May We Be Forgiven

of being judgmental? I don’t have any hard, fast rules—be happy, enjoy.”
    And I can’t figure out if Ed is a genius or a moron.
    Cheryl comes back with our Jell-O mold decanted onto a plate—shaking like a fat lady—and the boys bring out a tub of homemade peppermint ice cream.
    We dig in, and all is good until Cy asks for a third helping, and then, when he’s done, remembers that he’s horribly lactose-intolerant, and we make a mad dash for home.

    D espite the summer heat, the ninety-degree days, Madeline and Cy are always cold; they wear cardigans, inside and out. I extract the old window screens from the basement, put them in, and skip turning on the air conditioning. It is like a summer from the past: the heat builds during the day. Tessie lies on the tile floor in the front hall, panting; in the afternoon there are thunderstorms, and at night there’s the melancholy tap-tapping sounds of bugs on the screens.
    It’s near the end of July; everything is elongated, made languid and slow-motion by the heat. Madeline and Cy retreat into a world of long ago. There is something beautiful about their slowly evaporating ghostlike narration, which shows marks of revision, erasure, and locked doors—events long ago put away.
    I take them to concerts at the bandshell in the park and watch them dance across the lawn like it is thirty years ago.
    “What’s your secret to a long marriage?” I ask Madeline one morning.
    “We don’t burden each other with our feelings,” she says. “A woman friend of mine called it staying in the dance.”
    “The dance?”
    “Of courtship. When you are courting, you are your best self, but then, too often, we devolve and reveal our worst selves. Why would you want the person you live with to wake up seeing your worst self every day?”
    One day, when Cy is annoyed at one of the babies from South Africa, he fires him, tells him to “box it up and get out. There’s no future for you here, sitting around thinking it’s going to come right to you. It doesn’t work that way, buster. I don’t want to see you around here anymore,” he says.
    “That’s not your baby,” Madeline says, grabbing the plastic infant from him. “That one is mine.”
    “Mine,” Cy says, surprisingly possessive, grabbing the baby back.
    Just as I’m thinking I’ll have to intervene, they make up.
    “Fine,” Cy says, annoyed. He looks the baby square in the eye. “I’ll give you another chance, but don’t blow it.” From then on, Cy walks around carrying the baby under his arm—sideways, like a football. He takes it pretty much everywhere, calling it his brown brother and occasionally his wife.

    I give myself until the children come home to finish the book. I set up shop on an old card table in the attic—surrounding myself with box fans that create windy white noise. I weigh down my papers with rocks from the garden. I find the heat inspiring, like being in a boxing gym. Stripped to a pair of gym shorts, I type as rivulets of sweat trickle down my face, the meaty smell of myself ripening pushing me to work harder—ready or not, it needs to be over.
    Using a sharp blade to crack the old paint off, I pop open the small window up in the eaves. The glass is wavy; the view doused in rainbow-reflected light makes everything look better than it is. I move about cautiously, careful not to bump my head on the beams. There are things up there from long ago, a World War II uniform, old teddy bears, an ancient crib that I dust off and bring down to Madeline, who immediately takes it and sets up a nursery by her side of the bed for the babies.
    The phrase “while you were sleeping” takes on new meaning as I plow through the pages from the past fifteen years, noticing that everything I’ve written is couched in a protective tone, hemming and hawing, positing and pulling back. Time to rip out the stops—fuck it. Dick Nixon was the American man of that moment, swimming in the bitter supposition that for everyone else things came easily. He was the perfect storm of present, past, and future, of integrity and deceit, of moral superiority and arrogance, of the drug that was and is the American Dream, wanting more, wanting to have what someone else has, wanting to have it all.
    I conclude that the 1970s court of public opinion was bourgeois and unforgiving in nature; once a politician’s fate had been decided and his number in the global historic pecking order had been assigned, there was