“For starters,” I said, “he’s not Jewish. And he goes to public school. Natalia’s parents think he’s a thug.”
“Is he?” Kerry asked.
I considered this, bouncing the baby on one knee. I thought Steve was very nice. He had a slow, kind smile, and those pretty blue eyes. He didn’t speak well—his accent was pure New Jersey, and his diction was terrible—but sometimes he would make surprising observations, about a fish swimming upstream in that sad Overpeck brook, or about a scene in a movie that he’d snuck into after our parents had dropped off Natalia and me. I knew he had a police record, but only for petty things, like underage drinking, maybe a shoplifting incident or two. Once he had been suspended for bringing a gun to school—they’d found it in his locker—but it hadn’t been loaded. He said he only wanted to show it to a friend whose uncle collected antique weapons.
“Maybe a little,” I said.
“Still.” Kerry sat down and pushed the hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “It doesn’t seem fair that you would be in so much trouble. It’s not like you’re the one with the inappropriate boyfriend. You were just helping out a friend.”
Kerry loved making this kind of dig at my mother, like she was the cool friend and Mom the evil disciplinarian. In the past, I might have made the mistake of defending my mother, pointing out her valid reasons for being angry at me—the fact that I’d lied about where I’d be, and that I’d been drinking. But by now I knew that Kerry would report the conversation word for word to my father, so I just shrugged in agreement at the injustice of it all.
From the next room, we heard a gigantic crash, and then one of the twins—Ezra or Aaron—started screaming. “Oh, no,” Kerry said, and dashed out of her chair surprisingly fast for a two-hundred-pound woman. At the loud noise and her mother’s departure, Rebecca started screaming too. I stuck my finger in her mouth, but it didn’t help at all. Kerry was a big believer in breast-feeding, and the only thing that ever calmed her babies down was one of her giant boobs. I stood up and patted Rebecca on the back, walking her up and down the kitchen. I sang a little, but without much feeling, knowing nothing I did would make a difference until Kerry returned and peeled off her shirt.
“Did anything break?” I called to Kerry. My dad did all the deliveries for the Bulgar County Farmer’s Market. He and Kerry lived in the refurbished barn that belonged to Bob Pearson, one of the bigger farmers. Almost none of the furniture belonged to them, and they lived in constant fear of destroying things.
“No,” Kerry called back, thinking I meant one of the kids’ bones. “Ezra just banged his toe when the loom fell over.”
Rebecca kept on wailing, and I started to feel this very frantic sense of panic deep in my gut. Like if she didn’t stop crying, my head would explode. “Come on,” I whispered to the baby. “Come on, you can stop it now.” I hardly ever thought of my dad’s kids as my sister or brothers. To me they didn’t seem much different from the little kids at the pool, or the neighbors whom I occasionally babysat. They were just children, cute when they were laughing or snuggling, unbearable when—like now—they were screaming.
“Okay, Kerry,” I called. “I think she’s ready for her mom.”
Kerry whisked in and plucked Rebecca out of my arms. In one smooth motion, she sat down, popped out a boob, and dropped it into the baby’s mouth. Rebecca transformed from squalling anguish to blissful relaxation, her eyes half-closed and glazed in a happy stupor. She reached her chubby baby hand toward her mother, and Kerry absentmindedly twined her long, fat fingers into the baby’s short fat fingers. The gesture from Rebecca, holding hands like that, seemed impressively human. It always took me by surprise, those moments when I realized my dad’s kids were actual little people and not glorified pets.
I wondered if Kerry would take my baby if I ended up having it. This morning I had read in one of her baby books that it was possible for a woman who already had biological kids to breast-feed an adopted child. The sucking triggered the hormones, or something like that. So theoretically, Kerry would be able to supply milk for a baby she hadn’t actually borne.
