I sit on the floor and spread out the collection in front of me. For a while I savor the cover photos, the little arms and legs, the crisp new parkas and snappy denim overalls, the milk-tooth smiles. Then I gather the catalogs together in a stack and flip through each one. All my favorite pages I’ve marked with Post-it tabs. Each of my favorite children is a boy, each has a name and a story, and all their stories are happy ones. I smile and share the happiness as they revel in the satisfaction of normal lives and natural fibers. At times I’m so moved I cry a little.
But these are the only fantasies I allow myself. Though sometimes tempted, I never pretend that Laura is still alive, or that our son survived his birth and is now an adorable toddling gape-mouthed two-year-old, quick to giggle, with red hair like his mother’s and a predilection for Mack truck worship. Never do I lie dozing on the sofa and imagine I hear his bare feet slapping across the kitchen floor in pursuit of a dust bunny or a Matchbox car. Nor do I fantasize about taking Selia, leaving this town to its miserable fate, and starting a family of our own in a warm, sane place.
Never, ever do I allow myself these luxuries.
No. After a while I gather up the catalogs, put them back in the safe, give the combination dial a spin, and go upstairs to put my dinner in the oven.
The next morning I need to go to the bank, so I leave home half an hour early. Lester Hicks, the president of Kennebec Federal Savings, has a six-year-old daughter and doesn’t like me any more than any other parent, grandparent, godparent, aunt, uncle, big brother, or sister in town, but he grudgingly accepts my business on account of the fact that I’m worth more than the GNPs of Sierra Leone and Gambia combined.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that they’re pleasant or even polite to me there. When I reach the front of the line all three tellers simultaneously hang their NEXT WINDOW PLEASE signs and disappear. I wait. There’s much grumbling in the line, not about the tellers, but about me. Someone calls into question my parentage, suggesting not so subtly that I am the product of bestiality. Another says I might be more sympathetic if I were a parent myself, but of course that would presuppose certain sexual functions of which I clearly am not capable. This goes on for fifteen minutes, until the tellers reappear, prodded from the break room by Lester. They argue with him in hushed, vicious tones. Finally Lester initiates several rounds of rock-paper-scissors, after which they return to their windows, the loser with her head hanging.
When I’m finished I head to the door and literally run into Selia walking in off the street.
“Hi,” I say, knowing what’s coming.
“Hi,” she says quietly, then, louder: “Out of my way, jackass!” She screws up her face, hawks mightily, and spits a glob of phlegm onto my sports coat.
Everyone in the bank cheers. Selia gives me a look somewhere between amusement and apology. Though I know she’ll deny it, I wonder if these “chance” meetings are something other than coincidence, as they seem to occur more frequently after we’ve had a disagreement. Selia being Selia, I wouldn’t put it past her to manufacture a public encounter just so she’d have an excuse to abuse me a bit.
That night the only damage to the Celica is a gallon of red paint poured over the hood, so I get home from work a little early. Selia isn’t there, and she doesn’t show up until almost ten o’clock.
“Everything okay?” I ask when she comes in through the tunnel.
“Sorry,” she says, throwing down her handbag. “I’ve been at the hospital all day. Mom got hold of a bag of potting soil from the shed and ate a heaping helping while I was at the bank. I found her in front of the TV, munching away, watching The Price Is Right.”
“Well, gross, but what’s the big deal? It’s just dirt.”
“No, it’s that fortified stuff. Got all kinds of fertilizers and chemicals in it. They emptied her stomach and pumped her full of charcoal. Good news is, they’re keeping her overnight, so I can stay here.”
“Hey, great,” I say, though I’m instantly disappointed, and a bit panicked, that I won’t be able to go through my nightly routine with the catalogs.
Selia moves behind the sofa and kneads the muscles in my shoulders. “So I stuck around for a while and made sure they cleaned her hair and her nails and her dentures and changed her socks and let her keep the TV on because she can’t sleep without it. Then, the other reason I’m so late, I had a flat tire when I came out of the hospital.”
