“What if they want to interview someone who’s not available?” one of them asked, referring to members of the press who covered the conference. “What if they don't come to the press conferences we’ve scheduled?” asked another. “What if we need to reach you?”
I did the best I could to reassure them, acknowledging that the situation was less than ideal. I told them they would know what to do, that two of them had been to the conference before and would be able to help the others. I said I had confidence in their abilities. I would check in on them as frequently as I could, and I would always be just a phone call away. All platitudes, but I said them as sincerely as I could, looking into their innocent eyes and trying to determine which ones would make it and which ones would crack under the pressure.
The truth was I had my own demons to wrestle with. I knew a lot was riding on the successful completion of this conference—Eleanor seemed to echo like the voice of doom in my head whenever I thought about it—but with all the energy I had been pouring into the staff qualities, I felt now and suddenly that I had let preparations for the conference take too much of a back seat, and that near-certain disaster awaited. Something would go wrong—with me pinch hitting as director of both the education and communications departments, I didn’t see how that could be avoided. The only question seemed to be how deep the shit was going to get.
Bethany snagged me during a spare minute that afternoon, as I moved from one meeting to another where my only role seemed to be showing a confidence I didn’t truly feel.
“How are you doing?” she asked quietly.
We were standing in a corner of one of the small conference rooms, a meeting with her staff just ending and people still filing out the door.
“I’m good,” I said, not able to say anything else while others were within earshot. I wanted to ask her why the hell she hadn't said anything in the meeting with Mary, why she had simply sat there like a deafmute while Mary dismantled everything we had planned.
Bethany looked like she wanted to say something else, too, but I was glad she didn’t. Given the way she was looking at me, I’m not sure I was ready to hear it.
“I will help,” she said eventually, touching my hand clandestinely, as I had under the conference table earlier. Her back was to the others, but her fingers were warm on my flesh, and they made me feel like everyone could see what was going on. “With Michael’s workload,” she continued. “Especially at the conference. If you need me to cover something, just let me know.”
“Okay,” I said, my eyes more on the departing staff than on her.
She leaned in closer, as if she meant to kiss me.
“You did good,” she whispered. “You stood your ground. People noticed.”
With no help from you. I kept the comment to myself. Even with everyone else out of the room, I knew this wasn’t the place for an argument. Instead, in a moment of weakness, I shared my frustration. “She killed work/life balance, Bethany. The only one that really mattered.”
She offered me a bemused smile, patting my hand before withdrawing. “One step at a time. We accomplished a lot. If we keep pushing, things will change eventually.”
“Do you really think so?”
She looked at me confidently. “I know so.”
I didn’t have much time to think about it until later that night when I took Jacob to another one of his Sports Classes. I was stuck late at the office again, and on the drive home I went through my voicemail and left several messages for people in response. By the time I got home I had already missed dinner and Jenny had Jacob dressed and ready to leave.
“How’d the interview go?” Jenny asked as I came in and Jacob ran into my legs.
“Okay,” I said, turning to the side and helping my son out the door.
“Okay?” she said with dissatisfaction. “Is that good or bad?”
“It's okay. I don’t know, look, I haven’t had much time to think about it. I’ve been running a mile a minute and now I have to get Jacob to class. Can we talk about this later?”
“Sure can. Have fun!”
Yeah, right, have fun. Like that’s possible with her in such a flippy mood. It wasn’t have fun as in, “have fun, my love, you deserve it and I know how much you enjoy spending time with your son.” No, it was have fun as in, “have fun you good-for-nothing piece of shit, it’s about time you started doing your part in raising your little monster.” Those aren’t the words Jenny would have ever used—but, then again, she didn’t have to. When she was at the end of one of her long days as Jacob’s sole caregiver, all she needed to convey her frustration was the tone of her voice.
I knew I should cut her some slack, but it was hard after the kind of day I had had. As I drove Jacob to the high school, I tried to put her and everything else out of my mind.
“Jacob,” I said, looking at him in the observation mirror Jenny had installed on the edge of our sun visor. He was looking out the window, his hat pulled down too far over his eyes.
No answer.
“Jacob, buddy, what will we play tonight?” I adopted my Daddy voice, the one laced with excitement and promises of roughhousing. “Are we going to play soccer? Or tee ball?”
Still no answer—just staring out the window as if hypnotized.
“Jacob!” I barked, dropping all pretense of frivolity. “Can you hear me?”
I heard him sigh, and saw his little shoulders go up and down in my spy mirror.
“Daddy,” he said forlornly. “I don't want to go to Sports Class tonight.”
“What? Why not? I thought you liked Sports Class?”
“I don’t like it. I want to stay home with Mommy.”
Great. Mommy. “Come on, you'll have fun. Maybe we’ll do bowling tonight.” Bowling was Jacob’s favorite, tossing the red rubber ball and smashing it into the wooden pins.
“No,” he pouted. “I don’t want to do bowling. I want to go home.”
