First Light

by Charles Baxter

  “Though we haven’t actually done that yet,” Laurie says from the doorway. “But maybe we will. Maybe we’ll all sit together and watch the snow fall. It would be nice.”

  Unsure of her tone, he glares at her and takes the visitors downstairs, where he has built a playroom for the girls. With a twelve-inch spacer he nailed up furring strips at right angles to the rafters and then installed ceiling tile with a staple gun. From this job he had neck pains for two weeks. For the recessed fixtures he loaded the junction boxes on the adapter plates and connected the socket to the power line himself. He covered the cement walls with fake wood paneling, so that the girls would feel comfortable down there, playing with their dollhouses.

  He remembers which year he built the dollhouses; he can even remember the month. For Tina he bought an unfinished cabinet and cut away windows and doors in the back and the sides. He made furniture from lumber scraps and bits of hardboard. For Amy he built the dollhouse wall by wall, adding on a textured gable and crafting the interior with slotted joints and movable partitions, a stairway with a handrail, and completely appointed kitchen and bathroom. He used staples as toy cabinet handles and white tacks as doorknobs. With a band saw in his workroom he made domestic and farm animals—horses, dogs, and sheep—to stand outside the dollhouses in imaginary fields. He stood all the animals on dowel legs and drilled holes in hardboard for platforms, then put the platforms on wheels that he had made by slicing up a snapped broom handle. He attached the wheels to the platforms with toothpicks and glue. He thought animals looked friendlier when they were standing on platforms and wheels.

  He can remember how, the year Laurie gave up smoking, he made a walking tricycle for Amy and a small HO train layout for Tina. He put the trains on a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, a basic oval layout with two spur lines for storing extra freight cars. He built a small wire-and-plaster-of-Paris tunnel that served no freight-yard function but which looked handsome on the board. He had never asked Tina if she wanted any model trains, and when he unveiled it, her face looked surprised rather than pleased. Laurie insisted that she play with her father’s gift, and she did, for two dutiful weeks. Then the train set was hoisted onto its side and stored against the wall in the furnace room, its wires dangling down onto the floor.

  Hugh needs projects; unless he has something to do, he frets and dozes off and stares at the clock. Without a project, he must sit with Laurie in the living room in front of the TV set and watch entertainment. He doesn’t understand most television. Dramatic shows make him squirm and pull his hand back and forth across his scalp. Instead of seeing characters and conflicts, he sees actors reciting unusual lines in unreal settings. Nothing on television ever looks familiar to him. He can’t identify with anyone, either the heroes or the villains. The commercials come on as a great, generous relief from the agonies of narrative.

  He works on his projects in the basement, near a wall where his hockey skates are hung on a peg. In the four months before Amy’s birth, he built a pine bed for Tina; then, upstairs, he built a partition in the room so that Tina would have some privacy after her baby sister was born. He built for her three toy boxes on movable bases, and a set of outdoor tables and chairs for her doll-and-stuffed-animal tea parties.

  In the months when Tina was still toddling around the house, he laid down extra fiberglass insulation in the attic to reduce the draftiness in her room, and he wallpapered the room with a pattern showing circus clowns and red balloons. He didn’t like the pattern—he always hated clowns and feared their smiles—but Laurie had picked the pattern out, and he felt that he had no rights as a father to argue with her over wallpaper. He took out the old wall switch-plate and put in a new one with Winnie-the-Pooh on it, the bear’s paw in a jar of honey.

  That summer, as a favor to Laurie, he Rototilled a strip along the south backyard fence and helped her start a garden. It marked the season and the year. He sees the garden now and knows how far he has traveled in time away from its beginning. He knows exactly when he built the trapdoor stairs to the attic; he measures Tina’s age by his reckoning of how old she was when he put in the last bolt. When he can think of nothing to do, he sits in the living room, dazed, trying to imagine something he can construct by hand. He looks down at his large scooplike palms, as the laugh track roars from the TV’s loudspeaker. He opens and closes his fingers and feels the tightening of his forearm muscles.

