The Little House We Dance In

David G. Pace

Cheryl’s daughter slips me a personal check for a thousand dollars. This before she leaves for home without her son, our grandson, per usual. I toss it on the bureau in one of the two small bedrooms on the main floor and eventually go to bed in the little house we dance in.

In the morning, I get ready for work, thirteen-year-old Derek—for that is what I will call him here—gets ready for school, and Cheryl moves into the small kitchen to make breakfast. That’s where the dance begins. The kitchen is about ten-by-eight feet, if you don’t count the counter space, and she makes herself coffee at the sink which is angled into the corner. Soon Derek is standing in the middle, cold feet the size of boats on the tile, his Simpsons cotton pajama bottoms getting too short. His voice is lower than it should be, hoarse this early in the day. 

Cheryl turns from the sink, takes her mug to the opposite side of the kitchen, to the microwave above the stove. Derek steps back, yawning, hair a mess. There is the whir of the microwave, then she’s back to the sink as if she’s made a giant oval pass in a single move. There is his voice again, saying something at an improbable pitch for a boy his age. And then I step onto the floor.

This house seemed large when we first bought it four years ago. But then everything seemed large after our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Now it has settled in to be the cottage that the real estate agency called it—nine hundred square feet on the main floor, nine hundred in the nearly finished basement. We didn’t have enough furniture to fill it and went shopping for extra beds, a sofa for the TV room downstairs, chairs and lamps to fill spaces that looked blankly at us for weeks. Now we all live in the kitchen, it seems. Like the designated emergency gathering spot for airline crews outside a hotel, it is the space we migrate to when we aren’t sure where else we should be.

I was furloughed from the airline two years ago, and while looking for full-time work, I’ve been an adjunct at two local colleges. Cheryl is making lunches for me and Derek and is to the immediate left of the sink at the bread board above the utensil drawer, which is where I’m trying to get for a spoon. She’s halfway through cutting a tomato, and she swings the lower half of her body for me to the left. Derek moves back by the far wall next to the door that leads to the basement. He has an itch on his back, and both arms are wrapped around him, trying to get at it through one of my T-shirts that, because of his lank, has shoulder seams dropped halfway down his arms. I merge the spoon into my shredded wheat and move to the opposite side of the kitchen—to the door leading to the dining room—but I stand there to eat.

We all stare at each other for a moment, and then the dance starts up again.

I considered it a small victory when I began to think it was no longer an imposition to have Derek in our home full time, that I was getting something from the experience completely unexpected and filled with a kind of haphazard grace. But the conversations in my head with his mother, my daughter—really my step-daughter—continue anyway: furious, sarcastic, mean. Always I return, a bit sheepish, to the only fact I need to hang onto, a fact I share with those who ask. Derek’s mother is unavailable to him. That is all. Unavailable. And now I have this check of hers.

So, Derek lives with us in this cottage in a Salt Lake City neighborhood far away from the life we had in New York, and as he grows the house continues to shrink. As he moves through its tiny rooms built in 1950 in what was originally a Dutch enclave of the city, it trembles under his weight but somehow holds as he jumps the last four stairs to the basement with a mighty thud that rattles the new windows we finally had cut into the foundation—for more light in this little house with gray wood shingles for siding. And even downstairs where it is carpeted and slightly more spacious and where we congregate in front of the television for yet another viewing of Derek’s favorites (Die Hard and Ocean’s Eleven), we navigate around each other in a series of complicated steps. Step back, twist to the right, step up, fold to the left. We move around great-great grandfather Daley’s leather-strapped trunk serving as a coffee table for Cheryl who is sashaying through with a basket of laundry. We perform a two-step on the way to the corner office around a pile of videos being organized in the middle of the floor by Derek. “Bow to your partner, one, two, three . . ..”

And then there are the cats. How soon we have filled this little house that once seemed so spacious compared to the jigsaw puzzle of a New York apartment with boxes of Christmas wrap carefully stored with Cheryl’s picture-framing equipment under the bed. The owner of this little house before us, a young man, actually had a punching bag hanging from the door jamb leading into the office downstairs. Room to throw a punch, for God’s sake. Now, Cheryl and I share the office and Derek occupies the bedroom with Jimmi Hendrix in skintight pants posted on the door. The cats are like a credit card ad—“everywhere you want to be.”