About to cajole him again, I paused, remembering I didn’t like Sports Class either. It was really Jenny’s idea, this Sports Class, an opportunity, she explained, for me and my son to spend some time together, just the two of us, away from her and the house. That last part was important, I knew, for even though she never said it, Sports Class was not just about giving me Daddy time, it was also about giving her Jenny time—one hour a week when she could stop being Jacob's mother and do something purely for her. I didn’t know what that thing was, and had never asked, but as I sat there at a red light thinking about bailing out, I imagined all the possible things Jenny might want to do with her free time and what I might ruin by coming home early. Given what she routinely complained she didn't have time for any more, I thought the worst I would be interrupting was her painting her toenails or washing the kitchen floor.
Still, I was leaving the next day for more than a week, and she’d have no relief that entire time. And if I went home now I’d have to talk about the interview, and Michael’s resignation, and my meeting with Mary—none of which I was quite feeling up to. That was one of the nice things about having a four-year-old son. There was a whole new range of subjects and activities that didn’t have anything to do with what I had previously thought of as my life. That other life still mattered—the one with the increasingly complex arc of career and marriage—but not to Jacob. To Jacob I was just Daddy—something I hadn’t been for very long—and what Jacob and Daddy did often had little connection to the life Alan and Jenny had been planning.
So Sports Class it was going to be, for my sake if not for Jacob’s. I needed a break from all the turmoil. When the light turned green I started the car moving again, not telling Jacob about my decision, and wondering if he would notice by the turns we made.
At the high school itself, Jacob acted as if he had forgotten all about his earlier reluctance, bounding out of the car when I opened the door for him, and running ahead of me to the gymnasium, telling me he knew the way as I called out to him and told him to slow down.
In the gym, Marcie and her athletic Wonder Twin had a surprise for us. After our warm-up exercises, the kids were going to play an actual soccer game. This was a first. Up till now we had spent each class just practicing our skills in father-and-son pairs. Now, Marcie said, speaking as if rehearsing the lines to her school play, it was time to put what we had learned to the test.
I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea, but when they heard the news, Jacob and all the kids let out a cheer, as if finally being given the chance to satisfy some long-held desire. After twirling our arms for a few minutes, I checked with Jacob while foot-tapping a soccer ball back and forth across six feet of gymnasium floor.
“Are you sure you want to play soccer, buddy?” There was a fear inside me, large and undefined, like that of a psychic that can only receive dark impressions.
“Yes, Daddy!” Jacob said, his eyes wide with excitement.
“Okay,” I said, not at all sure things were okay.
When the fateful moment came I released my son into the fray and took my seat on the bleachers with the other dads. Tyler’s dad was one of them—adorned in an ironed tracksuit sporting the colors of his alma mater, a small golden cross hanging from the slim chain encircling his unshaven neck. He looked about ready to sit next to me, but veered away at the last moment, probably remembering his confusion from our last encounter and deciding to hunker down with companions more likely to share his interests. The rejection stung for a moment, but when the troop began whooping about their favorite athletes I didn’t feel quite so lonely.
On the gym floor Marcie and the other girl were busy dividing the boys into two teams—first trying to get them to call off by ones and twos and then, when that proved too difficult for their four-year-old brains, gripping them by the shoulders and positioning them on opposite sides of a blue line like overgrown chess pieces. There wasn’t much for me to do as Marcie started explaining the rules and the baboons next to me continued their mutual grooming behaviors, so despite my intentions in coming to Sports Class, I started thinking about the day I had had.
It could’ve been worse, I told myself quickly, thinking I should at least try to stay positive. I had by then already written off the interview with Quest Partners. I had been out of the job market for twelve years—did I think I was going to ace my first interview after all that time? Especially for a high-prestige job that I was only marginally-qualified for? No. Better to chalk it up as part of the unavoidable process of getting back into the market. At least I knew how rusty I really was, and how much I would need to refine my message and my interview presence. There’d be other opportunities, and I’d do just that much better with the next one because of the dry run I had had. That’s what I planned to tell Jenny at least, and sitting there in the relative calm of the high school bleachers, I felt confident I could tell her in a way she would accept as reasonable. Managing other people’s expectations was what I did for a living, after all, and managing Jenny’s would just have to be part of the game plan. Besides, I knew she really didn’t want to move to Boston.
What upset me more were my encounters with Mary—starting with the one in her office regarding Michael’s resignation. Michael was gone. The timing was awful, but I couldn’t say I was sorry to see him go. He was plenty good at what he did, but so were hundreds of other people, and I was confident we could find a replacement that wouldn’t come with Michael’s baggage and bullshit. Covering his workload and seeing to all the details of our national conference would leave me precious little time to conduct a proper hiring process, but the bigger obstacle, I feared, would be Mary.
Mary had hired Michael. She had been overly impressed, I thought, with Michael’s credentials, and overly supportive, everyone thought, of his half-brained ideas. He had been her golden boy, someone who was going to come into the organization under her wing and drive success in the way she defined it. And now he was gone. Driven to resign by a monstrous supervisor who treated him like a child and never appreciated the talents he brought to the table. That wasn’t true, but it was the narrative Mary would choose to construct. That much seemed clear from the way she had treated me in her office and later in the conference room.
