Abbott Awaits

1 Abbott Visits the Pet Store

One should always be wary of a pet store that is also a soft-drink outlet, but it’s a sunny morning in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and Abbott is prepared to embrace the world. Moreover, he needs to kill another hour while his wife gets some sleep in the quiet house. On the drive from the coffee shop, he finds his sunglasses in a pouch on the passenger door, and he puts them on for the first time this season. The glasses feel strange on his nose and ears. They’re nearly ten years old. Perhaps this will be the summer he is finally able to break or lose them. “Ready?” he says to his two-year-old daughter, pulling her out of the car seat. In the parking lot the girl points up and says, “Moon!” Abbott looks up skeptically, but sure enough. Grown people walk past carrying small bags of fish or crickets. They smile at the man with the premillennial shades and the curly-headed girl. Once inside the pet store/soft-drink outlet, Abbott regrets the outing immediately. The smell, for one thing. And all that sad rustling and chirping. His daughter begins to squirm, and when he places her on the ground, she scuttles to a tall rotating rack of plastic birds whose function, Abbott is dismayed to learn, is to keep real pet birds from getting lonesome. They are called Amigos. The girl pulls a low one from the rack and runs to the guinea pigs, who are either sleeping or deceased. She zigzags down the tragic aisle, from the hidden hamsters to the nibbling rabbits to the lizards basking beneath yellow bulbs. Many of the animals, warm-blooded and cold-, have their faces pushed into back corners of cages or aquariums. At a point far down the aisle, Abbott notices, the enclosures begin to contain animals that are retail food for other animals: the flies, worms, grubs, cockroaches, ants, and crickets. “There,” the girl says. “That.” She presents her Amigo to a bored scorpion. The end of the aisle, at which stands a life-sized cardboard cutout of someone Abbott does not recognize, turns out not to be the end of the aisle. The passage continues dimly beneath a burned-out fluorescent tube. Abbott’s daughter runs past the life-sized cutout, losing a shoe and not caring. Abbott retrieves the shoe and follows. He has that feeling that the inside of this building is larger than the outside. At the very end of the aisle, across from stacked cases of root beer and cream soda, he sees a glass tank full of brightly colored party favors. His daughter sees it too, and hobbles there with a floppy sock. Approaching the tank in the low light, he observes that it is filled with plastic snails in garish colors. Coming closer still, following his daughter, he realizes that the aquarium contains hermit crabs — real ones — whose shells have been painted, whereupon Abbott suffers an elaborate reaction. He cannot help wondering, first of all, who paints these crabs. It is not difficult to imagine the makeshift assembly lines, the improper ventilation, the fingers marred by repetitive motion and claw cuts. He speculates that crab painting does not fulfill what he considers the fundamental human need to create beauty. Immobilized on the sticky floor, he is also curious about the relative evolutionary histories of the two species here associated. Fossils of hermit crabs, he will later learn on the Internet, have been traced to the Late Cretaceous period, meaning that these creatures originated 65 to 100 million years ago. Meanwhile, Homo sapiens (sapiens meaning intelligent or wise) emerged approximately two hundred thousand years ago, at which point they immediately, relatively speaking, began decorating other species. Abbott watches the purple crab with the yellow swoop approach the pink crab with the blue zigzag, and while he is not sure if hermit crabs have a central nervous system, he hopes that if they do, it is insufficiently complex to generate feelings of shame or humiliation. He is, he thinks, opposed to animal painting across the board, but at this moment he feels that the hermit crab is a particularly inappropriate knickknack. This is not, let’s face it, a festive creature, and the pastel whorls are, rather than fun or cute, unseemly and dispiriting. Naturally there is, for the serious fan, a Red Sox crab, blue with a red B, alone in a corner of the tank. Abbott bends to study it, and when he sees that it is scavenging chips of lime green craft paint, he feels the electric snap in his chest that can only mean his heart has tripped its circuit again. “Pretty,” Abbott’s daughter says, her palms and nose pressed against the smudged glass. “Have one?” she asks. All the parenting experts, whose advice Abbott’s wife passes on to Abbott in radically abridged form, suggest that you use the word No as infrequently as possible when speaking to your toddler. “No,” Abbott says. He picks her up, sets her off. “Let’s go,” he says. “Time for home.”

2 Abbott and the Somersault

On the stained carpet in the family room, Abbott gently flips his daughter over on her head in a near approximation of a somersault. “Somersault,” he says. “Dad do it?” she says. “OK,” he says. He is, after all, on his summer break. He clears away the books and animals to make room. This is fun physical play with his child; the body is a wondrous instrument. “OK, watch this,” he says, sensing her attention already shifting to a stuffed chipmunk. He prepares but then stops to wonder if what he’s envisioning is actually a somersault. He hasn’t thought about somersaults in years, maybe decades. What he is doing — or what he is preparing to do — does not seem like a somersault. It can’t be a somersault. For one thing, what he’s preparing to do — fling his body over his head to land on his back — seems extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. He extrapolates that there will be a moment, mid-“somersault,” when the only body parts touching the ground will be his fingertips and his skull. This seems like a pretty advanced gymnastic maneuver. What he knows of somersaults is that they are simple, joyous, carefree exercises, very basic tumbling, and so he knows he is getting something wrong. Kneeling, with his forehead on the carpet, Abbott is certain this is not a somersault but considers going through with it anyway, in the spirit of fun physical play. “Chipmunk!” his daughter shouts. Abbott’s wife enters and says, “Oooh, Dad’s trying a somersault. Careful, Dad.” “Dad do it,” his daughter says, suddenly reengaged. Abbott remembers the feeling of climbing up to the high dive at the county pool. You couldn’t very well climb back down the ladder. “This is a somersault?” he asks, forehead on carpet. “What do you think it is?” his wife says. “Is she watching?” he asks. “You know, sort of,” she says. So then he goes through with it, a dizzying and undisciplined tumble, concluding in mild nausea and a grunt. Less a roll than an accidental fall. His breath is ragged as he stares at the ceiling. The pain, Abbott thinks, might be his kidney. His wife and daughter clap and laugh. “You’ve got to tuck your chin, sweetheart,” his wife says. A man does not always know his ultimate acts — the last time he swims in the ocean, the last time he makes love. But at age thirty-seven, perhaps the midpoint of his one and only life, Abbott knows that he has attempted his final somersault.

3 Abbott and the Inoperative Traffic Light

After a violent thunderstorm rumbles through the Pioneer Valley, bending the maples and traumatizing the family dog, Abbott leaves his house to buy an ink cartridge for his printer. While driving, he notices the large tree branches in the yards and streets. He hears sirens in the distance. The sun is out now, and the wet asphalt steams. As Abbott approaches a busy four-way intersection, he observes that the light is inoperative, knocked out, presumably, by the storm. There is no police officer directing the traffic. With a button he locks the doors of his car. He is reminded of his insufficient life-insurance policy. Gradually, however, he perceives what is happening at the intersection ahead. The drivers, as if by prior agreement, are treating this broken traffic light as a four-way stop, and they are taking turns moving through. If Abbott is not mistaken, there is a coordinated counterclockwise movement to the turn-taking. Occasionally there are pauses during which no car ventures forth, but then one motorist will signal to another, who then waves and proceeds. Everyone is using appropriate signals. Abbott has witnessed this kind of egalitarian poststorm automotive subcommunity two or three other times in his life, and each time it has nearly brought him to tears. The rip in the social order neatly mended by a group of morally imaginative and mutually supporting human drivers with a firm and instinctual sense of fairness. Here’s a repudiation of Thomas Hobbes, William Golding, Abbott’s father. When Abbott stops in front of the broken light, he signals a middle-aged Asian man to go ahead and make the right turn the Asian man has indicated he would like to make. (The Asian man turns right and waves.) Abbott looks at the motorist to his left. A woman who appears to be a yoga instructor waggles her fingers above her steering wheel, beckoning forth Abbott, who waves ardently as he passes straight through the intersection on the way to buy the ink cartridge for his printer. The graded streets and the storm drains are doing their work. The sun is bright and cleansing. All the college kids are gone. This should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. At the end of the story, which is right now, Abbott is thinking once more about what happened to that baby in Tulsa.

