The Senator's Children

by Nicholas Montemarano

  And then she hears a chair move. This startles her at first, just a little, until she hears typing—Peter on his laptop at her desk. She closes her eyes and listens to the rain and the typing. As much as she would like to say, “Good morning,” or “Hey you,” she worries that saying anything, or letting Peter know she’s awake, would end this moment she doesn’t want to end. Not even Peter in bed beside her, she thinks, could be better. The cold rain blowing outside makes her feel that much warmer, and she doesn’t have to be in class until eleven, and she wants to remain in this heavy yet somehow weightless state—her body sinking into the bed—for as long as possible. She’s comforted by the sound of someone awake while she almost-sleeps. When she was young, she liked knowing that her mother was up, liked hearing her footsteps downstairs, voices from the TV, ice cubes in a glass, her mother making herself a drink, some nights a tea kettle whistling, hot water poured into a mug, a spoon stirring honey, her mother on the phone with an old friend she used to go to auditions with.

  Her active, hyper-analytical mind wants to convince her that it’s weird for the boy she just had sex with to remind her of her mother, or that by feeling so safe with Peter in the room, she’s placing too much importance on their relationship too soon and therefore making herself vulnerable, but the truth is, she had forgotten entirely about the comforting sounds of her mother awake at night, and only by feeling something similar with Peter was she able to retrieve those memories; otherwise, who knows, they might have been lost forever, hidden beneath more complicated memories: her mother as needy, childlike, messy.

  *

  Now he is gone.

  Her eyes are open, and she can see the empty chair at her desk. Must be eight or nine, hard to tell: it’s pouring, the sky so dark it could be dusk, as if she slept through the day.

  She should check the time on her phone, which is on her desk, she should make sure, but as soon as she gets up, it will feel like a new day, whereas as long as she stays in bed, last night, in a way, can continue. The sheets smell like her and Peter—like sex. She moves her head to the pillow Peter used and tries to smell him. She feels silly, vulnerable, and stops; this is something her mother might do, probably did do. But when she brings her hand to her mouth to cover a yawn, she does smell Peter. She doesn’t know what the smell is at first except that it’s him and must be from when he was on top of her, holding her down by her hands. After, they joked that he had reversed the ticket—after all, she was supposed to be on top—and then this became shorthand for a move either could use: reversing the ticket. They didn’t use protection, neither wanted to, they agreed he would pull out, but when the moment came and he started to, she wrapped her legs around him and held him inside, just for a few seconds longer, and then he pulled out just in time. “I’m sorry about that,” she told Peter, and he said, “Believe me, I didn’t want to stop either,” and she said, “I’m normally more responsible than that,” and he said, “Next time, we’ll be more careful.” But as nice as she feels now, remembering last night, she also feels shaken that she almost did something so foolish—again, she thinks of her mother—and the last thing she wants is—

  Pencils.

  The smell on her hands.

  Peter takes notes with pencils. He has a thing for good pencils, beautiful pencils from Japan and Germany and France that cost two dollars each, and sometimes vintage American pencils, and Avery gives him shit for it even though she finds it endearing, it’s not some pose, he doesn’t go around telling people—in fact, he asked her not to tell anyone. She said don’t worry, she wouldn’t tell the tabloids, and then she got quiet, and he asked what was wrong, and she pretended that nothing was and went back to ribbing him. He even carries around a two-hole KUM magnesium wedge sharpener, made in Germany, one hole for standard pencils, the other for giant pencils. They double-entendre’d the hell out of that—its extra-hard, tempered, high-carbon-steel blades, its optimum cutting angles, the precision molding of its inner parts. He uses each pencil until there’s nothing left but the ferrule and eraser, and then he keeps the nubs in a glass jar on his desk.

  That is the smell—graphite and cedar on his hands, now on hers.

