Danyelle has gotten the kids addicted to taking evening walks in the neighborhood. She did it with chewing gum. At the mention of walking the dog after dinner, they each perk up and glide over to the little shelf with its stash of Orbit and Hubba Bubba and Trident. They do this almost methodically, as if their limbs were on autopilot. Once their gum is in, Cartter gets a poop bag out of the drawer, goes into the mud room where Sammy’s leash is tucked in a cubby, and collars the dog while she looks up and wags her tail at him. Little else gets them out the door as quickly as the word “walk.” The prospect of being late for school works as well but with an anxious, frazzled compulsion quite the opposite of the smooth, gratifying breeze that carries them away happily chewing. I almost wonder if the ease of it isn’t somehow wrong.
The other night as we struck out and made our way across the front yard toward the road, I noticed Cartter had what looked like a full container of gum in his hand. I was nearly ready to cry foul, but Cartter explained that the container was full of mints, not gum; after his jaw gets tired from chewing, he spits out the gum and has a mint. He told me all this matter-of-factly without any trace of guilt, and I let his words sink in and refrained from responding. Danyelle is way more prone to plying the kids with sugar than I am. Cartter in particular has a sweet tooth, and sometimes I complain about her nurturing it. I’m not complaining about this Pavlovian chewing gum/mint response she’s created, though; I like the boys being addicted to our evening walks.
Things were different a couple years ago. Then, when the boys accompanied us on our little treks past the boat landing on Creekside Drive, they played a game that involved using Danyelle and me as moving finish lines. Every twenty or so steps Danyelle and I took, here would come the boys racing up behind us and pushing us in the back, each eager to be first, neither concerned with the force of their impact. If I forbade the game, they’d end up racing around and through us like little laughing, arguing gremlins constantly threatening to take out an ankle or a knee. Of course, I’d fuss, but my admonishment only provided the briefest of respites, the memory of my rebuke almost instantly overwhelmed by the drive to play.
The boys would turn what might have been a pleasant stroll into an insufferable, stop-and-go affair. Any time a car came down the road, I’d have to holler at them to get out of the way, so capable were they of ignoring their surroundings, and Scotty had the most idiotic habit of walking on the sloped curb and periodically slipping and falling to the ground (He still occasionally reverts to it). They were so persistently annoying that sometimes, Danyelle and I would power walk ahead just to get away from them for a minute or even two or three if we were lucky, but once they noticed the distance that grew between us and them, they’d quickly erase it with their little legs.
Those were the early days of the evening family walk, when they were afraid to be in the house without us, when Scotty first outgrew the need of a scooter to keep up, and when Danyelle first introduced them to chewing gum. I fought the bribe back then. I don’t remember what exactly they did, but one time I found their behavior so unacceptable that when we came back to the house, I told them they weren’t allowed to chew during our walks anymore. When Cartter asked the length of their sentence, I told him “forever,” and my heart broke right along with his when I saw the crushing disappointment in his face.
I don’t think I ever granted a reprieve. Rather, somewhere along the line, Danyelle started slipping them gum again, and I didn’t notice, probably because they’re so much better walking companions now. They don’t play tag anymore or use Danyelle and me as props in their games. They just plod along chewing, watching the ground in front of their feet and unwinding all the thoughts in their little heads. Sometimes when they fall behind, as they often do, they’ll come running up behind us, their crocs clapping against the blacktop as they approach, but not because they’re trying to win; they just decide they want to be close for a while.
We don’t spend nearly as much time together as we used to. Even when they aren’t in school, there’s the pull of friends with which to contend, plus I spend four afternoons a week at the pool coaching, and even though I see the boys there three of those four days, there’s little chance to really talk. Sometimes when I come home, after seven, I pull in the driveway, and they’ll walk out the den door and wait for me to get out of the car. “Can we go for a walk?” they’ll say. They want to put their gum in and work their jaws while they amble down the street in the waning light; they want for their whole family to be nearby, the dog included, while they talk.
