By Murray Farish
George and Miranda Putnam have been called to another meeting at their son’s school. It’s hard for Miranda to get off work, but she’s going to be there. For George, it’s no problem, and there’s a part of him that’s glad for something to do. There’s a part of him that’s glad to have another grievance to nurse deep into the night. For Miranda, in this economy, this is all a real inconvenience.
Because what are they going to learn at this meeting that they didn’t learn at the meeting earlier this school year, or the five meetings last year, or the three the year before that?
What they learn, George and Miranda, what they always learn, is that their eight-year-old son, Archie, is continuing to struggle with impulsivity issues, focus problems, inappropriate behavior. A teacher shows George and Miranda a plastic bag she keeps on her desk, filled with the work Archie hasn’t finished. He’s simply incapable of completing his work. No one says ADD or ADHD. George and Miranda have noted the way the teachers and counselors and the principal avoid those terms, probably because there are medical and perhaps even legal points involved.
“But there are some not-so-fine points involved in a word like incapable, too, aren’t there?” Miranda asks George as they’re driving home. The radio is talking about Goldman Sachs. Four soldiers killed in Iraq. “If he’s really incapable . . .”
“You saw the bag,” George says. “I don’t know.”
And they’ve had him tested, they’ve tried all the meds. The drugs that turn Archie into a speed freak—grinding his teeth, pulling at his hair, staring vacantly—the drugs that make him incontinent. You’ve got to try to establish the proper dosage, the doctors say, but George and Miranda can’t stand to have Archie on those pills.
George and Miranda and Archie have seen more doctors over the past three years than a kid with cancer would. These doctor visits, with co-pays and deductibles, run George and Miranda more than $500 a month. One night, after an especially long day with Archie, George said this: “I just, I don’t know, I just think about some kid with leukemia, and what his parents are going through, and . . . I just thank God that he’s healthy.”
And boy, was that the wrong thing to say, because Miranda said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What?” George said.
“You seriously just said that, you thank God he’s healthy?”
Miranda was sitting on the bed in a long T-shirt, putting lotion on her legs. She still had a wet little pile of cream-colored goo in her left hand.
George said nothing. They’d finally got Archie to sleep, but if they raised their voices, even a little, Archie would wake up and come running down the hall. George walked to the bed and slid his slippers underneath.
“No, George, I mean it,” Miranda said. “You know what, I’m glad, too, I thank God, too. Because if I had to go through something like that, with you and your pious bullshit . . . You know what those parents are going through, you know how they do it? They’re fucking adults is how. Jesus.”
“Sorry,” George said.
“Seriously, you know what, I’d rather he was sick, I’d rather he had leukemia or whatever horrible thing you said. You know, I looked at you right before you said that, and I knew you were going to say some horrible crap thing like that. I could see it in the shape of your mouth. I waited for it. I should have started screaming right when I saw your mouth.”
“I just —”
“Yeah, I know what you just—you think that makes it better, makes me feel better? You’re just trying to shut the whole thing down. Ah, yes, everything’s okay because at least Archie’s healthy. Well, he’s not healthy, George. He’s got some kind of mental illness.” She stood up to move to the bathroom, suddenly remembered the lotion in her hand. She looked at it as though she didn’t know how it got there. She stopped, rubbed the lotion into her elbows and forearms.
“If he were sick,” Miranda said, “there would be a course of treatment, viable options. What I can’t handle is this.” And she shut the bathroom door and stayed in there for quite a while.
So George has learned not to talk that way, and he understands where Miranda’s coming from, he agrees that, yes, that whole line of thinking is stupid and sentimental. There’s a small part of him that still thinks it’s possible to recover from all this, but he can’t get to feeling sorry for himself. It’s going on five months, and now whole weeks go by when George doesn’t have an interview. He’s even started looking out of town, out of St. Louis, although so far, St. Louis’s unemployment rate has stayed slightly below the national average, which currently sits at 9.4 percent. In St. Louis, it’s 9.1, which means that George is not as good as 89.9 percent of the working adults in the St. Louis metropolitan area. This is one of the grievances George nurtures late at night.
And the worst thing is, he made it through the worst. Or they thought he’d made it through the worst. They’d even started to relax, or, if not relax, to grimly carry on. They started putting back some money in 2008 and 2009, when they started worrying, when people in George’s field were being plowed under at a truly inevitable rate. But he survived 2008 and 2009, and in 2010 they all took pay cuts, and then he was laid off. There’s an unfinished toolshed in the backyard. It has a floor, three walls, and part of a roof.
* * *
“You’ve got to go to sleep,” George tells Archie. For two-and-a-half hours now, the child has lain in the bed making his noises. Sometimes the noises Archie makes are words, the grand stories he tells himself, acting out all the parts as he fails to fall asleep. At a certain point, about an hour before he finally falls asleep, the sounds become just sounds, noises—gun noises, airplane noises, wizard-spell noises, miracles. Miranda grew up on a farm in northwestern Missouri, and she believes that the problem with all kids today is that they don’t spend any time outdoors just running around on their own. They have organized activities. They have play dates. But Archie doesn’t have any play dates. The doctors say a child Archie’s age needs between ten and twelve hours of sleep a night, and a child like Archie needs more. They put him to bed at eight o’clock every night, and he’s never asleep before eleven. Then he has to be up at seven to go to school. “You have to go to sleep,” Miranda tells Archie.
When they think he’s finally asleep, they’ll go to close his door, and about half the time he’s not quite asleep. When he’s not quite asleep and you try to close his door, Archie will scream, “No!” It feels like an electrical pulse from the doorknob, straight up your arm and into a vital organ. “You don’t have to scream at us,” George and Miranda tell him, shaking. “We’re right here. Just say, I’m still awake. Don’t scream.”
