“Daniela!” I got out of the car. I wondered if I should hug her. “You look . . . older.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
I glanced at my shorts and striped shirt, my stomach puffing over my belt. “You got in early,” I said.
“There was a delay at JFK but the pilot said he made up for it in the air.”
People rushed past us and through the automatic glass doors. Somewhere nearby, a car alarm went off. I looked at my daughter and she looked back.
“So,” I said, just as Daniela said, “So,” and then she said, “Jinx.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Everything’s good with you?” I said.
“Great.”
“Good.”
“Your semester’s almost over?”
“Yup.”
“That’s good.”
Ever since I could remember Daniela had been so bumbling and nervous around me, so desperate for my attention that she’d blurt anything. And now she was just standing there, looking deeply amused as I sweated through the conversation, her hip cocked and her leather suitcase at her feet. Finally I swallowed and said, “We just finished the Battle of Königgrätz.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Ah,” I said, and we fell into silence.
Traffic was light for Friday night. Alfalfa fields blurred past, dotted with the occasional farmhouse before the land seemed to give up altogether and retreat into marsh. As we made our way into town, I followed Daniela’s gaze, trying to see what she did. There was the hardware store that doubled as a market now that it was May and apricots were everywhere; the movie theater, which for the past three weeks had been showing a film about a foulmouthed man trapped in the body of a baby; the fire department, which hosted pancake breakfasts every fall. I rolled down the windows and the soupy smell of algae swelled in. I liked living a block from the water, away from the perky bakeries lining Willow Road or the Neanderthal bars closer to the college. I remember taking long walks along the harbor when I first arrived and knew no one in the entire state of Maine, and I sat with some of the men who looked as old as the weathered wooden dock they fished on, making small talk that helped me feel less alone than I feared I was.
But when I pulled into the driveway and Daniela saw my small gray clapboard, when she saw the front yard, wild with tall grass and calla lilies and the rope swing the previous owners had left hanging from an elm, she said, “So this is it.” And then her face opened into something between a smile and a smirk, as if anyone belonged here more than I did.
I was admittedly a bit of a slob, and in anticipation of her visit I had washed the floors, vacuumed the two butterfly chairs that faced the fireplace, even organized my record collection: the Ellington I’d coveted in my twenties, the Gould that had felt like required listening at Collins, the Billy Joel I played now that I figured I was old enough not to give a shit. I had wanted Daniela to see I was stable, homey and responsible. But now, leading her inside, I wondered if she was making mental notes for the script.
“You want to wash up?” I said.
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“You need some time to settle in and unpack, then?”
“Not really,” she said. “It’s two days.”
Daniela, it seemed, was going to revel in making me work for everything this weekend. She set her backpack in the entryway and I wheeled her small suitcase into the guest room. “We can walk out to the water,” I tried.
“If you want.”
“Or maybe you’re hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Daniela,” I said, unable, suddenly, to control the shrillness in my voice, “just tell me what you want.”
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
I brought cheese and a baguette and a bottle of wine out to the porch and dragged two Adirondack chairs together. “To my daughter the playwright,” I said, filling her glass.
Daniela raised her drink, then took a long sip, as if unsure how to navigate the line between excitement and bragging. “The craziest part,” she said, “is that they did Mamet on that same stage.”
“Impressive,” I said, a knot pressing into my chest. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might actually be good.
“Or bizarre. Mom was worried—I was working on it every night after work, and I think she was nervous about what would happen if nothing came of it.”
“Your mother’s the biggest worrier around, isn’t she?”
Daniela looked confused, or annoyed, as if she were searching for the joke in my words and couldn’t find it. I knew putting down her mother would score me no points. Katka and I worked hard at keeping up a friendship, mostly for Daniela’s benefit; sometimes I felt as if tolerating me was just another item on her long list of things to do for her daughter, right after making sure that the security system in her building worked and she was getting enough protein in her diet. I wanted to change the subject to something tame and tried to remember the name of the company Daniela had been temping for this year. While I had no real interest in the job, I liked envisioning my daughter at a desk in a bright buzzing office, staring out at buildings and sky. I liked imagining that she also chewed up her pens and that she popped her knuckles while she wrote—that she’d gotten certain traits from me that were irrevocable.
“You know when I heard, I didn’t tell anyone the first day?” Daniela said, swallowing a bite of bread. “Not even Mom. I was convinced they’d made a mistake and that the producers would call to apologize.”
“I’ve always been the same way. The moment something good happens I’m waiting for a bus to speed around the corner and kill me.”
“Mom said you had that side.”
So, they did talk about me. “We’re both just really happy for you,” I said, a little too fast. “Did I ever tell you that when my first book was published here, your mother spent an entire weekend making a celebratory meal?”
“Really?” she said, her voice beginning to rise. Daniela loved stories about times she was too young to remember. When she was little I used to catch her staring at this one photo of me and a pregnant Katka outside our flat in Prague, as if looking long enough would reveal what we were saying just before the shutter clicked.