4 Abbott’s Dog

Abbott’s dog is a sturdy, fit, and handsome yellow Lab that just might be, pound for pound, God’s most timorous creation. The dog has always been terribly afraid of thunder, fireworks, and backfiring engines, but the scope and intensity of his fear have increased as he has aged. At eleven, he now fears airplanes, garbage trucks, delivery vans, other dogs, cats, people, loud birds and bugs, scarecrows, snowmen, kites and flags, some trees, heavy rain, light rain, fog, cloudy skies, partly cloudy skies, gusts of wind, refreshing summer breezes. Also, he seems scared of what can most accurately be described as nothing. The symptoms of his fear include violent trembling, panting, shedding, and drooling so excessive that his front paws become shiny and slick. Abbott’s wife frequently says that the animal senses barometric shifts, distant weather phenomena. “No, he doesn’t,” Abbott says. Each night for the past week Abbott’s dog has been, for no discernible reason, overthrown by fright. Abbott’s wife, in her third trimester, is up frequently to urinate. Upon her return to bed, Abbott has noticed the dog shaking and attempting to get beneath things far too small to get beneath, his bad breath disseminated by panting. “There must be a storm moving in,” Abbott’s wife says, nightly. Abbott has yanked open the blinds to point out what he thinks is the Little Dipper. “Look,” he has said for a week. “There’s no storm.” “It’s far off,” his wife has said. “He can sense it.” Now tonight, after five or six stormless nights, Abbott, uncomfortable with mystery and irritated with the dog, strives to detect in the night some fear-inducing pulse or wave during his wife’s brief trip to the bathroom down the hall. He sits up in bed, holds his breath, cocks his head receptively, and in this way he achieves a promising hypothesis: The dog seems terrified by the barely audible rumble of unrolling toilet paper. This conjecture, Abbott knows, requires a well-designed experiment and a willing assistant. He entreats his wife to remove, so very quietly, the toilet-paper roll from its wall-mounted holder the next time she urinates. Once she has removed the roll she can — Abbott’s wife says she can handle it from there. When the time comes, about two hours later, she executes the test with a proficiency that compensates for her poor attitude. Meanwhile, Abbott observes the dog with rigor and dispassion. He notes that the subject, while markedly anxious about Abbott’s wife’s absence, does not exhibit the symptoms of a full-blown fear-based episode. The nonoccurrence of terror seems to confirm the hypothesis (though Abbott feels compelled to run a few more trials, both with and without the wall-mounted holder). This is a story Abbott would like to tell colleagues at a faculty cocktail party, should he ever attend one. It can be enjoyed as a humorous and suspenseful anecdote about a family pet, and it can also be enjoyed as a parable of the Enlightenment. Abbott imagines the clustered scholars leaning into his story, their cocktails nearly spilling onto the dean’s rug. To enhance the narrative’s dramatic effects — and to tease out its lofty implications about knowledge formation — Abbott finds that he must take small liberties with the truth. He embellishes, amplifies. He omits. For instance, Abbott sees no reason to tell the captivated imaginary gathering that his typical response to the dog’s fear is not sympathy or even intellectual curiosity but anger and exasperation. It drives Abbott crazy that the dog continually becomes so distraught over so little, and that the animal cannot, when afraid, be placated by words, logic, evidence, affection, or cheese. Best not to mention any of this, Abbott knows, but it’s so galling, all that hair in the closet, the drool on the floor. Here is a creature that understands from Abbott’s choice of shoes that it’s time for a walk, yet refuses to comprehend that a birthday balloon is not a mortal threat. Now, abruptly, Abbott’s story is gone, supplanted by the anger and exasperation he removed from it. He does not know — he can’t be certain — why he is so angered and exasperated by the dog’s stubborn fearfulness. Abbott’s wife’s hypothesis is, Abbott maintains, unverifiable.

5 In Which Abbott is Surprised by Artifice

As it turns out, a well-known actress’s tears in a well-known movie are not real tears. They are a special effect, added after shooting. The director, called out by some heroic entertainment watchdog organization, defends the actress in an interview, saying she could have cried real tears had she been asked to. She was not asked to. She’s a fine actress, deserving of an Academy Award. It was only when the director was editing that he decided her crying would improve the scene in question. So, yes, he digitally inserted some tears. He does not understand the controversy. After all, the car chase in the movie is not real, nor is the triple homicide. On the Internet there is a still from the movie of the crying actress, and Abbott notices that the tears really do look fake — big, round, firm Hollywood orbs, dewdrops on a morning leaf. They look like they could stream upward, climb the actress’s face. The director says in the interview that let’s not forget art is an illusion. He says that even had the actress’s tears been real, they would have been fake. He says just think about it. Abbott understands why Plato kicked these guys out of his city. “What they should do,” Abbott says at the dinner table, ostensibly to his wife, the only other adult present, “is put tears on everyone’s faces in every movie. Comedy, action, drama. Everyone. Every character in every movie, weeping from the opening credits to the end. What scene would not be improved? That’s what I’d like to see. That’s what they should do.” Most evenings they sit down together as a family for dinner, usually about 4:45. “It’s difficult,” Abbott’s wife says to Abbott after a while, “to have a relationship with the entire world.” Their daughter says, “More cucumber?” His wife says, “Do you know what I mean?” Abbott thinks he does know what she means. What she means, he thinks, is it’s impossible. What she means is, Please knock it off. Don’t just leave the table as soon as you finish your dinner. Live with us, here, now, in this house.

