Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  Well. I guess I’d always assumed that the topic just wouldn’t come up. The story, as far as it went, was that your father disappeared when I was pregnant, which was fine with me because I was so happy to take care of you all by myself. That happened to be true. But then a few weeks before we left for Mercer Island, I was having a particularly bad night; you found me sobbing and nauseated in the bathroom. That night, you asked if I thought I could find your dad.

  I told you I’d think about it and that you should think about it too. I told you it would take me a month to figure out how to look for him. Of course I was just buying time.

  I looked at the date on my iPhone. It had been exactly a month.

  “Can you find his number?” you asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Okay,” you said. You looked just like him. The same hazel eyes, the same soft brown hair, the same full lips. He was probably a very good tennis player. “When?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “When soon?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “Okay,” you said again, and now you looked at me; you looked suspicious.

  The boiled-down version of your father: he was a one-term Democratic congressman from New Jersey, swept in by a minor Bush rebellion in 2002, swept out again in 2004. A perpetual bachelor, he was fond of Bud Light, classic rock, and Rangers games. He kept a thousand dollars in cash in his freezer for emergencies. When you were born at Columbia-Presbyterian, I remember nursing you and gazing out across the river, knowing that whatever else he was doing, he wasn’t gazing back.

  I knew I could find him. I guessed he’d understand.

  “You said you wouldn’t be upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” I said.

  “You look upset.”

  I stood to turn off my bath. “Jake, honey, I told you I would be happy to do it and I am. He’s a nice guy.” I hated lying, but it just slipped out. “I’ll call him this week.”

  “Okay,” you said. You were old enough to fake empathy but too young to really know how to feel for someone else. “Thanks.” You skipped out of the room, leaving dirt marks on the carpet and me to my bath. The cell phone buzzed. Allison. The ziti was ready. I ignored it, sank into the water, closed my eyes.

  Truthfully, Jacob, I hadn’t seen your father since I told him I was pregnant. For all I knew he was married, had a kid or two of his own. For all I knew he was dead. No, he wasn’t dead. Even a one-term congressman would have scored an obit in the New York Times.

  Throughout my pregnancy (a thoroughly decent one, I should say, not a moment of morning sickness), I thought about him all the time, tried to imagine what he was doing, whether he was thinking about me. I was managing the Griffith senatorial campaign—this was 2006, an open seat—and I was crisscrossing Maryland twice a day, from Frederick to Baltimore, Bethesda to Ocean City, pancake breakfasts and chicken dinners. Standing a step behind and just to the left of my candidate, editing stump speeches, talking to journalists, doing debate prep, renting buses, fighting for more resources from the DNC. A small state like Maryland plus my background in local elections, I ended up running the thing like it was a congressional district, working even harder than I had to. But I couldn’t help it. Work was the only thing that kept me from calling him. And at night—the Hampton Inn in Annapolis, the Courtyard in Chevy Chase—I’d rub my belly and I’d talk to you, Jake, and I’d tell you about everything we’d done that day. I’d take the Amtrak to my OB. Griffith—a nicer guy than the media pretends—would always stop to compliment my ultrasounds. I never called your father, stayed true to my own dumb promise to myself.

  The week before the election we were ahead in the polls by eight points and I knew what that would mean—it would mean a bonus. It would mean scads more work down the pike. It would mean I could hire a nanny and take you with me on the road in 2010. Which I would. Which I did.

  It would mean I would never have to call him and threaten to sue for child support.

  He knew how to find me, Jake, but he never did. You should know that about your father. He was a man who should have known he had a child on this earth and never tried to find him and never called the child’s mother and never looked across the murky sluggish Hudson to see the newborn child nursing peacefully in his mother’s arms or the tears coursing down the mother’s face.

