All Is Not Forgotten(35)
Perhaps that is what I mean when I say I love her. She is simple. She sees things simply. I never wonder if she is hiding a secret agenda or manipulating me in ways I won’t understand for months to come. All day, I hear about lies, secrets, plots, and distrust. And those are just my days in Fairview. When I walk through my front door, feeling pride for a day of hard work, feeling satisfied that I have provided this house and all these things for my family, Julie is there, tending to our kids, tending to our house, tending to me. She generally ignores me until the kids are fed and their homework is done and we’ve done the dishes together. But then she sits with me for a glass of wine and she tells me about her simple day and I see that she is happy. The comfort this provides me is indescribable. I, in turn, feel happy in her company. I feel appreciated and cared for. And so I love her.
Before you think I am stuck in the 1950s, my wife spends her days teaching a class at the community college in Cranston, seeing her friends to play tennis or have lunch, and treating herself to a few hours of reading or a pedicure or something else that she finds enjoyable. She is not a servant in our family. She is free to do whatever she wants. In fact, I have encouraged her to pursue a master’s degree so we might engage in more sophisticated conversations.
There is one aspect of life that is not simple for my wife. I have mentioned before her fear of bad things happening to our children. How she makes herself feel the worst possible outcomes before she can move past the fear. My wife lost both her parents when she was in her thirties. They’d had her when they were in their midforties, so their deaths were not untimely. One went to heart disease. The other to a stroke. I have considered the possibility of genetic weaknesses, as these would affect my own children and might be cause for some early precautions. But I have concluded that these ailments were more a result of time and the sedentary lifestyle her parents maintained. The loss, however normal from an actuarial standpoint, was difficult for Julie. Her one brother lives in Arizona with his wife. They have no children. Our immediate family is all she has, and her parents’ deaths have made her acutely aware that people we love do in fact die. It’s amazing how we all lose sight of that. Maybe life would be unbearable if we did not.
I knew right away from the tone of her voice that she was worried. It was breathy and of a higher pitch than usual. She was trying, but failing, to hide her panic.
Hi, sweetheart. Hope your day is going well. Just wanted to know if you’d heard the news about the arrest. I’m sure you have, it’s been all over the TV. Probably on the radio as well. Anyway … apparently they now want to speak to all the kids again, you know, the ones who were at the party that night. I’m sure they just want to see if any of them can confirm that the man they arrested was the same one parked out on Juniper. No big deal, right? Call me, though. Laura Lyman said they might hire a lawyer to go in with Steven. Mark Brandino is his name. Maybe we should think about that for Jason? Anyway … call me, okay, sweetie? I love you. Drive safely. Give me a call. Okay … bye-bye.
Her words were like a cold shower. I had not thought much about Jason being at the party that night. There were over a hundred kids there, nearly half the school, including most of his varsity swim team.
Jason is a swimmer. He’s an excellent swimmer, actually. There’s been talk of an early college offer from Michigan, maybe even Penn. He’s going to need the swimming, being a B+ student. He works hard, so this really is his limit academically. I knew it might be an issue when I married Julie. I would put her IQ at around 100 to 110. I have found a negative correlation between exceptional IQ levels and emotional stability. The same is true with nurturing instincts. There seemed no point in having brilliant children if their mother couldn’t give them the proper amount of affection. And, indeed, my children are well adjusted, attractive, popular, athletic, and highly competent intellectually. I believe this will give them a kind of happiness that always evaded me.
Jason is a wonderful young man. You can believe me or not believe me. It is the objective truth. If I told you he was the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet, then you could call my objectivity into question. And you would be right. I do not believe he is the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet. I just feel like he is, and like everything he does and says (almost—he is a teenager, after all), is precious, and I find myself soaking it in so I have a full reserve of it when he goes off to college in a year, as my daughter did two years before. That is the parent in me. The objective person in me sees that he is a wonderful young man.
He is kind to others. He sits with us at dinner and talks about the world with compassion and understanding. We discuss everything from the Middle East and terrorism to the economy. Sometimes I smile at the conclusions he’s come to because he is so young and has so much to learn. But at least he cares enough to think and draw conclusions. He gets up every morning with a smile on his face, cracking jokes at breakfast, humming some new song he’s downloaded. He goes to school, goes to swim practice, comes home for dinner and then to study and sleep, only to start all over again. Yes, he is sometimes glued to his phone on the social media or video games, but this does not alarm me the way it does some people. This is their world, and they might as well become acclimated to it. It will not serve them well to treat their technology like a vice and limit their exposure. They will end up without the skill set that is already becoming necessary for the workplace and social environment of their generation.