Helium

Peter’s red balloon had stopped to chat with the whispering leaves of the poplar tree before floating away in pursuit of the soft September afternoon sunshine, its yellow ribbon trailing lackadaisically behind. Earth-bound Peter looked to the sky in lamentation, and tugged on his father’s flannel shirtsleeves. Jack Hamelin was tall, and Peter was convinced that if his father stood up and stretched out, he could retrieve the red balloon that was shrinking into a speck in the sky. Peter was afraid it might disappear entirely into the clouds if his father didn’t reach out soon and seize the yellow ribbon that was trembling in the breeze as though afraid of heights.

“Peter,” said Jack, not looking up, not looking down. “I need to explain something to you, and it might be difficult to understand right now.”

The yellow ribbon had gotten tangled with a curious raven, and briefly bobbed, suspended in blue. Peter leaned back on the park bench where they were sitting, engrossed by the action above.

“Your mother and I,” Jack continued, “we’ve been going through a lot of rough patches lately.”

The raven flapped away, squawking nevermore, and the red balloon resumed its path to the sun. Peter swung his legs from the bench, his Converse brushing the tips of the grass and sending feathery bursts of dandelion seeds into the air.

“I know things haven’t been the best at home these last few months—it’s not fair to you, Peter.”

Fair. Fairness was the virtue of the month for September in Peter’s kindergarten class—after August’s Truth but before October’s Compassion.

“In a few weeks, your mother and I are not going to be living together anymore.”

The red balloon vanished entirely behind Jack’s left ear.

“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

Peter contemplated the now empty sky and rearranged the syllables of this new foreign word in his mouth. It had taken Peter longer to learn how to read than his peers; while they grappled cardboard books with sticky fingers he constructed words out of building blocks with letters and sounds painted on the front. He put the sounds of the word “divorce” together and took them back apart again. Die-verse like bad rhymes in a poem about death. Divers like in the summer Olympics, leaping from high platforms and hardly even making a splash. Da Force like Yoda used in Star Wars to make his enemies tremble with fear and admiration. The syllables of the word tumbled senselessly on his tongue.

When Jack looked down at Peter, the boy had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Jack thought for a moment that his son had actually understood what he had been told, and he gathered the little boy into an embrace. Peter snuggled his nose into flannel and smoke.

When he looked up from his father’s grasp, Peter’s forehead was scrunched in deep contemplation. His mouth sagged open as he formulated a question. His lips pulled apart, exposing two gaping holes where teeth should have been.

“Where do lost balloons go when they float away? Do they ever come back?” Peter asked his father.

Jack looked down at his son’s watery eyes, pleading for comfort in the only way a five-year-old knows how. “Lost balloons carry dreams to little boys at night,” he responded, and Peter wondered what red dreams looked like.

“Would you like some ice cream?” asked Jack, consoling his son in the only way a thirty-two year old man who had never intended to have children knows how. He even let his son splurge on a chocolate-dipped waffle cone, and Da Force drifted from Peter’s mind and joined the ranks of the red balloon amongst the gathering clouds.

“Superman with SPRINKLES!” announced Peter proudly to the aproned ice cream man, and pointed eagerly to the waffle cone in the window. He took a wide lick and stuck out his tongue to show his father the melting rainbow in his mouth.

By the time Peter had devoured his ice cream, sprinkles, and cone and all, he wanted to know what Da Force was.

Jack hesitated. “Well, when two people love each other very much, they decide to spend their lives together, and they get married.”

That was mostly true—Jack remembered loving Hannah. In high school she had kept printed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in her locker and became the small town’s first feminist May Queen. Jack had found her naïve activism endearing. Hannah didn’t believe in marriage, but the two fell sloppily in love when they both turned twenty-one, and married the year after.

“But then, sometimes, two people grow up and grow apart,” continued Jack, struggling with the concept and the wording. “There’s no spark anymore. Like a fire that has burned out.”

Peter didn’t understand. His father was a fireman. He spent his life extinguishing other people’s fires.

“Then two people who were once happy together begin to fight a lot, and sometimes they just can’t work it out. And at this point they decide it might be best to separate,” explained Jack.

Separate. Like corn from mashed potatoes. Or lips, and fingers, and legs. And boys and girls bathrooms.

“And although they used to care very much about each other, they let their love go, and it just . . . drifts away.”

Peter wasn’t sure what love looked like, but if it were anything like helium, it would float away like an unattended balloon and make your voice squeak when you suck it in. But everything comes back eventually—dogs that run away, boomerangs, mosquito bites, letters to the North Pole, and even lost balloons. Da Force didn’t seem so bad.

That night, Hannah came home late from taking care of other people’s troubled children, and while they waited for her, Jack and Peter sat on the floor of the living room listening to old vinyl records and drumming on the carpet. Jack was too uptight to be a real drummer. He used to bring whiskey to his rockstar friends backstage when they toured northern Ohio. He picked up broken drumsticks and repaired frayed cables while his friends arranged chaos in parallel lines, snorting white through Washington and dousing their artistic fervor with wine.