  He draws mental blueprints for something to destroy or build, even if no one will notice; not the cousins or his daughters or even Laurie herself. He comes back home from work and sits in the kitchen chair near the south window, and Laurie asks him how his day has been, expecting no news. After that, she offers a few sentences about her day at the library: an irritable borrower, a virus going around and depleting the staff. Then she smiles at him, a smile not without its measure of sweetness. She sets out the forks and spoons for dinner, and asks Hugh to reach for a pitcher on an upper shelf, and as he stretches up to grasp it, Hugh imagines himself tearing down the entire kitchen, the whole wing of the house, leaving nothing but scrap lumber and nails scattered in the yard.

  At night they make love to each other in silence, joylessly and without variations, Laurie’s closed eyes turned away from Hugh, her face as far away from his as she can manage. They are obligated by their bodies to pay this obscure debt to each other, some invisible mortgage held until, in old age, each one owns the other, outright.

  Adulthood is a puzzle. Its logic is unknown. For logic Hugh sits at his workbench in the basement, where the old buzztone Motorola serenades him, and he can look at the nails in their glass jars, at his variable-speed grinder, his radial saw, his hammers and wrenches and drill bits. He looks at these tools, and thinks of how he worked on the porch with them, and how, the year before, he constructed the playroom, and how, the year before that, he built the dollhouses. He remembers how he made the trains and the partition and the desk and the kitchen counter. He looks at a jar of nails and thinks of the year he reshingled the roof and put in a new lightning rod on the corner peak of the house. Years ago. He was nailing down shingles when Dorsey called him from California, where she had earned her Ph.D.

  “Hugh.” Dorsey’s voice is long distanced, blank and static-shot.

  “Hi, Dorsey! How are you? How’s the baby?”

  “Hugh. I’ll tell you about him later. I’m not sure. We think he may have some hearing problems. But the thing is, I’ve been offered a job in Buffalo, and we have to leave here.”

  “Buffalo?”

  “Buffalo, New York.”

  “I know where it is,” he says. “Why Buffalo?”

  “Because they called me up and offered me a job. It’s a matter of connections. Let’s not talk about this now. The point is, I need some help moving. And I need help driving. Simon will do some of it, but—”

  “—Dorsey …”

  “—I think we could do it in four days, don’t you? Five days? The car’s in pretty good shape.”

  “I can’t leave my job that long. Clarence Findley will have my hide if I’m gone for five days. Who’s this Simon?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. Why can’t you explain to your boss that this is a family emergency? It is a family emergency. I have to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to get out of here now! Look, I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

  “With you, everything is an emergency.”

  “Don’t you say that to me,” she tells him. “Don’t you say that.”

  “All right. I’m sorry.”

  “Hugh. Please come out. We’ve got to have some help.”

  “What is this ‘we’?”

  “Noah and I. And Simon.”

  “Simon who?”

  “Simon O’Rourke. He’s an actor. He can’t drive all the way, and I have to take care of Noah. You know how I am about driving.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “Simon? In the grocery. I was down th
ere to get some bananas when I was pregnant and we struck up a conversation.”

  “I thought you said he was an actor.”

  “I didn’t say he was working in produce, I said I met him there. Don’t be a prig.”

  “I am a prig.”

  “Well, don’t be more of one than you already are.”

  “If this guy is working, how come he’s coming east with you?”

  “Because he can. I’ll explain.”

  “He sounds pretty suspi—”

  “Don’t do that,” she says. “You don’t have the right.”

  “To do what?”

  “To criticize a man, sight unseen. He’s helping me. I don’t get that many offers of help, you know. Disinterested offers, anyway.”

  Hugh imagines a calendar, and sees six days blacked out by a child’s pencil. “Dorsey, I just don’t think—”

  “Don’t think at all. Just buy the ticket and come out here and help me. Please.”

  Hugh thinks of his father, himself, Dorsey: time lifts up around him, and his father says, “Take care of her.” The pause in the line opens up, and after ten seconds she says, “Are you still there?”

  “All right,” he says.

