by Amity Gaige
O tiny imitator! Compact mirror! Within days Meadow was using words and phrases that I had used casually, almost aloud to myself, thinking she had not understood. A boo-boo was a laceration. A burp was an eructation. Acorns were ubiquitous. I never talked down to her. I had always loved words. My early experiences learning English satisfied me, if nothing else did, by the language’s interesting consonance with German. And so, almost casually, I threw in some foreign words, phrases from Spanish, Japanese, and even my buried native tongue. She retained every word. Anything you threw at her stuck. Naturally I wondered what else she might be capable of.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G.
One day, I sat her down with some old Clebus stationery and several sharpened pencils.
“This,” I began, “is an A. The sound” (I said) “of A is ah or the sharper aa, as in cat. If you add a y, the sound is the same as how you say the letter—ay. Like day.”
“Aaay,” she said. “Can I have a graham cracker?”
“Sure you can. Just as soon as we finish what we’re doing. B. B sounds like buh. Buh.”
“Buh.”
“What other words start with the sound buh?”
“Hamburger,” she said.
“Good try. Try again.”
“Bug.”
“Bug! Yes! Bug.”
H-I-J-K-LMNO-P.
And by the end of that fall, she could read. She was three years old.
Is it now safe to say that I made my share of mistakes? Sure. Can I now say freely that she took a couple of knocks in my care? That twice I lost her in the Grand Union—I had to do the grocery shopping, too—and she had to be raised on the PA system? That once, at home, we were visited by the fire department for something unwise we did with the smoke detector in the name of science? But the thing I will never apologize for is teaching her to read. I don’t care how it makes me look.
Ask her; she’ll tell you. We had fun together. Our days were full. I was getting the hang of parenting. I was no longer bitter about the busted real estate market or my lack of earning potential. I could accept the unique humiliation of asking my wife for pocket money. I even unearthed my manuscript from beneath its sward of bills and took up—at nap times—my independent research. And all this should have been good but for a single problem.
Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y, and Z.
“Where have you been?” you said, your face in a literal sweat, as you stepped out of the apartment and onto the porch. “I’ve been losing my mind here, Eric. Pacing around for two hours. Two hours! It’s dark. It’s November.” You fell to your knees and began to search your daughter’s body with your hands, making her laugh. She was bundled in her parka, hood up and cinched. I was confused. Why wouldn’t she be fine?
You looked up at me. “Do you even know what time it is, Eric?”
“I guess we lost track of time, hon. We’re sorry.”
“We’re sorry? She isn’t in charge of getting you guys home on time. Jesus. I was out of my mind with worry. You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have left a note? My poor peanut. Are you cold? Where were you?”
“The liberary,” Meadow said from behind her scarf.
You sighed, routed. As a middle school teacher, you had to support library use.
“Come in, come in,” you said, ushering us into the apartment, which glowed with golden light. “You two worry me sick.”
Throughout the winter, this sort of conversation repeated itself with little variation. I could see your evident exasperation with my time management, lack of schedule, etc., but as far as I was concerned, I was a trustworthy guardian—a man of strong build, multilingual, a good problem solver—so what were you so wound up about? As far as I could tell, a parent got through his or her day via a mix of structure, improvisation, and triage. This took complete concentration. Thinking about you or about how you would have done it would have been an unhelpful distraction. Did you want us to stay home all day watching the window?
But OK. I really don’t mean for this document to devolve into the jeremiad that I was never permitted to deliver in family court. I readily accept the following charges against me, that:
a) I often forgot to leave notes detailing our whereabouts.
b) I sometimes did not remember how much you wanted to see Meadow at the end of the day and therefore our whereabouts should have been at home.
c) I occasionally omitted mentioning certain not-so-age-appropriate activities or side trips we took, which you mostly found out anyway from some pal of yours who saw us.
d) I was bad at following instructions, especially as pertained to schedules and quotas (e.g., servings of fresh fruit), and probably, yes, I had a certain passive-aggressive reaction to these rules and hid my resentment of them behind a friendly absentmindedness.
But I tried. I took care of her.
One day, while you were correcting me for some oversight after your return home, I watched your pretty face in its shrewish contortions, and your words sort of fell away, and I saw that you were jealous. You were jealous that I got to be with Meadow while you had to content yourself with other people’s children. This realization softened me. I felt bad for you, and for what seemed like the Pyrrhic victory of being a working mother. I apologized for teaching Meadow foreign words that we would then use as code in public. I saw, as you did, that this was a wedge. And so I tried to include you more and leave you more notes and account for every hour we spent, and in general, to be smotheringly nice to you. Your happiness was still my central goal. I wanted you to see that you had everything you wanted. A noble job. A gifted child. A husband who was secure enough to stay at home with his child for a gap year. And a home—we did have a lovely home—a rented duplex on the top two floors of a baby blue tenement on Morning Street.
You cheered up by springtime, but there was still a part of you I couldn’t please. There was a part of you I couldn’t reach. I began to wonder if what you wanted was another child. Maybe you wanted another chance. Maybe you wanted to make sure one kid belonged to you, only to you. I understood that. I understand possession. After all, I wanted you to belong only to me. I brought up the issue that spring, one night in the kitchenette.
