Schroder: A Novel Page 8

But she was asleep again by the time we reached Plattsburgh. I can only imagine the dreams with which her unconscious mind explained the sensations: the thrum of the trucks as they lined up beside the passenger cars, the huge clanging of the ferry’s deck as it lowered the ramp, and the way it must have felt to have the car’s wheels detach from earth and slide away upon some other substance…

  It was 1:05 a.m.

  The Plattsburgh–Grand Isle ferry was surprisingly trafficked. I pulled onto the deck when I was signaled and shut off the engine and sat with one arm hanging out the open window, the lake breeze sweeping the deck. Meadow slept on in the backseat. Her sleep had already developed a deep, denying quality.

  I opened the door and stepped from the car, nodding at the trucker who idled behind us, high in his cab. Then I crossed the deck and climbed up the metal stairs to the passenger deck. I hid myself in the very corner, from which I could not see the Mini Cooper. I leaned over the railing, looking deep into the lake. It was odd. Suddenly I wanted to get away from her. That is, I wanted to get away from my love for her. I had forgotten about the vortex that gets created when you love a kid. Because I wanted to be with my daughter more than anything, and yet I also wanted to be free of that desire. I wanted to be free of that desire because I knew being with her had an end. You, me, death, her teenage years—what would end it? Whatever it was wouldn’t be up to me.

  There is no such thing as forgetting.

  You just have to stand it.

  Lake Champlain was as dark as oil. A necklace of distant lights flickered along its edge. Up on the observation deck, I watched the most curious scarves of spider silk float inches above the black water. There are silent people, and there are also very silent things.7 The strange silence of this windless lake was broken by the uneven reception of a radio playing pop music somewhere. The music roused me, shook me awake, back from the railing over which I was leaning recklessly. I thought of the truck driver high in his cab and wondered what the hell I was thinking leaving her there even for a second. I ran back down the metal stairs. In the backseat of the Mini Cooper, my daughter was safe and fast asleep. Within sight of the hinterland, the ferry’s engine powered down. Now we would simply skid the rest of the way. New York State was behind me. We had entered Vermont.

  RETICENCE

  As I’ve said elsewhere, my dad was a fairly quiet man. I associate him with silence, since that was the soundtrack of our lives together, whenever I wasn’t unspooling for him the tales of my schooldays in English he could only half understand. He wore a wool overcoat, and had iron-colored hair on his chest and back, and his beard was the same dark crimson color of the cherry juice he drank each day to ward off gout, and every once in a while, I threw back a glass of the same, wondering if it would thicken my own hair and make me hearty like him, capable of labor. Me, I was always getting sick.8

  Dad was not cruel. He rarely scolded me. He never forced me to do anything, except for once. After that one time, he never directed or guided me at all, and in fact, he seemed to forget the conventions of fatherhood altogether. I missed the pedantic advice he used to give me when I was very little, when we were all together, in East Germany, the cautions, the slaps to the back of the leg, all of it. For all the grimness of our life in Dorchester, his outrage might have reassured me. But the anger in him disappeared as I grew up, and as it did, our history made less and less sense to me. Why had we gone to so much trouble to get here? And so when I say that silence makes me think of my father, maybe I mean silence in the sense of censored speech, censored memory, the static of erased tape.

  ZWEITER TAG OR DAY TWO

  We awoke the next morning in Grand Isle, Vermont, our backs stiff, our car surrounded by chickens. I had parked the car there the previous night in the darkness, and I was glad to see in the daylight that I had hidden us well. The car sat in a patch of sandy ground behind a billboard advertising the Great Vermont Corn Maze. Except for the chickens and the road, there was no sign of civilization.

  Now, in any other context, I would have set out trying to secure Meadow a decent breakfast, trying to find a safe and sanitary place for us to wash up and change. But a strange thing happens to people once they start to sleep in a car. A sense of permission seemed to have settled over us both. We had not fled to Canada, but neither had we returned to Albany. We were on a road trip. It suddenly felt as pointless for Meadow to change out of her nightgown and brush her hair as it did for me to start being honest. We set off through the woods behind the billboard. I think we felt—we both felt—excited for the adventure—I think so.

