by Ben George
7.
Soon Owen and Henry talk in complete sentences, carry backpacks to preschool, and want to know if the Elks Hospital is a hospital for elks or for “big people.” And they have passions, hundreds of them: Tinkertoys, Gwen Stefani, puddle stomping, garden tomatoes, floor puzzles, ice cream, Elmer’s glue. They find letters of the alphabet everywhere they look: Os in noodles, Ts in bathroom tiles, Xs in the poos our dog drops in the grass.
At work, as a kind of procrastination, I start reading Herodotus’s Histories. Here he is on the Egyptians:
When the rich give a party and the meal is finished, a man carries round amongst the guests a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, carved and painted to look as much like the real thing as possible, and anything from eighteen inches to three feet long; he shows it to each guest in turn and says: “Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead.”
An hour after I read that passage, I learn that Henry and Owen’s great-great-aunt Dorothy has died. I spend the next few days thinking of Dorothy: who loved to sift through waist-high stacks of mail-order catalogs, who went for long walks inside the mall on winter mornings with her friends, who had a gold Saturn SL2 with six hundred miles on it. Who was childless but must have had some love stories folded tight inside her heart. What men loved Dorothy Lyskawa? Certainly some: she wore trim dresses and stylish skirts and crimson lipstick and worked as a secretary at Owens Corning and would pile onto the corporate plane and take notes at meetings and then rove New York City with her friends. And yet who stayed unmarried, who lived in Toledo, Ohio, all her life, the gray Februaries and the big, brown Maumee sliding along beside the glass factories.
Again I wonder: Is there a heaven? Some place where our lost relatives peer down at us from the fleecy rims of clouds and know our hearts? And know each other’s?
What’s the alternative? That when we die all our stories disappear? Are our private lives so inconsequential?
Maybe consequence is something you have to create. Consequence is doing something like Aunt Dorothy did in the first years after my grandfather died, before I was born, when my mother and father lived in Meadowlawn, Ohio, with two babies and one car and no money and Dad wore homemade suits to sales training sessions and Mom rode a bicycle with both kids to get groceries. Dorothy would slip Mom a twenty-dollar bill every time she visited. And twenty dollars, my mother says, “bought a lot of groceries back then.”
Dorothy never got to see Henry and Owen.
8.
Shauna signs up our boys for dance camp. The evening after the first day, Henry breaks his arm in two places. Without his twin brother, facing down the enormity of dance camp by himself, Owen spends the entirety of day two with the front of his polo shirt clenched in his teeth. He hides on the outskirts of the activities, trying but failing to follow directions. He tiptoes through the songs, shy, afraid, the front of his little shirt dark with saliva and wrenched into wrinkles. Twice he is sent to the “growing line” for talking when he shouldn’t.
Owen and Henry haven’t spent a night apart since conception, and as I watch Owen chew his shirt to a pulp I wonder what his life would be like if his brother were permanently removed from it. Doesn’t every little twin assume—wrongly!—that the world must naturally contain his twin? And on what awful day do they learn that the truth is the opposite?
“Even lovers,” Annie Dillard writes, “even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone.”
After snack time, with half an hour to go, the dance-campers take a walk around the block. And though there are probably twenty kids in the class, Jon Jon, one of the instructors, a kind-faced drummer with a beard and ponytail, who already seems to know every child’s name, makes a point of finding Owen and holding his hand.
Jon Jon and Owen start off at the back of the column of children, Jon Jon leaning over now and then to hear if Owen has anything to say.
When they come back, Owen hugs my leg. His shirtfront is twisted and wet but it is no longer in his teeth. Jon Jon smiles. “He reminds me of my son,” he says. “He notices everything.”
9.
It’s September. I’m sitting with the boys in loungers at the neighborhood pool. They are three and a half years old. We’re eating Wheat Thins. Twenty hours ago their drum-playing dance-camp instructor, Jon Jon, had his whole, unknowable, interesting life abbreviated to two sentences:
Thirty-three-year-old Jon Stravers of Boise, Idaho, was driving the sedan. He and three-year-old Jonah Stravers were both killed.
Henry says, “You always say the pool is warm when it is cold, Daddy.”
It’s on my mind again, our ancestors, Mary Leakey’s footprints, Keats’s epitaph, Herodotus’s Egyptians, the appalling brevity of our lives. We twist and swim and fold back into the invisible; our names are written in water.
How could the world possibly be better off without Jon Jon? How could anyone ever argue that his was a superfluous life? And what about Jonah’s life, and shouldn’t a prayer be sent up, too, for the now-ended twenty-six-year-old life of Bryant Hays of Sussex, Wisconsin, who (investigators suspect) had some alcohol or drugs in him and sent his pickup, grille first, across the eastbound lane and into Jon Jon and Jonah’s sedan?
