“I don’t … I’m not sure when it started. Or if she even knew what she was doing. But she did it a bunch of times.”
“I didn’t …” She says it quietly. They pass a road under construction: dug up asphalt, crumbled concrete, and orange cones.
“One time, she got up and started yelling at me to get out of her bed. But it’s not like I could explain to her that it was my bed.” A small bodega on the corner, with rows of flowers outside, a school, a yoga studio. “She was too fucked up to know which room was hers.” He shakes his head, rolls his shoulders. “I just went to her room.”
“Do you miss her?” Maya asks him. She’s not sure this is right, but she wants him to keep talking. When she first went down to Florida, Ben was the only one that Ellie spoke to on the phone.
“Yeah, I mean …” He’s quiet awhile, and Maya eyes the park just north of the bridge and then the courthouse, columns, concrete, and a blockade setup in front. The traffic’s heavier as they approach the bridge and someone honks and tires screech as they wait for the light to change.
“She’s my sister, you know?” her son says.
Two years before: she’d taken him to dinner, picked him up from practice. He didn’t need picking up anymore; she’d sat on the sidelines like she had all those years of his forming, watching the boys yell to one another, gesture, run, the thwack of foot to ball, their impossibly long limbs. They all wore shorts, though it was just beginning to get cold out. They wore the socks up to their knees and the shorts that almost fell as far. Patches of bright red skin, knees and sides of thighs, popped out as they ran after one another and the ball.
She was, mostly, a terrible watcher. She was the type to pull out a book in lines or on the subway, on trains or buses, when the kids or Stephen would keep their eyes on the world. Maya wasn’t capable of that much stillness, that much sustained attention to the outside world. Soccer had seduced her over the years, though, its beautiful simplicity, the boys’ doggedness, their strength. The crack of the whistle breaking through the low steady yells. The boys falling down the field in patches, the way they looked back at one another, could get free sometimes, just the ball and boy then, the steady, rushed control. She often felt winded when it was over, as if she’d held her breath through the whole thing.
After he had sat with his friends to take off his shoes and shin guards, pull on sweatpants, gulp down water, Ben had come over easily, happily, to her. They walked the fifteen minutes to the restaurant.
“I think I chose,” he said, refilling his water with the jug the waiter had left on the table, then refilling hers. He’d been on official visits all up and down the coast and a handful out West. Stephen was obsessive, so Maya had backed off. Her son’s face was still flushed as he spoke to her and ordered his dinner. He was still, daily, slipping between all the various men he might one day be and then back again to the boy she’d always known.
“Ohio,” he said. They’d gone out there together, the three of them; Maya had needed to be convinced to leave Ellie home alone. She was nineteen then, but Maya had called her three, four times a day. The school had been small, bucolic, frighteningly quiet. She’d wondered the whole time how people stayed sane amid all that empty space. None of them thought he’d choose it. It was a smaller school, a smaller team, than any of the others. Even the coach had seemed sure Ben would play someplace else. Stephen had made light of the coach’s desperation, had suggested the competition was not of sufficient rigor. Ben seemed to know this now, looking at her, chastened, his chin dipped to his chest as he began to eat his pasta.
“I guess,” Maya said. She wanted to say the thing that would prove he was right to tell her, that she could be trusted. That she would help him no matter where or what he chose. “It’s a great school,” she said.
Her son nodded into his plate. This wasn’t enough, maybe, he needed more, she thought. “That sort of change,” she said. She thought again of all that quiet, all those trees. “It could be edifying, maybe,” she said.
Her son smiled then, like he did sometimes when she drifted. “Sure, Ma,” he said. “It could be.”
She laughed, took a bite of her fish. “We’ll miss you,” she said, once she’d swallowed. “Benny,” she said. She thought of El then, all that worry, the not knowing, the way it seemed to rush through every crevice of their lives that was not already solidly filled in. “We’ll miss you desperately,” she said.
Her son gulped more water. He held his napkin to his mouth and scraped his fork along the bottom of his plate. “I need it, though, you know?” he said. “I think …” He stopped again. He brought his hands up to the table, his shoulders rose, his head went down, then up, “I need to get away,” he said.
The way he’d looked then, the way he’d held her there, signaling a different sort of man than all the ones she’d seen in him before that, she’d almost asked if she could come along.
The light changes and they cross. A large clock blinks atop a building: It’s twenty-eight degrees, not quite five a.m.
As they cross the middle of the bridge, between the two arches, they pass a woman whom Maya sees often when she runs at this time, late sixties maybe. She wears the same long large mink every morning, a full face of makeup, and old Converse shoes. She swings her arms and walks, her feet crossing in front of one another, her gaze never straying from straight ahead.
“I don’t want to go back,” Ben says.
Maya keeps her eyes toward her toes.
“To school,” he says. “I hate it. I hate everyone who’s there.”
It’s as if he’s been practicing these sentences for months.
“What would you do?” she asks her son.
They pass two women walking in unison, both wearing neon tights; matching headbands hold their hair.
“Dad’s going to hate me.”
