by Katie Arnold
The realization was so obvious, it was startling. I was not a story I’d made up: I was real, embodied. I occupied space within a place and time. Time was finite, here one moment and then gone. I was a girl now, but one day I would not be. The inescapability of it astounded me. Who was I, and what was I going to do with myself?
5
Matters of Importance
PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD
Atalaya Mountain and the Santa Fe foothills
Years from now, when I’m ninety and have just run my last day, I will remember a section of trail high on Atalaya Mountain. At 9,200 feet, it’s the tallest of Santa Fe’s foothills, pushed up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east side of town, three miles from the downtown Plaza. I love the whole mountain, but my favorite part is short, less than a quarter mile long. It comes after a three-mile, two-thousand-vertical-foot climb to the summit, followed by a steep descent off the north side. In winter, the north shoulder of Atalaya is snowy; in the summer, it’s shaded and cool. Most people climb and descend the peak from the west side, so I’m usually alone among the trees.
My trail hops small boulders and rocks, twists around a corner, then becomes smooth and forgiving, dirt over springy pine needles. Visible to the west through a fringe of ponderosas is Santa Fe, spreading south and west. If I stop to look, I can make out the silvery outline of our adobe house, its pitched tin roof glinting in the sun, notched into a low hill a few blocks east of the state capitol. But I don’t stop. I keep running along the ridgeline to Picacho Peak, just north of Atalaya and seven hundred feet lower. In an hour I’ll be home, but for now I’m high on my mountains, the world below reassuringly close and just distant enough.
I lean my torso into the turn, my legs soaring with sure-footed relief. It lasts only a few seconds, the sensation of flight, but it’s enough. I’ve put it in my body so it will stay in my heart.
When Georgia O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1940, she rented a small adobe casita in the craggy high desert fifty miles north of Santa Fe. From her studio window at Ghost Ranch, she could look south to Pedernal, a forested peak with a blocky, nearly perfectly flat top. She believed that if she painted the Pedernal often enough, it would become her mountain. For twenty years, I have run and hiked Atalaya so often, in so many moods and in all kinds of weather, that it has become mine. Even now, when I’m scared or happy, when I don’t know what to do with myself, I run to the top and sit on the knobby summit and remember how it felt to be young and scared but full of life and certainty, with everything stretching before me.
* * *
—
Every few weeks, I fly to Virginia with Maisy. Traveling between Santa Fe and Huntly Stage as an adult is as disorienting as visiting the farm was as a young girl. I can’t figure out where I belong: at home with Steve and Pippa—who, at two, is still a baby herself, and whom I miss terribly, viscerally—or here with Meg, helping Dad and Lesley.
Sadness burrows in my bones. It crawls into my joints, the space between my shoulder blades, the muscles at the base of my neck that contract when I nurse Maisy. My eyes are itchy, my skin pale, my neck stiff. Even my wrists ache. I shed long strands of my hair on couches, pillows, my own wool sweaters.
Every night at Huntly, I take long, scalding showers, trying to wash Dad’s sickness off my skin. I actually think that if I scrub hard enough, it will come off. When I get home to Santa Fe, I drive to the fancy Japanese spa on the mountain and pay a woman to rub coarse salt all over my naked body. The treatment is pure, overpriced agony, and when she wipes me down with a warm towel, the sticky, granular sadness is still there and I feel worse. Each trip back to Virginia adds a new layer of despair, so uncomfortable it feels like its own disease.
Except for a prostate scare a decade ago, Dad, who is seventy-three, has always been healthy. He never smoked, he doesn’t drink much, and his lungs are strong. He’s the one we didn’t worry about. Sometimes I would lie awake at night, filled with foreboding that Mom, who has the energy of an eighteen-year-old, was going to die one day. And when she did, who would help me with the babies and answer the phone in her delighted, singsongy voice that immediately made me smile? Who would exude such wacky, childlike optimism and look out at a cold, rainy night and chirp, without a trace of irony, “Aren’t we lucky we’re not squirrels!” Mom was mandatory, the clear skies to Dad’s partly cloudiness, the sunny MVP of everyday life.
