Better than bad

Splenda (a short, short story)

We'd been in the bar just long enough to order drinks when the stiff-looking guy came in with his daughter.

Khakis. Oxford. Tie. Tortoise-shell frames. Stroller and sippy cup.

The sight of her was frustrating to me because it'd been a long day and I'd been good and I wanted a cigarette. I didn't particularly want to smoke around some kid. I may be a smoker but I'm considerate as hell about it, and I didn't like the notion of blowing carcinogens within eyeshot of a 2-year-old-looking baby girl.

He set her down on the bar and, almost as if to mock me, the first thing she did was she started playing with an ashtray.

He was tall and bland, a young father but not that young. He acted a little like he'd walked in out of the rain, but it was clear and humid outside. He squinted, then seemed startled by the bartender.

"Can I get an ice tea in a to-go cup," he asked her, holding one hand about six inches over the other to describe what he was looking for. Then he stared up at the television screens while his daughter slapped her hand against the surface of the counter and went, "uhhh," and I thought about lighting up a smoke anyway because, you know, a father who brings a baby into a bar would have to expect a little of that anyway.

There were big two games going on. Both local teams eventually lost, one of them very badly to a team they should've well smeared. But neither was done just yet. There was still futile Saturday afternoon hope. And the father squinted up at two different screens, two different games, wearing an expression of disbelief and equidistant regret. And then his daughter fell right off the bar.

One second she was there. And then there was a clatter and she was gone, out of sight, down onto the floor between the legs of two high-backed stools. I think the bartender reacted first, but the father caught on soon enough. He whirled his attention back around, and then he kneeled down and disappeared from view. He stayed down a long time. Seconds passed. Each one became exponentially uncomfortable.

By the time he stood back up with her in his arms, she'd begun to wail and it seemed like everything was going to be OK. Her wail wasn't so much the sound of pain as a beacon -- "I didn't like that. I'm embarrassed. What just happened?" It was a wail, but it was a healthy, non-terminal wail.

The father began to bounce her against his shoulder. It didn't seem at all soothing. The bartender brought him his ice tea in a lidded styrofoam cup and she set it down almost right beside the ashtray.

"She all right?"

"Yeah, it's fine. She's fine."

"Want some ice?"

"Eh?"

"A little pack of ice? For her head?"

"No, no. It's fine."

The bartender slid his tea diagonally closer to him. The little girl wasn't crying anymore.

"No charge on the drink," the bartender told him. He nodded and held up two fingers and said, "Could I get you to put two Splendas in it for me?"

It took her a second to hear what he'd asked and she rolled and said, "Oh. Sure," and patted her apron pocket for packets of sweetener and about that time I snapped my lighter open and started my cigarette.

The most depressing thing I've read so far this month ... ?

... was the beginning of an Atlantic Monthly review of a biography of John Cheever that ran in April.

"Nineteen sixty-eight wasn't the most wretched year in the life of John Cheever, but it was close. On poor terms with his three children, bitterly angry with his wife for daring to initiate a career outside the home, and having recently had the last of his teeth removed, he spent his mornings struggling weakly to postpone his first drink of the day. Even though he was set to publish his third novel, Bullet Park -- which he suspected, correctly, wasn't very good -- his alcoholism had so crippled his ability to write that he was in the midst of a creative drought that would see him complete only one short story in three years. Tortured by his self loathing his homosexuality engendered, increasingly estranged from his neighbors social circle by his drunken excesses, he was so lonely that he not only answered all the fan letter he received but would frequently invite their authors, total strangers to him, to come to his house. He was just a couple of years away from touching bottom -- living alone and all but insensate in a Boston apartment, where he would come so close to drinking himself to death that his brain function was permanently impaired."

-- Johnathan Dee

"Suburban Ghetto: John Cheever, misread and misunderstood"

Late August roadtrip

Random tableaux

Late August clutter

Movie review in 75 words or less: "The Purple Rose of Cairo"

Not quite a great film, per se, but still just about a perfect movie. A square-jawed explorer in a 1930s studio comedy becomes smitten with a woman in the audience and magically steps off the screen to meet her. This sparks problems for the other characters, for the theater owner and his patrons, for the up-and-coming actor who plays him and, most of all, for the object of his affections -- a bullied and beaten-down naif who uses the movies to escape both of her depressions. Woody Allen's funniest and most successfully realized supernatural riff works on a variety of levels, most importantly in the way it celebrates the power of fantasy but also subverts it. The ending is like a terrible punch to the heart, not softened in the least by its obvious inevitability.