You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  She nearly put her head in her hands. Such inchoate thinking. Jack Sinai was a Socialist, or an “Anti-Communist Leftist.” The irony was that if he had been a real Communist, the Weathermen would never have forced J. to break with his own father. An article online from the Nation did better. Sinai had been shocked to be rejected as insufficiently radical by the New Left, a shock that colored the rest of his life. “These fucking lefties.” She spoke to this computer, too, though it was a PC. “So busy fighting with each other that they don’t even know who the enemy is anymore. And fighting over what? Fighting over words, words, words.”

  At seven she woke me, easing me out of bed, cajoling me downstairs to the breakfast table. She was aware that in some fundamental way she was lying to me and that this was something for which, one day, I may not forgive her. The thought tore at her as she looked at me as I was then: the auburn hair around the grave oval of my face, just turning adolescent, my rosebud mouth cherry red, still a child, a beauty mark on my right cheek. There was J., convincingly, in my nose, but I was, luckily for me, in every other way my mother’s daughter, and it wasn’t for nothing that my mother was, in her day, a starlet.

  And me? I didn’t find anything strange about Molly waking me, or about spending a few days in her care. Happened all the time, when my father traveled to court in Albany, to the mountains for a solo camping trip, to IMS on retreat. Molly waited while I dressed, then took me to her house as she herself dressed.

  Now, with me on her bed, chatting, she stands just inside her closet, takes off her T-shirt, puts on a bra. Then she takes a light gray silk blouse off a hanger, slips it on, buttons it.

  And then, without any pause, she unbuttons it, takes it off, puts it back on the hangar, takes off her bra. Standing topless in her jeans she leans over to a lower drawer and takes out a running bra. She puts that on, puts her T-shirt back on, then a sweatshirt. Then she steps out of her jeans and into running shorts, then sweat pants, and comes out of the closet, holding her trail shoes in one hand, gathering her thick black hair into a ponytail with the other.

  Thinking to herself, There’s just no way I’m going to work today. No way. What I’m doing is, I’m dropping Iz off, then I’m going the fuck for a run, and the run I’m doing is the full eight miles into Dutcher’s Notch and back.

  Not thinking to herself, however, that what she was doing was precisely, precisely what she did thirty years ago.

  Drive up the mountain.

  Deliver her news of death.

  Then run the eight into Dutcher’s Notch: four miles in, four miles out.

  5.

  It’s foolish even to try to describe what Molly sees, that morning, when she approaches the Dutcher’s Notch trail through the big meadows on the old Colgate property.

  Greene County in late November.

  The trees, as if launched into flame by the touch of the sun, dropping their scent in fine dust from the canopy of their leaves.

  The sun itself, filtering, deepening, maturing, through the colors. The carpet on the trails, the hands of lost lovers, Apollinaire called them, dying on the ground. It is poignancy so profound as to be almost kitsch. And above the kitsch poignancy, above the deepening autumn light, the endless well of Catskill sky.

  The Catskill sky. Molly’s father had liked to call it “Small Sky Country,” but not in disparagement. It gathered over you like a gothic cathedral, the horizon constantly cut by the line of mountain peaks. She’d been out West, seen real mountains, experienced the massive liberation of big sky and endless vistas. She hated it. This sky here was the sky of her whole identity, as if it contained all the moments of her life, risen and gathered there in the tip of its parabolic arch.

  At nine o’clock Molly Sackler pulls into the little trailhead parking lot at the Dutcher’s Notch trail, watching the vista before her, and feels her heart falter. She climbs out of her car, an Escalade, bought to protect Leo when, home on leave, he drove these upstate roads, mostly drunk. She runs her thumbs around the elastic band holding her sweatpants up on her waist, then drops her sweatpants to the ground and steps out of them, showing her running shorts, then begins to retie her shoes, one foot up on the running board, then the other. Very precisely, she sees her foot against the treaded running board of her VW Beetle, thirty years ago, very precisely she feels her shoelace in her fingers. And there it is again, deep in her thoughts, the image of an origami bird, forming in her father’s hands, as he curves two paper edges toward each other, pins them with a thumb, then creases them neatly together with a nail.