Over the years, Dad’s thrown himself into various enthusiastic fitness binges: jogging, stationary cycling, a ninety-day diet-and-training plan. Most of his athletic pursuits started normally enough but soon morphed into mild infatuation, which eventually morphed into full obsession, followed swiftly by burnout. Eventually he’d quit and start something new. His latest fixation was the Bowflex home gym he’d sent away for and set up in the basement.
“Whee!” he joked in an email six months before he learned he had cancer. “It’ll be just weeks before I achieve ‘a strong, sexy core,’ but there goes your inheritance!” A month passed with little contact, an eternity in Dad-land; then, an email: “Sorry for the radio silence! Don’t get me started on the wonders of the Bowflex!”
As much as Meg and I like to tease Dad about his monomaniacal fixations, this is what you want for your retired parents: for them not to act retired. He has more hobbies than anyone I know his age. Four years ago, he took up the saxophone; until recently, he drove to the county high school, in Little Washington, once a week to take lessons from his nineteen-year-old teacher. “There are some good days, some awful,” Dad wrote genially not long after he started playing. “Watch for my album soon!”
Still, he could sometimes wear himself out with his own enthusiasm. “I’m seemingly powerless to poke a stick in its spokes and stop the whole mess,” Dad confided to me by email about his photography project last spring before he got sick. He sounded weary, maybe wearier than I’d ever heard him—the first faint alarm bells ringing out from Huntly—but I was pregnant and too preoccupied to pay much attention. I brushed it off, as I always did, as just one of his compulsions, faintly annoyed that he was still pushing himself so hard. Why did he labor so over his pictures when he could be visiting his grandchildren or planning new adventures? Couldn’t he just hang out? But I knew that he couldn’t, wouldn’t. His creativity was what moved him, even when it exhausted him.
* * *
—
Virginia is in the middle of the worst stinkbug infestation in decades, and the whole house is crawling with them. They drag their miniature pewter shields on their backs, as though to war, oblong bodies clacking, tiny pincer feet scraping against the wide-plank pine floors. We flick them from beds and bookshelves. They cling to the plaster walls and skitter across the kitchen counter, emitting a terrible stale odor of sickness. But no matter how many we squish or flush down the toilet, the army of stinkbugs is winning. They remind me of Dad’s cancer: stalwart and insidious and determined to outlast us all.
It’s amazing how tiring it is to care for an infant and a sick parent, both of whom sleep a lot and eat often, but in Dad’s case never enough. As his illness has advanced, his appetite has diminished. He can’t stand the pressure of having to eat, so we scurry around the kitchen preparing calories in little batches, bestowing upon him trays with modest portions. Nor are we allowed to call meals by their proper names—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—as this is too discouraging for Dad. We’ve learned to retreat hastily from his room, leaving him alone so he can properly concentrate on eating. When I linger too long, he swats the air impatiently and I go downstairs, feeling lonely for both of us—Dad, eating by himself in his bed, and myself, missing him already.
Later we carry the same dishes back to the kitchen, their contents more or less intact, minus a couple of bites of omelet or a few stewed prunes and a quarter-glass of milky Ensure. Sometimes Dad is awake, propped up on pillows, smiling with the corners
of his eyes. “How long has it been since I kicked you out?” he asks apologetically. But other times he just lies there, slack-jawed, glasses off, his gray-green eyes open but eerily blank, and I can’t help but wonder where he’s gone and what he’s seeing.
* * *
—
Not long after we left Washington, Dad did, too. He’d met Lesley on a scuba diving trip to Jamaica, in 1976, and eventually they moved in together, renting a split-level in Bethesda. In 1978, they bought Huntly Stage. Though it had only just been built, the house had already slipped into disrepair, as though the previous owners had run out of money or interest before they could finish. With rough-sawn vertical planks and a wooden deck upstairs and down, it sat like a tall, lonely ship on the prow of the hill, surrounded by drought-singed grass trampled to a stubble and not a single tree. They drove three hours round-trip to their jobs in D.C. each day. Back then, no one had heard of a three-hour commute—it was the energy crisis, after all—but their love for Huntly trumped the tedium of the drive, and their diesel Rabbit got forty miles to the gallon, which Dad verified every time he filled up the tank, dutifully scribbling the mileage in a log book he kept in the glove box. On weekends and evenings they fixed up the house, repairing the chicken coop, seeding the lawn, planting trees and a vegetable garden.