At this my ears prick up. “A flat? Was it slashed?”
“No,” she says. “I had it towed to Arbo’s, and they found a nail lodged in the tread. Said it happens all the time during the summer. Lots of construction, lots of nails lying about.”
“Have you noticed Jeff Pauquette around anywhere?”
“I told you, it wasn’t him,” she says, rubbing harder. “Don’t be so paranoid.”
“Yeah, what am I worried about?” I say. “After that display of venom at the bank this morning, even if Jeff knew we were together no one would believe him.”
Selia tries, not too hard, to stifle a titter. “Sorry about that,” she says. “You have to admit, though, I was convincing.”
“A little too convincing. That was my favorite coat.”
“I’ll pay to have it cleaned, big baby. Okay?”
“It’s not the expense,” I say. “It’s having to drive all the way to the dry cleaner’s in Dover.”
“Oh, knock it off,” Selia says. “I’ll take your jacket to the cleaners. What else do I have to do? I’ll drive. Mom would enjoy a little road trip.”
Later, Selia wakes from a nightmare. She tells me she dreamed she was driving to Dover and her mother grabbed my coat and leapt from the passenger seat, screaming some nonsense mantra about gefilte fish as she hit the pavement and rolled.
“I couldn’t stop the car,” Selia says. “I hit the brakes, but the car just kept going. And all I could think was, she wouldn’t have been able to jump out if I’d paid the Adulation tax for child safety locks.”
She’s trembling.
“Try some milk,” I suggest.
“Nah,” she says. “I think I’ll grab something a bit stronger from the bar, if you don’t mind. First I’m going to call the hospital, though.” She rises and heads for the stairs.
“Don’t forget to disable the motion sensors,” I call after her.
I wait until she’s upstairs, then take the opportunity to sneak over to the safe and steal a few quick glances at BestDressed Kids. When I hear Selia’s footsteps returning I replace the catalog, close the safe door carefully so it won’t make any noise, then hop back into bed.
The next day, Wednesday, my session with Jeff is scheduled for one in the afternoon. He shows up on time and actually smiles at me when I open the office door.
“How you doing, you?” he asks, bright and friendly.
“Fine, Jeff, thanks,” I say. Jeff sits without being invited, and after a minute of staring quizzically at the back of his head, I take my seat behind the desk and set the timer for fifty minutes.
“Looks like they’ve left your car alone today, them,” Jeff says. He’s still smiling.
“Is that so?” I ask, trying to seem indifferent. “If you had to venture a guess, would you say the chances are good they’ll continue to leave it alone?”
Jeff makes a show of considering this. He tilts his head back and rubs his stubbled chin thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he says. “They’re in a real good mood today, them, so I think your car will be fine.”
“Well, that’s great news,” I say.
“Maybe not.” He stares, giving me the biggest smile yet. For a moment I’m certain my life is about to end, suddenly and with great violence; Jeff’s finally lost it and is going to brain me with the official CAPA paperweight, a statuette of a smiling child with the words NOTHING SPECIAL stamped upon its base. I look away, chilled. When I look back he’s still staring, still smiling, but it’s not violence I read in his eyes. Rather, his expression is that of a five-card-stud player si
tting on three aces.
I clear my throat and shuffle some papers on the desk. “Well, let’s get to it, Jeff,” I say. “I’d planned a session of negative-image negative-reinforcement today, so if you’ll just take off your shirt so I can affix the electrodes…”
“Sure thing.” He unbuttons his flannel and slips it off. Four hairless spots remain on his chest from our last NINR session. When I come around the desk with the electrodes, Jeff takes them from my hand and sticks them on himself.
“All set, me,” he says, smoothing the adhesive circles with the tips of his fingers. He looks up and smiles some more.
I take my seat again and turn on the machine. “Ready?”
“Fire away,” he says.
I show Jeff a picture of his son Abe.
“Mama’s boy. Too sensitive. Bad fisherman. Can’t even stand to put a hook through a goddamn worm. A sissy, him.”
