by Ben George
“I don’t really know what happened, something screwed up. I got the tiller free but the boom whipped around and all of a sudden it pulled the rope around my neck.” That was when it happened. His boat had heeled over with a rush, jerking him into the water—with the rope suddenly around his neck. The force of capsizing instantly tightened the noose and as the mast pulled down to the water he could barely get his hand in between the rope and his throat. He was being pulled down by the boat. He panicked, thinking he was drowning. And then somehow, he doesn’t know how, he slipped his head free.
He told his tale a number of times that night, getting his version the way he wanted it, gradually putting the picture outside himself, giving it over to us. As we listened, we all did that primitive thing. We kept reaching over to touch him. I put my hand on his, Lynn leaned her head against him, Caleb tapped his shoulder. The three of us were making him real again, planting him in our midst, taking him back from that “almost.”
“You could have drowned, my God”—we said it again and again as the rain hammered down. And we talked about it for the rest of the night. We hovered around, bringing the “almost” in close and then fending it off again. I thought of myself there on the deck, oblivious, and could not resist extrapolating: a big obvious message about how it is between parents and their children—between any people who are close, really—how it snarls up together, all the vigilance and ignorance, luck and readiness, love and fear. We know nothing.
Four days before we have to leave the Truro house, Mara arrives. We are the basic unit at last—Caleb took the ferry back to Boston the day after the sailing episode. Reunion is sweet. But the ground feeling, the joy, of having everyone together in the same place, with nothing on the schedule except trips to the ocean and the making of meals, is overlaid with darker tones. Mara is still in her mood, it’s obvious. She tells us that she has been having bad dreams and feeling anxious every night. I see her on the couch, reading a magazine, looking for all the world like a young woman relaxing with her family, except that something in the shoulders, the tilt of the head, gives her away.
Mara gets through the first night easily enough. In fact, she sleeps like she hasn’t slept in a long time, dead-weight sleep. Sleep like I have not had for decades. She told me to wake her early, that she would join me for my walk, and once I’ve had my coffee I try. But after a few separate prods I give it up. I go alone all the way down the long hill to the deli-market to buy the papers. Heading back, I think about our long season of morning walks. It lasted for years, that season, and I remember it often. How we moved in companionable solitudes, rarely breaking into talk. We walked almost every day, miles at a time. She told me once, later, that she did it to keep me from being sad. I may have been doing it for the same reason—we were tunneling the mountain from opposite sides. But then our morning schedules changed and we tapered off.
I open the sliding door off the deck quietly—everyone is still sleeping—and I drop the Times and Globe on the kitchen counter. I see Mara sprawled on her bed much as I left her. I pause in the doorway and study her. I forget in which Greek myth one of the gods drapes a cloth woven from gold over a sleeper’s body, but I think of that as I stand there. I see how her face goes all the way back to first innocence.
Mara does seem happier now. Being away, or being with us, has given her a lift. She starts to crack wise, which is always a sign. And she is eager to go shopping with Lynn in Provincetown. That next day they disappear for a few hours. And then in the late afternoon we all go to the beach. The tide is low, the light spectacular. Lynn and Liam take their boogie boards down to where the waves are breaking. Mara wraps herself in a towel and reads Nabokov’s Ada. I just stare, first to the left where the beach gradually merges into dune line, then, with a visceral pleasure—“There is nothing like this,” I think—over to the right, where the flat sand reaches into the faintest mist and the shoreline at every second takes that quicksilver print of water, and where silhouettes stand and wade and swim in the distance.
Mara doesn’t go in the water this afternoon, or the next. There was a time when she would just fling herself into the tallest waves she could find. She would yowl and shake herself and do it again. I feel, though, like something about all this water is beginning to reach up to her now, like she might be almost ready to push up off her towel and march down. But not yet. We sit side by side and watch Liam, our appointed stone gatherer.
