Short fiction: "The Tiny Little Things"

“But I don’t know how to cry!”

I plug my nose, hold my breath and stomp my foot lightly, struggling not to die laughing at my father’s ridiculous words coming from the next room. Being his daughter, I know firsthand that he’s not lying – in 17 years I’ve never seen the man shed a tear – but to hear him say it aloud, and sounding so helpless and defeated about it, is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

“You have to cry. It’s what the viewers expect.”

“But what if I don’t want to cry?”

I ignore the toast popping up as I tiptoe to the kitchen doorway and spy on my father and the director in their reflection off the glass doors of the china cabinet as they sit on opposite sides of the dining room table. The director is an older bearded man with dark curly hair, a ball cap and sunglasses. He thinks he’s Steven Spielberg.

“You have to cry at least once, maybe twice per episode” the director says. “Reality television is just like porn, and a man crying is the money shot. Take away the money shot and the viewers will get upset and tune out.”

My father shakes his head with resignation. “I don’t know about this. I can’t just turn the tears on and off like a faucet.”

“You don’t have to. That’s the beauty of it.”

My father looks at him quizzically.

“Here,” the director says, pulling his chair around to my father’s side of the table. “I’m gonna show you a little trick we have in the industry. I call it the ‘man cry’.”

“The man cry?”

“Yes. It’s very simple. Just do what I do.”

The director raises his left hand, balls it up into a loose fist, and brings it gently to the middle of his chest, as if he were stabbing himself in the heart in slow motion. “First, the fist.” My father follows suit.

“Then the other hand.” The director raises his right hand, palm facing out. It all reminds me of the mirroring exercise they make you do in drama class on the first day. Leave it to my father to be a mirror with a time lag.

“And finally the most important part: pucker the lips, squint the eyes, look away.” The director demonstrates the big finishing move. “You see? The audience wants to see the patriarch cry, because it shows he has a heart, but they don’t want an outright blubbering wreck, because that would mean you’re too weak to be head of the household. It’s a delicate balance, and so the ‘man cry’ covers off on both ends. You get to be human, to a point, but beyond that you’re still the big bear defending his cubs.”

The director takes a moment to catch his breath. “Just remember: fist, other hand, squint, pucker, look away.”

When my father does his rendition from the top, it is finally too much to bear, and I bolt up the stairs into my bedroom and close the door behind me. I flop down onto the bed and laugh into my pillow for all it’s worth.

“Are we all going to be on television?” asks little Toby from his spot on the living room floor among his building blocks and various Disney-branded playthings. Our Dad the Robot looks at him blankly, as if he’s been asked a skill-testing question and is weighing all the data before formulating a response.

“That’s right, little guy,” his mother, Jennilyn, cuts in, tousling my brother’s dark, curly locks. “You’ll be the most famous boy at school.”

Toby climbs up onto her lap and looks her straight in the eye. “Will I have to memorize lines?”

“No, sweety. It’s a reality show. Real life. There are no ‘lines’, just real stuff happening.”

Toby looks relieved. For the school play earlier this year he had a total of one line, but was so nervous that when the time came he totally blanked. To this day I’m sure the sound of catcalls and sarcastic cheers are still reverberating in his head.

Our father pulls a folded piece paper out of his pocket, opens it up and reads it over.

“What’s that?” asks Jennilyn.

“Oh, this. The director gave it to me. It’s some kind of script for the narration they’ll have me say during the opening credits each week.”

“Well? Read it to us.”

I can see a light sweat forming around the fringes of my fathers forehead. This is clearly killing him. How the heck did they pick him to be on television? He can’t even play the part of himself for his own family.

“Hi,” he begins, in a stilted voice. “I’m Carl. I’m an accountant, and numbers are my game.” He dabs his forehead with a tissue and continues. “This is my wife. A home decorator by trade, she makes our home beautiful just by being in it.”

(This is total crap. For one thing, my step-mother is not an interior designer. She took a night class in something artsy once at a community college, and is good at matching fabrics, but that’s it. She’s just a stay-at-home thingamabob. Moreover, my father barely notices her nor anything else beautiful around here.)

My father clears his throat and continues with all of the enthusiasm of someone reading a schematic. “And then there’s my daughter. Typical crazy teenager. Gotta love her.” I see a trickle run down the middle of his forehead.

“And last but not least, our little boy. We love him to pieces, even when he tears the house to pieces.” He looks up from the page. “It says here to pause, in square brackets.” He lets a moment go by, and then resumes. “They’re my family, and I wouldn’t trade them for anyone.”

