Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

The world has been sanitized. Passion is a metaphor. All we can do is dig.

I put the laundry in to dry.

Upstairs, I smoke a cigarette, stand at the bedroom door. It’s not a pleasant thing.

If I could, I think. If there were no Minutemen. If we could somehow reverse the laws of thermodynamics.

Around midnight I lie on the sofa. Can’t sleep, though. I get up and clean the oven. Scour the sinks, apply Drano, carry out the garbage, make coffee, plan the breakfast menu.

It’s nearly dawn when Melinda begins banging on the bedroom door.

“Daddy!” she cries, and I’m there in an instant. I tell her to calm down, but she won’t, she keeps yelling and thumping the door. “Have to pee! ” she says. “Real bad—I can’t hold it!”

It’s a dilemma. I ask her to hang on until I’ve had time to work out the arrangements.

“Wait?” she said. “How long?”

“Not long. You’re a big girl now, go back to bed.”

“ Wet the bed. One more minute and—”

“Use a bottle, then.”

“What bottle?”

“Look around,” I say. “Check Mommy’s dresser.”

“Gross!”

She hits the door. I can picture the droop in her eyelids, the tightening along her jaw.

“Bottle,” she says, “that’s stupid. I’m a girl! God, I can’t even believe this.” Then she moans. “Daddy, listen, don’t you think maybe something’s wrong? It’s not too nice, is it? First you lock us in here, like we’re prisoners or something, and then you don’t even let me go to the bath room. How would you feel? What if I did all that stuff to you?”

“Bad,” I tell her. “I’d probably feel terrible.”

“So there.”

Leaning against the door, rocking, I listen to a silence that seems to stretch out forever.

“Daddy?” Melinda says.

“I’m here.”

“You know what else?”

“What else?”

“I’m scared, I guess. And real sad, too. If you were me, you’d get so sad you couldn’t even stand it.”

“I know, honey.”

“Like right now. I’m sad.”

“Yes.”

“Let me out,” she says.

It’s a rocky moment, the most painful of my life. I hesitate. But then I tell her it can’t be done, not yet. “The hot-water bottle,” I say quietly. “Wake up your mother, she’ll handle it.”

“Please, can’t you—”

“I’m sorry, angel.”

She’s right, I can’t stand it. When she says she hates me, I nod and back away. I turn off the hallway light and move to the kitchen and drink coffee and try to patch myself together.

It’s a splendid sunrise. No more rain. The mountains go violet, then bright pink.

Just after six o’clock a taxi pulls up the long driveway.

Willpower, I think, and I write out a handsome check. “Tip?” the driver says. He’s just a kid, granny glasses and a sandy beard, but he clearly knows what it’s all about. He takes a twenty without blinking. “Could’ve called,” he says. “Six o’clock, man, no fucking courtesy.”

And that’s it.

Inside, I roll out my sleeping bag before the bedroom door. I strip to my underwear and curl up like a watchdog.

What more can I do?

Melinda hammers on the door.

“Daddy,” she shouts, “you’re crazy!”

“IF IT WERE UP TO me—” my father said, but he had the courage not to finish. Instead he said, “What can I do?”

“The money, that’s all.”

“Cash? Play it cozy?”

“Probably so.”

“And you’ve got a place to—you know—a place to go?”

“It’s being set up,” I told him. “I’ll know tonight.”

“That’s good, then. Fine. So what about the basics? Toothbrush, clothes. A new wardrobe, what the hell.”

“Not necessary.”

He smiled and touched his jaw. “On the house. Any damned thing you want, just say it.”

“A wig,” I said.

“Right. What else?”

“I’m kidding. No wig. Nothing, just the cash.”

“A coat, though. You’ll need a coat. Definitely. And new shoes—some decent leather.”

“It’s not a funeral,” I said.

“No?”

“It’s not.”

My father jiggled his car keys. “Shoes,” he said, “let’s not argue. Shoes, then a coat, then we’ll see about a haircut.”

At the shoe store on Main Street, my father sat beside me, draped an arm across the back of my chair, and told the clerk he wanted the best. Leather soles and rubber heels, no plastic. The clerk said, “Yes, sir,” and hustled off to a back room. My father lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he sat watching the smoke, legs crossed, and then he shook his head and said, “Christ.”

“If you want,” I told him, “I’ll call it off.”

“I don’t want.”

“If you do, though.”

“No,” he said. “It’s a crime, that’s all I mean. Just a sick rotten crime. No other possibilities, right?”

“Except to call it off.”

He nodded. “Except that. And there’s Doc Crenshaw.”

“Yes, but I can’t—”

“Who knows?” he said. “A heart murmur maybe. I read somewhere—I think it was in Time —I read how heart murmurs can do the trick, or else asthma, a hundred different things. You never know.”

“I won’t beg.”

“Of course not. But we can hope, can’t we? Heart murmur, we can damn well hope.”

“Or cancer,” I said.

My father laughed and clapped me on the leg.

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Cancer.”

He bought me shoes and a wool overcoat and shirts and jeans and a big green Samsonite suitcase. In the barbershop, he smoked cigarettes and flipped through magazines, keeping his hands busy. “Lop it off,” he told the barber. He made a slicing motion across his neck. “Amputate. Major surgery. The kid’s growing corn up there.” The barber chuckled and my dad went back to his magazine while I watched myself in the mirror. September 1968, and there was a thinning out in progress, a narrowing of alternatives. The scissors felt cool against my ear. The smells were good, I thought, all those lotions and powders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and when I looked up my father was studying me in the mirror. He turned away fast. “What we need,” he told the barber, “is one of those heavy-duty lawn mowers. Scissors won’t hack it.”

After dinner that night, when the dishes were done, I modeled my new clothes. An off-to-camp atmosphere, jokes and smiles, a nervous twitter when my mother said, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?”

We avoided specifics. There was great courage in what was not said. We listened to records, made small talk about neighbors and old times, and then later, on the spur of the moment, my father challenged me to a game of Ping-Pong. “Two out of three, no mercy,” he said, and he winked, and I said, “You asked for it,” and we moved down to the basement and set up the net and played hard for almost an hour.

At eight o’clock I asked for the car keys.