A screaming comes across the skylight. An unremitting howl modulated
only by the chopping of whirling blades overhead.
No, there is no incoming German rocket, no hovering helicopter. This is not the beginning of a Pynchonian, war-time nightmare. It is, however, the start of the nightmare of Jon Troutman, Sr., C.P.A.,
age 36. The chopping is that of the ceiling fan in the adjoining
bedroom. The cry exploding down the hallway, through the bedroom
and into the den, is that of Jon Troutman, Jr., age 15 weeks. It is a cry Senior has heard many times in those weeks, but one he
was promised he would not hear at this particular hour on this particular
night.
If asked
a minute earlier to identify the most salient feature of this night,
he would have announced with unabashed, juvenile zeal that it is the
night of Game Seven of the Stanley Cup finals between his darling
Philadelphia Flyers and the St. Louis Blues. In a single soundburst,
however, this fact has been supplanted by another. His wife
is out with the ladies, not to return for hours. He is home
alone with baby.
The quarter second it takes for the cry to travel from crib to Senior’s
tympanic cavity is twice the interval it takes his limbic system to
convert the sound to full-blown panic. Certainly he has lived
through harrowing events before: the level 2 CPA exam; a grenade ambush
in the Gulf; a lunch-hour line at the Downtown Philly D.M.V. But nothing has steeled his nerves for this, a state of affairs he’s
been neither genetically nor communally prepared to handle.
Following panic comes disbelief. Immediately upon announcing
her plan for a Ladies’ Night Out with fellow neighborhood mommies,
Senior’s wife had assured him that Jon Jr. would be sound asleep and
remain so beyond her
Disbelief quickly gives way to suspicion, as the pieces of the puzzle
coalesce further in his rapidly scrambling brain. He is NEVER
home alone with baby. Baby NEVER wakes up this early. Ergo, something fishy is going on.
It sounds crazy, he knows, but do the math. If baby wakes at
10:00 pm only once every 50 nights, and Senior is home alone with
baby only once every 100 nights, the odds of these scenarios coinciding
if they are, indeed, truly independent is 1 in 5,000. Throw
in the fact that the Flyers play a decisive Stanley Cup Finals contest
only once every 5,000 days, and it requires not even garden variety
paranoia, but merely a basic understanding of the laws of probability,
to infer that something purposeful, something willful, must be going
on here. Someone is out to get him.
But who has orchestrated this supposed happenstance? Baby? Yes, he decides after a moment’s consideration, who else? Somehow
baby knows that Senior is on his own and trying to enjoy what, God
willing, will be the Flyers’ first Cup since 1975. Having waited
patiently for such an opportunity to present itself, baby has finally
launched a brutal quest for vengeance, a formidable vendetta born
out of what Senior can only imagine to be a deeply ingrained Oedipal
compulsion that can be satisfied by nothing less than the complete
annihilation of father’s soul. And how powerful baby’s bloodlust
must be, how mighty his thirst to wound father, that it triumphs over
the countervailing factor – one that should be obvious even to a 15-week
old – that it is to baby’s great disadvantage to choose this night
to wake and require a tender and comforting parental touch?
Or, if not
baby, then who? His wife? Perhaps even God? Is this
really such a strange thing to think? If the elder generations
of Troutmans were to be believed, most of the concurrences of the
unusual marking Jon Sr.’s ascent from childhood to maturity were contrived
by divine or paranormal forces. When an oil stain bearing the
likeness of the Virgin Mary appeared on the driveway on the morning
of Jon’s Catholic confirmation, it was a blessing upon the occasion. When Mike Schmidt went 0-for-5 with three errors on the day that Jon’s
father pulled him from high school to attend a Phillies day game,
Schmidt had been jinxed to punish the Troutmans for truancy. How, then, could he fail to perceive the divine stamp upon tonight’s
probabilistic anomaly?
He looks quickly at the television, confirms that no scoring chance
is imminent, and bolts through the bedroom and down the hall to baby’s
room. He scoops Junior up, throws him over his shoulder, and
begins patting his back and hushing softly in his ear, a technique
he’s observed his wife execute repeatedly without fail. Nothing
doing. Five more minutes of different positions, rocking motions,
and soothing techniques fail just as miserably. If anything,
his attempts seem to enrage baby even more, as if baby is offended
by the sheer nerve, the unjustified hubris, father is showing by presenting
himself as an acceptable alternative to the high-pitched voice, sweet
smell, and soft bosom to which baby has grown accustomed. Each
time Senior attempts another feeble maneuver, baby screams louder
and sprays greater quantities of spittle in his face.
Jon Sr. has witnessed numerous exchanges of “baby talk” between mother
and Junior, mystified by his wife’s ability to engage in these “conversations.” Only now, as the remaining minutes in the second period continue to
drain steadily away, does Jon realize for the first time that he too
can understand precisely what baby is saying to him.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” baulks Junior.