The divorce granted Dad “reasonable” visitation rights. In my parents’ arrangement, this amounted to one week with him three or four times a year, give or take. Transportation was the tricky part. It was five hours by car from Summit to Huntly Stage, too far for either parent to drive us back and forth, so Mom took us to Newark and put us on the train to Washington by ourselves.
Even by the laissez-faire parenting standards of the seventies, this was borderline nuts. Newark had the highest violent crime rate in New Jersey; the Amtrak station was surrounded by abandoned buildings and smelled of urine. We wore laminated UNACCOMPANIED placards looped around our necks, which meant the conductor was supposed to make sure we weren’t abducted, though Mom, trying to hide her despair, didn’t say this outright.
She gave us each a few dollars of spending money, and once we settled in our seats and the conductor collected our tickets, we’d wander to the Café Car and ponder the candy selections. We always bought the same thing—two boxes of Cracker Jacks and two cans of yellow Country Time lemonade—and we sat on the counter stools, pawing through the caramel popcorn to find our plastic treasures at the bottom.
The Metroliner sped from Newark to Washington in two hours and fifty-nine minutes, and Meg and I remained on high alert for the duration. We did not fear strangers or foul play: What terrified us was the prospect of missing our stop—the train pulling in and out before we could exit, flinging us along to places where no one we knew was waiting. We memorized the stations, north to south, and the time between each one, imitating the nasally way the conductor bellowed them over the loudspeaker: Met-RO-park! Thirtieth Street Station Philadelphia! WILLLLmington, Delaware, Wilmington! Balmore, Balmore. Now arriving Warshington’s Union Station. Warshington! At least ten minutes before we were due to roll into the platform, Meg would slam shut her copy of Little House on the Prairie and yelp, “Time to go!” and we would leap to our feet, pull our monogrammed suitcases from the overhead rack, and lurch down the aisle to one end of the car. There we’d stand, waiting in the wobbly vestibule, clutching each other and our bags as the train jiggled back and forth and the track sped beneath us through the crack in the metal floor.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Meg on the Metroliner, 1983
Looking back, it seems that the fundamental terms of our sisterhood, maybe even our characters, were established on those train rides. The seeds of self-reliance had been planted, and the conditions of our survival made clear: Despite what might go on in either of our homes, the vagaries of our parents and stepparents that remained beyond our control and understanding, we two constituted our own independent, inviolable unit—separate yet united, Meg buried in her book, me pressing my nose to the train window, watching the gritty cities flash by, the narrow houses with yards that backed right up to the tracks. It was a wordless agreement. We must stick together at all costs.
When the train finally came to a stop, we’d rush down the stairs, scanning the platform for Dad’s familiar form: wavy black hair, owlishly round glasses, straight from the office in his tweedy blazer and pressed khaki slacks. He liked to pretend to hide from us, in plain sight—now you see me, now you don’t. Sometimes we saw only his hunched back, cowering obviously behind a concrete pillar, shaking up and down in silent laughter. Other times he’d be slouching against a bench, pretending to have fallen asleep, whistle-snoring a little for effect. We’d make a big show of finding him and nudging him awake, his face cracking wide open at the sight of us.
“Hello, girls!”
The sweet relief of arrival.
* * *
—
If Summit was a bucolic suburban wilderness—sidewalks, grass, trees, freedom—then Huntly was the sticks. We couldn’t ride our bikes downtown to buy candy bars with our allowance or corral the neighbor kids. There were no neighbor kids, and the closest shop was at Settle’s Grocery and Garage, in Flint Hill, five miles away, where they sold Spam and potato salad in plastic containers and knew Dad and Lesley by name.
