We wander from room to room like a pair of custodians after closing time. It’s the second time I’ve seen the house in its entirety, and each time it’s grown smaller. The dust, the silence, the rooms startled by our sudden appearance, the atmosphere, it’s as though the tension has been sucked from the house. I don’t really recognize it. It’s just a house. If you were to recreate it in reality, you would have to build on a scale of 1:1.5.
In the evening we sit in my room to get a closer look at the comic books he’s brought over. I sit on the edge of my bed, and my dad, seated on a wooden chair, shows me the covers one by one, stack by stack.
It must be thirty years since he’d opened the cupboard door a little and asked me to remember the location. Now I get the impression that he wants me to memorize every single cover before I leave. Know the quantity, how many there actually are.
Once again he tells about the comic book stand he built in his grandmother’s yard in Texas, Grandma Clark’s house, where the family lived the first dozen years. He also wants to show me the small plastic prizes he got from ’40s radio programs. His enthusiasm for these tiny objects, his little treasures. You need to have good eyes to see what they are, he removes his glasses and regards them, humble little objects, in his hand. He comes across a duplicate, and another. This one is for you, he says, and hands me something tiny wrapped in plastic. Oh, here’s another. A signet ring bearing a fanciful insect and a miniature telescope.
◊
We’re off to visit Uncle Faz, a drive of a couple hours. When we get in the car, he forgets the device that he typically mounts on the ceiling every time we go somewhere, a radar that beeps when we pass one of the police’s speed traps. As we drive along the route he used to take us to school, past the park where we once were stopped in the Lotus, we hear the sudden wail of a siren behind us.
Dammit, he says. Damn.
He veers onto the shoulder, and a young, Hispanic-looking officer sidles up to the car.
You in a hurry, sir?
No, I was just. I’m sorry. I didn’t notice the speed.
The officer walks back to the patrol car with my dad’s driver’s license. Soon he returns.
You a professor of physics, sir?
Yes, I am, at Washington University.
Breast pocket is heavy with writing implements, hair rumpled like a professor’s. He hasn’t removed his hands from the wheel. My dad slumps in his seat like a schoolchild, curved like a banana, and looks up at the officer who hands him his driver’s license as he shakes his head.
You physicists …
The officer tells us to have a nice day. Drive carefully.
The sun is high, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. The landscape glides past in huge sun-bejeweled, undramatic surfaces. For a long time, the Mississippi River is on our right side. It’s our first actual outing since I was eleven. The country roads weave in and out like in a net. My dad has printed directions from Google Maps and paper-clipped the pages. Still, we get lost in a cobweb of interchangeable roads, interchangeable lawns, and interchangeable pastel-colored houses. It resembles a witness protection program. A man with rolled-up sleeves repairs a lawnmower on his yard. My dad and I glance at each other. He’s the first person that we’ve seen in an hour. It’s probably better if you ask, he says.
Uncle Faz’s house is white and modern with a high ceiling, it’s like entering a gallery. We don’t need to go inside, he says when we stand in the entryway, his wife didn’t have time to prepare the sushi after all. We will take you out for sushi instead. The wife, who is younger than him and Japanese, appears from one of the rooms, and behind her is their daughter, a girl of about eight years old.
Uncle Faz had been a bachelor for much of his life, until he married in his late sixties, and when he was seventy-one, his daughter arrived, his only child.
The gaze he directs at me is serious and intense, and it reminds me of a bird seated high atop a cliff registering every single movement in a landscape.
Does he know he’s supposed to call me if something happens to my dad? Or has he forgotten? I don’t ask.
You may not remember, he says, but we met before, a long time ago when you were about Akira’s age …
Akira has black braids and a blue hairband and sits politely at the table conversing with the adults. She’s a good violinist, and she gets good grades in school. She eats with chopsticks like the adults.
My dad brought a book for the girl, one of Roald Dahl’s kids’ books that we found in a used bookstore. She has a rather sophisticated taste, he said, when he stumbled across it. He’s always searching for things he knows she’ll like.
We are showing off our daughters, says my dad to Uncle Faz.
Later, after we’ve said our goodbyes and are heading across the parking lot to the bmw, he says: She reminds me of you when you were a little girl.
•
We’re a little beyond St. Louis city limits, darkness has fallen, and we’re driving through a barren industrial area.
Do you mind if we take the car for a wash?
Perhaps because my flight leaves early tomorrow morning, he must feel the need to convince me. It will be fun, he says. Like taking a shower, except we won’t get wet because we have our car suit on.
We turn into a self-service car wash and remain seated with our car suit on. In the critical moment when the two spraying brooms roll across the sides of the car, he frantically begins to push buttons on the control panel. He’s realized that the little corner window in the backseat is slightly open, but instead of closing that window, the passenger window just rolls down as the brooms spin past.
What follows are moments of tremendous confusion. It feels as though I’m being dragged up from the bottom of a lake and placed on the passenger seat. My hair clings to my face like seaweed, I can’t see a thing.
My right ear is full of water. Somewhere out there I can hear him wailing.
My little girl! Oh no, my little girl!
It’s worth the whole trip.
