And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Read online

  That was on a Friday night. Tuesday, I got home late from work to find Rebecca pacing around the drive that circled our apartment complex, talking nervously on the phone to a friend from work and smiling timidly when I pulled up near her.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi, how was your city council meeting?” She was giggling like a girl who had just caught a glance of a teen idol buying milk at a convenience store.

  “Fine,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, why?” She paused. “Just go home, we’ll talk then.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nuh-thing.”

  “It’s something,” I said, and suddenly a thought came to me as clear and unexpected as a bolt of lightning out of a cloudless sky. “Beck, are you pregnant?”

  Nothing. She smiled, beamed really, and asked if I was okay. That night we talked for hours, about the future, about the news, about our now irrelevant five-year plan that had held for just over seventy-two hours. The next summer, Jack was born.

  We settled into the life of young parents as best as we could. We never had any money—journalists are, in fact, the only people who marry teachers for the money—and were the first among our friends to have children by a long shot. My budding journalistic career took a sideways detour when we realized that we didn’t have enough to make minimum payments on our burgeoning credit card debt and pay for a babysitter. And we couldn’t afford for my wife, then making nearly twice my salary, to stay home. So I had to leave newspapers to take a job doing public relations for the city I had been covering. Not exactly my finest ethical hour, but I had presented my conundrum clearly to my editors and tried to find an alternate solution—including moving to the night shift to stay home with Jack during the day. We couldn’t find one, so I took a job I had been offered several times by the city manager, who I got along with very well and who, by personality and profession, didn’t like dealing directly with the press.

  I wasn’t in the job long when I began pining for journalism. A dull ache to write stories—about people, profiles, mostly—set in like an ulcer, and I tried to find magazine writing opportunities. Finding none, I borrowed some money from my dad and started my own. So in addition to my forty-five-minute commute each way and the hectic life of young parents trying to care for a child without the benefit of close friends or family, I found myself working as the editor, publisher, sales manager, photographer, and lead writer of a small bimonthly magazine. I produced three or four issues before a friend of a friend introduced me to a man who owned an advertising agency. He offered me more money and even expressed some interest in helping build the magazine. I took the job and, almost immediately, regretted having done so.

  The magazine was never brought up and the slightly larger paycheck was often delayed in arriving. Once, I was told to hurry up and cash my check before others that had been sent out went through. Turns out the company, which was small, was writing checks it could not cover. I didn’t get an opportunity to do a whole lot of writing at the agency, unless you count writing banal, mindless, screaming television and radio ads for a chain of discount carpet stores to be writing. I certainly didn’t. I had made up my mind to quit, my magazine long gone and Dad’s investment wasted, when my wife nudged me one morning from a sunny sleep with some news. She told Jack first and wanted him to tell me, but he was not yet three years old and, while gifted from a verbal intelligence standpoint, perhaps too young.

  She was pregnant. Again.

  I greeted the news with genuine excitement, even if I knew that it would kill any hopes I had of leaving my dungeonlike work in pursuit of something better. It would turn out that, four months before Dylan was born, the decision would be made for me when my boss, with whom I always had a good personal relationship even if there was no business chemistry, called me into his office and rather unceremoniously let me go. I called my wife to tell her I had been fired, and we both settled in to the tingling numbness of shock that often follows a car accident. You are happy to be alive, but beyond that not much makes sense.

  Our lease was coming to an end and, without me gainfully employed, we could not afford nor did we want to renew. As luck would have it, a family of one of Rebecca’s students was being sent overseas for six months and was looking for someone to house-sit their beautiful suburban home. So that’s what we did. Most of our things went into a storage locker and we spent a long summer and fall sleeping in someone else’s bed, using their kitchen, and mowing their lawn. I stayed home with Jack while Rebecca finished up the school year and looked for jobs online while he was napping. I gained twenty pounds from depressive eating and felt less prepared to be a patriarch than I ever had. Dylan was due two weeks before the family was set to arrive back in the States and, a few weeks out I still hadn’t found a job.

  I wanted to work in journalism, but that felt hopeless. Editors in the area were wary of my intentions given the circumstances of my departure from the newspaper. And, even if I did somehow manage to get a job, it would not pay enough to cover the bills and child care. I had a month left of unemployment benefits when I got an e-mail from the boss who had fired me saying that a man he knew was looking for a magazine editor. I will always have Sam Wilder to thank for giving me my big break by hiring me to be the managing editor of a chain of regional home-and-garden magazines he had founded.

  Dylan was born the week I began working again, and in the mad rush of the next three weeks, we managed to find a three-bedroom condo, move our things, and arrange for child care. It was frantic and stressful, and I had an awful feeling of ill-preparedness and unworthiness hanging about me for months. Most of this had to do with Dad. Never once had he uttered a judgmental word in my time of unemployment. Never had he scolded or admonished me for not living up to my end of the familial bargain. Quite the opposite, actually. He had been very supportive. Still, I had a hard time looking him in the eye. He’s one of those guys who always had a job, who always supported his family. He’d never, as far as I knew, been fired from anything and, after leaving the army, I’m pretty sure he had spent his entire adult life living in homes of his own.