  And yes, I planned to call you.

  Have you ever seen Vermont hayfields just after they’ve been mown, the large sage-colored bales casting their shadows westward at daybreak? Have you seen red barns with their doors open, exhuming a cool, night-fed shade you can feel from far away? We came out of the woods into a sea of tall buttercups, whose sheltered birdsong we could hear over the silence. Lake Champlain glittered through white birch trees at the far edge of the field. Along the puckered furrow of cleared land sat an old white farmhouse in need of fresh paint, and on the slope above this house, a groomed geometry of green and brown farmland gave a shapeliness to the innumerable hillocks. Everything hummed with morning.

  “Here,” I said to Meadow. “Come up on my shoulders.”

  I hoisted her skyward. She was heavy, but I found myself glad to labor across the field carrying her like that, because I still could. Everything we did was starting to feel touched with lastness: the last summer I could carry her on my shoulders, the last—or at least finite—days of our togetherness before I would return her to Albany and to our occasional, supervised visitations. Crickets, butterflies, and orange-banded birds burst out of the grasses. Up on my shoulders, my daughter twirled her hair with one hand and surreptitiously sucked her thumb with the other. Her eyes had that loose, satisfied look of her early years, when she gorged on love.

  We were halfway across the field when the door to the farmhouse opened and a woman with a low-hanging bosom stood watching us, her face half in shadow. I nodded and pressed on, but two small dogs had been released from the house and were now darting around my ankles amongst the knotted stems.

  “Doggies!” cried Meadow. “Daddy! Can I pet them, please can I pet them?”

  “No, sweetheart.” I glanced over at the woman. “We really should forge ahead.”

  “Please, Daddy, please! Look how cute and tiny.”

  I stood there while Meadow sank into the grasses petting the dogs, and I tried not to acknowledge their owner watching us. We were trespassers, and I was determined to avoid all imbroglios or anyone who might demand to know who we were and what the hell we were doing. Besides, she looked like the shotgun type. I heard her garbled shouting.

  I feigned deafness. “Excuse me?”

  “You looking for me?” the woman shouted again.

  “No. At least I don’t think I am. No.”

  “Because we got cabins.” The woman had stepped off the porch with some effort and down the single stair to the edge of the meadow. “I thought you were looking for our cabins. I rent them. I rent the cabins.”

  I nodded. I gave Meadow’s back a little push.

  “Sometimes people just kind of come wandering through. Because they’ve heard about me in town. That’s why I ask.” The woman put her hands on the small of her back. She was, I could see now, a rather old woman, her gray hair cut short like a man’s. “Because I only want the kind of people who hear about me in town. People who come recommended.”

  “Sure,” I called. “That makes sense.”

  “All righty, then,” she said, and clapped her hands. The dogs ran off, glancing back at us. The woman turned and labored back toward her porch. I once again surveyed the view—the splintery farmhouse, the lake, my daughter, dew netted in her hair.

  “Excuse me!” I called, scything my way toward the old woman, until I managed to rip myself free of the field. I swatted the grass from my p
ant legs. She blinked back at me with opaque blue eyes. “Pardon me for being so slow to respond. My daughter and I—” The field spat forth Meadow, looking impish with thistles in her hair. “My daughter and I are taking a little road trip together and we do, actually do need a place to stay. For a day or two before we head on.”

  The woman’s eyes shifted vaguely in Meadow’s direction. “How did you hear about me? Someone in town?”

  “No,” I said. “No, to be honest. I don’t even know which town you’re talking about. We’ve been driving all night.”

  The old woman looked disappointed. “The thing is, I like people to come recommended. You never know. It’s just me out here. You never know.”

  “Oh, I totally understand. But we’re just a dad and his little girl, who needs a place to change out of her pj’s. She could use a nice little cabin to rest and change.”

  The woman nodded, but I could tell now she had no idea Meadow was wearing a nightgown. Aha. She was perfect; she couldn’t even see. I redoubled my efforts.