When we get home, I fish a pair of dry pants from my duffel that I’ve already packed for tomorrow. My dad walks over to the house to see if he can dry my jeans in the dryer over there, but quickly returns with them, still sopping wet.
I didn’t know how to make the machine work.
Instead he hangs them on the floor lamp next to the desk, draping the wet pant legs over the warm lampshade as one would decorate a Christmas tree. It glows blue, and the room slowly fills with steam.
◊
One of my dad’s friends and colleagues, Niels Bohr’s grandchild, once told me that a Danish researcher had learned how to make slow light. To simply lower the speed of light, it was a groundbreaking discovery, he said. Her name was Lene Vestergaard, and maybe she would even win the Nobel Prize for it. The Nobel Prize has always lurked, in some way or other, in my dad’s conversations with his colleagues.
Later I asked my dad what you would use slow light for. He replied that it could be used, for example, with glass.
Glass? I didn’t understand.
Imagine if you made some windowpanes, he said.
He imagined windows in a house through which the slow light filtered. When you looked out of the window, you wouldn’t see what was out there now, you would see the reflections of what had once been there many years ago. So, when you reached retirement age, he said, and you really had the time, you could sit in your living room and watch your little kids playing in the backyard. Like a movie, he said, except they are not there anymore, they are adults.
Slow light. The cherry tree that lost its leaves long ago, and now lies on the ground: Inside the house it continues to bloom in the yard.
Or the pecan tree. Outside it provides cool shade and twenty pounds of nuts per year, but inside the house, Preston is still planting it.
Slow light. The baby, the old man, on either side of the glass.
after my duffel bag is checked in and I’ve maneuvered onto the airplane, my dad
’s cries continue to resound in my head: my little girl, oh no, my little girl. Even after I return home I continue to hear him say it. But then the weeks pass, become months, and time sucks the sound from the words. My power of imagination is no longer capable of connecting them with his voice. Did he really say it? Was it really him? My little girl, oh no, my little girl? I can only hear them on paper, not in my ears. His little girl and forty-two-year-old me on the passenger seat. Soaked forty-two-year-old me on the seat beside him. With our car suit on. Forty-two-year-old me with my duffel on a plane. My twenty-two-year-old mother on a plane with as much as could fit into a bag and barely one-year-old me under her arm.
◊
The only thing my mother regretted not bringing home from St. Louis—apart from her mother’s letters—was a quilted blanket that my father’s grandmother had sewn for him when he was born. She sewed the quilt using small squares of fabric that slowly, as they were conjoined, formed a pattern. The pieces of fabric were hexagonal, no bigger than mandarins, and my dad’s grandmother, Grandma Clark, had spent considerable time on the blanket. She sat on the porch in the house in Texas where the family, Gussie and Preston and my dad and his sister, lived until my dad was twelve. She sat in a rocking chair. I don’t know what she looked like, and I can’t picture her, the only thing I know about her is that her husband was dead, and by that point she was already an old woman suffering from arthritis. And yet there she sat sewing a baby blanket for my dad, the first of Grandma Clark’s grandchildren. All I can imagine is the movement, slow and sort of languid, as her hand pulls the thread through the pieces of fabric.
Sewing such tiny squares of fabric into quilted blankets is something that happens all over the world, but in America’s South, the blankets have a special meaning. They are family heirlooms, they pass them on, it was my dad’s baby blanket, and when I was born, it became mine. Personally, I had no relationship to the blanket, I’ve never seen it, but for as long as I could remember, my mother has talked about that quilt. It bound me, she believed, to my dad and my grandmother and to an old woman who’d once sat on her porch across the Atlantic.
In one of the films my mother found in the basement, I saw the quilt for the first time. In one of the final images from St. Louis, before we’re once again sitting on my grandmother’s and grandfather’s terrace in Gentofte, I’m lying on it, on my belly in a yellow romper, looking up at my dad who is filming. A picnic on the grass consisting of hexagonal squares of fabric.
A few years ago, I asked my dad about the blanket. Eleven years ago, to be exact. Did it still exist? It did. My dad promised to send it to me, and because he couldn’t manage the complicated rigmarole of actually going to the post office and sending it himself, he packed the blanket in a box and arranged with Sabrina to do it for him. For a long time, the box remained in his office. At some point it reached Sabrina’s garage, and five or six years ago, when I asked again, it was simply gone. Maybe it was mistakenly given away, maybe given up, or maybe it just vanished in the multitude of life’s daily activities and tasks. The box, in any case, never turned up.
•
Except for her arthritis and her rocking chair on the porch, I have often felt like Grandma Clark during this past year. Sewing a quilt is very much like writing a book. Just as she stitched the hexagons together, I stitch my past together. I draw memories from the darkness, fragments, glimpses, scenes, and piece them together on paper. Every single piece is, for me, at once clear and frayed at the edges, like a hexagon of fabric. Do they belong together? The long, languid movements, the act of binding, of connecting X with Y. What will it become? It’ll become something else. I stitch something together that hadn’t been connected previously. Threading the continents with sentences, Denmark with America.
