How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money by Panio Gianopoulos

Author:Panio Gianopoulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Four Way Books

How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money

ETHAN HAD ALWAYS been a bad swimmer. As a toddler, he revolted when his mother carried him into the ocean, screaming and thrashing in her arms, then clambering onto her shoulders as if she were a sinking ship. At the YMCA where his parents signed him up for swimming lessons, he refused to get into the pool for five months, decimating the unofficial “sea slug” record (three weeks) previously held by a boy who ended up becoming a junior national swim champion and was paraded as a model of success—and, implicitly, the folly of childhood rebellion. Ethan, however, was unmoved by this story of triumph, and finally the instructors resorted to outright bribery. In month six, he retrieved candy from the bottom of the shallow end with his toes and ate it in a crouch, the sweetness of the butterscotch tainted with the blanching slickness of chlorine and acquiescence.

In every other part of his life, he was an obedient child, and the ferocity of his defiance first mystified, then angered, and finally exhausted his parents. On the day of Ethan’s final swim lesson (they had paid for one year, and would never pay again), his father pointed to a redheaded toddler climbing the ladder to the high dive. Her blue swim diaper peeked out from behind her bathing suit bottom as she scaled each step. When she reached the top, she ran toward the edge of the diving board and fearlessly hurled herself out into the air. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” his father said, as the girl plunged into the water with a small, echoing splash.

He got his wish. It was a moment of humiliation so potent that it nearly assumed a physical shape, and from then on, except for a brief stint of rebelliousness involving an earring in his senior year of high school, Ethan redoubled his efforts at filial compliance. He studied well, tested well, worked well, married well, and even parented well, despite being raised in a household in which a father’s parental duties consisted primarily of belittling, and the end result was one of respectability, decorum, and stability—“the good life,” as Ethan referred to it on occasions of immodest self-reflection.

It was this hard-earned, pleasant existence that Ethan cited when explaining to his wife, Lydia, the many reasons why they shouldn’t have a second child. Together, they had arranged their financial, professional, and parental ambitions and obligations to an exquisitely calibrated state—adding another child would tip the mechanism into disorder. Financially, they would suffer: either Lydia would have to take time off from work to raise the baby, depriving the family of her significant salary, or they would hire a full-time nanny they could barely afford. Lydia had only just resumed employment after their daughter Jesse had started preschool last fall, and did Lydia really want to indefinitely delay her career again—after months of hunting to find this job? As for the issue of

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