Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  “I want to play with you.”

  “I’ve got a headache.”

  “Why does your head ache, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know, Meadow. Maybe because you keep asking me questions. Now, please. Leave me alone. I need some time to think. Don’t you ever just want to be alone?”

  Her face clouded. Fine, I thought, I hurt her feelings. Fine. She had, to my mind, another long, blessed day, an entire beach all to herself. She had her whole life. She walked down the beach, moping, kicking sand, digging up rocks, not going very far.

  That’s when a tall woman in a sheer nightgown emerged from Cabin One, her arms stretched expressively over her head.

  “Well, hi,” she said when she saw me. “I’ve got neighbors.”

  Meadow and I both jumped. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, and Meadow, who’d been squatting in the water smiting two rocks together, drew to standing.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The woman walked in a lazy path toward the beach, which was not ten steps from her door, and stood there on the grassy rise between Meadow and me, her hands on her hips. I could see the outline of darker panties beneath her nightgown. The woman seemed unconcerned by this.

  “Hey,” she said, shaking a finger at us. “Isn’t that funny? I saw you guys yesterday. At that bar in town. I remember you because I thought, how funny to bring a little kid into a bar. How old-school. Like we’re back in County Cork or something.” The woman looked down now at Meadow, who stood in her spangled bikini, rubbing one bare leg cricket-style against the other. “But I bet you had fun, didn’t you, hon? You didn’t want to be left out, did you? No. I’ll tell you what. You can learn a lot in a bar.”

  Meadow’s eyes grew large behind her glasses. Our statuesque neighbor looked even more impressive from her knoll, staring back at us with the smile from her previous question still on her lips. Was she pretty? Not technically. She was too formidable to be pretty. I ran over the scene from the bar in my mind. I remembered a blond woman in the booth, yes. Hadn’t she left before the news story about us aired? I walked toward her, my hand extended.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name’s John.” I gave an inner wince. “John Toronto.”

  She took my hand firmly. “Hi. I’m April. April Los Angeles.”

  “OK,” I said, taking my hand back quickly. I waved it toward Meadow. “And that’s my daughter, Chrissy.”

  “Hey, Chrissy!” the woman shouted.

  Meadow shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Then she came closer, if only to get a better look.

  “So what do you want to be famous for, Chrissy?”

  Meadow squinted. “Excuse me?”

  “When you grow up. What do you want to be famous for? Everybody wants to be famous for something.”

  “I want to be a lepidopterist.” Not unkindly, Meadow added, “Lepidopterists study butterflies.”

  “You’re not going to be famous for that.” The woman laughed huskily in Meadow’s direction. “Forgive me for not raising the pitch of my voice when I talk to you, sweetheart. I don’t do baby talk. Then again, you don’t seem the type of child who likes to be bullshat. Are you? Look how erect you’re standing. Puts me to shame.” She then turned to me and said, “Why do all young girls want to work with animals?”

  I grinned. “Maybe because they’re beautiful and gentle and the world is harsh and cruel?”

  April touched me on the arm. Now that we were standing side by side, she seemed less Amazonian. I glanced again at the nightgown, which while not entirely sheer was definitely not outdoor wear.

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she agreed. “I myself once ran a very successful pet hotel. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.”

  The woman stood unmoving.

  “Oh,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “To get some groceries in Swanton. I’m out. Do you guys have a piece of bread or something? I’ll pay you back. You need anything? I’ll get it for you. I’m starved.”

  It was Meadow who went into our cabin and got our neighbor two pieces of Roman Meal. She placed them on the plastic card table beside the Weber grill and spread them with mayonnaise, then topped each with a slice of cheese, then stood watching while April devoured her sandwich.

  “I’m going to get us some meat to grill,” April said, kicking the Weber. “I’ll make you two a feast, you’ll see.”

  Meadow stood observing the woman in her quiet, anthropological way. For a six-year-old, she was a pretty good judge of character. If she had said to me, This woman is bad news, I would have taken her word for it. But a lonely man is not a skeptical one. Sitting beside her in a matching plastic lawn chair, I inhaled deeply, disguising as a sigh my desire to take this woman in, even just the smell of her, to say Let’s! to somebody, to say Let’s! to the giving and the getting. My brain seemed to flicker and go out. So what, it had done little for me so far.

