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

“Matts!” she shouts. “Are you awake?” I hear a cry from a distant tent: “Quinn. I’m awake! Are you awake?” “Matts!” shouts Quinn again. “I’m awake! I’m awake!”
    Forty-five minutes later, the four of us are all stumbling off to a breakfast of Sugar Pops. John, if anything, looks worse than I feel. And yet neither of us feels deterred; the evening went pretty much as we’d expected. “I just heard that they do this at the Oakland Zoo,” he says.
    â€œWhen’s that?” I hear myself saying.

THE SECOND RULE of fatherhood is that if everyone in the room is laughing, and you don’t know what they’re laughing about, they are laughing about you. A few months ago when I dropped Quinn off at school I had that peculiar fatherhood feeling of having just discovered in a crowded room that my fly was unzipped. From the moment I walked into her classroom, my mere presence seemed to remind her three lady teachers of some impossibly funny joke. They choked back giggles and turned away and pretended to be very busy organizing the dinosaurs in the sandbox and counting the graham crackers in the box. After a couple of days of this I finally asked one of them what was going on, and while she said, “Oh, nothing,” she meant, “You don’t want to know.” But her smile was indulgent; whatever I had done evidently had caused no offense. I should have just let it drop. Instead, I sent in my wife to investigate.
    â€œThey wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was,” she said, when she’d returned from fetching Quinn from school. “But it has something to do with something Quinn said about your…”
    â€œAbout my what?” I asked.
    She looked pained.
    â€œAbout my what?”
    â€œAbout your penis.”
    â€œThat’s all you can tell me?”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    That evening, as I showered, Quinn rushed into the bathroom. This in itself wasn’t unusual. It’s a hobby of hers to open the shower door and spray water all over the bathroom. She likes to watch her naked father wash the soap from his eyes with one hand and prevent a flood with the other. But this time she also had something she wanted to say.
    â€œDaddy has a small penis!” she shouted.
    The phrase came a bit too trippingly off her tongue. Clearly, it wasn’t the first time she’d said it. I squinted down at her, menacingly, through soap bubbles.
    â€œ What? ”
    She took it up as a chant.
    â€œDaddy has a small penis!
    â€œDaddy has a small penis!
    â€œDaddy has a small penis!”
    As the little vixen spun out of control, I considered my options. To protest at all was to protest too much. I was as trapped as an elephant in quicksand or a politician in a gossip column. Anything I did or said in response would only make matters worse. Really, there were only two choices, silence or laughter, and so I laughed—mainly because stoicism is impossible when your three-year-old daughter is hurling insults more or less directly at your privates. “Ha ha ha,” I said, with what I hoped sounded like detached amusement. Sure enough, Quinn instantly lost interest in the whole subject.
    Surprisingly quickly, my mere presence ceased to amuse her teachers. My vanity soon recovered, as it always does, and I’d very nearly forgotten all about the incident. But then, last week, as I walked through Quinn’s classroom door, the giggles resumed.
    I went straight to my wife.
    â€œYes, they’re all laughing at you,” she said. “But it’s only because of the way you dress your daughter.”
    Since Dixie was born three months ago, it has been my job to dress Quinn. I had heretofore regarded my performance of this duty, and indeed any other duty I happen to perform, as little short of heroic.
    â€œHow do they know I dress her?” I asked.
    â€œBecause when you were out of town