6 Abbott and the Paradox of Personal Growth

Abbott has two hours and fifteen minutes of child care before his wife takes over. He and his daughter take a hot morning walk around the neighborhood at a gruelingly slow pace, returning home with quite a few acorns and a flat gray rock. Abbott prepares himself before checking the clock in the kitchen. He estimates the time by subtracting fifteen minutes from his most conservative estimate of the time, but then discovers that he is still ten minutes fast. The morning yawns before him. He reads a book to her six times in a row, wanting very much to set the author’s house on fire. The girl spills juice on the carpet, and Abbott blots it with his shirt. They look at a neighbor’s cat in the yard. They ruin a yoyo. They spin a propeller. They eat animal crackers. They play with a long-necked toy dinosaur whose wonderful scientific name, Abbott will learn later, has secretly been changed to a name not nearly so good. Abbott looks at the clock and calls out in pain. His four-and-a-half cups of coffee have been, according to the calibration on the pot, eleven cups of coffee. They make Remote Control dance. They find a ladybug, some brown pine needles that must have fallen from the Christmas tree. They sort beads by color, by size. They roll the beads down inclined surfaces. “Dad sit right here,” Abbott’s daughter says, and Abbott sits right there. “Hold this,” she says, and he holds it. “Do this,” she says, and he does it. “Not like that,” she says. What did Abbott used to do with his summer mornings? He cannot even remember, cannot contemplate the freedom, the terrible enormity of Self. Abbott’s wife walks into the family room and kisses his warm head and his daughter’s warm head. Then she sits on the floor in a playing position. Abbott gulps the rest of his tepid coffee and goes to bed. He can hear his wife and his daughter talking at the dining-room table. “What do you think we should name the baby?” Abbott’s wife asks. There is a pause before the girl says, “Cheetah.” Abbott approaches sleep with an ineffable sense of relief that he did not know, before having a child, what it was like to have a child — did not really know what it was really like — because if he had known before having a child how profoundly strenuous and self-obliterating it is to have a child, he never would have had a child, and then, or now, he would not have this remarkable child. Abbott’s wife, were she here, might say that it doesn’t quite make sense. Abbott might rub her hip lightly with the back of his hand. “That’s the thing,” he might say.

7 Abbott’s Dread

It can happen at any time, in any room of the house. Abbott is never safe, and neither, consequently, is his wife. This afternoon, as Abbott kneels in the kitchen, pouring kibble from a forty-pound bag into a plastic bin from which the dog is fed, a folded coupon falls to the tile floor, frightening the dog. The coupon is covered in a fine coating of kibble dust. Unconcerned, Abbott picks it up and hands it to his wife, who is in charge of coupons. “Here,” he says, unaware that it is a smuggled and coded message. She unfolds the coupon to determine its value and its restrictions. She snorts. “This expires in 2017,” she says. Abbott looks up from his task, spilling some kibble across the floor. He feels an unpleasant tingle at the back of his neck. Will there be dog food in 2017? Or grocery stores? Or legal tender? “Ever notice,” Abbott says to his wife’s back, “that when you say a future year out loud, it sounds kind of ominous?” The dog eats the hearty nuggets one by one from the floor. Abbott says, “Not when you see them written, but when you say them out loud. 2023. 2048. The plan is to cut carbon emissions in half by 2051. Congratulations to the class of 2040.” His wife says, “Let me try. Wait. OK. The treaty expires in 2074.” Abbott nods. “See?” he says.

8 Wonderful Life

The Internet, Abbott reads tonight on the Internet, is now believed by experts to be one percent pornography. Somewhere, no doubt, confetti settles onto tumid organs. When Abbott browses the Internet, he imagines all that porn lurking inside the monitor, directly behind the screen he is browsing. It’s in there, it’s in his computer. Just a flimsy scrim of tragic news headlines dropped between his torpid gaze and all that nudity and unorthodox penetration. He imagines that one small transposition of letters in a Web address will produce a beaver, an anus, someone peeing on someone else. This thought, like so much of American life, renders him titillated and despondent. Abbott is not a prude about porn. Or, to put it another way, he is a prude about porn. He just wonders if the consumption of pornography can legitimately be considered a component of human flourishing. All that loneliness and credit-card debt. The thesis of Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life is that humans are an entity, not a tendency. “We are a thing, an item of history,” Gould writes, “not an embodiment of general principles.” After a thorough analysis of the 530-million-year-old fossil record in a limestone quarry called the Burgess Shale — and of the mass extinctions of species that occurred after the quarry was formed — Gould concludes that the evolution of human life was spectacularly unlikely, a lottery win. “Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning,” Gould argues, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.” With great mental exertion and a decent night’s sleep and no ambient noise, Abbott can hold this concept precariously in his mind, like an acrobat balancing a chair holding a sequined assistant. But when he tries, in his mind, to add the proliferation of Internet pornography to Gould’s thesis on historical contingency, the strain becomes too much and he nearly blacks out in titillation and despondency. What an awful miracle. Abbott knows from Keats that the fancy thing to do is to reside in Paradox without any irritable reaching. But he also knows that he is, above all else, an irritable reacher, and about as capable of reform as a trembling dog. (There is rain on the roof, song on the monitor. He could just type in wild sluts, get it over with.)

9 Abbott’s Imaginary Letter to an Imaginary Nationally Syndicated Childhood and Parenting Expert

Here’s one for the Puzzled Parents mailbag. Most mornings, Abbott explains, he gets up early with his young daughter while his wife, a pregnant insomniac, tries to sleep in. He prepares breakfast for his child and then sits with her at the table while she eats. Well, it is nice time together, but the truth is that Abbott on most mornings is listless and taciturn. Sometimes — understand that it is very early and there is no nanny and he’s so tired and it seems increasingly unlikely that he will ever be consulted for a fascinating story on public radio — he has his head in his hands. The girl eats and chatters across the table while Abbott grinds his eyeballs with his palms. But occasionally, and for reasons he doesn’t understand, Abbott is fun and funny at breakfast. He makes faces and voices, he hides behind cereal boxes, he pretends to spit out bad-tasting food, he flaps his arms and flies around the table. Hold on, he’s getting to his question. Abbott’s daughter loves it when this strange father appears, though she can never depend on his appearance. Abbott is troubled by his inconsistency. He knows that a parent’s consistency is vital, that children thrive when they feel a sense of steadiness and reliability at home. His question, then, is whether he should desist with the infrequent jollity and just be consistently sullen and unresponsive at breakfast. He is Yours Sincerely, Piqued in the Valley.

10 Abbott and the Jacobite Revolts

Abbott sits on the edge of his daughter’s bed after she wakes from a long nap. The girl is happy and full of song. “My body,” she sings, clapping her hands. Her fingers are splayed and so extended as to bend slightly back, so that only her palms touch when she claps. “My body, my body,” she sings. She looks to Abbott both tiny and enormous lying beneath her sheet. She is flushed and sweaty. “Dad,” she says. “My body, my body.” Abbott does not know where she learned this song. “It does sound like body,” he says. “It does.” His daughter sings, “My body, my body.” “It does sound like that,” he says. “But it’s Bonnie.” His daughter sings, “My body, my body.” Abbott says, “It does sound like that, honey, but it’s Bonnie. Bonnie. Bonnie.” His daughter says, “Dad.” “Like an nnnnnnn sound,” he says. “Bonnie.” His daughter claps her palms and sings a jumbled line about the sea. Abbott sings:

My Bonnie lies over the ocean

My Bonnie lies over the sea

My Bonnie lies over the ocean

Oh bring back my Bonnie to me

Abbott’s daughter says, “Be careful, Popo.” She makes her stuffed pony climb the wall. Quietly she sings, “My body, my body.”

