Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

“Each time you eat something from one of the food groups,” she says, “you check off one of the squares.” She reaches over and puts her finger on some of the squares. “When you run out of squares,” she says, “you can’t eat anything from that food group anymore.”

I look at the piece of paper. I put it on the bedside table, on top of the clock radio.

~

The day my mom came to live with us was the same day they came to cut the grass. The guy with the gray hair rode around on the little tractor. The younger guy went around with the weed-eater. It was cool and windy, like autumn, only it was only the first day of August. They drove the tractor up the retractable ramp onto the pickup truck. The weed-eater went off. Everything was quiet. All you could hear was the wind in the trees. Mom was downstairs, unpacking boxes.

~

Don’t lay this trip on me. Like it’s all my doing. Okay? As if you have nothing to do with it.

What I’m talking about is anything like a vase, in the sense that a vase is the last thing you would want to see.

ONE DAYwe drive out to the country to see Petra’s house. Tutti and Sammy and me. Petra lives in a town about an hour away from where we live. She has a boy the same age as Sammy, so we figure they can play together. We figure we can take them to the park. Petra says there’s a wading pool at the park, and a train ride.

We get to the town where Petra lives, and we get on the street it says to go on in the directions Petra gave me. We pass the gas station Petra said we would pass.

What I am picturing as we go along is this big house with big corners jutting out where the roof comes down, and a big front porch and a screen door that slams. This is the picture I get from all the stories Petra has told me about the house they live in. Instead, what it is is this small house with a hole in the ceiling in the kitchen and people next door who work on their car all day Sunday with the radio going.

~

I go in the bathroom and try to get Sammy to pee, but Sammy just cries and hangs there over the toilet with his little eyes still shut and his blanket clutched up around his nose.

~

We have this secret society at work, the Black Rod Club. We’re a bunch of guys working in a predominantly female workplace. I think this Black Rod thing involves subconscious desires.

The founder of the club sits at the desk next to mine. In this place where I work, some of the women have their own offices, but most of us sit at desks that are all pushed together in a couple of rooms. Jeff’s desk is perpendicular to mine and is always covered with stacks of books and papers. I don’t know what Jeff’s job actually is, but apparently it involves all the papers that are on his desk. Sometimes he puts all the papers and books into boxes and carries the boxes around for a day or two, as though he intends to do something with all that stuff.

When I ask Jeff about the history of the Black Rod Club, he rubs his beard. His glasses make his eyes look larger than they are. He says the Black Rod Club was founded by a bunch of guys with black rods. He laughs. He tells me that in the late 1600s a Scotsman named Roderick, nicknamed Black Rod, came to Canada and founded the Black Rod Club. He laughs again. He says he has work to do.

The room where our desks are has a window at the end, and we look out onto a courtyard with a picnic table sitting in the center of it, and benches under trees. We look at the people eating their lunches out there. We talk about these people. Some of them come every day, and we talk as if we know them. There is one blonde girl who has been coming a lot lately. She eats her lunch and we stare out the window at her. Sometimes a man in a suit comes to meet her. We believe they are having an affair. Sometimes they sit close to one another and look down at their laps. Sometimes the girl laughs and tosses her long, straight hair, and then leans close and brushes the man’s lips with her own. It drives us Black Rod members crazy to see this. We think the man should make his move. We want to see him really kiss her.

Mostly we notice the girls. These girls, whom none of us ever approaches or speaks to, are part of the Black Rod Club. Somehow they have become part of the club.

Today there is a guy sleeping on one of the benches out there. He keeps rolling around, and once in a while he rolls right off. Sometimes he undoes his shirt and talks to himself. Eventually he undoes his fly and, without getting up off the bench, he lies on his side and pees onto the interlocking stones beneath the bench. One of the managers finds out and calls the police. The police come and take the guy away.

I think the men in the Black Rod Club are afraid of something. They all laugh when the police come and take this guy away. They all make comments. There is talk of never having lunch in the courtyard again. Someone asks if any of the guy’s pee splashed on the picnic table. Beneath all this talk and laughter I think there is a kind of terror.

~

Anytime Sammy wants me to carry him, I carry him. Sometimes I carry him from the living room to the front steps. I carry him so he can get his shoes on and go outside and play. Sometimes I carry him all the way to the mall.

Today Sammy wanted to go to the mall to buy Tutti some blocks. “We could give Mommy some blocks,” he says. “Let’s get Mommy some blocks.”

“She doesn’t want blocks,” I say.

“Mommy wants blocks,” he says.

“We are not getting Mommy any blocks,” I say.

“Mommy needs blocks,” he says.

I carry him over to the mall on my shoulders. The air is cold and we go into Kmart.

~

Are you the kind of guy who, when it says, Take One , you always take one? I don’t know. Maybe you don’t get that kind of thing where you are. We get it on the buses.

~

There are things you can think about, where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.

~

Hypnotize me or something, would you?

ONE DAYTutti takes all the bank books and the bank cards and the bank statements and she says to me, “When your check comes in, give it to me.”

~

We just got back from visiting Mom. Yesterday, when we had to leave, Sammy stood outside the donut shop where my sister works and cried. He cried because he wanted a lemon donut. Tutti said he couldn’t have a lemon donut because he already had a chocolate donut and he couldn’t have both. We took him back to Mom’s house and put him in the car. I had all the suitcases on the roof of the car. Tutti was in the passenger seat with her seat belt on. Sammy was in the back seat, crying. He kept crying. He said he wanted to go back to the donut shop.

The thing is, I wanted to go back. I wanted to go back to the donut shop and get Sammy that donut. I didn’t want to hear Sammy cry anymore. He was crying so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. He said, “Daddy, you’ve never done this to me before.” Only, you could hardly tell what he was saying because of the way he was crying so hard.

~

It takes x number of years to figure out what you are trying to say, and then another number of years to find out that what you are trying to say cannot be said. What I want to know now is, what the fuck are you supposed to do with the rest of your life?

~

I took Sammy to the beach today. Tutti is out with Coco, shopping. I don’t know when they will be back.

It was cold and windy at the beach, and I didn’t bring any sweatshirts, because of the way the weather has been around here for the last week or so, and because I always think, once it is July, and it gets hot, it is just going to stay hot. I made egg salad sandwiches with cheese on them, but we never wound up eating them. We couldn’t even swim, because the waves were knocking Sammy down and it was scaring him. We ended up eating chips on the way home in the car. It was the jumbo size of rippled chips, and there weren’t many left, so Sammy would reach down into the bag and his whole arm would disappear. Then his hand would come out with some chips in it. He fell asleep on the way home, and I had to hold his head up with my elbow while I drove.