Excerpt from True Failure
BY ALEX HIGLEY
The three kids were each standing on their own plastic step stool so they could reach the kitchen counter. Taking turns with the hammer. Tara was letting them tenderize the pork chops with a real hammer, yellow handled, from the garage; she’d washed it in front of them with dish soap so that if any of their parents asked about the day and the hammer came up—inevitable—she could be sure its cleaning had witnesses. Pounding the chop, Billy was grunting in a way that reminded Tara of Monica Seles. She couldn’t think of a good way to share this with the boy. The girls, Micah and Jules, had very different hammer styles. Micah was firm gripped and too focused on the strike, the downward momentum of her arm, and as a result was repeatedly missing the pork and striking the cutting board with a loud bang. Jules was loose and wristy with the hammer, distracted by the birds arriving at the feeder hanging outside the window. Tara ended up getting her pork in shape while guessing at the names of the birds: “Sparrow, that one’s a grackle, yes, mud sparrow—”
Tara had been running a daycare out of their home for the past three years. Day care had occurred to her while she was pregnant and they still lived in the city. Before then, never. Before then she was concerned with the painting at hand— paintings with titles like Local Disaster, Look Skyward; Solemn Buried Commercial Fishing; and Parsnix—making enough money waitressing for rent, and little else.
There had been the brief, shattering pregnancy. Seven weeks. She never told Ben. She thought of these as two distinct secrets, the pregnancy and the loss of it, and this understand- ing was important to her. Important because her own personal tally of hardships survived had to mean something. The knowledge that she could endure what she had alone was important to her. Speaking some of these secrets, some of what she was holding onto, telling Ben, would seem to allow for the actual cruelty of the world to more fully enter—like water seeping into and permanently filling the basement of the home that was her life. Still water sitting dead. It was better to pretend; it was better to lie.
She hadn’t known about the baby herself until five weeks. Not uncommon, five weeks, the opposite actually, but still staggering, she thought, to be able to live even one day oblivious that another life was there with you. Think of one whole day spent evading effective advertising, selecting a bagel, considering an attitude modulation for work purposes, thinking about seasonal clothing and where to get it cheaply, getting horny for a tv doctor, refilling a coffee mug, getting horny for a tv lawyer, dropping a coffee mug, refilling a large fountain-drink cup filled with half Diet Coke and half Dr Pepper, being particular about the ice, filling with hate for strangers riding with you on the Brown Line, all those decisions in light of a baby coming. Five weeks of that. It was beautiful and silly and as common as another day. Oblivion. Daily, oblivion.
The three kids, not her own, were sitting with Tara in the green yard eating lunch, back behind the detached garage in long grass. There were mature trees quietly surrounding them: a bur oak, American linden, a ginkgo, all massive and beautiful, each over a hundred years old. Three trees can be enough to fill a yard, especially less than a quarter of an acre, and that’s to say nothing of any of the bushes, shrubs, or several twenty-five-foot-tall wooden posts that held drooping electrical wires loping toward neighboring homes.The trees took some effort to notice because much of Harks Grove was full of the same; one could easily be tricked into not seeing them at all, though Tara had always marked them. The four were sitting next to each other eating pork schnitzel sandwiches on the fake steel girder that Ben had built them earlier in the summer. Micah, Jules, Billy, Tara. Loosely, it was Czech week at Tara’s. The girder was made from leftover sixteen-foot precut deck planks from Nguyen and Hank’s house that Ben had painted gray. They’d redone their deck and were now worrying their way around the kitchen. Tara felt both renovations were needless—the house she’d seen once was flawless—but was glad to enjoy what their overbuying had provided.
The need for a fake steel girder came from one of the kids, Billy. He’d become fixated on the photograph Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the famous shot of the eleven ironworkers eating lunch suspended in the air on the sixty-ninth floor of the RCA Building under construction—the photograph nearly as old as the trees in the yard. Billy could not take in the information the photo provided as real, and as a result began concentrating his attention on its component pieces; as if the disparate units that comprised the picture might form its magic instead of the plain shock of men eating lunch in the sky. Tara had asked Ben to make the kids the girder for outdoor lunches. The girder had given their outdoor lunches a ritual quality they’d previously lacked. Head outside, sit on the beam, eat.