Abbott moves to the refrain:

Bring back bring back

Oh bring back my Bonnie to me, to me

Bring back, bring back

Oh bring back my Bonnie to me

Abbott’s daughter says, “Open the window?” Abbott gets up and opens the blinds. “It’s light up,” she says. “Yes,” he says. “Sunny out,” she says, even though it clearly isn’t. Abbott commences the second verse, which he did not even know he knew until he was singing it:

Last night as I lay on my pillow

Last night as I lay on my bed

Last night as I lay on my pillow

I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead

Abbott swallows the last word. Who taught his daughter this Scottish folk song about Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), who in 1745, after two decades of exile in Italy, returned to his homeland to regain the English throne for his family, only to be routed by the Redcoats and forced to escape the country disguised as a servant girl? Not that she learned it all that well, but still. He sings the chorus one more time, dramatically. He’s trying to win back his daughter’s attention because she has scrambled down the bed and is flipping through a book about a coyote. “My body, my body,” she sings. “Nnnnnn,” says Abbott, who in all honesty has a spotty grasp of English monarchical rule and who does not until twenty minutes later conduct Internet research on the song’s origins while ignoring the girl’s demands for grapes. “It’s about really missing a lady who is gone,” he misinforms his daughter, who is running away from him and down the hallway, “and who may have suffered some kind of misfortune on the water …” Later that night in bed, Abbott’s wife, aggrievedly not asleep, says she simply cannot stand children’s music and that she will go insane — and she really means insane — if she doesn’t cleanse from her mind this detestable song featured on one of their daughter’s new CDs. Abbott can empathize. He has had trapped in his skull for the past twenty minutes a vaguely tragic but ultimately unintelligible song called “Hinky Dinky Dee.” His wife thrashes the sheets. “Here it is,” she says. “I’m giving it to you.” She sings a frantic refrain:

My body my body

My body can do lots of things

Look at me don’t you see I can move so easily

My body my body

11 Abbott and the Highchair

Abbott is out in his driveway washing his daughter’s highchair with a hose, a sponge, and a soapy bucket. Neighbors walk by and say boy do they remember those days. They say he can wash their cars when he’s done. They say he should start a small business. The neighbors stop with their leashed dogs and tell stories of rotting fruit and yogurt beneath the seat cushions, the mysterious stenches, the revolting discoveries. Oh they don’t miss that. Abbott says these highchairs really do get disgusting. The neighbors say they literally gagged. You just don’t understand it, they say, until you have children. I know, says Abbott, it’s bad. One woman whose name Abbott thinks is Laura says her husband is taking it easy for a couple days after the vasectomy. Abbott changes the setting on his new hose attachment from SHOWER to JET, and he blasts the highchair so hard it rocks back on two plastic wheels. Desiccated raisins fly like shrapnel. A small, personal rainbow glistens in the mist at the face of the new hose attachment.

12 Abbott Hogs the Mood

Like many others before him, Abbott discovers, once married, that marriage is a battle — clinically, a negotiation—over the possession of the Bad Mood. A marriage, especially a marriage with children, cannot function properly if both its constituents are in foul temper, thus the Bad Mood is a privilege only one spouse can enjoy at a time. Who gets to be in a Bad Mood? This is the day-to-day struggle. In the Perfect Union, the Bad Mood is traded equitably, like child care or household chores. There is joint custody of the Bad Mood. If one spouse is grumpy for an entire weekend, the other spouse might take the Mood for the workweek. If one spouse is low-spirited during that unpleasant stretch from Christmas to the New Year, the other spouse might claim Thanksgiving, Easter, and the Fourth of July. In the typical marriage, however, one spouse tends to possess the Bad Mood disproportionately. This is called Hogging the Mood. Abbott peacefully acquired his wife’s Bad Mood in a long line at the Big Y during a late afternoon last February, a Thursday, and he has not given it up in four months. It is a testament to his wife’s good nature that she did not, initially, try to reclaim the Mood, as she had every right to do. She is pregnant, after all, and sleeping poorly. For the first few weeks, even a month, she let Abbott have it, no questions asked. Like a friendly librarian, she has always had a lenient overdue policy, and besides, Abbott suspects they have a tacit understanding that he requires the Bad Mood slightly more than she does. Although they have never kept a record — at least he hasn’t — he is reasonably certain that he has been majority owner of the Bad Mood during the marriage. Also, he supposes that she imagines there will be some attractive mood compensation package for her patience and goodwill. But as the weeks and months pass, Abbott senses that she is growing anxious to repossess the Bad Mood. She tries sex, and she tries withholding sex. She tries lighthearted humor and then lighthearted threat. We can, she says, do this the hard way or the easy way. She says broken kneecaps. Eventually she employs guerrilla tactics, surprise raids, quick and deep mood plunges designed to buoy Abbott’s mood and achieve marital equilibrium. But he holds fast. He wants the Bad Mood — he feels he needs it — and giving it up after holding it so long begins to seem arbitrary. He has had it this long — why cede it now? Many times he feels himself veering close to enjoyment or contentment, but then, realizing the risk, he retreats to the center of the Mood. And then this afternoon Abbott returns home from the hardware store and sees his young daughter running out to the driveway to meet him. She says “Dad” over and over again, grabs his leg like a child in an advertisement for life insurance or home mortgage. She smiles up at him, jumping, chanting “Dad,” as if he has been a good father. Abbott kneels to pick her up. He puts his arms around her neck and whispers something affectionate into her ear. Her curly hair tickles his face. When he looks up, he sees his wife watching them from the kitchen window, and that’s when he loses it.

13 Abbott Suffers the Pang of Vindication

Here in the corner of the basement, searching in and among cardboard boxes for a paint tray and rollers, Abbott finds the water. Six gallons, perhaps not hidden, but certainly stashed. His initial confusion gives way to satisfaction, which gives way to disturbance. This is not an argument one wishes to win. As long as Abbott’s wife is nonchalant about apocalypse, as long as her arguments derive from unexamined notions of hope and progress, as long as she does not surreptitiously buy emergency supplies, the household can exist in a delicate but sustainable balance. He’s the one who fears the cataclysmic demise of Western Civilization, not her. But now this dreadful evidence, this unwelcome glimpse inside her. How difficult to know someone, and how undesirable. Six gallons. Abbott walks across the basement to check on the three gallons he has hidden in the opposite corner. There they are, beneath a broken trampoline, looking insufficient. He wonders if she is twice as scared or just twice as diligent.

14 In Which Abbott Fails to Complete a Pretty Basic Task

When Abbott comes in from mowing, he finds his wife cutting his daughter’s hair in the middle of the kitchen. The girl is sitting in her highchair with a towel around her shoulders. She holds still; her face is grave, stoic. Abbott’s wife is biting her lip in concentration. She is using the family’s one pair of scissors, which is also used to cut paper, cardboard, fabric, wire, rubber, rope, dog-food bags, plastic packages of batteries, and once, in the middle of the night, aluminum. “I didn’t know you were going to do this,” Abbott says, wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a paper towel. Abbott’s wife mists the girl’s hair with a spray bottle Abbott has never seen before, not once. Abbott feels like an interloper. He tries to fade to the dark perimeter of the small kitchen, but there isn’t one. “When did you learn how to do that?” he says. Abbott’s wife leans down and closes one eye to check if the back of the girl’s hair is even. She’s so capable, so confident. So skilled and courageous with her dull scissors. “It’s not like I know how,” she says. “I’m just doing it.” The ring of locks around the girl’s highchair looks to Abbott ceremonial or ritualistic. Abbott would no sooner cut his daughter’s hair than remove her appendix. He has never even considered that her hair would need to be cut, but of course her hair needs to be cut. What is the appropriate response to your daughter’s first haircut? Why is he sad and afraid? Abbott’s wife makes one more tiny snip and then circles the highchair, gently pulling strands of the girl’s hair. “There,” she says. “That looks great.” Abbott nods. It does look good. He emerges into the center of the room and puts his hand on the girl’s head. “No, Dad,” she says. “Would you mind sweeping up this hair?” his wife asks. Abbott slinks to the closet for the broom and the thing that you sweep things into. “Do you want to see?” Abbott’s wife says to their daughter, holding up a mirror. Abbott sweeps the hair into the thing and holds it. Golden ringlets is what they are. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he says. His wife says, “Just toss it.” Abbott walks to the trash can, opens the lid, and sees the coffee grounds, a leathery carrot, some wet noodles, and a diaper. He closes the lid. Abbott’s wife holds the mirror, brushes loose hair from the girl’s neck. “Well,” she says, “why don’t you take it outside and spread it to the winds?” Abbott says, “Really?” “It’s an organic substance,” his wife says. Abbott takes his daughter’s hair outside. He walks through the pachysandra and onto the lawn, smelling the cut grass and exhaust. The cat dashes across the yard, reminding Abbott that he has a cat. The birds are making a racket in the trees, and Abbott squints up into bright sun. Then he looks back down at the golden hair against the green plastic. He walks back through the pachysandra and into the house. His wife and daughter have moved to some other room. He can hear their voices. From a kitchen drawer he takes a sandwich bag. He pours in the hair, seals the bag, and places it behind a cookbook on top of the refrigerator, where it will remain either forever or until Abbott’s wife removes it.

