Friday, Field Trip Day

The little boy is disgusted by the monkeys but adores the lions as his peers adore their older brothers and young uncles. Their bodies seem to spell out words to him, words he cannot understand, words he has not yet learned, long words that begin with soft esses and ells, then glide just as smoothly over rough kuhs and hard guhs without the slightest slip or flaw. They are slow and direct, they cannot be bothered by the little bugs that congregate near their manes and tails. They look in the direction they are headed, to the rock wall, to the water well, to who knows where.

The biggest male lion passes the boy’s shadow through the bars of the cage, two paws through his outstretched arm, the mane sliding into his shoulder, the shadows merge for a second, and he is a boy with a lion across his chest. Then paws stretch out of his ribcage, a tail brushing past his left hand and his little blue camera.

Judith, his mother, is standing in front of the kitchen sink, drying her own mother’s china with a tea towel. She feels she has not seen or touched any of these things—her mother, the china, the kitchen sink—for a while now. She rubs the plate hard, fast, her brown hair bucking and swaying from her head as her back and shoulders join the motion. If her son were there, he would think she was angry. At the dishes? At grandma? At something his father did or did not do? Again? But she is thinking about her son this afternoon, knowing deeply and quietly his wish to be a lion, admiring this quality in him, claiming it as a result of her influence, worrying what will happen when he discovers that boys don’t grow up to be lions after all.

She is the one who has given him his best qualities, she thinks as she rotates the dish against the towel with short flicks of her wrists. She supplied the natural creative talent, and she is the one who nurtures his imagination, who beams and grins and coos over the paintings and drawings, who has them framed professionally and hangs them next to the Matisse and Degas prints. Her husband has contributed mainly time, she decides. Which is certainly valuable, a good thing for a father to give a child. She has been glad about their life. Most days around this time, she is at her desk or at a meeting, and for a second she imagines what they must be doing.

Soon her husband will pick the child up since it is Friday, their day to “hang” as he puts it. Any other day, he would spend the early afternoon working, jamming with his musician friends, and pick the boy up from after-school. They would come home, have a snack, and he would put dinner on. Then he would retreat to his studio, the small shed off the side of the kitchen, and work on his songs. He would start them and stop them over and over, emerging absently only three or four times throughout the evening: to check the food, to stir it, to serve it and eat too much once she has arrived, to wash the dishes and eat some more, maybe to go to the bathroom a few hours later, and finally to drag his weight up the stairs at three or four in the morning and heave himself into bed beside her.

These days it’s a love song he’s been working on. She finds that she is least in love with him when his songs are about love. She cannot resist the urge to imagine that he is singing about someone else, some other woman. The “storm of sand after my desert rain” could not be her. This is someone smaller, with a pointier face and wider eyes. But when the songs buzzing through the shed walls are about other people’s products and services, she is inspired to love him well. He would think, for sure, that this is because the jingles bring money to the house and make him seem responsible, but that is not it. She feels these jingles showcase his true talent. He is not an artist, she feels, so much as he is a riddler. His poetry is unremarkable, but his ability to arrange collections of words—the names and phone numbers of carpet outlets, for example—and concepts like We won’t be undersold! and Our staff is well-trained and helpful! into short little snippets of song is astounding to her. During these times, about every other week when things are good, she is pleased with their life, the balance they have established: his gigs, her talent, her career, his work, their house, their marriage, their son.

These days it is a love song, but even so, there had almost been a moment of tenderness this morning. She woke up and thought for sure that she was right, that he was off sleeping with someone else because he was not in bed. She had not heard him lumbering up the stairs at dawn, she had not felt him sink into the bed beside her, causing her to roll back slightly in her sleep. She did not smell anything cooking in the kitchen when she woke up, did not hear him in the bathroom. He was with his love, his muse, she decided, and she would divorce him right away. Then when she saw the light on in the shed on her way out of the house, she was relieved and felt, for a second, an urge to pop her head into the shed door like a movie wife or a young girlfriend, to tell him to have a good day, to remind him that she would be home late, and perhaps even to blow him a kiss. But the child was almost late for school, and she for work, and the moment passed.

