Читать книгу Dad’s Maybe Book - Tim O’Brien - Страница 23

A few days ago, Meredith and I attended Tad’s weekly soccer game, which concluded in a rare victory for my son’s not-very-talented assemblage of six-year-olds. Tad did not score. He does not believe in scoring. In fact, during the course of the game, Meredith and I could not help noticing that the boy seemed to be intentionally kicking the ball to his opponents, or at least in the general direction of his opponents. At halftime I asked my son about this.

“Well, sure,” said Tad, plainly bewildered, “but I was kicking the ball pretty straight, wasn’t I?”

“Very straight,” I said. “Except straight to the other team.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not exactly, but the whole purpose—”

Tad looked up at me as if he were about to cry.

“I felt sorry for them,” he said. “I mean, we were really, really clobbering them.” His eyes swept back and forth. “I thought you told me sharing is a good thing.”

Timmy plays lacrosse. Not well. He stands motionless at midfield. He balances his lacrosse stick on the middle finger of his right hand, the stick artfully vertical against a blazing-blue Texas sky. He seems to be auditioning for the circus.

Again, I asked about this.

“It’s not easy,” Timmy said sharply. “I mean, you try it.”

There is nothing in either boy that resembles athletic aggression. Where the competitive instinct might reside, there is instead a very sensible pain-avoidance instinct, or, as Meredith optimistically calls it, a propensity for excessive kindness. Which is not, I suppose, such a terrible thing.

Still, I’ve suggested that Timmy give some thought to moving his legs during lacrosse games; I’ve advised Tad to try sharing the soccer ball with his teammates, just for the experience of it.

No luck, I’m afraid.

And so, after some soul-searching, I’ve become more or less resigned, as fathers must and should, to letting the boys pursue their own visions, athletic and otherwise. But the whole letting-go frame of mind comes very, very hard for me. It’s hard to stay silent on the sidelines, hard not to yell pointed instructions to my kids, and hard to be cheerfully encouraging after another midfield balancing act. True, my sons are young, but I want good things for them, happy things, and I’ve learned that athletic accomplishment can make a boy’s life considerably less stressful, especially in the teenage years, and even more especially in this sports-crazy state of Texas. Around here, Scrabble experts don’t get elected prom king.

Meredith, of course, jumps all over me when I ramble on like this. “Are you kidding me?” she says. “We’re raising a couple of prom kings?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Prom kings?”

Swiftly, I cover my tracks, admitting it was a terrible example. But even so, in my head, I can’t help flashing back to my high school years. I would’ve killed to be prom king. I would’ve eaten salamander guts.

“Okay,” I’ll say. “What about homecoming king?”

It is February 5, 2012, a Sunday, and Timmy and I have just returned from unicycle practice in the cul-de-sac across the street. The boy has found his sport. Today, after months of false starts, Timmy navigated a complete circle all on his own. What joy on his face, what joy on my face. A unicyclist!

And behold: Tad, too, has blossomed into a whiz-bang athlete. A hula hoop pro!

For many, many months both boys have been pursuing their off-the-beaten-track sporting specialties, and although their feats may never be celebrated in the pages of Sports Illustrated, I challenge any high school linebacker to execute a striptease, underwear and all, while simultaneously keeping two hula hoops in motion. I challenge Shaq O’Neal to mount a unicycle.

Decades ago, after the publication of my first book, I called my mom and dad to ask how they’d feel if I were to drop out of graduate school and devote myself to becoming a novelist.

“You’ll regret it,” my mother said. “For sure.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harvard is Harvard,” said my father. His voice seemed to me uncommonly ardent, a little desperate, as if I were contemplating suicide or bank robbery or both at once. “Listen to me. The world is full of people who think they can be writers. I’m one of them. Look how it turned out. Don’t do it.”

“All right, thanks,” I said, and then I did drop out.

Not immediately: I waited a couple of years. And yet in the midst of that phone call—somewhere between “Listen to me” and “Don’t do it”—there was a finality that slammed down on me with the full weight of the future. I remember hanging up the phone. I remember staring down at my hands. I remember how free I felt, how light and happy, and yet a moment later I was struck by a dizzying and unmistakable surge of terror. I knew what was coming. I would be exchanging security for jeopardy, forfeiting a Harvard degree for a degree in advanced uncertainty. The consequences, whether good or bad, would be with me forever.