  When Meadow was small, she’d gone through a phase of being fascinated with the human body, especially the innards. She wanted to know where pee and poop came from, and how the heart worked, and all that. We went to the library to browse the collection of anatomical drawings, murmuring over the bladders and bones and organs and meat-red muscle. When we got to a drawing of the brain, she became solemn.

  “That’s the brain,” I said.

  “I already know about the brain,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? Tell me about the brain. Tell me what the brain does.”

  She was three and already slightly myopic. The following year, she’d be prescribed eyeglasses, but before that, she would crawl up really close to other people’s faces when she spoke to them, I guess so she could see them better, but we didn’t know that. We thought it was sweet. I remember her best like this, close-up and breathing in my face, her brown eyes wide set and serious.

  “The brain,” she told me, “is the thing that makes ice.”

  LOVE SONGS

  Requested items April brought back for us from Swanton, with receipt and exact change: carrot sticks, seedless green grapes, a stack of bologna, Progresso low-sodium Italian wedding soup, cheddar-flavored popcorn, a twelve-pack of Diet Pepsi, a sweatshirt, and a sand pail. My plan was to regroup. I would figure out an exit strategy. We would get out of this cleanly. We would have fun in the meantime. We would figure it out.

  “So, John.” April poked the coals in the grill with a stick. “What brings you and Chrissy this way?”

  I shrugged. “Just a trip. A field trip. A trip through fields. Collect some butterflies. Befriend some tall women.”

  She snorted. “Tell some tall tales.”

  I sighed, held it, and breathed out. “You? What are you doing out this way?”

  “Passing through, just like you.”

  She smiled at me through the smoke. I felt my face get hot. She talked like someone who knew me a lot better than she did. She made me jumpy, and at the same time, I was not in a position to refuse a friend. I glanced over at Meadow, who was wearing her new sweatshirt with the tags still on and filling up her new sand pail. The spoils from Swanton had won Meadow over. She’d also been allowed into April’s cabin, where she’d been spritzed with some heavy fragrance that I could still smell over the creosote. I hate to say it; it felt nice—seductively nice—to be three again. To have a female influence around.

  “You’re lucky to me meet me, you know,” April said. “I’m actually pretty famous.”

  I grinned and took a pull from my Diet Pepsi. “Bullshit.”

  “Am too. You don’t recognize my name?”

  “I don’t know your name.”

  “April Almond.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  She placed the top back on the grill. “April A.?”

  “Stumped,” I said.

  She leaned in. “Don’t you know the song, by the Minor Miracles? ‘Oh yeah / Spring again, cares are gone away-hay. Hey now / Like a flower / Here comes April A.’ ” She stepped back, gesturing at her chest with a spa
tula. “That’s me.”

  “No shit.” The rest of the song came to me unbidden, a B-side hit I had memorized in my impressionable first years as an English speaker. “ ‘Ayyyy-pril Ayyyy,’ ” I sang. “ ‘Whose-a gonna be your lover next time…’ Wow. When was that? Nineteen eighty-three? Eighty-four?”

  “American Top Forty for three weeks in 1981.”

  She turned and settled into one of the plastic chairs we’d pulled up to the grill.

  “So tell me the story,” I said. “How you got a song written about you.”

  “I was nineteen,” she said. “It’s a long story.”

  A quick calculation put her deep in her forties. In truth, she looked older. Her hair drizzled down her back in gelled curls. The hair color itself was blond in the majority, but was also shot through with streaks of red and brown, giving it a kind of camo effect. Her face was diamond shaped, two generous cheeks tapering down to an expressive chin, and a brow that lacked worry. She did indeed seem like a person who’d had a lot of fun over the years. A person who might have possibly inspired a rock song. Even the way she sat invited you to look at her, one slightly sunburned thigh thrown across the other, her foot twisting in its gladiator-style sandal. She had changed into denim shorts so brief that the white squares of the inner pockets hung below the ragged hem. Her short, busty torso was covered in a blousy tunic. She had good, youthful legs. It was her legs, I decided, that must have inspired the Minor Miracles. My eyes reluctantly wandered away from them. But she had already caught me watching.