Not unlike my daughter, I suppose, whose absence is what’s everywhere. In fact, from time to time she still makes a phone call or sends an email to inform us of something all people should know about pre-teens, a summer program that would be good for Derek (and that we will have to pay for), how important it is that a child understand the “natural consequences of his behavior,” a new book out on attention deficit disorder. Through the receiver I can hear the television in the background, the raucous laughter of her boyfriend; the categorically fecund breath of the university where she is a hot shot undergraduate “single mother” at 34. She graduates soon.

This is what she can do as a mother. Make a phone call.

There is a conversational arc I travel in my head with my daughter. It is the same every time, and it comes across as sanctimonious and angry, a litany of her crimes and of my woes. It ends with “tough love” demands that start with, “And you will . . ..” I am the good father even though I’m hard and pressing, which is my job, damn it, to make sure my love for her is earned, not granted as with her mother’s. After all, the world works that way. You have to earn the love of the world.

This is how the conversation actually goes this time between us. We are in the park the previous summer which is between our cottage and the house that Derek does not want to live at. We are at a picnic table. I have asked for the meeting. She is smoking a cigarette.

“I know you think all of this is okay with me,” she says. “That I don’t care.”

“I’m not thinking anymore,” I say. “I’m looking for you to actually act. Not just talk about what you’re going to do as if just talking about it lets you off the hook.” She pulls out a piece of paper with a list.

“I’ve brought notes.”

“What are you going to do?” I say, jabbing at the paper. “Itemize our crimes?”

“I never asked you to take Derek in.”

“I’m not talking about me and your mother. I’m asking you to be a mother to your son.

“You step in without my asking and then expect my gratitude . . .

“Gratitude?”

“ . . . when you’re really just making me look bad.

“To whom? Who is it this week?” She searches over her notes, as if for the answer. Turns her head to take a drag. Blows. “Robert? Is that his name?”

“I didn’t ask you to take Derek in!”

“That’s right. Derek moved himself in. Took him a year. But he’s not a dumb kid.”

“He wouldn’t do anything I needed him to do. He’s . . . incorrigible.”

“What story do you need us to tell Robert when he asks about your son? That he’s ‘incorrigible’. . .

“I’m not dating “Robert”!

“ . . . when he finds someone he doesn’t know passed out in bed below his bunk? You can’t even pick him up on time at school.”

“I’m a single mother!”

“You were ninety minutes late. He was alone. And it wasn’t the first time. You showed up with a guy he doesn’t even know and then argued with your son that McDonald’s for dinner wasn’t what someone named ‘Mike’ wanted. Do you know that at night before bed your mother has to walk your son through the house checking the locks? He sleeps with a baseball bat.”

She stands up. “I didn’t ask you to take Derek!”

Maybe it doesn’t really matter how the conversation goes. Only how it ends. My pounding the table and raising my voice so that someone walking by looks at us. Something about “single mother, my ass. Try ‘no mother’.” Her saying something that sounds as if she pulled it off of Dr. Phil like, “This relationship costs me too much” as she tries to juggle her bike, her cigarette, and the two pages of now crumpled notes. And she is leaving. If there were a door, and she had an extra hand, she would be slamming it in my face. But it is I who wants revenge even though it is disguised as foresight. “You need to take care of your son for yourself,” I announce to her back. “You need to be his mother for your own sake as much as his!”

But she is gone. I will apologize two days later, but the damage will have been done. My gunning for revenge has only triggered her spite. Turns out that saying what I’ve been thinking for a long time isn’t the right thing to do. Clearly, I’m not good at this.

That was last year, in the spring, when dinner could be taken on the back deck. Now we are back inside, in the eight-by-twelve dining room off the kitchen. There is a seam between the dining room and the living room where, incomprehensibly, there appears to have once been a wall. Impossible to imagine one more wall sectioning off another part of the house that is already . . . so . . . small. We sit at this table for everything right now—dinner, breakfast, homework, model car making. My laptop sits here after two of the four shelves collapsed under the weight of books in the office Cheryl and I now share since moving Derek into my original office downstairs. This is my daughter’s fault as well, somehow. The collapsed book shelves with everything now on the floor. When my books are on the floor, I can’t seem to get anything done. Another convenient excuse—along with the TV just outside the door next to Derek’s GameCube with spidery cords spread eagle—not to get my prep time in, or not to work on my novel before I go to class.

I consider not cashing my daughter’s check. If I do cash it, don’t I legally accept the terms of the transaction, and in turn, the arrangement? But we need the money. Derek is expensive. We’ve seen an attorney, but her advice is not to anger either of Derek’s parents (whoops). To let sleeping adult children, well, lie, no pun intended. So not only is there no child support, but we don’t qualify for state assistance either.