When Tara thought back on the pregnancy, that is what she thought of most: not the two weeks she’d known her child was there with her, but the time before when she hadn’t. She couldn’t have known, of course. She had done nothing wrong. Tara wanted a child more than she let Ben know. Her line was, if they got pregnant, she’d welcome it. Not that this was a line she rehearsed or delivered regularly. Opportunities were wanting. Not a lot of sex, and even less talking around the sex they did have. Tara’s sentiment was not punctuated by a smile, it was flat, it was true; if they got pregnant, she’d welcome it. She was a natural with children and that made her want one. She didn’t feel she had to alter who she was around kids; her de- sire for a family wasn’t complicated. Her reasons were alive to her. She didn’t think Ben would be able to handle knowing about the miscarriage and she was also unwilling to find out whether he was or not. He was too sensitive, defensive, moody. And about nothing. Say, if he were wearing a hat backward, in- doors, folding laundry, listening to Led Zeppelin IV, a muted basketball game on the tv, intently watching the screen, folding his t-shirts strangely, consistently, but strangely, she might laugh at him. Maybe she’d tell him that with his current technique, there’d be a diagonal fold-line striping each shirt. And she might also be laughing at how deeply mass popular music touched him combined with his inability to prepare t-shirts for storage, his dumb hat; the totality. And he’d be hurt. He’d tell her he hadn’t listened to that record since he was fifteen; to leave him alone. She’d coo and kiss and pat his back, but still the hurt could last a whole ten minutes. Longer. She’d say, you can’t laugh like that at a man you don’t love. And that might be true; but it was also tiring. If you loved him, it was hard not to laugh at the man he was, unguarded. He arrived in rooms, a career, in conversations, without planning or cunning, as one would expect. And that was nothing. If there were stakes, my goodness. He could not modify his moods and reactions as she could. He could not hide. The more hurt he was, the more she had to be present to fix. The more she kept private, the more she was able to control. Tara was often more aware of Ben than Ben himself—his emotional state, his presence in a room, how he was being received, what he was actually thinking. And as a result, she was responsible for his care in a way that was not reciprocated. Ben could not sense what Tara hid from him, not in the way Tara could for Ben, and this in part meant he was burdened with less.
She didn’t want to always have to guide him: here’s how you make yourself happy, here’s how to be a better partner, here’s how.
Micah began singing on the beam, schnitzel sandwich in hand, and Billy shushed her. He’d started enforcing a “no talking” policy when they ate on the girder, and the girls respected it because Billy was the youngest of the three and this was fully his game that they were playing. Micah stood and wandered the yard, loosely holding her sandwich, self-possessed in her singing like her audience was somewhere floating inches above her head. Jules had her eyes closed with her face in the sun, still sitting on the beam. Tara could not see evidence of Jules’s sandwich anywhere, her plate, napkin, anything. In the past week Jules had hidden two pairs of shoes, three forks, and now a pork schnitzel sandwich.
For the two weeks she had spent planning her new life as a mother, making decisions with that knowledge, joying in the secret of the pregnancy, Tara had been preoccupied with finding a way to make money that allowed her to stay home with her daughter. She’d always worked. She’d waitressed, bar- tended, while going to school and then full time after, and had felt done with it. Nearly ten years of that work. She did not want to give her patience to customers ordering drinks, give them her kindness, and then go home and feel depleted of anything she would need to give her child. That she would want to give her child. Not if she didn’t have to. Yes, Ben had a job, but it was not enough. They needed to maintain two incomes like every- one they knew and everyone else those people knew. Student loans and a mortgage, credit cards, those three to begin, and need it even be said?
For those two weeks, still, Tara had thought of the unborn child as her daughter. It had never occurred to her that she could be anything else.
