“Dad, Dad, Dad,” she said. “Look—horses!”
“Those are cows.”
“Wow! Cows that look like horses!”
“Not really,” I said.
We plowed deeper into the scrubby interior.
“Look!” she said. “It’s rows and rows of vegetables!”
“That’s called a garden.”
“Yeah, baby! A garden!”
The drive was long, traffic got bad. The air changed, the light changed. She got quiet. We had two more hours to Tampa. Beetle was too elated to be cranky but tired, and the cows and gardens no longer interested her.
We would miss the author party, dammit. She would’ve loved that. Free food, all the cake she could want, where the lemonade flowed like wine.
She was fading. We needed a break.
But no, when your dreams come true, you cannot stop. Stopping is for the weak, the infirm, the unpublished, the dollar bin authors. Pop taught me that. And so we tilled through the brushy wastelands, the traffic thinning a little, the light low. I didn’t want to stop, but then I saw it—a celestial truck stop on a hill. We slowed.
“What are we doing?” Beetle said.
We bought enough candy to fill three or four piñatas. Beetle appeared to believe she’d won some sort of chocolate sweepstakes.
“This is the greatest day of my life,” she said.
We played soccer, there at the truck stop.
This girl had more trophies than her sisters, collected them like others collect dolls, in basketball and soccer and gymnastics. She is made of rubber and enthusiasm, a champion whittler, designer of imaginary machines. Her talents are many—cutting, cooking, gluing, making, designing, building, whittling, farting, burping, crying, and farting while crying.
She has always seemed most inclined to a life of making, the first of her sisters to ask to hold babies, the one who cannot sit still, fearless on a bicycle, fearful of dogs, the licker of dirty things, the naked one somersaulting in the yard, who makes my wife most desire margaritas, given all the naked somersaulting in the yard.
“Can I at least take my shirt off?” she said, as we kicked the ball to one another.
I wanted to say yes. I don’t know why. I did. The freedom in this child is heavenly.
“There are rules,” I said.
“Fine.”
Each of our daughters is chased by her own demons. Beetle is the most prone to displays of extremity, highs, lows. Many days of her life compete to be the greatest, or the worst, ever. But on the soccer field, every redlining emotion dissolves into the ether. She is focused and blindered in the goalie position, nostrils flared, diving into the dirt without fear or pain.
Right there in an empty lot by the truck stop, we scrimmaged, and she forgot the candy, and I forgot the tour, the sales, the money, the time. We scored on one another in the dying light of an autumn eventide in the rare wild vastness of central Florida. It was the happiest I’d been all year, in this most volatile year of my life.
I held her hand and drove across Old Tampa Bay, delighting her with the lights across the water. This was her dream now. Everything enchanted, holding magic.
“What is this?” she said.
“This is a hotel lobby.”
“What is that?”
“An ice machine.”
I felt like Adam in the garden, naming things while God watched. Beetle stared, struck dumb with the existence of this machine whose single purpose is to manufacture ice for people just like her.
“Can I push the button?”
“Push it.”
She pushed it.
She laughed maniacally as ice poured onto the carpet. A door opened. We ran away down the hall, laughing. We sat on the bed, ordered room service nachos and cake, took out a subprime loan on a salad. The next day, she wore my VIP badge as golf carts carried us about the grounds of this book festival.
“I’ve never been a Very Important Person,” she said.
“You were born a Very Important Person,” I said.
On Sunday, we woke at five in the morning and as we rocketed back across Florida in the dark, she vomited repeatedly on the floorboard and seat for several hours, until we got home.
“It was the greatest trip of my life,” she told her sisters, without irony.
* * *
I did not kill Beetle, so Stargoat felt, yes, okay, this is safe.
She is the follower of rules, the acer of tests, who, when told to go play, finds a quiet chair in which to write notes of encouragement to her schoolteachers. She is studious. When she does not make the dean’s list, she dons sackcloth.
She was ten now, my curly headed beauty, possessing many talents, including writing, acting, playing the recorder in such a way as to drive squirrels off the property, joke telling, reading books under tables and in closets, and explaining to her little sisters how they have disappointed her.
When she was five, she entered a school talent show with a brief comedy routine, in which she read from a page of jokes that she held so close to her face you weren’t sure how she could breathe. When she was six, she entered and won a poetry contest with such powerful lines as, “Jimmy played the saxophone, and it sounded maxophone.”
“That ain’t even a word,” somebody behind us said.
It was a proud moment.
She hugged Edna Jackson, the first female African-American mayor of Savannah, and I was, and continued to be, awed by the courage of this marvelous little child. I once discovered in her room a notebook on which she had written, “My Top Secret Book of Scaring and Plans for Scaring.”
And now Stargoat and I lit out for the edges of the earth, to another festival, once again in Florida, and she was not disappointed. She sailed through the saw grass, eyes as wide as Ponce de León’s at every turn.
“Dad, they have popcorn in the lobby!” she said, in awe.
She held it up to the light like it be made of gold.
