The Walk
He’s walking to town—there’s no bread in the house for tonight, he’ll probably get a few other things at the market, doesn’t know what, certainly a coffee for a quarter—and thinks of his daughters, doesn’t know why this thought suddenly popped in—sure he does, because of what happened earlier, Fanny saying when he dropped her off at school, “I love you, Daddy,” and probably also Josephine, last night, lying in bed, lights out, he’d just finished reading her a fairy tale and kissing her good night, saying, “I love you, Daddy,” and he saying, “I love you very much too,” and to Fanny, at school, “I love you very much too, sweetheart.” Tears come. Silly. Why? Okay, then not so silly, but if anyone saw him up close now he’d still feel embarrassed. Walking to the village, the back way through people’s properties and along hilly streets with lots of big trees, to the market to buy bread and also to take a break from work, nice day, fall but early fall, temperature in the mid-sixties, sun out, soft breeze, he’s in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, wishes he’d worn sneakers. What else they need? Doesn’t know; don’t they always need milk? He’ll get the coffee for sure. Has he missed getting one there five times in the four years he’s been going to this store? and he goes, by car, bike, or foot, about three times a week. They usually have, on a shelf by the deli department, two regular coffees and one decaffeinated in tall Thermoses, but he always gets the most exotic caffeinated. Sometimes they have Kona, and always a pint container of half-and-half in a bowl of ice water next to the Thermoses, but which he’s rarely used, and a few times a hazelnut-or amaretto-flavored nondairy creamer, all for a quarter, which you can put into the coin box on the shelf or pay for with your other items at the checkout counter. Store doesn’t lose money on it; in fact the coffee makes the customer stay longer, he’s sure, and buy more. Maybe a dessert. Ones he bought for the kids yesterday they didn’t touch, he saw this morning, when he opened the bakery bag thinking there were rolls inside he could heat up for them, and they were what, honey-glazed? so by tonight they’ll be a little stale. Thinks of his older daughter. Didn’t come from thinking about the doughnuts, did it? Oh, one thought leads to another and probably helped by the action and solitude of the walk and no distractions, not even a bird squawk or squirrel zipping around nearby. Dropping her off at school today. She got her things together in the car after he stopped with the motor running and gear in PARK (heavy backpack, big sketch pad, and something else: brown lunch bag with the lunch she made) and turned to him—she opened the door first—and said, “I love you, Daddy,” and he said that “very much” line (this is all pretty much ritual) and kissed her cheek (which he also does every day when she leaves the car unless it’s obvious she’s angry at him, though he doesn’t often kiss her hello when he picks her up at school in the afternoon), and she left the car and he smiled at her through the window on the passenger’s side and she smiled back, affectionately, not mechanically (usually she heads straight for school without looking at him again; he doesn’t know why today was different for her), and headed for the steps leading to the school entrance. Still awkward, he noticed: ungainly, he means. Other girls around, obviously older—some had driven cars to school and parked them in the lot—walked with so much more grace and confidence. Well, her age, and that she’s new here, he thought, a freshman, it’s been just a couple of months for her, and she stumbled going up the sidewalk curb, almost tripped but quickly righted herself, dropped the lunch bag when she stumbled (nothing fell out), picked it up, continued a few steps, hesitated, turned back to him, no doubt hoping he wasn’t looking at her. He waved—he immediately knew he shouldn’t have, and was smiling, though she might have been too far away to see that; besides, she wears glasses and she didn’t have them on; she’d told him in the car, when he asked, that they were in her backpack and scowled at him—maybe a smile through a car window’s more difficult to make out than a scowl, even with your glasses on—and went up the steps and into the school. She probably forgot about it a few minutes later, certainly once she got to her homeroom and started talking to one of her friends. No, homeroom was what she had in middle school; here, if she doesn’t get to school early, she goes right to her locker and then to her first class. Did his watching from the car have anything to do with her stumbling? How could it have? Maybe she was aware his car hadn’t driven off—no familiar sound of its motor—and sensed he might still be parked, or just assumed it, and was looking at her from behind, and she became self-conscious because she knew she was somewhat ungainly and didn’t walk as gracefully as a lot of the other girls and that was what made her, or helped make her, stumble. That could be it. He’d love to tell her but probably won’t, better not to bring up things that remind her of recent embarrassments—“Don’t think that way, my darling. Everyone’s like that when they’re young—you’re still growing, in height and your feet and so on. And if you saw me smiling in the car, believe me it was only an adoring smile. When I saw your head turning around I smiled, which is what I almost always do in something like this, because I thought you were going to look at me. It had nothing to do with your stumbling, which anyone could do, by the way. You should see how many times I do it in a year, and sometimes when I’m jogging—this probably happens about once every six months—I trip over an exposed tree root or sidewalk bump