Beginning of a new essay

Your father doesn’t do anything halfway. That includes getting a Radio Flyer for your son. He comes up with the idea while visiting during a September weekend. Baz has just turned four. His hair extends down beyond his shoulders. You have yet to learn he may be autistic. You have so much to learn.

 

“He needs a wagon,” your dad says. By now he’s almost entirely bald. He looks nothing like the man who raised you. He looks – if you are to be honest – like a latter-day Chevy Chase: round of cheek, gray of face. And Chevy Chase was always known to be a son of a bitch.

 

“He doesn’t need anything other than what he has,” your husband says. You stuff another pickle in your mouth because you’re at Saul’s and they’re free and it keeps you from freaking out over the fact that they always, always fight. Saul’s is what Moses would look like if he lived in Berkeley for a while: Judaism, hippified. They do a hell of a Reuben, though.

 

“Let me amend that,” your father says, leaving out the operative word: asshole. “I’m going to buy him a wagon. And I’m going to pull him around in it until I drop dead of a heart attack.”

 

The framed photos quiver on the wall. An earthquake, hyper-localized.

 

Your father and husband can barely stand each other. Never much could. Being around them is like being in a gas chamber filled with fruit flies. Not only do you die a horrible death, but you do it with them. Your husband tries to tell him something in his halting way and your father barely restrains his impatience. Your father talks about his points and miles and your husband only partly bites back his laughter. Derision, frustration; this lends to the type of environment that has you eating extra pickles because otherwise you’d have to address it. None of you really wants that.