There are so many lives that deserve prayers in this: Jonah’s mother, Jon Jon’s parents, Bryant Hays’s parents, the woman who might have poured Bryant Hays his beer that night, who might have delayed his departure four or five seconds by dropping his change: a quarter and a nickel and a penny rolling down the wood floor behind some bar. “Sorry,” she might have said. “Wait one second,” she might have said, and that one second might have been enough—enough to set Bryant Hays on his ruinous trajectory: father and son, Jon Jon and Jonah, hurtling east along a mountain highway, Bryant Hays climbing into his truck, turning the key, starting west.
All those lives, all those people—each of us operates at a vertex of a vast, three-dimensional, crisscrossing network of relationships. Son, brother, husband, father, friend, teacher. No life is superfluous. And yet thousands go out the door every hour.
Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead.
There goes Mary Leakey’s family of three; there goes John Keats; there goes Aunt Dorothy; there goes Jon Jon Stravers and poor, sweet, three-year-old Jonah. The great network vibrates and swings as lives are plucked out of it, one after another.
When you watch your kids begin to grow up, you cannot help but feel your impermanence more acutely; you cannot help but see how you are one link in a very long chain of parents and children, and that the best thing you have ever done and ever will do is to extend that chain, to be a part of something greater than yourself. That’s really what it means to be a father—to be continually reminded that you are taking part in something much larger than your own terrifyingly short life.
A reef of clouds builds in the west, so gray they look almost black. Owen finishes his Wheat Thins and takes the pool key off our lounge chair and walks barefoot across to the gate and stands on his tiptoes while he tries to work the key into the lock.
Henry says, “I love Wheat Thins, Daddy,” and crunches another one, spilling crumbs across his towel, and the wind blows into the valley and the sun slinks down into reds and purples and the sky takes on that deep, clarion blue of a September evening and we pack up our towels and swimsuits and walk home as the first cold air of the season slides down from the mountains.
FOR ELLA
MICHAEL THOMAS
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will…
—W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter”
Dear Ella,
You have just turned seven, and over the past few months—some of the darkes
t in my life—I have begun to understand that you trust me, you have faith in me, you love me.
Darkness: it would seem that this time in my life would be anything but. I’ve received the critical attention that most writers long for; I’ve been married to your beautiful mother for more than fifteen years; I have two healthy, handsome sons who paint, play piano, run and jump with grace and power; I have you, my daughter, who every day looks at me as though I was the greatest man she has ever seen. But darkness has a knack for eluding, or extinguishing, light, and it comes in many forms. Like my father, and his, I have at different times in my life been lost in it. It is an awful place to be, and when I search inside myself for some resource—a map, a light—I find the same night as the one outside.
My condition is exacerbated by the distance I feel between myself and those I love—the irony being that surviving my childhood has made me into someone who doesn’t know how to enjoy what I have now. And perhaps the greater irony is that what I need to survive my adulthood—innocence—is what I, as a child, relinquished.
But this life, now, requires an opposite trait, or at least necessitates that we shield something so fragile as innocence from what we witness daily—foster children subsisting on pancake batter and fiberglass, cities drowned by storm, paddy wagons unloading their cargo of chained brown men onto the sidewalk of the Atlantic Avenue jail—so that the impact upon us is somehow lessened.
I wonder how you remember it—last summer when the cat disappeared—how you’ll recall it later. She was taken, an alleged case of mistaken identity, from our stoop, where she’d been basking for the last twelve years. You, your brothers, and mom were away, and I was charged with finding her before you got home. I lied to you on the phone, told you I couldn’t come to the beach to watch you “no trun from the waves” that were over your head because I had work to do.
You’ve been carrying her around since you could toddle. Mini: elegant, lean, and black. She’d see you wobbling over to her—half dozing on the couch—arms out, as though imploring her to jump into them. She wouldn’t, but, rather, would stand, stretch, and wait. Grown-up willful cat, the boys never troubled her, but she’d let you scoop her up by the chest and belly, then teeter around the room with her until you were ready to put her down.
I stalked the neighborhood, postering every nonliving surface within thirty square blocks of our house to which packing tape could adhere. I rang doorbells, stopped strangers, and called to her through open windows. “She’s my daughter’s best friend,” I began telling people. I knew I had to find her even if it meant ransacking every home in Brooklyn.
After four days I did—near dusk—that cat you love, who sounds more ducklike than feline when she meows; who now trots to you, purring. And with a strange sense of pride that I haven’t felt since I was a boy, I called your mother with the news.
“We knew you’d find her.”
“We? You told her?”
“I let it slip.”
“So, she’s been hysterical all this time?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“She was a little sad at first—no tears, though—then she just said, ‘Daddy will find her. My daddy can fix anything.’ And you did.”
I’ve been trying to write this to you—for you—but I’m of different minds: I’m sorry that I feel the need to reveal any intimate detail that has gone into making me the father you now know, but also that I haven’t written it sooner—that I’ve withheld that same information. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been good at speaking intimately to anyone, and at this time, a letter is what I have to offer. And writing seems to have an indelible quality that spoken words do not.