  Once again it is as if thirty years were folded away and hidden.

  Once again, she puts on her red reflective vest, the same one she has been running in, hunting season, for thirty years.

  And then she is running already, leaving the car door unlocked, as soon as her shoes are tied: no stretches, no warmup, no game plan to pace herself through the eight miles ahead.

  Worse yet, she is running fast.

  As if she were not a seasoned practitioner of the sport, but a child, running away.

  Thirty years. One time J. asked her if she could remember being a girl. She had thought about this for a long time, wondering if she could tell him. How she had grown up watching everything that happened to her, girl and woman, float up into the parabolic Catskill sky and nestle there, always available, always there. It was so intimate to her, what he was asking. If Donny had lived, he may still not have known this about her, not after thirty years of marriage. But because he had died, and because she had been, these thirty years, alone, she did answer and what she said was this.

  “You know how they used to pour sidewalk with rubber expansion between the squares? Remember? That white sidewalk in four-by-four squares?”

  J. watched her blankly, shrugged.

  She said: “Sometimes, I walk out behind Mount Marion. The sidewalk out back, around the playground? The same expansion joints are there from when I was in nursery school. I put my foot on it and I can see my Converse sneakers, size three.”

  He thought about that. “The rubber must be gone.”

  “The rubber was gone then, too.” They were in her backyard, which had been her parents’ backyard, and she said: “J., that’s the thing about me. Maybe because I’ve always been here, you know? Eight years old? J., I can remember being four.”

  “God, that is unimaginable to me.”

  He said it with wistfulness, and she understood. It was like showing your new car to a poor friend. Everything was fracture and dislocation in his life, tectonic periods of time that ground against one another, much forgotten, much more lost.

  And why was that? Now, running too fast on stiff legs across the meadows toward the tree line, she thinks, really, it isn’t obvious. It isn’t Vietnam, or being a fugitive, or anything. It’s that he has no sense of common identity with his younger selves. How could he? He’s had so little sympathy for them, rejected so much of them, judged them so harshly. And if reasons for this may have seemed obvious—his fractured life, the war, his long criminality—the real reason was beyond that. Not for the first time, Molly thinks: we are never turned into who we are by our politics. Rather, our politics are always an expression of who we are, whether we want this to be so or not. Her life, too, had been filled with dislocation: Donny’s departure, his death, then both her parents, one after the other. What made J. who he was is not history, it is that he simply has never practiced the processes of rehearsal and remembering. Those totally interior processes that made continuity, they had to be practiced.

  But perhaps to achieve that continuity you had to want to. She tells herself: perhaps you had to want to graduate from a child’s life in to an adult’s. Graduate, gently, the one developing into the other. Not be ejected, forcibly, too early, from childhood into adulthood, from identity to identity, life to life. And there, history does matter. You had, she thinks as she crosses the tree line into dappled shadow and goes on into the woods, to feel comfortable enough with your past to
want to remember it. You had to like your past self. And you couldn’t like your past self if you were brought up with the idea that every one of the past’s hopes had failed.

  Her heart sinks at the thought, and she picks up her pace, again, as if in punishment.

  For a time she runs in silence. Then she finds herself thinking, how harsh it must be for J. to feel his father’s death in all that abandonment, fracture. Like a cold muscle injury. As if at the thought, she stumbles over a root, fights to get back her balance. And when she does, she’s thinking that even Donny’s death had had a context, the context of the tens of thousands of other wives, daughters, girlfriends, mothers who were suffering the same loss. Fifty-eight thousand Donnys. How many Mollys—mothers, wives, lovers—did that make? But J. To spend twenty-five years away from your father and for him then to die? To J., this was just another nail in the coffin that held everything normal a person could want: his childhood, his family, his home gone, gone, gone in the bleak landscape of his adulthood.