Sometimes, we all talk together. They were offended when Danyelle rejected their Halloween costume idea – Scotty was supposed to be a sheep pulling farmer Cartter in a wagon, and they got a kick out of me giving voice to Sammy trying to pull her way over to a little pile of dead fish at the boat landing – “I’m going over here with my limp. I’m so sneaky! They won’t even notice! Even though Cartter is holding my leash!” Mostly, though, they talk to each other, and I only overhear bits of what they say. Their conversations come to me in little bursts of clarity like a radio station that’s in and out of range on the highway. The other day I caught them talking about what age they wanted to be in Heaven. Scotty said he wanted to be “this age,” and Cartter said he wanted to be “in Mommy’s belly.” I made a mental note, and then my thoughts quickly began to wander.
Just the three of us and the dog walked the night Danyelle had book club recently. I told the boys I missed them the weekend prior when I was away. Cartter asked why. “I only have so much time with you guys while you’re still young, and I want to take advantage,” I said. We talked our way around the corner, the boys chewing their gum while I held Sammy’s leash. I was very pleased with Sammy. She didn’t tug, and she hardly limped. She just padded along next to me, and by the time we were walking back up our street toward the house, I found myself staring up at the trees overhead. The boys walked side by side ten feet behind me, talking, their voices like soothing background noise lulling me into a kind of stupor. I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to them, but I’d felt them there at the same time, their steady conversation setting my mind at ease. I forgot they were there even as I comforted in their presence, much the same way a person simultaneously forgets and takes pleasure in chewing a piece of gum.
Kalie Ma
One thing the boys and I talked about during a recent walk was the prospect of watching another Indiana Jones movie. We watched Temple of Doom over the weekend, and Scotty was properly traumatized by it, twice reemerging from his room into the kitchen complaining that he couldn’t sleep. The first time he stood behind the bar, held his arms out wide and asked, “Could there be a more inappropriate movie?” The second time I followed him back to his room and climbed into his bed with him. His nose was running from having cried, and he sniffed with every inhale; his wild unbrushed hair tickled my face, and he said softly through suppressed tears, “Why couldn’t we watch something appropriate?”
Of course, the image that so disturbed Scotty was the villain Mola Ram wearing a horned buffalo skull, eyes and teeth gleaming as he invoked the power of the Hindu goddess Kali before plunging his hand into a terrified human sacrifice and extracting his beating heart. For days afterward I enjoyed teasing Scotty by lifting my hand, clawlike into the air and exclaiming in evil joy, “Kali Maa! Shakti De!” and then attacking his ribs. One time I whipped him up into a tickled squirming frenzy.
Temple was the first Indiana Jones movie I ever saw. I watched it in the attic of my great grandmother’s Kentucky farmhouse on a tiny TV. I wasn’t older than four or five, and I found it thrillingly horrifying. I watched it repeatedly specifically for Mola Ram’s big scene. I also liked the chilled monkey brains. Scotty is apparently more delicate than I was.
Despite my early affinity for Temple, it quickly became my least favorite of the original three movies. The Last Crusade with Sean Connery, for me, is the best. I picked Temple for the boys for two reasons: the aforementioned classic scenes, and the nonsensical plot. In the other two movies, the bad guys are Nazis. I didn’t want to waste either of those classic films when the boys had no knowledge of World War II or Hitler. On our walk, I decided that since they’d seen Mola Ram use black magic to burn a man alive while laughing and holding his beating heart, they were ready to learn about the Holocaust. It was incredibly easy to explain. “It’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened,” I said. I told them about the Nazis’ role in the other two Indiana Jones movies, and Scotty asked, “So it’s a true story?” and I said, “No, but it has historical context.” He’s gone back to having nightmares about Big Bird again, which is strange to Danyelle and me, because he’s never watched Sesame Street, at least not at our house. Clearly, he’s ready for another Indiana Jones installment.
It Goes Up
The other night Cartter asked what the magic is in guys’ balls is that helps make babies. He wanted to know what “the tubes” were too. Apparently, he caught wind of these magic tubes somewhere, mentioned them to his mother, and rather than deny the truth of what he’d heard, she referred him to me. All four of us were sitting in the living room when it happened, and I protested to Danyelle that I’d told the boys our balls were for decoration.
“So they’re just decoration then?” Scotty said.
I was glad not to have to respond, because Cartter interjected with a question of his own: “Are they for weighing your penis down so it doesn’t just go up?” he asked. It seems that sometimes Cartter’s penis goes up when he’s in the shower. Other times a drip of pee might fall onto his balls and cause his penis to adhere to them. What could I do but agree? Yes, balls are for weighing a man’s penis down so that it doesn’t just go up.
