Little Children (4 page)

Todd nodded thoughtfully at her analysis, neither blushing nor trying to deflect the compliment. When you were as handsome as he was, Sarah supposed, there wasn’t much point in pretending to be surprised when other people noticed.

“I guess it is a little odd,” he admitted. “There aren’t as many stay-at-home fathers around here as I thought.”

“What does your wife do?” Sarah asked.

“She’s a filmmaker. She’s doing a documentary on World War Two veterans. You know, the Greatest Generation, all that stuff.”

“
Saving Private Ryan
,” said Sarah.

“Tom Brokaw,” agreed Todd.

“Anyway, I think it’s great that you’re here. There’s no reason why men can’t be primary caregivers.”

“I finished law school two years ago,” Todd volunteered, after only the briefest hesitation. “But I can’t seem to pass the bar exam. Failed it twice now.”

“That’s a hard test.” She shook her head. “I remember all the trouble John F. Kennedy, Jr. had with it.”

Todd felt the twinge of sympathy he never failed to experience when people mentioned JFK, Jr. in an attempt to make him feel better, as they almost always did. It was bad enough that the poor guy had to lose his father and die in a tragic plane crash; did he have to go down in history as the patron saint of failed bar exams as well?

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just whenever I think about it I’m filled with this unbelievable feeling of dread. It’s like one of those bad dreams, where you suddenly realize that you forgot to go to math class all semester, and now it’s time for the final.”

“Maybe you just don’t want to be a lawyer.”

He seemed momentarily startled by this suggestion. “Well, maybe I’ll get my wish. Kathy and I agreed that I’m going to take the test one more time. If I mess up, I’m going to have to find something else to do with my life.”

He seemed so matter-of-fact while delivering this confession, not at all embarrassed by the fact of his failure. Most men weren’t like that—Richard certainly wasn’t. She wondered if Todd was always this forthcoming, or if he found her for some reason to be an unusually sympathetic listener. Either way, there was nothing the least bit intimidating about him. If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interest, like a lot of the young mothers she knew.

“I couldn’t help noticing your stroller,” she told him. “Do you have another child?”

“Just Aaron. We got that at a yard sale. The extra seat comes in handy for carrying groceries and stuff. At least it used to, before Big Bear started joining us.”

“Lucy won’t even go in a stroller. We have to walk everywhere. It takes us half an hour to go three blocks.”

They pushed their children and continued chatting for another fifteen minutes or so, until Todd glanced at his watch and discovered to his surprise that it was already past noon. Unlike Sarah, he had apparently developed an effective system for bringing swing time to a close. After issuing a five-minute warning, he loudly announced the passage of each successive minute, until the time came for the final ten pushes, which he and Aaron counted out together in enthusiastic voices. Then he left his son to swing slowly to a standstill while he removed Big Bear from the swing and returned him to the stroller. It was only then, while watching him kneel down to affix the safety belt around the bear’s shapeless midsection, that Sarah found herself gripped by an unexpected pang of sadness.

Don’t go
, she thought.
Don’t leave me here with the others.

As if he’d heard her, Todd straightened up and gave her a curious smile, as if he were about to ask a personal question.

“Well,” he said. “It was nice talking to you.”

“Same here.”

She watched in silence as he cupped Aaron by the armpits and attempted to lift him out of the swing. The boy’s foot got caught in one of the apertures, and Sarah hurried over to free it before Todd even had a chance to ask for assistance.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem. Happens to us all the time. Sometimes I think Lucy does it on purpose.”

As Todd buckled Aaron into the stroller, Sarah found herself gazing at Big Bear, whose face was frozen in a look of wild alarm, as if he were witnessing something horrible but did not know how to cry for help. Todd stood up and shrugged, as if to say that was that. Sarah spoke without thinking.

“You know those women over there?” She gestured as discreetly as she could at the picnic table posse. “You know what they call you?”

“What?” Todd seemed intrigued.

“The Prom King.”

“Ouch.” He winced, as if this were a humiliating insult. “That’s awful.”

“They mean it as a compliment. You’re a big character in their fantasy lives.”

“I guess,” he said dubiously. “I mean, you could easily come up with something worse.”

“One of them bet me five dollars I couldn’t get your phone number,” Sarah said, once again shocked by her own boldness.

“Five bucks?” Todd smiled. “Could we split it fifty-fifty?”

“It could be arranged.”

Todd patted himself down, then showed her his empty palms. “You got a pen?”

Sarah knew there was a pen in her diaper bag, but she didn’t want to walk all the way over to the picnic table to retrieve it. And besides, she already had a better idea.

“You know what would really shock them? If you gave me a hug.”

