Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  Even with the windows down I could smell my dad’s shampooed hair. He kept both hands on the wheel and concentrated on the traffic. Jessica was howling, and now so too was Eugene. If the backseat arguments grew too shrill, my dad gave a low but explosive reprimand that no one noticed. Now, stop that, god damnit! Kids! Stoppit! His outburst would fade before it really amounted to anything. Like a cork popping from a bottle of champagne and then nothing more. The whining also decreased. The wind worked its way through the car.

  We reached Clayton, and my dad idled in front of the school, a modern, redbrick building with the words Ralph M. Captain Elementary School etched in the façade. Eugene and Jessica’s eyes were dry, their argument about the house forgotten; now they discussed who would get to carry the soda bottle to lunch. We climbed from the car and slammed the doors, the bell rang, and my siblings hurried toward the entrance. I spun and waved on the sidewalk, the half-full two-liter bottle rested like a newborn in my other arm, but he didn’t see me, he was busy snapping on his turn signal. Then he drove off and disappeared around the corner, and we wouldn’t see him again until the Earth had turned a half revolution on its axis.

  In the meantime, a fleet of yellow school buses waited. My sister and I were in the same class. The door to our bus clapped open, and our teachers, who were all sports fanatics and fervent Americans wearing baseball caps and shiny sneakers, stood applauding in unison, shouting: Come o-on, let’s go-o! Everything happened so fast, like a military exercise, and we strove not to be the last to clamber onto the bus and sit with our knees pulled up flush against the seat ahead of us. On odd days we were driven to a swimming pool in a park where we were given swim lessons, and on even days there was free swimming in the same pool in the afternoons. No matter what, we were in the swimming pool every day. That was how we got our daily bath.

  One of the first mornings after I’d arrived, the bathroom door between my sister’s and my room was thrown open. I’d locked all three doors carefully, I thought, but the locking mechanism was incomprehensible, instead of handles the doors were equipped with a round knob with a button in the center that you had to press down, but each time I tested it, I ended up unlocking the door. There was nothing for me to do but trust the lock. I was standing in the bathtub, in the process of washing my hair with the sprayer, when the water suddenly stopped and she stood before me, their mother, turning the nozzle off.

  Höt vater! she shouted. Are you out of your mind?

  I didn’t manage to think or respond or understand before she was yanking me all the way downstairs to the basement where she’d been doing laundry. She pointed at the water pipes. My hair dripped.

  How möch do you think that costs?

  It took me several seconds to understand that she was talking about the hot water that she’d just heard running through the pipes, on the way up to the third floor, up through each level of the house, because of my showering needs. Why do you think you go to that expensive skool? I had no idea, to pass the time perhaps. Because they take you to a pool. If we didn’t go there, she could spend all her time bathing small children. And what did I think would actually happen if her children took a shower like that? It would ruin her, that’s what would happen. Who do you think pays for your skool?

  My dad?

  Your daddy? She laughed. Your daddy döesn’t pay for anything. If it wasn’t for her toiling the way she did, I wouldn’t be able to go to that school or for that matter live in this big fine house. But you are probably too spoilt to think about that.

  •

  My siblings went to that same school the entire year, and to make that possible, she’d had to purchase real estate in the suburb of Clayton, close to the school. My connection to the address was tenuous at best, and my dad had been nervous that they wouldn’t accept me. One of the first days after I arrived, we drove to the school to show them my passport and explain to them the convoluted nature of our ties in the hope that we could convince them to let me go to school with my siblings.

  In the car he went over what to say if they asked about X, and if they asked about Y, his concerns piled up and found expression in his movements, he kept jerking the gear shift and speeding up between stoplights as if it were a deadline he was going to miss. If we couldn’t convince the school administrators, he and his wife would have to figure out what to do with me over the summer while my siblings were in school. Maybe I could go to work with him every day? Or maybe I could stay at home with his wife? Probably some combination, he told himself. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

  Once we reached the school, the whole thing took less than five minutes. We stood in front of a desk, and the woman seated there didn’t even look at my passport. She looked at me. Oh my gosh, did you come all the way from Den-mark to spend time with your dad? I nodded. Her mouth was large and moved a lot when she spoke, and she was so friendly I didn’t know what to do with myself. Americans were on the whole so friendly. My dad was also friendly, in a more subdued way, but the rest of the family was more European, more reserved. My siblings’ mother wasn’t reserved, she was something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. American, in any case, she was not.

  Good for you! the woman said, making a particularly supple motion with her mouth. So-o where has he been taking you so far? Have you been down to see the Gateway Arch yet? I looked up at my dad. I didn’t know what he’d planned in terms of all the different attractions, but I definitely dreamed of going up in the Gateway Arch. I’d seen the structure on a postcard and from the airplane, it resembled one leg of McDonald’s yellow M and swung across the city in a way that defied the laws of nature. It was said that you could take an elevator all the way to the top, from where you could see the entire city and the Mississippi River flowing below it, and if it was windy, I’d heard, the top of the arch supposedly rocked back and forth. I spent a lot of time wondering how an elevator could operate in such a curved form, and why the arch didn’t topple in the wind, and what it would be like to stand at the top of a rocking arch 630 feet above the surface of the earth. Four and a half times taller than the Round Tower in Copenhagen. I dreamed of going to the top of the arch, especially on a windy day. But my dad didn’t think it was much of an attraction, in fact, he thought it’d be boring for children. When we begged him to go, he said it wasn’t worth wasting time on, you had to stand in a long line, and you’d wind up seeing nothing through the tiny windows. We’d only be disappointed.