Lynn asked him to find some large ocean stones for her garden. Liam likes this kind of thing, a task. He has his big goggles on and every few seconds we see him go arsey-turvey into the waves, and then up he comes, arm lifted high, clutching the next prize, which he stops to inspect for a moment and then either hurls to the shore or releases back into the water. The Sunfish episode has receded. This is in keeping with his style. If for Mara life backs up and grows scary, for Liam it catches, pauses, and then rushes on again. They are so very different, and I look from one to the other as if recognizing that essential fact. It’s the kind of thing I might say out loud to Lynn, but she’s not here. She’s out swimming—I see her paralleling the shore, a small moving shape down to my left. I would tell Mara, but Mara is all at once up. While we were both sitting there watching Liam, the moment came. She has dropped her towel and is on her feet. With a quick over-the-shoulder glance she tromps down the sand and right to the water’s edge. No running back and forth to work up to action. She pushes her hair back behind her ears and steps thigh-deep into the water. A flinch—I feel a sympathetic shock—and then she’s in, under, three seconds vanished, and up with a thrust. And in again. I want to shout something, but I don’t. I wish for the cold salt to scour her clean.
Liam, I see, has noticed his sister in the water. This makes him happy. I can tell. He turns away from the rock project and goes dolphin-bounding toward her. He loves company, and the company of his sister especially. When she can be gotten to. He wants to cruise the waves with her now, standing by her side. Nothing in common between their body types—he dwarfs her. But they are brother and sister, something in the way they stand side by side tells on them. They share humor—it’s invisible, but I recognize it—and care. They share a certain brashness, too. When the big wave they’ve been waiting for arrives, they push into it with the same slugging lunge. Two heads, and then, right when the wave thins to breaking, two tumbling oblongs flashing against the green.
Contributors
Steve Almond is the author of five books, the most recent of which is (Not That You Asked), a collection of essays.
Rick Bass is the author of twenty-four books of fiction and nonfiction, the most recent of which is The Wild Marsh, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July. He lives in western Montana with his wife and daughters.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and seven story collections. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, and teaches at the University of Memphis.
Charles Baxter is the author of five novels, the most recent of which is The Soul Thief, and four books of stories. He lives in Minneapolis, where he teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Daniel Baxter is a structural engineer and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Sven Birkerts is the author of eight books, the most recent of which is The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (Graywolf Press). He edits the journal Agni at Boston University and is Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of ten books, including the memoir I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, published by Doubleday/Broadway (Random House) in 2008. Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There, was one of the first bestselling works by a transgender American. She has appeared widely on various television and radio programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, and NPR’s Marketplace and Talk of the Nation. She has been the subject of documentaries on CBS News’ 48 Hours and the History Channel. In 2007 she played herself on several episodes of ABC’s All My Children. Her nonfiction appears regularly in Condé Nast Travel
er magazine and on the op/ed pages of the New York Times. A professor of English, Jenny teaches at Colby College and lives in rural Maine with her family. Her new young adult series, Falcon Quinn (Bowen Books/HarperCollins), commences publication in 2010 with the first volume, Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror.
Rick Bragg has written three memoirs, All Over but the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, and, most recent, the third book in the trilogy, The Prince of Frogtown. He worked at several newspapers before joining the New York Times in 1994. In 1996 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his work at the Times and later became the newspaper’s Miami bureau chief. Bragg has received more than fifty writing awards in twenty years, including a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and, twice, the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award. He is now a professor at the University of Alabama’s journalism program in its College of Communications and Information Sciences.
Brock Clarke is the author of four books of fiction. His most recent—the bestselling novel An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England—was a Booksense number one pick, a Borders Original Voices pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and will be reprinted in ten foreign editions. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Believer, Ninth Letter, and the annual Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies. He’s a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in fiction, and he lives in Cincinnati, where he teaches at the University of Cincinnati.
Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. His short fiction has won three O. Henry prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Clyde Edgerton is the proud father of Catherine, Nathaniel, Ridley, and Truma Edgerton. Catherine is a member of the band Midtown Dickens, and the others are just getting under way. Edgerton teaches in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of nine novels and one memoir. A book on fatherhood, birthed through the essay in this volume, is scheduled for 2011 from Little, Brown.
Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for general nonfiction, was short-listed for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. Flynn is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether and Blind Huber, both published by Graywolf Press. He has received fellowships from, among other organizations, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review, as well as on public radio’s This American Life. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator on the Oscar-nominated documentary Darwin’s Nightmare. He teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, and spends the rest of the year elsewhere.
Ben Fountain lives in Dallas. He is the author of the story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ecco/HarperCollins), which won the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award.
