Inline
“Mawwm!”
This was the cry of Wallace, 5, and his three–year–old sister Joan. But their mother was long gone. She’d gotten up, attended a spin class, come back home, made coffee, showered, dressed, put in 30 minutes of makeup and hair stuff, had raced out the door and was already halfway to work by now.
It was five past six.
“Get up,” Marc shouted at them from his own bed, “If you want to get up, just get up.”
But they yelled and yelled for their mother until Joan’s throat tired. She appeared at the foot of her father’s bed, her face, still red and splotchy from having tantrummed herself to sleep after Marc had cut short her cuddletime the night before.
“I’m not going to cuddle you if you keep hitting me,” he’d said.
“But Daddy,” three year old Joan had said, “I like hitting you.”
“If you keep hitting me, we will no longer have cuddles.”
Joan had explained, “Daddy, every day when the sun goes down and the moon comes up, I want you to cuddle me. And I want to hit you. Every day.”
“But you can’t hit people.”
“But I WAAAAAAAAAANT TO.”
Now, she stood in his bedroom doorway, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and said, “Daddy, the sun is up and I want five little pancakes and two strawberries and toast.”
They walked down the short hall to the kitchen passing Wallace’s room on the way to the kitchen. Wallace’s head was peeking out from his pillow into the hall.
The boy slept with his bed positioned against the wall closest to the door. Each night, after kissing Wallace goodnight, Marc would pull the headboard halfway into the doorway, so Wallace could make sure that nothing was coming at him from the hallway during the night.
Marc recalled Wallace shouting out in his sleep last night; the memory spontaneously materializing in his mind, like a dream itself.
“Did you have a bad dream last night?” he asked.
“Yes,” Wallace said.
“What happened in the dream?”
“I was waiting in line.”
“What were you waiting for?”
“I didn’t know. Nobody knew.”
After he’d warmed up and served the little pancakes, Marc packed the boy’s lunch for school.
“Daddy, can we play the team game?” asked Wallace.
“We can’t,” said Marc. “We need to get ready and go.”
“Are we going to be late?”
“No.”
It was only 7:00. They didn’t need to leave the house until 7:50. Marc tried hard to avoid running late to anything involving Wallace. Wallace was utterly terrified of being late.
Marc sealed up the plastic lunch tray and slipped it in the shark backpack before going to the kid’s room. He grabbed outfits for them, tossed the clothes at the kids from the hallway, told them both to get dressed and headed for the shower.
As he got out, he overheard Wallace saying to his sister, “Joanie, do you know what happens when you die? You can’t move for the rest of your life.”
“I want mommy,” said Joan.
Marc wiped his fogged up phone screen with his thumb. It was 7:30. How was it already 7:30? The kids were still coloring at the table and had not yet begun to get dressed.
“Hurry up. We need to leave in ten minutes.”
“Are we going to be late?” asked Wallace.
‘Not if we leave in ten minutes.”
Marc sat on his bed with socks in hand and tried to reboard his train of shower thoughts in an attempt to account for all the time he’d spent in there. He’d had gaps like these, lacunae, dating back to his childhood.
He remembered once, in tenth grade English, just sitting there, when his teacher turned to him and said, “Marc, man you are OUT of here! I can not teach over your singing. Three strikes and you’re out.”
He’d not even been aware that he’d been singing. And moreso, he was completely oblivious to the apparent fact that he’d already been told to stop interrupting the class with his singing. Twice.
He looked at the clock. It was 7:50.
He frantically searched for his laptop and powercord. These were the only two things he needed to take to work, and yet he had to turn the house upside down searching for them every morning.
Wallace shouted at his sister to hurry up and put on her shoes. Joan had decided she needed her ladybug backpack and was filling it with necklaces.
“We can’t take necklaces to daycare,” Marc said to her.
“But I want to,” she said.
“These are all expensive. These are all mommy’s.”
“But I NEED them!”
By the time he’d corralled them all into the car, they were running fifteen minutes late.
There’d been a day, a single glorious day back in October, when they’d hit no traffic and made up a full fifteen minutes on their commute to school. He’d been chasing that day ever since. With a naïve and irresponsible optimism, he believed it would repeat itself.
As they idled on the freeway on-ramp, he realized today would not be that day.
“How many minutes?” asked Wallace.
“Plenty of time,” Marc lied.
“Are we late?” asked Wallace.
“Nope,” Marc lied again. “You guys want to listen to a Joseph Campbell lecture?”
“Nooo,” the children replied in chorus.
Marc had a theory that if he exposed his kids to the right mythic traditions, it would inoculate them from contracting the long spells of anxiety and depression that had plagued his own life.
“I see the moon,” said Joan. She had an uncanny ability to spot the moon even in the brightest daylight.
“No fair,” said Wallace, “I want to see the moon.”
“It’s on my side,” Joan said to torment her brother.
“I don’t want to hear another word about the moon!” Marc said.
“The moon is following me!” Joan squealed.
“You know? Lunar-centric religions, which emphasize the cyclical nature of life and the cosmos, traditionally don’t place great value on personal responsibility,” Marc said pointedly to his daughter.
“I don’t like you,” she said, “I want my necklaces.”
And then, a small miracle: the HOV lane cleared for four entire exits and they made up five minutes. As he fought his way back across the four lanes of traffic towards the exit he needed, Marc glanced at the passenger seat and saw that it was empty.
“Did you bring your backpack?” he asked Wallace, whose terror stricken face made it clear that he had not.
“We need to go back and go get it!” Wallace cried.
“No, I’ll get it. I’ll drop you first,” Marc said reflexively, in hopes of warding off Wally’s meltdown. Marc wondered if, in actual fact, he’d follow through. He had meetings scheduled all morning and a trip home and a return trip to school would make him an hour late to work. But Wallace couldn’t skip lunch. The school offered Sunbutter sandwiches to kids who forgot their lunch, but Wallace would rather go hungry than try Sunbutter and, even fully fed, he’d been written up twice for acting out during afterschool.
The boy, who was bearing the full weight of the burden of finding his place on a line that stretched into the infinite unknown, needed his lunch.
“This is the worst day ever!” Wallace cried.
“No, it’s not. Everything is fine.”
Everything was not fine. He could not afford to be late for work again. He blamed Joan. If she hadn’t up and decided to go nuts about those necklaces, he wouldn’t have gotten so fucked up and distracted. You had to be perfect. You had to be perfect every time or else, disaster. This guy in the exit lane wasn’t letting him in and he felt at the small of his mind all the stuff: the lack of sleep, all of the lost time, it was all rising above the levee, poised to flood his thoughts and to crater him.
He reminded himself to breathe. He reminded himself, with silent deliberation, enunciating each word in his mind as he they came to him, “Here is a situation that demands a responsibility response. Do not respond with a dependent one.”
He looked at Wallace and waited for Wallace to look back.
“Let’s play the team game,” Marc said, “I’ll start. A. Astros. What’s your ‘A’?”
Wallace didn’t respond.
“Okay, you think about it. I’m going to do my ‘B.’ ‘B.’ Bruins.”
Wallace muttered something.
“What?”
“Avalanche.”
“Oh yeah, Avalanche. That’s a good one. What’s your ‘B’?”
They were on M: Mariners, when they turned into the school.
Wallace, calmer now, said, “Dad, do you know what was my dream? The world was a line. Everyone in the whole world was in line. And you and I were at the back of the line. And we were in a hurry.”