The house was the family home, always at holidays and birthdays, especially around meals. Dinner was served at 7:00 p.m. sharp, even after the professor had stopped coming down the stairs. Dinner contained a serving of fish or meat; fresh vegetables, but no eggplants or cucumbers; toast; and nothing too spicy. In practice, this meant crab cakes or flank steak, cooked potatoes, asparagus or broccoli or salad, white rolls, and a big dessert. When it was time for bed, your grandfather, the renowned herpetologist, sang you down the stairs to sleep. After the meal, if she was home, the eldest daughter would stay up late watching television and listening for the professor. He slept into the evening and used the intercom to call for her help. The rest of the time, the two sisters ran the house, managed their father’s routines and finances, arranged his visitors and mail, moving meals up and down the stairs to his study when he was too weak to take the stairs, sitting up with him when he was sick. He lived well even at the end of his life. A little boy sometimes came up the stairs from the basement and sat with him and made everyone happy. The boy was happy.
Unanswered Prayers
“Unanswered Prayers” was Katie’s least favorite Garth Brooks song, the one that her friend’s new husband, at the wedding, gave to the DJ in a pinch when he lost the first-dance CD. The husband was panicked and trying to do his best to play anything so that the dance might happen. Katie was the maid of honor. The song always reminded her of that moment, which became her memory of the wedding, and more than anything else, framed her understanding of the difficult marriage that followed. “Well,” Katie would say, as she hung up the phone after talking with her friend about the latest crisis, “he did screw up their first dance song.” Katie forgave strangers easily. She expected very little from them. But it was another thing entirely to disappoint the people she loved, as the husband had disappointed her friend. Katie held on to such disappointments. They marked a clear barrier between the people she loved and those she did not welcome into her life. For this reason, I think, Katie always tuned out “Unanswered Prayers” whenever it came on the radio. I sometimes listened to it by myself, driving back from campus in Miami or walking across Bucharest, on my way to and from work. I came to like it for its taboo place in our lives and also because I knew that we could never listen to it together.
Once, at a county fair in rural Washington, a Garth Brooks impersonator closed his set with “Unanswered Prayers.” Katie and I were killing time before a different friend’s wedding. As it always did, apparently, the audience sang along. Katie sang too. Perhaps hearing it live made it a different song to her. I had never before heard the song. I remember rolling my eyes at the lyrics, and puzzling a little that the song was such a fan favorite. “Unanswered Prayers” is Garth Brooks’s paean to loving the one you’re with, accepting the hand life deals you, and not sweating the small stuff. “Because,” as Brooks explains at the end of every chorus, “some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”
Already, I feel a certain ironic contempt creeping into my consideration. I’m not sure I like it. “Unanswered Prayers” deals almost exclusively in clichés of sentiment. It is, by most measures, a pretty corny song. It is also beloved, widely. I used to feel like such a jerk when I mocked Katie’s favorite country songs, but I also hated keeping my condemnations to myself. Then, it seemed less a matter of taste, and nearly an ethical issue, that any music be held to account and judged according to its worth. I was twenty-five. Everything seemed worthy of my judgment.
Country music is, by tradition, a rigid musical genre. Chord progressions rarely change. Lyrics follow a few common themes. Listeners expect a certain, conservative transparency: show us what we imagine are our best selves—modest, humble, short on cash, true to family, God, and country—and let us celebrate them together. We, who work hard all week, and drink hard all weekend, and pray hard on Sunday mornings, deserve such simplicity. Country music fans are intensely loyal. They know what they like. They buy a lot of records.
All of the country music that Cait enjoyed on our cross-country drive to California was new to her, a hodgepodge of my own favorites mixed with the songs that Katie liked to play sometimes in order to counter my snarkiness. To Cait, the songs were all awful, and for that particular awfulness, and perhaps also because we were falling in love while listening to them, the songs were wonderful. Cait felt no contempt for such obvious sentimentality. She enjoyed the ridiculous lyrics. Country music wasn’t her thing, but then, what did it matter how we killed time on our road trip? Even as we took turns driving across Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and eventually the Sierras, one of us sat in the passenger seat, toggling the playlist “Cait’s country” on my iPod. We sang along to most of the choruses—“Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses!” and “Wheeeeh-White Lightning!”—which we knew pretty well after a few listens.
I did not play “Unanswered Prayers” on that cross-country trip. Even then, I wanted to keep something back. I don’t quite remember when I started liking the song unironically, only that I listened to it far too often after Katie died. That certain distance I had learned to keep between loving things and pretending to love them seemed, in grief, a useless distinction, mere wasted energy that I had mis-devoted to preserving an idea of myself that no longer seemed true. After Katie’s death, no one cared that I was the guy playing Garth Brooks and thinking about Katie. However the song remains one of the few remaining bridges between that life and this one, as perhaps only music can, “Unanswered Prayers” energized a whole range of emotional details in memory that I was eager to feel. Shame and guilt. Entitled and fragile and complicit. More than memories of ordinary days or recipes or even particular holidays, “Unanswered Prayers” persisted, vivid and particular, risking no contradictions.