Almost certainly what my mother and father had wanted for me was what every parent wants for a child, which above all else is safety. Graduate school was safe; writing novels and stories was not. And now, as a parent myself, I understand the ferocity of that protective instinct. Back during my “Row, Row” days, and over the perilous years afterward, the safety of Timmy and Tad had consumed me, and although I’m far from qualified as a biologist, I’d be surprised if our human DNA were not threaded with a gene or two that chemically wires us to be hypervigilant when it comes to the well-being of our offspring. It is this guardian instinct, I’m almost sure, that makes me worry about lacrosse sticks and soccer balls—a deep-seated, almost reptilian fear that my sons will be at risk in what can be a ruthlessly competitive world. And not just physically at risk. Emotionally, too. Who wants an unhappy kid?

The problem with this sort of thinking, pretty obviously, is that it has the sound of half-baked determinism, a survival-of-the-fittest rigidity that is at odds with the gentling subtleties of modern-day psychology. Even to my own ear, these concerns have the ring of something illiberal and Darwinian, not to mention way too Texan. I should be content with hula hoops. I should let the kids define themselves, each according to his special talents. And no doubt I should celebrate Tad’s soccer ball sharing and Timmy’s peculiar midfield balancing ballet. I realize all that. Yet when I stroll down high school hallways, as I often do on my travels, there is no mistaking the fact that athletics matter a great deal: the letter jackets, the rah-rah posters, the parent booster clubs, the no-expense-spared gyms and stadiums and locker rooms. And like it or not, ignore it or not, these high school kingdoms are often ruled more by popularity than by probity, more by charm than by charity, and not infrequently more by brawn than by brains.

For boys—and now for girls as well—athleticism remains an important coin of the realm, and like my own parents, I am sometimes drawn to impose my own yearnings on Tad and Timmy. How do I stop wishing that they might someday score a goal or two? How do I stop wishing for a moment of deftness or speed or strength or competitive spirit? How could I stop wishing for some plain old competence?

It isn’t that I care about sports—I don’t. What I do care about, probably too much, is the happiness and security of my sons, and now, as I sit writing these lines, I envision their coming teenage years and all the stresses that can add up to real pain for a kid. Right now, I suppose, their unaggressive antics seem cute; right now, it’s okay—or almost okay—that people chuckle and wag their heads. But in a few years Timmy’s and Tad’s dogged pacifism may be viewed as considerably less than cute by their coaches and teammates. Chuckles might hurt. Failure might hurt even more. One thing can lead to another: self-esteem problems, a sense of not belonging, humiliation, ridicule, second-class citizenship, and abject defeat in the teenage hierarchy wars.

All this, I realize, could easily be dismissed as a father’s obsessive hand-wringing. But cliques do exist. Kids can be cruel. Every day in this country, 160,000 children skip school because of bullying. The whole popularity imperative is an old and clichéd story, almost a funny story, unless of course you happen to be that unpopular bozo who can’t hit a baseball or catch a football, in which case you own the cliché. It’s all yours and it isn’t pleasant.

Tad and Timmy aren’t in that boat yet. They’re young. They’re still finding their way. They have plenty of time, and so, for now, all I can do is hope for the best. And who knows? Kids develop at different rates, in different ways, and maybe the boys will turn out to be terrific athletes. Maybe prom kings. Maybe Friday-night heroes. In fact, in a decade or two, they may well become headliners at Cirque du Soleil, a couple of sequined superstars, a tightrope-riding unicyclist and a stripping hula-hooper.

In the decades since that phone conversation with my mom and dad, I’ve often tried to rearrange things in my head. I’ll imagine my mother saying, “Of course, do whatever’s right,” and later my father will come on and listen to me for a while and finally say, “Well, I messed up my own dream. I was too lazy, too scared, too something, and I don’t want you to end up like me. Harvard’s just a fancy word. Go write your books. I’ll pretend I’m you.”

