Pranoat and Uncle Kip lived on Gannon Street, only seven houses down from where my mom and dad had lived. We stood on the sidewalk looking at it. I knew the house by sight, yellow brick with the arched front door in the center that was painted green, and whose only decoration was a peculiar, carved half-moon and star. My dad had taken a photo of my mother where she stood on the stoop wearing an A-line dress and a light-blue coat that was open due to her ball-shaped belly. Because of this image, I couldn’t help but picture her wearing this same A-line dress when the neighbors’ kids rang the bell. They’d just moved into the house, and when my mother opened the door, she saw a girl with rattails and a gangly little kid with a cowlick and a red ball squeezed under his arm. They wanted to know if she would come out and play. My mother was twenty and a newlywed with my dad, who was thirty-three. I’ve heard the story many times, how she politely declined, no doubt blushing, and softly closed the door without telling my dad.
While I stood with Pranoat and Kip on the sidewalk, I tried to imagine living there with my mom and dad, back when we were a family. I’d celebrated my first Christmas in that house; I’d seen the photos, presents had been sent from Denmark. A Brio dog, red-and-white striped pajamas, Christmas tree and candles, an entire little family. Involuntarily I thought of the poultry shears, the ones my mother had once asked my dad for the money to buy. She had a monthly budget, but household money didn’t stretch to cover the scissors. I’ve heard the story as many times as I’ve heard the one about the neighbors’ kids. My dad had said no. You can’t own everything, he told her. I wondered how my mother managed to slice the duck without poultry shears. Or did we get a turkey? Had we been an American family? I remembered nothing about it and hadn’t the faintest notion of where the kitchen was or any of the other rooms, but I hoped that whoever lived there now had poultry shears.
Then we went to the zoo. We went from cage to cage looking at the animals, me in the middle between Uncle Kip and Pranoat. Uncle Kip had a camera strapped around his neck. He fumbled with it much less than my dad and always remembered to remove the lens cap. A goat tried to eat the shoelaces of my white sneakers, and I let it, until it gave up and pattered beneath a tree. I looked up at Uncle Kip. I bet it just had lunch, he said, smiling. I returned his smile. We must have resembled an entire little family.
the question has festered since April. Who will call me if something happens to my dad? Now he makes a suggestion: Bary Malik. Your mom knows him, he writes, and you may also remember him from some encounter.
I know that Bary Malik exists. He belongs to the gallery of unknown and therefore halfway unreal and fairy-tale figures from back when they lived behind the green door. When I was a child, my mother referred to him as Uncle Faz. Maybe that’s why I’ve imagined him donning a shiny little bucket hat, a colorful fez, perhaps even of purple silk. Now that my dad tells me how I met him once, an image appears in my mind of a reserved and serious man, the kind who was better at talking to adults than to children.
Uncle Faz is a year older than my dad, which is to say, seventy- nine. He lives in a neighboring state, in Illinois, a two-hour drive from St. Louis. According to my dad, he works at a university there, but has some sort of connection to Washington University which brings him to town every other Thursday.
Besides, my dad writes (as if this is the trump card he’s got up his sleeve), Uncle Faz uses his office when he himself is away during the summer.
Uncle Faz, who is a year older than my dad and who uses my dad’s office when he’s away during the summer, is for obvious reasons not a solution that helps me sleep at night. The thread between our worlds has never felt thinner. I picture us, my dad and me standing on our separate continents, the Atlantic Ocean between us. We hold on to our separate ends, the thread going on forever, long and thin. There is only us. Except for my mother, neither of us is connected to anyone or anything that is connected to the other.