  “Let’s make us a drink,” she said, smiling.

  She came back with two old jelly jars full of a glowing greenish yellowish liquid.

  “Mountain Dew and vodka,” she said.

  The way she said vokka was familiar to me. “You’re not really from Los Angeles, are you?”

  “I didn’t say I was. I was born and raised in Plattsburgh.”

  “No kidding. We just came through there. What’s the story in Plattsburgh? Why’s everybody living in barracks?”

  “Those,” she said, raising her bright green drink, “are the remains of the Plattsburgh military base. The base got closed in the eighties and I guess they decided to keep the barracks. Just move right on in. Instant ghetto. How’s your drink?”

  “It’s very—I’m very grateful for it.”

  “Huh? Do you like it or not?”

  “Yes.” I took an acid sip. “Do you have some extra, for my daughter? I mean, without the vodka. She loves Mountain Dew, for some reason. Her mother would die. She’s a health nut, her mother.”

  “Sure.” April went into the hut and came back with another glass. She walked a couple of yards down the gravel path and gave a husky shout: “Hey, Chrissy!”

  Naturally, Meadow did not respond. She was crouched over her bucket, her back to us. From where we sat, she looked like two knees and a spine.

  “Sweetheart,” I called. “Want some Mountain Dew with your dinner?”

  “Sure!” Meadow did not turn around. “I found a frog!”

  “Great,” I said. “What kind?”

  “Well, it’s huge. Huge and warty.”

  “Is it a toad?” April asked.

  Meadow looked sadly over her shoulder at April. “There is no scientific difference between a frog and a toad.”

  “Well, good, because I always get them confused.”

  “Come on and show him to us!”

  “He’s kind of brown on the back but has a green mouth.”

  “Sounds like a bullfrog.”

  “I’m going to keep him,” Meadow shouted. “Just like I kept the mouse.”

  Then the image blazed in the evening: the mouse that I’d caught beneath the kitchen sink in Pine Hills and none of us had the heart to kill. We’d bought it a plastic box and a wheel and a whole world of wood chips. And where I saw the mouse in the box I also saw you, Laura, reaching in, your sleeve rolled up, cupping the thing in one hand, speaking to it in tender tones.

  Silence.

  “Why so quiet, John? You seem lost in thought.”

  I looked over at my companion. “I was thinking about your legs.”

  “Ha! Sure you were.”

  “You have very nice legs, April A.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know, I always wondered where you girls went.”

  “What girls?”

  “The subjects of love songs.”

  “You’re joking, but actually, I tried getting a group of us together about ten years ago. Lola. Sharona. Roxanne. Roseanna. Don’t forget Layla.”

  “Peggy Sue!”

  “Peggy Sue’s probably dead, for Christ’s sakes. They wrote her song in the fifties, John. Where’ve you been?”

  “Were those women real? I thought they were just made-up songs.”

  “Some of them are real. I’m real, aren’t I? I thought it would make a good reality TV show, you know, to trace the girls through their lives and see what happened to them. And how the song shaped their lives.”

  “And? What happened to your idea?”

  “Well, let’s say there was a certain amount of skepticism. Subterfuge. Jealousy. Agents intervened. The girls themselves, they took it took too personally. I don’t think they ever understood what they were.”

  I looked at her with amusement.

  “They were muses. There was a cause.”

  “A cause?”

  “Rock and fucking roll was the cause. You, John. At sixteen, in your underpants, playing air guitar in your bedroom. You were the cause. It’s not funny.” April took a sip of her vokka. “Of course, you don’t earn a living as a muse. Nobody writes you a check for it. Do you think the Minor Miracles were going to send me royalties? No. And so. I found jobs like everyone else.”

  “Were you at Woodstock?” I grinned.