  By the time Molly came down the chute, I had left the magazine on my own good terms, done some stay-at-home freelance work and taken a position at the web magazine, which offered a generous enough salary for my dear enduring wife to stay home with the kids. We weren’t well-off, but we were making it work. And the birth of my daughter signified the first time Rebecca and I had brought life into the world in something resembling stability.

  The moment the sonogram tech confirmed that the baby growing inside my wife was indeed a girl, my eyes welled up—part pride, part relief, part the oh-shit feeling that I imagine washes over every man when he learns he will someday be responsible for instilling fear into would-be teenage suitors. And I began looking forward to meeting her, holding her in my arms, and lavishing her with affection and praise more with each passing day.

  She was bundled tight against the chill November air, a square inch of skin exposed from beneath her blankets, and I carried her up the steps to our second-floor living space gently. The boys had been making faces and talking to their new little sister in the cloyingly cooey voice children use to talk to newborns and puppies on the entire ride home from the hospital—twenty-five minutes made much longer by lack of sleep and an overabundance of cuteness. Stepping into our home, a small second-story condo we’d been renting for three years with an eye on buying a place of our own for all but three days of that time, I felt, well, strange. My heart began pounding, my eyes dimmed. I had a hard time breathing. I was panicky, anxious as if I had just been told I was late for a college exam for which I had not studied.

  “Molly’s home!” the boys yelled.

  “Mommy’s home!” Dylan added.

  I turned and looked at my wife. I learned from Jack and had it reinfor
ced with Dylan and Molly how cruel childbirth is to a woman physically. Yet, she looked beautiful. I handed Molly to her, and they went to the back bedroom for a feeding and diaper change. The boys followed and I had a long moment alone in our living room/kitchen area. I felt somehow incomplete and jittery. I felt empty and lost and stood in the kitchen with my coat and shoes on, holding Rebecca’s overnight bag, Molly’s diaper bag, and two books the boys had been thumbing through in the car. It was like the opening scene of American Beauty where Kevin Spacey is going mindlessly through the minutiae of his day, pouring coffee, staring blankly out the window. And for a long moment, I found myself staring at a glass of water I had left on the counter absentmindedly before leaving to pick up my wife and daughter. I took three deep breaths to calm my nerves and was snapped from my stare by Dylan, who was pulling on my pant leg, wanting to take me into Molly’s room and show me his little sister.

  I didn’t dwell on the moment in the coming days and weeks, but I found it happening again and again at the least expected times. During my evening commute, at the dinner table, sitting on the couch, watching the boys play on the floor and feeling Molly’s warm breath on my neck while she slept on my chest. And each time, it was nearly the same. A sense of panic, a feeling of emptiness, anxiety, and incompleteness.

  Anxiety is nothing new to me. When things were really tough, when money was tight and my career was going nowhere, I suffered a few times from panic attacks. At one point, a few years before Molly was born, fearing that I was dying of some undiagnosed condition, I went to a doctor, who told me that there was nothing physically wrong, apart from a few extra pounds and not enough rigorous activity—which I took to mean sex as, I’m sure, any man would. Try as I did to sell my wife on the idea that upping our romantic heat might have medicinal benefits, she remained unconvinced and recommended that I go see a therapist.

  I should say right off that I have nothing against the mental health professions, but the idea of paying someone to talk about my feelings was about as appealing as paying someone to spit in my food. In my family, the only problems you talked about were those contained in your math homework. And even then it was an act of desperation. It’s not that we don’t have emotions. Quite the opposite, actually; it’s just that our emotions tend to run the spectrum between pleasantly contented and pleasantly bored. If you were to map my family’s emotional expressiveness through color, you’d only need eggshell and beige. When I was growing up, we always were a jovial bunch, if not a close one. My mom has a tremendous sense of humor—one of the best of all time—but I can probably count on a single finger the number of times I’ve seen her visibly angry. Dad’s emotions are only slightly more contained. I remember the two times he got really angry with me when I was under his roof. The first was middling compared to most fathers. The second was when I was twenty and we were fishing in Canada, but we’ll get more into that later.

  Despite my misgivings, I had taken Rebecca up on her suggestion. I tried to explain all this to the therapist in our first session—my family’s peculiar lack of emotional effusiveness—and was asked in return, “How does that make you feel?” Feel? How should I know? That’s the point. And that’s the biggest reason I knew I was not destined for a life of therapy. I steered the conversation toward the physical symptoms of my troubles, and it took her exactly three seconds to diagnose anxiety.

  “Do you know what your problem is?” she asked over the brim of her overlarge, Annie-Potts-in-Ghostbusters glasses.

  “No,” I said. “I was hoping that’s what you could tell me.”

  “Your problem is that you believe every little thing that crosses your mind. If your brain tells you that you’re not good enough, you believe it. If your brain tells you you’re not doing what you’re supposed to, you believe it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because it’s bullshit.”

