by Karen Olsson
Come back in an hour, two at the most, said the policeman. At the most! It didn’t seem possible that this was proper procedure, barring someone from her own hearth and home (or: hotpot and television), but these were law enforcers, and I was law-abiding. I slunk like some yellow-eyed nocturnal creature toward the Hunan Palace, a restaurant I knew only for the electronic OPEN sign that seemed always to be lit above the door. From the sidewalk you couldn’t see the dining room—the door was soaped over, and inside the single window was a display of cheap paper fans, with a partition between that and the rest of the interior—and it occurred to me that for all I knew the Hunan Palace was a front for something other than fried rice and green tea. But I entered to find an ordinary Chinese restaurant. A boy jumped up from the table where he’d been doing his homework to show me to a booth. I sank into a bench, one buttock met by a feisty old spring. Only two other tables were occupied by diners: an old woman drinking tea and the man from next door.
He was eating with the basketball girl. His daughter! Even though I knew they lived in the same building I hadn’t put that together, for I’d pegged him as a man alone in the world, a man who ate his meals by himself, in front of the television. Yet he had a child, and I was the one who, truth be told, dined most nights by the changing light of the tube. My staring led to waving. Awkwardly, we waved; more awkwardly, he invited me to sit with them; and—how could I decline?—I bumbled over to join them. Nina was the name of the girl, who acknowledged me with her eyes but didn’t say anything. Sitting with him, she seemed a different girl from the one I’d seen striding down the street, younger. A kid.
One day she would be striking, I thought, but her face was still indeterminate. She was at a stage when a few different potential women are contained inside one suit of skin. She had studious brown eyes and a looseness to her, for instance in the way she nodded, tracing a large arc with her chin, hair swaying. She said very little at first, while Daniel and I tried to shovel things forward. I explained I’d only recently moved to Vane Street.
“You used to live in Los Angeles? What was that like?” he asked.
“It was okay,” I said. “It had its plusses and minuses.”
“Nina wants to move to Paris, doesn’t she,” he said, and she tucked her chin closer to her neck, self-conscious, and I wanted to tell her not to be, not to worry about a thing.
“I used to want to live there,” she said, surprising Daniel and me both with a quick spill of syllables, “but now I want to move to Brazil. Or Ireland. My friend went to Ireland.”
“I’ve heard good things. About Ireland.”
“I wouldn’t like a place that had too many trees, though,” she said. “I get creeped out by forests.”
“Because you might get lost?”
“I like to see the sky.”
Was it because we met in the company of her father that I felt like a suitor, a supplicant for her affections? That evening in corduroy pants and Chucks and an old Senators T-shirt under her black hoodie, she was hunching and bashful. She kept tucking her hair behind her ears (triple-pierced, pink at the tips) and talking with her mouth full.
“I wish I lived someplace where I could walk to school,” she was saying. “Right now I take the Metro, and I get, like, smushed by secretaries every single morning.”
“When do you get your driver’s license?” I asked.
She looked down at her food and moved a slick piece of broccoli from one side of her plate to the other. “Probably never,” she said.
I waited for an explanation but didn’t get one. She was hard to read—they both were, she and her father. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and he leaned toward me, then paused, reconsidering. He leaned back, stared at me with that stare of his, and attacked a pile of rice, his fork shuttling between plate and mouth.
“She likes you,” he said. She does? As though I’d asked it aloud, he said, “She does.”
He fell silent and then un-silent again, asking could he ask me something. “What did you want for your birthday when you were sixteen, turning sixteen?”
I would’ve liked to give an original answer, but I’d been an unoriginal girl, one who’d wanted cassette tapes and books with detailed, informative sex scenes. I gave a little shrug and told him clothes.
He looked at the table. “I wouldn’t begin to know how to buy clothes,” he said. “What about a watch, would you have wanted a watch?”
Boring. I mentioned a store that sold girly things, clothes and novelty books and candles and baubles—“Of course I don’t know your daughter,” I said. “But maybe something from there? Maybe a gift certificate?”
He took a notepad from his coat pocket and wrote down the name of the store.
After Nina returned from the bathroom she was quiet again. Those good feelings toward me had faded, if they’d ever existed to begin with. Then it struck me that I’d been one hundred percent wrong, that fathers shouldn’t try to buy their daughters cool presents, that the attempt would only backfire. A watch was fine. A watch was perfect. Yet I could see no way of communicating my epiphany to Daniel.
Who this girl’s mom might have been, they didn’t let on. That Daniel was so eager to educate himself about girl-mysteries suggested to me that he didn’t speak to her mother much, if at all. There was something uncomforted about him. He spent his days at the Department of Justice, I learned, and apparently spent his evenings guarding this rare bird of a daughter. Yet he didn’t quite know how to talk to her, didn’t know how to give her gifts—like my own dad, that way. I got the feeling he’d made a home for himself in whatever well he’d fallen into, but every so often, when his eyes met mine, I thought I saw something in them, directed not at me but past me. He was like someone who needed a ladder but didn’t know what a ladder was.