  “How old do you think I am, you piece of shit? No. But I did Burning Man once or twice. All I got out of that was a snakebite and a yeast infection.”

  I laughed and finished my drink, cracking the last ice cube with my back molar.

  When I looked over at her, she was staring at me, stirring her drink with her finger.

  “So,” she said. “Later, after milk and cookies, I hope you come back and see me, John.” She smiled at me over the rim of the glass. “I hope you knock on the door. And say my name. I’ll wait up for you. I’ll wait up for you, and I’ll think about you. And then you’ll knock on the door and say my name. And we’ll see what happens. Maybe something nice.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  She laughed ruefully. “Oh, John Toronto, you are one strange man.”

  It was late before we had finished our steaks and cleaned up as best we could with only the use of bathroom sinks and bug lights. Meadow was delaying bedtime with some questionable frog care. I watched her in the iodine yellow light, squatting over the bucket, talking to it. Finally I wrangled her into her nightgown and tucked her into her bed.

  “April’s going to teach me how to change my hair,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with your hair?” I said, smoothing it down at the top of her head.

  “I want it to look like hers. Yellow.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “She gave me the bottle for it. The yellow comes in a bottle.”

  “No, I like yours how it is,” I said. But I wasn’t really listening. I was starting to experience a certain notorious foregleam, whetted by the short distance between my and April’s cabins. I slid off the creaky bedsprings and gave Meadow a peck. “Good night, then, sweets.”

  She clicked on her flashlight. “Where are you going, Daddy?”

  “Right over there. To talk to April. Could you not shine that in my face, please? I don’t like lights in my face.”

  “Can you read me one more poem from Birds Come and Gone?”

  “No. It’s late. The birds came and went. Close your eyes, and before you know it, it will be morning.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “
Not on your life.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Soon. Or, as you would say, soonish.”

  “I’m afraid to sleep alone.”

  “You won’t sleep alone. Like I said, I’ll be back really soon.”

  “Just one more poem?”

  “Meadow—”

  “Can you at least stand outside the door until I fall asleep?”

  “OK. OK. I’ll be right outside. Now, go to sleep.”

  Except for the light in April’s cabin, the night was completely dark. The lamplight spilled across the short distance and exposed me to the night. One movement and April would be able to see me from under the hem of her lacy window treatment. I cleared my throat. The lake lapped against the little beach, unseen, darker than the sky. I leaned against a tree with large, bald roots, kicking the dirt that formed a little collar around the barbecue. I could hear Meadow talking to herself, the beam of her flashlight roving the ceiling of the cabin. After a couple of extremely long minutes, the beam settled and I could hear only the lake. Three, four, five paces later, I’d crossed a realm.

  April opened the door and stood behind the screen, a drink in one hand and a rolled-up celebrity magazine in the other. She pushed the screen door open with it.

  “You’re supposed to wait for me to knock,” I said.

  “I couldn’t stand the suspense.”

  “I was hoping to get your autograph.”

  April beamed. “I’ll do you one better.”

  The headboard was cheap and loud and her legs were very long and she was strong and tawdry and enthusiastic and neither of us was very clean or polite and it occurred to me it had been a long, long, long time since I’d made love like that, I mean without apprehension, without bracing myself for some kind of fallout. It had been a long time since I’d visited that vast, unregulated sexual territory between two willing people—no hazards, no rattlesnakes, no treachery. But I remembered it. There is even a photograph of it. A Delaware Bay motel en route to Albany from Virginia Beach. We didn’t have a camera, so we bought a disposable one in the motel lobby, along with a package of pistachios and a liter of root beer. In the shower, we stood cleaning the highway off one another. I found black grit in the corners of your eyes, and inside the carpet of your hair. I shampooed you brutishly, a real amateur; you just laughed. The sun gives us a day, but who fashioned the hour? What is supposed to be accomplished within its parameters? How long is an hour supposed to feel? That hour—the one in which we lay on the bed afterward, staring at each other in the underwater light particular to roadside motel rooms—that hour seems to still be taking place endlessly, and it is a kind of invigorating torture to me, and I can’t get rid of it.