America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  Nothing in the room reflected what he’d seen, was changed by it, and because of or despite this he couldn’t be in it anymore. He walked in his open robe to the car. There were sidewalks covered in crooked hopscotch squares, there were stoplights he flew past like the anterooms of dreams, minor scenes we disregard on our way to the promise of some real message.

  He learned it two days later, his heart rate returned to normal. There were certain things he would be glad to remember, as glad as he had been while she lived. How she answered questions with questions, the bit of ink that was always on her face. A day he had parked a mile off and walked in, watched her for ten minutes she believed she was alone performing grand jetés over knots of manzanita, chin threaded to the sun, front toes piercing the future. That she had died almost didn’t matter, he thought. The distance between them was the same.

  Book Three

  1980–1988

  The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.

  —James Baldwin, Another Country

  * * *

  October 17, 1980

  Dear Mr. Kahn,

  Is there a version of events in which you know who I am and think of me the way I do you? You’re on my mind whenever I’m alone too long, and also during the point in a conversation when the other person begins to suspect there’s something I’ve left out, a secret I’ve been greedy with that’s kept me from some authentic way of being in the world. People seem to find me rude, outspoken about things that were better left unsaid—the obsolescence of religion or the overrated trifle that is the Beatles—but cold with the American small talk that is a comfort to them. It’s true I never ask about people’s families. There’s a reason for that.

  I’ve written all sorts of hedging introductions to this in the last few years, but maybe it’s best now to just come out with it. I think that a long time ago you knew or loved my mother, Fay, who was the woman on the cover of Life with her long hair on fire at the last Apollo launch. I’m her son, in the corner of the picture, crawling backward out of frame. I’m Wright.

  I wanted to say so right away because I know how much mail you must get. I would understand if you couldn’t read it all, and I would also understand if you didn’t love my mother. My own feelings for her don’t look like that anymore. They look like those photos you sometimes see in the newspaper real estate sections. They’re empty, these houses, price reduced, and you can tell how they were lived in, the dormer windows missing some shutters, the railings leaning away from the porch, but you can’t really see how they could be a home to somebody else. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you. I haven’t had to explain myself much and I also haven’t had much of an education, three half-asleep years at the only third-rate college that would take me and whatever my mother taught me before that. There were things she left out completely but when something interested her she gave herself over to it, which I guess a person could tell just by looking at that picture. I know a lot about herbal remedies and human anatomy, how to steal in bulk from K-Mart. My Spanish is still okay. What I learned or knew best was her. I guess anyone could tell that, too, by looking at my face on that cover.

  I’ll get to it, Mr. Kahn, because you must be busy. Or maybe you’re not. What does a man do after he goes to the moon? A trip to Hawaii must seem to you like a walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night. When I’m the worst I ever am—which is a lot, and I didn’t die last spring only because the door in my shitty rental happened to splinter and let me and the belt around my neck fall down it—I believe I’m the loneliest man in America. Then I think about you and with all due respect I wonder if you might be running laps around me in that regard. In terms of isolation, tolerance of it, your stamina is probably superhuman. I can’t manage mine for much longer, which is why the following.

  For a long time people were always recognizing me. I went to live with my mother’s parents, after what happened, in a small town in Northern California, and I don’t mean there, where I was given the leprous status of an object of pity, and every churchgoer in a ten-mile radius was sure to send me a birthday card. Any time we were in another place, though, two towns over or three, some little old lady or squinty trucker would say don’t you look like somebody. (I was thirteen, then fourteen, still very small. It was like my body wouldn’t accept my childhood was over because it hadn’t been much of one.) I was so shamed by this because I assumed they knew me from that photo, and I didn’t want to be the boy in that photo. I wanted to have a Coke with my nice new normal grandparents. I wanted to whine about the heat or beg for jukebox quarters. After it happened I would have to go to the bathroom—don’t you look like somebody—and stay there until Claudette and James came to get me. Even then sometimes I couldn’t leave because I was afraid The Recognition would still be out there having his hamburger. I could tell you a lot about the restrooms of those restaurants, the pedals under the half-moon communal sinks that made the water go, the powdered soap always the same antacid pink. They would come, my grandparents, and tell me, honey there is no way, sweetheart, they just think you’re cute, but I knew. Those people were just making sure. They just had to confirm it and then they would tell me that my soul was bad, just being the son of someone like that, that I deserved to be burned, too.

  I understand now that no one would really remember the face of that kid, out of focus and barely in frame, because my mother was the exploding star of that photo, and because no one wants to think of these things in the same sentence, white boyhood and homegrown terrorism. It was for another reason. When my shoulders came in and I grew about seven inches in a summer is when these people could finally name what they had always known.

  It’s happened to me something like fifteen times now even though I’ve tried to avoid it, by not buying a ticket to the movies after all when I saw the cashier in the glass box start to look at me that way, by only going to stations where you can pump your own gas. I tend to avoid interactions in the afternoon, which seems to be the time people most want to speak their lazy, native thought. People say I look like you, Mr. Kahn.

