The preciousness of that time, the fact that it is so contested and fraught with the weight of what is not being done with it, have forced my hand: I have to admit that I believe in art. Not as a lofty ideal, a form of salvation or elevation or sublime otherness, but as a way of accessing the large, old emotions and mysteries within the everyday, a way of being first shown to me by my dad. A consciousness. One that, for me, is equal to motherhood in its eradication of the self and the worldly, and yet is simultaneously of the world, composed of paper coffee cups in cheap hotels and the ragged snores of dogs, of quesadillas and the soundless descent of the perfectly pitched beanbag into the cornhole. And so I hunker down and defend my territory, lash out from it like a threatened bear. And yet the time itself is not some great march toward progress or glory; whereas in the past I was always working for a goal, an MFA, publication, awards, recognition, now I simply work.
Still, the pragmatic is constantly encroaching from all sides, with its spears of financial, familial anxiety: How in the world will we ever afford college? Preschool? A car that isn’t perpetually on the verge of collapse? Ignoring these questions would be delusional and unfair, although I can fight against the overwhelming American pressure to conform, to assume that the only way to raise a child is in a nice suburban home, bedtime at seven, soccer on Sundays, and a steadily accumulating college fund. There’s nothing wrong with this; it can be a dreamy way to grow up. But there are other ways to build a life and a family that bring their own benefits: the days I spend traveling with the baby, showing her seashells, rolling around cheap hotel beds blowing raspberries into her legs, and the meaning my husband and I find in our lives, our work, our everyday, which I hope we give to her as a deep passion and priority.
Still, I’d love to be paid for my writing, to live from it. I’d love a nursery, beautiful rocking horses, actual counter space. But even as those endless, important, and tedious questions about the accumulation of wealth and status weigh heavier and harder on the everyday, I sense a more pressing need to sequester my writing from them. The stakes are higher now than ever before: either I keep it separate, I write because I have to, I read what I want to, and I figure everything else out as best I can (fellowships? ESL? second photographer to my brilliant husband?), or I give it up. Become a park ranger. Bake pies and move on. Which maybe, someday, I’ll do. But for now I take my coffee and my computer to the barn, and I go until my brain hurts, until my body feels wrung out, and I keep going until up at the screen door pops Jorge’s brown, bearded face: “Te toca.” Toothy grin. In his arms is the wriggly baby, hungry for Mom, hungry for milk, and her eager pawing at my chest reminds me once again why this matters so much and not at all.
—
When I first move into the cabin I clear out the drawers in my dad’s old wardrobe to make room for my socks. There I find dozens of frail, yellowing index cards scrawled with words like dewlapped and heliotrope and oleaginous. They are packed in careful, cribbed handwriting onto each card: mucilaginous, pentapod, and limn; turpitude and fugue and bête noir. All of this prodigal lyricism set aside in a dusty drawer and discovered by tired, hormonal, confused, pregnant me, so many years later. I move those cards to my own desk and begin writing again.
So does my dad. One of his first poems is about observing a man at a dressage competition in southeastern Ohio. Why was he there? my dad wonders in the poem, studying him. For his granddaughter or his wife, surely. Dad looks away, watches the other goings-on in preparation for the competition. When he turns back, the man is dressed in full riding regalia, ready to trot his horse into the ring. Dad sees the man: “his own person, my contemporary / And I see the tenderness and care / Was for his own precious self.”
Finally, after forty years of child-rearing, he can spend the whole morning writing. We are now writing in tandem, some five hundred feet apart, listening to the same birdsongs, looking at the same stretch of woods.
—
Dad was not present at my labor, which was all female save for the blessed Jorge, who navigated a scene of six women—one screaming, bleeding, and panting; three comforting and soothing and pacing; two guiding and directing—with his preternatural grace. Dad stayed at the farm and waited for updates. When I’d started to experience intense pain while still only five centimeters dilated, Meg called Dad to fill him in.