Tara lay prone on the beam in the sun, the trees looming above her as the three kids circled, running and shouting, “Dead, dead, we think she’s dead!” Tara had named this game “Is She Dead?” and the unfortunate answer for the kids was always yes. Playing dead was Tara’s forever tactic within this activity. The game as Tara defined it was that she lay on the beam and the kids ran around her while determining if she was alive or not. Either choice allowed Tara to close her eyes and not be touched for around a minute and a half. She’d lie on the beam until the kids got sick of circling and pushed her into the grass, ending the game. To call this set of actions a game was incorrect, there was no winner and no firm rules; that didn’t stop them from playing. Whatever it was, this nongame, was a continuation of the ritual created and sustained by the presence of the fake steel beam. The kids stopped circling like a mob before the final violence. Micah pushed at her shoulder and Billy pushed at her ankles and Tara allowed herself to be thud-flipped onto the ground. She let her face settle into the earth, flattening the wet grass. Jules was doing the same, face down twenty feet away in the yard, though no one had noticed. Tara had spent two weeks sizing up home childcare in the near suburbs. Looked at the websites, cruised by the low houses in a borrowed car, parked at the storefronts, read endless on- line reviews. She’d looked at the women—it was all women, their bland and direct operations—and known she could do better. Or, more importantly, was positive she could do at least as well in a new and more interesting way that would not resemble the efforts of others.
Tara and Ben had been living in an Uptown studio apartment then. They were planning a move to somewhere they could afford to make a down payment on a house. It was hard for them to define what the word afford meant. Both wanted a house, kids or not. Houses in the city were cost prohibitive. Owning anything anywhere in the city where they were in- terested in living was cost prohibitive. They did not have the wherewithal or ingenuity or basic skills for a home that needed any serious fixing up, which was the only option they could manage in neighborhoods they wanted to live in; this was a be- lief and not the truth. They’d been renting south of the Wilson Red Line stop. This was the apartment where Tara lived with her pregnancy and her miscarriage, alone. Alone with Ben. Only her mother knew: a piece of information she seemed to take in like a repeatedly canceled lunch date.
In this Uptown stretch before, during, and after the pregnancy, they had no car, no dog, did not eat out. Did not eat out as much as they’d like: Sun Wah at Broadway and Argyle. Moody’s for hamburgers and draft specials. Cut-rate byob sushi by the Sheridan stop. Gyros at Windy City off Irving Park.
Tara had been nannying for twins of married lawyers in Roscoe Village then. Two large-headed boys. Looked like fraternity brothers already. The boys had loved Tara. The lawyers had not known what to make of Tara, beyond the husband be- ing fixated on the fact that she’d gone to art school. This was a detail that had been included on her resume, but never spoken by Tara. She claimed a degree on the resume but in reality had dropped out. The husband had asked for her thoughts on Frankenthaler, Hartigan, Carrington. He had asked after her current studio space. She’d said she had one she didn’t use. A lie. She didn’t know if she wanted to paint anymore and didn’t know what that meant for her making future. Tara had recommended Neo Rauch. Heillichtung (2014) or Kühlraum (2002). And Robyn O’Neil. The Mercy Quartet (2016). But mostly she’d evaded the husband conversationally by providing minutiae about the children. Speculative and often baseless minutiae. “They respond differently to me when I wear green. Have you noticed that? And yellow? They seem happier.” There was a framed Gale Sayers uniform hanging in the husband’s home office, and so Tara would return to yellow and green as capable of boosting the boys’ morale as often as she remembered to. She was sure he wanted to bed her. Nothing happened.
Even after the miscarriage, she was decided on day care. Her own, once they had the space. Tara’s private understanding was that the baby had given her this new vocation, and for that she was thankful.
They chose Harks Grove, near the Metra, far enough out that they could afford a small home. Three bedroom, one-and- a-half bath. Dated, worn, but their own.