*
Why, then, is my affection for “Unanswered Prayers” such an emphatic secret? Partly, it is a matter of privacy. I am a little selfish, ungraciously holding back something that I want to remain only mine.
But the larger share of my hesitation comes down to a matter of taste. I am embarrassed, still, to like the song. I have a sense of what “Unanswered Prayers” means to me. Some nights, I worry that anyone will misunderstand that meaning. Other nights, I wish that I didn’t enjoy the song’s corny reassurances and pseudo-religious consolations. However I distinguish the practice of faith from the gnawing reluctances of secular adulthood, I hear still a pernicious, even cynical suggestion of piety in the lyrics. Who wouldn’t choose what’s best for himself? Why would God constantly second-guess certain intentions (high school girlfriends, prayers) but not others (cluster bombs, network television)? More to the point, I like good writing. “Unanswered Prayers,” by that standard, falls pretty short. It misses rhymes and beats throughout. It abbreviates verses in the service of nailing down its wobbly hook. It stops and starts dramatically as it walks up and down the pentatonic scale, following Brooks’s hokey vibrato. “Unanswered Prayers” looks falsely forward with the great hesitancies of schlock, before turning back to complacence as a form of virtue, which is to say it resists reticence and encourages blind nonthinking. Like most of Brooks hits, “Unanswered Prayers” works hard but, to appropriate the old retort, so do washing machines.
Worst of all, “Unanswered Prayers” makes of laziness, if not the absence of critical thought, then a near virtue. Its lyrics invite not only acquiescence to the sacred, the trusting of a divine will, but also suspicion at any feeling too closely articulated. One can almost hear, in the singing along, a collective relief at not working too hard to understand one’s choices, the events to and from which a choice conspires, and any interconnected logic. Like the titular prayers, such effort is all mere grasping, bound to come up short. In the Brooksian worldview, life itself is essentially unknowable. The individual experience requires little articulation, except where it conforms to common experience. The complicated feeling, like the uncertain memory, is a poor approximation of larger, inevitable forces: chastity and family, humility, honors, and gr
ace. In this way, “Unanswered Prayers” is nearly a fable. It brings into the fold anyone who willingly surrenders the particular and looks instead for the lesson. Submit to God: something much larger and smarter than you is doing the heavy lifting.
A few weeks before Sam’s first birthday, I worked out the chord progression of “Unanswered Prayers” most of the way through the song. I sat with the guitar in my lap, staring earnestly at my toddler, singing to him sotto voce, subjecting his reptilian mind to rot. These are unimaginative chord progressions, I told myself, matched to terrible lyrics making arguments you do not believe. No doubt, I compelled my infant listener to be persuaded. Just as I rewarded his smiles with more attention, and held him when he cried, so I could not help singing my way through more than the first chorus without choking up. Listening to me sing as I tried to sing like Garth Brooks, Sam no doubt learned to associate joy with sorrow, and probably also to confuse them. In such moments, I made him complicit in my non-secret, at least until Cait entered the room to my crocodile tears and his bubbling smile, which maybe she mistook for simple affection crossed with a father’s overwhelming pride. Isn’t it what we both wanted to believe? In that moment, who was I to correct her?
Not So Much
Last week, I dreamt that you needed the aerial off of our old Ford Focus. I wrote the whole dream out as soon as I woke up, but I couldn’t remember enough of the details to make much sense. In the dream, it was winter but not cold. I felt a gnawing panic at seeing you, though I don’t think I knew you were dead. We were standing in the parking lot outside of the Jewel-Osco in Chicago, near our old apartment, just long enough for me to jimmy the joint of the aerial and toss it to you. You were surprised at my handiness. You gave me a big hug, and when I held you, my fingers stretched all the way around your back. I woke suddenly, made my notes, and brewed my first cup of coffee. That afternoon, I crawled back into bed and took a nap, and when I woke again, I had forgotten all about the dream until I saw it written out in the notebook beside the bed.
*
I’ve been reading our old emails, trying to remember how we talked to each other. The sound of your voice comes first, full of promise, like the opening chords of a song on the radio I love but can’t name just yet, and then your laugh, entirely yours, the music. Whoever told me that I would forget the sound of your voice first was wrong. I’ve never forgotten it. What I can no longer recall are the arrangements: how much taller I was than you when I stood next to you, how it felt to sit together on a sofa, who leaned into whom when we walked across a city. We did it often enough. I should remember. I thought the quality of memory would follow some magnitude of experience, that I might arrange the memories by frequency so that I would be least likely to forget those things we did the most often. Instead, it seems, memory falls away like a lost radio signal. The last parts, right up to your death, come through the clearest. Even now, when I make some explanation of my life with and after you, when I talk around you because I cannot stop myself from talking, it’s your voice I hear first, and then your laugh, as though we are fixed in time to both, and the things you might say to me are still only what you could have said when you were alive.