It didn’t happen that way. But as the years passed I began to feel as if it almost did happen, or as if it could have happened, because my parents were decent and thoughtful people, and because they wanted to protect me from the consequences of failure. Somewhere near the surface of their thoughts, I’m nearly certain, both understood that I was seeking not their permission but a kind of liberation, not their happy hallelujahs but an acknowledgment, however reluctant, that I was ready to weigh the risks all on my own. And of course they were right: the risks were real. I’d be giving up a great deal. By that point I’d completed my Harvard course work, passed my oral exams, and was only a year or so away from a doctorate. Still, I’d known from the start that graduate school amounted to little more than a convenient hideout after Vietnam, a place to put my head together, and my thoughts and ambitions were in no way academic. For more than three years I’d been trooping from class to class, a bit dazed, a bit surprised to find myself alive. I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. I’m not quite sure what I was. Bewildered, maybe. Disconnected. I remember thinking how civilized it all seemed, the campus and everyone on it, so peaceful and abstract and decorous, so weirdly theoretical in comparison to the boonies of Quang Ngai. I was also aware that the war had done things to me that could not be undone. Partly, I guess, I was full of anger. There was guilt, too, and lots of it. I had betrayed my conscience—my own heart and my own head—by going to a war I considered unjust. I had participated in the killing, and I had done so out of moral cowardice. There were no other words for it. I had been afraid of ridicule and embarrassment. I had been afraid of displeasing others, including my parents and my hometown and my country, and when you do things you believe are wrong because you are afraid not to do them, you cannot call it anything but what it is, and the correct word is cowardice. I needed to confront these things. By daylight I was fine, but at night I was not fine. When I couldn’t sleep, which was almost always, I’d get out of bed, sit at my desk, and try to dump the terrible shit on pieces of paper—mortar rounds exploding all around me, a young girl lying dead in a dry rice paddy, her face half gone, one of my buddies telling me to lay off the pity and suck it up and act like a soldier and stop whining about a dead gook.

I’d scribble these things down and go back to bed, and in the morning I’d head for my 9 a.m. class in statistics.

My mother and father knew none of this. For them, Vietnam was history. I’d survived, I’d come home, and it was time now to press forward. They never asked about the war—what did I see, what did I do?—and I never offered much. Each of us, I suppose, was trying to protect the others, which we did with silence, as if to talk about things would pick the scabs and exacerbate the pain and delay the healing. This may seem stupid, or old-fashioned, or callous, or excessively Midwestern, or psychologically illiterate, or emotionally unsophisticated. But they loved me, and I loved them. Not to speak was a kind of speaking, at least in our family, and sometimes it was more powerful speaking than speaking itself.

Surely, though, my parents had to wonder what was eating at me as I considered dropping out of grad school. Surely they were frightened by the prospect. And surely they felt exactly the same helplessness, exactly the same terrified pride, that I feel today as Timmy and Tad begin to move away from what I want toward what they want.

Back in second grade, almost two years ago, Timmy had joined a unicycle club that met in his school gymnasium three or four afternoons a week. The club had been founded by an inspired, forward-thinking teacher, Jimmy “Pedals” Agnew, whose dream it was to empower young children with the challenge of mastering an extremely difficult but wholly noncompetitive athletic endeavor. There would be no winners and no losers. There would be no scores and no time clock. There would be no first-stringers and no second-stringers. There would be no 1-A and no 6-A. There would be no getting cut from the team. There would be no water boys and no cheerleaders. There would be no pep rallies. There would be no exclusion. There would be no favoritism by virtue of height or strength or speed or other such common standards of physicality. Instead, as Jimmy gently explained to his second-graders, they were in for a long, frustrating, and repetitive lesson in perseverance, lots of spills along the way, day after day of remounting the unicycle and trying again and then trying once more.

Frustrating was the correct word. Repetitive was also the correct word.

More than fourteen months elapsed before Timmy was able to ride at all, and even then Meredith and I would scamper along beside him, each of us holding one of his hands for balance. Many times, I lost hope. While other kids began pedaling around the gym—some of them simultaneously dribbling basketballs—Timmy spent his time sprawled on the floor or pinned helplessly to a wall. I worried about what appeared to be motor dysfunction. I worried about epilepsy. And yet the idea of the unicycle had somehow seized Timmy’s imagination. It was what he wanted, not what I wanted. He wouldn’t quit. He accepted the scraped knees and the Band-Aids and the sting of iodine. Slowly at first, and then as if awakened by thunder, Meredith and I noticed something emerging in our son that a novelist might call “character.” Not so long ago we’d been the parents of an unformed, carefree, almost generalized little boy, but now there was a new and emerging Timmyness, a core of being that seemed to forecast what he would become in the years ahead—an earnest, determined, and intensely focused human being. He had ambition. He had an unsettling hardness in his eyes. He’d mutter to himself, pick himself up, and try again. Both Meredith and I sensed that we were now in the presence of this unfamiliar future Timmy, a Timmy who will one day shed the diminutive name, shed his childhood, shed his parents, and make his way forward without us.