Once they finally get Archie to sleep, Miranda goes to bed because she has to work in the morning, and she’s liable to be up with Archie’s nightmares in an hour or two. George checks the ads on Monster, even though LaShonda at the outplacement agency says no one ever gets a job off of Monster. The only way to get a job in this economy is to meet people, LaShonda says. Network, network, network. George looks at Monster. He looks at hockey scores. He jerks off to porn. He e-mails résumés. The Internet costs $24.99 a month. He nurses his grievances. He reads the news. In Washington, Congress has averted a government shutdown. The deal includes another six months of unemployment benefits. Six more months? He can’t imagine what will happen if it’s six more months. Don’t let feelings of worthlessness ever enter your mind, LaShonda says. You are not worthless because you’ve been laid off. There is no stigma attached to losing a job in this economy.
* * *
Are you churchgoers? the doctors ask. Because a lot of times bright kids like Archie can find some sense of structure in organized religion, and moral prescriptions appeal to their inherent need for boundaries and control. Even if we don’t believe in it? George and Miranda ask. Immaterial, the doctors say. So they go to church.
Are you churchgoers? the next set of doctors ask. Because the last thing kids like Archie need is one more structured place they have to go to on the weekends where they can’t be kids. Archie needs that time to himself. So they stop going to church.
Tell us about his diet. Does he watch violent television programs? Does he wet the bed? How was potty training in general? Is there a history of mental illness or emotional disturbances? Has anyone close to Archie ever died, a grandparent or a pet? Miranda says no, George says no.
Has there been an unusual amount of stress in the home lately? This is where George has to tell him he’s out of work. Going on five months now. The doctors nod knowingly. George wants to kill them all.
This started a long time before George lost his job, Miranda tells the doctors. George still loves her. This—when she sets the doctors straight—this is one of the times George still loves her. She’s started having drinks with her coworkers after work on Fridays, and sometimes other days, too, because sometimes one of the bosses shows up for drinks, and she doesn’t want to look like she’s not part of the team. People are being riffed at her company, too. That’s what they call it in this economy—riffed.
It’s an acronym for reduction in force. A near anagram for fired. Getting fired is what they used to call it. Then they called it getting laid off, but that made it sound like it was something temporary, just until orders picked up again, or something, and the one thing we all know about this economy is that orders are not picking up. Nothing is temporary, except for all the things that are. Especially whatever job you find next. George has been reading about it on the Internet late at night. Precarity, they call it. The new economic and social reality of people’s lives is precarity. In this economy, they call it getting riffed. And Miranda’s been going out with her coworkers for drinks on the theory that it’s harder to riff someone who’s popular with her coworkers. Most of these nights cost between $17 and $25.
Then there are the nightmares. They’re not like other kids’ nightmares. George and Miranda don’t have other kids, have never really been around other kids, but they know that Archie’s nightmares are not like other kids’ nightmares, because if all kids had nightmares like this, the human species would have died out long ago, because no one would put themselves through these kinds of nightmares.
Archie’s nightmares—like so much with Archie—start with a scream. The doctors say that if he’s screaming, he’s already awake. But they’re wrong. George and Miranda have stood there and watched it. Archie is sound asleep, and he screams. At the scream, George and Miranda get up, move down the hall. By the time they get to his room, Archie’s kicking things in his sleep, spinning in the bed. He looks like the kid from “The Exorcist.” Then the noises start—again, not words, but noises, sometimes they’re sharp little barks, sometimes they’re deep heaves, like a person who’s been running and can’t stop. That’s when Miranda and George open the door.
Sometimes that’s the end of it. Just the sound of the opening door will trigger something in Archie’s sleep, and a minute later, he’s breathing calmly again. On those nights when Archie goes back to sleep, Miranda and George look at each other like strangers, unable to read each other’s faces in the dark. Neither wants to be the first to admit how incredibly grateful they are.
Because more often, after the heaves and the kicks and the barks and the spins, more screams come. Archie is still asleep, and he’s screaming with a power that starts somewhere below the heart. Then he starts clawing his hands in front of him like he’s being grabbed by something out of the darkest human visions of fear. Then the thrashing, and all this time, he’s still asleep, until George and Miranda go to him and wake him and hold him on the couch for two hours until he falls asleep again. Then they carry him back to bed for a few more hours until the next nightmare, and by then it’s more or less time to get up and start the day.
Part Two
Touching other children. Sudden verbal outbursts, screams or shouts. Constant fidgeting. Singing. Dancing and flinging his arms when inappropriate. Nose picking. Scab picking. Fingernail picking. Talking during book time. Talking during quiet time. Taking other children’s belongings. Noises. Sitting on other children. Sudden angry outbursts. Don’t look at me, he screams. Whistling. Beats pencils and pens on desk. Doesn’t understand no. Unreliable. Won’t stay in line. Sometimes gets so locked into something there’s no way to get him out. Singing and laughing inappropriately at lunchtime. Impulsive giggling. Can’t keep hands to self. Interferes with other children’s ability to learn. Unable to focus. Willful. Willfully disobeys rules at PE, games, and sports. Constantly acting up for classmates. Laughter incommensurate with the funny event. Has to be told over and over. Can’t take my eyes off him for a minute. Never completes his work on time. Morbid curiosity expressed in frequent discussions of death. Wants always to be the center of attention. Disregards peer censure. Normal range of punishments and consequences seem to have no effect. Almost total lack of self-control. Seems to lack a sense of self. Prone to sullen moping. Takes other children’s food. Cares more about what he wants than about what’s asked of him by teachers. Doesn’t think before he acts. Difficulty gauging risk/reward. Sometimes lashes out. Doesn’t seem to see others as real people. Little sense of the future. Always says, What did I do?
* * *
It’s bill night in the Putnam household. It used to be sort of fun. George and Miranda would pour each other a glass of wine, toast another $385 and $312, respectively, toward their not-so-rapidly dwindling student loans, another $1602.61 on the mortgage. They’d take out a pair of dice and roll to see which credit card got the big payment that month. Now it is not fun.
The savings are what’s dwindling now, and fast. They’re still paying most of the mortgage, because their ARM explodes soon, and if George is still out of work then, they know they’ll need all the goodwill they can muster.
They’re stuck on the student loans, too—they used up all their deferments when they were saving for the down payment on the house. And sometime over the summer, they can never remember exactly when, the student loan bills are supposed to increase. In their early forties, it seems highly unlikely to either of them that they’ll ever have those things paid off.