Neither one of them moved for a second or two, and Sarah’s confidence began to falter. But then Todd began walking toward her, his Prom King face surrounded by the dazzling blue background of the summer sky. He smiled shyly and opened his arms.

Sarah was unaccustomed to the sensation of hugging someone so tall. She pressed her face against his collarbone, uncomfortably close to the sweat stain spreading out from beneath his arm. There was a sour odor radiating from his body that she found oddly reassuring.

“This feels pretty good,” he whispered.

She nodded into his chest and held him a little tighter, as if they were slow-dancing at the prom. Her back was to the picnic table, so she could only imagine the consternation this embrace was causing among the other mothers. She pulled her head away from him and looked up.

“You know what would be really funny?”

In retrospect, she was never quite sure if he answered her question. Maybe he nodded or made some vague murmur of assent. In any case, he did exactly what she’d meant him to, as if she’d outlined the action in precise detail.

The first kiss was tentative, only half-serious, as if they were acting in a play, but the second one was for real—gentle, then forceful, and then completely electrifying, the kind of kiss that would have made perfect sense outside a dorm room at two in the morning. On a playground at noon, between near-total strangers, though, it was a kind of insanity. Luckily, one of them finally had the good sense to pull away from the other, though Sarah could not for the life of her remember which of them it was.

“My God,” she murmured.

Todd wiped his bare forearm across his mouth. He was blushing now.

“Wow,” he said.

“You better go,” she told him.

He nodded and set off without another word, slowly pushing the stroller across the unreal green expanse of the soccer field. Sarah watched his broad back receding for as long as she could stand it, then turned to her daughter, who was sitting in her motionless swing, watching the same sight as her mother, her feet kicking dreamily at the air.

“Let’s get going,” Sarah told her.

For once, Lucy submitted without complaint as her mother lifted her out of the swing. The two of them walked back toward the picnic table in silence, holding hands. Sarah’s legs felt unsteady as she approached the other mothers, her face burning with pride and shame. Cheryl and Theresa were staring at her in complete bewilderment. Mary Ann looked furious.

“I’m sure your daughter found that very educational,” she said.

“His name’s Todd,” Sarah replied. “He’s a lawyer. And he’s really very nice.”

AARON HAD DISCOVERED HIS PENIS. WHENEVER HE HAD A SPARE
moment—when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story—his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper). Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

Having been reassured by parenting books that childhood masturbation was a common and harmless activity—and believing in any case that each individual has a sovereign right of ownership over his or her own body—Todd and Kathy had made a conscious decision not to interfere with Aaron’s self-explorations. But sometimes they wondered.

“Did you do that as a kid?” Kathy asked. They were watching from the hallway as Aaron absentmindedly stroked his tiny manhood while watching a video of
Clifford, the Big Red Dog
.

“I don’t think so,” said Todd. It was hard for him to remember the specifics of his early childhood. When he tried, the only image he could regularly produce was his mother’s face hovering over him as she tucked him into bed at night, a luminous, looming, loving presence that he could still sometimes sense at the edges of his perception.

“I sure didn’t,” said Kathy. “My mother used to tell me it was dirty down there and to never ever touch it. Of course, she wouldn’t let me suck my thumb, either. She painted that awful sticky stuff on it at night to make me stop.”

“Eet ees puffeckly nawmal to zuck ze sum!” Todd exclaimed, doing the imitation of Dr. Ruth that Kathy used to get such a kick out of. He’d do it while they were making love, whenever he needed to get her to relax and experiment with something a little out of the ordinary. (
Eet ees puffeckly nawmal to vare ze handcuffs!
) That was one of her sweetest quirks (or at least it used to be): As long as you could convince her that the practice in question fell within the boundaries of “normal behavior,” she was up for just about anything. “Und ees puffeckly nawmal to be aroused by big red dog!”

Kathy chuckled politely, but her mind had already shifted to another topic.

“By the way,” she said. “Have you been doing the flash cards?”

“Not too much,” Todd admitted.

Kathy had recently purchased a preschool “Fun with Math” kit. She wanted to get Aaron thinking about numbers—recognizing numerals, counting to a hundred, maybe doing some rudimentary addition—and had made a unilateral decision that Todd would be heavily involved, even though he had repeatedly expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the project. The kid was only three, for God’s sake. His idea of a good time was smashing two trains together. He didn’t need to be worrying about math.

“I wish you’d give it a try,” she said. “I just want him to feel comfortable with the basic concepts. Just because you and I were bad at math doesn’t mean he should be scared of it, too.”

“I wasn’t bad at math,” Todd protested. “Except for calculus. I had some kind of mental block with that.”

Kathy turned back to Aaron.

“Honey?” She had to repeat the word three times at increasing volume to get his attention. “When Clifford’s over, we’re going to do our flash cards, okay?”

