The scuba masks were still in the toy box when a January blizzard shut down the city. Katherine came home on Friday night with a family-sized take-and-bake pizza, two magnums of wine, and a stack of DVDs. We hunkered down, prepared to laze away the weekend in our sweatpants. Between movies and spells of preemptive snow shoveling (I’d learned my lesson), Galen and I hauled the train table to the center of the living room where, with the help of Lincoln Log girders and Lego support trusses, we extended the Isle of Sodor’s railway infrastructure from its hilltop perch down to the rug and through the legs of the couch. A single engine could make the drop without derailing, but any train pulling a payload inevitably resulted in a mass-casualty incident. We lengthened the decline and reduced the pitch angle, and I swear we were on the verge of seeing a five-car carriage cross Dead Man’s Gulch, disappear beneath the couch, and reemerge on the other side powered by nothing more than Newton’s first law of motion, when Hayden stomped into the living room like Godzilla through Tokyo and laid waste to the metropolis.
“Hayden!” Galen screamed.
Hayden squealed and dashed up the stairs, Galen in hot pursuit. Their feet thundered across the ceiling. A door slammed. Hayden cried out in pain. In our house, vengeance rode hard on the heels of every provocation.
Hayden may have struck first, but the attack didn’t occur in a vacuum. A long-simmering tension had been escalating for weeks, rooted in nothing more complicated than prolonged proximity and cold weather. Sitting on the couch, Galen would, apropos of nothing, lick his finger and plunge it into his brother’s ear. A few hours later, we’d find Galen’s Lightning McQueen underwear, his all-time favorite pair, floating in the crapper. Not yet four, Hayden was developing a keen and sophisticated capacity for ironic revenge.
Even Uno couldn’t calm them down. On Saturday night, we played five games rather than our usual three to make sure both boys notched a win, but long after the extended rigmarole of tucking them in and creeping slowly downstairs, Katherine and I could hear the boys jumping on their beds and taunting each other from behind their doors. At first light, while Katherine and I slept, Galen slipped across enemy lines and mounted a surprise attack. I woke up to Hayden screaming and had to pull the boys apart before I’d had my first cup of coffee. A good portent it did not make.
By Sunday afternoon, the snow had thinned out, but the house’s internal engine was running into the red zone. The Packers played at three, which meant a window of opportunity for grocery shopping and a trip to the YMCA. “I’ll shop,” Katherine said, “but only if I can go alone.”
In the household division of labor, grocery shopping was the chore I liked the least. I hated spending money as matters of principle, history, and family identity. As a devoted garage-sale patron, my dad routinely came home with brown grocery bags stuffed with three-quarter filled bottles of shampoo and body wash and shaving cream, a year’s worth of slightly used shower supplies he’d picked off someone’s lawn for a dollar. I’d also known him to buy six-packs of beer, water sealant, cans of WD-40. If someone was willing to sell it, he was willing to buy, provided he could pay out of his coin tray. Certain things, like brooms, he refused to buy altogether. He plucked them from trash cans when his neighbors deemed them too worn to be of further use. I had adopted several of his tactics over the years as a means of survival. The year Katherine was pregnant with Galen, we’d been so broke that we’d squirreled home the leftovers from a funeral, ate up what we could, and returned all the unopened boxes of Triscuits and fridge-packs of soda to the grocery store for enough credit to buy a week’s worth of lunch meat and cheese. Seven winters later and gainfully employed, I still had a hard time loading up a cart without my heartbeat two-stepping over the cost.
Katherine and I had struck a deal years earlier: She’d run the gauntlet at Woodman’s while I took the boys to the YMCA to swim. For the most part I was happy with the arrangement, but after the pent-up chaos of the weekend, the prospect of managing the boys by myself felt like the short straw. I deserved added concessions.
“Such as?” Katherine asked, her dark eyebrows raised.
“You make dinner.”
“Like I wouldn’t anyway? Unless I wanted eggs for supper.”
“Or spaghetti,” I said. I was good at spaghetti.
She opened the freezer and peered inside, a cloud of icy vapor around her head. “I’ll make dinner, but you do the dishes.”
“Don’t forget the kids will come home showered and in their jammies,” I said.
“Those are my terms.”
I extended my hand. “I accept.”
She curled her fingers around my palm. “Anything else?”
Snow was falling again. I’d have to shovel at least one more time before the day was finished. That should count for something. I wiggled my eyebrows. “Maybe later . . . you know.”
She leaned in to kiss me goodbye, her car keys jangling in her jacket pocket. She pressed her cheek to mine and whispered in my ear, “For a writer, you suck at sweet talk.”
