Raising Cubby

  I remembered my own fears of being eaten, and my parents assuring me that monsters were not real. It didn’t work. The problem was, my dad was a philosopher, and he relied on logic, which failed us horribly when it came to monsters. He had no answer to the monster paradox, which said: If monsters ate every kid they caught, there would be no survivors to tell us they were real, because the kids who knew the truth would all be in the monsters’ stomachs. I concluded that kids who said there were no monsters were either hopeful or ignorant, and I believe Cubby came to a similar conclusion, thirty-some years later.

  Most of the time, other activities like eating, sleeping, or making demands on parents distracted him. Those times, monsters were forgotten. Then there would be the moments when he was alone, in a reflective mood, and monster thoughts would come to the fore in his little brain. If he thought about them too long, he’d get scared. When that happened we knew it, because he’d come running. “Mama! Dada! Monsters!” He would leap into his mother’s arms, where he was warm, safe, and protected. She would reassure him and pat him gently on the back. After a moment, he would usually settle down and return to his Legos and other amusements.

  I watched that happen time and again. Sweet as it was, I thought it would be better if he learned self-defense. Mom agreed. She knew she would not always be there to protect him, and he needed to be able to resolve monster scares on his own.

  She filled an empty spray bottle with colored water. “This is monster spray,” she said as she handed him the bottle with the greatest of gravity. “Keep it with you, and spray anywhere you think there might be monsters. They hate the stuff, and will always run away.”

  “But if they don’t …” She gave him a plastic Wiffle Ball bat. “If you see any monsters, whack them hard with this.” Cubby put the bat next to his bed. He went back to his Legos with a newfound sense of security. It was amazing, the way that tyke accepted whatever his mom told him, as if it was The Word.

  A few weeks later, I decided to test Cubby’s preparedness. Placing a blanket over my head, I crept around the corner from our room to his. Poised in the doorway, a shapeless blue blanket mass, I growled. Softly, but with menace and conviction.

  Cubby turned around. “Hey,” he yelled, but I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if he recognized me, so I just growled in return. In the blink of an eye, Cubby spun around, grabbed the bat, and began pounding the blanket as hard as he could, all the while yelling at the top of his lungs, “Mama! Monsters!” It was shocking how hard and fast that tyke could swing a bat. I threw the blanket off, stunned, and he whacked me square on the head. Then he did it again, either before or because he recognized me. Quick as a flash, he dropped the bat and ran past me into the living room, yelling, “Mama! Save me!” He leapt into her arms as I rounded the corner to see her laughing.

  “Very good, Jack. You defended yourself and the monster just turned out to be Dada.”

  What could I say to that?

  I didn’t growl at him very often after that, and he didn’t whack me with the bat.

  Cubby continued to get bigger and stayed healthy. That was good, but it also meant a never-ending stream of new expenses as Cubby outgrew one thing and needed another. He was nothing like a dog, which was practically set for life once you got it a food dish and a blanket. Kid ownership is expensive. Before Cubby was born, we had purchased nesting materials, and that was costly enough. After he arrived, there were new bills every day. Little Bear nursed him, but her milk alone wasn’t enough. There were baby foods to buy, too. Then there was the Stork Diaper Service and an endless array of clothes. There were objects to stimulate his growing brain—mobiles to hang overhead and chunky rubber things to grab and chew. This list of baby paraphernalia kept growing, with no end in sight.

  Seeing all that, I redoubled my efforts to make money, and it began to pay off. Though I wasn’t restoring many cars, my ads were bringing in service customers, and the money was enough to support us. The bank account stopped its alarming downward spiral. Now I just needed to reverse the trend. I began to think I might actually pull it off.

  Just then, my business partner decided to pounce again. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. I had learned those words always presaged something bad, and this time was no exception. “You’re doing pretty well out there in that shop. I think it’s time you started paying me some rent. You can give me a few thousand every month, starting next Monday.”

  I could almost feel my blood pressure rising. I had to earn back the money I had lost and pay rent on top of that. It was becoming clear that the big loser in this arrangement was me, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing except make money for him and keep a little for myself.

  So I came up with a plan, which I prayed would get me out of the hole I’d gotten into. It was time to revisit the business of selling cars. That was where the real money could be made. I was making fifty- and hundred-dollar profits on service jobs. If I was smart, I could make ten times that on a single car sale. That became my goal. I used the credibility I was building in my service department to sell cars in a nontraditional way.

  “If you want a late-model Mercedes,” I told people, “I’ll go to the Mercedes-Benz auction and find the one that’s perfect for you. You pay me a six-percent commission, just like a real estate agent. I’ll buy you a better car than you’d find at any dealer, for a better price. You’re hiring me to be your expert.”

  In those pre-Internet days my idea took off. Soon I was buying five, ten, and even twenty cars a month. I wasn’t worried about finding buyers for my inventory, because everything I bought was presold. Customers loved the transparency of my system. If I paid ten thousand for a car, they paid me ten thousand six hundred. There was no fear that they’d paid too much, or that an unscrupulous salesman had taken advantage of them.