Miranda brings home $3,024 per month, except in the two months a year when there are three paycheck-Fridays in the month. This is not one of those months. George makes $1,164 from unemployment benefits.
They budget $600 a month for groceries and other household necessities. Sometimes that’s enough, sometimes it’s not. Gas, thirty bucks a tank, times two, times four weeks, $240. Sometimes that’s enough, especially with George driving less. They got rid of the cable, the Netflix. They got rid of the Y. They got rid of Archie’s after-school program, which ran them $250 a month and was nothing but a problem, since they got thesame kind of calls, the same kind of trouble there as Archie had at school, even more often. Archie won’t settle down during homework time. Archie has problems keeping his hands to himself. Archie throws food during Group Snack. Archie doesn’t listen when adults talk to him. Archie’s temper got the better of him. Archie had to be consequenced again today.
Power, gas, Internet, garbage, water, sewer, cell phone—set those aside for now. Instead, they get out the notebook that has all the medical- bill arrangements. The biggest one, the one they hate the most, is to the pediatric neurologist, a German immigrant who wanted to do a sleep study on Archie that ended up not being covered by either of their insurances, when George had insurance. They pay this man, for his inconclusive sleep study, $210 a month. Total up their current outstanding balances to St. Louis’s medical professionals—$7,352. Current monthly payment due, $511.
Every credit card gets the minimum now, no more big payments, no more pair of dice. Total minimum payment due— $519. George and Miranda guess it’s possible that someone could say there was a time in their lives that they were irresponsible with their credit, that they lived beyond their means, but really, they didn’t. They both like to read books, and they bought some books. They wanted to have this house for Archie, so they bought the house. It needed furniture. They don’t take elaborate vacations. They drive nine- and ten-year-old cars, a Nissan Sentra and a Ford Focus. When Archie first started school, Miranda agitated for a minivan so she would be able to take Archie and his friends places. But Archie doesn’t have any friends. So at least there’s no car payment.
The president gives a speech on job creation. Immediately after the speech, the Senate minority leader says no to the president’s job creation plan. Republicans win the special election in New York, where a former congressman had to resign because he sent out pictures of his penis on Twitter. The stock market’s down three hundred points. In Afghanistan, seven US soldiers are killed by an IED.
Insurances—car, home, life—must be paid, $311 per month. LaShonda at the outplacement agency says it’s smart to open automatic payment accounts for these must-pay bills so that you don’t see them and thus they don’t weigh on your mind. She recommends using your one remaining credit card for these accounts—she recommends cutting up everything but your oldest credit card and paying the balance in full every month. That way the bills don’t seem so daunting. George and Miranda have not cut up their other credit cards. What if there’s a car problem, a pipe break, a smashed window, a fritzy stove?
Throw the utilities back in the pile, and we’re at negative $490 for the month. That’s before drinks with Miranda’s coworkers. Before writing the check for Archie’s lunch money. Before anything that comes up.
* * *
And of course they don’t need the after-school program for Archie because George can pick him up every day. He gets there about ten minutes before school lets out, parks the car, and walks a block or so to the front of the school. To wait with the mothers. They all know each other, the mothers, they’re all out talking. They’re all nicely dressed. There are three categories of mothers. The busy professional, she’s on flex time, goes in at six o’clock every morning, wears a suit, slim, distracted. There are the rich wives, who range from the heartbreakingly cute twenty-five-year-old to the brittle but handsome forty-something. There are the uber-moms, thick but fit-looking, sometimes in jeans, all with the same short haircut Miranda calls Suburban Butch. There are no fathers. Oh, occasionally. Not today.
It’s windy today, and chilly. George gets out his phone. No messages, no texts, no e-mails. What do you expect late on a Friday? George is sure these people, these women waiting for their kids, are bound to have problems in their lives, too. You never know what’s happening in someone’s life. George waits where he always waits, by the concrete bulldog statue on the northeast corner of the school’s front lawn. The flagpole lanyard rings in the wind.
And there’s Archie, and yes, there’s his teacher walking alongside him and holding one hand while Archie drags his book bag with the other. While he was standing there waiting, George felt that a teacher would be coming out with Archie. It was in the air, like a smell, like the wind, and so George is not surprised. What has Archie done today?
What has George done today? There was a coffee at the Radisson in Florissant he was supposed to attend. He didn’t. He didn’t even get dressed until noon. He watched SportsCenter. He watched CNN. He watched ads for injury lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers, asbestos lawyers. Our attorneys are former IRS employees, and they know how to handle your case. He watched seven-and-a-half minutes of facial cumshots and four minutes of a blonde fucking another blonde with a strap-on dildo. Twominutes of a woman fucking a machine. Less than a minute of two men fucking a woman in the ass at the same time. He checked the ads on Monster. Ignored a phone call from Miranda. Ate a bologna sandwich.
“We had just another real rough day,” the teacher says. “Archie, you want to tell your dad?”
Archie does not want to tell his dad. His long hair blows in the wind. Some other kids run past Archie and the teacher and down the steps to the sidewalk. One of them bumps Archie and Archie smiles, laughs goofily, says, “What the heck?”
“Archie,” the teacher says. “Tell your dad.”
“I got in trouble for hugging Josh Okey,” Archie says.
“Mr. Putnam, he was not just hugging Josh Okey,” the teacher says. “He was practically chasing Josh Okey around the room. We had to put Archie outside in the hallway. You’ll get a report. I had to write him up.”
“I’m sorry,” George says. Archie is now watching, and laughing at, some boys who are chasing each other around the front lawn of the school. George puts his hand on the back of Archie’s neck, firmly. “We’ll work on it. We are working on it. Please keep us informed of any problems.”
“What’s your schedule like next week?” the teacher says now. “I talked this over with Ms. Patti, the counselor.” She says this like George doesn’t know who Ms. Patti is, like he’s not practically family with Ms. Patti after the last three years. “She’s got some new ideas. Can we meet next week, with you and your wife?”
