The Two-Thousand-Dollar Popsicle

The guy who owned the house on Calhoun Street that we had sublet had been out of town while we were there, tending to his triplets, and our correspondence had the comradely tone of people who are dealing with little children. But two weeks after we left, he popped up with a new tone. There was a problem. It involved the long, white couch in the living room—the cleaners had found an exploded Popsicle underneath the cushion. “Still in the wrapper, with the stick in it,” he wrote to my wife.

He sent pictures. The Popsicle was red.

Replacing the slipcover costs two thousand dollars. Could we please send a check?

I somersaulted into a state of grief. If you have little children and find yourself subletting a place that has a long, white, linen-covered couch you should throw sheets on it. This is obvious. And yet we did not take these precautions. Why not?

I lamented this oversight for about one second before moving on to the real issue, which was much darker—it was my fault. I have a weakness, indulged only occasionally, for sugar-free Popsicles. I like them in combination with N.B.A. basketball. I had watched the playoffs during that month in his house, and, once, (once!) had bought a box of these Popsicles. I must have let one slide down between the cushions. Then, at some impossible-to-determine point, an hour or a week later, while we were innocently going about our lives, a silent bomb exploded and incinerated two thousand dollars.

Our life in the sublet place had been mostly happy. The house was located on a prim, pretty street in New Orleans right next to Audubon Park. Sometimes, in the morning, I would stroll out into the heat shirtless, my baby boy on my hip wearing a diaper and nothing more. In the park, with its birds, water, and sweating joggers, we fit right in. I rejoiced in the feel of his skin on mine, and in the smiles his baby fat elicited. But now, hearing of the Popsicle, this indiscreet shirtlessness felt like a rationalization for being a slob.

Part of the horror of the two-thousand-dollar Popsicle was, naturally, the money. But another part was the fact that in my marriage, my wife is the neat, fastidious one worried about germs, and I am the easy-going one who doesn’t mind a little dirt. She finds this tiring. And now this happens.

“I try and keep this family organized and in one piece,” she said, despairing.

“Let me handle this,” I said. I had made a mess, I would clean it up. I wrote the guy an e-mail asking him to call me.

He called her instead.

We were in a kids’ shoe store when his name came up on her ringing phone.

I stepped out onto Broadway. She had dropped her phone a week earlier, and the glass had cracked. She was now keeping it in a Ziploc bag.

“I’d like to discuss a way of setting things straight with your couch that doesn’t involve two thousand dollars,” I said, pressing the sandwich bag to the side of my face.

His voice sounded terse, clipped, annoyed. He said that we had “treated the marble counter tops like a chopping block. But I don’t want to deal with that. All I want is the couch the way it was. It was brand new.”

I recalled my wife saying, “You can’t use a knife on marble,” to which I had responded, “It’s stone! What can a knife do?”

“Two thousand dollars is a lot for a slipcover.” I said.

“There is a one-day sale today at Restoration Hardware: ten per cent off. So it’s eighteen hundred.”

“Can it be cleaned?”

“It’s a red Popsicle stain,” said the guy. “Look, you can just not pay this. I suppose you could just walk away and….” It was hard to hear him through the bag. “It’s up to you,” he concluded.

“Let’s be clear,” I said, adapting as majestic a tone as is possible while talking into a sandwich bag. “I’m not going to say, ‘To hell with you, I’m gone, you can keep my deposit but there’s nothing else you can get out of me and if you want to sue me be my guest.’ I’m not going to do that. I just want to explore what the options are. Two thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

I thought of the white-linen chairs, which had also suffered. He did not bring these up. I told him I would send him a check.

Inside the store, my wife had picked out the shoes. The boy, a size five six weeks earlier, was now a size seven. Several sales ladies cooed at him but he only offered a long, cold stare. Then he walked away, pausing only to look back over his shoulder and blow them all a kiss. It caused an uproar of swoons.

My daughter, meanwhile, presented me with her choice: a pair of pink cowboy boots studded with rhinestones.

“No,” I said reflexively.

“But Daddy!”

New summer shoes. One pair for each kid. The Popsicle, I calculated, could have bought them twenty pairs each.

Afterwards we stood on Broadway, at a loss, literally. My daughter held the pink balloon which she had been given, to her delight, and asked me to tie it to the stroller so it wouldn’t fly away. I did this, making it extra tight. It was imperative to hold onto whatever assets remained.

We walked to Central Park, and on the way we stopped at a grocery and bought a bottle of lemonade and some sliced melon. These two items were nearly ten dollars. I did the Popsicle math.

