A Pair of Balls

Don’t get excited. She’s here, but these things take time. You know that. Jason uncoils from his emotional fetal position and watches her walk toward him. Beige suit the color of her long, curly hair, neckline same as last time, down to there, short skirt three feet from the ground, and best of all, those balls on her chest bouncing on either side of the strip of skin.

She sees him. She can’t help it. He’s sitting at the receptionist’s desk. But this time, she doesn’t breeze by. This time she stops. Why not? They’re old friends.

“Daddy,” she pronounces, in a breathy voice, walks up to him and offers her hand.

Then she takes it back. He’s bereft of the fleeting sensation that he has flown – that he was way up above where he is, because his heart has soared. A beautiful woman can do that. And does. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. The result is the same. Smitten.

She backs away, continuing to look at him, then spins around and goes into Clyde’s office. What a treat for lucky Clyde.

Last time, he couldn’t help but hear. This time, his ears are perked.

She gets right to it.

“Mr. Waters, I’m going to need to shorten my hours. I will be able to work afternoons, but not mornings.”

“May I ask why?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Yes. What personal reasons?”

“I’m not telling. That’s what makes it personal.”

“We don’t hire part-time help,” Clyde says.

“I am not part-time help, Mr. Waters. I’m your top salesperson. I intend to remain that.”

“But you want to work part-time,” Clyde whines, “and we don’t hire part-time workers.”

“Ah,” she says. “That’s quite right, Mr. Waters. You don’t hire, but you do employ, part-time workers. All the other salesmen are part-time. They take time off to get their nails done, to shop for clothes, I’d hate to tell you what some of them take time off for. When I work, I work. That’s why I’m worth three of them.”

“There’s no way I can do it. It’s against regulations.”

“Then don’t tell anybody. I’ll still be working more hours than the others. I’ll take a long, early lunch hour. Nobody has to know.”

But Jason knows, and he knows that they both know he can hear them. What does it mean? Nothing. It means that he’s nothing. It means he’s so low down on the totem pole that he can know big secrets because he is powerless, and of such insignificance.

He’s shocked when Clyde agrees to the deal. But then maybe she shook Clyde’s hand, too. He’s overcome with jealousy. It comes on quick and hot.

When she steps out of the office, he’s got control of himself. He tuned out their good-byes by tackling an actual hard problem, a pleasure he usually saved for the end, and savored. He was involved in it when she approached his desk.

“Daddy, listen,” she says in the melodious voice. “I don’t know who you are, but I like the way you look, and what you said last time. Even if you were joking. You’re a good, solid man.”

His heart is beating in his throat now. He can’t talk. But he doesn’t have to. She leans down over him. The boobs (such a gross word) are on either side of his face. His nose, for one sublime second, is in the flat between. He’s afraid to breathe.

She retrieves a pen from the desk holder, takes one of his pieces of paper without asking, and writes, www.dadsareus.org on it. “Go there,” she says.

The second he has seen the last of her twitchy little butt, he does. As perhaps you did too, but you found nothing there, as Jason’s world is only partially yours. When he clicks on the site, it opens up with a picture of what is obviously a father and son. Dad’s got his arms wrapped around Sonny, in the baseball hug every fortunate boy knows. The bat’s in the boy’s hands, but Dad is making sure it all turns out right.

Another dad is putting a band-aid on his little girl’s scraped knee. Yet another is giving his daughter away at her wedding. And the final pièce de résistance, a dad with his son, celebrating his grandson’s birthday. The boys are miniature versions of Dad. The girls are angels.

Just above the bottom of the screen is a word that pulses between “Dads” and “Tads”, and at the very bottom in small letters the slogan: “Dads don’t want their Tads aborted.”

If you click in the wrong place, you get horror flicks. When a dead fetus showed up, he leapt back to the previous screen. So. She was serious. But why had she given this to him? He linked to “Stories”.

You don’t want to hear them. You don’t have to hear them. Men whose children have been murdered by their mothers. Or so they assert. What right does she have –the child is half his. His DNA, his posterity, his reason for being on Earth. (There are men as well as women who feel this way, he is surprised to find out.)

What’s he supposed to do? Be sympathetic. This is purely a propaganda project, meant to change people’s perceptions of abortion.

Why is it, one man asks, that a father is expected to take part in the delivery – to feel the pain, if he possibly can. He’s expected to do his share of the staying up nights feeding the baby. He takes it to day-care. He diapers it. Because it’s his. Then why is it he gets no say in whether it lives or dies?

Jason has never really thought about this before. It’s always the woman’s right, has nothing to do with a man. But the logic of the argument appeals to him. Besides, he’s down on women right now. They’re hypocrites. All that blather about the children, then they go off and desert their own, the minute something more exciting than child-rearing shows up.

The bitches! There, he said it. He’s getting really angry now.

What right do they have to run the show? Because they weren’t allowed to run it before, now they’re the decision-makers? They’re the ones with the life and death of others in their hands, and men don’t have a word to say because some of their predecessors were pigs and denied the rights of women. He never had. Never before, that is, but now he’s feeling a little different. He’s feeling like an underdog, a member of a group that is going down, stepped on by women on their way up. He’s also a white male, so he has an additional handicap. He’s the lowest of the low.

It wasn’t just his wife, either. The manipulative bitches were everywhere. Wagman’s wife, for instance. If he drank all the wine, she couldn’t have had much, so she knew he was being dosed. She was in on it.

Even this woman – the bombshell – what the hell was her name? He strained his memory. DuBois, he had heard Clyde say. She was trying to convert him. Hey, at least she had something to offer. Just the sight of her made him stand up and salute.

There were others. That woman, Adele, who had taken Brenda shopping and completely turned her around. Had her dressing like a whore, with that slop all over her face. Three hundred dollar shoes. She used to rail against what she called whimsical waste.

As a man, he was feeling pretty goddam squeezed by these women, and not in a nice place.

He’d been scrolling through the “facts” about powerless fathers. There at the bottom of the section was the only thing he had to do – the only thing he could do, to show his solidarity. Give his name and e-mail address so he could be counted. They didn’t want anything – his address, his mother’s maiden name – but he hesitated.

What was he so fucking afraid of? He was turning into a milquetoast. Women were doing it to him. He’d stand up with the men and be counted. He tapped in the information.

For the first time in a few days, he felt like a man.