Jack harbored a secret desire that his son, although not terribly bright at schoolwork, could still be instructed in classic rock. He was convinced that Peter’s struggles at school were evidence of some latent creative genius. While Peter pounded the floor with unintentional syncopation and wailed like Robert Plant, Jack glossed the greats—The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix—referring to them by their surnames only like old friends, the kind you’d call up and invite for dinner. Peter liked Ringo’s beats the best since they were easy to follow, and he always requested that his father put on The Beatles first. They made it through the 1960s and had moved into the early 70s before Hannah arrived home. Hendrix was unexpectedly suffocated by her furrowed brows, and the house fell silent and still. Hannah wanted her son to grow up to be an engineer.

At the dinner table, Peter sat between Hannah and Jack, and watched the tennis match of growing resentment between his parents. He observed in subsequence his mother’s slicked back bun and his father’s wavy layers, her gin and his cognac, her tightly drawn lips and his darting eyes, her calculated bites and his hungry mouthfuls. Hannah had made Peter’s favorite meal: barbequed pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and fresh strawberries on the side. But the beans were runny tonight, too hastily made, oozing across his plate until the strawberries were puddled in sauce, and seeping into the corner of the sesame seed bun. Peter tried to build a wall out of his knife and spoon to keep them separate.

Like boys and girls. Mothers and fathers.

When Peter pushed away his plate having barely touched the baked beans, Hannah grew suspicious.

“Not hungry, Petey?” asked his mother, thinly veiling sharp agitation with the soft tone she used with her students.

“Daddy let me get a chocolate dipped waffle cone AND sprinkles at the park today after school! And a red balloon! But it floated away. . .” Peter stuck out his tongue again, hoping the rainbow was still there to show his mother. She told him to close his mouth, and turned to Jack.

“Are you trying to bribe him with ice cream?” she asked.

“Me? Strawberries aren’t even in season, Hannah. And you don’t like pork!”

“Did you pick up the veggie burgers at the grocery today like I asked?”

“The store is on your way home from work.”

“I’m busy, Jack.”

“And I’m not? I work, too. You treat me like I’m just a child playing fireman. I have been raising our son for the last five years so you didn’t have to quit your job.”

At this last remark, Hannah threw her hands up in exasperation and knocked over her water glass, effectively dousing any fires on the kitchen table. Peter had been enjoying Da Force until his mother abruptly ordered him away from the table to take a bath so she and daddy could talk. When he protested, Jack fee fi fo fumed him, telling him that the giant at the top of the beanstalk would smell him out and turn him into a soup unless he was squeaky clean. Peter sulked upstairs.

When Jack still hadn’t come into Peter’s bedroom to read him a bedtime story two hours later, Peter decided it must have been the bubble castle he left popping in the bathtub. His mother especially hated when he did that; she would stoop to her knees on the tile and attack the tub with yellow-gloved hands and mumble about rings and porcelain.

Peter lay on top of his blankets, watching the spider that had been slowly making its way across his ceiling navigate the canyon between two tiles. He waited for his purple raisin skin to unwrinkle and waited for his father to appear at his door, with the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales they had been devouring one by one for months despite Hannah’s disapproval. Secretly, the stories frightened Peter, although he liked the cadence of his father’s voice and the whisper of a page turning. Tonight, Jack had promised his son the tale of the Pied Piper, but he never came. Da Force had lured Peter with promises and ice cream and walks in the park, but led him to naught but lukewarm bathwater and bedtimes without stories.

From downstairs, Peter could hear the gruff sound of his father’s reading voice—the one he reserved for the villains’ lines or bits about monsters—although it was faster now, louder, more syncopated, echoing up the stairs and bounding into Peter’s open bedroom door. Hannah’s harsh tongue chased Jack’s fiendish words with a whip and a tongue-lashing. She rebuked Jack’s retaliation with the same sharp, reproachful tone she used when Peter pinched her in the car or when he asked her embarrassing questions about body parts in public.

Hannah was pacing. The sound of her heels on the kitchen floor was riveting. It moved from left to right beneath Peter’s head, cyclically, backwards and forwards like Zeppelin records on his father’s turnstile.

Peter was dozing off to the escalating sound of the grim drama downstairs, but he was afraid to fall asleep. Usually, his mother would come in and flatten his tousled hair, wavy like his father’s, kiss him good night, and wish him sweet dreams before switching off the light. Lying awake in the buzzing fluorescent glow of his overhead light, Jack was afraid the sweet dreams wouldn’t come.

Since it seemed as though his mother wouldn’t be coming up to tuck him into bed, Peter resolved to call for his dreams himself. He would be a big boy, taking charge. Peter made a clearing in the Star Wars action figures that were arranged on his dresser, and clambered up the knobs on the drawers and sat among them, a pajama-clad Gulliver amongst miniature ewoks and storm troopers. He leaned out the open window, stretching his head far into the darkness, leaving his decapitated body stretched out precariously on the sill. Satellites and airplanes and constellations above were confused for wandering balloons, scouring the neighborhood roofs below, searching for little boys waiting for dreams. Cicadas hummed in the trees, their songs shrill with helium. Peter waited for the yellow ribbon tail of his red balloon to stretch across the night sky, but this time he would leap out and snag it, although his father had failed to do so earlier. Peter wasn’t afraid of heights like the quivering yellow ribbon seemed to be. He just wasn’t sure if he had enough love in him to be able to float.

(Revised April 2012)