by Ben George
We came those first summers when Mara was little, just the three of us, so often renting on a shoestring and ending up in some places that in retrospect seem rankly depressing, but at the time, when we were in them, were mainly fine. We ignored or joked about smells and bugs and cupboards lined with floral sticky-paper and those molten-toned seascapes bolted to the walls. We took pride in making do, and I think now that we had endless patience for the clattery busywork of being young parents, the stroller pushing, the pretend playing, all the up and back repetitions. I remember one summer we set ourselves up in a box-shaped little house—it was one of a dozen or so—on a hillside near Wellfleet. And in our largesse, before ever even setting eyes on the place, we invited my mother to visit for a few days, with Lynn’s sister to arrive as soon as my mother left. It turned out that there was barely room for all of us in the living room, with its huge picture-window fronting the road. It rained most of the week. I was beside myself with boredom. But I also wanted to be a good father. I played and played with Mara, trying to make her vacation a happy one. Alas, we had nowhere to go. My only diversion was a box of dominoes found in the closet. I sat Mara down on the floor beside me and we built towers. Over and over, piece by ticking piece, always the same basic design. How high could we make it? And how irritated I got if Mara knocked one of my good towers down. I was building for myself, desperate to stay amused. Somewhere we have a Polaroid of the two of us sitting beside our prize construction. Looking at the photo, I think what a stunning, unbelievably sweet little girl she was—and how ridiculous it was for me to get so serious about stacking those bones.
What kind of a father was I? I know that I tried to be different from my own father, who all through my childhood maintained that he loved us—and clearly did—but who also told us, often, that we would appreciate him only when we were older and more intelligent. Then we would talk. But I could not imagine having that kind of detached deferral with my own child. I wanted entry to Mara’s world, a role in shaping her mind, her sense of things. I wanted to get as close as I could.
My problem was that I had no idea how to proceed. I was never one for playing. The sight of a spinner on a gussied-up board game or of some molded plastic doll—these things filled me with fatigue. I hated almost all toys; nor could I endure the infantilized pretend chatter that was the required accompaniment to all forms of parent-child play, at least from what I’d observed. “Snuffy is a niiiiiice kitty…” Yikes! I could finally do only what I knew to do, what I liked to do. I could talk. I invented characters, told stories, created plot situations that grew into one another and became more and more elaborate over time. Steffie and Kevin, their friend Lenny, the villains Moe and Joe, Steffie’s rival Cherry Lalou—and the world they lived in, the street, neighborhood, town…I worked hard at these, the adventures were good ones—so I thought, anyway—full of surprises, resisting pat endings but still upholding a basic picture of a moral universe, a triumph of idealism over low impulse. And Mara loved them. Every night, or whenever we had time together, she would beam at me: “Tell me a Kevin and Steffie, Dad.” This went on for years.
Mara is almost twenty now. She is taking a break from college, living with roommates in an apartment in Belmont, ten minutes from where we live. She has a forty-hour-a-week job in a stationery store in Harvard Square, though she barely makes ends meet. She is, by her own admission, unsettled, experiencing vivid and frightening dreams and moods that can suddenly plummet and leave her feeling sad and exposed. The sensations she describes are familiar to me—they reach all the way back into my own young years.
I wasn’t thinking about Mara just then, as I stood again on the deck to stretch, but I was very much aware of her. Her funks, the tone of her recent phone calls, knowing that she would be coming soon. I peered out at what I could see of the bay but all these things were there in my peripheral awareness.
I was having my first real doubt now. I could still see the tips of both sails, moving toward the other part of the bay, just above the edge of the pier, clean little shark-fin shapes. But the sky was definitely darkening and the wind was picking up slightly, and the farther out Liam took his boat, the less confidence I had in his bluster about knowing how to sail. I turned around to see if there was a clock in the rental shed. The girl who worked there had left her counter and was standing on a crate, shading her eyes and peering at the harbor. She must have picked up on my agitation, because just then she said: “They’ll be fine—but they shouldn’t go too far out.” I nodded. They would know that, I told myself. Then: they’re fourteen-year-old boys, they won’t know. I looked back quickly to make sure I saw the sails.