  “Thank you. Oh, God, thank you. I don’t know how we would have done this on our own.”

  “You’re saying ‘we’ a lot.”

  “I am, aren’t I? Oh, thank you, kiddo. How’s my little niece?”

  “Nice of you to ask. She’s fine.”

  “Bring a picture. When can you be here?”

  “Day after tomorrow,” he tells her. They mutter good-byes, and Hugh hangs up. Laurie is looking at him as she stands near the door, her left arm crossed onto her right, and her free hand raised, two fingers framing the side of her cheek. Hugh nods at her, without speaking. She often listens in to his calls on the extension; he doesn’t care about it enough to embarrass her and himself by telling her to stop it.

  Just outside the San Francisco airport, driving to Dorsey’s house in a rented Chevrolet, Hugh smells the ocean. He sees hills that might be mountains. The soft nameless foliage along the freeway, and the stimulating salt charge in the air, draw him into the city. He hasn’t planned to stop here—Dorsey’s place is close to the university, forty minutes away—but it’s only an hour’s lost time and he’s seen the ocean only twice before in his life. He puzzles out the traffic, stops to ask directions from a blond woman cop in a patrol car in Golden Gate Park, and at last the light in front of him breaks open into a clear view of the Pacific, at Ocean Beach. The colors are those of precious metals, gold and silver, and they stretch out unbroken to the horizon. He breathes in and feels his blood pressure dropping. After parking his car, he remembers to lock it—in this city you can’t trust strangers—and he walks to the Cliff House, where he buys some touristy color postcards for Laurie. Beyond the plate-glass windows are the seal rocks; yes, there are seals there, barking as advertised. Gulls volplane along the cliffs. Dazed, holding his bag of postcards, Hugh walks south along the wall down to the beach, until he finds a spot of his own, where he stops.

  Behind him, next to him, men and women of all ages and various exotic national origins are sunning themselves, or gazing, or jogging. The air is soft, smoothed by thousands of miles of salt water. Around him, the others on the beach observe the horizon to the west or the seal rocks to the north, or they gaze happily in no particular direction at all. How much more beautiful the people are here! he thinks. Relaxation or the ocean has improved their looks significantly. Also, their faces—watchful, calmed—seem more attentive than the ones he is familiar with in Five Oaks, but this might be a side effect of the coastal relaxation. Above all—he can feel the waves taking him over, lulling him—the waves are reliable and infinite. The waves don’t give a damn. He feels the tranquil sun on his face and groans with pleasure as a breeze that might have come all the way from China touches his forehead. He feels unable to control the dangerous contentment he suddenly feels. Slowly he unbuttons his shirt, letting the sun and sea air touch him impersonally.

  To shade his eyes, he weaves his fingers together at his forehead, thumbs at temples, and he remembers his home improvements, the shingles and gutters he has just hammered onto his house, and they impress him as luckless empty things. The waves come in. Time politely stops. Why has he ever set himself up in Five Oaks, Michigan, when he could live for the rest of his life in a tent on this beautiful beach? He realizes that he is feeling drugged, but he does not move. After a few minutes, he turns around to glance at the city behind him, built according to a plan and on a scale unimaginable to the practical midwesterners who buy cars from him. There it is, the cable-car city, America’s Naples: you could indeed come here and die. Many had. He would like to strip down to his Jockey shorts and dive into the water, into the undertow. The waves pound in his ears.

  What time is it? He looks at his watch; it has stopped, the stem still out from the moment the plane landed and he reset it for Pacific Time. He asks a woman in a red outfit sitting on a blanket, but, no, she doesn’t know the time either. Maybe no one does. Hugh stands in the sun and cannot imagine anyone out here winding a clock. Except maybe Dorsey. He can imagine Dorsey waking up in the morning and winding her noisy Big Ben with the black face and the luminous numbers. He remembers that clock and its spine-shocking alarm. In the center of this place, she will have remained as pale as typing paper. She will be alert. Hugh buttons his shirt, thinking of Dorsey and her baby.