He is one of only three in his class whose fathers come to pick them up after school. It is mostly nannies from other countries, or babysitters. His father is a musician, and he comes to pick the child up every day from after-school. Some days, like today, Dad will come early, and the boy will not have to go to after-school where they feed him stale oatmeal cookies that turn to powder in his mouth on the first bite and do not let him do what he wants to do. There are no kids from his class in after-school. The kids here are larger kids that seem to sweat a lot and talk loud all the time. The teachers make them do activities, uninteresting things like tying cups together with yarn and pretending that it makes a telephone. They will not let him do what he wants to do. They will not let him sit and draw. They make him do activities that he hates forever. Time goes so slow that it becomes heavy on him, he gets dizzy, and he begins to feel that if he does not do something interesting, his skin will erupt into a blistering itch. This is one of the things he does not say to anyone. He does not know how to put the feeling into words, and even if he did, he is not sure he would say them.

There are a lot of things he doesn’t explain to anyone. He likes drawing mainly because he likes to hold the crayons between his pointer finger and his thumb, likes to peel away the tan-and-black, aqua-and-black, magenta-and-black paper in rough rivulets and dig his nails deep into the wax. It gives him a satisfaction he cannot name, one that he gets he can’t think where else. Maybe from pressing his tongue against his gums when one or two of his baby molars tingle and start to feel loose, or from biting the inside of his cheek lightly for who knows how long, maybe days, until the skin is salty and raw, then stopping for a little while, then biting some more. He would dig his fingernails deep into the colored wax, deep, deep, until the wax seemed to burrow canals under his nails right into those mysterious top pads of his fingertips, into his veins, up his arms and right to a place in the crook of his neck that was rarely ever touched by anything other than these nameless pleasures of his own making. These were the greatest satisfactions because on top of the wild tension and release they brought, they could be nothing but entirely private; even when he had tried to explain them to people, as he once did to his cousin Bettina as she was sculpting something that looked like a porch swing, he did not know the words to convey the feeling. All he could tell her was that it was very weird and very good. She gave him a tilted eyebrow look, which she held only for a second before returning to her clay, and this look confirmed his suspicion that this was a private feeling that could not be explained, both because the words were not there and because people could not or would not be bothered to understand them.

He wonders what makes these lions feel this way, and he is tempted to ask one of his classmates, but refrains. The class is moving toward the picnic tables, and he gathers that it must be time for lunch. He feels it is too early. He has just eaten breakfast not so long ago in the car with his mother, and he would rather stand here against the hot metal railing and think about the lions. But remembering the good ham sandwich his father packed for him, he decides it is okay that the time has come to eat.

For him, for now, time is an unfathomable expanse drawn in bold colors: green and brown for trees, brown for dirt, brown for the hair of his mother and his sister and himself. Red for apples and farmhouses, blue for water and skies. Time holds all of these things just out of his reach, just beyond his understanding of the red and green numbers on the clocks that can never go past a certain point, never to 67, their building number, or 92, the number of their street.

Time does hold promises, though. It promises that one day soon will be his birthday, and that eventually he will be able to tie his shoes the real way, without having to loop each lace first into bunny ears and then tie them together. It promises that he will one day become all of the things he feels for the lion in front of him, that this is why he feels these things in the first place. He will one day walk like a lion on two legs, pass between the shadows and keep his eyes forward, focused on something important that only he needs to know. Time promises that soon the class will pile onto the bus where he will sit next to fat Jordan Richard and talk about television shows. Time promises that they will return to the classroom, that it will smell the same way it smelled when they left, and that before long his father will come to pick him up and take him home. He will not have to go to after-school today. They will stop for Chinese food on the way home, since this is Friday, field trip day, his mother’s late night at work.

She does not like her husband’s friends. She runs hot water in the basin and squeezes the dish liquid bottle hard so that half the contents spew into the stream and bubbles spring up almost instantly. Her husband’s friends are all fat, all irresponsible, as far as she is concerned. None of them have changed since college. None of them have given up their addictions, none of them have figured out how to provide for anyone as well as her husband has. They should look to him as a role model, but she is sure they don’t. They see him as a buddy, because they are still in the habit of having buddies. They call him in the afternoon to jam, to play, but really just to hang out and eat pizza and drink beer. When they can’t reach him, they call her, though she and he are rarely together because she works.