Liam has always been different from Mara. Six years younger, he is made from other material. Whereas she is delicate, slightly wan, he is fleshy and boisterously solid. He always has been. Since preschool he has never not been the biggest boy in his class. Barely into his teens, he has already caught up to me, and I am not small. The other night I told him to stand up straight against a wooden beam in the Truro house. I put the top of a DVD case flat on his head and drew a faint line. Then I told him to do the same for me. We had to laugh—we were the thickness of a pencil lead apart.
Given his size and his point-blank confidence, I tend to forget his age and essential vulnerability. When I have to face it I can get overwhelmed. He could hurt himself, cry a child’s tears. Or be in danger. The worst was years ago. He was seven or eight years old, at summer camp. Lynn and I got a call at noon one day that we should come get him, that he was in the infirmary, having what appeared to be an asthma attack. We hurried over to bring him home, worried, but also thinking he had just overtaxed himself. We told him to rest in his room. Suddenly he was standing at the top of the stairs, red in the face, making a noise that was almost a bleat, terror on his face. He couldn’t breathe, he was choking for air. Without hesitation we sat him down there on the top step and called the doctor, who told us to get an ambulance right away. Which we did. And moments later—time was a jumble—I was behind the wheel of our car, following an ambulance across town, hurtling through red lights, my calm life gone into a hyperventilating freefall that would not stop until more than an hour later, when a doctor came out to assure us that Liam’s breathing had been stabilized and that he would be fine.
How long it took—maybe years—for that shock to ebb fully, for some trace of that anxiety not to be there every time he went outside to play, daily breathing treatments notwithstanding. I think of the way we look at our children when we are afraid, the way we read their eyes to see if they are telling us everything, and the terrible sense we have of their fragility, which for me goes all the way back to the very first night we brought Mara home from the hospital and set her up in a little crib. I remember how I just lay there listening to the breathing sounds, sure that if I tuned them out for an instant they would stop. A superstition: much the same as how I used to believe that if I relaxed my will for an instant while flying the airplane I was in, it would instantly plummet. Life has taught me much about my fears and about my grandiose presumptions, but only gradually.
Liam and Mara, what a strange distribution of personalities—no, what a pair of souls. I have to think in terms of souls where my closest people are concerned. To think of them as personalities diminishes them, a personality being something one can put a boundary around somehow. Liam and Mara could not be more different, in who they are and in what each drew forth from us as parents. We never had a program or a plan. I have never had a clear instinct for what kind of father to be, not in terms of what I should be doing, modeling, instructing. I have somehow trusted to being myself. Maybe a better version of myself—kinder, more attentive, and more consistent in my responses than I might be if I did not feel the responsibility of children.
My idea—and feeling—of being a father has changed from year to year, if not from week to week. The father of a newborn is very different from the father of a toddler or a school-age child or a preteen or…Is there anything constant
in it, besides the love and care—the great givens—the fact that I would do anything at any time to ensure their safety and well-being? But in terms of who I am—well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? The father of newborn Mara was thirty-six, the father of teenage Mara was fifty, and the man looking out for some trace of his teenage son is slowly pushing sixty.
I keep an image that I refer to from time to time to orient myself, from an afternoon moment on a Wellfleet side road some years ago. We had a weeklong rental, an upstairs apartment in a frowsy old house that had been divided up to accommodate people just like us. The yard was grassy, though, and shady, and the house was on a nice stretch of road to walk, and nearby we had discovered a small horse-farm, which became a popular destination for keeping the kids amused. We would stand by the roadside, pressed against the wooden fence, and watch the horses being exercised in the corral. Mara might have been ten or eleven that summer, Liam four or five, and I somewhere in my late forties. I do all this approximate figuring because my epiphany—I think it counts as one—had everything to do with ages and proportions.