“I’ll have to get back with you,” George says. Archie has slipped George’s hand, gone over to sit on the concrete bulldog like it’s a horse. “I’ll have to check with Miranda.”
Months they’ve known this woman now, and she still always calls Miranda “your wife.” The actual unemployment rate nationally is something more like 20 percent when you include the part-timers, the underemployed, and people who have given up looking for work.
“Mr. Putnam, the other kids have to be allowed to learn,” the teacher says now, sotto voce into the wind, serious into the wind.
“We’re really sorry,” George says. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. We just have to keep working on it.”
“Try to make a time to meet next week,” the teacher says. “It’s important. Ms. Patti asked me to invite you.”
“Okay,” George says. “I’ll be in touch.”
He goes to Archie at the bulldog, has to do everything in his power to resist grabbing him by the arm and dragging him to the car. He does resist, and feels a little better about himself for resisting. Then he feels worse because he’s got nearly three hours alone with Archie until Miranda gets home, and that’s three hours if she doesn’t have to go out for drinks after work. He and Archie walk through the crowd of kids and moms toward where he’s parked the car. He decides he will not speak to Archie. He sets a grim look on his face. Not that not talking to Archie ever works. But neither does yelling or spanking or making him sit in the corner or not letting him watch TV or crying. They’ve even tried crying. Archie’s maturity level is not where it should be for an eight-year-old boy, the doctors say. His emotional maturity is a little slow-developing, the doctors say.
Nothing works.
They get in the car, they pull into traffic. It’s about a five-minute drive to their house. After about two minutes, Archie starts singing. George looks at him in the rearview mirror. Archie sees him and says, “What?”
“Why do you do this stuff, Archie?” George says. “What is the matter with you? We talk about this every morning. You say you understand what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate, and then I’ve got this teacher coming and telling me you’re chasing some other boy around the classroom trying to hug him.”
“I don’t know,” Archie says. “The teachers always get me in trouble. Other kids do things, too.”
“We’ve talked about this, Archie. You’re not other kids. I can’t do anything about those other kids and neither can you.”
Archie says nothing.
“You know you can’t do that, right?” George says.
“Yes.”
“Then, Archie, what the hell?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Son, you can’t just say you’re sorry.” Archie calls this saying my sorry. He thinks it fixes things. I said my sorry, Archie will say. I said my sorry like thirty times. It baffled George and Miranda until they realized he was confusing the second- person possessive with the contraction for you are. Because George and Miranda have said to him, over and over again, “You can’t just say you’re sorry.”
“You can’t just say you’re sorry,” George says now. “You’ve got to show you’re sorry. You’ve got to stop doing these things you have to say you’re sorry for. When are you planning to figure this out?”
“I don’t know,” Archie says. They’ve pulled into the driveway at the house. George doesn’t get out. He just sits there quietly for a moment.
“Can I have a snack?” Archie says. “I’m hungry.”
“No, Archie,” George says. “Get out and go to your room.”
The house is unlocked. Archie gets out of the car, dragging his book bag behind him, past the unfinished shed. George sits in the car. The car is still running. The radio is talking about the Euro crisis. The market continues its despondent slide.
* * *
When George got riffed, they sent him to LaShonda at the outplacement agency, and she explained all the programs they had available for him—severance, COBRA, social-networking solutions, job counseling, psychological counseling, emotional counseling, mock interviews. She said that most people change jobs five or six times during their working lives, and that most of the time, especially in this economy, it happens just like this. She advised George not to watch the evening news stories about the economy. She said it is very important to treat job hunting just like a job, to get up every morning, get dressed in business clothes, and get to work. She said it is very unlikely to take longer than three months.
LaShonda encourages George to recognize his own value. She says potential employers will ask him what he’s been doing with his time, and he needs a sharp and ready answer. She says long-term unemployment is an emotional roller coaster. She says that regular exercise provides immediate and lasting value for the long-term unemployed. It’s okay to grieve, but he won’t really feel better until he gets out of his house and outside of himself. He needs to embrace the concept that change is good. Be open to starting at the bottom—once employers recognize their value, good performers are quickly promoted. She recommends volunteering as a great way to network and contribute to solving some of the problems in your community. You need to turn negatives into positives. The fact that you’ve been unemployed so long, for example—a case could be made that this gives you a unique perspective any employer should value. Or you could express to a potential employer that, as a longterm unemployed person, you will be among the employer’s most valuable employees, because you now understand how valuable a job is, and you’ll work harder than anyone now that you’ve finally got a job again.
Don’t be discouraged by job postings that indicate they will accept only applicants who are currently or recently employed. Oftentimes, a third party is responsible for the job posting, and you can turn your unemployment story into a great cover letter.
* * *
Has he been checked for heart abnormalities? And brain tumors and epilepsy? What about autism? Well, these things are spectrum disorders. People can have them and still be highly functional.
Tell us about Archie’s bedroom. Tell us about your bedtime routine. Tell us about the books you read to him.
How old is your house? Is there lead paint? Proximity to power lines, to heavy industry, to busy streets? Are you on a bus line? Have you professionally cleaned your air conditioning ducts and vents lately? Your carpets, your drapes?
How does Archie do with various kinds of fabric? Are there shirts he particularly likes or doesn’t like? Does Archie’s mood change when he’s looking forward to something? Have you thought about taking a nice vacation somewhere? Have you had him tested for BPD? OCD? Nasal polyps? Schizophrenia?
Are there firearms in the home? What kind of art or pictures are on the walls? Is his room on the same level of the house as yours? Have you ever let him just cry it out? How long has this been going on again?
Part Three
Here’s something they do in St. Louis: everywhere you go, people will invariably ask you where you went to high school. There is a tremendous amount of data encoded in your reply to this question, and the native St. Louisan deciphers it quickly. Your answer not only reveals the neighborhood where you grew up, but how you grew up. It carries with it financial, religious, genetic, athletic, sociological, and demographic information. When you answer this question, your interrogator believes not only that he or she knows everything about your childhood and young adulthood, but that they’ve got a pretty good idea about
what kind of person you are today. Where’d you go to high school?