  Twenty minutes later, afraid she might miss class, she gets up to check the time. On her desk, beside her phone, is one of Peter’s favorite pencils, a black Calepino no. 2 with white eraser, laid atop a folded piece of paper. The note reads:

  Dear Avery Modern,

  I’m watching you sleep. You are such a still sleeper.

  Thanks for the all-nighter. You inspire me.

  xo Peter Swann (aka Jerry Ford)

  *

  The day, the long day ahead, frightens Betsy. It’s 10:30 AM and she’s alone, tired, nauseous; she doesn’t know what to do. She’s always known what to do: stay busy, work hard, get things done. But today? Plan for the wedding? Read baby books? Get healthy—whatever that means? Since the move back to Philadelphia in November, she has continued to work remotely. Just enough to feel as though she has a purpose. But the interim director seems to be doing well, and some days Betsy feels that she needs the foundation more than it needs her. She was the one who started it and grew it. She was the one who named it the Danielle Glass Foundation, as her mother had wished. Betsy suspected that this would hurt her father, and her mother had expressed her preference verbally, not in writing, so Betsy could have named it the Danielle Christie Foundation. No one would have known the truth. But she wanted to honor her mother’s wish—funny, she thought at the time, how the feelings of the dead often trump those of the living—and maybe she did want to hurt her father, just a little, wanted her mother to get in the last jab. No matter, her father said he liked the name, liked to think of Danielle Glass, the young woman he fell in love with in college.

  In twelve years the foundation has helped hundreds of high school students from economically depressed communities become first-generation college students. Betsy’s mother had been the first in her family to attend college. Betsy knew how to recruit people—teachers, camp counselors, guidance counselors, therapists like Cal—and how to raise money, and how to publicize the foundation’s work. The foundation was her baby, and there were always things to do.

  But today she’s scared: she can’t think of what to do. Except sleep. If she sleeps, then at least she won’t be able to think. The problem is, she’s too anxious to sleep. She could go somewhere, get out, take a walk, but it’s pouring, sheets of rain windblown against the window.

  She walks around the house. She’s been living here four months after not having lived here since she was eighteen, half her lifetime ago. She’s confused by the rooms. Maybe it’s from being so tired lately, her brain not as sharp, but as she moves from room to room, she isn’t sure she knows what year it is or how old she is. She imagines for a moment that the past two decades have been a dream. Longer than that. None of it ever happened; they might try again. These rooms, to varying degrees, contain the past: her father’s desk, his old Rolodex, his robe still in the closet, her mother’s snow boots, too big for Betsy, a shelf of her mother’s books, a bottle of her mother’s perfume, one of Nick’s football jerseys hanging in the attic. Too much of the present—Betsy’s things, mostly—remains unpacked: boxes in the corner of the bedroom, in the basement, in otherwise empty rooms on the third floor. She and Cal sublet their apartment in Brooklyn for the year with no plan one way or another after that. Betsy sits on the lone chair in a room on the third floor, surrounded by boxes, and thinks: The wedding is six months away, a baby will be born a month later, and it would be so nice—Betsy wasn’t kidding when she brought up the possibility with Cal this morning—to move somewhere very far away.

  Very Far Away, a book by Maurice Sendak, is in one of these boxes, Betsy realizes. Betsy has never been a braggart, but she did tell her school friends that Maurice Sendak was her neighbor, a claim that wasn’t exactly true. But the Rosenbach Museum and Library, which held much of Sendak’s work—sketches, original artwork, first editions—w
as her neighbor. Two doors down. She would fall asleep some nights, especially that first year without Nick, and imagine that Sendak and Max from Where the Wild Things Are were close by, and if not for the house between them, Betsy might have called out, “Mr. Sendak, are you awake?” or “Max, are you awake?” and might hear in return, “We’re awake, Betsy.”