In the same baby book, I read that you start counting weeks for a pregnancy on the first day of your last period, which essentially meant I had been robbed of two weeks. According to the long list of authors on the front of Kerry’s book, I was now nearly five weeks pregnant. The logic of this—counting back to before the thing even existed—struck me as ridiculous and unfair. Across the country politicians and Christians fought over whether life began at conception. Apparently they didn’t know the medical community had already decided: It began two weeks before.
From outside, we heard Dad’s truck rumble over the long, dusty driveway.
“Shit,” Kerry said.
My dad had this thing about whole, unprocessed food. Once when I was about eleven, he sat me down with this very serious look on his face. I thought he was going to give me a lecture on the birds and the bees. Instead he told me about the modern wasteland that is the chain supermarket, and gave me very specific instructions on navigating it by sticking only to the very perimeter of grocery stores. “Never go down the aisles,” he told me. He sounded so serious that I always battled a pang of guilt if I turned from the main course into the pasta aisle, or even to buy a package of toilet paper.
The food thing was one of the reasons my parents had broken up. “Your father becomes very fixated,” my mother always said. Though I took much of what she said about him with a grain of salt, I knew that she was right about this particular trait. Way back when we all lived together, and my father had worked keeping books for an architectural firm, he had read this article about the cattle industry, how the cows were overdosed on antibiotics and growth hormones. He started taking out books from the library and clipping newspaper articles about E. coli, and the next thing we knew he had quit his job and begun working for a guy who distributed grass-fed beef.
“Grass-fed beef,” my mother said, “grass-fed beef. Those were the only words I ever heard come out of his mouth. We could start out talking about the Dalai Lama, or our honeymoon in Barbados. It always led back to grass-fed beef. It was enough to turn me into a vegetarian, all the ins and outs of those stupid cows.”
The grass-fed beef obsession had long since given way to peak oil and self-sustaining communities, but Kerry still spent half the day doing what my mother had gotten divorced to avoid: making elaborate, organic meals from scratch. They were never ready when my father walked through the door, and he always heaved a sigh of disappointment at the world’s inability to measure up to his high ideals.
Kerry stood up and placed Rebecca back into my lap. The baby sighed and flopped her head against my stomach, sleeping happily.
Kerry peered into the oven at the meat loaf she’d made from hormone-free (and of course grass-fed) beef, pureed onions, and broccoli florets. The vegetables were from my father’s garden, but I happened to know the meat loaf also contained a secret cup of Heinz 57 sauce. I’d seen Kerry hide the bottle in the garbage underneath the plain brown meat wrappers.
“I promise,” she said to my father, “dinner will be ready in thirty minutes.”
“That’s fine,” Dad said. “I want to talk to Sydney for a while anyway. Syd? You up for a walk?”
We went outside together, into the broad, bright evening. My dad lived a forty-minute drive from my mother’s modest but well-kept house in the neighborhood she couldn’t really afford. But Dad’s life seemed so many miles farther than that, away from the suburban lawns and microwave ovens. He never allowed me to bring my computer, or my cell phone, or my iPod, which meant—among so many other reasons—that I hardly ever visited. And when I did, I felt like I’d entered one of those reality TV shows, where for no good reason people pretend they’re living in 1632.
Dad and I walked down the dirt path from his house onto the dusty road. I could smell some sort of roast from the main house, battling the rich waft from Kerry’s meat loaf. I knew this was the sort o
f thing a pregnant woman should be bothered by, these dueling odors. But I felt fine, only mildly hungry. Beyond the two buildings, horses grazed in a meadow and rows of corn stretched out to the horizon. Nobody would guess that New York City was less than an hour away, never mind the industrial chimneys that lined the New Jersey Turnpike.
Dad kept his hands in his pockets. His eyes fixed on the road in a habitual squint, as if something perplexed him, or he needed sunglasses. I tried not to fidget or look away from him. The truth was, under the best of circumstances I dreaded time alone with my father. Even though I had no particular emotional attachment to Kerry, I found her company much more natural. With her love of gossip and the built-in conversation piece of her children, Kerry was easy to talk to, whereas with my father I always found myself worked into a mild panic, racking my brain for something to discuss. It almost made it easier knowing that he had a particular grievance.