The assumptions involved in this question/answer equation are not pretty, and to George and Miranda—neither of whom grew up in St. Louis—it is amazing that no one ever sees how squalid the whole thing is. St. Louisans always talk about how hard it is to lure new businesses or new people to the area— well, this is one of the reasons why. St. Louisans love to talk about St. Louis as a “big city with a small-town feel,” but they’re wrong on both counts. St. Louis has neither of these feels. It feels like exactly what it is: a static, lifeless, dead-water burg, a place that lacked enough imagination to remake itself when people stopped using beaver pelts as currency, and that runs, after a fashion, on the inertia of old money. Anybody who grew up here and had any real sense isn’t around to answer the question, Where’d you go to high school, because the minute they graduated from high school, they got out of here so fast they left skid marks. St. Louis alternates between fits of manic boosterism—new stadia, weird art parks, frenetic ad campaigns—and long periods of impotent civic depression. The city faces a hopeless racial divide, a structurally unsound economy and workforce, an aging population, and hideous suburban sprawl. Every five or six years, someone commissions a massive, multimillion-dollar study to tell St. Louis what’s wrong with it, why it can’t attract new industry or stop white flight or revivify the schools or plug the brain drain, and then no one ever acts on the studies’ findings, because it’s stuff St. Louis has known about itself all along, and it’s too much trouble to try to fix it. Hardly the vision young Auguste Chouteau would have wanted for his city. Chouteau was only fourteen years old when he arrived at the bluffs south of the Missouri-Mississippi confluence on Valentine’s Day of 1764 to build a fur-trading post to the specifications of his employer, Pierre Laclède of New Orleans. Heading a crew of some sixty Creoles, Indians, and free Blacks, Chouteau got the post built on time and under budget, and he went on to become one of St. Louis’s early leading lights. There’s a street named after him, and people pronounce it SHOW-tuh, which, like a lot of things in St. Louis, is close but not quite right. Here’s something people say about St. Louis: It’s a great place to raise kids.
Not only do George and Miranda resent the parochial insularity of this place they wound up in, but George is convinced that his difficulty finding work is inextricably connected to the fact that when people ask him where he went to high school, he has to reply that he grew up in Alabama, moved here for work. That, in other words, he’s an outsider, and in St. Louis, outsiders are weird. Also, it’s pretty doubtful that any place where people go around asking each other where they went to high school can also be a great place to raise kids.
That said, there are nice parks in the area, and today it’s suddenly warm. George and Miranda have decided to take Archie to the park. On the TV in the kitchen, policemen in riot gear are pepper-spraying college students somewhere in California. Without cable, the picture comes in fuzzy.
“Arch,” George says. “Get up. We’re getting outside.”
Archie has brought most of his toys and stuffed animals out of his room and has laid them in a semicircle around the couch, where he sits arranging and rearranging them in patterns only he can discern. The couch is not a long one—Archie can lie out flat on it, but barely. Archie has his journal with him, and every time he rearranges a toy or an animal, he makes a note. It’s a Saturday. Archie hums atonally while he works, and occasionally makes a noise that sounds like a splash.
There are times on Saturday when George and Miranda can almost feel normal. But Saturdays are also a problem, because it’s hard to go anywhere without spending money, and George and Miranda are trying not to spend money without letting Archie know they’re trying not to spend money. Archie used to like to go to the Magic House, which is a mansion in the next suburb over that they’ve converted into this play world for kids. There’s a pretend construction site, a beanstalk that goes up three flights of stairs, a room where kids can dress up and act out picture books, a mock-up Oval Office where kids can stand behind a podium with the presidential seal and see themselves on a television on the other wall. But for months they’ve been telling Archie that the Magic House is under renovation, because it would cost twenty dollars for all of them to go. And twenty dollars is nothing, of course, except three or four shirts for Archie at the resale shop, five gallons of milk, three cook-at-home dinners. So most Saturdays, especially since it’s been cold, they end up just sitting at home. But today it’s warm—it’s like spring is suddenly coming. Strange weather. “Arch, get up,” George says again. “Let’s go to the park.”
Archie doesn’t respond. He sits in the middle of the couch and carefully selects certain toys or stuffed animals from the semicircle on the floor. His stuffed rabbit and constant companion,Mr. Carrots, is always included in his selections. Then he picks up one or two other toys, a book or two, and lies down on the couch, fitting the items around his body. After lying still for a moment with whatever toys he’s selected, he sits up, puts the toys back in the semicircle, makes a note in his journal, hums to himself, and then repeats the process with Mr. Carrots and two or three other things.
“What’s he doing?” Miranda says. She and George are watching Archie from the kitchen. They bought the house just before the housing market collapsed. If they’d waited a week or two, they could have probably saved thirty grand. Or been turned down for the mortgage in the credit crunch. Miranda has always wanted to close off the kitchen from the living room. Even if George got a job tomorrow, even if he got a good job, the whole first year of his salary would go to paying off debt. Their savings are gone. They cashed in his pension, what was left of it. The ARM explodes next month. George says, “I don’t know.”
Tell us about his activity levels. How much sugar? Sodas? Has he been checked for food allergies? What kinds of play does Archie like? What kinds of play does he avoid? What are his relationships like with his peers? How does he interact with other children?
Archie is lying on the couch now with Mr. Carrots, his Diego Rescue Pack, and two Daniel Pinkwater books. He lies very still. His hair spreads out around his head. George and Miranda like Archie’s hair long, but now his hair is too long. Archie’s haircuts cost twelve dollars, and every trip to the barber is a behavioral disaster.
“Archie,” Miranda calls. She leaves the kitchen and goes to the couch, where Archie has sat up and is making another note in his journal. She kneels down beside the couch and says, “Archie, what are you doing here?”