I knew her behavior during our second encounter was her trying to exert dominance over me, and that her attack on the staff qualities was part of that same compulsion. But I also knew her thirst for control would not be quenched in one uncomfortable staff meeting. There would be other attempts, very few as direct as what she had done in the meeting. I’d seen it before. Once you stepped over a certain line with Mary your fate was sealed. She’d rarely attack you openly—Michael’s resignation, I realized, must have really caught her by surprise—but bit by bit your life would be made more and more uncomfortable, until you just decided it would be better if you left. In my case, the surest and simplest thing for her to do would be to drag her heels on the roll out of the ten staff qualities she had decided to accept. No new hiring system meant no new hires, and no new hires meant me doing three jobs indefinitely. It would be just a matter of time before things started slipping through the cracks, and Mary would be well positioned to start taking pot shots at me once they did. The only question I had was, “Had I stepped over her line?” If I had, my life could get very ugly indeed, because based on my performance with Quest Partners, I wouldn’t have anywhere else to go anytime soon.
Marcie’s shrill referee whistle brought my attention back to the gym floor. While woolgathering, two goals had been set up at opposite ends, and a clueless four-year-old had been placed in front of each. The other children were clumped in the middle, Jacob among them, all kicking wildly at an under-inflated soccer ball. The dads to my right rose suddenly to their feet, clapping and shouting at their own versions of their immortal selves—GET THE BALL! KICK IT AWAY! Some kids understood—Tyler, especially—and when one of them came away from the pack with the ball between his feet, it didn’t surprise me that it was him.
I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket and pulled it out. This time I knew what the flashing red light meant.
R U ALL RIGHT?
It was as if she was there, sitting next to me, seeing the hang-dog look on my face.
NO, I sent back, wishing she was there, and then watched the boys play while waiting for her to make the phone buzz again. I saw now why the ball was partially flat. Fully inflated, it would’ve danced too quickly across the gymnasium floor and gotten away from the slow-moving children.
CHEER UP. IN 24 HRS WE'LL BE IN MIAMI BEACH!
YIPPEE. I wondered if she’d pick up the sarcasm as I hit the send button.
SERIOUSLY. IT’LL B GOOD 2 GET AWAY. I’LL BUY U A DRINK THE 1ST NIGHT IF U LET ME.
Damn if she didn’t. I started my thumbs working on my response.
“Hey, buddy.”
Startled, I looked over at the men standing next to me.
It was Tyler’s dad. “You better get your boy under control.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was angry and I felt like the skinny teenager I had once been when he barked at me. I looked out onto the floor and saw Jacob chasing after another boy, tears and spittle running down his face. I hadn’t heard his crying over the noise of the game before but I heard it now. I watched in horror as Jacob caught up to the boy, who had the ball between his feet, and pushed him roughly in the back. The boy fell hard and Jacob tried to grab the ball but he was too slow and another boy—Tyler, athletic Tyler with his little muscular legs and Ivy League haircut—swooped in and kicked it away, the shin-guarded portion of his leg connecting with Jacob’s body as it came swiftly forward. A piercing shriek filled the gymnasium as Jacob fell backward onto the floor, clutching his hollow chest.
Marcie and friend came running over, their whistles blowing and stopping most of the activity. I leapt down off the bleachers and trotted to Jacob’s side. Even with my heart pounding, knowing I was under the watchful gaze of the silverback and the other alpha males, I could not bring myself to run.
Jacob was screaming as if he had broken ribs.
“Is he all right?” the Wonder Twin asked, her nose wrinkled in distaste.
I bent down and scooped Jacob off the floor, trying to cradle him in my arms like a baby, but he fought against me blindly, terror surging through him like a rabbit caught by a farm cat. “He’ll be fine,” I said sternly as I wrestled him into a position stable enough for me to carry him out of there. He was screaming in my ear now, and I could feel his wet face against my neck.
“Does he need a breather?” Marcie said. “We can rotate some of the kids in and out.”
She was trying to help—I know that. Somewhere in all her adolescent indoctrination she had been trained to take this gig seriously, to do what she could to keep the kids under her charge “in the game” and to “never stop trying.” At sixteen, she was a true believer, an evangelist ready to pass her unproven beliefs onto the next generation. And over her shoulder I could see her acolytes staring at us—some of them frightened, but others contemptuous of Jacob and what he represented. Already at that tender age they were contemptuous, recognizing a freak when they saw one, and knowing what their doctrine told them to do.
“No, thanks,” I said hurriedly, turning to get Jacob out of there, again walking swiftly but not daring to run nor even to look at the other dads in my shame. Jacob wailed the entire time—all the way out of the gym, down the halls, out the door, into the parking lot, and to the car. He wasn’t hurt—not physically, but he was upset and scared. And as I struggled to strap him into his booster seat while he continued to flap and flail his arms, I finally lost my cool, shaking him roughly and shouting at him.
“Goddammit, Jacob! You’re okay! Shut the fuck up already!”
I slammed the door and marched around to the driver’s seat, getting in and slamming that door, too. With my son crying hopelessly behind me, I pounded my fists on the steering wheel as hard as I could, screaming both to blot out his cries and my own consuming sense of inadequacy.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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