Katherine and I were in the kitchen on a chilly Saturday afternoon in April when we heard Hayden say it. The word slithered off his tongue.
“Give me the remote control, you ass.”
Katherine had been chopping onions and leeks on the cutting board, sliding the bits into the pot on the stove. I was peeling potatoes at the sink. The word breezed through the kitchen, and Katherine’s knife paused in midair. She canted an ear toward the living room but turned her eyes toward me. Her dark eyebrows disappeared beneath the curtain of her bangs. “Did he say what I think he said?” she asked.
I’d known the echoes of our house to warp sounds as they ricocheted off the hardwood and turned the corner from the other rooms. Some noises, like sitcom laugh tracks and the voice of Special Agent Oso came through vexingly undistorted, while others disappeared into the static waves of the house. The boys’ voices were smack in the center of the spectrum, always audible but often confused, and I’d been known to hear things they hadn’t actually said. The cauldron of water on the stove didn’t help, either.
It sounded like Hayden, but I couldn’t be sure.
Hayden saved us the trouble of having to guess. “Give it here, you ass,” he said.
Katherine laid her knife on the board and dried her hands on the dish towel before methodically draping it over the edge of the sink. She moved with great deliberation from the sink, past the stove, into the hallway. “Come in here,” she called. “Right now.”
Hayden moseyed around the corner. He was five years old, his dirty blond hair was overdue for a haircut, and he was naked except for his Transformers underpants, which he wore backward, the fly a kind of thong between his plump cheeks. The outfit, or lack of one, was one of the contradictions of child-rearing every parent sooner or later encountered: the refusal to dress for the weather. So long as the mercury hovered below thirty, Hayden wouldn’t wear clothes. As soon as hot weather hit, he’d suddenly discover his drawer of sweaters. On the sultriest nights, when I showered before bed to feel the cold water against my skin, I’d find Hayden asleep in a woolen turtleneck and fleece pants, sweating like a wrestler trying to drop weight before a match. And despite our persistent arguments that undies were most comfortable when worn the right way, he insisted on wearing them backward. He cared less about comfort than seeing Optimus Prime flexing his metallurgic muscles across the seat.
Hayden’s thumb plugged his mouth, and he was blithely dismissive of his mother’s tone and not in the slightest bit worried about the consequences for swearing. In all fairness, I didn’t expect the punishment to be great. Let’s be honest: Few things are funnier than profanity in the mouths of babes.
Katherine dropped to a knee. “We don’t use that word,” she said.
“What word?” he asked.
“The bad word you used.”
“Which one?”
“You know which one.” Katherine had been fighting hard to keep it together, but eye contact and the sweet breath of her baby made it nearly impossible not to laugh. She stood and turned toward the coffee pot.
I tried to play it straight. “See what bad words do?” I asked. “They make Mom cry.”
Hayden slid his thumb back inside his mouth. “It doesn’t look like she’s crying,” he said, his lips like a camel’s around his wrinkled thumb. Katherine leaned her forehead against the cupboard, her shoulders shaking.
“Say you’re sorry,” I said.
He extracted his thumb and bared his baby teeth. Braces were a future expense to which I was already resigned. “I’m not sorry,” he said. “Galen sucks. He’s a big, big ass.”
Katherine turned around, cheeks and forehead pomegranate-colored and moist with steam from the stock pot roiling on the stove. “Who taught you those words?” she demanded. I crossed my arms and tried to play the part of silent backup. Mom lays down the law, and Dad brings the muscle. It was a posture I succeeded in holding for only a few seconds before I realized Katherine wasn’t waiting for Hayden’s answer. She wasn’t even looking at him. Her gaze was aimed at me.
I’d loved swear words for as long as I’d been able to talk. Any word deemed inappropriate for public voice felt imbued with magical properties that gave it a special place in the lexicon. But words themselves had long been a source of wonder. I could remember standing in my backyard when I was maybe seven or eight marveling over the word shovel. The more I said shovel aloud, the more it began to sound strange. Say shovel slowly and it sounds like a grunt; yell it and it sounds like an insult. A dig. When I discovered a cottonmouth coiled on the back patio, my dad used the long-handled spade to separate the snake’s head from its body in a single, searing blow. Well into adulthood, the word and the tool both retained an air of danger and violence.
