"We aren't fighting," my wife responds automatically.
"I know," scoffs my daughter. "You were discussing."
"With emphasis," adds my son in friendly mockery.
All of us smile but my wife, who nibbles on her lip in distracted gloom. She is extremely uneasy.
"What's wrong?" I inquire softly.
She is silent a moment, seems burdened with a knowledge almost too enormous to express. "He's coming to the house," she blurts out sheepishly.
"Who?"
"Him."
"When?"
On the part of the rest of us, there is massive shock.
"Today."
"Today?"
"I invited him for lunch."
"You're crazy!"
"I'm getting out!"
"I don't want him."
"And I," announces my wife in an expansive bellow of glowing self-congratulation, turning pointedly to gloat at each of us, "was making that up! Do you think," she continues in her rare flight of exultation, "I would expose a respectable man of the cloth to a gang of idiots like you?"
"Oh, Mom!" My daughter flings her arm around my wife's neck and hugs her from behind. "Mom, Mom, Mom. I just love her when she kids hike that. Don't you?"
"And so do I."
But it doesn't last, not on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday, unless all of us have already made plans, for Derek is waiting at home.
He is still there. He grows older every day.
"Can't she take him out some place?" my daughter objects. "He's always home."
And so is his quacking, ill-visaged, overweight nurse with her rinsed white hair and offensive scent of bath powder, whom I've ordered my wife to get rid of once and for all, even if we have to take care of him ourselves for a little while. (It might do us some good.) And the maid can go too, for all I care. (I can't feel at home when she's tiptoeing around.)
"Get a German, for Christ sakes," I barked at my wife. "Import a Dane."
"Where will I get them?"
"How the hell should I know? Other people do."
"I get embarrassed when my friends come over."
(So do we.)
"There's no need to," I tell my daughter gently.
"I knew you'd say that," she sulks in disapproval. "I knew you wouldn't understand."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying anything like that," my wife says to her in reproof.
"Leave her alone."
"She ought to be glad she's not that way."
"She is."
"You always take her part," my wife accuses. "The doctors said you shouldn't do that."
"She thinks I take yours."
"Why does she always have to bring him in?" my daughter protests. "Can't she keep him in his own room when my friends are here?"
(We wish she would keep him out of sight also when our friends are here and have told her so. She parades him through anyway, gabbling loudly at him and pointing to our guests to show him off, or to inflict a penance on us.)
"You shouldn't mind it that much," I counsel.
"You do too."
"He isn't that bad."
"He makes us uncomfortable."
(He makes me uncomfortable too.)
"You shouldn't be," I tell her. "It wasn't the fault of any of us. It could have happened in any family."
But it happened in mine.
"We have another child also," I have been forced to reveal time and time again in ordinary social conversation to people I barely knew, "who's somewhat brain damaged. It was congenital," I add. "He's retarded."
"We also have a child who's retarded or very seriously emotionally disturbed," couples who knew about us have sought me out to reveal (as though we had something I wanted to share).
It's a club I don't want to join, and I find those clannish parents repellent. (Their suggestive intimacy makes my flesh creep and I want to shake them away from me as I would flies. I detest clannishness of every kind. It boxes me in claustrophobically. Or shuts me out. I don't like to feel boxed in.)
I saw it happening to Derek long before anyone else did (boxing me in) and said nothing about it to anyone. (Later, when others began to notice things and make hesitant, fearful observations, I denied them with emphasis. I didn't want it to be true. I had nightmarish warnings. I saw the realities assembling themselves ahead of me in mapped-out phases. I still do. I felt if no one talked about it, it would not be true. I was wrong.) He sat late, stood late, walked late, ran late. Even to a father's doting eye, his coordination was poor. We thought him clumsy and cute as a newborn puppy or foal as he staggered, stumbled, and fell. There is not harmony in his movements now. He makes no effort to open his jaws wide when he tries to speak — he does not seem to associate mouth with speech. He looks like lockjaw when he tries to talk. (Tendons stretch and bulge and I wish he'd stop.) He can open his mouth wide enough, though, when he eats or laughs or just wants to make noise. Though what he's got to laugh about I don't know, except when I offer him things in play and snatch them back, and then he's just as apt to cry.
(You can't even play normal infant's games with him anymore. I feel worthless when I try to play with him and he cries. I slink away in rejection. I am furious with myself and with him. The least he can do, it seems to me, is be decent enough to laugh when I try to play with him.)
"Is having Derek for a brother," my daughter wants to know, in a manner that is somewhat demanding and somewhat abject, "going to make it harder for me to find a husband?"
"No, of course not," we lie.
"Why should it?" my wife flashes at her belligerently. She is shocked and outraged by the directness of the question. (And now it is I who must shield my little girl against her.)
"Leave her alone," I request softly.
My daughter turns to me for the truth. "Is it?"
"Are you thinking of getting married?" I gamble in a pleasant rejoinder.
"See how he tries not to answer me?"
"You should be ashamed of yourself," my wife says to her, "for even thinking like that."
"Leave her alone," I repeat.
"Will people think my own children will turn out the same way?" my daughter persists.
My wife gasps. "That's a terrible thing to say!" she rebukes her with emotion. "He's your own brother."
"That's why I worry about it. Can't I ask?"
"Leave her alone, for Christ sakes," I shout, and whirl upon my wife to glare at her. "I worry about the same thing."
"She's the one who should be ashamed."
"And you worry about it too. For Christ sakes, stop blaming her for him."
"Stop blaming me. You're always taking her part. The doctors said you shouldn't do that."
"I'm not."
"He's nothing to be ashamed of."
"If he's nothing to be ashamed of, why the hell are we always ashamed of him?"
"We're not."
"We are."
"You're always blaming me for him."
"I'm not. Like hell I am."
"Don't yell at me," my wife says unexpectedly, with an air of indignant calm and refinement that is utterly astounding.
I turn away from her in disgust. "Oh, Christ," I mutter. "You make me laugh."
"And don't swear at me, either," she reacts mechanically. "I've told you that before. Especially in front of the children. I think you must enjoy humiliating me. I really think you do."
I am incredulous. And I find myself wondering again just what in hell I am doing married to a woman like this. Even if I had no other reason for wanting a divorce, this idiot child she gave me would be enough.
I want a divorce.
I need a divorce. I long for it. I crave a divorce. I pray for divorce.
Divorces seem impossible. They're so much work. It's hard to believe so many really take place. It's enough to stab the heart with envy, turn eyes dewy with pining and sentiment. People less proficient than I am manage to breeze right through their divorces without breaking stride, while I can't even get a foot out the door.
I want one too.
I have always wanted one. I dream of divorce. All my life I've wanted a divorce. Even before I was married I wanted a divorce. I don't think there has been a six-month period in all the years of my marriage — a six-week period — when I have not wanted to end it by divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.