  The thought is shocking to her, and Molly finds herself gasping for breath now, running at her full capacity, still searching for her second wind. Who thought that shocking thought? Who felt that awful desolation? It was her, her, her. She says it to herself, nearly angrily, her feet slapping and slapping the trail, heading uphill, the long, slow uphill that started the run, her, her, her. Who was there, that day, bringing news of death to an old man? It is me, me, me, she thought, in the rhythm of her feet: my mind, my body, my cells, my genes. I am her.

  But there was no comparison. Then, and now. Then, she was a child, arms and legs taut muscles over bone. Then, she wore her hair in a center-parted perm wave, owned a paisley mini-dress. Then she had been ruled by desire, skin alive to every puff of wind, this endless well of wanting; then she was vivid, acute, full with the romance of deprivation and satisfaction, needing and getting, staged again and again. They had been children, starving for each other, and then he died, just like that. Bouncing Betty, Bouncing Betty. And after—nothing. Blankly, her mind traverses thirty years, inspecting, coolly appraising. Had it been an empty life? It hadn’t felt empty. It had been, perhaps, a lonely life.

  They’d never have even met, she from slummy little Saugerties, long before the spillover from Woodstock made it hip, he from WASPy Onteora Park, the fourth generation to occupy the same mansion in the private enclave. Her breath was coming harder and harder as she pushed, nearly sprinted up the rise, perhaps a half-mile of steady climb. When her father learned that Donny lived in the Park he said, I guess Sackler only sounds Jewish, right? That was, of course, right. Such an odd comment it seems now, when everyone is Jewish: J., Izzy.

  For an instant, running uphill, breathing very hard indeed, she is confused, and the slap of her step seems to call out then, now, then, now, then, now. But then she jumps a stream, long jump, and she is there again.

  They married right after graduation, in All Souls, the stone church at the end of 25 that still services the mansions of Onteora Park. It was summer, the first summer after their college graduations. They lived in the guest cottage on the Sacklers’ property. They played like children in the club house, the pool, the tennis court, the fourth of July party, the place her husband had grown up, summer after summer, with the friends he grew up with. In late August 1964 he took her to San Francisco, Monterey, Big Sur, Los Angeles. He left her at the airport, he to Camp Pendleton, she to fly home for her job at Mount Marion elementary. The Sacklers had invited her to stay: her summer at the clubhouse, on the tennis court, at the fourth of July party, her mini-dress—apparently—she had passed muster. But she wanted, while Donny was serving, to live with her own parents in Saugerties. That was one of the things she wondered about, afterward. Was there a feeling, even then, that her relationship with these people was tenuous, temporary, until Donny came home? If Donny came home? Was she another army wife, guiltily avoiding pregnancy until the big question, the question about their husbands’ survival, came clear?

  He was in Saigon by fall. They next met in Okinawa, a one-week leave. Nine days later he was dead. She knew he was dead a week after, but only she. And still another week passed before, when the official notice came, she drove her Volkswagen Beetle up the mountain from Saugerties, through Palenville, past Kaaterskill Falls, and Haines Falls, and right on 25 and into the big stone gate of Onteora Park, to the Sacklers’ huge house overlooking the Blackhead range.

  Of course she’d had to go alone.

  On the Dutcher’s Notch trail Molly crests the rise now, a half-mile in, her lungs bursting, her energy flagging, hits the long, wide trail that will sink for a half-mile, now, until it hits the edge of the Harriman Lodge’s holdings and turns brutally up. She is aware how awful is her pacing: no stretching, no warmup, and running way too fast. But she pushes into the downhill, dangerous, rocky, speed unchanged.

  It was 11 a.m. Only Don Senior was home. In his living room she sat him down and told him, as softly as she could, precisely what she’d been told that morning by two full-dress Marines who’d come to her front door. Donny had been killed walking point on a patrol in Songh Be. He’d stepped onto a booby trap—a Bouncing Betty, they called it—and died instantly. Old Mr. S had been very proper. He listened carefully, sympathetically, kindly, as if it were only she who was suffering. Then he went out of the room for a short time, perhaps minutes, during which she suddenly was convinced, convinced, that he was going to commit suicide: she knew he kept a pistol by his bed and a shotgun in the study. She rose then, half meaning to follow him, and had just opened the door out of the living room when she heard him, from the bedroom, make the sound she tried not to remember.