15 The Expatriate

Parenthood is a distant and peculiar country with its own customs and language. To people not living in Parenthood, the citizens of Parenthood may sound as if they have suffered an injury to a small but significant sector of the brain. “These are not the sensitive wipes!” Abbott’s wife shouts from their daughter’s bedroom. “And all these books in here really need to be washed.” “Hey!” Abbott hollers. “Why did you erase Blue Robot?”

16 Abbott and the Wrong Tool

Abbott is embarrassed about his broom. It is not, he knows, the right tool for the job. Abbott in his adult years has accumulated a fair number of tools, almost all of which happen not to be the right tool for the job. Abbott saw his neighbors — months ago, at the first buds of spring — sweep the snowplowed rocks from their front lawns to the street with large indoor/outdoor push brooms. These things had rubber grips, hardy bristles, lifetime warranties. Abbott’s broom is a standard straw kitchen model, and it isn’t doing much to chase the gravel from the crabgrass. He imagines an assembly of Pilgrims watching him from the street and shaking their heads. Abbott knows he should purchase the correct broom but in doing so he feels that he will commit himself entirely to this house, this lawn, this neighborhood, this family, this economic status, this climate, this region and its unfamiliar cycles — the winter plows, the spring sweeps, the seasonal relocation of gravel. If he owns the broom, then he will be sweeping this weedy yard each year until his death. The improper broom is embarrassing, but it keeps Abbott’s options open. He can enjoy the freedom of the dabbler, though it is true that he is not enjoying his afternoon on the lawn. To brush the rocks from the grass and weeds, he must use an incredibly forceful raking motion, and soon his wrists and forearms are sore, and he is, he notices, developing blisters on his hands. There are gloves in the garage, but they are the wrong kind. Abbott takes a break. He cannot lean on his broom, and he does not smoke cigarettes. The tall banks of clouds to the east look like a kingdom moving in. Or to the west. A Japanese neighbor hangs wet clothes on the line. What happened this morning is that Abbott spoke loudly at his daughter. This loud speaking might in fact have been yelling. The girl was imploring — Abbott does not remember about what — and he spoke loudly at her. He said, “Stop it.” He exclaimed. “You just push and push and push,” he said to her. “You will not let up.” Abbott knows that parents should not yell, that yelling just makes things worse and teaches children to yell. He knows he should maintain at all times a calm and controlled voice. He knows he should praise good behavior and simply ignore bad behavior until it disappears forever. Abbott can see that the broom is disintegrating. Pieces of straw are now mixed in with the gravel, and their extraction will require the use of some tool he does not own. It’s bad enough that he yelled at the child. What’s far worse is that his outburst to the two-year-old was nearly verbatim what Abbott had said several nights earlier, less loudly but more viciously, to his wife. He realized this as he said the words this morning, heard them, felt the familiar plosion of the push and push and push. There are different ways to articulate his misconduct, different angles of prosecution. It’s demeaning, Abbott suspects, to speak to your wife in the same way that you speak to your young daughter, while it might be downright creepy to speak to your young daughter in the same way that you speak to your wife. In either case, it means that Abbott has acted as if he is married to a toddler. But Abbott takes comfort in the suspicion that the problem is actually much more dire and generalized, not particular to his wife and daughter. He might, he thinks, yell these words at anyone, anything, in his small beseeching world. There is nothing that won’t not let up. Every day these cadgers and supplicants — the broken hinge, the moldy tub, the dog who has to pee. Down the street, coming closer, that sweaty college kid, collecting signatures for cleaner air.

17 Father’s Day

It’s already hot at 8:36 when Abbott and his daughter squat down beside the runoff grate at the edge of the road in front of their house. The girl says, “Rocks.” Abbott picks up three small rocks, puts them in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. His daughter pinches a rock between her thumb and forefinger, then holds it over the grate a moment before dropping it in. Abbott and his daughter listen for the sound of the rock hitting water — a faint, high-pitched bloop that reverberates in the dark tunnel. The girl laughs when she hears it. Abbott extends his palm again, and his daughter pinches a rock and drops it into the grate, laughing when the rock hits water. Abbott offers the last rock, and the girl takes it and drops it into the grate, but the rock is too small and flat to produce a sound. The girl holds still for several seconds, waiting for the noise. Then she says, “More rocks?” Abbott is uncomfortable in his squat. He has begun having pain in his right hip. He of course considers arthritis. He picks up three more rocks, puts them in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. A spry, gray-haired man, either a full professor or a retired full professor, walks up to the grate and stops. “My kids used to love putting rocks in that damn grate thirty years ago,” he says to Abbott. “Every kid in this neighborhood has dropped rocks in that grate. Decades of rocks. It’s a wonder the tunnel isn’t all clogged up.” The man’s tone, a complex blend of sympathy and severity, is a unique characteristic of the region and still perplexing to Abbott, who grew up with the comforts of superficial nicety. Abbott knows not whether to feel consoled that he is part of a lineage or irritated that his hardship is so prosaic. “Have a good day,” Abbott says to the man. Abbott’s daughter says, “Man.” With her thumb and forefinger she pinches a rock out of Abbott’s extended palm, holds the rock tantalizingly above the grate, then drops it. She smiles when she hears the reverberant bloop. She says, “Bloop.” She pinches another rock from Abbott’s hand, holds it above the grate, drops it. The rock, when it hits the water, makes a faint, high-pitched sound that echoes softly in the dark tunnel. “More rocks?” the girl says. “Here’s another one,” Abbott says, extending his palm. It’s 8:39, hot. Somewhere a mower is already buzzing. Abbott comes out of his squat and sits on the road beside the grate. A neighbor drives by and waves. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of small rocks within Abbott’s reach. The girl drops the rock in the grate, smiles when she hears the noise. “More rocks?” she says. A dog barks in some backyard. A cloud covers and then uncovers the sun. Campus is distant and theoretical, like a galaxy or heaven. There is something beyond tedium. You can pass all the way through tedium and come out the other side, and this is Abbott’s gift today. He picks up a pinecone, puts it in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. The girl’s eyes grow wide and she laughs. She reaches for the pinecone, says, “Pinecone.”

