Heat dome oppression at the Ramsey public pool as she’s texting her ex. Not her soon-to-be-ex-husband but her ex-boyfriend of ages ago, eons. An ex from her twenties. The one she thinks about. Not so much got away as might have been and who knows? may coalesce on the horizon in this fever dream of early July as a future possibility once again. I’m at the pool with my son reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and thinking of you.

He’s sitting on the front steps of a townhouse he inherited in Muscatine, feeling like he’s smack dab in the middle of the country. In the middle of his life. Two-story brick buildings. Empty storefronts. Mayflies swarming out of the mud along the Mississippi. He hasn’t had sex in fifteen months. He’s trying to empty his heart. He reads Epictetus every morning before suiting up to sell menswear to the last customers who wear ties: lawyers, attendees of weddings and funerals. He outfits grooms, defendants, open-casket cadavers. Why me? Am I the kid and you the parent?

Felt like it at times. She grins. Her son does a goofy Elvis hip shake at the pool’s edge. He’s obsessed with rockabilly music and pompadours. His father is in rehab for other obsessions: porn, gambling, sex. Her son thrusts his little hips at the other mothers knee-deep in the kiddie pool. Her grin melts. She imagines the water evaporating, leaving behind nothing but chlorine gas. She’d bottle it and release it straight into her ex-husband’s lungs. Burn him and his sins from the inside out. Adulterers will not inherit the Kingdom of God. Adulterers will not try to steal the mother of their child’s home out from under them.

Don’t you have a pool? He used to resent her East Coast success. Some titan of sales for a telecom company who could afford NYC just as easily—it seemed to him, in his resentment, seething along the banks of the Mississippi while grieving both his parents’ deaths despite a childhood spent tiptoeing around his father’s icy silence and his mother’s volcanic rage—as she could afford the inevitable migration to its suburbs when the hands on life’s clock landed on raising a family and good public schools and backyards. Tick. He drives 72 minutes one-way to sell suits in Cedar Rapids. A beleaguered bastion of menswear in the otherwise slob-infested heartlands. Tock. A haberdasher at the end of the line.

Yeah. I’d rather be floating at home too, but my son wanted to come. Not sure I’ll have a pool next year if my ex’s lawyer has anything to say about it.

Were his parents emotionally immature? His own mother had two emotions: anxiety and fury. Her father had been part of Saddam’s secret police before running afoul of the regime and sending her abroad—Germany, then America—leaving history to swallow up the rest of the family without a trace. His own father sold suits and had very little to contribute to any conversation unrelated to the construction, fit, or sale of suits.

Yes. And he was sexually abused as a kid by his soccer coach. It was a national scandal. My sister thinks he made it up for sympathy, but I believe him.

My grandmother was sexually abused by her father, he texts. A mosquito feeds on his neck. He smashes it with his palm, wipes the guts on his handkerchief, folds it, and lays it neatly on his thigh. Stern Prussian coal stoker who demanded the children not speak at the table. My cousin told me. Makes me wonder what my father knew. What he experienced and bottled up.

All that silence breeds emotional immaturity. She raises her eyebrow at her son’s latest antic. He turns, shakes his little butt. She thinks about slitting her ex-husband’s throat, his body floating in the pool, a bloated, pallid raft. His blood tickling down her arm in a parting gift of gruesome intimacy.

Is that in the book? Does she say that?

She says the children of emotionally immature parents experience emotional loneliness and often settle for it because it feels normal to them like their early home life. You want to come swim in the pool later?

I’m not driving fifteen hours across five states just for a swim. 

And how’d you know it’ll take fifteen hours? You been considering it?

In moments of emotionally immaturity. He actually hadn’t. He doesn’t consider anymore. He’s thrown away conceit. He wakes up. Starts his day. Does what needs doing. The rest is dreams. Futile strivings. Farts on wishful winds.

That’s why it never worked with us. You couldn’t commit to what you wanted. 

Because of emotionally immature parents?

Yeah, probably. Partly. 

I’m not sure I ever really knew what I wanted. Or what I want. Or anything.

Remember that time we fucked on that shabby couch in your living room with the balcony overlooking an alley in Woodside?

I recall.

Some of the best sex of my life. She thought so then. Now she’s not so sure. But she doesn’t want to forsake the then thought. She doesn’t want to give up on the version of herself that had such a thought.

Why didn’t you ever say so? He remembers that particular night. Three years into trying to make it in New York. Three years of tailoring and costume design and unpaid internships at clothing companies and nights in warehouses loading and wrapping pallets, unwrapping and unloading and his mother leaving long, half-incoherent voicemails about how disappointed she was in him, lobbing insults in Arabic he was glad he couldn’t understand. The light of the pharmacy consumed by the alley. His alley. Their alley. Her in his lap, one foot on each of his thighs. He held her hips. Pulled her hair, that thick, successful, Italian hair. Held her ankles. Noticed the tiny uniformity of her toes. Little goblin feet, he thought, and thinks now, imagining a goblin fleeing a group of ambitious knights sallying forth to carve deeds and titles out of his brethren’s slimy, pathetic flesh. The goblin abandons his kin to the enemies’ chivalrous blades. Deeper he goes on his little goblin feet, kicking through miscellaneous carcasses, hides and bones, the coins of fallen empires bearing the barest traces of faces of forgotten kings, scrambling ever deeper until the goblin finds safety in the heart of the mountain and becomes one with the stone, nothing left to fear but the slow erosion of the wind above, and even this he ceases to fear for the wind is actually the word and breath of his God cooing sonorously and calling him home.