“Dad, they have extra toilet paper!” she said, in the room, picking it up, marveling, as if the hotel was El Dorado, that famed City of TP. She had found glory and majesty eternal.
“Yes, extra toilet paper is standard,” I said.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s all so beautiful. It’s the loveliest place I’ve ever been.”
It was a Hampton Inn.
At the author party, she was doted on by many fine writers, including Richard Blanco, inaugural poet. I introduced her.
“He read a poem at the inauguration of President Obama,” I said.
Her eyes grew wide that such a thing could be done, that a poet can read a poem while tens of millions listened.
“I read a poem at city hall,” she said.
“That’s quite a feat,” said Mr. Blanco.
The next day, I read a story and did a talk, and then we drove home.
“Was it awesome?” Beetle said.
“It was amazing,” Stargoat said. “Daddy was the least famous of all the writers.”
* * *
Finally, it was little Effbomb’s turn.
“Please do not let this one die,” Lauren said.
We drove to St. Simons Island, Georgia, not far at all, but far enough to feel to this child as though she was at the very end of the earth. We pulled up to the library where I was to speak. She looked out the window toward the Atlantic, the boats nodding in the sun.
“What country are we in?” she said.
“The U.S.A.”
“What language do they speak here?” she said.
“English, mostly.”
“What does English sound like?”
The curiosity and earnestness at which these children take in the world is breathtaking. Effbomb has many gifts. She can still the storms to a whisper and wave a hand to silence a room. She is like Margaret Thatcher in a tiny little American body and then, in an instant, a thousand-year-old angel baby.
She was born to dance. If she hears a song, she will politely ask you to move, s
o that she can perform a dance for you, which you are to observe in respectful and grave silence.
“Don’t look at me,” she will say, dancing for you. “Stop watching me.”
We checked into the English-speaking hotel, and Effbomb just could not get over it, the long empty hallways, the luggage carts. The English-speaking desk clerk handed her a map, drew a star on it where our room was.
“What is that star?” she said.
“That’s the treasure,” I said.
“I’m pretty good at finding treasure,” she said.
She climbed onto the luggage cart, her chariot.
“You push,” she said. “I will lead us there.”
And she did, all three of my girls did.
* * *
Late that fall, six months after the book had come out, we got good news: HarperCollins would be releasing the book in paperback. They were not Old Yellering me quite yet. This good news kept us on the road even longer, allowing me to continue taking my daughters to new places that fall and into the next year, which was great, because Lauren got a promotion at the school and was now in charge of many things, such as other people, making her quite thrilled to let me take the people in our house somewhere else, and I did: I took them through tunnels on the Blue Ridge Parkway, roadside lakes, waterfalls, beaches, over the tops of mountains, into deep green basins where phones don’t work, through old record stores and museums and hotels with ballrooms and heaps of bacon that made my daughters’ eyes grow wide with disbelief.
“What is this?” the girls asked, beholding one of the grand visions of human culture.
“This is called a breakfast buffet.”
“How much bacon can you get?”
“As much as your plate can hold.”
A continental breakfast without children is a grim affair, adults slumping into chairs in the gloaming, but add children and the place becomes Valhalla.
“This is the greatest day of our lives,” they kept saying.
The days were great, got greater. I was forty-one now and had begun getting paid to speak, which was wild, to get paid to appear, which is something I’d been doing my whole life, just appearing, and disappearing, and reappearing via doors.
“What’s your rate?” people asked.
“Five hundred?” I said, and they paid it.
“Fifteen hundred?” I said, the next time, and they paid it.
“Five thousand?” I said, and they did not pay it, or even call back.
I brought down my price a little, because I learned they only pay you more if you win an award, and I had not won any awards, but we kept at it, my family and me, on the road in so many new cities and glorious Holiday Inn Expresses.
“Can we make a waffle in the waffle machine?”
“Sure. We can add chocolate chips if you want.”
“I can’t believe it,” they said. “I literally can’t believe we can make our own waffles.”
Sometimes I spoke in full auditoriums, sometimes in abandoned bookstores and haunted theaters. Nothing hurt anymore. The unplumbed chasm of loneliness down in me, in the place between my lungs, had been filled with three tiny people and my wife and mother and their endless surging love. I had felt so alone on so many days, for so many years, dreaming the book, and then writing the book, and then selling the book to a capricious and faceless American reader, lost in the hellscape of dreaming, and this fiery Sheol was now vanquished, gone, transformed into a harmonious green space of light and wonder and daughters. It didn’t seem to matter that people didn’t come to my readings, even when I gave out free beer and edible prizes. I no longer cared. I was having too much fun with my family to notice. Sometimes I brought Lauren, and sometimes I brought one daughter, and sometimes I brought them in pairs, and sometimes I brought them all, making them sit on different rows during the reading, to make the room look fuller, and then we went back to the hotel, so they could splash in the pool while I lay prone in the sun, drinking warm beer. They bought books at every store, volumes about dogs and sharks and adventure.
“Oh no! What’s happening?” Beetle said, in the car one day.
