Free Home Game by Michael Lewis

last week, I dressed her. And when she walked into school last week they all said, ‘Mama must have dressed you today!’”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with how I dress her?”
    â€œOh, please.”
    â€œShe looks fine when I dress her.”
    â€œShe looks like a street person.”
    â€œLook,” I said, pointing to Quinn’s room. “There’s a war in there every morning. I do the best I can.”
    â€œIt’s a war because she knows you don’t know what you’re doing.”
    You might think that I would have come away from this conversation relieved. It obviously could have been much, much worse. But a similar nerve had been struck, the one that is somehow more fully exposed in the male who must constantly defend his self and habits in a house of females. There was a time not very long ago when I didn’t think twice of wearing the same hiking shorts for a week at a stretch, or even once of going a year wearing only the shirts that happened to be stacked on top. This was not sloth; this was not indolence; it was efficiency . A minute more spent dressing than was absolutely required was a minute wasted.
    In the three months that her appearance has been my problem I have done my best to instill Quinn with the same ideals. “Daddy, I’m awake!” she screams at some bleak hour when she is the first in the house to rise. I stumble painfully over the barricades and into her room and throw clothes on her before she has a chance to wake up everyone else, too. It’s true that I’m not thinking much about what clothes I’m throwing on her, but that’s because she’s three years old . She’s not supposed to care how she looks, so long as she does not look wildly dissimilar to every other three-year-old. Plus, my theory is that so long as she’s dressed to get dirty, the way small children are meant to, no one will notice that I haven’t the first clue how to do her hair.
    But a fact is a fact and I can’t deny this one: In the past month or so, Quinn has become increasingly difficult for me to dress. Every morning for a month the first conversation I’ve had with her has sounded like this:
    â€œDaddy, I want to wear a party dress.”
    â€œIt’s cold outside. Brrrrrrr! You should wear pants.”
    â€œI don’t waaaaaaant toooo!”
    â€œBut I’m wearing pants!” (Spoken cheerily.)
    â€œNo! I hate you!”
    With which she collapses howling in the corner of her closet, forehead pressed into the carpet like a Muslim at prayer. It’s been an odd experience. Quinn has throughout this difficult period acquiesced happily to her mother’s aesthetic judgment, but the moment I walk into her dressing room she revolts. If it’s forty-five degrees and foggy, she insists on wearing a skimpy dress. If it’s eighty degrees and sunny, she demands wool tights. When a day calls for pants and a T-shirt (as every day does, in my view), she calls for her hula-dancing costume and hollers until she gets it. By my lights, she is wildly unreasonable. By the lights of the women in her life, her mother and her teachers, she has finally and justifiably decided to resist my incompetence.
    I have a tendency to prove, at least to myself, that whatever I happened to do in any given situation was exactly the right thing to have done. (Small penis syndrome, my wife now calls this.) This time, I surrender to a force greater than my opinion and try a new approach.
    â€œI want to wear a party dress.”
    â€œSure! Pick a dress!”
    â€œOkay, Daddy! And Daddy, I want to wear Mama’s lip gloss.”
    â€œSure!”
    â€œGreat, Daddy!”
    And from there it couldn’t have gone more smoothly, except that the party dress hangs awkwardly, the lip gloss winds up as face paint, and her hair remains far outside my abilities to cope with. The truth is Quinn doesn’t look any better than she did when I