  “This might sound like a whole lot of hooey to you,” I said, “but I believe we were recommended. By the land. We were drawn to it. Sorry—” I squeezed my eyes with my fingers. “I’ve been driving all night. I completely understand your policy. Come on, sweetheart.”

  “Well,” the woman said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “you can come and have a look at Cabin Two. Cabin One is rented, so you don’t get a choice. I don’t know”—the woman spoke to the ground as she walked—“the other one is rented to someone else who wasn’t recommended.”

  “The economy is terrible,” I said, taking Meadow’s hand. “We’ve all lost so much.”

  “I don’t offer breakfast or any conveniences,” the woman continued. “I don’t have innerweb. Hell, I don’t even have a phone. But most guests, to tell the truth, seem to get a kick out of that. Where you from?”

  I squeezed Meadow’s hand, gave her a wink. “Canada,” I said.

  Meadow’s eyes widened, then narrowed with conspiracy.

  The old woman led us down a gravel path that ended at the lake in a small horseshoe beach with hard gray sand. On either side of this beach stood what looked like two refurbished tool sheds spruced up with a little latticework. The chocolate brown structures were so small that they appeared as two dollhouses standing in the woods. The old woman grappled for a key ring on her belt and shouldered open the door. Meadow ran inside and bounced upon one of the narrow, iron-framed beds. The room was musty and unswept and smelled of wet wool. An oval rope rug lay on the floor, and a dozen small apothecary bottles lined the sill of the cabin’s single window in the dimness.

  “Well?” the old woman waited. “What do you say?”

  What did I say? What should I have said? Should I have said no—no, we’d better turn around and go home? I failed to save my marriage, and I failed to protect my rights as a father, and I failed in my resolve in so many ways, and now my exceptionally intelligent child must return to Our Lady of Chronic Fatigue and her deadening education, and her conventional grandparents, and her merciless mother, and we must never speak of this, and must never wonder what we would have gained if we had just said yes? And I! Should I have said, Actually, I’m needed back at my rental on New Scotland Ave. so that I can spend another evening in the shower stall scrubbing the soap scum off the sealant with a toothbrush, a glass of Canadian Club nestled in the soap basket?

  I stepped inside the tiny cabin and sneezed from the visible allergens.

  “Thank you,” I said, pumping the old woman’s hand. “We love it.”

  WHEN IN DOUBT, DON’T

  They say the recession made people look inward. Out of work, folks suddenly had time on their hands to contemplate the fabric of their souls. People who had driven themselves into the ground for decades were suddenly baking bread, reading poetry, creating sand mandalas, and asking probing questions of their priests and rabbis. I’m not saying it was good for us. I’m just saying we tried to make the best of it.

  As for me, I guess history will count me among the legions of promising young Realtors whose careers were in ascension when the real estate bubble burst. Throughout 2006–2007, I had been selling properties at a steady clip. Just ranches and bungalows in North Albany, condos in refurbished multifamilies in Pine Hills. Small-fry, starter homes, but lots of them. Not bad for someone who was barely trying. At my best, I was representing ten to fifteen properties at a time, all of which vanished from the market before the next insert in the Sunday paper. I was doing so well that I simply stopped taking calls. My success—albeit in a field for which I had little respect—appealed to my latent exceptionalism. And so, although it was the recession that brought me low, I was well into the process of subverting my career when it struck. In fact, it was probably at the pinnacle of my career (Clebus & Co. Realtor of the Month February 2007) when I lost interest. Having proved myself so handily, it was my nature to grow bored and look for a new challenge.

  The moment Meadow was born, I knew she was exceptional. First of all, she didn’t cry. Although I understand that a newborn crying is a sign of life and of vigor, I dreaded the cliché of it. To be honest, I had little interest in her until that moment. I never really wanted children. That is, I never really wanted children, but I wasn’t prepared to take a stand about it. I didn’t not want children. But Meadow didn’t cry when she was born, and this piqued my interest. I peered at her in the silver scale as she punched at the emptiness, and I thought, I’ll be damned, there’s something in this.

  Then I let two years go by before investing more than a passing interest in her. She was a sweet but somehow not yet relevant presence, not yet here. Besides, she was yours, clamped to your breast. A father gets the message.