“Shhhhhh,” whispers Senior.
“You’ve got some set of balls on you showing up here!” Junior wails.
“Shah shah shah, shah shah shah.”
“Where the hell is the broad?!?”
“God help me,” Senior moans, his voice cracking.
“Fucking-A right you better go call her, asshole!”
Lunging back toward the crib, Jon Sr. plops the now psychotically
furious Junior down on his blankie, turns on the Winnie the Pooh mobile,
and rushes back to the den to regroup. He clamps his hands over
his aching ears and consults the tv screen.
“Motherfff—” he begins. He’s missed a goal. The Flyers
celebrate on the portion of the ice in front of their bench while
Jon learns from the PA announcer that it was Gagne from Roenick and
Rangarsson. The goddamn PA announcer!
Play resumes. The crowd goes wild as the Flyers continue
to build momentum, winning the post-goal face-off and mounting another
scoring rush that sees a Johansson slapper ring off the cross-bar. Jon Sr. can feel the electricity, can sense the Flyers taking control
of the contest. But, at the other end of the hallway, baby is still
screaming bloody murder. It’s been ten minutes, and hoarse, guttural,
gasping sounds now punctuate the short breaks between full-blown howls. If his wife were here, things would be easy. She would know
exactly what to do. The only thing he knows is he’s got to do something.
Or does he? After 15 weeks of watching his wife spring reflexively into action
the instant baby calls out, frequently making use of sophisticated
and expensive surveillance technology to ensure detection of the slightest
whimper, he had never considered that any other course of action was
possible. But suddenly, a revolutionary idea – an epiphany,
even – materializes in his brain. He could do nothing.
Could he, he
wonders? Could he really? Could he simply shut the door
to baby’s room and watch the rest of the game in the largely soundproof
basement two floors below? Perhaps go with the cutting edge
theory that humans – no different from amoebae and viruses – are mere
machines, nothing more than the organizationally sophisticated sum
of their component parts, the entire concept of consciousness, self-awareness
– aliveness – a trick of the fictitious “mind?” Could he view
baby as a mechanized collection of neural pathways running a complex
software program, the resulting appearance of agony convincing, but
nevertheless an illusion to be safely ignored? He wonders what
the great philosophers would make of this one. If a baby screams
and no one’s there to hear it, does it really make a sound? Does it really suffer?
On the other hand, Senior reconsiders, if Jon Jr. is, in fact, the
possessor of a delicately evolving psyche, then his future mental
health is resting on Senior handling the present crisis. Suddenly
he finds he is furious at his wife for leaving him alone like this,
an emotion he immediately recognizes to be preposterous and shameful,
given that she busts her ass 24-7 to do everything for the little
bugger, and, while Senior frequently complains about being the one
to “work,” he has the secret knowledge that his commute and day at
the office are like a private jet and island paradise compared to
the horrors confronting her stay-at-home existence: diarrhea-soaked
diapers; sour-smelling gastric spit-up; puss-covered eyelids; angry,
speckled rashes; scratched and bleeding eczema wounds; snot which
oozes further and further out of the nostril and yet, in defiance
of gravity, never quite detaches from the upper lip; yogurt-and-applesauce
encrusted jowls; nearly fossilized chunks of half-eaten banana, pasta
shells, and bagels crunching under feet she’s had no time to wash
or cover with socks; her own ratty hair, sore nipples, aching back,
and B.O. He sometimes jokes that his wife has it easy, and,
on occasion, reminds her that staying home was her choice. (Some
“choice:” suffer the blow to self-esteem and identity that comes with
giving up her career or the guilt involved in abandoning baby to be
raised by a stranger, or worse, a hopelessly inept father. Some
choice: endure the ridicule of her generation or the disapproval of
the previous one.) But he is well aware that one day in her
shoes would land him in the nuthouse, and he constantly marvels at
what super-human abilities enable her to endure. So God knows
she deserves this night out, although, to the extent the word “deserves”
implies some proportionality between the service rendered and the
compensation paid, a single night out is one hell of a measly shit-speck
of recompense for 105 straight days and nights of toiling at the foot
of this little tyrant.
He bolts from the den again and makes one more attempt to soothe his
irate son, hoisting him out of the crib and putting him through a
series of maneuvers and armholds reminiscent of an Olympic gymnast’s
training regimen. This too fails, leaving him to once again
face the bald facts. He can’t take the screaming anymore. He can’t do anything to stop it. And he absolutely cannot call
his wife to confess his incompetence, which he would never hear the
end of. Ever.
Despair grips him. But just before it can fully take hold, inspiration
strikes. A solution is at hand. He darts back to his bedroom,
scoops up the phone, and dials.