Whenever I attempt to tell the story of how we moved back here to be closer to our grandson after his parents’ divorce and how we are now raising him, none of it sounds convincing, especially to myself. Somehow my brilliant but conversationally elusive daughter has perfected the narrative that makes us look as if we are just mid-life co-dependents. Why aren’t we putting our foot down? people ask. Why aren’t we claiming our grandparent lives? Why don’t we go to court?

Why is our house suddenly so small? Why do we put up with it?

It was eighteen months into my furlough, the summer after my conversation in the park with Derek’s mother, and our little family of three manages to go on vacation, my first in over two years. We drive across the high desert, down through the appropriately named and plunging Virgin River Canyon to Las Vegas and into the San Bernardino Mountains and then to LA where we land on Hollywood Boulevard. Universal Studios theme park will claim our lives for the next two days. We are out of the house but into a single motel room in Little Thailand. One bathroom, one television, one short fuse. Derek has the impossible task of exulting in movie-land while still maintaining “cool.” It’s not unlike my dilemma. How do I love this boy but not feel taken advantage of? To love him, to care for him—doesn’t that mean I’m absolving my daughter of any responsibility? Am I not telling her by my actions, by being here with her son while she’s out gallivanting, that it’s okay what she’s doing?

We’ve been on the Jurassic Park ride. We’ve visited the Backdraft exhibit . . . thrilled at the spills at Waterworld, eaten ribs the size of mine at a Flintstones’ eatery. And I hate this place. It represents everything that is wrong with America. Gluttony, living vicariously through movies, the materialism approaching hedonism of a culture that must, I’m convinced, fire the imaginations of an Islamist suicide bomber flying into the World Trade Towers across the river from our Brooklyn neighborhood and sending the airline industry into a nose dive. Derek, on the other hand, is ecstatic. High on sugar, going ballistic over the Back to the Future ride—twice. He’s pushing and pulling me. Demanding this and that. In a frenzy that he’ll miss something. In short, he is a twelve-year old en extremis, every angle of his body jutting out above over-sized feet. He’s entered that place where he likes to slug me in the arm as if determined to figure out where he bodily ends, and I begin.

And then the Blues Brothers are in front of us. A half hour review of their songs built around the bare bone’s references to a long-lost narrative from the 70s. It’s live, and, finally, there’s something for me to enjoy, the music, the singing. And I can tell Derek is jumping out of his skin, craning to go over here, busy himself with something over there, head out for the Terminator 2 Pavilion to don 3-D glasses to see the Governor of California in leather. The Blues Brothers show appears to be winding down. It’s hot—LA is insufferably hot in July. And Derek starts pulling on me. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Now he’s pushing me, this kid almost my height with elbows the hardness of squash rackets.

It goes badly from here. I grip him by the back of the neck with one hand and take his upper arm with the other. I start walking him somewhere, away from where he was pulling me. I get my mouth very close to his ear, behind him. He can’t see me; he can only hear and feel me. He attempts to wriggle free, but I have eighty pounds on him. He attempts to say something back, but my grip gets tighter to shut him down.

When he’s completely overpowered, I can actually let go and he does exactly what I say because he can’t control his shaking. Cheryl has moved away, furious with me. Only temporarily resigned to the situation, she knows that Derek is spent, but more critically, so am I. She knows, at any rate, that I will only try to defend myself to her and will be angry with her for taking Derek’s side. As if there’s a war going on between me and a twelve-year-old. Or something like that.

Now that I have made Derek cry, and Cheryl has walked away, helpless, I become the soft-spoken psychologist that I have learned to hate. And like the soft-spoken psychologist the conversation is designed to make sure that the patient (Derek) knows that my intentions are good, but that he’s just pushed me (the lay shrink) too far. That my bad behavior is not my fault, but his. The optics are: Look good (the parent at Universal Studios quietly decompressing with a visibly distraught pre-teen), get what you want (revenge for having descended as a former flight attendant from five miles high to this parental road where I am both the asphalt and the rubber), and finally, don’t be at fault (he made me do it). None of this is my fault for one very important reason, I think, but it is my trump card: Derek’s mother is not my daughter. She’s Cheryl’s. Derek is not my blood grandson. I am not really a part of any of this. That it is I who can’t stop myself from seeing red, and then acting on it, escapes me in the moment.

It will take a long time before Derek starts to trust me again, if he ever does, completely. His “Poppa” is explosive, like the man who fathered him before exiting his life. What’s more, his Poppa does denial like his mother, but his Poppa has less of an excuse than either of his birth parents: I have a young person in my charge, supposedly under my protection. They do not. At least not any longer. At least not for now.