or something and fall flat on my hands and knees and cut them … I must have told you that. So I’d never find anything funny in your stumbling. And if you really had tripped, spilled things and landed on your hands, I would have run out of the car to you, though you might not have liked that: drawing too much attention to it. So let’s say I would have wanted to run to you to do what I could to help, certainly picked you up if you were still lying there, and said things like ‘I’m so sorry, my darling, are you all right? It can happen to anybody. I trip all the time and occasionally hurt myself badly, cuts and bruises and such, so I’m as clumsy, if not even more so, as anyone your age, in action as well as trying to put across my ideas and phrasing words, though don’t ask me what the last two have to do with it,’” and he drove home, it only takes seven to ten minutes from her school, and thought then and thinks something like it now, What a lovely girl; and what a lucky guy I am in having such a daughter, so sweet and bright and kind and modest. It’s so painful to think she might be hurt—she will be—in the future, and many times, or at least several, physically, emotionally. But what else they need? Can’t think of anything. Cat food they can always use. Opened the only can of it he could find in the crowded cupboard this morning, so two cans of cat food—don’t want to make the bag too heavy and almost no space at home to store it. And of course the coffee, that he’ll have drunk before he leaves the market or, as he’s sometimes done, standing outside. Then his younger daughter. Last night, while she was sitting up in bed and he came in to say good night, that sad look she had over nothing, it seemed. As if he said something truly horrible to her—he’s said some lousy things but nothing deliberately or even unintentionally horrible: it’d destroy her or at least for the night and maybe a few days, and he’d feel terrible, a lot more than when he’s just said those mean things. What could he say that’d really be horrible? That she’s not pretty. That’d be just mean. But will never be and, to add to it, never was. That she was an ugly baby and hasn’t grown prettier as a child. That she’s dumb, just about as dumb as anyone he knows, and so on. That the short haircut she begged to get and just had makes her look stupid and homely. The mean or lousy things: when he was working at his desk in the bedroom and she ran in and said, “Daddy, I have to ask you something,” and he said, “Damn, don’t you see I’m working?” And once, “Must you always burst in here like that? Dammit, you scared the freaking shit out of me!” And, “Listen, it’s obvious you didn’t study for the test and that’s why you got such a crappy mark, so stop making up excuses.” Other times. But why does she so often have that sad look? Something he’s done or continues to do? Doesn’t think so, and it certainly isn’t anything from his wife. An accum
ulation of those mean and lousy and insulting remarks that she knows he’s liable to make anytime? He hasn’t made that many to her, and they were spread out enough where they wouldn’t have accumulated like that, though who knows? And whenever he’s said something like that to her—and “insulting” only a few times—he’s always quickly apologized. And if—and she almost always does this—she ran out of the room or away from him to wherever she goes, usually her bedroom, where she slams the door, since it usually happens at home, and started crying, he went after her and apologized there, blaming himself for his short temper and for being high-strung sometimes and jumpy, especially when he has his back to the door and is busy working and someone bursts into the room, and promised to do things for her, like get her something she’s been wanting for a long time and which he didn’t think she needed, till she made up with him and they hugged and he’d kiss the top of her head and close his eyes a few seconds and hope hers were closed for a short time too, though not necessarily when his were, and then be extra solicitous to her the rest of the day and probably the next, or at least till he saw her off at school. And it’s not that she’s a gloomy child. She’s in fact the skipper of the family. He doesn’t mean the boss of it, the way some people use that word for kids and wives. Just that she frequently bounces around, has for years, much more than her sister ever did and is a lot more cheerful than her sister too, singing in the shower, laughing at the comics, things like that, though her sister’s witty and usually smiles and sometimes guffaws when she sleeps. Once bounced exuberantly into the refrigerator and broke a front tooth. Wailed then. He went to her first. Around a year ago, family was at dinner. She usually eats fast and leaves first, even when he and his wife say to stay—“Sit and talk with us, we like your company”—did they say to stay that night? What’s the difference? And she usually gets up a minute or two after one of them tells her to stay—twirled around past them from the living room into the kitchen—he was probably glad she was so happy. His wife and he might even have exchanged smiles when she twirled past, though also concerned she was jumping around too much so soon after eating. She was singing as she spun into the kitchen, lost her footing, and smacked her face into the refrigerator. (The refrigerator can’t be seen from the dining room; she later told him how she hit it.) Then she screamed. He thought she was kidding, he doesn’t know why—maybe the scream didn’t seem like a real one at first and he thought she wanted them to think she was hurt or he just didn’t want to believe she was—but it continued and he yelled, “Josephine, anything wrong?” and she screamed harder and he ran in and blood was dribbling out of her