  Because when he made that sound, suddenly and without warning, she felt worse than she had ever felt in her life. She turned back and went to the window and looked out at the thin fall day, the drying lawn falling to the stone wall, the drop of the valley over Tannersville and the peaks of Roundtop and Overlook under the low sky.

  And then he made that sound again and suddenly all color drained from the view before her, all color drained from the world, or rather, all color drained from her range of emotion and the green of the lawn, the gray of the sky, went mute.

  She knew that this is what Donny saw in the long, slow moments before he died. She thought, you were supposed to have three score and ten to prepare for this view. It was supposed to be our last view. You were not supposed to see it at twenty-two. You were not supposed to. You were not supposed to. For a long moment, while Don Sr. made those noises in a far-off room of the house, the house Donny grew up in, she saw the world as she never should have seen it. When her father-in-law came back she smelled scotch and mouthwash on his breath. And when he spoke, his voice was very hoarse, which made her understand he had thrown up. Darling girl. Darling girl. You’ll always be a member of our family.

  She hadn’t told him she was pregnant—she didn’t actually know it herself, then, though she suspected. Lie number two. When, a week later, she heard from the Sacklers’ lawyer in Manhattan that Old Mr. S had already emended his will to leave the Onteora Park house and membership to a nephew—The Park bylaws don’t allow membership to pass out of the families, my dear—she knew she was pregnant, but didn’t mention it. Later, when their lawyer contacted her with an offer to adopt Leo, she broke off contact with them altogether. She had let Leo know his grandparents, of course, but Leo had started refusing to see his rich cousins as early as twelve, or thirteen, and still—as far as she knew—had not touched the trust fund Old Mr. S had established. Still, she had called Old Mr. S, four years ago, to get him to say a word to someone at Quantico when Leo announced he was following his father into the Marines.

  So much for righteousness.

  She is deep in the woods now, past the Harriman inholding, across the East Kill bridge, climbing the long, rising spur up to Beaver Pond and Molly thought bitterly, Son of a bitch. Her breath is coming in sharp gasps, her heart pounding, even more as the trail evens out and her muscles
began to drink oxygen again. Thirty years later, Old Mr. S. joining forces with that cruel uphill to torment her. It was always like that. The harshest thoughts come on the uphill. Then they leave you weakened for the rest of the run. Against the wish of her body, which already wants to rest, Molly picks up her pace. And, in the pain of running, manages actually to stop her thought; manages actually to get a break, lost in the ache of her legs, her back, the sharp work of her lungs, gasping, until, to her surprise, she rounds a corner and finds herself jumping hard to avoid tripping over the steps of the little bridge over the East Kill.

  On the bridge she drops onto her knees, then rolls herself onto her back on the hewed wood surface of the bridge, thoroughly pissed. A beginner’s mistake. Lost in bad thoughts, she’d been running too fast, and now, not even at the halfway point, she had run herself anaerobic. “Idiot, idiot.” She hisses the word at herself while she waits for the pain in her back to fade and her breath to come back.

  The thin line of sky showing through the dry leaves was white as often as blue, now, with big, high clouds blowing in on the wind, the promised rain coming in. Soon they would block the sun, and the high, tenuous autumn would step toward winter with the first rains. The thought makes Molly unaccountably anxious, and although she’s not ready, she stands and takes off again at a measured pace.

  A beginner’s mistake: not to know your run and therefore, to pace yourself wrong. One that, she’d been amazed to see when they started training together, J. made constantly. Slowly she realized that it was because, before they ran, he got stoned, secretly—she was, then, a teacher at his daughter’s school, and he wasn’t about to light up a joint with her. He liked to run stoned, and that was why he never, ever, really knew where he was on the trail: between the THC and the endorphins he was constantly in a state of elated confusion. This was a huge disadvantage in competitive running: you had to know the track to devise a pacing strategy, and for the first several weeks that they ran the Colgate trail together, she watched him exhaust himself early and then, to his frustration, consistently ran out ahead of him.