Swear words I found even more fascinating. They were the scantily clad dancers gyrating in the shadows behind the lead singer, all flesh and titillation and slander, the very things I ought not to have noticed and therefore ogled with my mouth hanging open. They were language candy: nutritionally worthless, an embarrassment when you pulled one out of your lunch box, and yet so sweet on your lips.
As my parents’ marriage careened toward its ultimate demise, swearing in my family, especially among my uncles and grandfather, became a kind of Dadaistic performance art, the exhibition of bluster mixed with the spontaneous eruption of rage. My uncles could barely utter whole words without pausing to swear. They were fond of unbe-fuckin’-lievable, while my stepdad, once he came on the scene, introduced guaran-damn-tee to the batting order. My grandfather, a longtime Disney fan, favored Mickey fuckin’ Mouse. My mom’s divorce lawyer was Mickey fuckin’ Mouse; the television was Mickey fuckin’ Mouse (or else the fucking boob tube); the placement of the pin on the seventh green was Mickey fuckin’ Mouse. My father usually earned a double: Fuckin’ Mickey fuckin’ Mouse.
By the time Dad moved to California, he’d done his best to make his life new again. My stepmom, a former evangelical missionary, saw the move to California, where she’d grown up, as an opportunity to return to the ministry. Within months of their arrival, she became the children’s pastor of a small church in Laguna Beach; a year later, she moved to a much larger congregation in Laguna Hills, a few miles inland. She rarely if ever swore and relied on antiquated words like cross and shoot fire to see her through the rough patches. She once, in anger, used the word shit in a restaurant in Tijuana, where we’d gone for the day. If I needed further proof that the border city was a den of iniquities, that pretty much iced it.
My dad wore a cross beside the gold initials charm on the chain around his neck and prayed with his eyes closed before every meal. He swore much less than before, and rarely in my stepmother’s presence. It was different when we were alone. In the ocean or sealed up inside his car on the freeway, language could roam wherever it pleased. We talked about school and swimming, but also about the divorce and the nasty things the family in Texas still said about him. On occasion he’d release a torrent of swear words intended to make me laugh as well as to remind me that despite all the slander from back home, the miles between us and his newfound faith, he was still him. Swear words thus became a language of trust, a kind of Boolean algorithm for intimacy: If I could use without reprisal language that would get me in trouble elsewhere, then I could safely admit to those parts of myself that I felt uncertain about or embarrassed by—which, at thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, included pretty much everything. If Dad swore, then it meant he was telling the truth. If I could handle the conversation’s language, in other words, then I could also handle its content.
As a result, I never lied to my father as an adolescent, and I believe he didn’t lie to me, either. To this day, there’s a part of me that continues to view swear words as litmus tests for truth-telling, even if I also recognize that such a test is vulnerable to false positives.
It was entirely possible, as Katherine assumed, that the boys learned to swear from me. Maybe it was the night I recounted an argument at work, believing the boys were in bed when they were huddled together on the staircase. But no word, obscene or otherwise, springs from a single source; like the flu, they’re transmitted by doorknobs and countertops. Chances were greater that an older kid on the playground first passed the words to Galen, who infected his little brother, who spread them around his kindergarten class until his teacher, a few weeks after the episode in the kitchen, called us at home.
“The first time Hayden used the F-word, I tried to laugh it off,” the teacher said. “None of the kids knew what it meant anyway. But now the other children are asking me to explain it.”
“He used that word in school?” Katherine asked. Her face was once again turning red.
“I’m afraid so,” the teacher said.
The week before, Hayden had fallen asleep while riding in the shopping cart. Today his teacher was calling to tell us he said fuck in class. It was a contradiction I couldn’t reconcile.
“Thanks for letting us know,” Katherine said. “We’ll take care of it.” She pointed at me. You take care of it.