Not so long ago, a snowbound weekend was all the romantic enticement we needed. The house we rented in Utah had a wood-burning fireplace and a video store and decent Italian restaurant within walking distance, and no matter how much snow came down, Katherine’s Jeep could go practically anywhere. So long as the canyon roads stayed open, we could always get into the mountains. When we couldn’t afford lift tickets, we could find a trail to snowshoe. We snowshoed so much I grew to love it at least as much as skiing, if not more. It was quiet for one thing, often transcendentally so, as though we’d stepped across an invisible threshold into an outdoor sound booth. The flocked pines and cedars creaked as the snow piled on their boughs, but noises from farther away couldn’t pierce the bubble. We’d pack a thermos of hot tea sweetened with milk and sugar and hike until we could no longer hear the highway, and then hike farther until one of us fell over in the snow. The snowfall unlocked the earthy smell of the woods and granite, and everywhere inside our perimeter the mountains rose up, so large and enveloping, it felt to me as though we were the only two people on Earth. As I neared the end of my degree and commenced my program of earnest worry about finding a teaching job, Katherine and I agreed, while sipping tea in a snowbank, that if the academic job market came up snake eyes, we’d join the Peace Corps or teach English in Asia, maybe rotate back to the States after a few years to teach at a prep school nestled in an idyllic New England hamlet. To find our way back to the car, we had only to follow our own shoe prints, but it sometimes felt to me that if we kept going forward through the untrampled snow, we’d eventually go up and over the mountains and come down into another world, one where anything was possible.
Before the boys came along, I had a general, if vague, conception of the attention children required. But I’d conceived of children’s needs solely in physical terms. Babies had to be fed, changed, and toted from place to place. Kids were more mobile but must be given food and watched after closely, lest they do themselves or others harm. What I did not anticipate was how much the boys would consume my inner life. Not only did I find it difficult not to think about them, my mind drifting during the day to how they were faring at nursery care or school, or staring down as they slept and wondering what they might be dreaming about, I also found I could no longer entertain a single one of my old fantasies about reinventing myself. The boys’ abilities to imagine the far-flung splendors of the world ironically relied on a stable home, a stable conception of Mom and Dad; they needed us to be the people they thought they knew in order to become the people they were meant to be. Every parent is a lighthouse on the shore of their children’s lives. Most of the time I accepted the trade-off.
We scanned our membership card at the front desk of the YMCA and jostled down the corridor toward the pool. Our path took us past the large glassed-in cage known as the “Family Fun Center,” containing an expansive climbing set outfitted with narrow tubes, plague-infected netting, and Plexiglas gunners’ turrets where trapped children pressed their faces against the plastic and pleaded for help. The crawl-through tubes were way too small for a regulation-sized adult (about half the size of a Wisconsin-sized adult between the months of November and April), so once a kid went in, he or she could either come out the other side or stay there forever. The Family Fun Center, like nearly everything that bore the “family” label, was only actually fun for the smallest members of the clan. The rest of the family suffered. The glass walls made the chamber deafeningly loud, cries from the criminally insane rained down from the upper tubes, and the steady production of soiled diapers perfumed the space. Children weren’t allowed to play inside without direct supervision, but given the tight dimensions the Y had allotted for the space, the Family Fun Center lacked a single chair. Parents hugged their knees on blue tumbling mats, heads slumped forward as though awaiting the plunge of a guillotine. One mom lay supine, arms and legs splayed and her head buried beneath her fleece as if the blade had already struck. The lone dad in the room made eye contact. Help me, his eyes said. I ushered the boys quickly past the windows, before they asked to go inside.
We hung our jackets and jeans in a locker, and I unfolded the boys’ swimming suits from my duffel bag. Hayden grew incensed when he saw which suit I’d packed for him—his green striped trunks instead of his Finding Nemo trunks. He’d eagerly stripped out of his clothes but refused to don his swimming attire. “No!” he yelled. “I’m not wearing that one!”
“It’s the only suit I have for you.”
“I hate it,” he said, teeth bared. He bolted, naked, for a toilet stall. The metal latch clicked shut behind him.
Galen looked at me, confused. “What do we do now?”
“We wait,” I said. The toilet stall didn’t have a back door, and I had all of Hayden’s clothes. As far as I could tell, I had the upper hand.
Thirty seconds later, the latch released and Hayden reemerged. I held the green trunks open by the waistband, and he slid one foot inside. From the bottom of the bag I produced Dad’s scuba masks. Here, perhaps, they might be of some use. If not, we could always leave them on the bottom of the pool.
Through the showers and out to the pool deck. The boys had long ago declared the shallow water for babies, and they plunged into the deep end before the lifeguard, a pimply adolescent with Martin Scorsese eyebrows, could head them off. “Kids under ten aren’t allowed in the deep end,” he said.
“These boys can swim,” I said. “I taught them myself.”
