Where We Going, Daddy__ Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other - Jean-Louis Fournier [23]
Obviously Thomas is not taking part. He’ll be a spectator. They’ll take him outside and position his wheelchair by the sports ground to watch the proceedings. I’d be surprised if he was interested, he’s more and more locked away in his own world. What does he think about?
Does he know what he meant to me, more than thirty years ago, the luminous little blond cherub who laughed all the time? Now he looks like a gargoyle, he dribbles and doesn’t laugh anymore.
At the end of the competition they announce the results and hand out medals and cups.
I’d have loved to have children I could be proud of. To be able to show my friends your diplomas and prizes and all the cups you would have won for sports. We would have displayed them in a cabinet in the living room with pictures of us together.
In the pictures I would have the smug, satisfied smile of an angler photographed with the huge fish he’s just caught.
When I was young I wanted to have swarms of children when I grew up. I could see myself climbing mountains and singing, crossing oceans with mini sailors who looked like me, traveling the world at the head of a jubilant gaggle of bright-eyed inquisitive children whom I could teach all sorts of things, the names of trees and birds and stars.
Children I could teach to play basketball and volleyball, I could have matches with and not always win.
Children I could show pictures to and play music for.
Children I could secretly teach to swear.
Children I could edify with every possible rendition of the word fart.
Children I could tell how a combustion engine works.
Children I could invent funny stories for.
I didn’t get lucky. I played genetic lottery, and lost.
“How old are your children now?”
What the hell do you care.
My children can’t be dated. Mathieu is beyond all that and Thomas must be around a hundred years old.
They’re two stooped little old men. They’re not all there in the head but they’re still kind and affectionate.
My children have never known how old they were. Thomas still chews an ancient teddy bear, he doesn’t know he’s old, no one’s told him.
When they were little we had to change their shoes and buy the next size up every year. Only their feet grew, their IQs didn’t follow suit. Over the years they seem to have gone down instead. They’ve made progress in reverse.
When you’ve had children who play with building blocks and have teddy bears their whole life, you stay young. You don’t really know where you stand anymore.
I’m not sure who I am now, I’m not sure where I’ve gotten to, I don’t know how old I am. I still think I’m thirty years old and don’t care about anything. I feel as if I’ve been launched into some huge practical joke, I’m not sensible, I don’t take anything seriously. Here I am still talking nonsense, and writing it. My road comes to a dead end, my life ends in deadlock.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Jean-Louis Fournier is a writer, humorist, and television producer. He is the author of a number of successful essays and novels in which the humor and humanity of his style always shine, among others Il a jamais tué personne mon papa (My Daddy Never Killed Anyone) (Stock, 1999) and Mon dernier cheveu noir (My Last Black Hair) (Éditions Anne Carrière, 2006).
NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
ADRIANA HUNTER studied French & Drama at the University of London. She has translated nearly forty books including works by Agnès Desarthe, Amélie Nothomb, Frédéric Beigbeder, Véronique Ovaldé, and Catherine Millet, and has been short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice. She lives in Norfolk, England, with her husband and their three children.
FERN KUPFER is a novelist who has written for popular magazines including Redbook, Family Circle, and Women’s Day. For more than a decade she wrote a column for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, and is the author of Before and After Zachariah,