Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

Making his way over to the buffet table, Green crouched down to see if Jocelyn was hiding underneath it. She had never hidden from him before, but as his book would have been only too happy to confirm, rapid tactical innovation was a hallmark of her age, and the acute sense of embarrassment he felt, getting down on hands and knees to look for her, seemed to confirm that he had fallen neatly into one of her traps. All that he found under the buffet table, however, was a back issue of Allure splattered with mayonnaise, a loose skateboard truck with neon orange wheels, and a small rubber pig.

Green checked the kitchen. He checked the laundry room. He traveled down a dim back hallway of the house, checking in the bathrooms, the bedrooms, the closets, ending up in a recreation room, where, under a skylight, on top of a bumper pool table covered in tangerine felt, two young people were asymptotically approaching copulation. Nobody he asked had seen her; he didn’t interrupt the lovers.

“Jocelyn,” he called out, again and again, his voice densely layered with irritation, embarrassment, anxiety, and an attempt to sound good-humored and accustomed to her mischief. “Jocelyn!”

As he searched the house, Green’s calm inner therapist’s voice seemed to swell within him, repeating its stock reassurances and sensible explanations — his daughter was playing a trick on him, had gotten into a sewing basket or toolbox, was punishing him for leaving her, for taking her, for sending her back — with increasing imperturbability and lack of sense, like the intoner of useful foreign phrases nattering on about bus depots and the price of a postage stamp on a language tape playing in the dashboard of a car that is spinning out of control. All the while, in a dank, spiderwebbed corner of his thoughts, the story of his daughter’s disappearance from the world was being rehearsed, in flat and unexceptional newspaper prose: a graduation party in a down-at-heel suburban neighborhood, a divorced father returning his daughter to her mother, one terrible moment of inattention—

“Uh, Marty?”

It was a hoarse, raspy young voice, calling from the front of the house. Green ran back along the hallway from the rec room and nearly ran into a small, bony, frail-looking young man with large black eyeglasses, dressed in a Charlotte Hornets basketball jersey blazoned with the number one, carrying Jocelyn in his arms. She was crying, muddy, soaked to the skin, alive.

“She fell into the pond,” said the young man, handing her over to him. “I think she’s all right. I’m Seth.”

“Thanks, Seth,” said Green. “I’m sure she’s going to be fine.”

Green carried his daughter into the bathroom and stood her on an oval of worn pink chenille. Her socks, dress, and blouse looked as though they had been splashed with thin coffee. Her cheeks were splattered with mud. She was incoherent and apneic with outrage and relief. Green spoke to her softly.

“Did you fall into the pond?” He pulled the ruined dirndl up over her head. “Were you trying to see the fish?” He unbuttoned her blouse, rolled the tights down her legs, slipped off her shoes. “Did you hurt anything?” The murky water had soaked through to her panties. Green pulled them off. “Are you okay? Were you trying to see the fish, silly girl? Okay. I know. All right. You’re all right. Come, we’ll get you into a nice, warm bath.” He reached across her with his right arm, cradling her in his left, and opened the tap in the bathtub. “Okay. I know. All right.”

The sound of the water seemed to calm or distract her. She left off sobbing and pressed a hand to her chest, feeling for the agitated throb under the bone. Green had undressed her without thinking, without hesitation, and now, after his encounter with Ruby Klein, the sight of her pouting, chubby vagina, glinting with down, filled him with an unaccustomed tenderness. It occurred to him that, in all but the most glancing and utilitarian of ways, he never looked at her genitals, or touched them, or allowed himself to think about them at all, and it seemed to him, as he lifted her into the air and set her down into the green, clear water of the tub, that this prohibition of consciousness, born on that night in Ruby’s bedroom eighteen years before, had somehow grown to include all of Jocelyn Green, his daughter. Because he was afraid of what he might do to her, he had removed himself from her life, for her own protection, as it were.

“Daddy,” said Jocelyn. She was calm again. “I want you to take a bath with me.”

“No, honey,” said Green, as he always did, refusing even to consider the suggestion. “A bath is something you do by yourself.”

“Mommy takes a bath with me.”

“I know she does.” His steadfast refusal to join mother and daughter for their nightly romp in the tub was one of several small but collectively fatal disappointments Green had caused Caryn during their marriage. “And you two have a lot of fun.” Green looked around for something that might pass as a bath toy and so distract Jocelyn. He picked up a flat soap holder, caked with green scum, studded on both sides with rubbery spikes. He rinsed the scum away in the bathwater and handed the thing to Jocelyn. “Look,” he said, his tone sickly and bright, “a hedgehog.”

She knocked it away. It struck the tiled wall beside Green and ricocheted into his face.

“No!” Blood flowed into her face, and she went limp with rage. He caught her before she slipped under the water, drenching his forearms and the front of his shirt. “I don’t want a headhog! I want you to take a bath with me!”

“Honey. Sweetie. I’m sorry. I know you think it could be fun for us to do that, too. And I love to do things with you …” Jocelyn did not appear to be listening. She had curled herself into a ball, kicking at him, splashing him, screaming so loudly that it was all Green could do to keep from covering her mouth with his hand. There was an entire chapter in Green’s book devoted to dealing with the anger of children. None of the techniques he recommended involved gagging or straitjacketing the child. They were all about listening to and accepting a child’s emotional outbursts, in a supportive way, without giving in to them. The use of such techniques, however, was predicated on the parent’s staunch certainty of having the child’s best interests at heart. You were not to forbid things to your children simply and for no other reason than because you were afraid of doing them yourself. You were not to oblige your children to pay for the errors and calamities of your own upbringing. And you were never, not if there was a milligram of love in your heart for your children, to deny them the incalculable comfort of your own body.

“Oh, all right,” said Green, gripping the slippery, squirming girl by the upper arms. “All right!”

The transformation was breathtaking. She stopped crying at once, and the blood drained away from her cheeks. She laughed.

Green took off his pants and folded them neatly, laying them on the closed lid of the toilet, with his underpants folded on top. He hung his shirt from the hook on the back of the door. Quickly he stepped into the tub with one foot, hesitating, his unfettered penis flapping like a tattered rag knotted to his body. Jocelyn looked at it with great interest, the way she had looked at the goldfish in the pond and the studs and pendants in Ruby Klein’s face. She pointed.

“What do you have?” she said.

“I have a penis,” he said. “How about that?”

“It looks wobbly.”

“It is,” he said. “Very wobbly.”

He settled himself in beside her, around her, enclosing her small form in the slick black fur and protuberances of his thin, bony shanks. There was a knock at the door. Green jumped. He put a hand to his chest.