When it came to swimming, I was a complete and unabashed snob. Snobbery is rarely a good quality in any man or woman, and most of the time I made a conscious effort to counteract it. The only person who’d ever called me “doctor,” even though I had the degree to warrant the moniker, was my mother, and she did it to tease me. Students either called me “Mister” or “McGlynn.” I preferred the latter, unaccompanied by the former. But around water, my snobbish impulses were allowed free reign. I’d yanked Hayden out of swimming lessons last year after his teacher patently refused to advance him from the Tadpoles group to the Guppies because, in her words, Hayden “spent too much time underwater.” As though that weren’t the entire point. Under my tutelage, he’d flourished.
“They’re good swimmers,” I said to the lifeguard.
“They’ll have to take the deep-water test,” he said. “They have to tread water for a whole minute without touching the side.”
The way he said it, it sounded like the first task at Navy Seals training camp. “I think they can handle it,” I said.
I stood on the tiled deck beside the guard and kept the time. Hayden failed his first attempt on a technicality: he grew bored treading with his head above water and about halfway through his minute, made a dive for the bottom. The guard insisted his head had to stay up the entire time. I demanded a retest. The second time, he passed.
Jumping into a pool in which the boys were swimming was a little like throwing a bucket of chum into a frenzy of sharks. As soon as my feet broke the surface, they lunged for my hands, my arms, anything they could grab. Hayden followed me below the surface, slithered between my legs, and bit me on the calf. “What did you do that for?” I asked when we came up.
“I want to play Starbucks,” he said.
Playing Starbucks consisted of Hayden paddling to the corner of the deep end where he extended his arms backward, one hand anchored on each wall, and leaned his chest and head forward in a manner uncannily similar to a drive-thru barista. “What can I get started for you?” he asked with a smile.
“I guess I’ll have a coffee.”
“How about a grande nonfat vanilla latte with no whip?”
“Is that what you’re making today?”
He nodded.
“That sounds fine,” I said.
He turned his back and for a moment appeared very busy at the corner. When he finished, he choo-chooed himself along the coping, the invisible cup in his right hand and carefully held above the waterline. He passed it to me and said, “Here you go, sir.”
I took a long sip. “No whip, huh? How often do you and Mom go to Starbucks?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it sure is a lot.”
Buzzed on pretend coffee, the boys next wanted to play “elevator” by holding onto my shoulders as I slid down the wall toward the bottom. Despite their many attempts, neither Galen nor Hayden had quite figured out how to propel himself all the way to the floor of the twelve-foot tank. They relied on me to get them there. As a boy, I’d learned to hold my breath exactly this same way, by clutching my father’s shoulders as he plunged toward the pump grates at the deep end of our neighborhood pool. I could recall the panic I felt when he dove, a feeling similar to being pulled under, except that I was the one hanging on. I could feel the tension in the boys’ grips, their small fingers digging into my skin, as we neared the bottom. Their stubborn refusal to let go. It’s a father’s job, I suppose, to lead his sons into the deep end, to show them that every abyss eventually has a bottom, to teach them not to fear it.
The boys didn’t fear the bottom; they just couldn’t touch it. Once their fingers grazed the tiles, they rocketed back to the surface inside a swirl of bubbles, leaving me alone on the bottom. At last I was enclosed in a silence as complete as the one I’d found on the mountain trails in Utah. No place had ever been more tranquil or restorative for me than the water. Not even the mountains. Water was where I went first in times of anxiety or sadness, and no trip away from home was complete without a swim. Oceans, lakes, rivers, pools—at a certain depth it all felt like the same water, a viscous conduit for every bygone dream and harebrained idea, every grand design and foolish hope. Sunday afternoons at the pool were as much about me as they were about trying to wear the crazy out of the boys. At the nadir of the YMCA pool in Appleton, Wisconsin, on a winter Sunday afternoon, I could recover a little of my imaginative life, and a few of the possible alternative futures that had once, a long time ago, seemed so infinite.
But also: watching the boys scurry up the rungs of the metal ladder and disappear from view, it struck me that the present would give way to my real future all too soon. In a few years, the boys would become more interested in spending time with their friends than with Mom and Dad, and a few years after that, they’d move away. Before I knew it, my Sundays would be as quiet as they once were. I’d be free to snowshoe for as long as I wanted, to investigate the realm beyond the trees without anyone whining or tugging at my pant leg or plopping down in the snow and refusing to go one step farther. I could foresee the day when I’d miss the boys clinging to my neck, chomping on my calf.
I called their names, but my words bubbled silently toward the water’s mirrored surface.
Right when I started to feel sad, Galen dove in. His eyes were enormous behind the pane of the scuba mask, and his lips were pressed flat like a fish’s. He grabbed my hair in his fist and hauled me up, back to the surface. Back to now.