Read Online Home Game by Michael Lewis - Free Book Online Page A

The Fairyland staff lays out a buffet banquet of hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, and chocolate and vanilla cupcakes: food that not a single toddler can find anything to object to. Not a single vegetable! Not one fruit! For the first time since I have become a father I dine with my child, alongside other parents and their children, unaccompanied by torture-chamber shrieking. All the children eat happily, greedily, so that they can scramble away as quickly as possible to the Fairyland rides, which stay open until nine p.m. But there’s more! At eight o’clock at night, when most of them would be in bed, they attend an expertly executed puppet show. They watch the story of Cinderella with giant sacks of popcorn on their laps and their mouths wide open. At eight-thirty a woman dressed as a gypsy leads them in song. At ten p.m. they stumble, exhausted and sated, back to their tents. There begins the second part of a night in Fairyland.
    About two years ago, addled with lack of sleep, my wife and I adopted a firmish policy not to further encourage Quinn to view the middle of the night as the most interesting part of the day. We shut the door on her at nine p.m. and do our best not to hear or see her until seven in the morning. And it has worked, so far as we know, though she still tends to get up a few times a week around three a.m. and holler at the top of her lungs. But as a result of our policy I know next to nothing about her sleeping life. That changes this night.
    We crawl into the tent at ten. For the next hour Quinn amuses herself by punching the roof and racing outside and trying to climb inside other people’s tents. When even that gets old, she settles into her sleeping bag and instructs me to read her a book. Eleven-thirty at night must feel to a three-year-old like four in the morning to an adult, but Quinn lasts, along with every other child in the camp, until eleven-thirty. During the second reading of Harold and the Purple Crayon , she falls asleep. Here is a rough log of what occurs during the next six hours:
    12:15. Quinn pokes me in the head until I wake up. “Wake up, Daddy. Wake up, Daddy,” she says. “What?” I say. “I need you to snuggle me!” she says. I curl up next to her. She falls back to sleep.
    1:00. “Daddy!” I wake up and find her seated bolt upright inside the tent. “What?” I say. “You forgot to put bug spray on me!” It’s true. I apply insect repellant. She falls back asleep.
    1:38. “My sleeping bag came off!” “What?” I say. “My sleeping bag!” she wails. I cover her up. “No!” she says. “I want your sleeping bag!” As her sleeping bag is four feet long, this presents a problem. We negotiate and compromise on both of us sleeping under both sleeping bags.
    3:15. “An owl is in the tent!” Again, she’s bolt upright. “What?” I say, scrambling for the miner’s headlamp. By the time I find it, she’s fast asleep.
    4:12. “Daddy.” I wake up. This time she’s awake, alarmingly alert and rested. I am not. “What?” I ask. “Daddy, I just want to say how much fun I had with you today,” she says. Actual tears well up in my eyes. “I had fun with you, too,” I say. “Can we go back to sleep?” “Yes, Daddy.” Then she snuggles right up against me for what I assume will be the long haul.
    5:00. The fucking birds are actually chirping. Quinn, of course, awakens with them, turns to me, and begins to sing:
    There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name, O!
    B-I-N-G-O
    B-I-N-G-O
    B-I-N-G-O
    And Bingo was his name, O!
    â€œIt’s still sleepy time,” I mutter. “Is it time to wake up, Daddy?” “Not yet.” Miraculously, she falls back to sleep.
    5:45. It’s still dark outside. I wake up to find Quinn standing in her pink slippers at our tent door, which she has unzipped.