We stopped at the top of a low hill just beside his vegetable garden. Rows of tomatoes and lettuce were lined up neatly and impressively. He let his eyes rove happily over the sprouting plants with their neatly lettered signs, a kind of satisfied pride I never noticed when he observed his children. Then he knelt down and pulled a head of Bibb lettuce from the ground, lovingly brushing dirt away from the roots. In half an hour, these greens would be a salad at the center of our dinner table.
“Grab some tomatoes,” he said, and I bent down to inspect the stalk for ripe ones. Dad watched me, but I couldn’t tell what, if anything, he was thinking. He didn’t tend to speak much unless sparked on one of his pet topics. I could never tell exactly what would do this. Once when he took me fishing on Redtop Lake, I’d worn a “Life Is Good” baseball cap. He’d ranted on and on the whole afternoon, about how he hated my hat because life wasn’t, in fact, good. It might be good, if only we could do away with corporate greed, and processed food, and the industrialized world’s addiction to fossil fuel.
Dad had this whole apocalyptic theory about how oil would run out in the next few years. Suddenly the supply would just stop, and almost immediately our entire culture would crumble. Nobody would be able to get food or clean water, there would be riots in the streets, and everybody who didn’t know how to can fruit and grow their own produce would perish. The year before last I’d started coming home from our scheduled visits with nightmares about being stuck in the city when the oil ran out. I’d dream I was fighting my way to the old railway tracks, where people were being loaded aboard a train like some old World War II movie. Three nights in a row I woke up screaming, so my mother called her lawyer. In the affidavit for his appeal, my father wrote a defense of my nightmares—how they were grounded in coming events. The family court judge stripped him of visitation rights, so instead of staying with him every other weekend and over holidays, I saw him only when my mother decided it was appropriate, meaning convenient for her.
Like now. “The thing is,” my father said, “kids in the suburbs are separated from the natural world. When you don’t know where your food comes from, when you’re not connected with the practical strength of your own body, you have nothing to do but look for artificial ways to expend your energy. It’s like keeping a border collie for a pet. The dog was meant for working, and if it doesn’t have work, it ends up chasing a tetherball round and round till it wears itself out.”
I plucked two pale orange tomatoes and held them up to my nose. They smelled sweet and grassy. I didn’t remember much about when my father lived with Mom and me, but I knew there had been a family next door to us that owned a lunatic border collie. The dog was obsessed with the tetherball set in the backyard, and from morning till night it would chase the ball back and forth, like the polar bear that swam endless laps at the Central Park Zoo. Even at seven years old I had recognized this behavior as perverse, disturbing, and very sad. I felt insulted and confused that my father would compare me to that neurotic dog.
“The other night was really not such a big deal,” I said. “We just went to a party. It wasn’t even late. We were back before nine o’clock.”
“You took a car without asking,” my father said. “Your friend drove without a license—as if this nation doesn’t waste enough gas with the licensed drivers on the road. The police brought you home. And you’d been drinking.”
At this last he looked at me, particularly disappointed. Dad didn’t believe in putting anything into the body that didn’t have nutritional value. He himself wouldn’t eat Kerry’s apple pie—disapproving of sugar, even the raw brown sugar that she used to placate him. His own body was very lean from following this diet, not the barest ounce of fat. Clothes hung from his sharp edges in straight, neat lines, no extra flesh to interrupt gravity’s pull. The rest of us couldn’t help but feel soft and hedonistic in his presence, dependent on the world’s pleasures instead of its healthful possibility.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”
“But it does happen again,” he said. “It happens over and over again, and you end up in the same place. You end up with your parents disappointed in you.”
I waited for him to say something else, to elaborate—with specific instances, or his own opinion—but he didn’t. He turned and headed back to the house, as if our main objective had been gathering food and the conversation only a way of passing the time. I stood watching him for a second, then ran a few steps to catch up.