Later, he tells me that at this point he went upstairs and did tonglen meditation. The purpose of tonglen, which can be translated from the Tibetan as “giving and taking,” is to take on the suffering of others, breathing it in on the in breath, and to give back happiness, breathing it out on the out breath. I think of Dad in the lotus position in his paint-splattered T-shirt and his white kneesocks, his aching foot bent beneath him, breathing in suffering and breathing out happiness in big, slow, concentrated breaths. A little over two hours later the baby is born: bright red, crying at full pitch, our healthy beautiful Elena.
There is no way to repay or to thank my dad, no act or story that can ever hope to acknowledge how he has absorbed our suffering and given his precious breath for our happiness. I can only try to emulate his gentleness with my own daughter, and to write. Write not to redeem a lost glory, as I once imagined, but to make of my life a more conscious and empathetic and open space; write not to compensate for a dearth in his life, but to become more like him.
I look at a picture my dad has on his bookshelf of him and his father. My dad is a freckled little boy in suspenders and high-waisted 1950s shorts. He stands beside his dad, a chubby-cheeked young man just back from war, who smiles as he leans on one knee toward his son. I see my dad as a child, which is to say I feel for him a motherly affection. This has begun happening since I became a mother: the cycles get muddled and move too quickly and I lose my place in them. I feel a maternal empathy and concern for my parents, a childlike adoration and need for my child. The love I feel for the little boy in my dad’s old photo and the love I sense from Elena blend, indistinguishable, ever renewing.
—
My dad married Meg in a backyard ceremony at our house on Fairview Avenue in Cincinnati. It was an old brick house they’d bought together, with ivied front steps and a big sycamore that sprawled its palomino branches over the backyard. They exchanged vows at sunset under a white tent, and Meg’s friend’s band serenaded them with the Talking Heads “This Must Be the Place.” Dad gamely carried a whiny me over his shoulder for the better part of the night. The following year, Jack was born in the front room of the Fairview house, and we were a family.
In those early years my dad and Meg were deep into Free Daism, an offshoot of Buddhism spawned by a Queens-born guru who went on to christen himself Adi Da and write a series of books with titles like The Incarnation of Love and The Knee of Listening. After a sex scandal and accusations of brainwashing, they realized the guru, holed up at a commune in Fiji, might be on the sketchier side of New Agey, and they left Free Daism. But the teachings, which were rooted in the fundamentals of Buddhism, stayed with them and were instilled in my brother and me as we were growing up. I remember my dad reading me a book that asked “Why is an apple an apple?” The concept seems obvious now—the random, symbolic abstraction of language—but at the time it was radical, a question that made my brain itch. There was a lot of talk of “the mystery,” which was at the heart of the unanswerableness of the apple question. Having grown up Catholic and later rejected Catholicism, Meg and Dad found meaning instead in the mystery: the notion that we can’t know and that we can find peace and meaning in not knowing. Respect the mystery, my dad used to tell me when I’d torque myself up with worry about AIDS or the flesh-eating disease or velociraptors or, later, work myself into great quandaries of adolescent self-doubt.
Language breaks down before the mystery, as I discovered trying to explain it to college boyfriends, who inevitably walked away with a notion of my parents as tie-dyed, incense-reeking, adorable Ohioans who encouraged their kids to offer orange slices to a blown-up photo of a burly New Yorke
r. My dad would get frustrated with me later when I grilled him about Free Daism with my writer’s relentless, prodding curiosity. He was unable to neatly summarize what appealed to them, although he never regretted this time and was quick to point out that he and Meg still lived by many of the same precepts: not getting caught by desires; living a conscious, compassionate life; not fearing death.
At the farm, in early motherhood, I circle back now to the mystery. There have been many periods of my life in which I have not known where I’m headed, but never with the combination of settledness I feel now—settledness in my family and my commitments—and a new understanding of the randomness of choice. China or Portland, farm or apartment block, in the end it will all come round to the same things: coffee in the morning, books, cameras, the juggling of finances and responsibilities and competing desires within the finite container of the day. The mystery is the space between it mattering so much and it not mattering at all.