18 All Observation, Darwin Noted, Must Be For or Against Some View If It Is to Be of Any Service

Abbott would like to think he’s a good guy, and yet his wife is up there sobbing, and he’s down here with the superglue.

19 Abbott’s Mind

Abbott nearly swerves into a mailbox trying to read the church’s hand-lettered advertisement for a forthcoming sermon entitled TOLERANCE IS NOT THE SAME AS LOVE. There is no need for comment or response. No need, even, for thought. Abbott knows that you are supposed to envision your mind, your consciousness, as a clean and empty room, open windows on opposite walls, the wind just passing through. The wind is the world, here and gone, or perhaps only here. Abbott likes to add white fluttering curtains to give the wind form, but he soon discovers that the room of his consciousness has a curtain rod, some hardware, a cordless drill with a battery that needs to be charged. He’ll need an electrical outlet. Is the room wired? He can’t remember what the things on the ends of curtain rods are called. They have a name. The wind swirls in his room, stirring up dust. Abbott has thoughts, he can’t help it, about the hand-lettered advertisement for the sermon. One thought is that tolerance, while admittedly not identical to love, is, on an imaginary Continuum of Regard, a good deal closer to love than enriched uranium. Another thought, buried beneath the first like an earthquake survivor, is that there is in fact not one thing the same as love, including love.

20 Malaise Is for Renters

Some stories, like this one, have more than one ending. Here is the beginning: When his family moved into the house in Western Massachusetts, Abbott found an old nine-by-twelve carpet rolled against a wall in the unfinished basement. Soon after settling in, Abbott unrolled the musty but serviceable carpet on the cement floor. He then placed the cat’s litter box atop the carpet, both to create a comfortable excretory environment for the cat and to limit the dispersal of litter. During the winter, Abbott began to suspect the cat was spraying the carpet, but the carpet is dark and the basement lighting is poor, and he did not care to investigate the matter. When spring arrived with higher temperatures and higher humidity, however, the basement began to reek. And then tonight, Abbott, dizzy with the fumes, investigates the matter and realizes with a cold shudder that the carpet is soaked with cat piss that apparently never dries. Not dealing with it is no longer an option. He must put his hands on the carpet, and now. Abbott rolls the carpet (wincing at the wet cement beneath), opens the rusted metal doors of the bulkhead, and drags the sodden, cylindrical load up six wooden stairs to the backyard, then around the house to the driveway. Now is the time for thinking. The carpet is far too big to leave by the curb for the weekly garbage pickup, and also too big to place in or on his car to take to the dump. Abbott knows what must be done, and he selects from his garage a standard carpentry saw, with which he attempts to cut a strip from the carpet along the twelve-foot side. The carpet, however, has a thick border, reinforced, Abbott will come to learn, by saw-resistant wire. Thus he returns to the garage and emerges with a large pair of hedge clippers, and with some effort he manages to slice the carpet’s border. The word Abbott cannot quite remember until much later is selvage. The sun has dipped below the tops of the big trees, but the night is still quite hot, and Abbott is sweating. The windows of his house are open, and he can hear his wife tell his daughter, “No mouth.” Once he has sliced through the carpet’s border with the hedge clippers, he is able, with considerable exertion, to cut a nine-foot strip with the saw, stopping at the bottom border to use the hedge clippers again. With this combination of tools, he makes seven long cuts, creating eight strips of filthy, urinous carpet, nine feet long and roughly eighteen inches wide. This takes quite a while. The wire inside the carpet borders cuts his fingers, which are wet with piss and slimy nuggets of cat litter. He hears his wife tell his daughter, “Time for your bath.” Neighbors walk by and watch him cut carpet with a saw. It is possible, he knows, that they can smell the ammonia from the street. He does not look up, does not indicate that he is available for chitchat. Even so, they call out, “Looks like you got your hands full there,” and, “What you need is a carpet cutter.” He grunts assent, wipes his brow with his sweaty shirt. Abbott rolls each of the eight nine-foot strips into a tight, damp bundle, and he stacks the bundles in the driveway like firewood. Cord, he thinks. He hears his wife tell his daughter, “Let’s get you to bed.” He returns the hedge clippers and saw to the garage, and he sweeps up the litter and carpet fluff from the driveway. Then he takes from the garage an empty plastic garbage can and a box of heavy-duty lawn bags. He places the carpet rolls in two bags, four to a bag, and he heaves the bags into the garbage can. He tries to push the lid on, but it will not fit. That one vivid star must be Venus. Garbage pickup, Abbott remembers, is not tomorrow but the following day. He would rather the stuffed and lidless can not sit incriminatingly at the street for thirty-six hours, so he decides to drag it back into the garage. This kind of dragging will eventually wear a hole in the bottom of the can, but Abbott does not know that yet, and he is untroubled. He presses an illuminated doorbell button mounted on a two-by-four, and the garage door drops slowly like a final curtain. And this is where the story furcates like lightning, strikes ground in four places. The first ending is about Ernest Hemingway and masculinity: catching speckled trout in a cold stream, knocking them dead on a flat rock, furling them in leaves, and placing them in a shady spot until dinner. The second ending is cold and familiar, another variation of the look-behind-the-refrigerator horror of domesticity and the soul-diminishing obligations of middle-class citizenship. The third ending is a virulent eco-sci-fi scenario, involving planetary visitors in the year 2820 who find massive underground deposits of nondegraded carpet. The fourth ending is the riskiest and the most interesting. This ending makes a sincere attempt at Franklinian homily, and it goes more or less like this: Almost any task, no matter how initially abhorrent, can, if conceived with Ingenuity and executed with Industry, create feelings of Satisfaction and Pleasure.

21 Abbott and the Longest Day of the Year

Amidst the toys in the family room is a battery-operated light-sensitive jungle-animal-sounds puzzle, given to Abbott’s daughter either by a childless friend of Abbott or a friend of Abbott who hates Abbott. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott and his wife clean the family room after putting their daughter to bed. Tonight, like all the nights, when they turn off the light after cleaning they activate a loud light-sensitive jungle-animal sound — an unspecifically savage squawk from the bottom of the puzzle crate. A monkey, perhaps, or parrot. Tonight, like all the nights, the jungle-animal sound is an agonizing surprise, an ambush. Abbott and his wife laugh and say curse words. Shit and fuck, for instance. The imprecations, because they are directed at a puzzle for children ages two to four, seem more vulgar and thus more satisfying. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott says he will just take the batteries out of that motherfucker. Outside, the sun is setting, and the sky has turned that color that is both lovely and frightening. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Abbott’s wife, vanishing down the dark hallway. This day, like all the days, endless and gone.

