Fathermucker by Greg Olear Read Free Book Online Page A

much everyone drives a Subaru with at least one sticker of leftist sentiment crookedly festooned to its bumper. This is a bluer locale than even Manhattan, which is, at last, a city of bankers. Where better than Crunchtown to wait out the last days of Bush-Cheney? To wit: in the election returns last November, Obama smoked McCain by 5,360 to 1,274. Had Gore gotten anything close to those results in a few precincts in Florida or Ohio, the world would be a vastly different place.
    But it was not to be. The alternate reality where Gore takes the White House feels as distant and foreign as the alternate reality where Stacy and I are childless residents of the East Village. The former never existed, thanks to the Supreme Court; the latter may as well not have.
    â€œD ADDY,” COMES M AUDE’s STENTORIAN VOICE FROM THE MONITOR , just as I’m about to step into the shower, “I want to watch TV.” She has the personality of a despot, at times, and the voice to match.
    Although Maude speaks well for a three-and-a-half-year-old—her prosody and vocabulary are excellent—she resists dropping the vestigial whine of her toddlerhood. Daddy, I want to watch TV is delivered in a voice halfway between a baby’s bawling and the King’s English, as if her native and preferred tongue, Crying, manifests itself in an accent she can’t quite shake, like Keanu Reeves trying to play an Englishman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula . As with Reeves, the effect is grating.
    Another facet of Maude in the morning: she doesn’t wake up gradually. When she comes to, she’s as alert as I would be after three cups of coffee. She’s like a laptop on sleep mode—flip it open and the applications are still running, Firefox displaying the Facebook feed, iTunes paused in the middle of “Rehab,” unfinished Solitaire game going: just how you left it. If you tell Maude before she goes to bed that she can have a lollipop if she has a good night’s sleep, the first thing she’ll say when she opens her eyes ten hours later is Where’s my lolly? Nothing gets past her—nothing. She could work the homicide desk with McNulty and Bunk. This is in stark contrast to Roland, who will put a Lamps Plus catalog on the table in front of him, pause to look out the window, and then start crying because he can’t find the Lamps Plus catalog.
    I jump back into my sweatpants and run up the stairs. By now, Maude’s whine-accented speech has reverted to outright crying, and Roland is banging on his door to get out (we have these child safety thingamajigs on the knobs so they can’t open their doors, or the lunatics really would run the asylum). I open Roland’s door, switch off his noise machine—he bounds into the hallway—open Maude’s door, switch off her noise machine, and scoop her up.
    â€œDaddy,” she says, and her eyes meet mine so directly, her gaze so intense, she may as well be trying to hypnotize me, “I want to watch TV.”
    â€œGood morning to you, too. What do you want to watch?”
    â€œUmmm . . . ummmm . . .” She does this a lot, filling in the space as she decides.
    â€œ Yo Gabba Gabba! ?”
    â€œNo! Not Yo Gabba Gabba! I don’t want to watch Yo Gabba Gabba! ever again .”
    Kids have no concept of time. Ever again, forever, yesterday, tomorrow, last year, next month —none of these terms have any real meaning to a child, especially a three-year-old. Sometimes you can use this to your advantage. Sure, you can say, we’ll go there tomorrow . Or, We’ll buy the new Lego set next week . So few arrows in the parental quiver—important to use the full comportment of weaponry at your disposal, however meager their power (and however deceptive their advertising).
    â€œBut Daddy,” says Roland, “ I want to watch Yo Gabba Gabba! What’s for me? What’s for me? ”
    â€œWe’ll watch something