“What is this?” Effbomb said.
“It’s just rain,” Lauren said.
“Daddy, what is this?” they said.
“Rain.”
“Make it stop!”
“It’s just rain.”
“God makes it rain so we can have trees and grass,” Stargoat said, trying to calm her little sisters down while also patronizing them, a gift all oldest children possess.
“But why is God doing this to us?” Effbomb said.
She hit the window, defying God. The wailing grew. Now even Stargoat was crying, as Effbomb had mistaken her face for the face of God and hit it, too. We slowed down and drove so very slowly, eschewing the strained hurry of interstates for the laze of rural routes and county roads, and the sun came out as corn and woods and chicken houses pressed up against the windows. We slowed more. I could now make out the scenes of my life in real time, as they happened, and it was a gift, a paradise.
“Daddy, daddy, what is this?” they asked. “Is this a city?”
“No, this is a gas station.”
“Is that a zoo?” they asked.
“No, that is also a gas station.”
Everything was beautiful and dewy and new.
“Look at all the towels!” Stargoat said, touching them.
“I know, I know,” I said.
“They’re so white,” Effbomb said, smelling them.
“I know.”
“The pillows are so soft,” Beetle said, licking them.
“Please don’t lick them.”
“I need to lick them.”
It came as a sudden happy surprise, this realization that seeing my children experience raw wonder was far more exhilarating than any dream, that the roar of an audience’s laughter was a thrill that muted into the background of my daughters’ awe at a continental breakfast. Their joy became my own. I had become as a child again.
In every new city, I watched these little dreamers dance on the beds and hoped in my heart that they might draw some enduring lesson from all this, to know that when their own roads darken, when they are being pulled and tugged and crushed between the overwhelming force of what the world expects of you and what you expect of yourself, that it’s possible: A dream can be made real.
But it was me who learned, and what I learned is probably so obvious as to be upsetting, that this thing I had been searching for all my life was right in front of me, licking the pillows.
Chapter 25
There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey, and be handed along, for good and selfish reasons.
—WALKER PERCY, The Moviegoer
NOBODY TELLS YOU THAT NOBODY REALLY CARES ABOUT your dream. Not your mother, or your wife, or your children. They don’t care if your dream doesn’t come true. What they care about is you, and also the garbage, and when you’re going to take it out.
Your friends might ask, Hey, friend, how’s that dream going?
But nobody’s going to be upset if the dream dies, and mostly they will not ask, because they will already know. You alone have to care, hard. A dream is a baby, and it will die, if you let it.
But if you nurse it up and make it real, even then, nobody really cares, and even if they do, their love for what you have made blooms and dies like a roadside daisy. Their love does not endure. It is not eternally begotten. It’s not their place to care: That’s your job.
Oh, they talk, the neighbors and bloggers and people who ask for a photo with you, they talk as if your book is so good that it should be given to new parents at birthing centers and attached to tiny baby parachutes and dropped behind enemy lines. They speak like this, and you believe them. Thank them. But do not believe them.
Nobody tells you that the way publishers make money is: They launder it for foreign governments
, and also, they have this secret weapon called To Kill a Mockingbird. Just one Mockingbird can fund thousands of debut novels and memoirs. It is the golden goose, this mockingbird. It, and Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and all the others. You are grateful to these books. They are the geese of literature, birthing eggs that can be transmogrified into book contracts for ugly ducklings, like you, like me, and almost every other author ever born, it turns out. Never again will you mock Twilight.
Thank every sexy werewolf you meet.
* * *
Nobody tells you that on any given day when you are to appear at a bookstore or festival, a surprising number of all your friends in that town will message you that regrettably they are unable to attend because a family emergency requires their attention. Many of them have to leave town for a family funeral, they will say. Everywhere you go, people die, it seems.
Nobody tells you that some bookstores will love you and exclaim with delight when you arrive, and other bookstores will not give a fuck. They will be all out of fucks. They will go in the stockroom and check for fucks and find the stockroom bereft of even one remaindered fuck. Because most bookstores see a dreamer like you almost every other day, sometimes four or five a week, and it gets exhausting, treating you all like you’re the most special author in the world, which is a lie. They’re not. You’re not. Be grateful they remembered you were coming.
You will be honored to read one of your stories at the War Memorial Auditorium, original home of the Grand Ole Opry, more than 2,000 seats waiting to be filled. You will walk out on stage, thinking of all the legendary acts that have stirred this room with their gifts, and you will see that only twenty people have come, and you will try to laugh and try not to cry. Nobody tells you that so much of dreaming is filling imaginary rooms with imaginary people.
Nobody tells you that you will perform in statehouses, sanctuaries, synagogues, city council chambers, train depots, school auditoriums, county fairs, casinos, in the ballroom of the Hotel Monteleone and on the grounds of a derelict French castle, and even at the annual meeting of the Georgia OBGyn Society, alongside horrific displays on transvaginal mesh and fetal scalp electrode placement. Why have they asked you to speak, again? Is this a joke?
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 23