David Gessner has worked as a cartoonist for the Harvard Crimson, High Country News, and the Boulder Weekly. He is working on a graphic memoir called Wormtown, which is set in his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts. In his non-graphic life he is the author of six books, including Sick of Nature, The Prophet of Dry Hill, Return of the Osprey, and Soaring with Fidel. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award, and his work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, Outside, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, and Orion. He has taught environmental writing at Harvard, and currently lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter.
Sebastian Matthews is the author of a poetry collection, We Generous (Red Hen Press), and a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps (W. W. Norton). He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. Matthews teaches at Warren Wilson College and serves on the faculty at Queens College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Matthews also co-edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal, and serves as the creative director of Asheville Wordfest.
Neal Pollack is the author of the bestselling parenting memoir Alternadad, and the founder of Offsprung.com, an internet community and humor magazine for “parents who don’t suck.”
Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and author of The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, a collection of stories. His work has also been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and High Times. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Brandon R. Schrand is the author of The Enders Hotel: A Memoir, the 2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize winner and a summer 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, and numerous other publications. He has won the Wallace Stegner Prize and the Pushcart Prize. A two-time grant recipient of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, he lives with his wife and two children in Moscow, Idaho, where he coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho.
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, the most recent of which is Project X, and three story collections, the most recent of which is Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Granta, The New Yorker, and Playboy. He teaches at Williams College.
Darin Strauss is the international bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, which were both New York Times Notable Books. Also a screenwriter, he is adapting Chang and Eng with Gary Oldman, for Disney. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he is a clinical associate professor at New York University’s graduate school. His most recent novel, More Than It Hurts You, was published in 2008 by Dutton. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
Michael Thomas was born and raised in Boston. He received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. His debut novel, Man Gone Down, was selected as a Top Ten Best Book of 2007 by the New York Times and a Notable Book of 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle. He teaches at Hunter College, and he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Acknowledgments
I commend Abigail Holstein, my excellent guide, for her perfect admixture of saltiness and sophistication, a combination I have always imagined the best New York editors possess. She has served this book and the writers within it well. I salute Daniel Halpern—for saying yes, and for helping to bring this book into the world.
Liz Farrell was there from the very beginning. Without her boundless enthusiasm and know-how, this would not have happened. She deserves more credit than I can convey here.
It can be a vulnerable thing, writing about one’s fatherhood. So I’m grateful for the generosity of the writers collected here, who allowed me to persuade them to do so anyway, especially those four who started the project with me: Anthony Doerr, Rick Bass, Steve Almond, and Charles Baxter.
My gratitude as well to those persons whose assistance was invaluable at points early and late: Clay Ezell, Jessica Purcell, Suet Chong, Allison Saltzman, Alison Forner, Christopher Silas Neal, Speer Morgan, and, in particular, Kim Barnes.
Special thanks to the following rock-solid individuals…for friendship and support in rough seas: Jeff Jones, Gary Williams, Matthew Vollmer, Michael Shilling, Wesley Bullock, Kyle von Hoetzendorff, Tony Perez, and Cheston Knapp, aka C$; for sharpening my thinking, both about this book and about fatherhood: Brandon Schrand, Nate Lowe, Bryan Fry, and especially Mark Cunningham; for a welcome harbor: the peerless community of writers and students at UNC Wilmington; for th
eir love: Daniel, Pamela, Andrew, and Phillip George.
If all goes well, fatherhood will be a lifetime occupation. But for me it would feel a paltry and hollow one without the mother of Lucille Paley George. Whatever’s more than thanks, whatever’s more than love, I give to Meg, who on an August Sunday evening just after six o’clock delivered the gift I cherish above all others, a feat I’ve been doing my best to live up to ever since.
While commissioned for this anthology, the following essays appeared previously, sometimes in different form, in the following publications:
Ben Fountain, “The Night Shift,” in New Letters, Spring 2009.
Charles Baxter, “The Chaos Machine,” in The Believer, February 2008.
Anthony Doerr, “Nine Times (Among Countless Others) I’ve Thought About Those Who Came Before Us in My Brief Career as a Father,” in Missouri Review, Spring 2009.
Rick Bass, “Notes from Adolescence,” in Southern Review, Fall 2008.
Sven Birkerts, “The Points of Sail,” in Ecotone, Winter 2008-09.
A version of Davy Rothbart’s essay, “Zeke,” was first featured as “I’m the Decider” on the public radio program This American Life on March 9, 2007.