  It happened again yesterday, on a date with a woman who was kind enough to let me touch her, even though I hadn’t showered in days and I got fired from my latest construction job for showing up late too many times. I tried moving the alarm clock down the hall, then to the kitchen, but my body would not be roused, could not face being a body again. I had taken her, Cheryl, to a bad Chinese restaurant where there was a dirty aquarium with no fish in it anymore and then to my place to watch TV, but nothing was on and she was annoyed by my milk crate coffee table and how bad my antenna was. She asked to see my room anyway, and when it was over in bed she was so happy, looking at me like she would have to draw me from memory, and I was so glad to have made her that way. I’ve been trying to figure it out all night, she said. You look exactly like Vincent Kahn. I asked her to leave after that and she couldn’t understand why, shoved me playfully at first.

  I’m sure I’m not the first person to have written you, claiming to be your son. It’s a common delusion, isn’t it? We want to attach ourselves to greatness. But the funny thing about me, maybe the first thing about me, is that I don’t, Mr. Kahn. The fantasies I have are of houses in the forest, places without mirrors or telephones. I want to treat my thinking like nothing of consequence, stop hearing it like people do the traffic where they live. I want to see myself as secondary.

  I can’t claim to love where my mother’s politics led her, but I’ll tell you now I wasn’t exactly raised a patriot, and it isn’t exactly ideologically convenient, thinking what I do about who my father is. I spoke the idea aloud exactly once, to my grandparents, who looked at me as though I’d just seen my loyal dog shot and served for dinner. You’ve got to let that go right now, James said, and left the table. On a drive the next day, past cows and horses on the way to the ocean, he turned off the radio and asked me to listen ca
refully. My mother had not been well for some time, he said, probably from the time she was my age. There was no way of knowing what exactly had happened during those years at her sister’s bar, he said, but her behavior had been reckless. When he asked if I understood what he meant, I said I did, and for a little while felt better believing that my father was not one man but somehow a stream of them. I was fourteen, and I imagined men pouring single file through some hokey swinging saloon doors, naked and determined, a parade of erections. If my father was no one, he was also in some way everyone, Southern and Midwestern, green eyed and brown, spindly and slowed down by his paunch, moved by a belief in God and changed in the absence of it. The first time someone likened my face to yours in the presence of my grandfather—it was a hardware store employee an hour north—James clapped a hand to the man’s shoulder and laughed. The third time was a hostess at a restaurant, and we left without lunch.

  The dates line up, when you were at the base near the inn that my aunt owned, where my mother worked when she left her parents. She almost never spoke about that time, as she almost never spoke about other things that shamed her, her parents’ wealth or how when her sister died she hadn’t called her in two years. Charlie’s drinking had become such that people had stopped going to her bar, where sometimes the only creature behind the counter was her horse, Lloyd. He was an alcoholic, too. This I read in a posthumous profile, of which there were quite a few. My grandparents always expected to raise unforgettable daughters, but the ways Charlie and Fay became remembered eventually drove them inside. By the time I lived with them they had already taken up certain habits of the irretrievably unhappy, bickering viciously about things like directions and expiration dates, telling stories that had transpired decades before as though they’d occurred over the previous busy weekend. Everything they need now, food, laundry—never the news—is delivered.

  I’m not writing for money or love, or to say there’s a person I should have been that I’m not, now. I’m just writing to ask about my mother, if you knew her. Did you know Fay? I don’t know anybody who does.

  Yours,

  Wright

  P.S. For a year now I’ve been living in Texas, only about an hour from Houston. It’s easy to find out where your house was, that cul-de-sac with the other astronauts—I think there’s even a tour. But I wanted to guess. I drove down it at night and thought very carefully about which you might have chosen, knowing what I do about you from the profiles I’ve read. Of course I didn’t have much luck. The same curve to the driveways, the same green of the plantings. Living like that, I would worry I’d disappear, Mr. Kahn. Can you explain it to me, the American idea that luxury is a house indistinguishable from the one next door? I’ve had dreams where I show up in the town where you live now in Ohio and I take a job at the drugstore downtown and wait for the time you’ll come in, thinking it’s inevitable—your head will hurt, or your clothes will be dirty, and you will have run out of the thing to fix it. Any day now, I think, he’ll come in with a question I can answer.

  * * *

  November 16, 1980

  Dear Mr. Kahn,

  I think I called your mother last night, which I want to apologize for right away. I was shocked to find her listed, under her maiden name of course. She was very nice about everything, despite the hour, I guess just after one A.M. there, and said she’d give you my message. We spoke about a dog you had, as a child, which I’d read about. Poor Shadow. There did seem to be some confusion—when she said goodbye she didn’t hang up but started sort of calling out to someone else. Then she stayed on the line a long time. Is your father still alive?

  I’ve waited a month to hear from you and again I know the amount of mail must be staggering and I think about it, the piles of paper, the cursive and capitals, and I wonder who manages that—you? Where is it kept. Surely not at home. Maybe behind the lines and clerks in some recessed room at the local post office. It’s calmed me to think these questions, at night in bed, a mattress on the floor that I’ve covered with a quilt my grandmother made me. We are not exactly speaking, Claudette and James and me.