“More children?” you said, turning around, a dish in your hand. “Why do you say ‘more’? How many ‘more’ do you want?”
I took the dish from you to dry it. Again we were cleaning up and trying to talk at the same time, something that probably contributed to our irritability.
“One more, then. One more child. You want to, Laur?”
You looked at me for a long moment. Then you turned back toward the sink, saying, “Oh, Eric.” My name, as you turned, was swallowed by the running water. I watched you sort through the dishes caked in spaghetti sauce and waited for you to elaborate.
“You seem discontented,” I said.
“Discontented.”
“Do you object to that word too?”
“Yes,” you said, “I do.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s so cold is what’s wrong with it. Discontented. It’s a word someone would use in Masterpiece Theatre.”
“It’s Latinate,” I said, shrugging.
“I don’t care. I’m your wife, Eric. It’s just you and me here. There’s no audience. The word you should use with me is sad. Or unhappy.”
“OK.” I stacked another dried dish on the countertop. “Are you unhappy?”
You considered it. “No.”
“Well, good.”
“Lonely sometimes.”
“You’re lonely? Why are you lonely?”
“I don’t know. I feel lonely a lot. When we don’t understand each other. I sometimes think we aren’t interested in understanding each other, like we used to be. Sometimes I don’t understand the things you do. Sometimes you seem like a stranger to me. I can’t figure out if I’ve gotten lazy or if there’s a part of you that’s hidden from me. Tell me I’m crazy.”
You looked over your shoulder at me then. I sta
red back at you.
“I’m just me,” I said. “Eric Kennedy. No big mystery.”
You were slow to turn away.
“Maybe I’m just tired,” you said, rubbing your temples with wet hands. “I don’t know, Eric. I don’t know what’s wrong. I think about it so much, but I never get anywhere.”
I watched your shoulders as you returned to the dishes—scrubbing, rinsing, placing them dripping in the rack. You did, in fact, look lonely. This seemed to me impossible. Impossible in the sense of wondrously bad—inconceivable. It seemed inconceivable that two lonely people could strand one another in the same kitchen. The naked conversations in which we spent our first year abed were not so long ago. God, Laura, I was interested. I came up behind you and put my arms around you. I rested my head against yours. We stayed that way for a long time.
“I’m totally devoted to you,” I said.
“I know,” you said.
“I don’t want anything more than this.”
“It feels good when you hold me,” you said. “It feels good. Don’t move.”
MERMAN
Meadow and I settled in. We both unpacked our small bags into a shared dresser. Then we got back in the Mini Cooper and I drove an hour south until I found a local credit union. There I took out a cash advance on my credit card, netting two thousand dollars and a roll of quarters. I then drove back north to a Walmart on the outskirts of Swanton. I bought Meadow a proper bathing suit—a two-piece with spangles that you would have hated. I also bought a fresh razor, a flashlight, Tic Tacs, a loaf of Roman Meal, a squirt bottle of mayonnaise, a family-sized package of cheese singles, and a vanilla-flavored Garcia y Vega. We used half the quarters on the plastic horsey ride in the Walmart foyer. Oh, and I let Meadow buy a heavily discounted package of chocolate Easter eggs, which she divested of their pink and blue foil wrappers in silent rapture in the backseat of the Mini Cooper. There. There are your details.
Back at the ranch, I hid half of the cash behind a le Carré novel, and we sat on the ash-colored sand and ate cheese sandwiches and chocolate eggs and I smoked my cigar. Ours was a small, unnavigable cove, and the motorboats we saw in the lake beyond did not enter. Once, a pair of lady kayakers surprised us through the reeds, but there was something about Meadow standing guard in her spangled bikini, her legs caked with sand, that made them paddle away.
That afternoon, I was every kind of monster. I was a manticore. I was a merman. I was a hippogriff. A leviathan. When we ran out of amphibians, we went on to giants. I was Anteus. Paul Bunyan. Magog. Meadow’s job was to slay me. She ran me through with sticks, peppered me with pebbles, she pinecone-bombed me. As a rule, I am very good at dying. I stagger. I fall backwards. I cry chillingly. I float underwater for longer than you thought possible. (You should see me stiffening from tetanus!) Whenever I stayed underwater too long, I could hear Meadow’s garbled pleas above me, telling me to cut it out already, and I was strangely satisfied by the limits of the game. I enjoyed playing a game in which my death seemed ludicrous. We dried ourselves off with the scratchy guest towels and watched the stars enter the mind of the sky like a billion epiphanies. And I wondered momentarily if you weren’t right, Laura, about a God, because there was someone, someone superhuman, who had kept me from succumbing to the terrible ideations I’d had in the darkest of February.
DRITTER TAG OR DAY THREE
It was late afternoon on our second day in Grand Isle when I became restless. Nothing was wrong; I’d just probably gone too long without adult conversation. I suggested to Meadow we go out for chow. She was game. We clambered into the Mini Cooper and began to make our way down Route 2, snaking back and forth across Lake Champlain, which seemed on the verge of spilling goldenly onto the roads. We drove through first-growth woods whose moss-colored shade itself seemed ancient. It was another glorious day, the third in a row. The light seemed purified. Winter had retreated in a torrent of dirty runoff, leaving the springtime world new and washed, like this.