“I’m trying to decide which of my toys I want to have buried with me when I die,” Archie says. He says this very matter-of-factly, like this is something boys all over the world do every day, and there’s something in the statement, so plainly made, that makes Miranda feel like she’s been grabbed by the throat. She can’t breathe. She turns to George, and he sees that crease in her face again, a line of what looks like sucked-in flesh running from her hairline to her chin. She never used to cry when they first got married, before Archie. They’ve fought about this. You can’t lose your composure, he tells her; I have no composure left to lose, she says. Miranda sees that George sees that she’s losing it again, and she hates him for seeing it, even though she knows he’s right. She stands up and runs out of the room, down the hall. She decides to be a coward today. That’s what one of the doctors, one from about a year ago, said to George and Miranda once—you can’t be cowards with a kid like Archie.
George isn’t sure what to do. But this is how it happens, how their life seems to happen these days. You wake up in the morning with a vision of the day, and in a moment everything goes very wrong. Miranda can get that line in her face and cry and run off, but George can’t. So now he’s standing alone in the kitchen watching Archie carry on with his plan for the afterlife. He goes to Archie, who’s scribbling another note in his journal.
“Archie,” he says, “I don’t think you need to be planning stuff like that or thinking about that kind of stuff.”
“What kind of stuff ?”
“Stuff like death. It’s not good. And you don’t need to worry about it. You’re going to live for a long, long time.”
“My teacher says people who are my age will live to be a hundred because of how good medicine has gotten. She says she’ll only live to be seventy-five. You and Mommy, too.”
“Me and Mommy, too, what?” George says.
“You’ll only live to be seventy-five. That’s only thirty-three more years.”
“But a hundred is good for you,” George says. “That’s ninety-two more years.”
“I know,” Archie says. “I did the math. Want to see?”
George says yes, and Archie flips to an earlier page from his journal. There, and for the next several pages, are rows and rows and rows of numbers, where Archie has tried to figure out how many more days, hours, minutes, and seconds are in ninety-two years. Most of the figures aren’t even close to accurate.
“I only have about a million minutes left,” Archie says. “And that’s if I don’t sleep. And that’s if my teacher’s right about how many years I have left. She might not be right. Kids my age die all the time. They get sick or their cars crash or they fall off something.”
“I’m sorry you’re worrying about this,” George says now. “I didn’t know this was scaring you.”
“I don’t want to live ninety-two years. I don’t want to live longer than you and Mommy.”
“Look, Archie.” George pulls the curtain back from the picture window above the couch. “It’s a nice day. Let’s get out of the house. Let’s go to the park.”
“Can I bring Mr. Carrots?”
“You can bring Mr. Carrots in the car, but he’ll have to stay in there when we get to the park.”
“The far park?”
“Yeah,” George says. “The far park.”
The near park is only a couple of blocks from their house, but every time they go there, they see some of the kids from Archie’s class. What are Archie’s relationships like with his peers? Not good. Sometimes, if it’s only one or two kids, the right one or two, they’ll play together okay. But if there are three or four of them, they’ll gang up on Archie. If Archie’s in the sandbox, they’ll throw sand at him until he leaves for the swings. At the swings, they’ll run in front of Archie or push him too high. On the slides, they’ll climb up the ladder right behind him, crowd him, until he gets scared and comes back down, kids stepping on his hands on the ladder rungs.
The kids’ fathers and mothers just sit there talking to each other. They just watch all this. They’ve known each other since they were kids. George just sits there, too.
But St. Louis is a great place to raise kids, so there are lots of parks. After getting Archie dressed, George slowly approaches the closed bedroom door—Miranda’s in there—and he listens. He hears nothing, and he says nothing. He goes back down the hall, gets the keys from the peg by the back door. He and Archie go to the car, past the unfinished shed. George stops at the BP station and spends $13 on a quarter-tank of gas and drives into the next suburb to the far park.
When they get there, the park is crowded, but that’s good, because Archie can sort of get lost in the crowd and do what he wants to do. It’s a nice park, recently updated, with a new play set shaped like a mansion, surrounded by flower-and-garden-themed seesaws and swings and slides and these wobbly metal mushrooms on springs the kids can climb and balance on.
George finds the only unoccupied bench and sits down. Other parents arrive with their children, but none of them sits down on George’s bench. They see other people they know, and shout hello and wave, and talk and laugh and smile, and the women touch each other’s arms during conversation. It’s warm, even warmer than George expected it to be, and some of the women are wearing long-sleeved T-shirts and slacks. The men, there are three of them around the playground, are wearing jeans and sweaters and golf vests and polo shirts. George tries to see signs of unemployment in the men—there’s one who keeps checking his watch; George is frequently stunned when he checks his watch these days, expecting it to be hours later than it really is. There’s another guy with a cell phone in a holster on his hip. If another man in the park is unemployed, George would bet it’s the guy who’s climbing the jungle gym and chasing two little blond girls around—overcompensating. George had planned to sit for a minute, then put Archie on the swings, but since he’s seen the chasing man, he decides to stay where he is. All of the men look healthier than George—all of
them are younger.
When George was a kid in Alabama, parents didn’t even take their kids to the park on Saturdays. You wanted to go the park, you just went to the park. Saturdays, you got up, bolted down some sugar bombs, got on your bike and hit the streets. If other kids were mean, you just had to deal with it. You grew up, and your parents didn’t have to sit there at a picnic table and watch the whole damn ugly thing. Now there are all these parents around. Spending time with their kids. Because they work all week.
LaShonda says most people get jobs because they know people who know people who are looking for people who are looking for jobs. LaShonda sends George to meet-ups, job fairs, networking groups, coffees. LaShonda says you have to put yourself out there. George is not good at putting himself out there. Even so, he can’t help but feel he’s worthy of a job, especially since he doesn’t really care what the job is, particularly. Phrases like working life or words like career have always struck him sort of funny. He just wants a job he can get up and go to every day, get paid for, and get home to Archie and Miranda. He wants to go on vacation somewhere once a year—nothing fancy, the lake or something. He wants to have enough money to pay the bills. He wants a college fund for Archie. He likes to watch the Cardinals on television, and would like to be able to get the cable back on before baseball season. He used to buy books, but now he checks them out of the library. All these buildings he passes every day have people inside doing jobs they get paid for. Another grievance for late at night.