  And so I didn’t sweat fatherhood much those early years. I was a provider. It made me proud that I could give you time at home with the baby. I enjoyed my erratic work schedule and used it to further my recreational soccer career. I became friends with my clients and with them took three-hour lunches in the winter, spontaneous trips to Saratoga in the summers. I often came home at the end of the day with cleats over one shoulder, skipping my way up the stairs, and until I heard Meadow’s crowing from behind the apartment door, I sometimes forgot that I even had a baby.

  You, of course, Laura, had changed. Meadow was your life. After you gave birth to her, you spent a disheveled year at home. You mashed your own baby food, fretted about environmental poisons, and generally ignored your careerist impulses. Sometimes, when I came home, the kitchen was chaos, as if it had been ransacked, with no sign of either of you. I would climb the stairs, and there at the top, in the steamy bathroom, you and little Meadow would be secreted in the bathtub together, clothes—your big blousy shirts and her little onesies—strewn like lovers’ clothes across the threshold.

  It doesn’t take much effort to go along with someone else’s vision of life. For Christ’s sakes it doesn’t take much effort to go along with anything. But then, one day, a force of reckoning comes to your door demanding a word with you. For me, that day occurred when I came home from soccer and Meadow—eighteen months of age, a whisper of a being—pointed to my sweaty face and said, “Daddy rains.” It made me pause, just as I had when she didn’t cry. How does a child so young compose such a pretty sentence? She looked up at me. I was thirty-four—not an old man, but old enough to spy the burnt edges on the scroll of my life. This child. Did some clue to my life lie here?

  So for me, for us, the economic slowdown presented an opportunity for spiritual growth in the form of me going bust and you getting a coveted job at the new experimental charter school in North Albany. By springtime of ’09, the real estate market was as dry as a desert. It seemed as if its previous health, the happy exchange of sellers and buyers, was a fairy tale. And this is how I came to be Stay-at-Home Dad of the Year. This is how I came to be left on the porch that fall with my three-year-old child, who was really a stranger to me, while her mother drove off in my company car, l
ooking very pretty, actually, in a flounced blouse and touchingly mature pearl earrings.

  Do I remember my first days alone with Meadow? I sure do. I remember looking down at her, her thumb snug in her mouth, her Stinky Blanket under the other arm, and me filled with complete terror. The neighborhood was as silent as a tomb. The leaves on the oak trees were still. An acorn pinged off the hood of a car. I could hear my blood in my ears. I waited for someone to approach down the street—anyone. I longed to make the sort of meaningless small talk I was so good at. How would we fill a day, two people with such a different sense of fun? I felt overwhelming pressure to do something outrageous or entertaining. I worried that she would just pick up Stinky Pillow and walk away from me. What I didn’t know was that she was helplessly bound to me already. It was me who could have wandered away from her. I could have left her outside of the fire station and walked away and—after a year or two of effortful self-justification—would barely have thought of her again.9 My daughter stood barely looking at me, as if embarrassed by her position, the ligature of her polka-dotted underpants visible above the elastic of her corduroy rompers. My heart flipped. How abandonable a child is.

  With this vague gleaning of one another’s vulnerabilities, we were off. We quickly exhausted the territory of the apartment, whose dolls and crayons had always bored me. To be outside was better. We both could breathe there. We played in the wet sandbox and the wet grass. We discovered that we could stand inside the hedge that bordered our property and thereby go unseen by the mail carrier. We discovered that on the other side of the hedge, summer’s late blackberries still clung to their scary-looking vines. We debated whether or not the hedge was ours and therefore the blackberries were ours also. (We decided yes.) We found, in the neighbor’s yard, an overgrown garden. We discovered that the scent of mint leaves, when crushed between thumb and forefinger, stayed on the skin for hours. We made grass stew. I noticed that my daughter was able to combine her mother’s scrupulous attention to detail with her father’s relentless sense of wonder. I came to see that her apparent ordinariness (her fondness for glitter and for high-pitched screams of excitement, etc.) was a kind of camouflage for the truer, inner child burdened by extraordinary perception. The child—I quickly came to see—was gifted.