I thought it might go to your head. Honestly, probably more about the firmness of the couch than anything you did. 

Fair. 

What’d you do on the Fourth? 

Read some Epictetus. Patched the elbows on my Harris Tweed jacket. It’s never too early to prepare for fall.

You were always a dapper one. What did Epictetus have to say?

He copies and pastes the quote from a photo. The beginning of philosophy is to know the condition of one’s own mind. If a man recognizes that this is in a weakly state, he will not then want to apply it to questions of the greatest moment. As it is, men who are not fit to swallow even a morsel, buy whole treatises and try to devour them. Accordingly they either vomit them up again, or suffer from indigestion, whence come gripings, fluxions, and fevers. Whereas they should have stopped to consider their capacity.

What the fuck are fluxions?

Something off in the body. Stuff moving or flowing the wrong way. Heartburn, maybe? An aneurysm. Crippling anxiety. Diarrhea of the soul.

We should get married.

I don’t know if I’m cut out to be anyone’s partner let alone a good stepdad. There is a moment on Monday mornings when he’s ingested two cups of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal with a little splash of molasses, a handful of walnuts and golden raisins, and a light dusting of cinnamon and he’s donned his suit, his perfectly tailored suit, and tied his tie, his perfectly knotted tie, when he thinks, when the thought descends on him, that he might be fit to swallow more than a morsel. That he might actually be qualified to sit at the head of the table in the feast called life. Then he begins to sweat. His collar in the mirror betrays a yellow greasiness he missed. His father’s silence echoes through his house. His mother’s rage, too, roaring out the door ahead of him, a tornado ripping through the landscape, horrors beyond the scope of the Fujita scale. Cramps and nausea. Fluxions. I also watched some kids set off fireworks in the baseball field down the block despite the rain.

Kids endure. Kids are resilient. She endured her own father’s coldness and rigid laws. Her mother’s affection, endless, but a tease too since she kowtowed to her husband’s tyranny even as she watched her children tremble and wither beneath it. My ex-husband said he wanted to spice things up which meant he wanted to watch porn while we had sex.

Did you let him?

I wanted my father to love me. I wanted to be a good wife. I didn’t want to be a prude. And he had this weird compulsion or superstition that he couldn’t fall asleep if he didn’t have sex but also basically couldn’t have sex without the porn. So he had porn going on his laptop on the nightstand and we’d have sex for hours. It was exhausting. At first, the porn felt random, introduced here and there, background noise, a tolerable kink. He kept it muted to lull me into thinking this was all ok. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see these bleached buttholes and these ugly men with enormous cocks widening their hips so the camera could catch the moment of insertion.

Is that common among adult children of the emotionally immature?

God, I hope not. Lindsay C. Gibson so far has nothing to say about porn addiction specifically. Does Epictetus?

He recommends abstaining from desire.

Your boy sounds a bit emotionally lonely.

My last girlfriend only wanted to have sex when she was drunk. She had the libido of a stone while sober, but after half a bottle of wine she became an inferno of desire. I felt molested sometimes. Pestered. She’d demand things.

Things?

Oral sex. To give oral.

Could be worse.

She’d suck my dick after sex until I got hard again even if I wasn’t really in the mood anymore. But she didn’t want me. I didn’t feel wanted. Felt like she’d sit on or suck any dick she happened upon. Not that she cheated. Not that I’m aware of. 

She sounds emotionally immature. She hasn’t had sex in a year. Sex with actual connection is an even more distant memory, a myth, something painted on an unearthed prehistoric cave. She doubts she can ever trust a man again. Her son kicks her chaise lounge, asks for money for ice cream, stares at her with his father’s eyes.

Epictetus said you should strive to walk alone and converse with yourself.

Where’d he stand on blowjobs?

He said you should take counsel with the Godhead.

Well, I like conversing with you despite what Epictetus says. All those stoics might be a little emotionally immature if you ask me. Ok. I need to go buy this brat some ice cream. Remember. Fifteen hours isn’t so far and I’m sure whatever a Godhead is, if you have it in Iowa, we have it in Jersey. She stands up, squints, examines the line for ice cream, recalls her ex-husband’s chest, bruise-colored in the light of his laptop, his eyes contusions of compulsive, pornographic lust. A shabby couch from a lifetime ago. Four hours of meetings first thing in the morning. Emails, links, attachments. She takes her son’s wet and pruning hand.

Happy fifth of July! The exclamation mark embarrasses him. He doesn’t know where it came from. He can’t remember the last time he swam. How light he must have felt in the water. Can’t remember the last time he’s touched anyone other than a customer during a fitting. His mouth is dry. He goes inside, sets out his suit for tomorrow, putters about. Fifteen hours. Almost 1,000 miles. He takes a Pepcid, cranks up the a/c.

A leftover firework pops and fizzles in the baseball field. It’s the loneliest sound he’s ever heard. It sounds like home.