  I made fifty thousand dollars selling cars that first year. That was when the next problem surfaced. My partner announced that I had to pay back the money I’d lost “after taxes.” So making back a hundred grand was not enough. I had to make back two hundred grand. A year before, I’d have been crushed, but now I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, the better I did, the nastier my so-called partner became. There were days I just cringed going to work, he was so venomous and ugly. He could not stand to see my business take off, as his own company withered and he got older and sicker. He was a mean, bitter old man.

  He lurked in his office, looking out over the parking lot. Whenever he saw the chance, he’d charge out and belittle me in front of customers. “Move that car,” he’d bark. “Get that oil off the ground.” I don’t know what he thought he was doing, but my customers came to see him as an arrogant bully, and they wondered why I put up with him. I just kept my mouth shut. I knew I was winning. Slowly but surely, I was building a bank account and planning my escape.

  By that time, I had learned to keep my new son as far from my work as I could. I never shared with Little Bear how ugly the situation at work had become. Perhaps I was ashamed, since I blamed myself for getting us into the mess. The worst was when Little Bear would visit, bringing Cubby along. It made me sick, the way my partner acted nice while they were there and they had no idea what a beast he really was.

  It was a hard grind, the hardest work I’d ever known, but I knew inside I could win.

  I’ve observed a lot of kids, and one thing they all have in common is a strong curiosity about their origins. Once the basic words like Mama, Dada, and car are out of the way, and the first yelled exclamations (I’m hungry! Gimme that toy! I don’t want a nap!) have been learned, they move on to calmer and quieter philosophical issues. Sure enough, one day Cubby reached the stage where he asked the Big Question: “Where did I come from?”

  Where indeed? There were many possible answers, some more interesting than others. Some people say, “God brought you to us.” Unfortunately, that didn’t answer anything. If God brought me, who is he and where did he get me? A religious person might answer, God created you,
but I’m a rational guy, and, knowing the sperm-egg thing, I could not in good conscience use the God explanation.

  Cubby’s mom substituted her own fanciful creature, saying, “The stork brought you.” But Cubby didn’t seem to find that explanation especially satisfying either. The very idea of a bird carrying him around was troubling, to say the least. He might have been dropped from a great height! In any case, his mother often contradicted her explanation a few seconds later by saying, “You came from Mom and Dad.” That answer didn’t work either, because no tyke can possibly conceive how he might come from Mom and Dad, even though that’s true. Even to a three-year-old, Mom and Dad are two distinct individuals, so how could they produce a kid? Was it like baking a cake?

  If I had been a more dedicated parent, I might have tried to explain the science of procreation, but I wasn’t. Instead, I turned to the familiar. I knew Cubby needed an explanation that made sense, one his thousand-day-old brain could comprehend. That is exactly what I found at the place every middle-class suburban toddler in America comes to know and love: the mall.

  Even before Cubby could talk, he accompanied his mom and me to the Holyoke Mall, where we bought goods of various sorts. Cubby saw food taken from grocery store shelves and placed in our refrigerator, only to be eaten a short while later. He saw a crib carried home in a box, to be erected for his containment and pleasure. He saw books put in shopping bags, to be read to him on the living room sofa.

  Almost every single thing that came into our house came from some kind of store. Cubby reached that conclusion early on. He even figured out that we went to stores in the car, which was fueled by gas I bought at filling stations. I know he understood filling stations and gas, because two of the first words he learned to say were BP and Mobil. And when he learned to read signs a few months later, the first one he read said: Michelob. It’s always been a mystery to me how he read that sign, which glowed red neon in the window of the gas station we visited every couple of days. I do not drink beer and never buy Michelob, but somehow Cubby picked up that word.

  By his third birthday, Cubby was well on his way to reading signs, using stuff, and understanding commerce. He did not grasp the finer points of business yet, but he definitely understood that we had to buy an item before eating it or using it at home. That was particularly true at the grocery store, where Cubby had already learned not to get caught eating food directly off the shelves.

  Buying toys was something he (and I) understood all too well. Of course, Cubby had no idea how much things cost, where the money to pay for them came from, or how it was exchanged. All he knew was, we went to stores, gathered up stuff, and brought it home.

  That made understanding his origin very simple, when I got around to explaining it.

  “I bought you at the Kid Store.”

  “Really?” Cubby digested that answer with puzzlement and wonder. No matter how many times he repeated the question, I answered it the same way. Yet he kept circling back, time and again.

  “That’s where you came from,” I repeated in a tone that didn’t brook any argument. I had to be careful to answer firmly and quickly so he would not sense uncertainty, which opened the door to competing explanations, like his mother’s stork story or even the “growing inside Mom” fable. “There was a Live Kid Department in one of the stores at the Holyoke Mall, and I kept seeing you up there in the window, and one day when they had a sale, I just went in and bought you.

  “You were stuck to the window in a big display basket, looking out at the shoppers as they walked through the mall. Your mom thought you were really cute, and I thought you’d grow up to be a hard worker around the house. They had you out there on display because you were the best-looking kid they had, and stores always put their best stuff out on display. They wanted to give me a wrapped kid from the stock in back, but I knew you were probably the best specimen, so I insisted on the display model, and here you are.”