The air burns Maya’s throat, cold and sharp, then sluices through her lungs. She finally looks at him. His face looks round and small.
“He won’t be able to handle two fucked-up kids.”
“Fuck Dad, Benny,” she finally says.
He smirks and turns to her. “Right,” he says.
He picks up speed and she stays with him. Her whole body feels warmer now, firmer and more sure. They pass a skateboard park and a playground, a row of tennis courts. They can hear the whoosh of the first smattering of cars out on the West Side Highway. There’s a thin layer of mist hovering over the whole city still.
“Do you want to take the semester?”
“I just feel like I’m wasting everyone’s time,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m doing there.”
“I think that’s what college is for, though,” Maya says. Her children are finally the age she’d always looked toward: the age of her students, whom she’s always loved, whom she’s nearly always known how to help.
“But I don’t like anything,” he says.
“Benny …” She tugs his arm and they turn off the path just as the signal turns green and they cross into the city. They’re all the way west, just south of Times Square, but the streets are still quiet this early in the morning. They pass storage warehouses, then apartments, billboards for Broadway plays, then lines of theaters, finally the fluorescent flashing lights of the main square. The morning shows are getting started up in some of the glass-walled buildings. Cameras glint and anchors settle into chairs. Cars are no longer allowed here and the streets are filled with flimsy metal chairs and tables. Everything around them is too bright and too big.
“I miss …” he begins. “I miss it here,” he says.
She wants to ask him to be more specific. Does he miss them? Does he miss the city? Was the quiet as awful as Maya had feared?
“Benny, I think it’s fine, okay? I just don’t want you to feel stuck here,” she says. This isn’t right exactly. “I don’t …” She’s not sure she’s capable of staying functional for him.
“Dave says I can come help him this semester. He says he’ll pay me to be
his assistant coach.”
“All right,” says Maya. “That sounds …” They pass Grand Central, then go south a block to get off Forty-second Street. They pass beautiful apartments and hotels.
Her whole life, September’s served as her beginning. May has meant the end. She likes the sound of the word semester, how it cuts the school year into halves and the whole year feels more surmountable somehow. She doesn’t want him running back and forth, reacting and escaping. She’s not sure what else there is to do.
“If it’s what you think you need to do,” she says, “you should.”
“Can you tell him?”
Him is Stephen. Him is Dad.
Maya nods. “Sure, Benny,” she says. “I can tell him.”
She stays with her son all the way down the East Side of the island, up into Chinatown and along the bike path on the Manhattan Bridge. He slows down a bit once they get back into Brooklyn, and Maya’s grateful. They take the most direct route, straight up Flatbush, then right just before the park. They’ve covered probably twelve or thirteen miles in a little over ninety minutes. It’s only when they get to their stoop and stop running that Maya feels the weight of what they’ve run, the tightening of her muscles and the rush of lactic acid. She grabs the wrought-iron rail that runs along each side of the steps that lead to the apartment and tries to keep her breathing steady as she watches her son begin to stretch.
“I’m old,” she says. She has hold of both her knees, but turns to face him.
Ben laughs and sets his right foot up on the highest step, leaning over it, then does the same with his left. He stops the timer on his watch. “Still pretty impressive,” he says.
He rests his hand briefly on her back.
“Stretch,” he says.
She shakes her head and positions her feet as he has. She leans forward, feeling that first satisfying pull of her muscles loosening.
“You’ll be a wonderful coach,” she says.
“How the fuck did we get this so wrong?” says Stephen. Ben’s out with friends. She and Stephen sit with cartons of take-out Thai food. They have a daughter they’ve locked up in rehab, and a son who’s dropping out of college. Maya has decided to bring Ben up first.
“Two kids who’ve fucked up so royally,” Stephen says. His knuckles look sharp and white on top of his chopsticks. They hover over a large plastic container of greasy pork and vegetable pad thai.
“Stephen.” She watches a noodle split between his teeth.
“Should I just accept this? One of us has to actually face all this. To parent, Maya. He’s a child.”
She picks up her chopsticks and flips them back and forth through her fingers. She’s left-handed and they make a hollow knocking sound against her simple white gold wedding band. “He’s nineteen.”
“Exactly. He has no idea what he’s doing. You can’t get a job busing tables without a college degree.”
“Please, just give him a little time. They were so close, you know? We should have realized how much all of this affected him. I think it’s admirable, that he acknowledges he’s not getting anything from school.”
“Are you serious? We must have made them this way, you know. It can’t have been easy, being so wonderful all the time, having everything given to you, having everything come so easily.”
“Just give him a break. He’ll come back on his own.”
“From what? He needs a kick in the ass, is what he needs. You let them think they deserved things without having to work for them. You’re so committed to your catering to them, giving everything you could think to give to them, but then you were the one who would disappear. I never got so scared or sad or whatever it was you got that I needed breaks from parenting.”
Once, when Ben was two and El was four, she’d flown down to Florida for three weeks, just to be quiet for a while, just to be alone with the water and her books and not have to love quite as much as she did when her kids were there. She escaped sometimes, either to her study, or right there in front of them. She curled into herself for fear of how all that love—more than she could feel she had a hold of—might inflict itself in ways she hadn’t meant.