Hayden perceived the seriousness of the moment by the look on my face when I appeared in his bedroom door. Or else he’d figured out on his own that saying fuck in kindergarten would eventually come back to bite him in his backward-underwear-clad butt. Either way, he didn’t resist. I held out my hand, and he took it, sliding from his mattress to the carpet and walking beside me to the bathroom like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. I flipped on the light and sat down on the toilet lid. Hayden cupped his hand over the coping of the pedestal sink. He waited for me to make the first move. The bar of Irish Spring lay on its grated tray on the corner of the bathtub, unused since the morning and dried out by the heat from the furnace. I bounced the bar of soap in my palm. “If you won’t stop saying bad words,” I said, “I’m going to have to wash out your mouth. Do you think it tastes good?”
He slid his thumb into his mouth and shrugged.
“Taste it,” I said. I held the bar close to his mouth.
His chin doubled as his eyes turned to saucers. “You first.”
I raised the bar to my nose and gave it a good sniff. It smelled almost minty. How bad could it really taste? I dragged my tongue across the slightly rippled arch. It was much worse than I imagined, bitter and obliterating. I tossed the bar into the tub and dove for the faucet, running the water at full blast.
“Yucky,” I said to Hayden, sticking out my tongue. “No good.”
I dried my chin on the towel, collected the bar, and held it out to him. “Your turn.”
“No way,” he said. He turned and bolted for the staircase. I could hear him screaming all the way up the stairs, “No way, no way, no way.”
“No more swear words,” I called after him. I leaned over the sink to further flush the soap from my taste buds. I squeezed a huge glob of toothpaste onto my brush and worked up a mouth full of minty foam and swabbed my tongue until I about gagged. I caught my reflection in the mirror, the goatee of white on my chin elongating and detaching and splattering against the basin. The absurdity of my condition was a lesson I’d been trying to laugh off instead of learn. Regardless of where Hayden had learned to swear, the swearing needed to stop, and not only from him. I needed to watch my big mouth.
Katherine stood in the kitchen with her arms crossed, leaning against the counter in the corner between the dishwasher and the toaster. The spot, I’d learned over the years, had a number of advantages, including clear views of both the back door and the doorway to the hall and quick access to the block of knives. Katherine looked a little like a boxer in the corner of a ring waiting for the ding of the bell. “I can’t believe he said that,” she said. “At school.”
“Well,” I said.
“Well, what?” she said. An entire argument took place within those three words.
A teacher calling Mom and Dad was always a cause for alarm. I remembered the times a teacher called my mother (and once, after I forged my mother’s signature on a disciplinary report, my dad at his office) and the sheer terror they incited in me. Thirty years later, the teacher calling home still produced a sinking feeling in both Katherine and me, as though we were the ones in trouble. Over the last several years, as Galen moved from kindergarten through first and second grades, teachers had called at least a few times a year to discuss incidents of bad behavior in class. Dead Santa had been only the beginning. In nearly every case, the incidents—running the gamut from minor infractions like talking too much at the craft table to major offenses like throwing wood chips on the playground—had provided a pretext for hinting (always a hint, never a direct hypothesis) that Galen’s outbursts and impertinence were signs of ADHD, a diagnosis I resisted tooth and nail. Galen was a young boy, I countered, squirrely and Irish and emotional. I was so much the same way that my eighth-grade English teacher bought me a poster of Taz, the Tasmanian Devil in Looney Tunes, because she said it reminded her of me. I’d outgrown it, sort of, and I believed Galen would, too. Youthful, boyish energy was not a disorder.
Disorder was a word I’d gnawed on quite a bit, in anger and in fear. The word contained the stigma it projected, and to be saddled with a disorder meant talk of separate classes and special schools, medications and therapies, a limit to what could be expected of and hoped for him. That was the problem with language: It had the power to both define and confine us. By using ugly words, the boys exposed themselves to having the same ugliness used against them. The days I picked up the boys from school, I watched the other parents and wondered what they’d heard. Would another kindergartner point at Hayden and finger him as the bad apple? As much as I told myself that I didn’t give a lick what people thought, the truth was that I wanted to protect the boys from judgment and negative opinion. In my secret fantasies, they’d one day run for office—hell, maybe even president—as crusaders for justice and fairness and universal health care. I wanted to ensure that no amount of opposition research would turn up anything against them. The world would see them as the good people I already knew them to be.
