by Lisa Gornick
I put my hand over his. “Because I am going to call her parents, to let them know she’s here. They have a right to know where their daughter is at six in the morning.”
Nate glares at me. Pure hatred. As a young child, he’d been so easy and reasonable, no storms of I hate you and You’re the worst mother on the entire planet, neither of us was prepared for this past year when he’s had to break away to become himself.
“I am not going to tell them the details. That’s your business. I am just going to say that when I woke up this morning, she was here in our apartment.”
The girl looks at me with horror, as though I have told her that in three minutes she will be executed.
“Sarah,” she whispers. “Sarah Callahan.”
My eyes open wide and my hand clamps my mouth, muffling a gasp. Unable to stop myself, I stare at your daughter with her gorgeous red hair, her ballet flats outside my front door, the beauty mark on her collarbone that you bathed or perhaps you did not do the baths, that her mother bathed, covered by the blouse your wife bought her or you gave her a credit card to buy herself, seated now at my kitchen table, eating the cranberry bread from the bakery I run with Corrine, who you hated because you thought she was too wild and loose.
Your daughter is crying. “My father will kill me,” she says. “You don’t know him. He’ll ground me for the rest of my life.”
“I do know him. William Callahan.” I do not say, Yes, he will ground you for the rest of your life.
“How did you know that?” Nate demands. “Her father’s first name?”
“We went to college together.”
Your daughter rests her arms on the table and lays her face on top of them. She cries into the pillow of her folded arms. I open her purse and take out her cell phone. I scroll through her recent calls until I see “Home.”
My son touches your daughter’s heaving shoulder. He rubs her back. I am glad he is kind to her.
*
I lie on my bed with your daughter’s phone in its hot pink case on my chest, your face across that table twenty-two years ago as clear in my mind as if it were last night.
I wonder what you look like now, if you have lost your thick hair, if you have a gut.
A lifetime ago, you told me that you could imagine me at fifty. “You’ll still be beautiful,” you said, and it was the nicest compliment anyone had ever given me, your faith that time would treat me well. This, though, had been the heart of the sickness between us that I did not understand until the afternoon in the bar with you, filled with excitement at the strength of your desire for me but with enough distance after our four years apart to be able to recognize that there was a higher order of love. I had fallen in love with how you made me feel about myself more than with you. Yes, I loved your determination, the way you catapulted yourself from your plumber father’s two-family house in Cincinnati to Princeton, the way you’d insisted on forging your own way, escaping the dull grind of your father’s work, the smashed dreams of your hockey player brother-in-law, the deprivations of your sister’s life. And yes, I loved your exuberance, your enormous joie de vivre—but mostly, if I was honest, I loved the way you made me feel: like an exquisite prize, not the overlooked afterthought I’d always been for my father, too peripheral from my mother’s deepest dramas to keep her from driving her car through a guardrail and down an embankment.
Not until I met Paul had I understood what it means to love someone for himself, to love him independently of what he does for me—where he takes me, to use Corrine’s phrase from our girlhood together, from before Lily died, after which, in order to survive, Corrine had to become a grown-up, which I understand now very few people do. With your daughter here, crying in my kitchen, I can see why you came to hate me—I was using you, using you to feel better about myself—and why you had to get away from me. Your love for me left you feeling degraded, and you dug me out of you, in those months after Lily’s death, like a dog scratching out a tick.
I push the call button on your daughter’s phone, listen to the ring on your home line. I do not know what I will say if your wife picks up.
“Sarah,” you mumble, reading your daughter’s name on your caller ID, the alarm seeping into your sleep voice by the second syllable of her name. I see your mussed hair, your deer’s eyes that you gave your daughter, and in that moment I know that you are a good father even if you react more with your heart than your head, so that it will be my one task with you, what I owe your daughter for my son having snuck her into his bed, to slow you down enough to think about how to respond to your child.
“It’s me.”
I think back thirty-four years to the night we met, you trying to smell me through the Princeton drizzle, my cousin Lizzy pregnant with the baby she named Brianna and then let go, before I met Andrew or found him in bed with Cat-Sue, before Lily or your parents died, before I understood that jaguars don’t kiss horses or you became rich or Corrine and I opened our bakery.
“Louisa?”
I see you swinging your runner’s legs over the side of the bed, sitting up, your tiny psychologist wife who doesn’t know how to cook curled at your side.
I see my husband asleep in his childhood bed, his silenced cell phone next to the notebook he keeps with his clients’ names and the addresses of their damaged homes printed in block letters, his father sleepless in his hospital bed, his mother awake by now, poking through her cabinets as she decides what she’ll bake for her husband’s return home today.
“Louisa? Is that you?”
I inhale deeply before I speak, taking stock of the gifts in my life and the soil of sadness out of which each has grown.
“Bear,” I whisper.
“Oh, Bear.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of Agni, Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, The Ledge, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Slice, where earlier versions of eight of these stories first appeared; to the editors of Glimmer Train and the Summer Literary Seminars for awards granted to “Barberini Princess”; and to the editors of the Best American Short Stories for the selection of “Instructions to Participant” as a Distinguished Story of the Year.
Again, thank you to my sage literary agent, Geri Thoma, who found this collection its home, and to my brilliant editor, Sarah Crichton, and her über-competent assistant, Marsha Sasmor, who brought it to life.
These stories stretch back many years, and were generously supported by many friends and teachers including: Mickey Appleman, Peter Carey, E. L. Doctorow, Terry Eicher, Mark Epstein, Claire Flavigny, Alejandro Gomez, Amy Kaplan, Christina Baker Kline, Philip Lopate, Jenny McPhee, Shira Nayman, Jane Pollock, Caran Ruga, Arlene Shechet, Jill Smolowe, Ana Sousa, Nancy Star, Barbara Weisberg, Mary Kay Zuravleff, and the talented and bighearted women of the Montclair Writers Group.
Finally, my gratitude to my extended family of Gornicks and Hollenbecks, to my husband, Ken, who knows these stories from the inside, and to my sons, Zack and Damon, for whom my love has no horizon.
A Note About the Author
Lisa Gornick is the author of the novels Tinderbox and A Private Sorcery. She holds a B.A. from Princeton and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at NYU and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. New York City is her home. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY LISA GORNICK
Tinderbox
A Private Sorcery
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1961
Instructions to Participant
1975
Louisa Meets Bear
1978
Lion Eats Cheetah Eats Weasel Eats Mouse
1990
Misto
Priest Pond
Raya in Rapahu
1992
Parachute
2001
Conchita
2003
Barberini Princess
2009
Nate in Bed
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Lisa Gornick
Copyright
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Gornick
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Woodstock.” Words and music by Joni Mitchell copyright © 1969 (renewed) Crazy Crow Music. All rights administered by Sony / ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gornick, Lisa, 1956–
[Short stories. Selections]
Louisa meets bear / Lisa Gornick. — First edition.
p. cm
ISBN 978-0-374-19208-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71026-2 (ebook)
I. Gornick, Lisa, 1956– Instructions to participant. II. Title.
PS3607.O598 A6 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014029306
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