  One day in 1985 her parents brought her to the Rosenbach to see Sendak, who was there to read to children. He sat in a large chair in front of a fireplace, and Betsy—when it was her turn—stood beside the chair, and he read Very Far Away to her in his gravelly voice. A little boy named Martin, ignored by his mother, runs away to where someone will answer his questions. With a horse, a sparrow, and a cat, Martin finds “very far away”—“many times around the block and two cellar windows from the corner”—where he imagines they will all be happy forever. But soon enough they get on each other’s nerves and begin to quarrel and the sparrow decides that very far away isn’t far enough, and Martin returns home.

  Betsy didn’t cry, and so she didn’t know—still doesn’t—how Sendak knew. Maybe children’s book authors have a sixth sense for the hidden emotions of children. He looked at her from behind his large glasses and said, “Child”—she remembers that word so clearly—“Child, it’s okay to be sad. You won’t always be.” He signed the book to her: For Betsy, especially for Betsy. Maybe he signed all his books especially to anyone, but she believed then—and still does as she opens boxes looking for this book, it’s suddenly important that she find it, it’s something to do—that Maurice Sendak’s especially was especially for her. What he said to her she didn’t tell her friends or her parents or anyone ever. Except Nick, in her mind. Nick, who she pretended—believed—saw everything she did and knew her innermost thoughts.

  She finds three boxes of children’s books from when she was a girl. More Sendak; and a Dr. Seuss called The Shape of Me and Other Stuff (“The shape of water when it drips,” she reads now as rain pounds the roof and a drop of water and then another drips from the ceiling); and the book her mother read to her the most, Winnie-the-Pooh, “In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water” (“It rained and it rained and it rained”); and a book of poems by Ruth Krauss called The Cantilever Rainbow (“was it a part of your childhood yes your story”).

  She reads and rereads this line—“your childhood yes your story”—and repeats it to herself as she goes downstairs to get a bucket and as she brings it up to catch rainwater. Something to do. She arranges the children’s books on built-in shelves by the window, feeling sad, more sad than afraid now, but peacefully so (“Child, it’s okay”). She can feel different parts of her negotiating her emotions. Maybe it’s hormones, she thinks.

  In the fall, back in New York, when Betsy was having a hard time getting through the day—a panic would find her by late afternoon and overtake her by dark—Cal encouraged her to talk to someone. Betsy saw a therapist once a week for two months, a total of eight hours, the equivalent of one workday. He explained to her his belief that every person has an “internal family,” inner children, sort of, who need to be in healthy relationships with each other and with the “adult self,” the most solid, poised, unafraid, and empathetic part of the person. What he said, and maybe the way he said it, made sense to Betsy. And so her work in therapy, in that small, dimly lit room with a couch, where she sat, and a chair, where her therapist sat—it’s so vivid in her mind that she could draw it, if she could draw well—involved a kind of time travel in which her adult self observed and then interceded during pivotal moments from her past when her parts were wounded or afraid—not to change anything, which was impossible, but to comfort, to let Betsy then know that everything would be okay.

  But—and this was where Betsy stumbled in therapy and why she didn’t show up for her ninth session and told Cal she wanted to move back to Philadelphia, which was not very far away, was closer, in fact, to her past—would that be the truth? Would everything be okay? What could she say to ten-year-old Betsy, who had recently lost her brother? “Even though Nick just died, and even though your mother will die when you’re still a teenager, and even though your father will betray your mother—and you—and even though your relationship with him will never be the same, and even though in your midthirties you will be anxious and indecisive and pregnant before you’re married and won’t know how to tell the man you love just how afraid you are to have a family, how you’re afraid of messing up, because that’s what people do, they mess up, and even though on a rainy day in March you won’t know what to do, you’ll feel purposeless and lost—don’t worry, child, everything will be okay.” Her adult self, when faced with the child she used to be, couldn’t quite say this.

  Do something, she thinks now.

  Start small. Arrange the books. Open one and read to yourself. Then another. Wait for the bucket to fill. Empty it into the sink. Set it back under the drip. Lie on the floor. Close your eyes. Don’t do anything. Rest.