22 The Abbott Hubcap Index (AHI)

As Abbott drives homeward through the Pioneer Valley, his spirits are lifted by the sight of a shining hubcap propped against a maple tree, and then another against a weathered wooden fence. They look like gleaming medals bestowed upon the human race. The probability of a driver ever locating a missing hubcap is remote, of course, which is precisely what makes hubcap-propping such a poignant act. These anonymous pedestrians have propped hubcaps because they know if they ever lost a hubcap, they would want someone else to prop it. It’s the foundation of all moral philosophy. Then, as Abbott nears his house, he notices his neighbor has returned home from a weeklong trip in his new car. He notices, furthermore, that the wheels on the driver’s side are missing their hubcaps. The car, so sleek just days ago, now looks dilapidated. Considering the possibility of a design flaw, Abbott drives around the block in order to examine the car’s passenger side, and he observes then that those hubcaps are also missing. Whatever he might wish to believe, Abbott knows it is statistically unlikely that all four hubcaps fell off this new car. He stops just past his neighbor’s driveway, stares back into the black nothingness at the center of the tires. He feels that he is within a drama of contending moral forces, as we find in Hawthorne. Is it unreasonable, Abbott wonders, to want to live and raise children in a land where the number of propped hubcaps (PH) exceeds the number of stolen hubcaps (SH)? He imagines a list of industrialized nations, ranked according to a hubcap index — the ratio PH: SH, expressed as the average number of propped hubcaps per one stolen hubcap. An index of 2 would be righteous indeed. Really, anything above 1 would be an index of virtue, as it would indicate that the citizens’ noblest instincts were prevailing, by however slight a margin. The USA, Abbott speculates, certainly has an index no greater than the 0.5 he has recorded this afternoon. Sweden’s ratio is probably the best. Sweden’s or Norway’s.

23 Abbott RSVPs

Regretfully, again, Abbott cannot attend. The timing is inopportune. Checking his calendar, Abbott finds that he has a prior engagement on the day in question. On that day, he needs to rise early with his daughter to play in the family room with buttons and beads for two or three hours. Some of the smaller buttons fit inside some of the larger ones, and quite a few of the beads are sparkly. It’s just not something he can miss. He cannot, he regrets, even stop by for a minute to say hi because he needs to go the Big Y to buy $117 of groceries, even though his wife went shopping four days ago. He needs to leave in the car the snack he lovingly prepared so that his ravenous daughter, who is somehow never hungry at home, will have to eat food from the grocery store, which means that Abbott will end up purchasing an empty box and an empty bottle in the checkout line for $5.58. When, later, he puts away groceries, he’ll just dump the box and bottle directly from the shopping bag into the recycling bin. He’s going to be busy securing the string of the helium balloon from the bank branch inside the Big Y tightly around the handle of the shopping cart because his daughter will absolutely flip out if the balloon floats away. He hopes you understand. The invitation sounds great, and three or four years ago Abbott would have been the first to arrive and the last to depart, but regretfully, Abbott needs to hear from both the checker and the bagger at Big Y about how much milk he’s buying. Three different kinds! While his daughter naps, Abbott will unfortunately still be occupied so he can’t sneak away or sneak anything in. He promised his wife he would install a plastic locking device on the toilet-seat lid to prevent his daughter from dropping pennies in the bowl and laughing. Moreover, the veterinarian needs a urine sample from the dog and, if Abbott is reading his wife’s note correctly, the cat. Regretfully, Abbott must also, throughout the day, construct and then dismantle the grandiose conviction that he is unappreciated, and this cycle of self-pity and self-reproach tends to be arduous and time-intensive. Abbott realizes the event could go on for quite awhile and be fun, but he’s afraid he won’t even be able to swing by later because the afternoon and evening are completely booked. He needs to go outside to play with pinecones, which always ends up taking way longer than you anticipate. Then it will be time to go inside to get some maple syrup rubbed into his hair, at which point he’ll be busy clenching his jaw and reminding himself over and over that stewardship is a privilege, that he lives an enviable life, that by any important measure he is a profoundly fortunate man. Abbott knows, regretfully, that he also declined the last four invitations, and that at some point you’re going to stop inviting him, but this day has been scheduled for a long time and there’s nothing he can do to change it. Before you know it, it will be bath time, and he needs to be there to squirt the plastic raccoon. After the bath, he’ll be going downstairs to pretend to look for something. If there is any time remaining in the day, which is unlikely, Abbott knows he should stop collecting acute and contradictory feelings for his wife, and spend just sixty seconds trying to imagine what it’s like to be her. Now that he rereads the invitation, Abbott sees that the event to which he has been invited took place last weekend. It is with sincere regret that he sends this regretful note so late. He hopes you had a great time, and he reminds you that he would love to get together in four or five years for a coffee or maybe a beer.

24 Abbott Goes In

That crinkle Abbott hears as he undresses before bed is caused by the numerous plastic sleeves of juice-box straws stuffed into the pockets of the shorts he has worn for three days straight. Eventually he might ruminate about fluorocarbons and landfills, the domestication of the modern man, preschool dentistry, the lunatic conjunction of juice and box, but first he needs to sneak into his daughter’s dark room. She lies on her back, way up on her pillow. The top of her head is pressed against the wall, and her face is turned severely to the side, away from Abbott. Her hands are fists at her throat. She is braced against sleep, as if against wind, a wave. Abbott’s eyes adjust, but Abbott does not.

25 Abbott and the Antique Tractor

Sure, they could drive across the neighborhood, but it’s more fun to walk. It’s good exercise, and it’s also nice to be outside in the summertime. Abbott dresses his daughter and gets her ready to leave. “OK, here we go,” he says, opening the front door. He feels nearly euphoric. That noise in the front yard is the squirrels. “Let’s go see the tractor,” he says. A neighbor told him there’s an antique tractor parked in the field directly behind the neighborhood, and he thought his daughter might want to see it. His wife, too. All of them. Here comes Abbott’s wife with that belly. Abbott looks at her and feels the stirring of ancient, mutually exclusive impulses. His wife regards the girl’s outfit. It’s probably right what she’s probably thinking. She says, “I don’t really … For one thing, I have never even seen those pants.” Abbott shrugs and says, “She picked them out.” This isn’t true. “Ready?” he says. “Let’s get going. Tractor!” “Wait,” his wife says. “Did you put sunblock on her?” Abbott nods his head in the manner of someone who could later deny having nodded. His wife looks right at him and says, “You did?” Abbott almost imperceptibly shakes his head. His wife says, “So you didn’t?” Abbott nods again. His wife says, “Could you put some sunblock on her?” The girl says, “Tractor.” Abbott closes the door. His wife says, “Does she have a new diaper?” Abbott’s eyes become glassy and unfocused. He breathes audibly from his mouth. He feels unhappy and old and sleepy. “And I am sorry,” his wife says, “but these are not summer pants. See, they have a lining.” Abbott attempts to say that the girl chose the pants, but he’s too tired to repeat the entire lie, and he falls silent. “She’s already sweating,” his wife says. “I’m not trying to be a bitch,” she adds. Abbott tells his daughter they have to return to her room, and the child erupts. Tears actually seem to shoot forth from her face, as from the faces of animated characters. He picks her up and carries her through the house, knowing these days will soon seem, in comparison, like the easy days of a carefree summer. The girl keeps kicking him in the abdomen. Much later, prepared for the family outing, they walk back through the house together. Abbott’s wife has packed some snacks and drinks. “OK, let’s go see that tractor,” she says, opening the door, accepting the tremendous burden of enthusiasm. Outside it is humid and resplendent. In the driveway there are, it turns out, two feathers, a berry, several chunks of tar, and a lot of pebbles. The girl begins to collect the items, and Abbott carries what she cannot hold in her hands, which is almost everything. Overhead, planes cross the sky, and Abbott’s daughter stops to watch every one. “Plane,” she says, pointing. “Plane.” “Check out this weird bug,” Abbott’s wife says, pointing to something in the grass. The family checks out the weird bug. Neighborhood children ride by on their bicycles, captivating Abbott’s daughter. Her naptime is looming. The tractor is an impossible dream. Nobody in Abbott’s family will see an antique tractor today, if ever. Abbott’s wife seems to have accepted this fact with grace and maturity. It occurs to Abbott that she may have known it all along. Abbott and his family have still not left the premises. “Who else is hungry?” Abbott’s wife says. She sits on the blacktop and opens the bag of snacks. Abbott’s daughter yelps and runs across the driveway to her mother. The way she runs. Abbott watches, trying to memorize it.