He looks up and scans our faces for reaction. Jennilyn looks at me as I sit there, determined to show no reaction whatsoever. She begins to clap. Toby starts clapping too, as if on cue. “Yay, Daddy!” she says.

I look at Jennilyn. “Since when are you an interior designer?”

My father cuts in. “She has a design background,” he says, as if implying that’s some sort of professional credential qualifying her for life into some rarified upper stratum.

“And what ‘jobs’ has she had in her thriving interior design business?”

This is making Jennilyn squirm. And it’s making my father pissed that I’m daring to ask such insolent questions. “The network is going to line up some clients for her, and will show her doing her thing on the show. I think you’ll be proud of her work.”

She is now sporting a full-on blush, and looks like she wants to crawl under a rock. I decide to ease up. I may not like her, and she will never be worthy enough to breath the same air as Mom, but she’s still human. And if push came to shove, I’d take her over Harvey Hemorrhoids. (Mom was right to leave him. I just wish she were still here to enjoy life without him.)

Besides, as much as I hate to admit it, Jennilyn is pretty cool despite her deeply-flawed taste in men. Under radically different circumstances, she and I might have gotten along famously. Also, I secretly envy the mellow Deadhead vibe she exudes. Maybe too young to have been a flower child way back when, but a real hippie nonetheless, with her long, brown-with-grey hair and flower print dress, and sandals. The fact she married a hunk of anthropomorphic machinery and then let it impregnate her is the Achilles’ Heel of her credibility, not to mention endlessly puzzling. Such a miscalculation must point to some deeper flaw.

Maybe that’s it – it’s not that I dislike her in and of herself, but rather it’s that she's an extension of him, the man who made my mother feel so inconsequential.

Later that night I’m still wide awake. I look over at the clock radio, which reads 12:35, and decide I may as well sit up and read and see if that makes me sleepy. First, though, I go downstairs for a glass of water.

He sits at the kitchen table with a bunch of papers stacked beside his laptop. He types something in, crosses something off a sheet of paper with a pencil, and then looks up as the floor creaks under foot as I step into the kitchen. He doesn’t ask what I’m doing or how I’ve been. In fact he doesn’t say anything. Nothing but a blank stare. Rather than look away or avoid him, I simply stand there and hold his gaze, unafraid.

“When is my birthday?” I ask.

“What?”

I fold my arms and look at him with suspicion, not letting him off the hook. “When is my birthday? If numbers are your game, shouldn’t you be able to account for when your only daughter was born?”

“Stop being ridiculous.”

“No. Tell me my birth date.”

I can see in his eyes that he wants to either tell me to go to hell or just cut and run. But he can’t very well do either. He’s stuck without a simple answer to my question, and its killing him to be put on the spot.

“Go to bed. You have school tomorrow.”

“That’s what I thought,” I say, pouring a glass of water from the tap and going back up to my room.

I wait with my father and Toby at the show’s main production office, which consists of some rented space within a campus of soundstages and offices for other production companies. Jennilyn is in another part of the building, and will soon be previewing her makeover. (The producer felt she didn’t look "designy" enough. Unless, of course, she’s designing batik wraps to sell on a consignment basis in quaint little craft shops up cottage country way. Personally, I think she’s fine the way she is, but what do I know?)

Meanwhile, my father is glued to his laptop while Toby throws a paper airplane back and forth across the room, stopping every now and then to make adjustments. He folds the outer tip of a wing to make it fly in a corkscrew trajectory. “Lookit this, Dad!” he says excitedly before launching it again and pretending to shoot it out of the sky with a Gatlin gun as it corkscrews to its demise somewhere off the coast of France, next to a water cooler.

“Good job,” my father says, not even looking up from his work.

“That was awesome,” I exclaim, so that Toby knows that at least somebody is paying attention. He retrieves the plane from the cliffs of Pointe Du Hoc when the producer steps into the room and clears his throat. We all look up.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, looking very proud of himself, “I present to you our new and improved leading lady.”

He steps out of the way and at first I think someone else is standing there. It is a woman (I think) clad in black Capri pants and a black turtleneck, sporting short, spiky platinum blond hair and thick-framed glasses with some ridiculous flowery pattern on the arms. She is frowning angrily, and I can barely breathe – all the air has somehow escaped from the room. She looks at my father, who offers no sign of reaction. (Shocking!) Then she walks towards Toby and kneels in front of him. He recoils.

“So,” the producer says. “What do y’all think? Doesn’t she look marvellous?”

I’m wincing, praying to God it’s not obvious as we all sit there awkwardly, saying nothing.

“That’s not my mommy,” says Toby quietly, finally breaking the silence.