  *

  College students, Avery thinks even though she is one, are ridiculous. Neither she nor Peter owns an umbrella, and they are waiting after class to make a run for it across the quad and back to their dorms. It’s forty degrees, windy, and pouring, and yet because the calendar says March, because spring break is only a week away, here are intelligent young men and women wearing shorts and very short skirts and flip-flops. At least Peter is wearing rain boots and she’s wearing a raincoat.

  “We should probably go for it,” Peter says.

  “Two more minutes.”

  “It could get worse.”

  “That doesn’t seem possible.”

  “It just got worse.”

  “That was a wind gust,” Avery says.

  “Seriously, let’s run.”

  “Wait,” Avery says. “Can I use your car?”

  “Right now?”

  “I feel weird asking.”

  “Don’t feel weird.”

  “Just for like an hour.”

  “It’s my mother’s car.”

  “Does that mean no?”

  “No,” Peter says. “I mean, yes, it’s cool with me, but do you really want to be driving in this?”

  “No, but it’s better than biking.”

  “Where do you need to go?”

  “Long story short, there’s this man—”

  “I knew it—another man.”

  “Peter, are you serious?”

  “It’s Jerry Ford, isn’t it?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Even worse.”

  “Let me start over,” Avery said. “I volunteer at a nursing care facility.”

  “You do?” Peter says.

  “I’ve been visiting a man who’s sick,” Avery says. “Every Monday and Wednesday. But I didn’t go last week, and I really feel like I should go today, but I usually bike there, and so—”

  “No, definitely,” Peter says. He gives her his car keys. “It’s in the lot behind my dorm.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t weird that I asked?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything,” Peter says, “but I already made you a key for the car, and for my room, and we’re having dinner with my parents tonight. I hope yours can make it.”

  “Shut up,” Avery says. “Sometimes I wish you had a pencil neck so I could call you a pencil-necked geek.”

  “Geek will do just fine.”

  “Thanks for your note, by the way.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, and for your giant pencil.”

  Peter laughs. “Screw you.”

  “Okay, thank you for your standard pencil.”

  “For the record, giant pencils are unwieldy and impractical and not at all beautiful.”

  “Agreed.”

  “We’ll have to come up with a better word than standard.”

  “Super-standard.”

  “I have a Swiss pencil called an Edelweiss.”

  “Too Sound of Music.”

  “How about Goldfaber?” Peter says. �
�It’s German.”

  “Better,” Avery says.

  “Wait, I have an amazing pencil from Portugal called Fine & Candy.”

  “And we have a winner,” Avery says. “Jesus, we sound like two dudes naming our things.”

  “I’d rather not think of you with a thing,” Peter says. “Though even if you did have one, I’d probably still be into you.”

  Avery bats her eyelashes and in an exaggeratedly sweet voice says, “That might be the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “This is not getting better,” Peter says. “Run on three.”

  “One more minute.”

  “One . . . two—”

  “Okay, okay, let me put up my hood.”

  “Three,” Peter says, and they run laughing into the rain.

  *

  Avery isn’t sure who looks worse, her or David. Wind kept blowing her raincoat’s hood off her head, and in the twenty-second dash between Peter’s mother’s Subaru and the nursing care facility’s entrance, she got soaked, her long dark hair flat against her head, her jeans heavy and sticking to her legs. But she’s never seen David look like he does. He’s still in his pajamas, his hair is unkempt, and he needs a shave. Normally, by the time Avery visits him in the afternoon, he’s wearing a button-down shirt and pressed pants and his hair is perfectly side-parted, a bit longer on top so that a thin strand falls over his right eye—a Ted Hughes look. Today, however, he’s disheveled, as if someone put her hands on David’s shoulders and shook him.

  He is shaking—his hands, his head—and Avery wonders if he didn’t take his medication this morning, or maybe he’s just getting worse. Of course he’s getting worse, she thinks; there will be no getting better.

  From his wheelchair, parked purposelessly in the center of the room, he looks up at Avery dripping in the doorway and doesn’t seem to recognize her.

  “Do you not feel well today?”