Three minutes later, he opens the front door and welcomes in seventeen-year-old
Anne Spencer, soon-to-be high school senior, family friend, and intermittent
babysitter.
“Anne,” he mutters, out-of-breath from lunging down the stairs, “thank
God.” He points feebly up the stairs, looking as if he has foolishly
tangled with a rabid wolverine before giving up and calling in a heavy
hitter. “Can you…”
“Sure thing,” she says. She smiles and begins bounding happily
up the steps, turning right at the top and disappearing into Junior’s
room. Ten seconds later, silence follows. Jon Sr. waits
at the bottom of the stairwell, too afraid to hit a creaky step and
upset the delicate state of equilibrium the teenager has somehow brought
about. After another minute of silence, he begins to creep quietly
up the stairs. He makes it safely, and tiptoes back to the den,
where period three is getting rolling on the screen. Two minutes
later, Anne is standing in the doorway between bedroom and den.
“Hi,” she says.
“Oh, God, thank you,” he stammers, turning from the tv to face her. “That was amazing. How did you...?” He glances quickly
at the tv again.
“Just needed a burp was all.”
“I really can’t thank you enough,” he says.
“Like I said, no biggie.”
And like that, the ordeal is over. He can collect the remnants
of his fractured psyche, settle back into the recliner, and watch
the rest of the game in peace.
Except, she isn’t making to leave.
Jon Sr. waits, glancing nervously back and forth between the game
and his persistent redeemer. The girl smiles and continues to
stand in the doorway, her head tilted to the side, resting against
the doorjamb. An awkward moment passes.
“You like hockey?” he asks, for lack of anything else to say.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” she says, rather unconvincingly.
Thirty more seconds ooze painfully by.
“Do you want to sit down and watch?” he finds himself asking, his
aversion to socially awkward silences prevailing over both his desire
to recapture the ideal playoff hockey-viewing environment – solitude
– and his fear of seeming a lecherous creep.
“Sure, cool,” she says, and hops into the den. She plops herself
down on the loveseat flanking the wall separating den and bedroom.
“Flyers, Blues,” he explains quickly. “Two to one, good guys.”
Thirty seconds later, Habinsky takes a pass from Amonte, stickhandles
through the slot and backhands a roofer past the Blues goalie. Jon Sr. drops to one knee and pumps his fist frenetically. She
giggles. ESPN goes to commercial.
Perplexed by her dogged presence, but wanting to be gracious and neighborly,
he offers her a drink. Only after she says “sure” does he realize
he is holding a beer, and that the presence of the beer may have implied
that “drink” means alcohol, as it certainly does not when a mother
offers one to a toddler and certainly does when a Statie pulls you
over to ask how many you’ve had. She waits as he stands stupidly
inert, eyes fixed on the screen, stalling. She looks up at him
questioningly.
“Right, then,” he says finally, and heads downstairs to the kitchen,
where he stares blankly into the refrigerator, aware of every precious
second ticking off the game clock, but paralyzed by indecision. If she is expecting a beer and he serves up a soda, she will be rewarded
for her Samaritanism by being made to feel stupid, childish, patronized. If she is expecting something “age appropriate” and he shows up with
a Bud, God knows what kind of a deviant slimeball she’ll imagine him
to be. Just then, it occurs to him to simply ask her what the
hell she’d like, and he hurries back up the stairs.
“Whatever you’ve got,” she shrugs, leaving him still in the dark.
Except, perhaps not, as she would have no reason to be coy if she
was expecting a Coke. And, what more, the only thing she knew
he’d “got” was beer.
He disappears once again to the kitchen and returns with a Bud, playing
the role of cool-neighborhood-dad-just-cutting-a-responsible-teenager-some-slack. His fear of being perceived as a lecherous-creep-seeking-to-prey-on-underage-schoolgirl
rapidly abates as she accepts the offering, neither appalled nor unexpectedly
delighted. He watches her sip from the can and wipe a patch
of moisture from her lips, unable to help remarking to himself that
she is on the verge of becoming a real knock-out.
On the ice, the whistle blows, stopping play after the Flyers’ Harhuis
has iced the puck. She turns to him, the glazed look in her
eye evidencing confusion and something else he can’t quite put his
finger on. He considers explaining the icing rule to her, but
is fairly certain that no man has ever gone through the bother of
explaining icing to a woman in the absence of a desire to get into
her pants, and he is neither feeling bold enough to muddy his mental
picture of what is going on here or to attempt the world’s first platonic
inter-gender icing explanation.
The resulting face-off is deep in the Flyers’ zone. It takes
only 7 seconds for the Blues center to win the face off back to Jobman,
who fires an arrow into Jon Sr.’s heart, knotting the game at 3-3. He groans, visibly beset.
“Oh, poor baby,” consoles Anne, skipping over and patting his back.
