Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

WHEN I GOT HOME THAT NIGHT, I followed the sound of Moroccan music into my son’s room and found the boys bathed in artificial light. Jeremiah sat on the foot of the bed, half-hidden from me between two tall ferns that belonged in the study. The television sat on top of the dresser facing him, playing an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. Ernest sat at his desk in the corner, immersed in a computer game. “Prepare for battle,” it said. Chin lifted, eyes vacant, fingers tapping away at the keyboard — my son didn’t register my presence until I’d crossed to the windows and opened the blinds, and then he did so with only a groan.

I wanted to tear the plug from the wall — all of them. As a child, I hadn’t spent my every waking hour stuck to a screen. I’d scraped my knees on the playground and run just to feel the fluttering of my school’s blue and gold tie over my shoulder. Ernest, though — he was beginning to remind me of a shackled prisoner being transported to trial. If you took away soccer camp and Little League and all the other activities he embarked upon with nothing more than great reluctance, he only visited the outdoors in transit, and never with any pleasure. Whenever stepping free of a car, bus, or minivan, he’d squint up at the horrors of the high-hanging sun and move quickly to the nearest door, eager to return to the comforts of the box.

I looked down at his laundry hamper. He’d laid his soccer uniform on top of it, ready for the next day. The shorts, as always, were clean; he never came home dirty. “I’m starting to think you’re afraid to slide,” I said.

This, too, elicited little response. After shrugging, he turned back to his computer—“My liege,” it said, “how may I assist you?”—and began clicking away at its keys. Was it my fault? Had I failed him in some way? I thought of Aspirina, who had fed him countless fried plantains all those years and helped him fall asleep as a baby by singing Spanish lullabies. Was I supposed to learn Spanish?

I put the shorts down on top of the hamper, hearing the Moroccan music on the television build. Pagans had gathered in a natural rock amphitheater, assembling before a bald black man who stood high above them on an overhanging ledge. Tattooed from skull to foot, he thrust a python into the air with both hands, flashing his white teeth as he roared. The crowd erupted in glee. The spectators danced and spun and made sounds like elated Muslim women.

Jeremiah dropped his forearms down onto his knees, allowing his face to push out from between the two ferns. It was only then that I noticed he was drooling — a strand of saliva stretched from his plump lower lip to his lap.

“Are you all right, Jeremiah?” I stepped toward him, sending a hand to his forehead as he sat up, moving back between the two ferns. “You don’t feel warm.” I pushed aside one of the leafy fronds between us. “Have you taken your medicine?” He looked back at me with a faint look of recognition in his eyes, just a flash of life, like the squiggle of a fish at the bottom of a stream. I let the branch swing back into place. “What have you two been up to?”

Ernest half turned round in his chair, holding a Bloody Sunrise in one hand. “That demands coins of the realm,” the computer said. My son’s face gave off the glow of a dim light bulb. He shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

Jeremiah was still wearing his soccer shorts, but instead of the V-neck jersey that was supposed to accompany it, he had on a faded blue sweatshirt that bore the lapsed logo of a non-regional football franchise which had a storied history of loss. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

Jeremiah looked to the television. A commercial had started to play. A child no older than Ernest stood in the bathroom, wearing a shaving-foam beard as he applied deodorant to his armpits. “Be a Big Man!” the voice-over said. “Use Big Man deodorant!”

“Well, maybe I’ll just get your mother,” I told my son.

Seconds later Betty was following me down the stairs, wearing a synthetic track suit that made a swishing sound as she walked. The colors were somehow wrong on her, I thought. The outfit reminded me of the flag of a newly decolonized African nation.

“Do you know how long they’ve been here?” I asked.

“They were home when I got home.”

“Do you think maybe they spent the day sniffing things pulled out from under the sink?”

We were nearing our son’s door now. Betty raised a finger to her lips to silence me, then led the way inside and did exactly as I’d done before her — push through the ferns like a latter-day Livingstone, then reach for Jeremiah’s forehead.

“You don’t feel warm,” she said. “Does your stomach hurt?”

Ernest finished his glass of dyed juice and set it down beside his keyboard.

“Get your friend a glass of water,” Betty said.

He looked to me, as if to confirm the merits of this command.

I wasn’t about to challenge my wife’s authority — not here, at least. I nodded. Ernest got up and rushed out of the room.

A minute later Betty and I were retracing our steps upstairs, and I was whispering what I had not dared say until now.

“It just seems a bit like you’re reloading the child. Maybe some dry bread would’ve been best.”

“Dry bread?” She stopped at the base of the stairs, turning to me so suddenly I almost bumped into her. “If you wanted to give him bread, why didn’t you do it yourself?”

“I was just thinking—”

“What? That I should know what to do? What do you expect? You drag me in there as if I’m some kind of witch doctor. ‘There’s a boy in back drooling. Can you do something?’” She started up the stairs, but stopped again after only a step. “I’m a tourism development consultant, David. Have you forgotten? I deal with blight, not drool.”

As I followed her up the stairs, taking one step for her every three, I realized how right she was. I had hoped that some form of innate motherly wisdom would take over, that she’d be able to call upon something that had been passed down to her over the generations, like a family recipe for Thanksgiving gravy. And if the boy ever drools, feed him two spoonfuls of molasses and a half cup of dry oatmeal, then be sure to sit him in a chair facing west.

Betty turned into the great room. I continued on to our bedroom and moved into the walk-in closet, meaning to change into my house pants. But before I could do anything, I noticed something new on the wall. A split photo frame had been hung between Betty’s side of the closet and mine. The photo on the left was a Polaroid I had taken myself while we were on vacation in Hawaii, back when doctors were still advising us to adopt. Betty stood on the balcony of our hotel room with her arms hanging down at her sides like dead things dangling in a deli window. She was forty pounds heavier than she’d ever been, and dressed in a flower-print muumuu. “I look terrible,” she’d said right before I snapped the picture. But I’d insisted on taking it, saying we needed some evidence we’d been on holiday. It was a mistake. It looked like a ransom photo.

The picture beside it had been taken several years later, after Betty had lost all her weight. It was a candid shot of her leading an aerobics class at the studio where she’d worked part-time for a year after regaining her figure. In the photo she wears leg warmers, black tights, a pink-and-black-striped leotard, and a smile as bright as her neon headband.

“It’s motivation,” Betty said, when I stepped into the doorway of the great room to ask her about what I’d found. “I can’t go back.”

“But you look wonderful. I don’t know what you’re worried about.”