Lesley was tall and reedy and very British, with short brown hair layered in waves, always a little mussed, as if she’d just come in from mucking the stables. She was thirty-four, seven years younger than my father, an administrative officer at the World Bank. She’d never married and had no children of her own. She loved all creatures madly, maternally, and she strode about the farm in her faded Lee jeans and dark-green Wellies, trilling at her menagerie: horses, chickens, donkeys, and a rotating cast of cats and kittens she brought home from the dump in cardboard boxes. The way Lesley warbled in high soprano for her shaggy, good-natured mutts was straight out of the Westminster dog show. Yet her brisk English accent and aloofness scared me a little. It was possible that she was fond of us, but it seemed, to a seven-year-old’s wary eyes, as though her four-legged creatures were simpler and easier to love.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Dad, Lesley, Meg and me, Huntly Stage, 1978
The peacock was Dad’s. It showed up in the early nineties, after it ran away from a nearby farm and started roosting in the trees behind the house. Dad and Lesley heard its high-pitched, tortured shrieking before they saw it. Dad phoned around to the neighbors until he located its owner. “Your peacock seems to have wandered over to our place,” he told him. “You can keep him!” the neighbor replied. Dad set out a bowl of puppy chow on the lawn each morning, crouching in the grass, calling, in his growly-affectionate way, “Here, Peacock, Peacock!” Peacock would tiptoe across the lawn and peck at the kibble. Peacock’s head was hardly bigger than a thimble, his plumage outsized and iridescent. Dad bought him a full-length mirror at Kmart and propped it up against the barn, along with a pair of shiny truck hubcaps, so Peacock could preen to his reflection.
The remoteness of Huntly Stage was unsettling at first. Without school, we had long, yawning days to fill with Dad. We flew kites and built model towns and shot plastic airplanes with rubber bands. We drifted in hot black inner tubes down the Shenandoah River. We took seemingly endless walks on seemingly interminable one-lane country roads that dead-ended in the woods, and then turned around and walked all the way back the same way.
To shuttle between parents at such a young age is to vacillate among every major emotion, sometimes in the very same moment. Did I miss Mom? (Always.) Was I glad to see Dad? (Of course.) Did I believe that the divorce was somehow my fault? Did I occasionally resent Mom for moving us away and Dad for letting us leave? (Yes, yes, and yes.) I existed in a state of near-constant confusion. But when I was outside, I forgot about feeling guilty, torn between families, vaguely uns
ettled in both homes. I could run bare-legged through the grass, chasing clues in a treasure hunt Dad made for us. I could climb trees and catch tadpoles in the creek. I could be seven and pretend this was normal.
* * *
—
Later in the afternoon, after Meg and I get back from town, we find Dad on the back patio. This is where he likes to relax with a glass of orange juice after a long, sweaty day mowing his fields. Across the meadows, the trees on the lumpy ridge of Rattlesnake Mountain are blazing orange and red, and the chestnut he and Lesley planted shortly after they bought the house casts enormous, droopy shadows over the lawn.
He’s sitting at the table facing the sun, working his way through a little black notebook. On the cover he’s written OBLIGATIONS in all capitals. It’s crammed with envelopes, presumably bills. He flips through the pages, slowly and purposefully, ticking off items with his pen. Every few moments he pulls out his checkbook and writes a check. He’s settling his affairs.
Meg and I quietly pull up chairs. Dad appears so focused and unperturbed, I don’t want to disturb him. It’s kind of awesome and horrifying at the same time, his diligent concentration, his reverence for the tedious minutiae. Dad has always been a vigilant record keeper. He’s tabulated every centimeter of rain that’s fallen on the farm since they moved in. When Meg and I were teenagers and he was saving up for college, he recorded his daily expenses in a spiral notebook that he kept in his back pocket: thirty cents for a Tab at M Street Deli next to the Geographic, $22.99 for pancakes and pork scrapple for four at the Best Western (or “Worst Eastern,” as Dad nicknamed it), in Front Royal. If he forgot his pad, he’d write his expenditures in black ink on the back of his hand. This troubled me. It made him seem poor, though of course he wasn’t, as though he was about to spend his last dime. I didn’t want him going broke on account of us.