parenting books that childhood masturbation was a common and harmless activity—and believing in any case that each individual has a sovereign right of ownership over his or her own body—Todd and Kathy had made a conscious decision not to interfere with Aaron’s self-explorations. But sometimes they wondered.
“Did you do that as a kid?” Kathy asked. They were watching from the hallway as Aaron absentmindedly stroked his tiny manhood while watching a video of Clifford, the Big Red Dog .
“I don’t think so,” said Todd. It was hard for him to remember the specifics of his early childhood. When he tried, the only image he could regularly produce was his mother’s face hovering over him as she tucked him into bed at night, a luminous, looming, loving presence that he could still sometimes sense at the edges of his perception.
“I sure didn’t,” said Kathy. “My mother used to tell me it was dirty down there and to never ever touch it. Of course, she wouldn’t let me suck my thumb, either. She painted that awful sticky stuff on it at night to make me stop.”
“Eet ees puffeckly nawmal to zuck ze sum!” Todd exclaimed, doing the imitation of Dr. Ruth that Kathy used to get such a kick out of. He’d do it while they were making love, whenever he needed to get her to relax and experiment with something a little out of the ordinary. ( Eet ees puffeckly nawmal to vare ze handcuffs! ) That was one of her sweetest quirks (or at least it used to be): As long as you could convince her that the practice in question fell within the boundaries of “normal behavior,” she was up for just about anything. “Und ees puffeckly nawmal to be aroused by big red dog!”
Kathy chuckled politely, but her mind had already shifted to another topic.
“By the way,” she said. “Have you been doing the flash cards?”
“Not too much,” Todd admitted.
Kathy had recently purchased a preschool “Fun with Math” kit. She wanted to get Aaron thinking about numbers—recognizing numerals, counting to a hundred, maybe doing some rudimentary addition—and had made a unilateral decision that Todd would be heavily involved, even though he had repeatedly expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the project. The kid was only three, for God’s sake. His idea of a good time was smashing two trains together. He didn’t need to be worrying about math.
“I wish you’d give it a try,” she said. “I just want him to feel comfortable with the basic concepts. Just because you and I were bad at math doesn’t mean he should be scared of it, too.”
“I wasn’t bad at math,” Todd protested. “Except for calculus. I had some kind of mental block with that.”
Kathy turned back to Aaron.
“Honey?” She had to repeat the word three times at increasing volume to get his attention. “When Clifford’s over, we’re going to do our flash cards, okay?”
Aaron nodded—Todd thought he would have agreed to just about anything right then—and turned back to the TV. Todd kissed Kathy on the cheek.
“Oh well,” he said. “Better hit the books.”
“So how’s it going?” she said, making an unsuccessful attempt to sound casual.
“Fine,” he said. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just worry about you sometimes,” she said. “I worry about us.”
He kissed her again, this time on the forehead.
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
Todd didn’t understand the point of certain skateboarding maneuvers. They weren’t always self-explanatory, like popping a wheelie or spinning a basketball on your fingertip. Sometimes it was hard to know what the boys were trying to do, let alone if they’d succeeded.
Tonight, for example, all of them were practicing a low-key move where they scootered along at a leisurely clip, crouched down like a surfer, and then hopped into the air for a split second. If the rider was skillful, the board clung to the soles of his sneakers as if by magnetism, and he continued rolling as before
Shauna Rice-Schober[thriller]