I don’t know to whom I’m writing, though. Certainly not the girl I can still easily lift over my head so she can touch the ceiling, but who is so unbearably ticklish she cackles and wriggles dangerously up there; who wraps herself around my leg to hitch a ride down the hall. Although I can see your chocolate eyes, your soft and wild ringlets—umber to gold—to say that I can fully envision the woman who may someday read this limits you to what I can conceive.
A great author wrote, “I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love,” and I worried, last August, that my frantic search for the cat was just such an attempt. I have, for most of your life, been hiding from you, moving to empty rooms when I could. And my attempts to love come in the form of elaborate meals, prepared to loud music, along with manic dances by the kitchen sink and other feats of fatherhood. I’m not saying that what we’ve done together wasn’t, isn’t, real. As I said before, I’m beginning to understand that you love me—feel it—and that feeling frightens me, as it yanks me back to a time it wasn’t safe to do so.
Your father has had a strange life: some of it I inherited, some of it I made. “Strange”: what an imprecise word. I’ve used it a lot, though, allegedly to protect you from what lies behind it, but the euphemism is really a feeble effort to obscure things I’d rather not review: the different times a police officer left a bruise on me, or drew blood, when I was a boy; or now, on the subway, how sometimes when I’m without some badge of distinction—a tie, a child, or a white person—women of all age and hue pull their bags to them when I pass by.
It seems reasonable—not to trust your innocence to another. And practical, wise even, not to possess any at all. Early in his autobiography, W. E. B. DuBois recounts the time when his valentine note was spurned. And I can crush most of my young life into a metaphor for unrequited affections. And not only for me; it seemed that the confessional missives of everyone I knew had been returned to sender.
The world I grew up in was oddly similar to the one you see now. I remember long lines at the gas station and the unemployment office. There were junkies in the park and pedophiles in the bushes. There was a war on TV. I was a dreamy boy who, like my father, was oblivious and ill-equipped to negotiate the perils of the world. There are old photos of me—you wouldn’t recognize your dad—in which I look unreasonably happy. Most of the time I was. I listened to birds sing, and their melodies, in my head, attached to words that I couldn’t quite pick out, but I felt confident that if I just sang, it would all make sense—“it” being the junked car, the weedy hedgerow, the lonely mother, the missing father, and the uncertain future. But the song never worked: things stayed as they were—grew worse. The car remained in the driveway, up on blocks. And my father’s domestic and professional failure—his hideous emasculation—was completed. And I could begin to clearly see my future—the grim one that had already been enacted by many poor, black men whose one asset was the “radical innocence” of which Yeats spoke.
I watched my mother—your nana, who is the bravest, toughest person I have ever known—struggle alone to raise your uncle, your aunt, and me. She’d left her home in Virginia when she wasn’t much more than a girl herself. (Now, when I see the young women at the college where I teach, or in line at the movies down the street, I think, my mother: how could this be?) She endured the multiple humiliations of being a poor, single, black woman among people who had little use for her except as a domestic, or as a convenient receptacle for their pieties and their pity.
But your nana paid them no mind. And I would secretly think, Why do you do that? Why keep exposing yourself? And as for me, my concerns weren’t even practical. I wanted to tell everyone about the secrets in the language of the birds. In later photos of me, I’m a little stoic—near dead-eyed, probably more familiar to you. I was only a little older than you are now (how can this be?) when I realized that I had to be hard. I went from being a dreamy boy to being, outwardly, a reasonable one, and eventually, that reason migrated into me, until that area of me which housed those secret languages, the answers to the world’s problems, was overrun, and I couldn’t access it anymore, even if I wanted to.
This letter isn’t a cautionary litany for you—brown girl, brown woman. What you will face—racism, sexism, objectification, fascistic beauty st
andards, which in the simple mind render you ugly or even invisible—I cannot protect you from. The TVs are on, the hot irons are fired, the billboards sit high, and the newspaper rattles our door every morning. The conditions they advertise, report on, and even celebrate have preceded you and, regrettably, will outlast you, but that doesn’t mean that they will, while you live, defeat you. The only antidotes against these afflictions are faith and love.
I’m sorry I have to use these words; myriad individuals bandy them about in common, tired ways. That, however, doesn’t make the words common, or strip them of their power. You will hear people twist them for their own purposes. I have. Regardless: faith is the “belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof.” And love, “an intense feeling of tender affection and compassion.” Rather than cling to definitions or popular notions, think of them as callings. We do not choose who or what calls, but rather whether or not we’ll listen, answer, and go—enter conditions that can, beautifully, dovetail into one.
Love: I’ve always been terrified of revealing those parts of me that need it—emotionally limping through the world, favoring the damaged, overburdening the well. I have always felt myself too broken to be loved, an identity formed long before I met you. “Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned / By those that are not entirely beautiful.” And I’ve believed my only chance of earning any heart was through Herculean labors and Olympian distance, protecting my beloved simultaneously from a world of hurt and loss and from my own jagged edges, my rages, my mourning the parts in me I thought long dead.