It came to us as a family (the adult portion, at least), as we sat huddled in the basement, sipping iced colas and watching Killers from Space, one of those god-awful horror movies from the fifties, on the Scream Channel (#148 on the infinite dial — no, make that the Möbius strip, which is worse than infinite) one Saturday afternoon.
During a commercial, Maddy scanned the curtain-dimmed room, her gaze stopping on the two youngsters sitting cross-legged on the broadloom directly in front of the TV.
“Can anyone here tell me,” she asked, pausing dramatically, “what is wrong with this picture?”
I knew where she was headed so I kept my mouth shut; quite possibly, Eric and Rachel knew, too, although it’s hard to say for sure.
“Well, the special effects are poor,” Eric said, straight-faced. “The acting’s a bit wooden ... and the least they could have done is colourize it.”
Maddy, too, might have sensed that she was being played with — just a bit. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“Nooooo,” she said.“ That’s not exactly what I meant.”
“Oh, oh, I know,” Rachel said, thrusting her hand in the air with the urgency of a brown-noser.“ We’re all sitting around the basement like a bunch of mushrooms when we should be out enjoying this scorching summer day.”
“Bingo,” Maddy said.“ I couldn’t have put it better myself.” Rachel eyed her suspiciously. “I said scorching. That’s sarcasm, Mom.”
“I’m fully aware of that,” Maddy said. “I think what your mother’s trying to say,” I said,“ is that you can’t let a little thing like weather keep you in the house. When I was a kid, I’d be out playing football or baseball or whatever all day, even in a heat wave like this. I’d crawl home for supper drenched in sweat.”
“There weren’t any heat waves when you were a kid,” Eric said.“ You were born during the last ice age.”
“That’s Cold War, baby boy, and you’re not the least bit funny,” I said. “But we’ve all been through this before, so we’re not going to go through it again. You two decide what you’re going to do.”
What we’d been through was this: Eric and Rachel, though merely middle-class, suffered from an embarrassment of entertainment riches — endlessly redundant television, video games, computers that linked them to the entire world, and much, much more — and were capable of staying indoors and not seeing friends for three or four days at a time. Their friends, similarly equipped, often fell into the same trap. And the parents, selfish, stupid, lazy, or just filled with misguided love (okay, we never belaboured these points), indulged their children in this behaveiour. On the odd occasion, a boy or girl not ours might wander by, slouched and wan, and utter a “Hey, Mr. Kearns” or a “How ya doin’, Miz Moffatt?” before stepping through the doorway to the basement; undoubtedly banished from a foreign residence for the crime of over-familiarity, the interloper would then descend into the void with a cache of video games or DVDs clenched in his or her fists.
Heat, rain, soothing temperate breezes, none of these factors influenced this pattern; kids, at least ours and the ones we knew, lived this way during the summer (or any time, actually, when free of school for a decent stretch).What severe weather tended to do was coop families together for extended periods of time during non-business hours and draw attention to this problem.
So Maddy and I issued our worn but simple edict: step outside. It was that basic. Sports, a walk, even something as passive as standing beside a tree and taking in the air would fit the bill.
After Killers from Space and by a third of the way through The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,we’d winnowed it down to this: Rachel, cellphone in hand, would trek the three blocks to Chantal Watson’s house without calling in advance, guaranteeing herself a walk. If Chantal was home, Rachel would call to let us know she was staying. If not, she’d come home and help Maddy in the garden.
Eric, slyer still, had opted for the baseball glove purchase. Not baseball itself, or at least a game of long toss or five hundred with me over at the park (using Rachel’s glove for the afternoon), but driving up to National Sport and picking up Slurpees on the way home. This, of course, was one of Eric’s famous back-end deals. Not much in the way of outdoor activity now, but the promise of substantial frolicking in the sun later: “A whole summer’s worth, for cryin’ out loud! Starting tomorrow!”
So we drove north, away from midtown traffic, up to National Sport and its fashionable-suburb prices. But we’d dallied till late afternoon, allowing the heat to climb from uncomfortable to punishing, and Eric’s face, shiny and red to start with, now beaded over at the forehead and lip as we travelled.
For an instant, I felt sorry for him.After all, late last fall, in a fit of thrift, Maddy and I replaced our aging auto with a newer aging auto, laying down five thousand cash (but taking on no monthlies) for a ’99 Mustang. Mechanically sound, rust-free, and with minimal mileage on it, the car held two major flaws: racing stripes (which we knew about) and no Freon in the air-conditioning unit. It blew, all right — just not cold.
Yes, poor Eric. But bad-taste Biafran jokes aside, I’d heard somewhere recently, in a World Vision commercial, I think, that twenty-seven thousand children die daily throughout the world from malnutrition and disease. Twenty-seven thousand. Daily. The sound byte had stuck, popping into my conscience on occasion and diluting at least some of the empathy I might have for a daughter whose jeans just weren’t faded enough, gosh darn it — could we run them through the washer again? And a son who, although quite sweaty, was on his way to buy an apparently disposable ninety-dollar baseball glove and an iced sugar drink verging on poisonous. He could roll down his window to cool off.
He had, of course, as had I, and we now bombed up Pleasantview Boulevard with the wind tousling our hair and the stereo rumbling. Mixed tapes filled the car’s glove compartment: Maddy/Rachel mixes, Maddy/Jim mixes, Rachel/ ... actually, every combination possible except for Eric/Rachel mixes because neither of them drove by themselves. Sometimes we’d spend a Friday or Saturday night laughing, razzing, and gnashing our teeth as we chose cuts for the next car tape, goading each other into more personal and vexing choices as Cat Stevens followed The Stranglers who followed Pere Ubu who followed Nelly, all the while kicking each other’s butts at blackjack or three-card draw; and other times, we’d behave with a social conscience, trying to satisfy all tastes concerned as we played a civilized game of Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit.
But right now, as Eric and I cruised the boulevard, we listened to an Eric/Jim mix, a father/son showdown, a no-holds-barred goad-a-thon, the speakers vibrating as we crested Pleasantview’s long rise and turned onto Durham Mills.
The next tune up was by Pale Prince, the music industry’s latest attempt to loosen Eminem’s stranglehold on the trillion-dollar angry-white-suburban-teenager rap market. “Pale America” I think the rhyme was called, and it opened with a sonic blast:
Open yo’ eyes, The Man is whack, Been thirty fuckin’ years since he knew what’s mack. See him smoking’ his ceegar in his Lincoln Continental, He’ll tell ya what to do ’cause he’s mutha’-fuckin’ mental. So listen up good, listen up Jack, If you fuck wit’ me, I’m gonna fuck you back.
I glanced at Eric, who purposely looked straight ahead, nodding in time with the beat. This song was one of his knockout punches on the tape, a statement, but Maddy and I had already discussed it in private, again coming to the conclusion that sometimes the message wasn’t as important as the messenger. This pale guy was The Who forty years later, except surlier and with a fouler mouth, but that’s inflation