“I think I’ve seen you out shooting baskets at the playground,” I said.
“Nina just made the varsity team at her school,” Daniel said.
“Oh yeah? I played basketball in high school,” I said. Then I remembered that for her, my going to high school was a thing that had taken place in olden times, before she was born, even though I still considered it recent. I might as well have been talking about the kind of basketball my mother had played, with three girls on offense and three on defense. “I wasn’t great or anything. You’re probably better than I was.”
She shrugged, that is to say she made a face that conveyed a shrug.
“But I felt like it was the one thing I was allowed to love wholeheartedly.”
“Yeah, it’s good to be into sports,” she said, which was less than what I’d meant, but what had I really meant? At least she’d started talking again.
“What position do you play?”
“Post.”
“When’s your next game?”
“A few days from now.”
“You should come watch,” Daniel said.
Nina seemed embarrassed. I told them that I didn’t know whether I could make it, but that I would love to, maybe, I’d try.
We left together and walked back to our buildings, the blocks made brassy by the street lights, so that it felt as though we were crossing a stage, the trash cans placed just so, and there was HOMELESS MAN, who’d forgotten his line, and RED-HOT MAMA COMING OUT OF A STORE, peeling the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes, preparing for her monologue. And there I was, rudely, mechanically performing, recalling for Daniel and Nina my high school basketball days. Mundane stuff, which schools had been good and which bad, who had been rivals, and so on, but it was more than I’d realized I had access to—if you’d asked me beforehand I would’ve said I didn’t remember much of that. But in my awkwardness, under those municipal spotlights, I felt a pressure to produce memories and grab hold of them. Which must have made me a bore, for those two, but maybe they were also relieved, since it wasn’t like they’d had so much to say.
* * *
I’d all but forgotten about the break-in until I was back at my apartment, whe
re I felt suddenly alone and unnerved. Out of pure instinct, I called my mother and told her about it. “They took a woman’s computer,” I said.
“Oh no, that’s terrible. I would be lost without my laptop.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I’m so bad about backing it up. I need to do that more often,” she said.
We talked about backing up files and then about other things, and I never got around to telling her that the break-in had scared me.
“You remember we were talking about Dick Mitchell the other day?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“You reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for years. You might remember it too. We had Dick over to the house a lot of course, and a lot of times he and your dad would wind up off in a corner, talking politics, lost to the party. You couldn’t penetrate their little conference, or at least I could never break it up. But Courtney, when she was about ten or eleven, would just march up and say, ‘Hey, what are you guys talking about?’ It was the funniest thing. And they would try to explain it to her, and she would give her opinion on it. Like she was one of the adults. One of the men!”
“She did? I don’t remember that at all.”
“You were probably with the rest of the kids. But she always wanted to find out what was happening, what these grown-ups were all about.”
“She doesn’t now,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I just hadn’t thought about that in so long. I miss that age.”
She seemed to forget, briefly, that she was talking to me, but I understood what she meant. I missed that age myself, and I wished I had video of eleven-year-old Courtney, all legs and pigtails, talking about the 1980 election with my dad and Dick Mitchell.
* * *
I did wind up going to one of Nina’s games. Another morning, I saw Daniel walking to the Metro, and he saw me too, and we walked together. He was exceedingly friendly, not hitting on me (at least I don’t think he was) but brimming with things to say and grins and gestures. He asked me again to come to a game, that very night. And when I walked into that gym and saw the girls in their uniforms warming up, my ambivalence vanished. It was like walking into a room from my own past. In a good way. Even after I was home again, I still felt stirred.
Rob called, and I told him all about it, that I’d been to a high school girls’ basketball game with my neighbor. He found this almost unbelievable. “You know your neighbors? Didn’t you just move in?”
“I met this father and daughter. The dad’s kind of a dork, but I really like the girl, she’s cool.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a date?”
“You mean with her dad? No. I mean yes, I’m sure it wasn’t. There’s—no. It wasn’t.”
He asked whether I wanted to come over. “I think I’m going to stay in,” I said. I told him I was tired, though that wasn’t it exactly.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” he said.
“What about it?”
“How I went off on my mom, for one thing.”
“It’s okay.”
“Come over. We can talk about something else.”
“Such as?”
“Recent Supreme Court decisions?”
“That’s tempting.” I did want to go—I did and I didn’t—but it was late, and I had to work the next day, and then there was the queasiness I had about him, which was part my old infatuation and part something else. I said I was going to bed, and then I invited him to come with me to a Christmas party the next week.
“I’d rather go to a girls’ basketball game,” he said.
“Teenage girls in shorts?”
“I’m not opposed to that. Are you really going to bed?”
“Yes.”