  She told me to imagine all my negative thoughts as news items on the ticker that crawls across the bottom of the television screen. See them, but dismiss them. And it worked. I hadn’t had an anxiety problem for close to four years. Of course, I never went back to therapy, but that’s because I figured I was done. I assumed the problem had been solved, that the thin woman’s work was finished and guaranteed like an oil change from an ASC-certified mechanic. I was good to go, only to return on the occasion of a mechanical failure.

  For four years, things worked well. Until Molly came home. Until I felt for the first time that dull ache of nothingness. It was in mid-December when I was standing in the upstairs bathroom of my parents’ house in Cleveland, shaving off my wiry mustache in the mirror I used to pop zits in as a teenager, when I caught a glimpse of myself. All at once, the panic set in, the heavy breathing, the thumping chest, the aggressive ennui. I made a few careless final swipes at my face with the razor and cut my lip, then went downstairs, holding a blood-sodden piece of toilet paper to my wound. Dad was sitting where he normally sits, in his dark blue leather recliner next to the fireplace. The television was on—a Cavaliers basketball game. My sons were on the floor. Molly was sleeping on her grandfather’s chest. Rebecca was talking to my mom in the kitchen. I stood in the doorway and looked at it all. My family, my father. My life laid before me in complete innocence. And then I realized what had been troubling me; I saw the words on the ticker in my mind.

  You are the same age your dad was when you were born and you feel nothing like him. You don’t feel in control of your life. You don’t feel like a man.

  It was as if I had been staring at a book in a foreign language and all of a sudden I understood what the words meant. And it wasn’t bullshit. It was exactly the truth, fact, clarity.

  It’s hard to explain the profundity of that moment. All my life I had been my father’s son, my mother’s son, and despite marriage, a career, children, and bills, I never really felt like a grown-up. Whereas my dad, who was in fact a year younger than I was when his third child—me—came along, was always so grown-up; so put together; had such a clear grasp on the world.

  And my uneasiness lingered with me for weeks, through the Christmas holiday and into the new year. The panic was gone, the physical symptoms abated, but there was this sense of not feeling up to the life I was leading, of not fulfilling my role.

  Of course it’s not fair to compare yourself to your parents. You come from different places, different times. My dad grew up in Iowa, working on farms and walking to a country school. He went to Iowa State where he studied chemical engineering, and he later joined the army and became an officer. He grew up with eight siblings in a three-bedroom house. He made his own sausage.

  All this seems like so much mythology when I think of my own anticlimactic superhero creation story. I grew up in the suburbs, a child of the ’80s and ’90s. I was an English major, and the only thing I ever had to share with my siblings was a healthy regard for Guns N’ Roses and John Cusack movies. The closest I ever came to raising my own food was when I planted and killed a small tomato plant as part of a Cub Scout project. It wasn’t that I felt I had wasted my life or was unhappy with it. Far from it. I had a pretty good life. It was just that I felt somehow stuck in the hinterland between youth and adulthood, being a young man and simply being a man. I wasn’t stuck in the middle. I was 85 percent of the way there. But I wanted to know what it felt like to be the man in my household, the way I had always viewed my dad. And the mustache hadn’t done the trick.

  I needed something. A change. A continued evolution. Having a family early meant drifting apart from my college friends, nearly all of whom were slower to get married and have kids. Living as we had under constant financial strain meant any hobbies I may have had, any aspirations to travel or try new things, bowed below the weight of an always-too-small budget. I had long been comfortable with the fact that I would never have any stories about sowing my wild oats, about crazy trips to Mexico, or about following the imprudent impulses of youth. And, to be hones
t, I was fine with that. I never wanted anyone other than Rebecca. I still don’t. Having a family had been a surprise, but it was quickly a welcomed one and I knew, even in the midst of the heaviest ennui, that what I was feeling was nothing like regret. It was more like unfulfilled potential.

  There isn’t a mustache lush enough to make up for that.

  3

  I Want to Hunt

  It was late—maybe around midnight in February—and I was sitting up in bed, the TV on top of our dresser was tuned to the Travel Channel, and the host was buying a load of hunting gear from an upscale shop in Vienna, Austria. He seemed pleased, like a lot of men are when buying themselves new toys, particularly when those toys are being paid for by someone else. My wife was asleep on the couch in the living room, having passed out watching her favorite soap opera and surviving another day at home with our three kids.

  I was tired, not feeling well, and I knew I should be asleep. But even the cold medicine that promises a good night’s sleep wasn’t helping. I was feeling listless. I felt like I had things to do, but I didn’t know what. It was just a general sense of obligation. I watched the host tool through the Alps in a Land Cruiser with his hunting guide in search of deer. They spotted a few nice big bucks. They were well within range, but the host didn’t take a shot. He can’t, he explains to the camera, because the show blew their budget on hunting gear. They could afford to shoot a doe, but a buck was just too much money. He laments wryly, then heads home with the hunting guide to eat venison and sausages around a small family table.