  Oh shit, Jake (Sorry! Darn! Shoot!): things are getting way too sentimental here and, worse, self-pitying. I have nothing to feel sad about! I have been blessed with you and you have been blessed with me, and your family is enormous: here on Mercer Island, with Allie and Bruce and the kids, and at home with me and Julisa and your friends and teachers and Kelly the hamster whom I hope to God Julisa is managing to keep alive. And I know as you get older you will create an even bigger family for yourself: more friends; more loves; a partner, one day, of your own. Children.

  It’s late, I’m shivering, I missed dinner. I hope you can forgive me for missing dinner, angel. I feel so sorry for myself right that second I couldn’t believe I was even able to type. I hate self-pity—it’s the most putrid of all emotions, literally rots a person’s dignity, a person’s grace. But right now I miss you so much and I am still here in this house, this room. The same square acre as you. How could I have missed dinner with you? That’s an hour we will never have again.

  It’s the nature of this project of mine to assess where I’ve been and where we’re all going, and Dr. Susan would say not to beat myself up about the self-pity thing. She disagrees that self-pity is putrid; she says it’s natural and that certain situations, such as this one, even call for it. And she says that I should just ride it like a wave.

  Remember, she says, even at the bottom of the wave, there is so much in the world that makes me happy. You are so lucky, Karen, to have had so much that makes you happy. Say it out loud like a prayer.

  My work.

  My sister, Allison.

  My niece and nephews.

  The Seattle sunshine. We’re supposed to have yet another day of it tomorrow.

  The water slapping at the rocks below this island.

  You you you you you.

  I press a button on my phone so I can look at your face. Then I turn back to my book, to these pages, this thing I have to finish soon. I hope I have time to write it all for you, Jake.

  You are my happy ending.

  2

  As you might remember, throughout my treatment I tried to work as much as possible, because even more than taking care of you, work felt like taking care of me. It gave me a purpose, a hope that the world might notice me and maybe even remember me after I was gone. Working on campaign politics, I was changing facts on the ground for millions of our fellow citizens. Get the right guy elected and the right changes will happen. I always believed that, Jake. I hope you do too.

  Still, lately I’d been too sick to be a strong advocate for my clients, and I was embarrassed about how much I hadn’t been able to do. I was kind of a terrier once upon a time. When I was working on the Wallace campaign, for instance, still in my twenties, I found out that our opponent’s daughter, a teenager in a fancy private school, had had an abortion a week before her junior prom. Listen, far be it from me to saddle a sixteen-year-old with a newborn, but her dad was one of those abstinence-and-Christianity jihadists who wanted abortions to be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. A bridge too far, my friend. I leaked the abortion news to a sympathetic reporter at the Wilmington News Journal and Wallace won by fifteen points.

  Of course, I’d become much more temperate at work, when I was able to work at all. Chuck, my partner (remember him?), had been good about picking up the slack, and we’d hired a bunch of twentysomethings to take care of a lot of the detail stuff. And it was an off year—mostly just New York City local elections—so it wasn’t like I was missing that much action, but still. Three years ago I was something of a regular on MSNBC. You probably didn’t notice, but I hadn’t been on television since my diagnosis.

  I
called Ace this morning, 6 a.m. Seattle time—I wanted to talk about the campaign mailer, or anything else. “You feeling good?” he asked.

  I was not feeling good. I’d had more of those mystery pains in my side, I had almost vomited the night before, and I knew I should go to Hutchinson, but the thought of being admitted in Seattle, I just couldn’t face it. “I’m great, Ace.”

  “Still got cancer?”

  “I’m in remission.” Which sounded better than it was.

  “So you can do the job?”

  “I wouldn’t take it if I couldn’t,” I said. The woman we expected to be his opponent, Beverly Hernandez, was the daughter of Dominican immigrants; she’d risen up the ranks at Roosevelt Medical Center, and would probably appeal to a different demographic than Ace did. Still, City Council reps were basically reelected as a matter of course. We’d both have to screw up in a big way for him to lose his job. The goal here was for him to blow his opponent out of the water.

