We, Adults by Peter Stenson

Author:Peter Stenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

VI

An Excerpt from We, Adults: “A Day in the Life Of”

Jacob sleeps in my bed. He’s four, going on both six months and thirty years. He can’t sleep alone. I know about sleep training, about independence, about the “strength” and “self-esteem” of a “well-adjusted, self-soothing” child; but I also know that he wakes up screaming the cries of the abandoned, sometimes yelling for his mom, sometimes for me.

Each morning, he wakes me up by rubbing his fingers against my back. More specifically, across the twin patches of hair along my shoulder blades. This is at five-thirty, without fail. I roll over and he tells me I have dragon breath and I tell him it smells like he ate a bag of dog poop. We say this joke every morning. He starts laughing before the short exchange is even half over. He clings to predictability.

I don’t believe in God, so our routine of stating the one thing we’re grateful for isn’t a religious thing, more of a how-not-to-be-a-prick thing. Depending on his mood, Jacob tells me he’s grateful either for a specific toy or day of the week or for me. My answer is the same every morning: you, buddy.

We eat organic cereal for breakfast. I let him watch cartoons. I pretend to read the paper, but really end up watching animations kill one another. I make him eat fruit. He hates bananas. He says he doesn’t like the strings of “yarn.”

He also hates showering, but I make him every morning. I’m not trying to have him be the smelly kid at preschool, which is where he goes for six hours three days a week. I drop him off and most of the time he doesn’t even turn around and wave, just walks with his short little steps, his head slightly lowered, his shoulders slouched. I’m always struck with the comical notion of him headed to the salt mines. This notion turns from humorous to oddly tragic in the span of a second.

I work thirty hours a week. I don’t really need the money (I’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I rent a two-bedroom apartment in Roseville, Minnesota, pretty much the affordable cost-of-living capital of the country), but I need adult conversation. I need to be around people who wait until they’re in the privacy of locked rooms to put their hands down their pants. I need companionship. So I work at The Hungry Mind, a bookstore in St. Paul near Macalester College. It’s an eccentric shop with two cats and pun-laden mugs and booksellers who are either college kids or retired teachers with a few workers stuck somewhere in the middle. My favorite coworker is Cheryl because she’s still all Gen-X, even though it’s at least twenty years past the point of working. She’s crude in a way that’s endearing rather than projected. I appreciate the way her skin has started to sag around her eyes and ears. It makes me feel good about myself. Sometimes I imagine sleeping with her, if it would be fun, fulfilling, if it would change anything.

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