Reach. The word comes to me when I consider my relationship to the English language before fifth grade. Whenever necessary, my mother and grandmother switched to English to exchange Christmas present ideas or to discuss subjects that didn’t concern children. It was the language of secrets, it was like putting something on the top shelf, I could see it, but I couldn’t reach it. When my dad visited us in the summer, my mother talked to him in the secret adult language, the only language he knew. But I could read the body language, and it was clear they knew each other well; the familiarity between them was evidence that we three were family. But what they actually discussed was beyond my reach, just like the life they had once shared. There was no geography, no landscape, no object like Paul Auster’s father’s sweater or lamp or car to pull any threads back to the time that existed before me. There was no house that I could enter. The closest I came was the sidewalk on Gannon Street, where I’d stood with Pranoat and Uncle Kip. Fifty feet. That’s as close as I’ve been.
◊
My mother has found four flat cardboard boxes with home movies in a moving box in the basement. To surprise me, she’s had them digitized in a photography shop. When we sit on her sofa in front of her tv, I have no idea what we’ll see. Then she appears on the screen just as I remember her, she’s seated at a table on a terrace, her dark-brown hair in a pageboy and a little cardigan slung over her shoulder. My mother as a very young woman. She has what film directors speak of about certain actors, a natural photogenic quality that causes the camera to focus on her. She’s so young that she almost looks like a child. Being observed through the lens has no effect on her. The way she lowers her head, lifts a glass to her mouth, says something to the camera that no one can hear. She’s unbelievably beautiful. Like a woman in a Godard film.
I instantly recognize the table she’s seated at. It belonged to my Danish grandparents. It’s their terrace. She is pregnant. She and my dad have traveled to Denmark so that she can give birth at home. That’s the word she always uses: home.
In the next film we see the house on Gannon Street. My dad, who is filming, is more concerned with the cars parked on the road, their three cars. They had a Mini Cooper, a Lotus, and a white Corvette. Not exactly a cinematic motif, three parked cars on a road. He films my mother eating ice cream while leaning against the Lotus. He films her sitting in the Mini Cooper. He films her driving up and down the road, parking, climbing out, parking again. Scene after scene. My mother parallel parking ad absurdum.
My mother and father met at a pub in Copenhagen in November 1966. My penchant for patterns and coincidences would prefer that the pub in question was Hviid’s Vinstue or Skindbuksen where, many years later, I would sit between them trying to fathom the fact that I had four siblings, but my dad thinks it was a place called El Toro Negro. At that point, the man who would become my father lived in an apartment on H.C. Ørsted’s Avenue, and he’d been a fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute for a little more than six months.
He has a short, dark goatee and drives around in the green Lotus that my mother would later eat ice cream against on Gannon Street. The dollar is strong, and he doesn’t want to make his own meals, so each night he eats at a new restaurant. Suddenly the woman who would become my mother sits down at his table along with her girlfriend. The chemistry between them was present at once. She’s eighteen. They talk the entire night, as if they’ve always known each other, and when it’s time for my mother and her friend to go home, my dad commits, by his own account, a mistake. He offers to drive my mother home. The girlfriend needs a ride too, of course, but he reports that he has a sportscar and there’s only room for one passenger …
It was stupid. Did he think that my mother would leave her friend behind at El Toro Negro and drive off with the black-bearded gentleman in the Lotus? No proper person, he was well aware, would go along with that, and my mother was, like him, a proper person. He could have easily squeezed them both in, there was plenty of room (he’d once driven three adults plus himself). But it was too late. The girls took a cab.
It vexed him. He
hadn’t gotten her telephone number, only a name, Steenberg. In his little office at the Niels Bohr Institute he steeled himself to call every Steenberg in the telephone book just as the telephone rang. He picked it up, and it was my mother.
I imagine my mom’s version of events would sound different. Maybe she’d say it wasn’t El Toro Negro but Laurits Betjent, or maybe he’d been the one to find her, not the other way around, or maybe he had called every Steenberg before finally getting hold of her. It’s not that important. Stories are the format in which we store our past. They are not a true format, the truth is not at all the point, sense and meaning are. There are just as many pasts as there are people, and then more still. We collect pasts and save them for our own sake, and every once in a while we take them out and polish them against our pantlegs or the edge of our sleeve, and we hold them up to the light, and maybe we see new things in them, things we haven’t seen before.