In Where I Was From, Joan Didion tells the story of a quilt that her great-great grandmother sewed, how it was passed down in her family and now hangs on her wall. She writes that the quilt has more stitches than she’s ever seen in such a blanket, stitches sewed over old stitches, “… a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches.” She’d made the quilt during a journey to California in a covered wagon, crossing the America that was, at the time, an unpopulated wilderness. During the journey, she buried a child and gave birth to another. She contracted mountain fever twice, and she and her husband and the families they traveled with took turns driving a span of oxen and mules and twenty- two free-range cattle.
It wasn’t until Joan Didion hung the quilt on her wall that it occurred to her how her great-great-grandmother must have finished the quilt one day in the middle of the prairie, and yet she’d simply continued to sew. “Somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and sadness,” she writes, “[she] just kept on stitching.”
To sew as a form of incantation. As long as she was busy doing this work, she was somehow safe.
II
Travel Book
I think that in my memory I have often done my father an injustice.
ingmar bergman, The Magic Lantern
In later years, I would occasionally wake up at night and find the stars so very real, and so brimful of significance, that I would not understand how people could bear to miss out on so much world.
rainer maria rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Take me to Texas
Where my daddy worked
Where his blood and sweat and tears are still in that red dirt.
brandy lynn clark/shane l. mcanally
when i was little, like most children I loved to look at maps of distant destinations whose lands and customs I tried to imagine. But most of all I loved to look at the map of the usa, whose belly button was St. Louis, the place where my dad lived.
Behind the door of my study there hangs a large map of Texas. When the door is closed and I’m at my desk working, my eyes will occasionally wander to the map. Like clouds, most countries look like something other than what they are—Italy is a boot, Denmark a runny-nosed man—but Texas is unmistakably Texas-shaped. Texas looks like nothing else but Texas.
The map has hung there for so long now that I barely think about it. Seen from the desk, Texas’s cities and the roads that connect them are little more than a scribble. Most of the towns and cities are in the eastern part of the state, and the three of the largest, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, can be reminiscent, with their outer rings of infrastructure, of the tall white flat-topped flowers you see by the roadsides in summer, with Interstate 35 a thick stalk holding up the flower heads.
To locate the town where my dad was born, I must get to my feet and cross the room. It’s but one of many dots east of I-35 on the stretch between Austin and San Antonio. I know it’s there. But you need a magnifying glass to read its name: Lockhart.
But of course, there are smaller places than Lockhart, so small that not even a big map like mine is big enough to show them. When my dad and I visited my grandmother in 1997, they took me to a place out on one of the local roads east of Lockhart that was so small and insignificant that, later, I was unable to find it even on Google Maps. Its name was Clark’s Chapel, but all that was left was a cemetery with a handful of graves in it. There was a particular grave there that my dad and grandmother wanted to show me, the cemetery’s most prominent, two mounds of cement next to each other, each with a headstone, at the foot of a tall juniper.
The way I remember it, my dad and grandmother stood for a long time looking at those graves. It was a very hot day; I was wearing flip-flops; the dry grass stabbed at my feet and was alive with grasshoppers. The scorching sun beat down on my head, making me dizzy and compelling me to seek the shade of the juniper every few minutes. I stood there beneath the tree and watched the horizon shimmer the way it does in movies set on African plains, while my dad tried to make me understand who it was whose remains had lain under the two mounds of cement since sometime in the 1800s, referring to them as “the Ur-Clarks,” the first of the Clark family to settle in Lockhart, where five generations would grow up
and live.
But none of it really stuck at the time. I failed to comprehend exactly what it was we were doing there or why it was important, the only thing I could think about was how unpleasant it was to stand there in the prickly, humming heat and stare at some old headstones.
My dad knows I’m trying to write about him and about the America that used to be so far from me. As Christmas nears, I write to him and tell him I need his help to carry that work forward. I want to spend some time in Texas and wonder if he would like to join me, for some of that time at least.
He writes back: I would love to make a trip to Texas with you. In fact, he is wild about my idea of writing a Texas book. I’ve thought of writing something myself, he says, and I am thrilled that you are interested in doing it.
He already has an idea as to when we can meet. At the end of April, after the semester closes in St. Louis, before he goes to Belgium in May, there is a window.
eleven weeks before the window, at the beginning of January, I’m skiing down a mountain in the Italian Alps. I see a snowboarder on his backside farther down the slope. I’m zigzagging at speed; there’s no avoiding him; he sits planted in the snow in the middle of the piste and looks like he’s going to be there a while yet, a stupid place to stop, I think to myself, but never mind, and prepare to curve past him. And then, at that very moment, he gets to his feet and, without looking, sets directly into my path. He’s right in front of me, there’s no way I can stop, nothing I can do but brace for the collision before the tips of my skis smash into the point of his snowboard.
I somersault, Donald Duck-like, down the slope. My left ski fails to detach. When eventually I come to a halt, I lie there dazed. The snowboarder, a Russian, sits scowling at me. Then, exactly as before, he gets up and sets off down the slope again without looking. I, on the other hand, am unable to rise. Testingly, I bend and stretch my leg. My boyfriend helps me to my feet, hauls me upright, and then we head for the foot of the slope.
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