Chapter 22
One Saturday morning, Caleb burst into our bedroom and said triumphantly, “I’ve found my purpose!”
It was wintertime. The holidays had come and gone.
Caleb’s brothers and their families had descended upon the estate for Christmas and New Year’s, the veritable flock of Mills children dragging mud through the hallways, the brothers sharing raunchy jokes in Doug’s office, the women smiling mildly at one another over champagne flutes in the kitchen, and then they had all gone again, returning to their lives in San Francisco and Manhattan and DC. And still, Caleb and I remained here.
Now it was January. Which meant Reena was back in Boston in her off-campus apartment.
At this very moment, she was probably still in bed, perhaps just waking up now, leaning halfway over the mattress, fingers dragging groggily past empty red Solo cups on the floor, searching for a half-drunk bottle of Gatorade or a Tylenol bottle to soothe her pounding headache.
I, on the other hand, was at the changing station, moving through the fourth diaper blowout of the week.
My fingernails were dark with shit. I had a deranged expression on my face, something between a grin and a grimace.
Pretend you’re being watched, my mother whispered in my mind—an especially easy task at the current moment, since Clementine was lying on her back, actively glaring at me while I pulled out the fifth baby wipe.
“Hold on,” I sang softly, “that’s it, almost finished … ”
I glanced over my shoulder, only just processing my husband’s entry into the room. “Your purpose?” I tossed the final wipe to the side and began fastening Clementine into a new diaper. I resisted the urge to reply in singsong, Did you finally check the couch cushions?
“Remember when we drove past my old school the other week?”
“Uh-huh.” Clementine let out a warning shriek, and I moved more quickly with the diaper straps.
“Well, I stopped by the other day, just to say hi to everyone”—That’s my husband, I thought merrily, saying hello to everyone at a private school in the middle of nowhere, not a concern in the world, while his wife uses her last five brain cells to power wash a baby’s butt crack—“and they need a substitute kindergarten teacher this spring. The current teacher is on maternity leave, and they love to find teachers who are alums. Perfect timing, don’t you think? ”
I fastened the snaps on the diaper and picked Clementine up, then turned to face him. “What about that is perfect?”
“They need someone to fill the position. I need a job.” He held his two palms up in the air, weighing them equally, like a math equation had been solved.
I sat down on the bed, letting Clementine crawl onto the comforter and into Caleb’s arms. “You’re saying you want to replace her.”
“Don’t you remember our conversation a few weeks ago? How I said I wished I could play with kids for a job?”
A kindergarten teacher. My husband wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. My first thought: I had never met a kindergarten teacher who wasn’t a sixty-year-old woman. Then the second thought arrived. “What’s the salary?”
“I didn’t ask.”
He didn’t ask. Of course he didn’t ask. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a teacher.”
“I didn’t either, but now that I think about it—I think I’d be good at it.”
A pit formed in my stomach. He would be good at it. He’d be incredible. He would probably love spending all day with children, teaching them all the benign bits of information about the world that any idiot adult could master. Blue is a primary color! Fish have gills!
If he started this job, he would want to do it for the rest of his life, and the dream of a respectable life would be over.
We would be consigned to life as a kindergarten family.
Dimly, I registered that there was some poetic justice to the phrase.
We were a couple with a diagnosis so serious it bordered on medical: failure to launch.
I watched as Caleb played pattycake with Clementine’s feet. She let out a gurgle of laughter, the kind she never did with me, and my chest constricted. A sad, quiet thought: none of this had gone the way I thought it would.
I looked at my husband, who was now making goo-goo faces at our daughter. “Do you even know what they teach children in school, Caleb?”
“What?”
“They teach them that being a Christian is a terrible thing. That gender is a construct and that marriage is some destructive force. Do you want that for our kids?”
“Of course not,” Caleb said. He frowned. “Do they really teach that, these days?”
I nodded somberly. “They teach little white children to feel guilty about the fact that our country used to have slaves.” My public school hadn’t taught this, but I’d heard of other schools that had.
Or rather my mother had heard about it from another woman at a church bake sale, who had heard about it from her sister’s best friend, who was a principal at an afflicted middle school in California or Maryland or Canada.
My mother (or the woman or her sister) could never quite remember where.
“But that ended centuries ago!”
“It doesn’t matter. They don’t care about facts.”