Aaron nodded—Todd thought he would have agreed to just about anything right then—and turned back to the TV. Todd kissed Kathy on the cheek.

“Oh well,” he said. “Better hit the books.”

“So how’s it going?” she said, making an unsuccessful attempt to sound casual.

“Fine,” he said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just worry about you sometimes,” she said. “I worry about us.”

He kissed her again, this time on the forehead.

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

Todd didn’t understand the point of certain skateboarding maneuvers. They weren’t always self-explanatory, like popping a wheelie or spinning a basketball on your fingertip. Sometimes it was hard to know what the boys were
trying
to do, let alone if they’d succeeded.

Tonight, for example, all of them were practicing a low-key move where they scootered along at a leisurely clip, crouched down like a surfer, and then hopped into the air for a split second. If the rider was skillful, the board clung to the soles of his sneakers as if by magnetism, and he continued rolling as before when the wheels reconnected with the ground. If not, the board slipped away from the rider’s feet and plunged to the pavement, usually landing upside down or on its side, and making either a soft clattering noise or a decisive smack, depending upon whether the rider came down on top of it, in which case a fairly interesting fall could result.

A smooth landing was preferable to a painful tumble, of course, but was that it? Even when done properly, the maneuver seemed unassuming to a fault, barely worth the trouble. And yet, rider after rider kept gliding past him like figures in a dream, crouching and hopping, standing or falling, performing their pointless task with the stoic patience of early adolescence.
I don’t know why I’m doing this
, each boy seemed to say,
but I’ll keep doing it until I’m old enough to do something else.

As he had so often in recent days, Todd closed his eyes and let out a low moan, mentally reenacting the kiss by the swing set. He still couldn’t believe that it had really happened, right out in public like that, after only a brief conversation, with all those women and children looking on (Aaron had been particularly curious about what he’d seen, and had received Todd’s explanation that it was just pretend, a game grown-ups sometimes played, with justifiable skepticism). But Sarah hadn’t just kissed him. She had pressed her body against his with astonishing frankness, murmuring these sweet little noises of approval and encouragement right into his mouth. Todd had been
this close
to grabbing her ass when he remembered where they were. She looked dazed and disappointed when he pulled away, and he’d had to stop himself from inviting her back to his house for more right then and there, though what “more” might have meant with a pair of three-year-olds in tow, he couldn’t have begun to say.

A week had passed, and Todd hadn’t seen or heard from her since. He and Aaron had returned to the Rayburn School playground the following morning, but no one was there, not even the three bitchy women who supposedly called him “Prom King.” They were back a few days after that, but played dumb when Todd asked about Sarah, as if they didn’t know the first thing about her, not even her last name or where she lived.

“I’m surprised you have to ask,” said the bossy one with the toothpick legs. “It looked like you knew each other pretty well.”

Sarah hadn’t shown up at the Town Pool, either, though Todd remembered telling her that he and Aaron could be found there most afternoons. So she was obviously in no big hurry to reconnect with him and explore phase two of the playground fantasy, whatever that might be. It was probably a good thing, Todd decided. It wasn’t like he wanted to have an affair or anything. He just wanted to see her again, maybe talk a little about what had happened, find out if she felt as unsettled by their encounter as he did.

Because he couldn’t get that damn kiss out of his mind. The whole thing was just so uncanny. Todd had been fantasizing about something like that for months, every time he found himself engaged in conversation with an attractive young mother—
Dear Penthouse Forum, I’m a 31-year-old stay-at-home dad, and you’ll never believe what just happened to me at the playground
—and now it had really happened. It was like suddenly being a teenager again, returning to a time when sex wasn’t a routine or predictable part of your life, but something mysterious and transforming that could pop up out of nowhere, sometimes when you weren’t even looking, though usually you were. Walk into a party and Bang! There it was. The mall, McDonald’s, even church! Some girl smiles at you, and it’s a whole different day.

Losing that sense of omnipresent possibility was one of the trade-offs of married life that Todd struggled with on a daily basis. Sure, he got to sleep with a great woman every night. He could kiss her whenever he wanted (well, almost). But sometimes it was nice to kiss someone else for a change, for the hell of it, just to prove it could still be done. It didn’t seem to matter that Sarah wasn’t his type, wasn’t even that pretty, at least not compared to Kathy, who had long legs and lustrous hair, and knew how to make herself as glamorous as a model when you gave her a reason to. Sarah was short and boyish, slightly pop-eyed, and a little angry-looking when you got right down to it. She had coarse unruly hair and eyebrows that were thicker than Todd thought necessary. But so what? She’d read his mind and walked into his arms, as if she’d memorized a script he hadn’t even remembered writing until he found himself standing in the middle of it, breathing hard and barely able to let go.