  “Hernandez had cancer too, you know. Like you. Breast. She’s always wearing one of those pink ribbons.”

  “I have ovarian,” I said. “It’s different.”

  “Right, I know,” he said. “Listen, I’ll have Amani give you a call to talk about scheduling. I just hired someone in the office, Haley’s her name, she’s the new assistant, so if you can’t get a hold of Amani you can probably find her. Jill has me going on an anniversary trip next week, but if it’s an emergency you can find me. Otherwise, Amani or Haley.” Haley—sounded young. “And while I’m gone, find out whatever you can on this Hernandez,” Ace said. “She doesn’t seem like much, but we’ve still gotta take her down.”

  “That’s my job, Ace.”

  “Twenty points,” he said.

  “Let’s make it thirty.”

  Ace chuckled. “Say hi to your kid.” He clicked off before I could say anything else.

  Truthfully, on the Karen M. Neulander Scale of Objectionable Politicians, Ace Reynolds barely nudged five. Believe me, some of these mouth breathers I’ve encountered—some of them I’ve even worked for!—at least Ace remembered I had cancer. At least he remembered I had you.

  So I filled out some paperwork to send back and then, while I was at it, sent an email to Julisa to see how the hamster was doing. At around seven, you knocked on my door—here you went to sleep early and woke with the light—and we decided to go downtown for breakfast, because it was a Saturday in June and nobody else in this house was going to wake up for another two hours. And because it was sunny out. And because you were hungry and I could fake being hungry for you.

  THE BELL CAFÉ on the water had a whole salad-bar type setup of whipped cream and maple syrup: we went there often and early, before the crowds of fleeced-up Seattle parents or hungover musicians could stop us.

  “Did you call him yet?” you asked as we parked around the corner from the Bell.

  “Are you kidding? I haven’t even figured out how to find him.”

  You looked stricken, but still, reflexively, you held my hand as we cross the street. “I thought you knew.”

  “I told you I could find out,” I said. “I never said I knew. But it won’t be hard. I’ll Google him. We can find him this afternoon.” This was much sooner than I’d planned on.

  “What if he wants to stay private?”

  “That’s impossible, even if he wanted to. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore. Besides,” I said, nodding at the hostess, who knew us by now, and where we liked to sit, “he’s a lawyer, and lawyers don’t like privacy. They all want the world to know how great they are.”

  You nodded like this was gospel. “Will he be mad to hear from you?”

  “No,” I said. “He might be surprised, but he won’t be mad.” I hoped this was true.

  We picked up our menus and casually perused, even though I knew what we were each going to have. I loved going out to restaurants with you. We’d been doing it since you were born—I used to nurse you in restaurants, and it was surprising to me that I would do such a thing, considering, before I had you, watching other women nurse was mortifying. But oh! As they say, there was so much you couldn’t know until you had a child. I loved nursing you and did it until you were almost a year old and pushed the breast away as though you were embarrassed, like you couldn’t stand it anymore. And I tried to force you! I remember wondering how I would live without the hormonal rush of nursing, the calorie-burning life-affirming sigh of it. But you squirmed your little head, and then finally you chomped down and I got the idea.

  I had been so anxious with you back then—when you were a baby you’d fall asleep in my arms, and even though I was beyond exhausted I wouldn’t let myself sleep, for fear you’d fall from my grip (as if I’d ever let you fall). But then every time I’d try to put you in your crib you’d wake up shrieking. So I’d just sit in that rocking chair, forcing myself to stay awake, playing Scrabble on my iPhone over your heavy little body, doing everything in my power not to nod off. And then one day, when you were five weeks old, Allie was visiting and she took a sleeping you from my arms, and magically, like a spell had been cast, you stayed asleep. And then she put a pillow under my feet, and we slept in your nursery, both of us, soundly, for six hours straight. It was undoubtedly the best sleep I got that year.