You wouldn’t care for this conversation I’m trying to start. For you, it would not be a conversation. You would sit and listen, nod and smile. You might ask me to be kind to your mother but not to dwell too much on the past. You would remind me to be careful of expecting too much from anyone and to remember my low tolerance and easy frustration. There would be a silence when you would not ask me to look after all those lives that accumulated around you, friends and colleagues and strangers on whom you made the most vivid impressions, who wrote me after your death to say such nice things. Those people you brought close because you listened so well, but also because you guarded, more than anything, against the obligations that came with needing other people. It was easy for you to give and be needed. With me, it’s need first, and order. I wouldn’t just pick up the phone and tell your friend, as you did, “No, you’re not a bad parent. You’re just having a hard time of it, like anyone.” Or, “It’s okay to leave your husband for a little while. Go to the city and get your head straight.” Everyone said you were a straight shooter, but I think that’s more a reflection of how you made us feel—held to account—than what you said. You rarely told people what they did not want to hear.
If you speak at all when I imagine you, you say things like, “You could not have saved my life.” I say, “Maybe.” You smile at me in that way that means, Well, we both know how this is going to end, or you say it outright: “Really, John? A bear? You were going to stop a grizzly bear?” And we go back and forth like that, starting and stopping our fight, until that moment you decide to stop me dead in my tracks. “What does that night have to do with you now, John? I’m the one who died. You are the one who lived. I was killed by a fucking bear, and you married Cait and moved to California and started a big family, and you want anyone to say, still, ‘Poor guy, he had a rough go of it, eh’?”
And I would want you also to say, “Isn’t it enough, already, that year in Indiana and these eight years since? Can’t you just fucking be happy—the boys, Cait, California, the writing and teaching—can’t you get over yourself?” and if I could goad you into it, if I could make you snap, then I would know for sure that it’s not really you talking. I would no longer recognize your voice. Of course, you never swore like that. You never lost your cool when you were really upset. What I would hear, instead, would be the sound of my voice as I have trained it to sound like yours and call back in those moments I run out my string, desperate for a signal.
*
“You married the wrong Peace Corps Cait,” you used to shrug at the end of a conversation, or as you crossed a room, or sometimes, as you leaned over to kiss me on the forehead, on your way up the stairs, turning back to say good night, when you enjoyed getting my goat, because you knew that I enjoyed letting it be gotten, and maybe, also, as a reminder that however well I enjoyed the joke, when some plan for the future came up—a family, a house, our hometowns—we were for now keeping at a distance those things we were not sure we wanted together. And I think our life would have continued like that, and we would have been happy in our own way, because when you died, I didn’t think of the joke too often. It was only a year or so later that I began to think you knew me well enough to see several different paths to happiness and to lay them all out in front of me at the same time, to clue me in that however we fought, you wanted both my happiness, and also, whatever had made the fight worth having.
I know it is my own smallness of mind that seeks the reference point in meaning, that insists on comparing one marriage with the other in order to decide that one suits me better. Divorced men, apparently, do this quite often. Widows rarely remarry, but they too take the measure of a past, and often more acutely than widowers. At family events now we hardly talk about you. Someone asks about your family, whether I’m in touch with your mom or how your nieces are doing, but rarely do we talk too long about you, which I think is a kind of superstition against tragedy and loss. Not that we mean to avoid you, but since my life continues so well, we focus instead on the present.
“You married,” Cait said the other night, “the most straightforward girl in the world,” and it is one of our running jokes, that she is the even and calm one, and I’m the worrier. She is hopeful and I am filled with doubt. She sees the good in people who I worry are out to get me. She visits her mom, is adored by her students, and loves our boys and her husband, all of whom together make her feel happy and rooted and loved. I feel loved too, but I get prickly when I don’t take time away from what I love, and eventually, from myself. I am a loner but she is an extrovert. Didn’t you and I basically switch those roles when you were alive? You hated comparisons. You loved the world enough and felt secure enough in it. You did not need contrast in order to recognize the things you loved.
*
“Not so much,” Beth wrote afte
r you died, “is what we all remember you for saying. It was your kinder, gentler way of saying, ‘No.’ Katie, do you like syrup on your pancakes? ‘Not so much.’ Should we go out tonight to that club your friends like? ‘Not so much.’” The night before you died, we went to the international movie theater and saw Ocean’s Thirteen. We had dinner at the café with the pizzas and the tall beers. I opened my birthday presents a week early so that we wouldn’t have to take them with us on our train ride into the mountains. We were at the beginning of a journey, just. That memory is where I go to find the conversations that might continue as something other than our last night together. I know what I want to ask you. I am thirty-nine years old now, remarried, a father. I live in California. I have written about you, and little else, for nine years.
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