Less than a minute after we hung up, the phone rang again. I saw Rob’s name and assumed he was going to try one more time to cajole me, and I felt myself starting to relent. But when I answered, the call ended, and there was no knowing whether it had been an accidental redial, or whether he’d called back just to hang up on me.
“So Dad,” I would say to my father on the phone, the so announcing a new foray. Then I would lob questions at him and hope for a response. I was playing the odds, the likelihood that one out of every three or four tries he would tell me something.
“So Dad, when did you first meet Oliver North?”
By then I’d read a lot about the lieutenant colonel. He orchestrated all manner of stratagems from his outpost in the Old Executive Office Building, and he won over half the country by acting the part of the good soldier during the televised congressional hearings, although the other half didn’t buy it: I can remember my high school friends making fun of him. To left-leaning teenagers in 1987, North had been a pitiful liar, just like the president himself. Years later, when I began to read more about him, I felt less decided. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I had a lot of sympathy for North, but I saw him differently, as an ambitious, God-fearing egotist, his background provincial, his energy astounding—a passionate man, at times deluded, who’d thrown himself into a questionable venture, believing it was for the best.
“I suppose I met him around the office. People knew who he was. There was never any shortage of talk about him,” Dad said. The way he said it, I assumed that was all I’d get. He paused, and I prepared for him to change the subject, but he surprised me. “Then there was a trip to Miami. That must’ve been the first time I interacted with him in any substantial way.”
Dad was pulled into it at the last minute, he said. Another person from the NSC staff was supposed to go and then couldn’t. North knew he’d be arriving late, and he wanted to make sure to have someone else on hand when things got started.
Late for what? When was this?
Dad didn’t remember the exact date, but it must’ve been around February 1985. The point of the trip was to meet with a group of Nicaraguans at the Howard Johnson near the airport. I’d read about the same hotel, which was said to have offered certain guests a special guerrilla rate.
There were concerns about the Contras’ operations, my father told me. We were trying to straighten things out.
His instructions were to convey Washington’s misgivings—about the lack of a clear command structure, for one, the rivalries among different Contra factions. In order to sell this thing they needed a unified force battling against the communists, against the odds, but not against one another. There had to be a public relations strategy. Slide presentations. David slinging rocks at the Soviet-sponsored Goliath. And the funds had to be accounted for, that was imperative.
My dad in Miami, with the Contra brass. As an old boss of mine used to say: infuckingcredible.
* * *
… Let’s say there are eight or ten men assembled in one corner of a banquet room, joshing awkwardly about the girl wiping down tables, as they wait for the meeting to start. Outside, a strong wind tosses sand and grit and pieces of plastic against the slanted glass wall. People—who are these people?—show up at the hotel with gifts for the Nicaraguans: a box of glazed doughnuts, a stack of blue jeans wrapped in cellophane. Someone brings them Cuban coffees in takeout cups.
My father has shown up with a bundle of traveler’s checks and a list of talking points, which now seem all but impossible to say. Two other Americans, based here in Miami, have arrived, but he’s never met them before and doesn’t understand exactly who sent them. There’s a rattling that might be caused by the wind or by some loose connection inside his head. He didn’t sleep the night before. His skull feels like a piece of china.
Like him, the Nicaraguans have come straight from the airport, but in a truck fitted with reinforced windows. There were more of them than could squeeze into the cab, and two rode unprotected in the bed, sitting solemnly upon the wheel wells in their suits.
He was assured beforehand that these men understood English, but the one who answers him, the most senior among them, speaks in florid generalities, which m
ight as well be in Latin. His voice will start out low and cordial, and then it will spike as he puts forth some urgent declaration of principles. Liberty. Freedom. The more he says those words the more they shift shape. It’s possible to agree on the meaning of grenades, sixty-five-horsepower outboard motors, magazines: the comandante gives him a written inventory of needed supplies, much of it misspelled. Liberty, however, can’t be brokered or shipped or invoiced.
The commander, who appears now and again in press photos, is as tall as his Anglo counterparts, a large forehead and a strong chin framing his face. “A bit small-minded” one of his fellow officers would later call him: he is strapping, determined, and blinkered. Older than he looks. He makes frequent trips to Washington and Miami, and between trips he writes lengthy missives on Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense letterhead. His rebel army is the protector of thousands of peasant families, he insists—it really is humanitarian aid he’s seeking, even the grenades and mortars are for a humanitarian purpose.
There are pauses, there is small talk. Tim mentions his daughters to the commander. Maybe they can chat about their kids.
So you didn’t have a son, the commander says.
And the response?
At no point does the conversation go smoothly. At no point does Tim feel he is on solid ground. He stares at his big, empty palms, not knowing how to read them, and listens while the man recommends his favorite vacation spots, as though they haven’t just been discussing the war in that same country.
Look here, my father says. I want to make sure we understand each other.