Heather and Jacob

I asked my friend, do you think if you named a child Smothered Sexual Ambition, it would grow up to be a very repressed person? There was only one way to find out, so we made a baby and decided to name it Smothered Sexual Ambition. It was a girl, though, and we decided the experiment wasn’t as interesting with a girl, so we named her Heather and right away set to work trying again, and had a boy this time. But by then we thought the whole idea was pretty stupid, now that we’d had approximately 18 and two half months to think about it, so we named him Jacob.

“Would you like to marry me?”

“No, I would not like to marry you. I’m sorry, was that a serious question?”

Heather and Jacob were a handful, there’s no doubt about that. One might argue that we weren’t really prepared to be raising two children, especially two children who had only been conceived as part of a thought experiment we didn’t even have the resolve to follow through on. In the interest of making everything as easy as possible on the two of us, we cut back on some things: we celebrated no birthdays; we brought them no friends; the two of us did not take any jobs. In this way, Heather and Jacob learned to enjoy each other’s company, and to depend on each other, and they learned to obey their parents no matter what, because they did not suspect there was anything else, I think.

“Would you like to go somewhere?”

“Where? And do what? With whom?”

(hangs up the phone)

We decided home-schooling the kids would be easier, so we wouldn’t have to be constantly dropping them off places—at the bus stop, at soccer practices, at birthday parties, etc. Of course we could not teach them, so we hired a teacher away from the local school. Economically, she had to do it—we were offering her double her salary to teach less than one tenth the number of children she would have been charged with had she stayed with the class. Even so, she felt our situation was a bit strange—and she told us this many times, she said, you should let the kids have friends, go out into the world, this borders on abuse, etc., but she kept coming back. I told her that the kids had seen enough of the world on TV and weren’t that interested in it—seemed afraid of it even. That’s because you never let them see it for themselves, she said, with a superior tone that suggested she thought she had won the argument with this point. But she was wrong—some people are just afraid and that’s that—it’s in their character. I, for example, have been all over the world, and I am still as terrified of it as the day I was ripped from the womb.

“Let’s rob a bank. We’ll rob a bank. We’ll get a car and some guns and go across the country robbing banks. We’ll be like Bonnie and Clyde, only just friends who don’t sleep with each other. Please come rob a bank with me. Pleeeeeease rob a bank with me.”

“I think I’m going to put on a sweater.”

At ages fourteen and fifteen, the children started to develop a rebellious streak. They didn’t quite know how to do it right, having been sheltered, but they were doing their best. Started wearing their clothes backwards, defecating in inappropriate places—things in that vein. We had been telling them, the day you turn eighteen, you’re out of the house (we started telling them this pretty much as soon as they popped out, just so there would be no confusion), but they wanted their independence now. You never let us do anything, they said. Which was preposterous. It’s not as if we locked them in. We would have allowed them to leave whenever they wanted—encouraged it even. Walk downtown, catch a bus, here’s the car keys (gas is on the right brake is on the left)—but they stayed of their own accord. That’s not what we mean, they said, you are repressing us, on an existential level, on the level of the soul or the individual spirit or somesuch. You did this to us from the very start, they said, and the damage you did to us runs so deep there is no way it can be reversed. Well neither of us bought that, and besides, we said, if there’s nothing to be done about it, there’s no use getting angry about it either, if it’s just one of those things like the tides and whatnot then it would be pretty silly getting all bent out of shape about it. I had been an obedient child too, I said, and I had turned out OK, with a friend and two children.

“Are you drunk?”

“Yes.”

“How drunk are you?”

“Don’t.”

Then they turned eighteen and we told the two of them they had to go out and find spouses and get jobs and go live somewhere else, because the two of us wanted to get on with our lives (eighteen years is a long time). Jacob asked if why didn’t the two of them (he and his sister, he meant) just marry each other. He wanted us to take it as a joke, but his sarcasm was poorly deployed—there was obviously some real feeling behind the suggestion, which is understandable, maybe, on some level, since Heather is the only human female he had really ever known, besides his mother (and I had, from an early age, trying to be a good father, steered him away from these Oedipal-type thoughts by standing over his crib stroking a knife and waking him up in the middle of the night—it was only a butter knife, but he was too young to know any better—and whisper-shouting she is NOT YOURS!, and even at a young age I could tell he got the message by the way his eyes got wide and he pulled the covers all the way up to his nose). Heather’s response to this “sarcastic” “proposal” was she said well maybe I don’t want to marry you, did you ever think of that, did you or any of you ever once consider what I might want? Jacob muttered that he had only been joking—he looked like he just about wanted to die. At just that moment, the fireworks on the front lawn went off. You see, when the children were born, I bought a bunch of fireworks and a very long fuse—18 years worth of fuse, I estimated at the time—and piled the fireworks up in the front yard and stretched the fuse over hills and around towns and through woods and whatnot and lit it, hoping for exactly this moment, when Heather and Jacob would leave the house and the fireworks would send them off. I had forgotten all about them, all these years later, but sure enough, they went off right on schedule. Well Heather and Jacob had never seen or heard fireworks firsthand before—on TV, sure, but always with the sound down low—and the sudden booming and the violent colors frightened them. They tore down the hallway into their room—crashing into walls, knocking over furniture—until they finally scampered under their bed and hid there (because they shared the same bed—we felt it would be easier this way, with only one bed to make up every morning). They thought they were hidden, but we could see the bottoms of their feet sticking out a few inches. We went around to the other end of the bed and lifted up the bed skirt and could see their big flat eyes, pupils pulled all the way to the white, as they shook there and tried not to breathe with the fireworks going off in the front yard. We tried to coax them out with one of their toys—a little fuzzy ball with a bell inside that they would delight in chasing down the hallway—but they wouldn’t budge. If they had come out, we could have carried them over to the couch and stroked their heads and scratched behind their ears and whispered that it would be OK that everything would be OK until they fell asleep purring in our laps, but they wouldn’t come out, even when the fireworks stopped, and even when we left the bedroom and shut the door and got in our two separate cars and drove off and left them there.