“That’s because you weren’t around as much as I was.”
“Because I was working, remember? You wanted them to feel loved the way you didn’t. You wanted to right all that shit with your dad. You taught them this.”
Maya’s father. Ice clinking on the thick highball glass he always carried, filled with scotch when she was younger, then gin later, the brush of his hand cold and quick across her cheek, the meticulousness with which he dressed each morning, his thumb and forefinger—meaty, hardened from working closely with the contractors at the houses that he bought and sold—working carefully to button each side of his shirt collar, dark socks and the musty heavy leather smell of his newly polished shoes.
Her mother had left them, three months, nearly to the day, after Maya was born. She knew this through the one letter that her mother had written to her father. She’d dated it, in some odd attempt at propriety, in the moment that she’d absconded in the face of life’s demands. The letter said that she was sorry. It said this was not the life she wanted. Maya wasn’t. Maya had understood then that she was something people had to work to want. Her father had taken on the role of dad most earnestly. Though he was awkward, though he was uncomfortable often around his girl, he did adore his daughter; he adored her in the bumbling self-centered way that sad and callow men love their little girls.
He was in real estate, self-made and later self-destroyed. He’d bought in with a development company with offerings in the middle of the state, deeds handed over, for properties that could be used only for camping and hiking, some of it completely swampland, to buyers far away who thought they were getting land to build. And though the bulk of sales had happened in the sixties, it was nearly ten years later that he’d finally been bankrupt as a result.
She was fourteen and home from St. George’s. Upstairs, trying to sleep in her room. It was a room that never felt like hers because her father had moved the year she’d left for boarding school. It felt like someone’s approximation of a girl’s room, which in fact it was: a designer that he’d hired. It was how it felt when her dad looked at her, like she was an approximation of a daughter, something he had conjured, less somehow than he’d hoped.
This night, like all nights, he’d been drinking. He padded barefoot through the house. She could still summon the smell of him. Aftershave from a dark green bottle, old, slightly watered gin. He’d taken a lime when she was younger but he didn’t anymore. She’d noticed this because she watched him, she studied him for lack of knowing what to say. He read three papers every morning cover to cover. He ate his breakfast quickly, standing up, drank his coffee black. Instead of interacting with one another, on her trips home they each sat quietly across the table at dinner, next to one another in the car, and noted how the other smelled and moved. They took each other in with care and a safe distance and, both of them maybe, hoped that added up to love.
He seldom touched her. She made him nervous, especially as she’d grown slightly taller, begun to grow breasts and shave her legs. These were all things she’d learned to deal with on her own, reading magazines furtively at grocery stores and at the doctor’s, listening to girls at school, to women on TV. When she’d first used a tampon, she hadn’t realized she was supposed to remove the applicator and instead had left it in the entire time, tearing herself up, having to wear pads for the next month.
They said good night that night, all nights, in the kitchen, Maya leaning toward him, kissing his cheek. “Daddy,” she still called him. “My girl,” he still said. He’d never come into her bedroom, though sometimes she would check on him in his room, slipping off his shoes or pulling down the duvet and the sheets.
But this night, late, he came to her. And what he did had been so simple, could have been, had he been an altogether different father, a thing she remembered with a sort of loving, qui
et angst. But instead it left her squirming, nauseous, nervous, each time after. And each time after, he did it again and then again.
He was slurring, his shoulders folded inward. He wore his undershirt and shorts. She hardly ever saw his legs and was shocked by their thinness, how pale and thick with dark coarse hair. She was supposed to be asleep but wasn’t. The room was still so new and foreign. She was up reading, a small light she’d gotten at school to read by while her roommate slept. She was under the covers with Charlotte Brontë: Bertha was in the attic and Jane had just run away.
Her father said her name once in a whisper, then pulled the covers up and climbed in next to her. She felt the coarseness of the hairs along his legs against her, the warmth of his breath, and smelled the aftershave and gin. It was then she realized he was crying, shaking heavily, a bit of snot caught thickly in her hair. He pulled her close to him. And though she stiffened, though her stomach turned and her skin itched and ached to get away, she lay there and let him hold her, knowing finally, this was something she could give.
He’d lost all of his money. Somehow, brilliantly, with the same sweeping unexpectedness of its arrival, all of it was gone. He was sad and desperate and he clung to Maya. He whispered she was all that he had left. And she stayed completely still and tried to empty her brain of everything. She tried not to breathe or move or let him feel her flinch as he held her, because she knew he was her father and he loved her, because she knew she should be glad to give to him.
From then on this happened each time she came home. And each time, Maya stayed very still and waited for her dad to fall asleep. He didn’t always cry, and sometimes she was able to slip out from beside him. But those few times he woke up late in the night or early in the morning, still drunk and blubbering, saying that she had slipped from him because she knew he wasn’t worthy of her. He cried and said if even his daughter didn’t love him, what was there left for him. And then Maya would have to beg him to please stop, to promise him she loved him, to calm him, hold him, until he fell asleep again.
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