I try to imagine my mother in St. Louis, pushing a baby carriage around University City. I try to imagine life in the house where there wasn’t enough money to buy poultry shears. My father bent over his stacks of books and papers. Eraser shavings everywhere. One day while she’s cleaning, my mother doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, concentric circles of strange gray lint. What in the world is that? It’s all over the desk and turns out to be eraser shavings, which my father produced in tranquility and with utmost care. Or rather, it’s a byproduct, it’s how matter forms when my father has been immersed in thought, a kind of sediment.
Once in a while, my mother said that my father shouldn’t have had all the wives and children, but a housekeeper. He would have been better suited, she says. They were married four years, and during that time she was his housekeeper. She was good at it. Every day she’d lay out his clothes on the bed, so he’d remember to put everything on, shirts, pants, socks, and in front of it on the floor she’d place his shoes, so he’d remember to put everything on.
I imagine his clothes, the checkered shirts and the pants on the bed, a man without a man inside, a form, a human casing ready and appropriate for the weather. Otherwise he’d walk around in the hot, humid summer sweating in a thick wool sweater, my mother said. Kind, as good as gold, and presumably with a vague discomfort buzzing on the edge of his consciousness. Why was it so hot? The absent-minded professor.
They are on their way to a formal event and, as usual, my mother has laid out his clothes, the nice tuxedo, white tuxedo shirt, and the patent-leather shoes she’d placed on the floor. They’re in the car, maybe it’s the green Lotus he didn’t take her home in back in Copenhagen, or maybe it’s the Mini Cooper, or the white Corvette. They’re in one of the three vehicles on the way to the formal event, the light turns to red, he steps on the brake, and my mother glances down at his feet. They’re bare. He’s got bare feet in his patent-leather shoes. She realizes that she forgot to lay out socks. They’ve got to stop at a gas station to buy a pair of white sport socks.
These are my mother’s stories. Eraser shavings, poultry shears, clothes laid out on the bed. Gradually they’ve become mine. They lie in my mouth, smooth as beach pebbles.
My dad got the Corvette, and my mother got me. Another pebble in my mouth. I’ve uttered this sentence so many times that I don’t know where it originates, whether it’s something I made up, or whether I’ve inherited it like the stories about the erasers and the poultry shears. They divorced in an orderly manner, not because of bitter fighting. Maybe my mother didn’t want me to grow up and become an American. Maybe she saw no future for herself in the house without poultry shears. Maybe she was tired of laying clothes out on the bed. Whatever the cause, she packed as much as could fit in a bag and boarded a plane. I can picture the clothes, my dad’s clothes lying on the bed like a peel. She went home with me under her arm. Not even her own mother’s letters did she bring, only her nearly one-year-old child. My dad got the rest. The house, the things, the Lotus, Mini Cooper, the white Corvette …
The last film continues seamlessly the summer she returned to Denmark. The child has learned to walk, she runs around on the lawn in a diaper. They live with the grandmother and the grandfather. The father is still the one filming. Once again they’re sitting on the terrace, at the same table where she sat in the first film, pregnant, my mother. Now the child sits before a layer cake bearing a single birthday candle, she turns one. The same terrace, the same blue-fluted coffee cups. It’s as if the Atlantic Ocean never existed.
◊
The Lotus, the Mini Cooper, the Corvette. He’s always loved cars. I write to ask him about the cars he’s owned over the years, and he responds with an email full of details. He talks about them like others talk about their children. Except the blue Ford, that one wasn’t anything special, but I loved that car, metallic blue with red vinyl seats that pinched our skin and stuck to our thighs in the heat. It was kept in the garage along with his wife’s beige Oldsmobile and a small car that I’d never seen, a dusty blanket draped over it. On the blanket he’d written his name in meticulous block letters above an address on H. C. Ørsted’s Avenue in Copenhagen. One summer he pulled off the blanket to reveal the Lotus underneath, the vehicle he’d not driven my mother home in.