  Cubby was not sure what to make of that explanation. He surely compared what I said to what he heard from his mother and grandparents. He realized that buying things in stores was something he observed almost every day. In comparison, he had never seen a stork deliver a baby. And other possibilities occurred to him, too. Just recently, he had taken some sea horses out of a box, put them in water, and seen them come to life. Maybe the same thing happened with kids, he might have thought.

  The thing that confused him was that he did not know where the Kid Store was. If he had seen a Kid Store with tykes for sale he would have accepted my explanation without question. As it was, he was unsure and somewhat troubled. That made me work even harder in hopes that my explanation would prevail. At times I wondered what would happen if he made it to his teens still believing I’d bought him in a store. The possibility was slightly alarming, but I sensed it would never happen.

  “Can we go to the Kid Store?” Cubby asked. I never knew if he wanted to buy a brother or sister, or just get validation. Either way, it was too late. All the mall had to offer was different species. “I’m sorry, Cubby. They put a pet store in where it used to be,” I said. “But they still use some of the same cages and stuff. Let’s go there and maybe you’ll recognize where you used to live.” However, he never did. Recognize it as home, that is.

  Whenever he complained about chores, cleanup, or any other parental request, which was often, I countered by reminding him of all the claims that had been made when I bought him. Cubby had heard salesmen describe products, so he knew it happened. The only question was what they had said about him.

  When he thought to ask, I reminded him never to rely on spoken claims for anything. In the car business, they call that talk salesman’s bullshit. People will say anything to get a deal. You should only rely on what you see in print, because that isn’t as likely to change.

  “I wish I still had the papers that came with you,” I told him. “They made a lot of promises, more than you got from the average car salesman, and I’m still waiting for some of them to come true.”

  Guaranteed to grow, they said, and he sure had done that. Cubby had quadrupled in weight, in just three years. My Land Rover, in comparison, weighed pretty much the same as when I got it. “You’re good value in the growing department, for sure,” I told him. “The Land Rover consumes a hundred pounds of gasoline every week. I’ll bet you don’t even eat ten pounds.”

  Eats regular food. That was always important to me. It’s bad enough having to put premium gas in the car. I couldn’t handle a kid that ate only premium baby food. Cubby was the human equivalent of a military vehicle—one that goes anywhere and eats whatever you feed him.

  Obedient. “Cubby,” I said, “that was true in the beginning, but the older you get, the more rebellious you become.”

  Does all chores. That was a tough one. “From the moment you could walk unassisted I said you were born to the yoke. Parents raise kids to help them with work around the house and elsewhere. For a dad like me, more kids equals more opportunity. If I had ten kids, I could open a coal mine. If I had twenty, I could have a clothing factory too.” That was what I told him, but it never came true. It was very hard to get useful work from Cubby. He was friendly, and even superficially cooperative, but when it came to hard labor, he was always someplace else.

  In fact, when he got older, he became a lot like Tom Sawyer in his ability to get other kids to do his work for him. Since I had been careful never to read him Mark Twain, so as not to give him ideas, that seemed to be a natural-born trait. I was proud to see it in action, except when I wanted him working for me.

  Despite all the problems, I made it clear that I was pretty satisfied with my purchase. As well I should be, for what he cost. “You were two hundred dollars,” I would say in my most serious voice. “Plus tax. The best kid in the store, and the second most expensive! The most expensive kid was three hundred seventy-five dollars, but he came with a third eye, and I did not see the sense in paying for that extra eye. A two-eyed kid was good enough for me. They us
e three-eyed kids in mining and industry, but they look funny in a community like this.”

  Cubby always liked the notion of being the best in the store. It’s nice to be the best of something. Only problem was, his mother persisted in offering him alternate origin stories. Eventually, she actually convinced him that he grew inside her, and he ended up believing that and not my own colorful account, which was really a shame.

  I think it was the pictures that made the difference. After all my talk about believing what you see in print, as opposed to salesman’s bullshit, his mother turned that around on me and won him over with photos from National Geographic and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I could not trump that, because there were no Kid Store photos available. If only I’d had the Internet and Photoshop back then! The only thing that could have trumped my story then would have been a pregnant Mom, and Cubby ended up an only child, so I’d have won, hands down.

  Without photos, my creative explanation was defeated. The inherent believability of the Kid Store alone was not enough. Realizing I had lost, I felt a bit sad. In fact, that experience led me to question the meaning of “right answers.” When you have a kid, and he asks where he came from, what’s the correct response? Is it the most entertaining story? Or is it just the dry, boring facts? After much reflection, I decided that the world is what we make it to be, and that the best answer for a little kid is the one that gets him thinking. That was what I tried to do.

  There was a time when Cubby derided my imaginative explanations, but now that he is grown I can see that they had an effect; I made him think, and questioning the conventional wisdom is never a bad thing. Someday, when he has a kid of his own, I would not be surprised if he offers even more imaginative answers when faced with the Origin Question.