The Front Door

I was always surprised by the long drop to the ground from that window, no matter how many times I did it. I would lie with my stomach on the window, my legs stretching down as far they could before I would let myself drop to the grass. I hit the bushes most of the time, and almost always lost my shoes, but every now and then I would just miss and land with shoes intact. On those nights it seemed luck was with me. Strange, but when I left the house by the window, life's forbidden possibilities seemed so close at hand. Grandpa must have known I escaped. I think he planted that bush there to make it harder for me, but he never said a word. Doug was always there, waiting in the dark with a tender kiss.

That night we were headed to a party at Roger's house, a ten minute walk. Roger’s parents lived in the center of my little town -- alcoholics who always seemed rumpled and sad. They encouraged Roger's friends to hang out there by ignoring all company. The house was dingy, but you could tell it used to be nice -- a white wood-frame 50's style home with oversized rooms and lots of character. The back part of the house was added on later with narrow halls and lower ceilings. It felt like a cave, the perfect hangout for us.

That night the blender was making margaritas in the kitchen; Mrs. was doing the honors. It was rare to see her out of her bedroom as she was quiet -- not shy, just closed off. Her presence that night was explained by the fact that some relatives of Roger's were coming over and she wanted to see them. They were attending A&M, which made them celebrities. I had a secret dream of going off to college. I never mentioned this to any of my friends. I didn't think they would understand the urge to leave this town.

Doug got me a special margarita with sugar on the rim. He took care of me that way. It was a nice touch, but it made it messy to drink. We were asked to sit around the living room with the parents. Seemed to be the price of the special drinks that night as Mr. and Mrs. had never said a word to us before. We usually just went to the back of the house with the TV on mute and the hard-rock music on so loud we felt it, or we sat around on lawn chairs in the garage where an old ping-pong table sat untouched. I never even saw a paddle. Roger would have the music blaring from his crudely made plywood speaker cabinets housed in trunk of his car. The treble speakers were under the dashboard inside. It was a serious system, if unattractive. With all this heavy metal, not much talking went on. But this evening we were sitting around the living room and it was very uncomfortable, like being in a police lineup. I kept getting sticky sugar fingers, which I tried to wipe off on the sofa when no one was looking.

Mr. and Mrs. were asking what each of us planned for the future. Doug was planning on becoming a welder since he heard it paid real well. Jeff was thinking along the same lines, but he one-upped Doug saying he wanted to do the underwater kind. Roger did not know and said so with annoyance. Just as the question was about to get to me, the phone rang. I was relieved and disappointed in the same instant.

With the distraction of the phone, Roger dragged us to the garage avoiding the margaritas so his parents wouldn’t trap us again. He had beers in the ice box outside. Tonight Roger decided the stereo system had to come out of the car so we could hear it properly. This took an incredible amount of effort--things were cut and reassembled. Roger was proud of that system. After he got it out and working again, requiring some electrical tape and wire stripping, Ozzy Osbourne started playing. We’d seen him live two weeks before after camping out for tickets overnight. We were still all about the bat eater.

By the time we were all getting lazy and stoned, a small, nondescript sedan pulled up. Out stepped a young couple about twenty years old. They seemed deliberate in their movements, or maybe I was just in slow motion. They said they didn't have much time. They just wanted to stop to say hello. They seemed so goal-oriented in that one statement. The tension in the garage went way up and the music went down. Everyone wanted to impress them. Sentences were complete, voices were loud enough to be heard. But mostly, we all wanted to hear what their life was like. They had one more year to go til graduation, and they were already getting offers from Amoco and Conoco, not as welders but engineers. They didn't stay long -- half an hour at most, and Mrs. never made an appearance, but they made an impression on me.

We all were a little depressed when they left. The party kind of fizzled. We felt empty, without purpose. What were we working towards? It was a long, silent walk back to my window. I was bad company and I don’t know why I tried to hide it. Getting back in was always harder, but we had it down. Doug would lock his fingers together and I would step into his hands as he flung me up. Tonight I said, "I got it, you can go". I don't know if he understood, but he nodded as he turned to leave. I waited a bit, and then decided to just go in through the front door.

Written by: Deborah Dwight Brown

Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Never Say That

Never underestimate the power of a child’s words. They may not have many to choose from, but when they find the right subject-verb agreement, it’ll floor you faster than a plastic stegosaurus.

Sometimes, they say something so adorable, you feel compelled to pick them up, purse your lips against their forehead, and freebase the innocence straight from their cranium. One time, Becca–my one and only little lady–put a dollar in a panhandler’s cup and asked, “Can I play in your fort now?” Unfortunately for me, the bum said yes, and instead of basking in my daughter’s naieveté, I spent the next thirty minutes sopping up her tears with my sleeve while trying to explain why I wouldn’t let her rummage through the homeless man’s cardboard castle.