26 Abbott and the Families of Trapped Miners

Despite Henry David Thoreau’s admonition that “If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another,” Abbott nevertheless clicks tonight on an interview with the families of trapped miners. What he learns is that these families of trapped miners, like the families of trapped miners throughout the devastating history of mining, are tired and sad and recklessly hopeful. One woman whose husband is trapped holds six-week-old twins. She says she woke in the night because she heard his voice.

27 The Labors of Abbott

Returning home from a spectacularly unsuccessful quest to buy a couch, Abbott stops with his wife and daughter in the parking lot of a strip mall of premium outlet stores in Northern Connecticut. He’s not shopping, though. What he’s doing is cleaning vomited raspberries out of his daughter’s car seat with antibacterial moist wipes. He is reminded of the exceptionally strong mythical hero who had to clean out the dirty stables. He is trying not to be reminded of the exceptionally strong mythical hero who had to perform the same bad job over and over. The moist wipes are cool and pleasing, with a faintly stringent odor, redolent of bactericide. The considerable mound of red-tinted towels is striking, nearly pretty, on the black tar. He glances up once to see his daughter running across the searing lot wearing yellow socks and a sagging diaper, looking very much like a child whose parents do not file federal income taxes. Abbott’s wife chases the girl listlessly, pregnantly, in the heat. In one hand she holds the ruined clothes, in the other the clean clothes. In her uterus she carries another uncivilized human child. She appears to have no hope of catching the girl, much less of clothing her. Like a mythical hero, Abbott returns his attention to the car seat, the numerous crevices of which are coated in sweet-smelling gastric compote. She really ate a lot of raspberries. He removes the seat from the car and discovers that it is dripping somewhere from its center. There are brown birds in the parking lot picking off pieces of discarded bagel and croissant, then flying back to a crevice behind the Liz Claiborne sign, where they live and raise their children. They appear to be uninterested in his liver. Time has more or less stopped. Abbott’s sweat drips down into the vomit, and he arrives again in paradox. The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.

28 Abbott the Activist

It’s late and still awfully hot when Abbott inadvertently discovers, on the Internet, a petition to prohibit the painting of hermit crab shells. The petition is beautiful, Abbott understands, precisely because it is futile. He suspects that he would not like to be in the same room with any of these 298 dissenters, but he loves them virtually and from afar. There is distant thunder, and Abbott can hear the clicking of the trembling dog’s toenails on the wood floor. He does not want to know what time it is. The miracle child is asleep in her bed, clutching a stuffed pony. He signs the petition with the letters of his keyboard, perhaps augmenting his modest file at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Then, galvanized still, he changes the light bulb in his desk lamp.

29 Abbott Takes the Garbage Out

It’s not as if Abbott is never struck by the sublime grandeur of existence. It’s not as if he is never moved by the simple fact of being alive on this magnificently unlikely planet. Just this evening it happens as he is taking out the garbage. He places the cans by the curb, and when he turns to walk back to his house, the hazy summer light through the spruce trees brings him to a stop in his driveway. When language too quickly catches up, perhaps five or six seconds after he is halted by the splendor, the word that comes to Abbott’s mind is gratitude. He is grateful to be alive, grateful to be a witness to beauty. So far, so good. But then Abbott recalls, as he not infrequently does, Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize — winning photograph of the young Sudanese girl who has collapsed on her way to a feeding station. It appears that her head is too heavy to lift off the sand. In the background a vulture waits on the ground with what looks in the photograph like patience. It’s not an intrusive thought if you summon it, if you keep it close. The image abrades him like a hair shirt. The inevitable substitution of his daughter for this Sudanese girl does not increase Abbott’s gratitude; rather, it warps the gratitude into guilt and sorrow, which are, like gratitude, insufficient to the problem. Abbott looks away from the hazy summer light through the spruce trees to his house, a 1955 ranch with vinyl siding and a Cape roof. What kind of fool would cherish this? What kind of fool would not cherish this? Carter’s suicide note said, among other things, “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.” He was survived by a wife and young daughter, who suffered for his response to suffering. Is Abbott afflicted by a problem of psychology or a problem of philosophy? Are these discrete problems? Are these rhetorical questions? Back inside the house, Abbott, reaching irritably, wonders if he has a responsibility to enjoy his life, given the material conditions of his existence. Preoccupation with suffering does not alleviate suffering. Preoccupation with suffering actually causes suffering. Therefore, it is both practical and ethical to ignore suffering … Perhaps a minute after his euphoric epiphany about the grandeur of existence, Abbott is standing at the kitchen counter, picking at scraps from the dirty dinner plates, not honoring or being at all conscious of this food and how it arrived on his family’s plates. He’s not even conscious of putting food in his mouth or chewing or swallowing. He’s certainly not hungry. You’re not, he knows, supposed to eat while standing. Might Abbott be obliged to take some delight in his existence? Deprivation ceases to have meaning if we do not recognize and enjoy that which is deprived. This is either correct or incorrect. Determined to make a sincere attempt at delight, Abbott returns to the driveway. Fortunately, the sunlight is still hazy and still shining through the spruce. He stares at the light and the trees and exhorts himself: There, now, look — enjoy. He attempts to risk delight, as the poet instructs. Perhaps it is a risk; perhaps it takes courage. Abbott fails to achieve a powerful sense of gladness. After eight or ten seconds he thinks, I am not thinking of the Sudanese girl. The mowers make the evening hum. There’s a high branch, he notices, leaning heavy on a power line.

30 Abbott and the Bowl-Shaped Field

If he weren’t an untenured humanist at the flagship campus of a state university system, what would Abbott most like to be? He’s thought about this question and now he has an answer: He’d like to be a field scientist with a useless research project. While he does make himself click on the headline about the man who threw his three young children off a bridge to get back at his wife, he also, it should be noted, permits himself to click on the headline about the husband-and-wife team that has studied fireflies for the past eighteen years. During this time they have amassed copious data on the life cycle and mating habits of several species of lightning bugs. It’s not much of a surprise to learn that the males with the brightest and longest flashes have the most reproductive success. In some species, the females return a blink two seconds after the male’s blink; in other species, the interval is four seconds. The research is wonderful because it is so unnecessary. All it does is create knowledge. Abbott loves science without application or consequence. It’s no mystery why they aren’t divorced, these scientists. Or why they haven’t stabbed or poisoned each other. For eighteen summers they have been conducting research in the same place in Pennsylvania. They sit on a jutting rock and look down at the fireflies blinking in a large bowl-shaped field. No vivisection, no monkeys, no Pentagon grants. They just observe and record the data. The man says the first night of each summer they never do any science. They used to try, but they gave it up. He says all these years and it’s still an amazing sight. His wife agrees. It’s like the sky is turned upside down, she says.