During the trip home I mentally disappear into the Mojave Desert. For Derek, he ventures further into Hollywood on the portable DVD player he has in the back seat that Cheryl scrimped together for weeks to buy him just for this trip. He has some good moments after my blow-up in front of the Blues Brothers pavilion. A competition between us of swimming underwater in the hotel pool. A calming moment at an aromatherapy salon, the two of us plugged into the bubbling, bright liquids of jasmine, lavender and citrus. A retro lunch at Hard Rock Café where Cheryl makes us apologize to each other for “the incident” while she is shooting me her mother bear look. She’s right. I have failed the boy, and it makes me want to run away from him, just as others in his life have done. To run back to the choices I thought I was making even after I got laid off from the airline. To be childless. To somehow be a writer. To not ever have to visit Universal Studios.

Back in the little house we dance in, we have been gearing up for another school year. There are school fees, clothes and shoes to buy. We need a new bed for Derek. He’s outgrown the daybed we folded out for him before he migrated over full-time. We are getting ready to take a mortgage out on the house we bought for cash with the money we got from selling our co-op in New York. And there is the second appointment coming up with the orthodontist who will require another two thousand dollars up front, out-of-pocket, none of which either of his parents has offered. Until now.

My daughter’s check is here, waiting to be acknowledged, redeemed, and it’s the very embodiment of her myriad avoidances, the latest of which has turned me into an abuser of my grandson. Derek trusts me less, of course, digs his heels in more when I do anything other than agree with him or let him have his spurious, now nearly-thirteen-year-old way. I am one who overpowers and shames, one who digs in his heels as well. Someone who wants to win, and who propels every conversation, every interaction into a competition of sorts. A sick contest between an adult and a child.

But my daughter is right. I didn’t have to take on Derek. And now that I have, badly, I have become the very thing I’ve come to despise in her.

Today, it’s the first day of school and we are dancing again. Derek is eating eggs, bacon, and toast that I’ve made for all of us before the start of a new year, to get us all off on a good foot. I am standing at the stove, the frying pan hissing and spitting, and Cheryl comes up behind me with her coffee. I shift to the right even before her hand rests gently on my back to signal her arrival. She opens the microwave to warm her mug and pats me twice so that I know she’s retreating backwards in a tango step to our internal rhythm. I move back into my space for two beats. Then Derek arrives to get juice out of the fridge, the door of which opens into my hip which I bump back just enough to send it closed as he turns to the counter with the jug, looking for a glass, which Cheryl gets for him since she’s now standing at the counter wiping up crumbs. From cruising altitude, it must look like a hive—bees frantically filling in cells, intimate, humid. Or it looks like the choreographed chaos of a street scene in a musical. These are steps comforting but terrifying as well. This is the little house we dance in and will dance in forever it seems. Constrained, constricted as we are but at times calmed by kinetic familiarity.

“We need a bigger house,” I say to no one in particular and flip an egg. “I think we should look for something with a bigger kitchen at least. Maybe something on the other side of Liberty Park.” Derek stops short, a half-filled glass of juice in his hand. He is a different boy than he was this past summer at Universal Studios when he followed the patron saints of the American dysfunctional family, The Simpsons, as they waddled away from signing autographs with their four-fingered yellow hands. He had padded after them like a puppy as they disappeared following the photo op behind a fence, and he stood, as if in jail, hands on the vertical bars, his pale forehead pressed into the cool steel, his cheeks still stained with dried tears from our ugly encounter. Now, standing with his juice held half aloft, he is something of a cross between The Beaver (a TV boy sanitized from irony) and a mountain-bred surfer dude (coolness bordering on nihilism).

“No way!” he growls as only a man-boy can growl. “We are not moving from this house. I love this house. This is our house. You’re going to give it to me when you die.” And then he grins. And those four-thousand-dollar braces go a-glint in the kitchen light, and I have a stab of gratitude for the slip of paper signed by my daughter and sitting on my bureau less than a simple, modified foxtrot away.

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This nonfiction piece is an unpublished excerpt from my book-length narrative nonfiction Cold Desert: An Interstate 80 Picaresque, which placed second in the Utah Original Writing Competition.  It tracks a breakthrough between me and the step-grandson my wife and I raised as our son in the early aughts. How does a non-blood grandfather acting as a father care for a boy when he doesn't feel like he (the author) had a choice to do so? That "Derek" demonstrated to me that "the little house" the three of us danced in was now HIS house, was the dam that broke into a wash of tender paternal feeling and bonding.