It was the very end of a beautiful summer afternoon, the light beginning to slant. But though I was vacationing, I was also trying very hard to get some writing done, to bring a book project around to completion. It was because I wanted to think, to stew in my own notions, that I begged off when Lynn and the kids started off down the road on another walk. I waved them off, I remember, and then sat myself down on a steep, grassy verge in front of the house and watched. They were moving slowly, one or both kids dawdling. I sat and stared at them, and as I did I felt come over me, gradually, the clearest and sweetest melancholy. It was as if I had suddenly moved out of myself, pulling away and rising like some insect that has left its transparent shell stuck to the branch of a tree. It was as if the needle on the balance had drawn up completely straight; the string I plucked was exactly in tune. I watched my wife and two kids walking away from me down the road and I got it. I was exactly in the middle—of the afternoon, of the summer, of an actuarial life, of the great generational cycle. Outlined against the horizon in front of me were those three shapes, and behind me, imagined on the opposite horizon, were my own two parents, both still alive and in health, just coming into their seventies. I was in the middle, at once a son, a father, and something else: a man with plans and projects in his head, no one’s person. It was the frailest and most temporary alignment, and the sensation just then of everything holding steady, hovering in place, exalted me, just as the knowledge that it had to change filled me with sorrow. I took a breath and swallowed my metaphysics. I headed in to use the bit of time I had to do my work. For if parenting held any practical lesson for me, it was that I had to learn to stake out time, to filch every little scrap I could.
Something’s happened just now, here, between one glance and the next. There were two sails in view beyond the line of the pier, but when I look I see only one. The blue sail. Caleb’s. Fatherhood compresses into a single pulse, long enough for me to jump off the edge of the deck to the sand and start jogging around the ropes and old buoys to where the pier meets the shore, and when I reach that point I duck and go under to get to the other side, where I can see. As I straighten up I see just the one boat, and I can’t get a clear picture of the rest. There are other boats, sailboats, bobbing at anchor, just masts. I scour the water surface between—nothing. I am not afraid, exactly, but definitely anxious. Liam can swim, he has a life vest, he is right there somewhere. And yes, yes, there—I center in—I spot something moving right next to one of the anchored boats. A small commotion. Caleb’s Sunfish appears to be heeling around in that direction. Liam has obviously tipped over; he is there fussing in the water next to his capsized boat.
I know, sure as anything, that he will not be able to right the thing by himself. And Caleb won’t be able to do much. Still not worried, I also realize I should tell the girl at the rental shack so that she can send someone out to give him a hand.
When I get back, the girl is standing on her crate with binoculars. She is ahead of me. “I’ve got Jimmy on his way to check it out.” When I turn, a small launch is chugging toward pier’s end. “He’ll just bring them in,” she says. “It’s getting kind of blowy out there.” And so it is. A glance up reveals that our blue day has gone completely cloudy and that the water is getting choppy. I return to my chair to wait.
There is no guide to any of this. Kids get older in sudden jumps and with each jump the scramble begins. Strategies that worked so reliably one day are useless in the face of the new. Moods, secrecies, distances, brash eruptions. You know things are shifting when you suddenly find yourself choosing your words, reading cues like you never had to before. I had thought the family, our blustering foursome, immutable until Mara arrived at adolescence. Then she changed. She grew moody, and these moods were not something she could leave at home when vacation time came. This altered everything. It marked out before and after. Before was all of our innocent routines: walking to the beach, walking to the pond, or getting ice cream or lounging in front of a rented movie cracking jokes. After was a new unknown that threw so much about family life into question. Who were we that this young person would find a thousand reasons not to be with us, who was she to take us in with evaluating eyes, to wander off on self-errands that left the rest of us wanting? “Family” now felt like something picked apart. What had happened to our invincibility?