Kids are also capable of channeling an astounding amount of sympathy. Case in point, at my mother’s funeral, when Becca comforted me by saying, “Is okay, Daddy. I be your mommy now.” I don’t know if that promise magically altered my gray matter or what, but from that moment on, I couldn’t look at Becca without seeing little traces of my mother: the mannerisms, the mole on her right cheek, the missing teeth–the cancer treatments made my mom’s teeth more fragile than daisy petals. Seeing the woman who gave birth to you in the girl you gave life to is oddly comforting.

But little ladies aren’t all pigtails and endearing speech impediments. There’s a darkness lurking not so deep inside each and every one of them, and in Becca’s case, it rises like the Kraken right around bath time. It was then–no more than a day after making her noble pledge–that Becca told me she hated me for the first time. “I HAT YOU,” if we’re being specific, but I knew what she meant. And all because I told her scotch is only for adults with dead mothers.

I was in no mood or emotional state to hear her declaration of hate, but even that didn’t disturb me as much as the string of syllables that rolled out of her mouth earlier this afternoon. There we were–me, Becca, and our matriarch, Jennifer–enjoying an idyllic autumn day on the state capitol lawn, when Becca came down with a wicked case of the questions: “Why is the sky blue?” “Is Gramma on that cloud?” “Who is he?”

She was pointing to a statue of George Washington, and I, trying to be a good father/American, walked her towards it while relaying all the biographical information Google could provide. That’s when she looked up at me with an ear-to-ear grin and said the worst thing a child could ever say to their parent, “I want to be president.”
In retrospect, I probably should’ve given her proclamation about as much weight as the h-bomb she dropped in the tub–her hair shampooed in a mohawk–but I wasn’t thinking rationally at the moment. All I could picture was my sweet, innocent Becca wearing a Hillary Clinton pantsuit and holding her finger over the big, red button that would usher in the nuclear apocalypse.

“Never–say–that,” I said, putting my pointer finger so close to her nose her eyes crossed and filled with water. Before the first tear could roll down her cheek, she went screaming down the hill towards Jennifer.

“What’s wrong,” Jennifer said, scooping Becca up into her arms and searching for signs of injury.
I caught up to them just in time to hear Becca mumble, “Daddy said I couldn’t be president,” into the wool of Jennifer’s turtleneck.

“Why would you say that?” Jennifer asked, perplexed by my need to squash our daughter’s dreams.

“In my defense, I never said she couldn’t be president,” I argued. “I simply told her to never say she wanted to be president.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want her to be president.”

“WHY?”

“Have you SEEN what it takes to be president these days: the pandering, the backstabbing, the flip-flopping, the begging for money? Think of all the Republicans and Democrats currently running for office and name me one who you’d actually like our daughter to look up to.”

Jennifer thought for a moment, bouncing Becca in a way that made her whimpers sound like a helicopter propeller. “Lincoln,” she said.

“Lincoln Chafee?” I said, nearly swallowing my gum.

“No, Honest Abe Lincoln,” she clarified.

“That’s cheating! I said CURRENTLY running for president.”

“I heard what you said, but I couldn’t think of any.”

“Exactly.”

“THAT’S NOT THE POINT,” Jennifer yelled so loud Becca stifled her sniffles and shot me a look of concern. “Sorry sweetheart,” she said, coaxing Becca’s head back to her neck.

“Then what is?” I whispered, out of respect to Becca’s ears.

“The point,” Jennifer continued, matching my tone, “is that she is three years old. Today she wants to be president, yesterday she wanted to be a butterfly, and there’s no telling what she’ll want to be tomorrow, but whatever it is, we need to support her.”

If Jennifer was holding a microphone in place of our daughter, that was the moment she would’ve dropped it. Ceding defeat, I sidled up to the remaining loves of my life and rested my head against Becca’s back. Her quaking lungs confirmed that she was still pouting about the whole president thing.

“Hey, Becca Bear,” I said, prompting her to bury her head deeper into Jennifer’s neck. “Do you still want to be president?”

Her nodding caused Jennifer and me to rock back and forth like timid concertgoers.

“Then you have my vote.”

Becca turned and placed her arms around my neck, swinging from parent to parent like a baby chimp. Once her velcroed sneakers were affixed to my ribs, she gave me a big kiss on the lips and said, “I love you, Daddy!”

“You can say that again,” I said; so she did, and I realized if I can just teach her to be a moral, honest, and kindhearted person, I’ll never have to worry about her becoming the president.


Written by: Mark Killian
Photograph by: Chris Boyles