Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“I have to go,” she said, soft, but angry.

“I want! To go with you.”

“You want me to go?”

The stroller was going, he was going.

“No no no no.”

“I want to!” he yelled, and lost his pacifier.

No no.

He let the crying come out.

All the noes were crying out.

“I’m sorry, honey.” Mommy was everywhere and above.

The elevator sank through the floor. She gave him his pacifier back. He felt it fill his mouth, wet inside, outside.

The wall door popped him out into the lobby. There were all those legs and clothes. Voices: “What’s the matter, baby?”

Ramon bothered him. “Watch you cry.”

He hid his face. Don’t watch.

“Watch matter? Big boy don’t cry.”

“Yes, they do,” Mommy said. “Everybody cries sometimes.”

The yellow covered him, hot and smooth and rough.

No.

PETER THOUGHT: I’ve become a character in a poorly written play. Recently, he had seen several with scenes just like the one he was suddenly playing himself. Diane had called out to him when he came home. He had been at a late dinner with a lively group after an Uptown Theater premiere. They had been at Orso, a delightful place, jammed with his favorite celebrities, theater people, and he was smashed. What a good word for it. Smashed, all the little fearful repressions repressed, the opaque partition between outward and inward self smashed by gin. He came home feeling young, relieved the affair with Rachel was over, looking forward to tomorrow’s session, and to a weekend of interesting theater and ballet — and then Diane called to him.

He went into the bedroom, bobbing happily on his sea of alcohol. Diane was in a long nightshirt from L. L. Bean, surrounded by papers, the room filled with cigarette smoke. Maybe she’ll die of lung cancer, he thought with disinterest, wondering, not hoping.

“Peter,” she said in the fake formal tone people adopt when they’re about to speechify. And she went on about her worries. Incredibly obvious worries. Horrible clichés that should be cut from any good drama. She was aging. Byron was becoming precious. He could use a sibling. A sibling? That set off his alarms.

He watched her talk on; he stopped hearing. Her head levitated in his slowed vision. “You want to have another child,” Peter interrupted.

She paused before she answered. “I wanted to know what you think about it.”

He laughed, he couldn’t stop himself, there was no repressing the nonrepression. “Bullshit. You want me to say yes, you don’t want me to think about it.”

“Does that mean no?”

“I don’t want to have another child.”

Diane seemed surprised. How could she be surprised? He had never wanted to have a child. Had he made any speeches that having a kid was great? How could she be surprised? Diane glanced down at her papers, intent on them for a moment. “Has being a father been that bad?” she asked with a sudden look at him.

“No,” he said with a groan, although why he was positively negative was a mystery.

“Would you rather we hadn’t had Byron? Sometimes I think about you asking me to have an abortion—”

“Wait a minute!” He couldn’t stop himself; she was insane, she was out of touch, spinning in the solar system. “Are you saying if I don’t want to have another child, it means I want to kill my son?”

Diane pushed the papers off her lap and pulled her legs up in a crouch, like an aggressive animal, a cat poised. “Are you listening to me ? Or are you talking to someone else?”

“What?” He felt drunk, stupid. Maybe he wasn’t understanding her.

“ I’m in this room. Not your shrink.”

“Maybe we should talk about this in the morning.”

“No! That means we’ll never talk about it. Yes, I want to have another child. Not only that. I want you to be a father. Your son is suffering. Do you hear me? He is suffering .”

God, the words hurt. They could punish. He remembered noticing that when a scene becomes emotional, the words could be physical, hit you, even in your comfortable aisle seat, whack you in the chest, and knock your breath out. He thought suddenly of Byron, like himself, abandoned without acknowledgment of hurt, living with a ghostly parentage, seen but not felt. Her words transmitted that image.

“I can’t,” he heard himself mumble. “I can’t,” he pleaded.

“You can’t what?” Diane persisted.

Peter stared at her. She isn’t afraid of me.

“You can’t be a father to that wonderful boy? That’s too hard for you?”

She doesn’t want truth; she wants to be righteous. “I’m not interested in any of this,” his voice answered. He was banging inside his body, swelling up to the edges of the shell — hatching. “I don’t want to be married to you. I don’t want to be a father. I told you that. You didn’t listen. You never really listen to me. You think I’m someone to be manipulated, you think everyone is to be manipulated, so the world works the way you want it to work. I can’t be what you want. I can’t! I can’t!” His face had burst through, pressed out into cool world, hot and alive against the chill.

Diane sat still. She looked girlish. Her long nose and dark skin gave her face a tough edge, but her eyes got big, her mouth trembled. She looked ready to cry. “I don’t want to manipulate you—”

But Peter was out of the shell; he was born again, new-feathered and strutting in the sun. “Yes, you do. You think your desires are good and my desires are bad. So you ignore my desires, like I’m a two-year-old and you know better. It’s a vanity all middle-class women have. They live their lives with the unexpressed conviction they are more moral than men. That they care about real things and men don’t. All the men believe it too! But I don’t. You’re just as selfish as I am! You want to control Byron, you want to control me, you want us to meet your schedule. Well, I can’t! I can’t! No matter how much you badger me, I can’t! I can’t!”

She was crying. In a strange way: her head was still as stone, her forehead, her cheeks, her lips didn’t move, but a stream of water dripped straight down, a statue weeping.“I love you—” she started to say.

But he was free; he was born whole again; no matter how bad he was, he was real. “I don’t love you,” he said quite happily. “I don’t give a damn about you.”

Diane bent forward, wailing. Peter was surprised. He reached toward her, reached for the words, to put them back, put them back into his ugly mind. He hadn’t remembered that she was real too.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean that.” She went on crying. “I just can’t be what you want. I can’t. I can’t. That’s all. I can’t.”

Diane cried. Peter watched. He tried to think of what he might say.

“I can’t,” he repeated.

From the next room, Byron screamed. Byron screamed the scream of innocence murdered. Byron screamed right into his father’s bones. A cold scream of murder that whistled through Peter. Peter ran to save him.

NINA DIDN’T like the feel of school at first. The buildings were too big. The people were too big also. She wasn’t used to being around such large people: competent, talky, able to do things, argue, have opinions, look her in the face, or down at her — everything oppressed her senses.

Each frustrating day at school began as a tragedy at home. Luke’s anxiety would start as soon as Pearl arrived. That first week, Luke saw Nina off with an utter collapse into bawling despair. Nina assumed the worst was over. But the second week, Luke took to grabbing Nina’s ankles and begging her to stay. It would have been comic if it weren’t so crazy. What was wrong? Nina came back home at the time she promised; Luke had no complaints about Pearl. There were many things Pearl didn’t get quite right, but they were trivial and soon corrected. Pearl reported Luke was basically happy. Nina stood in the hallway one morning after she left, and listened for fifteen minutes. The tears stopped after five. She heard laughter and shouts of play after ten. She came downtown at lunchtime one afternoon and watched Luke from a distance while he played with Byron in Washington Square Park — the kid was happy! So why was he clutching her shoes, screaming, “Don’t leave me, Mommy. Don’t leave me, Mommy”?