“Well, I’m sure they don’t teach that in kindergarten.”
It’s a job for a woman, I nearly snapped.
Instead, I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, thinking.
“I suppose that’s true. I just worry that you’re selling yourself short on something more …
intellectually rigorous.” He didn’t answer.
He was counting Clementine’s little toes, and she was making little shrieks of delight.
Time to switch tactics. “You know, I had an interesting conversation with my mother the other day,” I said.
“She told me about how sometimes, when she has to do something she doesn’t want to do, she imagines that she’s doing it for an audience. ”
“An audience.” He snorted. “That’s funny.” He made a face at Clementine. “Isn’t that funny?”
“Yes. An audience. Like, if you took a job as a financial analyst, maybe you would imagine a bunch of smart, admirable men watching you. Almost like a game.”
Caleb frowned. “Are they real people, in this audience? Or are they angels? I’m imagining angels. Like, of God.”
I could feel my smile straining on my face, the stitches threatening to snap. “The point is sometimes you have to pretend to like something at first, and if you pretend for long enough, you might just end up liking it.”
“You mean pretend to like one of those jobs you send me every day?”
“Exactly! Yes.”
“But I know I wouldn’t like that.” He gave me a meaningful look. “You know what I would like? Being a kindergarten teacher.” He raised his eyebrows at Clementine, like, Checkmate! Daddy won!
What had I been thinking? The strategy worked only if opting out was not an option.
But for Caleb, it was always an option. In every single waking second of his life, he had the opportunity to say, simply, I don’t want to do that.
Imagine if I said that. Imagine if Clementine started crying and I rolled over in bed and said, I don’t want to do that.
Breastfeeding: I don’t want to do that. Scrubbing Caleb’s little flecks of calcified shit from the toilet bowl in the guest bathroom, even though there were housekeepers here, because my mother had always taught me that what your family does in the bathroom is no one else’s business but your own. Nope, don’t want to do that.
“Well!” I said shrilly. “You shouldn’t do things you don’t want to do!” I felt like my brain was going to melt into a pool of liquid and drain out of my nose.
“Exactly,” Caleb said. He looked relieved and victorious. His wife had actually started making some sense. “So I’ll call the school in the morning and we can—”
“Hold on.” I pressed a hand to my forehead, which felt like it was overheating. “Just—just hold on a second.”
This was the longest conversation we’d had in months.
My mind stretched and contorted in little panicky grabs at a plan, a strategy, anything to stop him from taking that position.
“Being a kindergarten teacher cannot be the only thing that you would have fun doing. Think, Caleb. Think. What did you want to be when you were younger?”
He scrunched up his face. “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think I ever had a clear idea of it. I mean, when I was little, I wanted to be an actor. Or a cowboy. But that was just kid stuff.”
A cowboy, or an actor. Lord, give me strength.
The options were so absurd as to render me without any clear opinions to begin with.
It would be years before this moment made sense to me in any intellectual sense.
Specifically, it would be just under a decade from now, at the campaign stop in Iowa where Doug would announce his third presidential bid, when the introducer would describe my father-in-law as the last living John Wayne, and I would turn to look at my husband and see the light in his eyes, and the memory of this conversation would click into place.
Caleb didn’t want to be an actor, or a cowboy. He wanted to be his father. An icon. A true American patriarch.
Men and their legends. Embarrassing.
Well, I thought. Here we are, at the end of the road. Kindergarten teacher, actor, or cowboy. Pick your poison. Drink it quickly.
Then I looked at my husband and remembered our first date.
His misty eyes at the idea of a farm. What you said sounds nice.
Over the last few months, Caleb had mentioned the idea in passing several times, talking wistfully about growing our own crops, taking care of our own livestock.
I hadn’t even remotely entertained it as a possibility.
But now I felt the weight of the idea drop into my lap.
The Lord might not have given me a mother’s instinct, as I’d been praying to receive for months, but He had given me something even better: a plan to make the father of my child a man.
A substitute kindergarten teaching job was the professional version of a fully flaccid penis. Humiliation incarnate. But a real-life cowboy? That, I thought with surprise, I can work with.
Caleb didn’t have to be good at farming. He didn’t need a strong work ethic or even a working knowledge of how to keep farm animals alive. He just had to learn how to pretend.
A chorus of angels sang Hallelujah in my mind.