angus. “We’ll put the rain forest in that corner.”

“Deal,” she says.

He sees the needle glint of an opportunity to go deeper than this joviality. “What brought you to Bolivia?”

“Fungi. The study of.”

“Mushrooms,” he says, immediately thinking that insiders probably don’t call them “mushrooms,” that maybe using the word mushrooms is like calling someone “colored” or denotes a telltale amateurism, like the way someone who doesn’t know much about Mexican food like his parents will always order crispy beef tacos to be safe.

To his relief, she echoes, “Mushrooms.”

He almost tells her about the time in college that he and Ethan Mellor took shrooms and wandered off into the middle of the woods and emerged in the midst of a gathering of Revolutionary War reenactors and he became convinced that all of the post-1700s history of America that he’d experienced was a strange dream. Even afterward, when the shrooms wore off and he was no longer shaking his head at Ethan and repeating, “No, man, you don’t understand, it was a fucking revo lu tion,” and he’d returned to his senses, he’d felt as though he understood America in a profound new way. It is one of his better stories. But is this not the worst thing he can offer to a woman who calls them “fungi,” i.e. to treat mushrooms as self-indulgent fodder for the antics of his youth?

Instead he nods. “What about them?”

“Well, a lot of traditional cultures have used them for thousands of years. And so I work. . worked to ensure that those who cultivate them get adequate compensation, don’t get duped by pharmaceutical cretins. Pardon me if you’re in Big Pharma.”

And if he was, he thinks, watching her crescenty lips and her bosom’s pertitude, he’d turn in his resignation that day. The truth, though, is that he avoids even the over-the-counter stuff.

“Nope, nope. My brother and I are inventors. Entrepreneurial spirits.”