A home daycare was ideal because Tara wanted control of her work, control of her days, and no boss. She didn’t want anyone to know the particulars of what the work meant for her. When researching home daycares on a Canadian mom-blog, Tara encountered the idea that kids’ menus were inherently condescending. That limiting a child’s food options to chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and the like was not based in rational thinking. Equating a kids’ menu to a children’s book was lunacy, stated the Canadian. Language proficiency and eating proficiency, unrelated. Tara was not a true believer in the Canadian, did not share in her hatred for bland American staples, but the woman’s idea gave her something. The idea had opened up all her thinking at the time, though it felt distant and problematic in memory. She had started the daycare with a focus first on the meals that would be provided. The meals would stem from a light curriculum she would devise that centered on various foreign countries. She would quietly play the country’s music throughout the day, cook the country’s food. And sometimes she’d play the music loud, and the children and Tara would run around in the living room. Sometimes not. She was concerned not with authenticity, but with honest effort. She’d attempt to match one region’s music with that region’s food. Illuminate how complicated each and every country is; dignify these places in their particularity. Show the country’s cartoons, which were now so easy to watch online. But homey too. The curriculum would not be taught in a clinical, academic way. It would not be taught at all. It would be shared. And if a child in- stead wanted to kick a ball, scream until the cords in her neck appeared, sing the same song forever, so be it.
And what Tara had imagined was more or less what she was able to make real. What she was able to form was a less wholesome, less consistent, less striving version of what she’d initially conceived. Tara never watched more than three kids at one time, though she did have a short waiting list, friends of past and current customers, and could easily have expanded her business. She kept a handwritten notebook for each child in her care, and at the end of their time together, she would give each notebook to the parents or parent. The painting had stopped and the note-taking had begun. She’d cared for seven different children, total, over the last three years. The idea behind the notebooks was to mark down a couple happenings from each child in her care, each day. Sometimes the entries were a line long, sometimes pages. Tara had half a dresser drawerful of in-progress and still-empty notebooks, empty on the left, in-progress on the right.
- Micah believes that bats thrive in countries other than the United States because it is less distracting to sleep upside down if you can’t understand what everyone is saying. I told her bats don’t speak English, or any human language.
- Jules took off her glasses today when we were outside and held them at her side. She put her head back and watched the clouds. I told her she looked very beautiful and she pretended not to hear me so I told her again and she turned saying, “I appreciate you saying it twice.”
- Billy asked me if it was ok for him to sit in the bathtub today when we heard thunder. When I went in to check on him he was sitting naked in the tub. Once he was dressed and the rain had stopped I took him outside to watch a tree service, one man in green and goggles, section the seventy-year-old white oak that had fallen. The man in goggles was deftly using the end of his chainsaw to make the cuts. Part of the tree was in the street, and occasional traffic would creep around the shrouded man with the chainsaw. I know the tree was seventy years old because that’s what the man in goggles told Billy when he asked.
The journals had begun as an earnest vocational practice but became increasingly difficult for Tara to keep up. So she didn’t. She began to invent, instead. The wholesale creation of imaginary events, imaginary conversations with the kids, wasn’t at all difficult for her. Easy as breathing. The lying did not come from feeling the need to catch up in her notes; the lying came from Tara having trouble parsing her days with the kids for their contents. Even inside the days while living them, she was hitting checkpoints. Breakfast, outside, books. Music, snack, outside, books, cartoons. Sometimes, field trip. Lunch. Outside. Quiet time. Nap. Playtime. Pickup. Repeat. There were moments, hours, where she was alive to what was happening, reading or singing or playing dead or cooking with the kids, but still, this was her job. Work. She felt protective of her time with the kids—wanted it to be a practice, practice! Jesus, wanted it to be time she was awake for more completely, which it never would be. But she did love those stupid kids; at least Billy. She did love Billy. He seemed to need it most. She felt guilty about missing so much, her inattention, and the more guilt she felt, the more she wanted to do better, the more possessive she became. But there was nothing to possess. What she owned wholly, what she could possess, was what she put down in the notebooks. That which she could create and so control.
She was a caretaker, not a parent. She did not confuse the two despite any feelings. Tara felt ready to shift. She also knew she might be needing less of a change than she imagined; maybe she needed less, period. Less work, less to maintain. Different work, maybe. She didn’t know what was possible, how much she could reasonably shed and still be herself. Or, unbeknownst to her, how much she had already shed. She was thinking of the kids, of Ben.
No amount of shuffling or change would leave her less busy. That was not an American option. Not one afforded to her. This understanding was another she’d invented, though she did not know it. She lived it. Everyone she knew did.