“For all this country’s transgressions,” I mused aloud, “for all its abuses, its opportunism, its meanness, it sure is pretty. Don’t you think, Butterscotch?”
“It is pretty.”
“It really is a beautiful country. A lot of people come here, looking for somewhere to be safe and free.”
“They come to Ellis Island,” Meadow said.
“They used to, sure.”
“But if they come from Mexico, guards shoot at them.”
I nodded encouragingly. “I don’t think they get shot at per se. But yes, it is dangerous to come here sometimes. America can’t fit everybody, right?”
“I don’t see why not.” Meadow gestured out the window. “Plenty of space up here. They could live right there in those woods.”
I grinned. We both returned to staring at Vermont.
“You’re a sweet kid,” I said.
“I know that,” she said. “You tell me that all the time.”
The countryside receded and exchanged itself for a thicket of small houses, the outskirts of a town we soon discovered was North Hero. The town was, in essence, a barracks-style row of short retail spaces fronted with fluttering awnings. The parochial avenue was the same as in any small American town: a hardware store, a pet-grooming outfit, a coffee shop, an impossibly small public library. Meadow pointed out several eateries, but I kept driving. Just as we were on the verge of reentering endless Vermont countryside, I spied the neon glow I’d been looking for. The wheels whined as I pulled up to the curb.
“Wait here,” I said, walking up to the window to give the place a once-over. Through the wrinkled plastic tinting I saw a large man behind the bar pouring a coffee-brown pint of stout.
“Perfect,” I said to Meadow, throwing open her door and unsnapping her seat belt. “A cozy little pub. The perfect place for some local color.”
Meadow stepped from the car. Her purple velour sweatpants—the only other change of clothing she had in her overnight bag—were flecked with sand, and the sides of her unwashed hair had slipped out from her headband. I straightened her glasses and swatted clean her pants.
“There,” I said. “You’re such a pretty girl. Do you know that?”
“Technically, I’m not so pretty. I’m prettyish. Rapunzel is pretty.”
“Rapunzel? Are you serious? What about Maria Callas or Benazir Bhutto or somebody like that?”
“No. Rapunzel is prettiest. I’ll show you her in my fairy-tales book when we get back home home.”
No heads turned when we entered. There was only one grizzled man sitting below the television, staring at the bottles behind the bar, and a booth along the wall in which a single woman applied lipstick from behind a compact mirror. I was overjoyed to see a plastic red basket on the table in front of her. The joint served food.
“Up here, honey.” I patted the stool beside mine at the bar.
When the bartender approached, I stuck my hand out. “How’s it going?”
“Good.” The bartender shook my hand once, hard. “How are you?”
“Very good,” I said. “Excellent.”
“You’d have to be an asshole to be unhappy on a day like this,” said the bartender, flipping a coaster onto the bar. “What can I get you?”
“Canadian Club on the rocks. And my daughter here will have two hot dogs and a Shirley Temple. Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Did I get that right?”
The bartender looked at Meadow. “How many cherries does the little lady want in her Shirley Temple?” he said, pouring me a generous drink. The ice cubes cracked like dry wood in a stove.
Meadow blushed and leaned her face against my arm.
“Come on now,” I said, “tell the nice man how many cherries you want. She can be sort of shy at first.”
“As many as you want,” said the bartender.
Meadow held up six fingers.
“Six!” the bartender bellowed. “That’s all?”
Meadow nodded.
“One for every year,” I sai
d.
“You’re six?” The bartender leaned against the bar across from Meadow, his big maw exaggerated in the track lighting. “Well, then you probably already know how the world works, right? You know about gravity? You know about taxes?”
Again Meadow buried her face in my arm. The bartender chuckled and grabbed a pint glass. I gave her shoulder a squeeze, drinking deeply with my free arm. Canadian Club is sweet up front, but somehow I’ve gotten used to this and can’t stand anything drier.
“Isn’t this fun?” I said to Meadow. “Isn’t this place a riot?”
I turned and surveyed the pub. The lady in the booth had snapped shut her compact mirror and gave me what looked like a wink. I smiled back, but she got up to leave. I tried not to stare at her big blond dandelion hair as it sailed across the mirror behind the bar.
“You count those cherries, sweetheart,” the bartender was telling Meadow, sliding her Shirley Temple toward her. “You shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of twelve. After twelve, it’s lies, lies, lies. You know about Area 51? You know about Roswell?”
The bartender was leaning across the bar again, smiling gamely. He had a wide, ironic face. He looked like he was waiting for something unpredictable to happen.
There are moments—I hate to say it—when a parent’s loyalties jump ship, and he just wants to be liked by another grown-up. Even the best parents with excellent parenting styles can’t help, on rare occasion, but side with their own kind, those on the downslope of life, and in this process they get the urge to gang up on somebody young, since it’s impossible to banish this instinct altogether, this throwing around of one’s hard-won experience.