“She took the bus all the way to Burlington to get lamb and then spent the next day baking dumplings,” I said. “It was outstanding.” That was a lie; Katka used ingredients from the Stop & Shop and the dessert came out charred and inedible, but the conversation finally seemed to be flowing and I imagined us sitting up late, finishing one bottle and then the next, swapping stories and secrets. At least I thought we would, until Daniela stood up and said, “Is the guest bed ready?”
“It’s not even ten.” I hoped it didn’t sound like a plea.
“It’s been a long day.”
I’d set her up in my study, just off the kitchen. It was my favorite room: wood-paneled and dark, with a wall of books and an old copper lamp I’d bought at a yard sale years ago. But when Daniela walked in, the space felt small and dusty, and I wondered if the futon, which I napped on every afternoon, would even be comfortable for her.
“Here are towels,” I said, setting two on the desk chair. I hesitated, unsure how to say good night.
“Dad?”
Here it came. I blinked, twice, and stepped closer. “Yes?”
“I need to change into my pajamas.”
“Right,” I said, backing toward the door. “I’m out here if you need anything.”
I spread my students’ bluebooks across the kitchen table and listened as Daniela walked down the hall to the bathroom. The faucet turned on, then off, the bathroom door opened, the guest door closed. And then, finally, the band of light beneath her door went out. I opened the first bluebook and read the sentence “Austrian forces arrived near Sadowa” three times without registering a word. I got up, poured myself a glass of water, sat down. Then I took off my shoes and slid quietly through the kitche
n, the living room, and into the entryway, keeping an ear out for Daniela. Her backpack was still leaning against the mail table. I coughed, masking the sound as I unzipped it. Then I thought about what I was doing, how easily I could get caught, and closed it back up. I told myself to go back to my bluebooks. But I couldn’t. I crouched on the floor, unzipped her bag in a single motion and searched the entire thing. But there was no notepad or laptop, nothing at all resembling a play—just her running clothes, a neck pillow and the Sunday crossword, and it occurred to me that Daniela wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave the play out where I could find it; I’d kept every copy of the Chronicle hidden behind my medicine cabinet until we were ready for distribution. Or was I being too cynical? Could Daniela not even trust her own father? I shut it again and returned to the kitchen. But the last thing I wanted to do was read another student essay, so I took the cordless out to the porch. It embarrassed me that I was dialing Katka’s number for a second time this week, when she never seemed to make these desperate calls—at least not to me.
“This is a disaster!” I said when she picked up.
“Tomás?”
“She’s barely talking to me.”
“You got in a fight?”
“Of course not.” Right then I wanted nothing more than to confide in Katka about what I’d just done, but it felt too terrible to say aloud. “Daniela’s impossible to read. And to be honest, she’s getting on my nerves a little—the whole too-confident-to-notice-I-exist thing is a bit much. She’s hardly asked anything about my life—and you two talk about me?”
“She’s probably just stressed.”
“What does she have to be stressed about?”
“I don’t know, Tomás. Sounds like a relaxing weekend to me.” Katka’s voice drifted. She sounded bored. “Where is she?”
“She went to bed. What twenty-four-year-old is in bed at ten?”
“Can she hear you?”
“I’m outside,” I said, but suddenly I worried that Daniela could. Living alone, I never had to consider this. I ran across the lawn and let myself into my hatchback. The interior still smelled like Daniela’s buttery lotion. I reclined the seat and closed my eyes, the way I did after takeoff. “Have you been in all night?”
“Sam and I were at a concert earlier.” Her boyfriend of the past few months.
I could see Katka as clearly as if she were in front of me, sprawled on her sofa in an oversized sweater and ankle socks, one of those crime dramas she liked on mute. It was always so comforting to slip back into Czech with her, and in the beginning I’d wonder if sitting on the phone long enough we could begin to feel like us again—not the “us” in Vermont but the “us” that was good, back on Boivojova Street—but it never happened; she told me about Sam and all the other men she dated with loose, offhand ease, as if she could barely remember why she had married me in the first place.
“Listen,” I said, “just tell me what the play’s about.”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“You expect me to believe that? Daniela probably lets you read her diary.” I looked out the window at the clear night. I caught my reflection in the glass, warped and blurry. The critics, I knew, would call the father character “unsympathetic” and “unreliable.” My neighbors would read about it in the paper. My students would laugh. In one night in some dim Off-Broadway theater, Katka’s version of the story would become the official one. My entire legacy as the Quietest Man would be erased and for the rest of my life I’d be known as The Egomaniac, The Itinerant or maybe, simply, The Asshole.