My father was quiet a minute. Then he said, “Bob Pearson has a friend who runs canoe trips up in Canada from a place called Camp Bell. Kids spend the summer paddling on a lake in Ontario, camping out on islands. No electronics. No motorized vehicles.”
“Huh,” I said. I didn’t take the information as any sort of suggestion. Dad often held up other people’s activities as examples of the wholesomeness I lacked.
He didn’t say anything else on the way back to the house. It occurred to me that I had no idea how he felt about abortion. Whatever the recent divide between my mother and me, I knew her very well. I could write a term paper on almost any one of her opinions, political or otherwise. I knew exactly what she thought about reproductive freedom, and how deeply she believed in what she would call “a woman’s right to choose.”
But with my dad—apart from foreign oil, processed foods, and the “Life Is Good” logo—I knew very little about what he thought about anything. I wondered what he would say if I told him I was pregnant. I wondered if he would want me to have an abortion, or keep it, or have someone adopt it. In my head a funny sepia image appeared of an old-fashioned home for unwed mothers, and me standing at a sink, washing sheets for the nuns.
We walked inside, and Dad handed me the lettuce. I went to the sink to wash it. I chopped up the tomatoes and tossed them with vinegar, oil, and fresh herbs in the wide, cracked wooden salad bowl. Kerry’s meat loaf sat cooling on a rack, inches away from where I worked, and it was all I could do not to plunge my fist into the brown, gelatinous crust—shining with a pool of broccoli-flecked gravy.
That ten-minute walk might have been a twenty-mile hike through the desert. I couldn’t wait to sit down to dinner. I was ravenous.
chapter three
my fate, their hands
While I was at my dad’s, my mother sent me a letter that read like a rap sheet, listing everything I’d done wrong in the past year. I had been caught spending the night at Greg’s when his parents were away and I was supposed to be at Natalia’s. Three times I had been caught in lies, covering for Natalia when she was secretly meeting Steve. My grades had slipped, and I had waited two full weeks before telling her that I quit the swim team. “These instances only represent your getting caught,” she wrote. “I suspect they represent a very small fraction of unsavory and habitual activity.”
I wasn’t sure about her word choice. Unsavory? But if she meant drinking and sex and occasional mild drug use, of course she was right. Her biggest grievance was the weekend I’d gone to the shore with Natalia.
It frightens me that for two entire
days I thought you were one place, only to discover you were someplace else. It frightens me to realize the extent to which I cannot trust you. I feel that you have been slipping away from me and that coddling and protecting you is no longer the best course of action.
She went on like that, laying on some very heavy guilt about how hard it was to raise a child all by herself, let alone keep me in private school.
I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to do this. Your father has always refused to contribute to your tuition. It is an enormous expense for me, and it doesn’t seem to be doing you any particular good.
My heart sank. I had been at Linden Hill Country Day since pre-K. I had a regular spot at the best lunch tables, and this was not just a matter of status. It was a matter of all my friends, some of whom I loved nearly as much as Natalia. For the past few years these girls had been the heart of my emotional life, more than either of my parents or my tiny half siblings. It was bad enough Natalia’s parents might send her away. I couldn’t imagine being ripped from the school I’d attended since I was four years old, to be sent instead to a public school with bells and crowded hallways. And Natalia thought she had it bad, threatened with ritzy exile among wealthy Europeans!
My hands shook as I read my mother’s letter. I was sure she couldn’t wait to start spending the money that had been set aside for my tuition. I imagined her at that very moment, sending our furniture out to the upholsterer while she drove into the city for a shopping spree at Bloomingdale’s or Talbots or wherever she bought her lame clothes. But of course she disguised her giddiness by trying to sound 100 percent stern:
I’m going to wait on making that decision. In the meantime, I’m going to leave it up to your father as to what to do with you this summer. If he wants to keep you there as a mother’s helper, that’s fine with me. If he wants to send you to some free-range veal cooperative to give back rubs to baby cows, I’ll agree. But for now, you’re not coming back here.
Every Little Thing in the World Page 3