  It was too late, when it came down to it. I was foreign in every sense. I ate things with my fingers that you were not supposed to eat with your fingers, I bathed only when they reminded me to, I walked barefoot around their property and through their house. They’d catch me at midnight in the snack cupboard, wince at the dirty pads of my feet, the calluses.

  When Nixon came on I belched and left the room, which upset them and which even I couldn’t understand—my leaving I mean, my disapproval of him, given how much I wanted to be apathetic and mild-mannered and not made of my mother in any visible way. I was already inculcated, already wary of American authority and the jowly speeches. When he resigned I came in and clapped, and my grandparents looked at me as they did the vagrants that occasionally made their way through our town, having managed the fare for the bus that came from San Francisco.

  There was tenderness, too, Claudette teaching me how to use a steak knife, the power hon is in your forefinger on it, and remember it’s guided by the fork you thread it through, James buying me my first tie and laying it across my bed, that fine white tissue and long navy box waiting for me when I got home from school.

  I was behind in those classrooms in ways easily quantified and ahead in a manner those bespectacled women sensed but did not trust. There was an IQ test, an embarrassment James insisted on and paid for and whose results he put on the fridge, but I could not easily long-divide, it being a week in school I’d missed on account of some three-day hike my mother thought we should take, and when I saw that symbol, that line reaching left and slanting down and peaking back up, I felt fear as far as I could, lost feeling in toes and calves. I could not name the presidents, though they tried in off-hours, after school, to teach me the ditty of a mnemonic everyone else had learned. Wash-ing-ton Addd-ams, Jeff-er-son Mad-is-on, Mon-roe Adams, Jaaack-son. I sang it back to them, standing, my hand on my heart as instructed, the chalk dust tunneling farther into my body, my eyes on theirs as insisted. But I could hear something wrong in the way I sang, tinny or hesitant or duplicitous. The Spanish priests and the missions they had founded up the coastline I could not recite, and when I raised my hand and asked in all sincerity whether the Miwok and Wappo and Tipai had said absolutely, we’ll make bricks of cow shit and water, we’ll hand over our cypress and juniper, we’ll take your God, I went straight to the principal’s office, a pinched forefinger and thumb on my shirt’s collar.

  I wanted to be their boy and their pride, poor Claudette and James, who had done maybe nothing wrong except to live by the rules given them, and I posed for the photos, face straight ahead, right fingers planted on opposite knee, their hands on my shoulders hot with love or embarrassment. James signed me up for baseball tryouts, bought and oiled a mitt, tried to show me, on the hill where my mother had been pregnant and known she would leave, how to swing a bat. Knees bent. Knuckles aligned. Feet and shoulders exactly twinned. He knew when he picked me up by the dugouts, didn’t ask, nodded at me in some shorthand of comfort and asked did I want the radio on or off. I said on for his sake, because I knew his disappointment was big and probably symbolic. Five buttons, each another station, James punching through them with his middle finger, more age spots on his hands every day, rock stations he had put on for my benefit or enculturation, Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” topping the charts that year and humiliating him in a way I’ll never forget—there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them—James pulling over and grumbling something about the back wheel but pacing the car with his hands on his face. Was he thinking of my mother, was he blaming himself for what had happened on the inside of her, was he just unprepared for how I’d arrive, not the son he’d never had but a person already formed, the deficit already carved out. He got back in and put on the one station he’d left for him, classical, and we drove back in silence.

  Did she talk to you about them
? I imagine no, or a little, or that if she did it was to express how their every habit and ritual was repellent to her, had always been. Of this I’m not sure. They lived in the south of the state then, not far from where you two met. There are still a few photos, ones Claudette hid under a loose board like this was all some English mystery novel. My mother waves from the orange tree she has climbed, her dandelion hair and white dress blown around by the Santa Ana winds, her tiny fingers in a salute or a sun shield. Claudette, wearing forties shoulder pads and silk, holds Fay up to place the tinsel-haloed angel on top of the tree. All childhoods look happy in photos, you might say—nobody grabs for their Instamax when his kid has made another kid bleed in a game that seemed innocent until it wasn’t—but there are others, from when she looks more physically like the person maybe you knew, but also their daughter, someone who grew up on the inside of their protection. There was a moment, however brief, when she was both. Fourteen or so, a desk where she had placed her writing implements in a container meant for it, wooden and perforated, so they stood up straight as a forest. Textbooks and novels spread around her, open, earmarked, underlined. A shy, proud glance over her shoulder. A spelling bee ribbon she holds up for her father to see.

  I admit I think about it, you and her, what sort of conversations you had or if it was not, forgive me for saying, a largely verbal relationship. I have known she was beautiful since I’ve known anything. She must have been interested in your mind, is what I say to myself. She must have sensed you were headed for the extraordinary. I know how quiet you are in interviews, only the few, best words, and I wonder if she brought you past that, made you curse, which was always one of her powers. She would extract from me opinions I didn’t know I had. Her way with people, drawing them out, was like those magician’s scarves, silky and effortless and a little bit evil.