—
One long and tired afternoon in August, Jorge and I are beginning to have one of our fights, and at that first sharp flare that ignites all of our sensitivities, I am struck by the notion that it doesn’t matter: standing on the grass, taking in the house and the cabin, I think, Why bother. It is not that I stumble upon that clipped, fuck-it wisdom of “life is short,” that I don’t want to waste time with anger. It is rather that the passionate fury of the moment seems so small and irrelevant, my life so small and irrelevant, that I can’t work myself up. I don’t go make oatmeal cookies for the whole family and write love letters to long-ignored friends; I just go back inside and get to work, trying to keep my back straight, watching those dreamboat storm clouds bluster in on the wind.
“Life is short” suggests that we should rush to fulfill as many of our desires as possible—make a pass at the neighbor girl, stuff ourselves with chocolate cake, drop everything to call our grandmothers—because there’s not enough time and we’ll be flayed by regrets. The thought of it all not mattering is different. It’s more like I, myself, am a TV show I don’t really care about, with the actors tearing up and ranting about dramas that seem hazy and insignificant, and so I stretch and turn the TV off and have a Kalamazoo Stout on the front porch, watching the last of the lightning bugs carve tangled streaks of incandescence through the trees.
—
In August, I am making a slow rotation around the cabin as I do with the baby, bringing the world into focus object by object—birdhouse, sunflower, butterfly, rock—when I notice squash flowers blooming in our small, messy garden. My dad cruises up, as he often does with a tool or a question or just wanting to chat idly with his buddy Jorge, and I offer to make him a squash blossom quesadilla. I enter the womblike darkness of the cabin, which is simultaneously summery and holding a protective wintery musk. I set butter to sizzle in a pan. The squash flowers go in, with some cumin, salt, pepper. I press them and white cheddar between two tortillas, rub butter on both sides, heat them to a toasty brown. My dad has come in and is playing with the baby, and I say, “Try this,” but his hands are full of infant, and with cheese dripping down my arm, I drop the square of quesadilla into his mouth. His eyes lift, light up.
“Wow!” he says, with his utterly genuine enthusiasm, his warmth. In my twenties I never would have envisioned this moment, in a cabin, with a baby, making a squash blossom quesadilla for my dad. In cooking for him, feeding him, I feel like the mama bird, and also for the first time like the daughter taking care of an aging parent. My dad is still capable of unloading several hundred pounds of wood and chasing a toddler around for hours (activities that inflict approximately parallel levels of exhaustion), but nonetheless in this moment I feel his mortality, which I now see is aligned with my burgeoning adulthood. I get to feed him this warm pocket of fresh flower and cheese, as he fed me redbud blossoms, crunchy sweet and fresh with dew, and hemlock tea and morel mushrooms with olive oil and garlic over spaghetti, and as later I will feed Elena crushed paneer and creamy Mexican black beans and oatmeal with blackstrap molasses. There is a different kind of knowing in this moment, which I did not have a year ago: knowing to walk slowly around the house, knowing to kneel and pluck the flower from its stem, knowing to stop and chat with my dad, knowing to offer the quesadilla and to come inside and cook it carefully, deliberately, and give it to him as a gift, knowing it is all nothing, it is all in a day. This is the mystery: moments of calm knowing that contain within them nothing larger than the everyday. And this is what I am seeking, although I don’t know this, or cannot articulate it, until more than a year after Elena is born, when I am walking with her through the pastures, thumping her new running stroller over molehills and tangles of cut multiflora rose. She is being jangled to sleep, and my brain is jangling around the question of what is different about reading and writing and my understanding of them. It is summer dusk, and long sashes of peach light fall over the pastures. Phlox blooms by the walnut tree before the cabin, waving stiffly in the breeze like a stodgy Englishman trying not to seem overly excited. Without realizing it or trying, I see, I have shed the pressing need for purpose. I don’t need to be able to define a book’s themes, its goals, its message. I’ve developed an aversion to stories that have too clear an aim; I want the heady, dreamy immersion of novels or of stories so intimate and pressed up close to a life that they have no bigger picture. I want to feel the world called up, depicted in its contradictions and coincidences and complex schemas. I want to merge with it, with its mystery. Why is an apple an apple? I can only say, I fed my dad a squash blossom quesadilla.