Jennilyn is shouting all the way home as Toby and I sit in the back, terrified at this display that is so completely at odds with her usual Type B demeanor.

“Carl! You said they’d be giving me a makeover, not turning me into Andy-fucking-Warhol!”

“Honey, it’s for-”

“Don’t honey me!”

“It’s just for the show.”

“Screw the show!”


Maybe it was because I was just on their turf and allowing myself to get caught up in the showbiz zeitgeist, but once we’re home I go online to see if I can learn anything about our show’s producers, and end up in a subreddit where stars of their previous masterpieces anonymously vent about feeling mocked and exploited by the whole experience.

“Clearly,” says one person, “their intent is not to educate nor enlighten, but to satirize and ridicule their unwitting subjects, particularly through editing. They’ll completely alter the flow and timing of a scene to make you look as idiotic as possible.”

If their intent is to make my father seem obtuse, then they’ve got themselves a stunningly easy target. For a very brief moment I feel tentatively sorry for him. Then I push those feelings out of my mind.

Screw him for forgetting my birth date.


A few weeks later, and it’s the first day of shooting. In this ‘scene’, my father is to hug and kiss Toby and I and tell us to pay attention at school before heading off to work. Of course, it’s after lunch on a Saturday, which makes it all very weird.

Toby stands next to me in the kitchen, sporting his Sponge Bob backpack, while the director goes over some notes with my father as the hair and makeup people give us all some last-minute touch-ups.

“In this scene, you’re seeing the kids off before they leave for school,” the director says very quickly and excitedly. It’s obvious he’s hopped up on far too much coffee. “And what you’ll do is tell them how much you love them both. And we’ll have them do a voice-over narration saying how you get mushy so easily. And then I want you to start rockin’ the man cry, alright?”

(At the top of my list of the worst violations of the English language as used on TV by old people desperate to seem hip is the all-purpose overuse of “rock” as a verb.)

I bite my lip, worried that I may not be able to hold it together. Everyone is going to hate me.

“Action!”

My father kneels down in front of Toby, gives him a hug, and then stands up and does the same to me. He puts a hand on each of our outer shoulders.

“Listen,” he says. “I just want both of you to know that I love you both very-”

He cuts himself off in mid-sentence and brings his fist to the center of his chest. From my vantage point I can see the director in the dining room nodding with approval as he sits in front of a video monitor with a set of headphones over his ears. I notice his sense of excitement build as my father then raises his other hand (palm facing us), squints, puckers and looks away.

I suddenly explode with laughter.

“CUT!!!”

I saw it coming but feel somehow like I’ve been caught off guard. (To be fair, how does one prepare for something so lame, yet so excruciatingly funny?) The director removes his headphones and stomps into the kitchen, furious.

“What the hell is this?” he screeches.

I walk away, holding my gut, unable to stop laughing. They are all looking at me. Nobody finds this nearly as amusing as I do except Toby, although he’s starting to giggle only because he’s young enough that his instinct is to copy his big sister.

“Are you or are you not going to take this seriously?” the director asks. “We have about three different unions on site here, and the clock is ticking!”

I wipe the tears from my eyes and try to settle down. Just when I get back into position and my laughter subsides, it starts all over again. This is intensely pleasurable – after all, who doesn’t love a good laugh? – yet it feels like I’m having some sort of psychotic break, like I’ve been possessed by a cackling demon who just won’t stop.

And now even Toby looks worried.

The pilot wrapped a few days ago, and now life can go back to "normal". After my laughing fit they decided to de-emphasize me as much as possible for the rest of the shoot, which is just fine by me. It’s now in post-production and, after a private screening for us, the producer will show it to some suits and from there who knows. For now I’d rather forget it ever happened.

I’m walking home from school when out of nowhere Jennilyn pulls up to the curb from behind me, leans toward the open passenger window and offers me a lift home. I hesitate for a moment, and then hop in.

“I thought we should talk,” she says as we pull away from the curb. (Uh-oh. The standard-issue Caring Stepmom’s Heart-to-Heart Talk With Her Troubled Teen Stepdaughter talk.)

At the next intersection we hang a left, and are now travelling away from the house.

“Listen, I know you and your father aren’t that close.”

Yeah. Same house, different universe.

“And I know that someday he’s going to have a lot to answer for. You and Toby deserve so much more of him than he allows. Often times I feel I deserve more of him too, but you and your brother are ahead of me in line, know what I mean?”

I gaze out the passenger window at the endless procession of trees and houses passing by, imagining that it’s us that are motionless, and that it’s the landscape that’s moving. Anything to distract myself from this.

“I realize Carl is hard to get close to, but underneath it all he is the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.”

