"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. “Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then awalk, guy,
a walk to thepark !”

Off they went.

First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants
together when they did not have some other day care to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit
depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids but there it was;
without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.

Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement
for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb
on, and so he scampered around the colorful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things,
ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause
problems. “Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!”

Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick
could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant
red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared
sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in
something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.

Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s
hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a
complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It
happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other
man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just
wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to D.C. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for
that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the
realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same
time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had
perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on
the road; and being the good guy he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the
other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more.
So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.

And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been
doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid
number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to
get to him.

So now Charlie sat there in Gymboree, hanging with the moms and the nannies. A nice situation in
theory, but in practice a diplomatic challenge of the highest order. No one wanted to be misunderstood.
No one would regard it as a coincidence if he happened to end up talking to one of the more attractive
women there, or to anyone in particular on a regular basis. That was fine with Charlie, but with Joe doing
his thing, he could not completely control the situation. There was Joe now, doing it again—going after a
black-haired little girl who had the perfect features of a model. Charlie was obliged to go over and make
sure Joe didn’t mug her, as he had a wont to do with girls he liked, and yes, the little girl had an attractive
mom, or in this case a nanny—a young blonde au pair from Germany whom Charlie had spoken to
before. Charlie could feel the eyes of the other women on him; not a single adult in that room believed in