It would be several years before the Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tapes of Donald Trump bragging to Billy Bush about grabbing women by the pussy (though the conversation itself had, by that time, taken place years earlier). When the recordings did surface, I was struck by Trump’s characterization of the lewd language as “locker room banter”: the kind of randy, not-fit-for-public talk that takes place among men, especially young men, when they’re sequestered from women. The pleasure of locker room banter was in saying the very things one wasn’t supposed to say in mixed company. The pleasure was its badness. It wasn’t so unlike my conversations in the car with my dad.
Trump was hardly the first public figure caught on tape saying awful things, and long before the recordings came to light, I understood that the line between run-of-the-mill, back-of-the-garage swear words and the language of misogyny and homophobia and prejudice was exceedingly thin. Around the time Hayden’s teacher called us, I’d seen a sign for sale at the supermarket, in a rack of discounted party decorations left over from the last Super Bowl. The plastic sign had been molded to looked like a riveted steel plate, reminiscent of a MEN WORKING sign. Only this one read, MAN CAVE: NOT MUCH THINKIN’, JUST A WHOLE LOT OF DRINKIN’. My first thought had been, Who in their right mind would hang such a thing in his house? Now, searching for a way to put the kibosh on the kids’ swearing, I thought something else. Masculinity didn’t have to be violent to be toxic. It needed only to be thoughtless.
I considered the usual tricks, like a swear jar. The boys didn’t have any money, so a swear jar would likely have ended up costing me more than it punished them. For a while, an overheard swear word was an automatic ticket to walking the dog, which made our poor little beagle a pawn in a conflict she had nothing to do with and doomed her to getting hauled around the block by an enraged grade-schooler muttering that his piece-of-shit suck-ass brother was the true criminal while he’d been acting in self-defense. Hayden thankfully swore less at school, but every neighbor on our block likely heard him speak in a manner unbecoming of a kindergartner.
Near the end of May, we were driving to a wedding in Saint Paul, Minnesota. After four hours in the car, I could feel the boys growing amped in the back seat, whispering “sucks” and “balls” under their breath, their language steadily creeping toward the gutter. This time, instead of trying to stop the swearing, I decided to let it out. I turned off the radio. “See that bridge up there?” I said. “That’s the state border. You can swear until we’re across.”
“We can say anything we want?” Galen asked. “Anything at all?”
“Only as long as we’re on the bridge,” I said. “It stops once we’re on the other side. Got it?” In the rearview, the boys nodded and grinned.
The car cleared the trees. Below us was Lake Saint Croix, blue and gleaming and dotted with boats. “Fire at will.”
Galen leaned forward and shouted, almost right in my ear. “Fucking asshole!”
I swerved hard toward the suspension cables but managed to pull the car back to center. Galen was slapping his knee, his eyes squeezed tight.
“Does it always have to be that word?” Katherine asked, her head against the window.
“Shit nuts,” Hayden said.
“Buttohmygoddamn!” Galen howled.
“Sexy!” Hayden said.
“Sexy?” I said. Our eyes met in the mirror.
“You’re sexy, Dad.” The look on his face said the word wasn’t a compliment.
This was how their swearing had been all along: compliments turned into insults, the profane spliced together with the banal. Their cursing was an experiment in the ways language—and the thoughts that preceded words—could be bent and repurposed. Swear words, if nothing else, had volume; say one aloud and someone, somewhere, would take notice. The boys were figuring out which words were polite and which words rose up against the manners that made us too compliant, too willing to do what we’re told, too willing to accept the world the way it was rather than how it might or ought to be. Some things in life were obscene enough to warrant protest. And because we were in the car, I also hoped they’d learn the same lesson that I had years before: There was nothing they couldn’t say to me. A broken heart, a lost job, a run-in with the police, not to mention all the worse things I tried not to imagine. I wanted to be the one they talked to, no matter what they had to tell me.
A hundred yards before the bridge ran out, Hayden swallowed hard enough to squeak in one more. “Holy crab cakes!” he shouted. He pumped his fist, as though this were the phrase he’d been waiting all day to say, the brass ring on the swearing carousel. The fact that “holy crab cakes” wasn’t actually a swear word didn’t matter. I’d given him a chance to speak.
He and Galen sat back against their booster seats. The river swept along beneath us. Katherine said, “Now that that’s done, how about some goddamned music?” The boys squealed, and a few seconds later we crossed into Minnesota, a car full of outlaws.