The one friend, Billy, called her four or five times this morning. It was a busy morning. She did not pick up the phone. She did not have time to check her messages before lunch, but by 12:10 she was in the car, on the phone, driving, dialing, moving dizzily toward home. She had found it hard to hold the phone, she remembers now, gripping a clean soup bowl firmly and dunking it into the soapy water. She had a hard time seeing the numbers on the phone, and knowing whom to dial. She had trouble remembering how to press the buttons with her fingers and press and release the gas with her foot at the same time. She had found herself on the phone with Billy, somehow, who told her things she hadn’t understood then and cannot remember now, now that she is home with the bubbles and running water and the china that refuses to get clean. No matter, though, she will wash these dishes again, and she will think. She will remember her mother’s advice on how to clean good china. She will remember her middle name, she will remember Billy’s messages this morning. Nine-something AM, just after the start of a meeting, Billy: Wondering where he is, we had to pitch an idea to someone, he’s late, call back. Closer to 10, Billy: Jude, hey, hoping nothing’s wrong, call back. Some time later, a message, or maybe many, Billy: Jude, uh, don’t have your work number, at the house, listen… uh. This she remembers. She remembers the length of his stammer, the porousness of his voice as his uhh seeped through the phone, through her ears, over her mind like coffee over gravel, come, call, back, come, pick up, shit.

He always said he would have a heart attack. It was a pun to him. He meant his tortured artist’s soul would be overwhelmed, that his heart would eventually snap completely out of his control and attack him for all the love he helped it to produce and forced it to dole out, much of which, he felt, was never returned, leaving, as he saw it, holes which would breed anger, which would germinate into little heart armies, which would eventually overthrow him. He would laugh about it, and she would tell him to stop smoking, to stop drinking, to stop gaining weight.

But she cannot think too much about these things because she will drop the dishes, or she will miss spots of grease and they will not be clean and she will have to wash them again. People will be coming over in a few days, and she will need to serve them food on clean dishes. She has to run the water, she has to scrub, to rinse, to wash, to dry, to soap up. She does not have to remember what Billy said, who Billy is, what happened when she turned the corner and saw her door, her front door, which looked so strange and made her wonder if she was on the right street, if this was her house after all. She does not have to remember the date, and she does not have to remember the time, just for a moment.

The nannies have all come. The mothers have all come with their big smiles and hugs. The fathers have come, but not his. The after-school children have already gone down to the basement to be fed powdery cookies and juice from a can. The boy sits on the bench in the office while they call his mother. He tells them to call his father because sometimes his mother is at work and does not get to answer the phone. They call more people, someone, he does not know who. The big black clock is moving to a rhythm, he has noticed, and if he pays attention he can move with it. He can click his tongue or blink his eyes or bite his teeth along with it, and he can predict where it will be in three bites, four. Maybe his mother will come instead, he thinks. Maybe she will surprise him, and maybe she will cook dinner instead of take-out. He would rather have take-out, but she is a better cook than Dad, at least. Sometimes he wishes she were the musician instead of Dad, because he likes the way her meat is soft and juicy and easy to chew, and he even likes the taste of her broccoli when he dips it in the juice from the steak. But in the office, the secretary tells someone else he will have to go down to after-school. He is not surprised, but he is something—mad, disappointed, let down. Some adult will come, will hold his hand and walk him down into the basement. He would rather do almost anything else.

He would rather sit and learn this clock. He would rather rub his fingers along the ridges of the corduroy bench cushion until his father arrives. He would rather not have to hold the hand of the secretary or some other person, a hand that would be huge and strange and probably cold or sweaty. He would rather not have that hand lead him to a place he suddenly hates more than anything in the world. He looks out the window, down the long hallway to the stairwell. He hates this hallway now, almost as much as he hates after-school itself. He hates the white line in the middle of the floor, hates the muraled walls on either side. There are children smiling on these walls, different colors of skin and shirts. There are people playing, holding their arms out, smiling to the center of the hallway, but he walks straight, still looking at the stairwell. He thinks about putting his hands in his pocket so the secretary will not come up behind him and grab them, but instead he keeps them to his side. He walks not slow but not fast, toward his afternoon. No matter the activity, he decides, no matter the puzzle-making or puppet show, he will find a way to draw—cameras, lions, rock walls, wells. He walks straight and thinks of these things.