“Good,” I say. My hand hovers, eager and trembling, over the shock toggle switch. “More.”
“Ugly. Gap-toothed. One eye bigger than the other. And that harelip you’re always going on about, you. Still gives me the willies to look at it. Kid looks like a big bald cat.”
We continue. I stretch the session ten minutes beyond the customary half hour, putting Jeff through his paces, covering both Abe and his other son Corey, as well as negative impressions of children in general. Jeff requires correction only once, when he criticizes Abe for not caring what the kids at school think of him. I press the toggle switch for somewhat longer than the prescribed two seconds, then tell him this is a tricky one but that what children think is so utterly irrelevant that not even other children should pay it any heed.
I am, admittedly, disappointed that I don’t have another opportunity to correct him.
“That wasn’t too bad,” he says as I remove the electrodes and hand him his flannel. “Did pretty good, me.”
“You’re all set for this week, Jeff,” I say. “I suppose you can see yourself out.”
“Suppose I can,” he says, rising from the chair.
“You’re sure they’re going to leave my car alone, right?”
“The car, it’s safe,” he says. “Those fellows who beat up your car, they’re happy as clams today, them.”
Finally, like a big, dumb fish, I bite. “Why, Jeff?” I ask. “What is it that’s got them in such a great mood?”
He pauses at the door. “Let me answer your question with a question,” he says. “I wonder, how much of the big bucks you make running down our kids did it cost you to build that tunnel, anyhow?”
We stare at each other. My mouth hangs open, and I can’t seem to close it.
“Later, boss,” Jeff says, smiling again as he closes the door behind him.
Selia calls me in a panic.
“My car is destroyed,” she says. “All the windows are broken. It looks like someone took a chain saw to the tires.”
“It’s Jeff,” I say.
“No shit it’s Jeff,” she says. “How did he find out about us?”
“I have no idea. He knows about the tunnel. He must have seen you coming or going.”
“Jesus.”
“Selia, calm down,” I say.
“I will not calm down! What am I going to do? I’ll end up like you, driving sixty miles to get a Pepsi.”
“Honey,” I say, “we’ll figure something out.”
“He’ll tell everyone. And they’ll tell everyone else. They’ll run me out of town. They’ll show up at my house with torches and a rope,” she says. “I can’t leave here. Mom would die. She grew up in that house.”
“It might not be that bad.”
“Don’t say that,” she says. “You know better. It will be very, very bad. It will be the worst.”
She starts to cry. Like a stone I sit there with the handset pressed against my ear, listening to her sobs, and gradually I become what I have not been for a very long time—angry.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says quietly, “because it’s really no reflection on you, but at the moment I’m sort of sorry we ever met. I feel like I should say that.”
My mind, spurred by an anger so sudden and unfamiliar, gallops furiously ahead, and I barely hear her.
“I think that’s the hardest thing about God being dead,” Selia says. “You know? Because before, when bad things happened, you could always shake your fist at the sky and say something nasty under your breath and you kind of knew that God would understand, he put you in a shit situation, so you had a right to be pissed. Now, things go sour and there’s no one to take the blame.”
“Selia,” I say. “Get your mother together. I’ll come pick you up.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Grand Asian Buffet.”
There’s a pause on her end. “What?”
“Just listen to me,” I say. “I’ve got an idea.”
Selia listens. When I’m finished she cries some more and says she won’t do it, no way, no how, but her refusal is of the impotent variety offered by those who realize they have no other choice.
“I’ll be ready in ten,” she sniffles.
Despite regular outbreaks of food poisoning, the Grand Asian Buffet has been Watertown’s most popular restaurant six years running. It’s also the only place in town where I’m allowed to sit down to a meal, as the owner, Ping, being Chinese, possesses an attitude toward children of dutiful indifference, and so isn’t required to attend my therapy sessions.
When we arrive the parking lot is, as always, full. I put the Jaguar in park and turn to Selia.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m going in. Wait here fifteen minutes or so, then come in and do your thing.”
