By Jason Hamilton
Something happens when you reach a certain age without having children. You become the guy who should have kids but doesn’t. We’re talking you’re ninety-seven and kidless. It’s surefire. A wrist tattoo reads: something went wrong. All right, let’s not be cute. You’re not ninety-seven. Let’s say you’re thirty-four and kidless, so there’s hope. Being thirty-four and kidless is like being ninety-seven and kidless with hope. I mean the ship is sinking, but thirty-four is a big enough bail-bucket that you might make it to shore with dry hair.
You people who had kids in high school won’t know what I’m talking about, seeing as how there is nothing wrong with you. Sure there was something wrong with you in high school, but now that you are my age, you are without my particular bag of air.
So what people mistake your daughter for your sister in staggering (as opposed to flattering) elicitations? Flattery only occurs for those tandems whose mother-daughter age gaps are their druthers, since we’re all appraised not only according to the width and amenities of our strollers, but by how late in life we buy them.
So no, former teenage parents—let’s not be cute—former teenage mothers, now in your early-mid thirties, the whole daughter-mistaken-for-sister thing is a constant reminder of a wrong turn made into the woods somewhere. The woods on the outskirts of a town like Providence or Modesto, where the factory was shipped overseas when you were three, and by your Summer of Conception (early teens), the factory and the town were all echoes—that’s the sort of woods things went wrong for you in, the woods on the outskirts of a town like that. And now the daughter-sister thing is embarrassing. I don’t have those kinds of problems, the kind I’m burning to have, yours.
What happened to you in those woods? Why’d you walk into them alone with three guys making you carry the liquor bag? Well granted, you were young, and healthy fear had to be earned. And the guys were exciting. Well, walking into the woods with the guys at night was an exciting thing to do. An unknown thing. There was probably a ping of freedom in the fact that, as you were walking into the woods guy-flanked, one of the guys being way too popular for you to be walking into the woods with, you realized your mother had no idea where you were at that moment, that you were outside her grasp in every way. This was probably enlivening.
I’ve been one of those guys walking into the woods flanking a girl carrying the liquor, so let’s go back there a moment. You be the girl carrying the liquor, I’ll be one of the three guys, and the tree line, blacker than the starless sky it anchors, is looming just ahead. The sound of a car door shutting behind us.
Maybe we both did things in those woods we would disavow (proposition by proposition) now. Maybe I grabbed your ass in the dark while you and my friend sat on a log, his arm around your shoulder. Maybe you jerked one, or two, or all of us off. Maybe you jerked me off. Maybe you took my two friends from both ends while I meandered in the dark kicking leaves around and swigging from the bottle, feeling both moth-sees-flame and moth-can’t-bring-self-to-smother-flame. Maybe you got so drunk you passed out on bony roots and one, or two, or all of us did stuff to you with the bottle. Since this is a conception story, and I have no kids, I probably didn’t fuck you. More than likely you made out with one of my friends while me and the other guy stood a few feet away, not really seeing you and friend number three going at it in the dark, or it was like the bystander effect where there’s a bomb in plain sight, but no one sets it off because each expects the other to. Or (also likely) the potential for wet sloppy havoc was so clear, so expected, that we all just laughed over our belt buckles. And you’d listed us pussies from that point forward and never hung out with us again. No more enough danger to make walking into the woods with us worth your while. So the conception happened on another night, a different set of guys, different bag of liquor, same you.
And now I’m in your living room with your daughter staring at me. She seems too old for the time that’s passed since high school and close enough to legal that her shorts and bare feet are making me uncomfortable. She’s long and has long black eyes and black hair and a head that measures: volleyball. Hell, you know what and how she is. She’s you when I last saw you.
“Is it sad?” she asks me.
I don’t know what that means.
“Your leg,” she says, “is it sad yet or not?”
Your other child is straddling my leg. He’s shirtless, wearing nothing but white boxerjocks, the kind athletes wear under uniforms. They’re stretchy poly fiber and too small for him, and he’s clenching my leg with his butt cheeks. I think you said on the phone he was five. He’s your youngest and she’s from the woods. They couldn’t look less alike. He’s Carmelite and shredded, a little weightlifter who hasn’t grown into his head yet. I want to ask you about this later but I know that would be too soon.
Your daughter is tending my sorrow with jokes, but that’s all she’s doing. I take this to mean I should sit still and take it. That she’ll report back to you how I did with your youngest. That you’ll debrief her when I drop you home for the night. So it bothers me that her eyes and mouth don’t match. Her brother’s crotch is biting my thigh muscle, making a tingling humid spot there, him pushing all his body heat down into it, laughing.
“Spider, get off him.”
I haul off and nail Spider in his athletic head. He goes flying. I feel his heels parted by the underside of my leg as he goes flying. His ribcage makes a sound like a harmonica when it hits the floor. I look over at your daughter. Her face tells me I’ve accomplished in half a second what you’ve failed to all their lives. Her right leg, crossed atop her left knee, is bouncing a sockless foot up and down.
Now she and I can talk.
When I ask, she says she likes school in a way that says she really doesn’t (“It’s all right”). I fire off some names of teachers, and some of them are still kicking. She has them. They’re feeding her the same shticks and synecdoches we chewed and swallowed and spit. Campus-adjacent hangouts have retained their our-day nicknames: “Rocker Corner,” “Baby Park,” “The Bleachers” is still “The Bleachers” even though the bleachers are gone.
We push from our armrests (hers, the love seat’s; mine, the leather lounger’s) and break for Spider, who is screaming, having just been applied lipstick by the hardwood floor. We stand him up and it’s-okay-it’s-okay him and I ask her Get a wet cloth! a second before she was going to run and do it anyway. There’s firecrackers going off inside him (I have a decent right jab), but he’ll be all right. She wipes his lips and face with the cloth and hugs him like I imagine you would. I find a tooth on the floor (he swallowed another, we’ll find out later) and I’m grateful for the dance music squirting from under your bedroom door.
“Look!” your daughter says, snatching the tooth from my hand and waitressing it.
Spider stops crying (because he can’t cry and look at the tooth at the same time). She talks to him like a puppy, and he’s sniffing and wiping at the sides of his eyes, and she takes his hand, and they head off down the hall to put it to bed.
You yell about us being gone down Prospect Ave. before I lose my mind.
Spider will wrap your legs in himself and cry into your skirt in a moment. Your legs will be smooth and smell foreign to him, and this will cause in him dread. He’ll roar snot into the crotch of your skirt and you’ll have to go back and change, this time silently. His red tender gums. I hear your clothes whooshing off then on, him talking to you while you do it.
Do I tell you about socking him in his head in my head? Just before his head went counterclockwise? Yanked his body with it? Because of the cramp? That he caused me? Let’s not be cute. He fell.
“He fell.”
He fell, and in the car, on our way to Artun’s Neighborhood Dok Shoons, you might start probing as to whether, based on this little test, I could and would be willing to shoulder your particular bag of everything. And what, if anything, did Elyse and I talk about while waiting?
I asked her if kids still hang in the woods over off 7th.
I know, I was tense. I mean, these are your kids, and I’m this guy coming in.
She said that they do. She has a football friend who stands on 7th and throws rocks into the underbrush because he likes the sound of breaking glass.
She didn’t say.
I did ask her that.
You really wanna know?
I’m a good girl.
Jason Hamilton runs the literary website Howlarium. His work has appeared in The Sun and The Mental Illness Happy Hour. He works for the Department of Social Services and lives, uncomfortably, in Northern California.