“Hey, pervert!”

Todd cringed at the word, flinging up his arms as if to deflect a blow. The minivan had crept up so slowly—or he had retreated so deeply into himself—that he didn’t even notice it until it was idling right in front of him, blocking his view of the skateboarders.

“Like the little boys, do you?”

The teasing note was clearer now. Todd dropped his guard and squinted into the van in an effort to identify the driver, who was craning across the front seat to assist him in this task. It took a few seconds to pin a name on the broad, fleshy face grinning at him through the open passenger window.

“Jesus, Larry. Don’t even joke about that.”

Larry Moon was a father Todd had hung out with a couple of times at the Stuart Street sprinkler park during last summer’s heat wave, and hadn’t seen since. He was a stocky, thick-necked guy in his midthirties, an ex-cop who had recently retired on full disability, though there didn’t appear to be anything physically wrong with him.

“You busy?” he asked.

“Actually, I’m, uh, supposed to be studying.” Todd lifted his bookbag off the ground to bolster what sounded—even to himself—like an unlikely claim. “I’m taking the bar exam next month.”

“Didn’t you do that last year?”

“Yeah,” said Todd. “See how good I did?”

Larry laughed, as if Todd had meant it as a joke. He popped the lock and the passenger door swung open.

“Get in,” he said. “I got a better idea.”

Larry cleared off the passenger seat, tossing a football and a pair of binoculars into the back of the van, and snatching up a fat stack of blue paper, which he dropped into Todd’s lap a moment later.

“You mind?” he said. “I’m trying to keep ’em nice.”

Todd recognized the pervert warning right away. He had received three of them in the past week alone—one in his mailbox, one folded into the Sunday paper, another slipped through his car window when he’d left it open a crack at the supermarket. A small footnote at the bottom of the flyer said,
Paid for by the Committee of Concerned Parents
.

“You part of the committee?” Todd asked.

“I
am
the committee. It just sounds better than
Paid for by Larry from Hazel Avenue
. A little more official.”

“How’d you find out about this creep?”

“There’s a web site. The state’s required to disclose the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders.” Larry shot him an inquiring glance. “Don’t you check it?”

“Not on a regular basis,” Todd confessed.

“I think decent people have a right to know if Chester the Molester’s moving in next door, don’t you?”

“McGorvey’s not living next door to you, is he?”

“Not next door. But close enough.” Larry’s expression darkened. “They should just castrate the bastard and be done with it.”

Todd nodded as noncommitally as he could, trying to acknowledge Larry’s strong opinion on the subject without having to express his own more measured one. In the interval of silence that followed, Todd’s attention latched on to the familiar music playing softly on the car stereo.

“You a Raffi fan?”

“What?” Larry seemed startled by the question.

“That’s Raffi, right? ‘Big, Beautiful Planet’?”

“Ah, shit.” Larry punched
EJECT
. “After a while I don’t even know what I’m listening to anymore.”

“I actually like some of his stuff,” Todd volunteered. “You know, just a song here and there. I’m not president of his fan club or anything.”

Larry didn’t respond, and Todd wondered if he’d been more forthcoming on the subject than he needed to be. His discomfort grew more acute at a red light just beyond the center of town, when Larry shifted in the driver’s seat and examined Todd’s body with disconcerting thoroughness, his gaze lingering on the legs and moving slowly upward.

“You look good,” he said. “Been going to the gym?”

Oh shit,
thought Todd.

He felt like an idiot, more embarrassed on Larry’s behalf than his own. Because what was the guy supposed to think? He pulls up, calls you a pervert, and invites you into his van, and you climb in without even asking where you’re going. The average five-year-old would have known better.

“I run a lot,” Todd explained. “Lotsa push-ups and crunches and stuff.”

“This is unbelievable.” Larry grinned and gave Todd a hard but not unfriendly sock in the arm. “I’ve been searching for you for months, and when I finally give up, there you are, standing on the corner like some crack whore in the ghetto.”

“Why were you looking?” Todd decided not to make an issue of the crack whore analogy, which did not strike him as auspicious. “Did you want to ask me something?”

“The guys are gonna love this,” Larry said, more to himself than Todd.

The guys?
Todd thought unhappily.
What guys?
But before he could pose the question, the minivan veered unexpectedly across two lanes of traffic, into the parking lot of the high school athletic complex, which was brightly lit and the scene of a reassuring amount of activity—senior citizens shuffling around the track, some teenage boys tossing a lacrosse ball, two Chinese women practicing Tai Chi near an equipment shed. Todd let go of his misgivings, despite the fact that Larry was staring at his legs again.