  It takes him an hour and a half to find her house, near the famous university where she has earned her doctorate and become pregnant. When he does find it, he can’t understand why she moved from her nice apartment to this place, with its flaking green paint and broken porch swing. The house is untended. The front patch of lawn is gouged and pitted as if a dinosaur had grazed on it, and there is a torn screen on one of the upstairs windows. But that’s the address. He finds a place to park two blocks away. Walking to the house, he passes a woman so unnaturally beautiful that the hair on the back of his neck stands up.

  From the porch steps he looks in through the screen door and sees his sister at the back of the house, leaning forward in a kitchen chair, her hands clasped around a cup of coffee. He knocks. “Dorsey,” he says.

  She screams and at once rushes out of the kitchen through the living room and out onto the porch. “You came,” she says, and gives him a long hug. In this embrace he feels, guiltily, her breasts, enlarged from their production of milk, pressing against him. She gives off a mother smell of bread and oatmeal and baby fluids. She pulls away from him, takes his hand, and says, “Come inside. Where’s your suitcase?”

  “In the car.”

  “Shouldn’t leave it there. Better get it soon. We’re in kind of a mess here.” She walks through the living room, side-stepping boxes of newspaper-wrapped household items on one side, and grocery bags loaded with books on the other. The boxes and bags take up most of the available space. There is a mean smell, acidic and tense, in the air, different from his sister’s fragrance, but Hugh can’t tell where it comes from. It might be book dust, or the residue of generations of students hemmed and penned up, their fires raging, in this house.

  In the kitchen he studies his sister’s face, luminous with its sweet intelligence. Her eyes are wounded, circled with a kind of shadow-flesh, but still inhabited with light. On the kitchen table are her yellow legal pads scribbled over with equations. Hugh has seen these before. Everywhere his sister goes, she is accompanied by these ciphers. And on the kitchen floor is Noah, now a year old, sitting up, his hair wild, staring at his uncle.

  “There he is,” she says proudly. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

  “He sure is. Can I pick him up?”

  “Of course.”

  Hugh bends down and puts his hands around Noah. The boy looks alarmed and opens his mouth, and his eyes widen in toddler fear. As Hugh brings him up to eye level, Noah’s face calms, though his arms reach toward his mother. Hugh bounces and jigg
les him, and Noah’s mouth closes. His hands begin to make intense motions in front of him.

  “There’s no explanation,” Dorsey says. “We’ve had him checked by a number of specialists. I didn’t have German measles during my pregnancy, so that’s not it. No one knows. He has a very, very low level of hearing, and with some powerful hearing aids he may hear slightly, but not very much, not ever. We’re learning sign.”

  “You and this Simon person.”

  Dorsey nods.

  “How come you called me so suddenly? Why’re you leaving so fast?”

  “I just have to get away from Carlo.” Hugh is careful not to interrupt. “I think he’s trying to take me over, haunt me in some way. He’s very upsetting.” She crosses her arms and raises her knee to the kitchen chair. “He tried to get power over me and wreck my life. He wouldn’t call it that. He’d call it … I don’t know what he’d call it, actually. He might call it love. He’d invent a name for it. He’d find a name in Dante and use that.”

  “How did you ever meet him?” Hugh asks.

  Dorsey doesn’t answer. She is through talking about Carlo Pavorese. “I made phone calls all around the country and found this one-year lectureship in Buffalo,” she says. “They may make it tenure-track, I don’t know. They need women in the physics department there worse than most places. And Simon thinks he can get acting work there. We decided not to wait any longer.”

  “It’s so beautiful here,” Hugh says. “The ocean—”

  “—Don’t tell me about the fucking ocean,” Dorsey whispers. “God! All the people out here mesmerized by that goddamn bay and that bridge and that fucking expanse of water! And don’t tell me about fog, either. I sucked my share of fog. Fuck all that.”

  Hugh is so shocked by his sister’s language that he can’t think of anything to say for a moment. At last he says, “Where’s your friend Simon?” He takes Noah from his knee and puts him back into his playpen.