  But he didn’t say that to the woman at the school. Instead, he said something polite and pulled out his pale blue checkbook, relieved that the mission had been successful.

  Twenty-four years, three months, and—let’s say—twelve days, five hours, thirty-three minutes, and fourteen seconds later I went up in the Gateway Arch. I was with my boyfriend, we were visiting St. Louis and staying at the hotel with the bear in the foyer. But it’s thirteen dollars, I said, and the windows are small. Let’s just do it, he said (for my boyfriend everything seems so easy). We’ll just be disappointed, I said. My boyfriend stared at me. Then we went up. The elevator was shaped like a train, and it was like being shot up into space in a rocket. At the top, sixteen windows on either side tilted downward, we huddled close beside one of them and gazed out. You could see all the way to the blue edge of the horizon. Our own shadow was a crooked arch over the Mississippi River. There was no wind. Absolutely nothing shook.

  ◊

  I lay exhausted on the wooden floor in my sister’s room staring up at the ceiling, and she sat on the edge of the table studying her calves. We’d danced to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” though mostly from memory since the sound from my Walkman could barely be heard through the headphones on the table. I asked her when she thought our dad would return. She wasn’t just the one I felt most connected to, she’d once been the only one, you could clearly tell that she’d been here the longest and knew all that there was to know, not just about the English language and the school, but also about how things worked in t
his house.

  At no point had it occurred to her to consider when he came home, our dad, or whether he was even in the house. Neither she nor my other siblings rushed to the door like Siri Hustvedt and her sisters. It makes no difference, she said. She spoke with the air of an expert, her head tilted downward, her gaze fixed on an indeterminate spot on my nose or near my chin. He’s never really here anyway. I was willing to indulge her on most things, but not when it came to our dad. We had many discussions about him. How he was. She believed she knew him best, and I believed more or less the same.

  How can you say that? I said. He’s so nice, our dad is, as good as gold.

  No, he’s not, she said. He’s always angry with us, always upset.

  I told her there’s not a mean bone in his body.

  You don’t know him like we do, she said. Either he’s upset, or he’s not here.

  I gave up discussing the subject with her. She sounded just like her mother.

  ◊

  Sometimes I go to work with him. Before we leave, we make our lunches in the kitchen. The house is quiet, their mother has driven the others to school, and we walk back and forth between the refrigerator and the kitchen table like a single lunch-making organism, grab the head of lettuce, mayonnaise in a glass jar, and the melon-sized onion we cut slices from the last time I’d gone to work with him.

  The sandwiches we make, or rather build, look like the ones the other kids get for their school lunches. Our lunch usually consists of two slices of white bread with peanut butter or baloney. In the morning, slices of white bread lay scattered across the kitchen counter like a hand of solitaire, which their mother lathered and clapped together with swift, busy movements, and the tricks she then divided up in transparent plastic bags that each of us carried in our hands. At school, we put the lunches on top shelf of the fridge so the bags wouldn’t get mashed by the other kids more solid lunch boxes. During lunch period the yellow school bus drove us back to school after our morning swim, and we got the bags from the fridge along with the big soda bottle and the five grooved plastic cups that meant we’d have to sit together. We settled with each our sandwich bag at one of the tables in the cafeteria, and then it came, the moment when all the other students opened their lunch boxes at tables all around us with a sound like clicking briefcases. Their metal lunch boxes had flexible handles and themes from E.T., Star Wars, or Sesame Street, and inside them was a matching thermos with juice and a full meal, which was unpacked and consumed, a carrot, an apple, maybe a small bag of chips or a hunk of chocolate and one or two of the kind of sandwiches I was now preparing with my dad, with real cold cuts and tomatoes and a crisp leaf of lettuce.

  My dad carves a thin slice of the onion and lays a tangled swirl of rings on top of the tomatoes. I pack the onion in plastic wrap and set it back in the fridge. When we’re alone, I’m allowed to open the fridge, otherwise it’s absolutely forbidden, electricity is expensive, his wife says. We are only allowed to turn on necessary lights, it’s a recurring theme that flipping a light switch is connected to money, the entire summer the hallway on our floor has been missing a lightbulb. I’m not sure they know, the adults almost never go up there. But I know that electricity and water expenses have to be kept low. The only place in the house that’s air conditioned is in my dad’s and his wife’s bedroom. Mustard on the top slice. The mind can sort of rest; neither of us will perish if we occasionally fall silent. We pack our sandwiches in heavy-duty aluminum foil that is twice as thick as the kind we have back home. It feels almost like iron. The difference between thrift and extravagance isn’t always clear. We take the Ford. Pass the stretch near the park where today I am free to choose all the houses. Except for the wind and our chit-chat, silence.