Saying Goodnight
“If they were toddlers, they’d be coming in and out of this room pretending to feed us soup they made in their fake kitchen,” I said to Danyelle. We were collapsed in the guest bed in a heap, exhausted from the week, and my mind was wandering to the past when the boys were more helpless and spent nearly every waking second of their lives with us. Strange to think that in five years, Cartter will be in high school.
Of all the little joys of their childhood that I expect to miss, the one that might sadden me the most is hugging them goodnight. Cartter usually calls for us to come back to his room after we’ve said goodnight. He always calls, “Mommmyyy!” but nine times out of ten, I’m the one that goes to him.
I teased him about it the other night. Leaning over his bed rail, cradling his head in my hand, I whispered into his ear, “Mommmyyyy!”
He chuckled. “And then Daddy comes,” he said.
He puts his little hands around me and holds me next to him. He sleeps without a shirt on, and when I lean in to snuggle him, I can feel his smooth skin. I brush him with my beard, and he giggles.
I peek for the gleam in Cartter’s eye in those moments. It glints in the little bit of light still in his room and shines through the darkness at me. Scotty hides his eyes more than Cartter, playing coy, turning his head this way and that trying to avoid the tickle of my whiskers. He likes when I whisper a song in his ear and when I rub his back. His little breath purrs like a cat’s when it hits the back of his nose.
I wonder what life will be like without these particular bits of tenderness.
Pigglets
“It’s weird,” I told a neighbor. “I don’t really like other people’s kids when they don’t swim for me.”
“I’m like an old lion,” he said. “I want to see my seed spread, and . . .” He trailed off a bit and explained that he didn’t really want to kill the other lions’ kids.
“I get it,” I said. “I guess I’m an old lion too.”
Across the street from that man, there is a house belonging to the unfortunately named Pigg family. Their mailbox juts out into the three-way intersection so that when a person turns left onto my street, they have to cut the corner a bit to avoid hitting the mailbox. The Piggs often have a truck parked out in front of the house too, which worsens the need to turn into the left side of Scotland Drive.
Thomas Pigg has an attractive wife who likes to walk around the neighborhood in spandex shorts. She’s overly friendly to Danyelle when she comes across her at the pool and then oddly cool in other social situations. I think Suzi’s problem is that she doesn’t really have much to say. She has a big-toothed smile that she wears frozen to her face as if she’s trying to cover up the vacant look in her eyes, as if she were a foreigner who didn’t really understand English and simply nodded along with what others said. I say she’s attractive, but maybe I should say she’s almost attractive. There’s just something off about her face. It’s long and kind of pushed in, oddly flattened.
Suzi’s kids have beautiful bronze skin and flowing blonde hair that curls upward below their ears. They got something of her flattened face, but they don’t wear it quite so poorly as she does. In fact, I’ve never seen them smile. Their faces are slack, and their brown eyes cold. Suzi had two boys, and then she had twins, a boy and a girl. The whole brood plays out in the intersection, riding around on bikes and trikes and playing tag. I can’t tell any of them apart, because they are all freakishly small. It’s as if once they hit the age of four, they stopped growing. Their proportions are all normal, just tiny. When all the little Pigglets are out in the street, their tiny bodies scurrying about, their identical moplike hairdos bobbing above their identical expressionless faces, one wonders about demons.
Driving home on a Tuesday evening, exhausted from the day’s work, I saw out of the corner of my eye a piece of a bicycle hiding behind the Pigg’s mailbox, and for a second I thought it might lurch out in front of me. “What if I hadn’t seen it?” I wondered. Then, as I drove past, right before I turned left, I glanced over at the child. I think it was one of the younger ones, but I never can tell. He was sitting on his bicycle, staring me dead in the face, moving his jaw up and down menacingly and making nonsense sounds, “maaa maaaa maaaa maaa maaa.” Then I thought, “What if I’d just jerked the wheel and run over the little Pigglet?”
The Raging Elitist 
One response to “Chewing Gum”
Brilliant. If this is a true story it shows extraordinary courage. If fabricated, it reveals a bit of genius. Too many writers adhere to the strictures of social conventions and political agendas, fearful of writing the bald truth.
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