This was one of the things. The other thing was found inside the house, a small painting that my mother had painted when she lived in St. Louis, which proved that their worlds had once been bound together: an abstract motif in yellow that hung on the third floor. My dad’s wife had pointed it out to me one day. Did you know that your möther made this painting? she said. She was in a good mood. She said: I like it fery möch. She’d found it between the things my mother had left in the house on Gannon Street, and she brought it with her to the new house.
In the garage, our dad folded the blanket and tossed it in the corner, and then he took Carissa and me out for a drive in the Lotus. Do you know what lotus stands for? he asked. We didn’t. Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious. The car was difficult to maintain; it was nearly impossible to find a proper mechanic for it in St. Louis, he said. They’re just not like the one we had in Gentofte.
But reliability wasn’t everything, there were compensating joys, and those we’d get to feel shortly. Dust flew, and at first the motor sounded as if it had a cold, but then we were driving at a good clip. We shared the seat belt, the car, and the seat, the whole design was so flat we were practically lying down, three astronauts being blasted toward the earth’s horizon nestled snugly in a metal sleeping bag. We raced through the park we passed every day on the way to school, the world became stripes above us, and I couldn’t really see anything, only a glint of green in the treetops. A contradictory sensation of being sucked down by gravity and at the same time nullifying it. Then came the sound of sirens, the stripes took form, and my dad pulled over. A park officer’s face appeared above us, like a moon, and I saw his baffled look when he realized that the offender was a lanky professor-type with two skinny girls on the passenger seat.
◊
There’s a widely held notion that children of divorced parents keep dreaming their parents will get back together again. That’s all wrong. Like most children, I was conservative, and the starting point of my fantasies was located in what was familiar to me. I didn’t go around dreaming the grass should be blue, either; that it was green was mystery enough. My mother was Denmark, my father was America. You could look at a map to see how far apart they were. It was a reality with all the solidity of the stars in the sky, that’s why it was so confusing when my father’s wife announced last year: Then your möther and father can get back together!
It’s an exhausting thought, my mother and father getting back together. The scenario raises so many questions it makes me dizzy. What kind of alternative life would I have wished for, if so? That we’d stayed in St. Louis, my mother and I, on the street with all the cars? That I’d grown up as an American? What should I do with the life I know?
Or what if my mother had returned to Denmark with my dad under her other arm? W
ould he have lived with us in the changing apartments, spoken Danish, tied my shoelaces, mounted and unmounted training wheels, helped me with my math, gone to parent-teacher conferences? Thinking about it tires me, such thoughts unravel the past. It’s as if someone began stirring the universe with a crude ladle, rather than gently, gently penetrating the mystery it already is.
I picture us standing at Thingvellir in Iceland, at the spot where the continental plates meet, one foot on the North American and one on the Eurasian. There we stand fluttering in the wind, the three of us fixed, a sad little family. I am three, I am five, I am seven, I am fourteen. It’s windy, but the nights are starry. What’s that noise? Is it the plates scraping against one another? No, it’s coming from above, the sound, it’s the stars that turn out to be nailed in place. A creaking as someone attempts to pry them free. Then the stars begin to fall around us, a giant shower of light. We stand in silence, watching. Afterward we remain in the darkness, perfectly motionless.
every day after school, she was parked outside waiting in the beige Oldsmobile. We could see her out there, straight-backed behind the wheel, her jaws working a stick of chewing gum. She always kept a green packet of Wrigley’s in her purse, the rectangular sticks piled in a stack, each encased in a silver wrapper. Once, in a department store, she’d offered me one when I was hungry. Here, take a piece of göm, she said, her purse dangling from her shoulder and the green packet extended toward me. We were surrounded by food vendors on the top floor of Famous-Barr; it was the smell that had made me hungry for food. This must have been the type of situation my mother had thought of when she insisted that I had to be able to speak English, so that I could tell someone when I was hungry or if I wanted a glass of milk. I declined the gum, and she said that I was a very confusing child.
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