When he first lost his job, George would say to himself: In two months this will all be over. At idle moments like this, like sitting in the park while Archie played, George would imagine himself into that two-months-away future, and it helped him feel better. Later, when the money started getting really tight, he’d say, In two more months, this will all be over, and he’d cheer himself up by thinking about how in two months the money would seem like a lot more money because he was getting used to having a lot less. When the money fully ran out, George said to himself, In two more months, this will all be over, and he imagined himself very responsibly recovering from the long-term job loss by carefully managing his money, by upgrading his skills, by shaping his ass up. Now it doesn’t even seem like he can—
Archie’s nowhere. George can’t find him. He was on the balance beam by the jungle gym, and then he was by the sandbox, but now he’s not there. George is up and on his feet—there’s a ringing in his ears. He’s looking everywhere, now he’s running. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees one of the fathers, the watch-checker, and he sees the man’s face looking at him. George runs to the parking lot, to the soda stand. He runs into the bathroom—there are two boys in there looking at their popsicle mouths in the mirror, and when George bangs into the bathroom it scares the boys—they lock their eyes on his in the mirror before George turns to look under the stalls. “Little kid?” he asks the two boys, putting his hand up to Archie’s height. The boys in the mirror shake their heads.
He’s moving again—there’s no telling where or what . . . there’s a pond near the playground, and George sees Archie’s red jacket floating in the water; the cell-phone-holster man ismissing, and George sees Archie in the back of his car; there are a bunch of kids crowded around one of the wobbling metal mushrooms, and they’re laughing and pushing the mushroom back and forth, and George sees Archie’s sneaker pop out from underneath.
No, really, that’s Archie’s sneaker popping out from beneath the metal mushroom, where a fat boy at least twelve years old is now jumping up and down on top of the mushroom as the other kids keep springing it back and forth. Archie is underneath. Archie is getting stepped on.
“Hey, hey! ” George shouts. He runs toward the metal mushroom. Some other parents—cell-phone-holster’s back, there are some bare-armed women, they’re up and moving now as George shouts and runs toward the mushroom. The kids scatter from the mushroom, all except the fat kid who hops down and just stands there, looking at George and another person who’s behind George.
“He wanted us to do it,” the fat kid says to the person behind George, who turns out to be the fat kid’s mother. George has arrived at the metal mushroom now, and he sees Archie underneath, bleeding from a cut above his eye, another on his knee.
“Lamar!” George hears the fat kid’s mother say. “Lamar!” she says, scolding. The kid’s name is Lamar? Archie is crying and bleeding, and George is still trying to pull him out, and Archie screams more. His hair is caught in the metal mushroom’s enormous spring, so George gets down on his knees to lift the mushroom, but he can’t lift it at the proper angle because Archie is lying underneath. George keeps shifting his feet to try to get the mushroom lifted up, and when he does, Archie scoots away, tangling his hair even worse. There’s blood in the dirt, and Archie’s screaming.
“Lamar, that little boy is badly hurt,” his mother says now.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Lamar says. “He wanted us to do it. He wanted to see what it felt like in there.”
“Lamar,” the woman says again, and then takes the boy’s hand and walks away. When Archie sees the blood, he kicks and rolls away from George, farther underneath the mushroom. His eye will need stitches. Emergency room visit—how much? Lots of parents and kids are gathered around now. Cellphone-
holster asks George if he wants him to call 911.
“Just fuck off,” George says, not so under his breath that people can’t hear it. He reaches under the mushroom and grips the hair caught in the spring into his fist. Archie’s sweating, bleeding scalp is on one side of George’s fist, the cold metal coil of the spring is on the other, and George rips, and Archie screams. George tries to pick Archie up, but it’s hard to get him out from under the mushroom where he’s crying and for George to get to his feet at the same time. He’s out of breath and sweating on this weird warm day when everyone should be so happy.
“Come on, Archie,” George says, still kneeling there. “You can stand up, right?” Archie is still crying, his tears mixing with the blood from the cut above his eye. He looks like one of those wrestlers who’s had a chair smashed over his head. Everyone, adults, kids, are still hovering around, making it hard to breathe. Everywhere George looks he sees knees.
“I apologize, but will everyone please just leave us alone?”
George says now, loudly, into the knees. “He’s fine, I’m his father,” George says, and feels at once that there’s a failure implicit in that confession. The knees start to back away. George leans in under the mushroom where, once more, he puts a hand between Archie’s hip and the gravel ground and pulls.
He’s got him. Archie’s still kicking and crying, but George has got him. George carries Archie to the car, has to shift him to the other arm to get the keys out of his pocket. He gets the car door opened, gets Archie strapped in. Archie cries and hugs Mr. Carrots the whole way to the emergency room, where Archie screams and fights the doctors and nurses. They eventually have to strap him down to a board to put six stitches in his eyebrow.
So the trip to the park ends up costing them $283.
Part Four
Today George has his first job interview in three weeks. “Good luck,” Miranda said when George called her with the news. She doesn’t mind working. She likes working.
There was a time, in people’s living memory, when women had to justify the decision to work outside the house. Where her parents lived, on the farm in Stanberry, in northwestern Missouri, women would still have to justify such a decision, if there were anywhere in town to work. In Stanberry the only place women really can work is at the regional school, and the women who teach there are either young and unmarried or honest-to-God spinsters. Living there is like living during the Eisenhower administration.
But in St. Louis, in this economy, women have to justify the decision to stay home with their kids. And some do, and good for them, fine with that. Miranda doesn’t even want that, George knows, especially if that means staying home with Archie all day. She loves her son. She’s said to George that she doesn’t think she ever even understood love until Archie was born. But she does not want to stay home with him all day long.
And she likes to work, she likes her job. But George knows she doesn’t like being the family’s sole breadwinner. There’s something wrong with that, and no rationalization or socioeconomic thinking will fix it. It’s just not natural for a woman to go to work while her husband stays home and becomes less and less of a man every day. Another grievance for late at night.
But today he’s got a job interview. A LinkedIn friend recommended George for the interview. LaShonda showed George how to get on LinkedIn. George doesn’t know this person who recommended him for the interview, but they’re LinkedIn. The guy wrote George a message, said he couldn’t promise anything but an interview, but he knows the HR rep, and he’d get George on the list. George wrote him back and said thanks. The guy sent George a message: Thanx? Thats it?