  The university is spread out across an enormous, parklike area they call a campus. Just to the right of the front gate is my dad’s building. The door is heavy and has a transverse bar that you’ve got to shove with all your might, and then, with a metallic click you’re on your way down a long, dark corridor with a shiny linoleum floor and a rather unique smell. Paper, I think, smells like this when it’s found in such large quantities, and a great deal of energy has been spent writing on it. My dad’s office is on the first floor, the last one at the end of a lengthy row where the doors are always open, and inside each one of these rooms sits a man in a checkered shirt, with or without a beard and glasses, looking pensive. None of the offices contain more paper than my dad’s, no office in the entire world does, it’s all over the place, in yellow and green folders or stapled together in scattered piles, on bookshelves, on his desk, on basically every horizontal surface: stacks of paper and books, and fastened on one wall is a large, dark-green board covered with old, chalky formulas.

  We sink into our own separate projects. Instantly I feel the joy in focusing on a sheet of paper and pulling something out of my imagination, making things materialize on the paper, laboring to get it just right. There’s also an ibm typewriter with a round golf ball that looks like a globe formed of letters, which will be mine when it’s spent. My dad stares into the screen of a large, beige-colored thing, a so-called computer, completely absorbed. It looks repulsive. Honestly. Staring at a stupid screen that doesn’t do anything but stare back at you robot-like with its neon-green figures! It’s no secret that I’m waiting for this computer fad to pass, and for my dad to come to his senses. But until then I sit drawing him as he’s seated across from me, absorbed by his stacks. I didn’t know that he was connected to something they would later call the World Wide Web, or that he was writing other researchers from around the world. For me, the only researchers are in the corridor, every once in a while they knock on my dad’s door and enter his office. They stand in front of the chalkboard talking to him, slightly too chubby or slightly too thin men in glasses. In their own unique way, they seem uncomfortable in their bodies, weighed down even by the fact they’ve got to drag such a thing around, and each time my dad introduces me and says: This is my eldest daughter, and they look at me and seem as if they’d rather vanish into thin air.

  When I get bored, I go out into the corridor. Downstairs, the walls are covered in photographs. At first glance it appears as if it’s precisely the same rectangular photo duplicated over and over, each portraying two or three rows of physicists, the first row seated and the back two rows standing, everyone facing the camera. But if you look closer, you see that the photographs are all different, the little faces in them unique, some with and some without beards and eyeglasses. I walk up and down the corridor scrutinizing each and every one to see if I can spot my dad. He’s there somewhere, maybe in several photos, but every time I forget where.

  For lunch we grab our paper bag with our sandwiches and head outside. The campus is its own little town with stone-inlaid paths crossing green lawns. My dad buys two cups of soda and crushed ice, and we sit on the grass beneath a tall tree. We sit under the same tree every time, and before long, it becomes ours. It’s calm and peaceful eating your lunch in the shade, watching students pass, backpacks slung over their shoulders or a book in their hand. On the lawn, a number of birds hop about, house finches and sparrows and doves, searching for something edible. We toss them crumbs. One of them, a dove, comes right up to us. I wonder why they do that thing with their head when they walk, it looks as though they’re pulling their legs forward by their head.

  I wonder what makes them do that thing with the head, my dad says.

  He wags his finger back and forth in front of the bird, like a metronome. The dove is quiet and seems to have been hypnotized. Each time he stops wagging, the dove continues on its way, and when he starts again, the dove pauses. I wonder if they all do that, he says, or if it’s just him. Like me, my dad is convinced that every single animal is unique, not simply a cookie-cutter form pressed from its species, but an individual with its own personality. Without success, we try to lure more doves with crumbs. I ask him if he believes in God, and his response can be understood in a thousand ways. God is
an idea, he says. I believe in ideas.

  Afterward we drift around in the bookstore. Then we buy an ice cream and compete to see who can eat the fastest. We sit on a bench in half-shade. Mine melts down my fingers. He’s faster, but he lets me win and says: The world’s fastest ice cream eater! When I’m tired of studying faces in the photographs out in the corridor, I go down to Pranoat. Her office is on the opposite end of the hall from my dad’s, like two wings of a T. She’s my dad’s secretary, as well the rest of the faculty’s, a Thai woman who’s the exact same height as me, and whom the others seem to be a little frightened of. Her eyes are completely black and full of everything in the world, and even when she gets angry, her voice is like a feather caressing your cheek. But she’s never angry with me, only with the physicists, who are notoriously bad at remembering meetings and managing their own affairs, always sliding things sideways through her door for her to type for some journal, either past the deadline or in a sorry state, mostly both. I was introduced to her in the doorway of her office, she was on her way out, and my dad wanted to show me off, and she cast one glance at me and adopted me on the spot. Daughter, that was the word she used, I was her daughter. She and Uncle Kip, her husband, didn’t have any children of their own, just a nephew who once in a while visited them from Thailand. Even as we stood in the doorway, she negotiated with my dad that I, when I visited during the summer, would also spend time with them. One week was too much, my dad thought. They agreed that three days was reasonable.