would create a greater distance between father and son but because Eric would try to draw a correlation between her son’s experience and the sorry state of California’s public school system. Ever since quitting his job in sales for 24/7 Alarm, he has had way too much time to complain, mope, and focus on his “shorts”—abstract little films with close-ups of things like a fly in a glass of milk, which is somehow supposed to illustrate the conflict between North andSouth Korea. Georgia very much wants this to be about her son and nothing else. She envisions the problem as a real thing, a small flame in her belly—not necessarily a negative image: a flame. She is sustaining something, keeping it lit. What is she doing that gives this flame life? How can she convert this fire into a more productive form of energy?
She takes a right onto another wide boulevard and sees the squat building lit up like a small casino.
“We’re here!” she sings and pulls into the parking lot, quickly choosing a spot and smiling to herself. It feels good to park so quickly. Whenever she’s without Eric or Chris, or any adult, she can make decisions, but if someone else had been in the car she would have driven around, trying to divine somehow where her passenger would like her to park. She realizes this about herself and for the first time understands it to be an irritating versus a thoughtful quality.
She gets out, puts Zoë in her sling, then takes Gabe out of his car seat and holds his hand. Zoë looks up at her and stares, wide-eyed, and Georgia knows she’s pooping.
They walk toward the entrance, and she tightens her grip on Gabe’s hand. “We can’t run around in here, okay? Do you think you can calm your body? Perhaps play and run around in your mind?”
He tries to squirm away. “I have candy,” she says. “I have candy to give to good boys.”
“Gabe want,” he says.
“If you’re good in here then I will give you one.”
“Want now!” he says, then jerks his body away from her. When she reaches for him, he arches his back and wails.
“I know,” she says. “You’re upset because you want a piece of chocolate. You’re upset because this isn’t part of our routine.”
She doesn’t know how “talking him through” can help if he can’t hear what she’s saying. She feels her body heating up. Gabe’s red faceis wet and blotchy. When he tantrums, two red dots bloom on his forehead.
“You look like the devil,” she says because he’s crying too hard to hear, and then she says loudly: “Crying is not the best action, Gabe. Try to find a better action!”
More crying, arching, glaring through fat, pulpy tears.
She sifts through her purse and gives him the damn chocolate.
* * *
After Georgia posts Chris’s bail, hugs him, cries, is admonished for hugging him and crying and acting like a “freak,” she and her children walk back to the car, and once everyone is buckled in she drives out of the lot. She says nothing. She waits for Chris to make the first move. This requires so much self-restraint that she keeps shifting in her seat and fake-yawning.
“What’s your problem?” Chris says. “Do you have a hemorrhoid or something?”
“No,” she says and refrains from telling him that his father does. “I think I have a hemorrhoid,” he said last night during Dateline .
“They’re pretty common,” she says. “Nothing wrong with it.”
She can feel him looking at her. Eric has beady ferret eyes that Chris fortunately didn’t inherit and thin little lips that he did. Zoë coos, and Georgia remembers her soiled diaper, but doesn’t want to stop, especially since Gabe has fallen asleep. She looks in the rearview mirror and sees him with his pacie in his mouth, his filthy blue blanket over his legs. Chris looks back at his sister. “You’re dumber than knuckles,” he says.
“That’s not a nice thing to say.”
“I don’t mean anything bad by it,” he says. “She was
M. Stratton, Skeleton Key
Glimpses of Louisa (v2.1)
Barbara Siegel, Scott Siegel