The Angel and
the Skank
Written By Andrew Corsello
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Now here's the thing: Mine is an extreme temperament. Always has been. In the face of great emotional or psychic pressure, I either do or I don't. There is no deciding. There is the ghost and there is the machine, and when the crap starts flying, the machine takes over with one of two programmed responses: either a pointless, pyrotechnic, Tourette's-like display — or psychic vapor lock, an utter freezing up. Both are invariably out of proportion to what needs to be done. This tic, this flaw, explains why I've lost an impossible number of terrific girlfriends, why I could lop off a couple of fingers and still count my good friends on one hand, and why I wound up in a profession that involves me staying home. Alone.
So here in Barnes & Noble, it's a foregone conclusion that my balloon won't weather this trial. The only question is whether it's going to pop or slowly hiss itself away. (Quincy's clearly placed his bet on the former.)
And yet, and yet, here's another thing. The next thing. I don't know how to describe it except to say that my balloon begins to rise. Up it goes, to a height of about 10 feet. Then it stops. I am below it and it is above me. Yet somehow the reverse is also true. I'm also up there, an observing specter. There are my boys. There is their father. There are all those amazed strangers. This warm third-person hoveringness is not unlike what people who undergo near-death experiences sometimes describe.
A man who looks like me, but isn't, lays a reassuring hand atop my older son's pretty head.
"Q," he says with a rueful smile, "you know better." Then in an aside meant for the boy, he turns to a 60-something woman several feet away, her face a mask of alarm and scorn, and shrugs, "His mother has a filthy mouth."
Some tone, some message inside or beyond the words themselves — You are my son, you are my boy, you are all right, there's no reason to panic — passes into the boy, dissolving his rage.
I ought to be shocked. This capacity for calm flies in the face of everything I've ever been and felt. But it's been available to me now for more than three years — since Quincy's birth. Until he, and his brother in turn, showed up and drew it out of me, I'd have scoffed at any suggestion that it was there, dormant. But it was. It's been growing, too, in both frequency and strength.
Nobody who knows me believes me when I try to explain this, by the way. They know the story on me. Even my wife, who lives with it, who has seen it time and again, who benefits from it, doesn't quite buy it. But then, how could she? She knows the story on me better than anyone.
So here it is, the story on my wife and me. I'll start with her.
When Dana was a very young girl, her cousin ran away for two weeks. Several days into the search, Dana underwent a clarifying moment. Sitting with her aunt and uncle, beholding their terror and grief, she made a vow.
I will never cause such grief. I will be ... good.
An astonishing ambition: not just to act good (which is merely goody), but to be good, intrinsically. But she did it. Anybody who knew her as a child, or a teen, or a young adult, or who's in her life now, can give you the story on Dana. Hell, anybody who just meets her can tell you her story. With that great big beautiful pie-plate face of hers (her college nickname: "Pumpkin Head"), she's as emotionally open and generous a human being as you'll ever meet. The woman radiates a goodness (a goodness less sweet than deep) and a motherliness that neither competes with nor diminishes her sex appeal.
People want to be near Dana. It makes them feel, and want to be, good. There's an iconic childhood picture of Dana that I had framed a few years back, when she was out of town and I felt like reminding myself why I missed her. In it, she's 4 years old. She's seated, clasping her hands, leaning forward, and in that smile, in that befreckled, beaming-moon face of hers, is a look of such giddy and innocent embrace of everything it beholds that it breaks your heart. It now greets visitors as they enter our home.
She's a priest, you know. An Episcopalian.
Now the story on me: unpleasant child, ferocious temper, quick with the coldcock. In church I pocketed cash from the collection plate. On the soccer field my bag of dirty tricks inspired parents (opponents, teammates, and once, even my own mother) to howl for my ejection. I was told, so often and so unanimously, that I had a "dirty mind" that the words took on prophetic power. (College nickname: "Greasy." Reasons: legion.)
And the story on the two of us, on our marriage? A saint-and-skank affair, an opposites-attract relationship that draws its sustenance not from amity but from tension. ("Baby, you put the 'o' in holy," I told her the day she was ordained. Her response: "Jesus.") My contradictory needs to be good enough for her on the one hand and to corrupt her on the other, create a constructive friction — a self-replenishing source of light and heat. That's the story, then: Without my loogie-hawking antics, my endless self-indulgences, our love would wither.
Funny thing about these kinds of stories. Once they start, they're hard to stop. They acquire momentum. They metastasize. Which is to say that other people began to expand the story of our marriage — The Angel and the Skank — to include our children years before we actually had children. In the decade preceding Quincy's birth, how many times was I subject to the punchline, "God help us when Corsello becomes a father"? Not even half the number of times someone quipped, "Has that child been baptized?" or "Doesn't the court injunction say 50 yards minimum?" whenever I took somebody else's baby in my arms.
Good jokes, all of them. I laughed every time. But were they just jokes? Of course not. Like all stereotypes, these jokes were based on a there there — that's what made them funny. That there presupposed a clear picture of what kind of parents Dana and Corsello would be. Dana, a called person, a person who knew exactly who and what she was, who always knew the right thing to do in any situation, would be the patient parent, the nurturing and responsible parent, the parent who creates structure in the lives of her children. Corsello, forever steeped in his own self-regard and studied ambivalence, prone to temperamental surges, would be the fun parent, the one who lets the house descend into a Fresh Killsian dump of pizza, poop, pans, and Deadwood profanity when Mom's out of town for the week. Fun, but ... not a real parent. Because, as anyone familiar with the story could tell you, Corsello is a congenital flitter and flee-er, a man-child with the attention span of a 3-year-old. Capable, in love and work, of inspired bursts, but no good for the long haul. The unglorious day-by-day commitment that comprises 95 percent of good parenting (and, more generally, good love) would fall to Dana. When the going got tough, Corsello would do what he always does when the going gets tough: blow up or freeze up.
Next page: Then the babies came along ...