Selia won’t look at me. “I hate this,” she says. “I hate you for making me do it.”
“There’s not much else we can do,” I say. “Unless you want to move to New Hampshire.”
“I’m not going to New Hampshire,” Selia’s mother says from the backseat.
“Okay?” I say. “Selia?”
“Okay.”
“You’ve got to sell it,” I tell her. “You’ve got to be utterly convincing for this to work.”
“Betty?” her mother says. “Where are you taking me?”
“We’re going to have some dinner, Ma,” Selia says.
I get out of the car and enter the restaurant through fiberglass doors decorated to resemble the gates of a feudal Chinese fortress. The cavernous dining room is full. Two hundred faces turn, stare, and darken. The Shofner family, on seeing me, rise and stalk out, leaving behind half-eaten plates of food. Ping, smiling modestly, leads me to a table near the scale replica of the Great Wall which runs the length of the restaurant.
“Something to drink?” he asks.
“How about a Heineken,” I say.
“Of course.” He motions toward the buffet at the end of the dining room. “You may help yourself.”
And though I’m not hungry I think, why not? This will be the last time for a while that I’ll be able to partake of fried rice and wontons. So I run the gauntlet of grumbling diners. Selia’s name curls off their acid lips. When I reach the buffet everyone else clears out except for a boy of fourteen or so wearing a T-shirt that reads: I HAVE THE DICK, SO I MAKE THE RULES.
I head back to my table after heaping up a plate and spot Jeff sitting with his family against the far wall. He smiles and waves. I put a thumb into my mouth and puff out my cheeks as though I’m blowing up a balloon. I raise my middle finger slowly until it’s fully “inflated,” then display it to Jeff. He just keeps smiling.
I’m into my second plate and third beer when the doors open, setting off a crash of gongs through the PA speakers. Selia enters with her mother in tow, and the entire restaurant goes silent as the gongs fade.
Selia calls for attention, but she’s already got it.
“By now, many of you know I’ve been spending time with this man.” She points at me. “I can imagine what you must think. You consider me a
traitor, a whore, an all-around bad citizen. What you don’t know, however, is that my aim was not to consort with this filth, but to rid our community of him. Now, finally, I have the means to do so.”
Not angry enough, I think. Not disdainful enough. Sell it, honey. Sell it.
“Before coming here today, I placed a call to the Kennebec County sheriff’s office,” she continues. “As we speak, deputies are searching his home. In his home they will find a safe. And in that safe they will find a large, carefully annotated, and totally illegal cache of children’s clothing catalogs.”
A murmur ripples through the diners. Selia’s got one more block of dialogue to get through, an exclamation point of derision about me being a hypocrite and a child worshipper. But her eyes have begun to well with tears, and I jump in before she blows the whole thing. I rise from the table, mustering an expression of wounded betrayal.
“Selia,” I say. “How could you do this?”
She looks at me. Her eyes shimmer. For a horrible moment I think she’s going to break down and embrace me, but then her face goes dark with an anger as real and implacable as death.
“Shut your mouth, you son of a bitch.” She rears back and kicks me squarely in the balls. I go down like a sack of bricks, utterly convinced.
The restaurant is silent.
“Betty,” Selia’s mother says, tugging her hand. “Betty. They’ve got beef and broccoli. Can we have beef and broccoli?”
Prison isn’t nearly as bad as we’re led by prosecutors and newsmagazines to believe. At least not the prison they’ve sent me to, a minimum security compound in the midcoast region. No shanks or forced sex here. My fellow convicts are all nonviolent offenders, largely white-collar sane individuals who can be trusted with a knife, if not your wallet. I eat well. I can come and go more or less as I please within the compound. There’s cable television, and movies in the rec room on Tuesday and Saturday nights. In the yard we play volleyball, basketball, horseshoes. Once a week five or six of us gather in the quad for poker. I’ve got gratifying work as a peer counselor, helping other inmates cope with depression, sexual privation, and the guilt associated with having disappointed and shamed their families.