mouth and she wailed, “Oh, no, my tooth, my tooth,” and he told her to open her mouth wide and she kept it closed and he tried forcing it open, he wanted to relieve his worry that one or both of her front teeth were broken—a side or back one, even one of the eye teeth, wasn’t that important—and she said, facing away from him, “No, no, don’t look, my tooth, I felt it, I’m so sorry, so sorry, I’m so sorry, Dada, I didn’t mean to, I’m so stupid, I was so stupid,” and he said, “It’s all right, I won’t blame you, just open your mouth,” and she did, and the bottom half of a permanent front tooth was gone, and he yelled, “Oh, no, oh, my darling!” knowing right away what it meant to her, and hugged her and said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry, oh, what can we do?” and they both cried, and his wife came in and said, “Calm down; what about her tooth?” and he said, “She broke it, a front one,” and his daughter screamed and wrenched free of him and ran into the bathroom and started shrieking and he ran after her and she was looking at her mouth in his shaving mirror and he said, “Don’t look, it’s no good for you; we’ll get it fixed, I promise,” and wiped the blood away, got ice and treated her, and called her dentist, who said to come in tomorrow morning, “But if you can see a dark spot in the core of the cut part then it could mean she’ll lose it,” and soon after that a friend of his wife’s called and just happened to have lost a front tooth the same way when she was a girl but against a stove and said she got the bottom half replaced with a toothlike bond and when her mouth was fully grown a permanent fixture and no one’s ever been able to tell the difference and she can bite into apples and carrots with it and she thinks a quarter of the women she knows have lost part of a front tooth, and he said, “Tell Josephine all that,” and she did and things quickly got better. He looked for the tooth part on the floor, found it, and it seemed to be the whole piece, didn’t want to hold it under the broken tooth it came from to see if it was a perfect fit, so later went into her room and said, “Open your mouth again, sweetheart; I want to see how your tooth’s doing,” and then, “It’s looking a lot better. A clean break, two pieces, very simple, so it’s going to work out fine, no complications,” thought of bringing in the found part to the dentist the next day but then thought, What for? and it’ll just get lost, and taped it to a piece of paper and wrote the date and event on it—J’s broken front tooth, fridge, disturbing scene for both of us—and put it in a small container where he keeps every tooth his daughters have lost except the one Fanny swallowed, all taped to paper with just the date on it except the first two of theirs, which also say what number it was and where it came out. Anyway, last night, that sad look, he asked if anything was wrong, she shook her head and asked why, he said, “Your look,” and she said, “What’s wrong with it?” and he said, “Nothing, it’s fine; one doesn’t always have to be smiling,” and read to her awhile. After he turned off the light and said good night, she said, “I love you, Daddy,” and he said, first kissing her forehead and lips—ritual; if he didn’t she’d ask him to by saying, “A huggy”—“I love you too, veddy mucho grandee, now go to sleep, you’ve school tomorrow,” and she said, “No, we’re off,” and he said, “This is one of my rare sharp nights; you can’t fool me,” and left the room, her door opened a couple of inches, which for the past half year is how she’s asked it to be and he’ll keep leaving it that way till she says not to. Tears again, quickly wipes them. What is it with me today? he thinks, walking downhill to the market. Is it something else? My mother, maybe. When he spoke to her last night she seemed too weak and despondent to speak and after a minute broke off because of her coughing, she said, but hadn’t thought of her today till now. He’ll call her when he gets home, first thing. But what else they need? What did he remember to get so far? Cat food, bread, milk. Gallon of spring water for his wife, but that’d be too heavy to carry. Desserts for the kids; maybe a baklava for Fanny and a napoleon for Josephine—now that’s odd; he never thought of the connection before. They’re twice to three times the price of the doughnuts he usually buys, but hang the expense: they’re always excited when he tells them he got their favorite desserts. That should do it, and the container of coffee, and takes a handful of change from his pants pocket, counts out twenty-five cents, ten of it in pennies—the people who empty the coin box must hate getting the pennies, but he’s got to get rid of them some way—and puts the counted change into a separate pants pocket, so when he takes it out for the coffee he won’t have to count it again. Such a nice day; he’ll drink the coffee sitting on the bench in front of the market and dump the empty container into the trash can by it, or sit there if there aren’t too many bees around. Will this closeness or oversolicitousness or whatever he should call it ultimately hurt his kids? No, they’ll hardly remember it, or only a little. He reaches the market’s parking lot, crosses it and goes inside, picks up a shopping basket, though for all he’s going to buy he could just as well carry the things in his hands, gets the coffee first, feels like having it with half-and-half today, doesn’t know why—maybe so he can drink it faster, though there’s no need for him to rush home, so it could be his stomach telling him something—and sticks the change into the coin box. Now what did he tell himself to get?—sipping the coffee by the deli counter and then finishing it off—bread, milk, two cans of cat food. What else? Forgets.
30 Pieces of a Novel Page 55