  “Look at that kid,” you said, after a cheerful lip-pierced waitress brought us our order. I turned to see a small child by the maple-syrup bar decked out in full Batman gear, cape and mask and shiny shoes. He was balancing an enormous plate of waffles and whipped cream and I could see what was about to happen, but like Cassandra, I knew were I to shout no one would listen.

  I said it anyway, under my breath: “Careful!”

  Batman started to run, and then it happened: he tripped on the edge of his cape, his plate went flying, whipped cream sprayed us like bullet fire, the kid hurled himself on the floor and started to wail, the other patrons looked up, surprised, and the kid’s father, who had already made it back to his table, turned around, and yelled, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  The room went cracklingly quiet. For a moment, all was still. Then the father had at it again. “What the hell is the matter with you!”

  “Harry!” Mom was red-faced. The kid keened like an Italian widow.

  “Why can’t he watch where he’s going?”

  But Batman could give as good as he got. He rolled about on the floor and shrieked, “I hate you! I hate you!” as both father and mother rushed to his side to try to stand and shut him up. Meanwhile, the waitress brigade wiped up stray whipped cream while the busboys collected his shattered plate, and then the mother started to ream out the father for letting Batman carry his waffles back to the table by himself and the father reamed her out right back. And you and I couldn’t help it: we looked at each other and started to laugh.

  You had whipped cream in your hair. I laughed harder.

  “You think this is funny, do you?” said the father, turning to us. He was much more aggressive than your average Seattleite.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, taking a napkin to wipe my eye.

  “For your information, my son has serious behavior issues that are not funny at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  Meanwhile, Batman was rolling around back and forth and kicking his shiny little booties on the floor and screaming, “Get me a jetpack! Get me a jetpack! I hate you!”

  “I think we should order that kid a jetpack,” you said, and this cracked us up all over again. Batman was screaming, “Get me a jetpack! I’m gonna kill you!” as his mother picked him up under her arm.

  “I said this wasn’t funny!” the father yelled at us, but oh, how it was. We were still cracking up when we left the restaurant twenty minutes later; we had to stand outside the restaurant to collect ourselves.

  “Jeez,” you said when we finally did, “that was kind of hilarious.” Hilarious was one of your new words; you used it all the time. I zipped up your jacket. “That kid’s dad was really mad,
” you said. “Screaming across the whole restaurant.”

  “I know,” I said. “I hate guys like that. So tightly wound you think they’re going to snap.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, easily angered,” I said. “Stressed out.” After a minute I added, “A lot of dads are like that.”

  “Hmmm,” you said. Instead of walking to the car we turned, drawn like seagulls to the waterfront. “I’m not sure that’s true,” you said, thoughtfully. My chest hurt from laughing; you let out a hiccup. We passed the converted warehouses lining the street, in and out of dappling shade.

  “Kyle’s dad isn’t,” you said. Kyle—I assume you remember this—was your best friend at home. He lived two floors below us on West Seventy-Fourth Street.

  “You’re right—I guess he’s not.”

  “And Uncle Bruce isn’t.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted.

  “In fact,” you said, after a gulp of air, “I think most dads aren’t.”

  “But some are,” I said, then realized already I was on a campaign to malign dads. We reached the park by the water, still empty in the dewy morning; we took side-by-side seats on the damp swings.

  “Was your dad tightly wound?” you asked. “Stressed out?”

  “Grandpa? Sometimes.” Actually, Jacob, I can tell you now that throughout my childhood my father was catatonic with stress, retreating at all hours into the basement so that he could smoke his pipe in peace while the washing machine gurgled. He worked as an adjunct history professor at two different colleges, and my mother never really gave up hectoring him (if only he’d finish that dissertation and find a real job!) and my sister never stopped longing, loudly, for things they never could afford. My mother worked as a bookkeeper in a law firm, and it was from her that we got the health benefits, the extra bit of money for Hebrew school, and the sense that if only my dad had been a man of more conviction, our family’s lot in life would have been a prosperous one.