To be a parent, a father, was suddenly to contend with the world washing in. Or adulthood. Adulthood is a force that no wall of childhood can ultimately withstand. Fatherhood has its first incarnation as a presiding and protecting. Later it becomes a kind of brokering. We start to run interference between the world as we know it and the world as our children are learning about it. If early parenting is about the fostering of innocence and the upholding of certain illusions—to give the child’s self time to solidify—the later stage of parenting asks for a growing recognition of sorrow, cruelty, and greed, of the whole unadorned truth of things, the truth that the child, now adolescent, will encounter; but the recognition is marked and annotated and put into perspective.
The last few of our Cape summers have made me feel this acutely, more than our daily-world interactions. The idea of vacation is so imbued with heedlessness and innocence—the stock imagery of families relaxing together—that any small sadness or disaffection is amplified. The kitschy menu board at the clam shack seems to mock us, as do the shop-window posters, the happy blond groups bicycling along the beach road. For there is our teenager moping in the backseat, or on her beach towel, or lying curled up in bed as if nothing in the world is worth the exertion of sitting up. At times the daily business left behind can seem like the real vacation, the place to get back to.
I’m on my feet again. Foreground and background—my thought and my immediate awareness—seem to merge as soon as the procession comes into view from behind the pier. The launch with two silhouettes—one of them Liam’s. And then, behind, the Sunfish with sail down, on a tow. Caleb’s blue-sailed boat trails behind. All’s well, I think, shaking my head. The girl from the rental desk makes her way down to the beach. I wave to Liam, wait for some nod. But though he seems to take me in, I get no response. He is sitting up very straight in the back of the launch, looking the way prisoners always do in movies.
I jump down from the deck and join the girl on the beach. Jimmy has unhooked the Sunfish and pushed it toward shore; he turns the boat to dock it at the pier. Liam remains upright in his seat. He doesn’t respond when Caleb passes the launch on his way in.
A few minutes later, he moves toward me along the pier, his life vest still buckled tight. He looks pale, and when he draws closer and I reach to touch his shoulder, I catch something new in his expression. He’s afraid.
The story comes out in jags, and not right away. First we all have to gather together again. Lynn arrives from her errands around town and we mill around for a few minutes collecting our things. And then the four of us are ba
ck on the main street, scouting for a restaurant where we can sit. Only when we get a table and sit does Liam open up. It jars me. He switches into an edgy sort of agitation, not like him, talking fast and using his hands. I’m expecting some dramatic bluster, but I’m wrong. “I thought I was going to drown,” he says. The voice itself, the tone, is flat. I know he’s serious. “I was in irons—facing right into the wind—and then I got pushed into this other boat.” We’re at our table on the enclosed patio of a big bayside restaurant, paying full attention. In the five minutes since we arrived the sky has gone black—the wind is shaking the plastic around us, the first drops trailing down.
It’s not until we’ve placed our order that the whole story finally comes out. And now I start to put it together, the way he was sitting in the launch, the look on his face when he walked toward me. I get the surface of it, then I get more. And even now, as I write, I’m feeling still other layers. I feel the shadow of the wing—the dread—as I did when he was talking. Liam could have drowned; it could have happened. He will need to tell it again and again to us before that look on his face goes away.
He was doing fine, he claims, until he passed the pier and found himself headed toward the moored boats. “I started to get scared,” he says. The boats were coming up fast, and he tried to turn. “I messed up.” I stare at his hands, big and red. “I got turned around and all of a sudden I was in irons.” I can see he likes the phrase. “My boat got pushed back into this other boat and then my tiller got caught in its rope.” He pauses to get the sequence straight, and takes a breath. I think how I’d seen none of this, only the triangular peak of his red sail stalled in the distance. He explains how he was trying to work the tiller free with one hand while using his other to jostle the boom back and forth in hopes of catching some wind. And then—