I had a rubber ball in my pocket. I bought it with my daughter the day before. (The Popsicle, I calculated, would buy sixteen hundred of them) I bounced the ball as I walked with my little boy on my hip. He made one of his little squeaking noises, some kind of bird sound that connotes interest, and held out his hand. I gave him the ball. He bounced it on the sidewalk. He didn’t merely drop it. He threw it! I caught it. This was a delightful development. Teaching my children to play catch had been extremely high on my parental agenda.

We took turns throwing. It was heaven. Except, 1) every second or third time I gave him the ball to throw he would bring the filthy rubber thing directly to his mouth, and 2) the boy’s father had just incinerated two thousand dollars in an act of sloth and stupidity. This ball, these shoes, would have to last.

The two-thousand-dollar Popsicle made a mockery of nearly every financial consideration of the summer: How much summer camp we could afford? Would we able to rent a place in the country for a week, or a weekend? What about Whole Foods? Two thousand dollars was exactly the sort of sum I was protecting. And now it had flown out into the ether with my blessing, because I was being honorable to some stranger upset about his marble counter top. I wondered if taking the high road and agreeing to pay for the stained slipcover was also a form of sloth, a cowardly shrinking away from a conflict at the expense of my family.

The air and light were lovely as we walked along Central Park West, munching on melon slices. At Columbus Avenue my wife and I had a conference, mostly in glances, about the pink balloon. The girl loves balloons. The baby boy does, too, which is a problem—he tries to eat them. Her face explained to me that it was a safety issue. Mine replied that the children love balloons. The girl and the boy ate melon abstractedly while their pleasure was weighed against their safety. The decision was easy. My wife untied the knot I had made and let the balloon go.

“It’s so hot it can barely go up,” my wife remarked.

We watched it rise.

I struggled to remove the phone from my pocket. By now the balloon had gained altitude and was on the verge of drifting out of sight. I was frantic to take a picture of the departing balloon. This felt like the nadir of the Popsicle afternoon and I wanted to document it. I held the phone above my head and pointed to the sky. A second later the camera turned. Instead of a blue sky with pink balloon the screen was filled with image of my anguished, distraught face squinting upward. The camera had been set to reverse. My face looked Fellini-esque—that of someone from another time trapped in the modern world where no one can understand him, filled with personality to the point of being grotesque. I didn’t take the picture.

My mother was home when we got back and I told her about the Popsicle.

“A terrible waste,” she said, and looked away, stricken, shaking her head. She has given us occasional gifts—for child care, things like that. The Popsicle mocked her magnanimity.

My wife bathed the girl and my mother played with the boy while I got Restoration Hardware on the phone and up on the computer. Between the two, I deduced that the entire nine-foot couch could be had for a thousand dollars more than the slipcover I had agreed to replace. For one second I was excited.

I pondered how Restoration Hardware had managed to insinuate the innocent seeming sofa into the increasingly tricky business model by which the thing itself is cheap, but the parts you need for it are extremely pricey. This happens with printers and toner, with razors and razor-blade cartridges, with cell phones and cell-phone minutes. Now they had found a way to do it with a couch—very reasonably priced, but if you stain the slipcover, look out.

Meanwhile, the girl had been very upset while getting a bath; she had wanted a big communal bath like the one we took the other day. But she was too dirty, my wife said, and her howls of despair floated down the hall, echoing how I felt. When we all sat down to dinner—my wife, the baby, my daughter, and my mother—she was still teary eyed. I put a colander on my head and pretended to be a robot. Amazingly, this worked. She stopped crying and soon she was laughing.

The storm had cleared, as far as my daughter was concerned. Or so I thought. A few minutes later, as my wife bounced the baby on her knee and fed him tiny bits of broccoli, my daughter, five, looked at her fourteen-month-old brother and said, with crushing matter-of-factness, “I wish I had your life.”

A flurry of distressed noises rose from me and my wife. In short order the girl was sitting in her mother’s lap and I had the baby.

But after dinner my mother said, “Thank God she said that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Thank God she was finally able to say it. She has been feeling it for so long and acting up, and then finally she was able to find the words to express how she felt.”

“You think that was a positive thing?”

“It was wonderful.”

The phrase had felt like a dagger in my heart when I first heard it. Now my mother was reframing it as a gift. The depression about the Popsicle lifted a little. I glanced into the living room. There sat a lovely white couch, dignified, faintly nineteenth-century in its bearing, like much of my mother’s furniture and, for that matter, like my mother. I redoubled my resolve to never let any food enter her living room.

_Thomas Beller’s most recent books are “How To Be a Man: Essays” and “The Sleep-Over Artist: A Novel.” He is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University.

You can read his recent pieces on Culture Desk here and here.

Photograph: Photodisc/Getty Images.