So George had to write back and thank him more, and tell him how great he was for doing this, and how much George appreciates him and his time, and thank him again. The man didn’t write back.
But George assumes the interview’s still on, so he’s driving out Manchester Road in make-you-weep traffic because they’ve got Highway 40 shut down. The radio sings, For a hole in your roofor a whole new roof, Frederic Roofing.
Up ahead, someone’s trying to make a left-hand turn. The radio says, Thank you and here’s my address. George is running late for his first interview in weeks, for a job he’s not qualified for and that he will not get. LaShonda says never to turn down an interview, no matter what. They’re good experience, and you never know. Every interview is one step closer to the rest of your life. Every interview is one step closer to the next fulfilling chapter in your life. Every interview is one step closer to the next exciting chapter in the story of your life.
And George’s cell phone rings. Something happens in his diaphragm every time the cell phone rings now. It’s a whole involuntary routine. The cell phone rings, his diaphragm feels like someone’s popped open a soda can in his chest, he tells himself to calm down. His fingers start tingling. He takes two deep breaths while the phone rings again, he takes the phone out and checks the number, and while he’s checking, he feels this popping sound in his shoulder and neck, like knuckles cracking in there. It’s been a long time since George has seen a doctor for himself. He’s forty-three, a little overweight, but he did quit smoking.
It’s Miranda on the phone. As George pushes the button to answer the call, the diaphragm thing starts again, because there’s no good reason why she’d call. She’s already said good luck.
“It’s Archie,” Miranda says. “The school called. Archie had some kind of freak-out. They’ve got him in a cool, dark room.”
“I’m on my way to an interview,” George says.
“Honey, I’m sorry, I know.” She’s quiet for a second. “I just don’t know what we’ve done,” she says.
She can’t leave to go to Archie. Well, she could. Sure, if your kid gets sick, you’re entitled to leave work. It’s the law. Yeah, no problem, go ahead, of course. We’ll just have to find a way to carry on without you.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “Someday it’s going to be all right,” she says.
George hangs up the phone and he’s in traffic, and now he’s the one trying to turn left, to turn around, and no one will let him in. Always program any contact info into your phone, LaShonda says. George didn’t program today’s interviewer’s contact info into his phone. The radio says, Heal your home with Helitech. While he’s trying to turn around, he’s looking through all the paper on the passenger seat. Someone honks. George looks up and a woman in a blue Chevrolet is looking at him, raising her eyebrows and motioning with her hand, a cutting motion in front of her face. Go, go, he sees her mouth say. George goes. It still takes him another forty minutes to get to Archie’s school. Just as he pulls up, he realizes the worst thing about all this: he realizes he’s delighting in an excuse to miss the interview, and hating himself for delighting in it, which is not delightful. Luxurious, maybe. He’s luxuriating in the excuse—another grievance.
“He’s just having an exceptionally bad morning,” the principal says, meeting George on the walkway up to the school. Someone’s put an orange and black scarf on the concrete bulldog. Has he been checked for color-blindness? For light sensitivity? Two other concerned women are waiting for George and the principal in the school vestibule. One of the other women is the school counselor, Ms. Patti, who calls herself Ms. Patti because her last name is some consonant-thick Slovak impossibility. She believes that Archie needs several periods of tactile decompression during the day, so she takes him off to a converted broom closet to play with Lincoln Logs. The other woman introduces herself as Mrs. Bergeson, the school district’s director of social work. The school is overwarm and there’s a low-level, barely audible hum from something electric in the walls.
“Where is he?” George asks.
“He’s taking a rest,” Mrs. Bergeson says. She hands George her business card. “He’s comfortable and fine. Let’s talk a minute, and then we’ll take you to see him.”
Mrs. Bergeson leads George and the two other women down a hallway. A curly-haired little boy about Archie’s age pokes his head out of a doorway, sees George and the women, and quickly goes back inside. A sign hangs from the hallway ceiling: The Most Special Children In The World Walk Down These Halls.
They go into an empty classroom. Mrs. Bergeson sits behind the teacher’s desk, and the two other women quickly pull up little kid chairs and sit themselves down in them, exactly as though they enjoy sitting in these little chairs, as though they are perfectly comfortable there. George remembers the little chairs from parent-teacher conference night. He was afraid, sitting in one of them, that he’d split his trousers. He stands to the
side of the desk.
“Mr. Putnam, they’ve brought me in from District to deliver some news,” Mrs. Bergeson says now. “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
There’s a poster on the wall above Mrs. Bergeson’s head that shows happy children, sunshine, green grass. There’s a whiteboard covered in simple arithmetic. There’s a bank of computers on screen saver, bubbles and waves and cosmic zoom.
“Won’t you have a seat?” the principal says. She and the counselor still look concerned. George pulls up a chair and sort of squats above it, keeping most of his weight on the balls of his feet.
“This is all part of a process,” Mrs. Bergeson says, putting her hands in front of her and flat on the desk in what looks to George like some sort of soothing motion she was taught in a conflict-avoidance seminar. At interviews, unless someone puts something in your hands, you’re supposed to keep your hands in a relaxed position in your lap. Do not put your hands on the table. “We’ve been in a process with Archie, right, Ms. Kuchar?” she says to the principal.
“We have implemented a process, as you know, Mr. Putnam,” the principal says. “We’re just running up against the limits of that process, I’m afraid.”
“Well, of this particular part of this process,” Mrs. Bergeson says. She smiles in what seems to be a mechanical way. “And so now we need to start a new process. This is the part that’s not great news, but if we think of it as a process, the beginning of a process, a series of steps, we can begin to get Archie to where
we all need and want him to be.”
This is when Mrs. Bergeson opens the file she’s been holding, which documents Archie’s inappropriate behavior during his three-and-a-half years in the school system. This is where she talks about how Archie has become an untenably disruptive influence in the classroom and how he prohibits other students from learning to the best of their abilities.
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