Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

By Ken Sparling

From Ken Sparling’s intro: When someone asked me what Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall was about, it felt like I’d seen a beautiful tree and struggled to describe it to someone, only to have that someone say: Yes, but what is the tree about?’ You wouldn’t know how to answer that question. It isn’t the right question. The tree wasn't ever about anything. It was just beautiful.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781938604409

Ken Sparling

Ken Sparling is the author of six novels: Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, commissioned by Gordon Lish; Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, handmade using discarded library books and a sewing machine; a novel with no title; For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers; Book, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Award; and Intention | Implication | Wind. He lives in Toronto, where he works in a marketing role with the city's public library system.

Book preview

AT NIGHT, I am at home. And before I am even home, I am walking home.

~

To me, that street looked perfect. It was a perfect street. In my mind, how I remember it, everything was perfect. The curb in front of our house, for example.

If I went back there today, back to that street, and I looked at that street, I don’t think that street could compare, in sheer perfection, to the street I remember.

~

We got a magazine in at the library this morning. On the cover it said: Don’t Date Until You Read This. I was going to read it, but before I got a chance, one of the women who works here took the magazine to the lunchroom and read it while she ate her lunch.

~

The girl was twelve. She was standing in her driveway. Her legs were skinny. They looked like storks’ legs. She was holding onto the handles of her bicycle.

~

I worked at a grocery store and they paid us in cash every week. I would just stick the money in my pocket and never go to the bank. I bought Tutti a giant stuffed animal, a Mickey Mouse telephone, sheets and pillowcases with cats wearing running shoes on them, and I bought a kit and made her a Christmas stocking with her name on it. I can’t remember what else I bought. Anytime I saw something, I bought it. This past year was our eleventh Christmas together, and I bought her a plastic rack for inside the kitchen pantry door, where she can put her rolls of food wrap.

She is lying in bed beside me right now, with her back to me. I think she has finally gone to sleep. I came back from a meeting where I had just been elected to the board of directors and I came home in the rain, and there she was, on the couch, watching TV.

Now we are up here in bed and I am wide awake. I think she’s asleep. But she might just be pretending to be asleep so she doesn’t have to listen to me anymore. She might, at some point, have said to herself, I can’t listen to this anymore, closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep.

I don’t think she’s pretending. I really don’t.

But, the thing is, it occurred to me. There was a time when something like this would never have entered my head.

~

There were layers of trikes feathered out behind us, lined up against the wall. They were lined up in rows, with spaces in between them, and they were all, each and every one of them, red. Each trike was a red moment, separated from other red moments by something skinny and breathtaking. I felt short.

~

The wife came over to the bed and bent her face down close to the husband’s toenail. While she was bent over like that, she started pulling off her pants. She got her pants down over her feet, tossed them into a corner, and then stayed bent down like that, looking at the husband’s toenail.

What is it? she asked.

I don’t know, the husband said.

The wife stood there in her underwear.

It looks like a thread from a pair of my pantyhose, the wife said.

The husband went on looking at his toe.

When the wife was gone, the husband sat up and pulled the thread out of his toenail. He held it with his fingers and kept it there, close to his face.

~

There was this girl who used to take me over to a park near my house and make me take my clothes off. I always got a boner. What I am talking about here is a boner. A real boner. Exactly what you might picture in your head when you hear the word boner. I was not even six at the time. I was four. Maybe. Or five. Because I was six when my parents split up and my mom and my sister and I moved to a different neighborhood. So it had to be before I turned six that I sometimes went to that park with that girl and took off my clothes.

I guess I wanted to take off my clothes. I must have wanted to. This girl, she wasn’t holding me down or anything, or threatening me in any way. She just said something like, Take your clothes off.

I must have wanted to. I must have enjoyed taking my clothes off. I think I liked getting that boner. It was new to me, that boner. But I didn’t get the boner because I had all my clothes off and I was with a girl. Being with a girl had nothing to do with getting the boner. I was getting the boner from being out in the park like that, out in the open that way. It was having the boner that gave me the boner.

She made me sit on a swing and swing in the park, with my clothes off, with that boner of mine. As far as I know, she just watched me. She never took her own clothes off. I think I wanted her to take her clothes off. I think I must have asked her, at some point, if she, too, would be taking her clothes off. But she must have said no. She must have liked seeing me naked like that. A little boy like that with the little boner I had. She must have liked that.

It was not because I wanted to see her naked that I asked her to take her clothes off. That was not why I asked her. I asked her because I had my clothes off, and I did not want to have my clothes off and then not have her have her clothes off. It was a matter of having.

I think she must have told me she would take her clothes off. She must have told me if I took my clothes off, she would take her clothes off. In order to get me to take my clothes off, I think she must, at some point, have told me she, too, would be taking her clothes off. Now that I think about it, I think she must have left me there, swinging on that swing with my clothes off, and her running off, away from the park, leaving me there with my clothes off, swinging on the swing like that, with my boner poking in the air.

And it wasn’t a park. It was somebody’s backyard. It was a big backyard. More of a forest, really. It must have been some kind of estate, with a swing on a tree back there, and you could not even see the house that the backyard was a backyard of.

~

Sometimes when I sit at my desk at home I’ll just sit there with some papers in front of me, but I won’t really be looking at the papers. Tutti will come up behind me and touch my shoulders. She will stand behind me for a moment with my shoulders in her hands. Maybe she thinks I’m looking at those papers.

~

There was so much love. I think it forced us to eat that way. I think it forced us to eat like there was no way to get at all that love that there was. We couldn’t stand up, there was so much love. It was like all that love was right there over our heads. We were afraid to stand up. All we could do was keep sitting there, eating.

AT EIGHT weeks it’s the size of a lima bean, Tutti says. By eight months it’s like a basketball full of puppies."

I look up from the book I’m reading. I’m outside the story, which is only a swamp after all, and a swamp that’s a long way off, with the surface look of a solid stretch of land. Something you could walk over without sinking in. Just five hundred pages, you could say.

Positive pain, Tutti says. Pain with a purpose. She grunts.

The apartment building speaks. The walls speak. It’s this apartment we are living in that’s telling our story, and we are deep inside it, hardly listening.

~

This is me leaving the house. This is me not looking at the door when I’m home, and here I am not looking back when the other side of the door is behind me. Here is me not thinking much about the door.

Here I am lifting up off the bed, hearing my thoughts drift away, falling suddenly when they reach a certain radius of existence.

I was either inside the house, or on my way to being inside the house. I kept track of my time inside the house.

~

I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.

THE WOMAN who sits at the desk across from me was typing something on her computer. She would type something on her computer and then she would stand up and do some kind of a little dance. Then she would sit back down and start typing again. Each time she did the dance, she did it a little different. She would wiggle her hips a different way. Or put her feet on a different part of the floor.

~

We were all sitting in the car. There was Harold, who could not hear out of his right ear since his father hammered him in the head one night when Harold was asleep in his bed. There was Ronnie, the mechanic, who could fix any car and never charged anyone for his work. There was Bill, who had no car of his own and would ride around in anyone else’s car any chance he got and who always talked about how any day now the deal was going to come through and he would have a car of his own. The guy in the driver’s seat was J.B. It was J.B.’s car.