I look at her with a raised eyebrow. Lay off the Kool-Aid, I say to her inside my head. She continues.

“There are reasons why he is the way he is.”

“Such as...?”

“It’s not for me to say. That’s a conversation you’ll have to with him someday once he's ready to broach the topic. For now, all I can tell you is that he doesn’t choose to be that way, and that he's still learning what makes him like that. I wish I could tell you more but it’s simply not my place.”

“What good does that do me?”

“Your father doesn’t perform on cue, but that’s okay. If you look for the tiny little things he does, and try to understand them, you’ll see the man I married. But you have to look for the person, not the performer.”

A few right turns later, we are heading back towards home as her words sink in.

We settle into our seats in a room at the facility where the production offices are located. Jennilyn squeezes my father’s arm as the large flatscreen TV goes momentarily black as a DVD is loaded. Suddenly, the image of our house fills the screen to the accompaniment of happy-kooky filler music.

Cut to: my father looking up from his laptop and waving.

Voiceover: “Hi. I’m Carl. I’m an accountant. Numbers are my game.”

Cut to: Jennilyn showing fabric samples to her pretend clients. She turns to the camera and gives it a pretend smile.

Voiceover: “This is my wife. A home decorator by trade, she makes our home beautiful just by being in it.”

Cut to: Toby bouncing a soccer ball off his knee. “And last but not least, our little boy. We love him to pieces, even when he tears the house to pieces.”

Cut to: the three of them enclosed in a picture frame, smiling and waving at the camera.

Voiceover: “They’re my family, and I wouldn’t trade them for anyone.”

Jennilyn looks back at me, seeing my look of bemusement. She then turns to my father. “Where is your daughter in all this? Where is she? Why wasn’t she in the opening?”

“I don’t know,” he says. Even from behind I can tell he’s upset. It’s like he has some kind of negative energy coiled-up inside him, and he doesn’t know how to release it.

Jennilyn looks back at me and whispers: “I’m so sorry.”

I get up and leave the room. I don’t want to be involved in this stupid show, anyway.

On the ride home I stare out the window. According to national television, I soon won’t exist anymore. I will be erased from my own family. I imagine my image fading to nothing in our family photos and home videos, like the guy in Back to the Future.

I look at the trees and houses passing by, feeling myself like something that is just passing by.

I turn out the light before going to bed and look out the window, down at the driveway. I see my father sitting in the front seat of the car. From this angle I can’t quite make out the expression on his face.

I wait awhile for any signs of movement - no such luck. If his is an android, as I’ve long suspected, perhaps he’s recharging himself off the car battery through a connection to the cigarette lighter.

Yes, this snotty 17-year-old would love to secretly mock him from up here, but something else is seeping in that I can’t quite place my finger on.

I get into bed and try to forget everything. All of it.

Arriving home from school, I see a late-model Lincoln Towncar in our driveway. It looks familiar. I go in through the front door and can hear my father in the dining room talking to some deep-voiced man. I stand and listen for a moment.

“You do realize this could be a long and drawn-out process,” says the man’s voice. “They will have anticipated moves like this, particularly if they’ve faced legal challenges previously. Like I said before, in showbiz nothing is left to chance.”

“I don’t care,” I hear my father say. “They never told me they were going to get rid of my daughter and make the rest of us look like jackasses. I want to keep this thing off the air, whatever the cost.”

Fearing that I might be discovered, I tiptoe up the stairs to my room and sit quietly on the bed. I can still hear their voices but can’t quite make out the words, even though I can tell it’s legalese of some sort or another.

Just then I notice a small, folded piece of paper sitting on my bedside table, held in place by an empty water glass. I pick up the paper, unfold it, and see something in my father’s precise little scrawl:

January 14, 2001

That’s it. No salutation, no extraneous data.

I smile, feeling the weight of something lift from my shoulders. I hold the piece of paper to my heart, and then get up and walk down the stairs and poke my head in the dining room doorway, where I see my father and his lawyer sitting across the coffee table from each other with some papers splayed out between them.

“Hi, Dad,” I say. (This is the first time I’ve said “hi” to him in a long, long time, and the first time I’ve addressed him as “Dad” since before the divorce.)

He looks up at me with what I normally mistake for a blank look, and for a moment I can see vulnerability of some sort. I can see a person who finds human contact difficult and laborious. A hurt and fearful person, but a person, nonetheless.

He looks back down at the paperwork, then at his lawyer, then back up at me and holds eye contact for another moment. It’s taking everything he can muster, but that’s okay. I find myself smiling gently at him and then head back up the stairs to my room.

It may not make for great television, but as real life goes it’s a good start.