“I asked her,” Katka said, “but Daniela said talking about her work too early would kill it.” She said the last two words as though she were wrapping air quotes around them. But I knew it made her proud to hear our daughter trying to sound like an artist, and suddenly Katka seemed to be purposely flaunting their closeness. That’s how I felt this past summer in New York, anyway, seeing them together at brunch. Over waffles Daniela had talked about her temp job and the new play she was working on. She’d just read Catastrophe, and watching her enthuse over Beckett, I remembered first encountering Anna Akhmatova’s poems and feeling like I was sliding back into a conversation I’d been having for years with the writer. Even the new vocabulary Daniela was trying out—she kept talking about the “exhibitionist nature of the theater”—was offset by her genuine ease at the table: she was so animated, talking with her hands, moving the salt and pepper shakers around to enact her favorite parts of the play. Katka seemed to be reveling in every second of it, and for the first time I wondered if our daughter’s desire to be a writer allowed Katka to finally accept the fact that she no longer was one. As I watched them, squeezed in the corner booth, swapping food off each other’s plates without even asking, it seemed as though their relationship had morphed into a genuine friendship.
I knew that should have made me happy, but I hated the way Katka had kept mentioning Daniela’s friends by name that morning. I hated the way Daniela talked about the professors she’d stayed in touch with after graduation, and when she said she was going to see one of them read at the National Arts Club, I wondered if she was intentionally rubbing it in that I’d never been invited to talk there (though how could she have known?). Even Katka’s supposedly nice gesture of heading back to Queens to give us time alone had felt like an aggressive challenge: how would we fill the day?
But Daniela seemed to have it all planned out. The moment her mother said goodbye, she led me down Amsterdam, pointing out her morning running route and the Greek diner where she stopped after work. We walked and walked, long after I craved refuge in some air-conditioned store, and before I knew it, we were in the theater district.
She stopped in front of a theater, small and brick with a ticket-seller who waved to her through the glass booth, then went back to reading his magazine. “I’ve been ushering here a couple nights a week,” she said. “They let me see free shows.”
“That’s nice.”
“The guy who runs it, he said he’ll read my script when it’s done.”
She was staring up at the marquee, and I knew that if Katka were there, they’d already be fantasizing about her play being sold and all the glorious things that would follow. But I was afraid it would have been cruel to indulge the dream. This was the theater that would end up taking her play, but I didn’t know that then. That summer afternoon, it didn’t seem possible that my daughter would have her name up in lights. I didn’t doubt she was intelligent—she’d always done well in school; all her life teachers had commented on how hard she worked, how creative she was, how nicely behaved. But she had always presented herself to the world in too apologetic a manner for me to take her ambitions seriously—because it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it was different to be an artist or writer or thinker here in America. That one didn’t need to be a persuasive speaker, or have a charismatic presence, as so many of my colleagues had back in Prague. Daniela simply needed to live as an observer, sitting discreetly in a corner, quietly cataloging the foibles of those around her.
“I know it’s not one of the fancy places,” she said. “But it has a history. Yulian Zaitsev did his gulag plays here.”
“Zie-tsev.”
“What?”
“Zie,” I repeated. “You’re pronouncing it wrong.”
Daniela didn’t respond. She looked like such a mess in a loose black t-shirt with her hands stuffed in her denim cutoffs, her face blotchy and raw in the heat. “This is my life,” she said, quietly.
I could barely hear her. I felt as if we were on the loudest, most obnoxious street in the world. Cabbies were having detailed conversations with one another entirely through their horns, and throngs of people kept pushing past us, their foreign, sweaty arms rubbing against my own.
Daniela took a deep breath. “I’m trying to show you—my life.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I was hot, and tired, and I didn’t have the energy to tell her she was twenty-three, that this wasn’t
yet her life, this was an unpaid job she did a couple days a week with a bunch of other theater kids lucky enough to live in New York.
I just wanted to get out of there. I hated midtown, especially in summer, and though I was a tourist myself, I didn’t want to be surrounded by them, so I turned away from the theater and started up the block. The disappointment was all over Daniela—in her face, in the heavy way she walked—but the last thing I wanted was to have a conversation about any of this. All I wanted was to get through the rest of the day without making things worse, my flight back to Maine that evening the light at the end of the longest, most excruciating tunnel.
We just kept heading uptown, in the vague direction of her apartment, neither of us saying a word. She’s just guarded around everyone but her mother, I tried to tell myself, but I saw the way her entire face opened up when an acquaintance called to her from across the street, how she joked so effortlessly with the lady at the coffee cart. I loaded her up with groceries and a new fall coat she didn’t need, and after a while even the bustle of the city couldn’t cushion our silence, so I suggested we slip into an afternoon movie. It would have seemed impromptu and fun if we were different people. But I could feel how depleted that afternoon was making us both. We passed popcorn back and forth and I studied her soft profile as the screen colors flickered across her skin, wondering if I could come up with anything new to say before the credits rolled and the lights came on.
BUT NOW it was up to me. If I needed things to be relaxed, I had to make them that way. So when Daniela shuffled into the kitchen in the morning, still in her pajamas, I handed her a mug of coffee and said, in a tone I hoped wasn’t too falsely cheerful, that I had the day all planned.
“I’ll show you around town, and we can walk through campus. For lunch there’s a decent fish place on the water,” I said. “Or you can stay in and write, if you need to. You can even bounce ideas off me.”
The UnAmericans: Stories Page 9