The other day, Jorge got out of the shower and I was lying in bed with the baby, exhausted, listening to Andrew Bird, and Jorge, his hair plastered penguinlike to his head, towel wrapped around his brown belly, started playing the air violin. He rocked out on the strings and then moved on to the air harp, the air trumpet, the air flute, until I was laughing so hard I was coughing and the baby looked on in confusion. He left and then returned marching to the air trombone.
“Ohhhhh,” says the baby, a long, almost moaning sound, when she notices something, anything: cow, gum wad stuck to the sidewalk, cigarette butt, hummingbird. “Ohhhh,” her mouth a perfect O of wonderment, and she looks at me to make sure I see it, too.
One winter morning my dad comes up and knocks on the kitchen window, beside where the baby is sitting on the table in her Bumbo seat. He is wearing a fluorescent yellow knit hunting cap, and he shows the baby an egg, hoisting it up like a wild jewel extracted from the forest, grinning a big wacky grin.
—
During this time at the farm, I have been teaching my dad Spanish. Dad, always embarking on a new learning curve—birdsongs, dog training, mushroom hunting—wants to learn Spanish in order to travel to Oaxaca and communicate with Jorge’s family. Little by little, he and I forge our way through verb tenses, vocabulary, idioms: “for everything good, mezcal, and for everything bad, too.” To convey unknown vocabulary I draw terrible sketches of eggplant and horses, and sometimes he switches into English without realizing it but keeps speaking in the accent of a mustachioed Mexican paramour. He is perpetually coming up with obscure words for things like small splashes in puddles of rainwater, and I am perpetually trying to bring him round to the basics of queso and zapatos.
I try to enforce a Spanish-only rule during our lessons, and sometimes this means it takes a while to get meaning across via context. Last fall, we had conversation practice while we picked apples from the two trees in the front pasture. We were squinting up at the high branches, angling baskets attached to long wooden poles, talking about family.
“Cuántos hijos tienes?” I asked him. How many children do you have?
“Hijos?” he asked.
“Hijos,” I said, gesturing at myself and Jack, who was listening to music in the barn nearby.
“Hijos…,” he mused, not getting it.
“Hijos,” I said again, more emphatically, pointing at Jack, then myself. I tapped my chest, just over my heart. “Soy
tu hija. Somos tus hijos.” I am your daughter. We are your children.
“Oh, hijos!” he said. Then slowly, deliberately, “Tu. Eres. Mi. Hija.” He grinned with the sheepish grin he reserves for Spanish, when he must play the role of infant.
And on this clear fall day in southeastern Ohio, the spotted apples dangling like pearls from those cragged branches, my own daughter just beginning to assert herself in my belly, I wanted to say, I’ll tell you what, it couldn’t have worked out any better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first began writing, I labored under the cliché that art is made in beautiful, agonized solitude, the artist emerging stunned and blinking from her cave in the early evening for a stiff drink. Little by little, as I founded a magazine and became part of a community of writers, that cliché eroded. Parts of the writing process are and must be intensely solitary, but a finished work is a collaboration of influences, perspectives, insights, and criticisms. I have never felt this as acutely as I have while working on this book. The close readings and critiques of friends and editors have been essential: equally so, the efforts and sacrifices my family has made to give me the time, space, and energy to work.
Thank you to Emily Giglierano for believing in and championing this book from the start, and for her enthusiasm for my midwesternisms. An immense thank you to my editor Andrea Robinson, for her acumen, thoughtfulness, and patience, and for guiding me through this process. Thank you to my agent Jane Dystel, for her support and faith. She took me on, stuck with me, and assured me in the low moments that I would one day have a book; now I do.
I would not be half the writer I am today without the time, energy, and critical reading of Vela’s editors, who shook me out of many complacencies, bad habits, and indulgences, and taught me to see my work anew. I want to thank in particular the brilliant Amanda Giracca and Simone Gorrindo, who have spent hundreds of hours wading through my rants and redundancies and sifting from them a few hopeful seeds, and whose readings of the first few drafts of this book helped shape it and make it possible. I am so grateful to have you as friends and colleagues; may we continue our three-hour-long Skype sessions about infant inserts and chickens and the present tense long after your babies are born. Thank you also to Jenny Williams, longtime companion on this often grim, sometimes transcendent literary path, whose camaraderie has many times saved me from nihilism.
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