Its down to crunch-time, and the possibility that Anne is jinxing
the Flyers, who have now blown a 3-1 lead, has not escaped his attention. Frustrated, he begins to wonder again what she is still doing here,
when it finally occurs to him that he has not offered to pay her,
pay being fairly integral to the parent-babysitter relationship. True, she needed only walk half a block and spend 5 minutes with the
baby, and an offer of payment might insult her. But then again,
she may be too timid to ask, and it would be wrong not to offer. So he does. She laughs and declines, brushing her hair away
from her face. No big deal, she says. She’s happy to do
it. She loves the baby, which he can’t help thinking is a strange
thing to say, since, regardless of how much she might actually love
the baby, she could not possibly relish having it screaming hysterically
in her face, drooling, and sputtering spit and snot on her while she
coaxes a fetid belch out of it.
She sips from the can again. A few drops escape the corner of
her mouth and dribble down her chin. She throws back her head,
wipes clumsily at her mouth, and laughs. And now he realizes
what that other look in her eyes was. It had not occurred to
him that 12 ounces of beer could do anything, but his need to get
rid of her has been suddenly offset by the need to let her apparent
buzz wear off. If she goes home tipsy, her mother will question
her baby-sitting story and will call Senior’s wife, blowing his cover. To try to sober her up, sharpen her wits, he asks her how school was
this past year.
“Boring,” she replies. “I don’t have a boyfriend.” It
is unclear whether the two statements are connected.
Flyers’ center Bogut lifts a glove-side wrister over the crossbar. Jon Sr. winces.
“Boys my age are so immature,” she elaborates. She sits on his
recliner’s arm.
Suddenly, an amorphous dread descends upon Jon Sr. and he turns to
face her, stunned to find her sitting on her new perch, inches above
and beside him.
“Don’t tell my wife about this,” he says, deepening the level of ambiguity
about what is going on here, as it is unclear – even to himself –
whether he is referring to the help with baby, the beer, the bizarre
date the pair now seem to be on, or all three.
“It’s our little secret,” she says, pronouncing “our” as “are” and
slurring the ‘s.’
With
“Whoooh!” she exclaims, laughing. Senior leans closer to the
tv. She tumbles off the side of the chair and hits the carpeted
floor with a dull thud.
With
“Gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaallllllll!!!!
He turns to face Anne, who jumps into his arms. He swings her
around as the Flyers skate onto the ice in celebration. She
clings to him, looking up into his eyes.
“YEAH! BABY!” he shouts.
“Waaaaaaaaahhhh!” comes an explosive wail from the nursery. And from the den window comes the sight of headlights and the sound
of tires rumbling onto the driveway.
“Oh, shit!” he screams. “You gotta go! Carol’s home!”
“But,” she protests as he drags her out of the den. “We didn’t even do anything!”
He scoops her into his arms and runs for the stairwell. He bounds
heavily down the steps, straining under her weight and the piercing
sound of baby’s renewed fury.
“But the baby!” she hoots as he reaches the bottom of the stairs,
disturbed at how loud the crying sounds even on the ground level,
a maelstrom of noise sure to carry straight through the windows of
the house and his wife’s idling Volvo. Amidst the shouting,
he can just barely detect the sound of the car’s ignition shutting
off.
Still holding
Anne, he rushes for the rear of the house and begins fiddling with
the lock on the door leading to the back porch. A click, rattle,
click can be heard from the front door. He drops the girl onto
her feet and throws open the back door.
“Jack?” a moment later from the front of the house.
“Hurry!” Jon Sr. exhorts, eyes pleading with Anne to go.
“Jack?” again with considerable alarm, followed by the sound of footsteps.
He nudges Anne out the back door and forces it shut behind her. The baby is still screaming bloody murder.
“Jack?” his wife asks again, arriving at the rear of the house to
the sight of a head of dirty-blonde hair disappearing down the porch
staircase. She hurries to the kitchen window in time to see
Anne trip over the bottom step and topple into the yard before springing
back to her feet and running, giggling, onto their westward neighbor’s
property.
“What
the fuck is going on here, Jack?!?” she yells, rounding on him and
slamming her fingers into her hip sockets. Her eyes bore into
him. He knows just how grave the situation is by the fact that
she’s still present, patiently awaiting an answer, while her precious
offspring screams his lungs out a story above her.
He remains silent for five seconds as he searches for the words to
explain. And then, a queer smirk crosses his face, as he suddenly
conceives of the question he must first answer for himself. Will his wife be more upset to discover he couldn’t handle a single
night alone with the baby or to think he’s fucking the babysitter?
Author’s Bio: Hal
Poret is a mathematician, attorney, and perception researcher who
has drawn on these diverse experiences in pursuit of his biggest
passion, writing. He is the author of a novel, a novella, three
screenplays, and a series of short stories (yet to be published) with
more writing projects in the works.
