by Michael Cart
Anyway, I don’t know the actual dates of any of these milestones because I didn’t think to take the year one scrapbook when I left the house. Ask your mom if you want to see it. I doubt she’s ever shown it to you, because it’s full of references to me, and if she tried to cut them out it would be like one of those censored letters from World War Two, all lacy, more holes than paper.
The YEAR TWO book, luckily for me, happened to be in my backpack the night I left, because I was working on the page about your first time tobogganing. I’m looking at it now, turning the gaudy rainbow pages. It starts with your first birthday party: giant bubbles (they left sticky marks on the grass), and an Eeyore cake that you spat out because you’d never tasted sugar; it’d been all pureed yam and barley till then. As a bookmark, there’s a sparkler I stuck in your cake, thinking it would be more exciting than a solitary candle, but when I held you over the table to blow the sparkler out, you grabbed it instead and burned your hand and your mom got furious with me. (She was furious with me most of the time by then.) year two has thirteen pages filled in with things like: first concert, first entire bag of potato chips, first time you threw a Walkman over the banister…. (Do you know what Walkmans are, Lang? Like iPods but bulkier, and they only held one cassette. I know, seems a feeble invention, but we enjoyed them hugely.)
I don’t look at it all the time or anything. A year might go by. Then I’ll get into a mood to read through those thirteen pages for hours on end, and Jasmine knows not to interrupt me; she goes off and makes a casserole or something. I showed it to her once, and she read it very respectfully, holding it like it was some ancient manuscript that might fall to dust any moment. She turned over a page after a drawing of you on the sled and suddenly it was blank; she turned back to see if she’d missed something. No, I told her, it really did end on the word mitten.
Jesus, I miss you, Lang. Does that strike you as ludicrous? I admit I don’t know the girl I’m missing. The toddler I remember from 1993 waddles and staggers, lurching through my dreams. The girl who’s sixteen—her, I just have to make up in my head. For every month I lived with you, the real you has lived a year without me. Wow, you’re probably a babysitter by now. (It’s a great job for loners, if you are one; that’s how I made my pocket money till I left home.)
What are you like? The question torments me. I know you’re intelligent; that much was obvious from day one. Probably beautiful too, though it’s hard to extrapolate sixteen-year-old features from the fat face of a toddler. Still quick to laugh? Once I put a wicker basket over my head and you snorted so much that apple juice ran out your snub nose. But maybe any fifteen-month-old would find that funny. Avocado’s still my favorite food. Is it yours? You probably don’t chase squirrels anymore, but do you still climb sand dunes? When you cross a bridge, do you stop to throw pebbles into the water like we always used to? I wonder whether I left any mark on you at all.
I’ve only got two pictures: the ones I happened to have in my wallet. I’ve blown them up to book size and framed them, but I keep them in a drawer, because otherwise, casual visitors might ask, Who’s that? They look like two different children, though they were taken around the same time. One is a close-up of your face, but I can tell you’re in the bath because of a trace of a bubble-bath goatee I used to put on you; you’re showing three gleaming teeth, laughing as if you’re about to go up like a firework. In the other picture you’re at your birthday party, in your mom’s lap, looking kind of nervous, with your shirt riding up. You’re paying her no attention, but she’s your safety, your springboard, your daily bread. Bitter as I am, I think I can say that I’d never have tried to wrench you out of her grasp.
I took more of the photos. (Is that the definition of a dad? An un-mom, anyway. Moms haven’t got enough free hands for a camera.) There must have been pictures that showed me and you together, but I haven’t got any. There’s no proof I ever kissed your velvet neck or hiked through the woods with you asleep in a carrier on my back. I don’t know whether your mom threw all the photos of me away, but she’d have had to, wouldn’t she? Logically.
What does she tell you when you ask, I wonder—that she was single when she went to the clinic? That you’re your stepfather’s, but he had a phobia about being photographed in those days? Or does she say that there was another mother, who chose to leave? She better not have told you that.
I didn’t choose it, but yes, it was my fault. You’re old enough to hear this, and I might as well tell you before she does. When you were a year old, Lang, I had a thing, a small fling. You’re a teenager; surely you can understand acting on a stupid impulse? I was tired, ground down from arguments. I was twenty-five. I did what parents so often do, but I was stupid enough to forget that I didn’t have the rights of a parent.
Jasmine always tells me to stop blaming myself; she says maybe I deserved to lose Cheryl but not you. I don’t know about that, but I comfort myself with the thought that your mom would probably have cut me out anyway, sooner or later. If she always had the potential to be that ruthless, then surely the time would have come—even if I’d behaved impeccably—when she’d have fallen for some guy and told me to move out. That way I get to pretend my hands were clean.
Jasmine also says she’d love to meet you—but I can tell she doesn’t believe you’ll ever knock on our door. Whereas I believe it; I insist on believing it. I’m cynical enough on other matters, but on that I’m unshakable. You’re my child behind a door, behind a wall, under a spell, lost in a fog. Or rather you’re in dazzling sunlight and I’m in the fog. I have to believe that you’ll come and find me someday—even if it’s just out of curiosity or rebellion; I’m not fussy—and we’ll take it from there. I don’t care if you’re not anything like I’ve imagined, not anything like me. I just want to know you.
But the wait is more than I can bear. Yesterday I saw a blond teenager in a borrowed Saturn opposite me at an intersection, and for a second I convinced myself it was you, but the eyes were wrong. I write to all the schools you might be attending, though your mom could have moved to another city, of course. (I did that myself, the year after it happened, because I couldn’t seem to stop driving by the house.) I leave messages on any bulletin boards that a sixteen-year-old girl might come across; I’ve been kicked off a few when they think I’m a pervert.
“Why bother?” I can almost hear you asking it, in a bored voice. “It’s too late now, so what’s the point?” It’s not even like I’m the donor: the mysterious other half of your genes. I’m just a woman who messed up her chance to raise you.
But that’s not the real Lang talking, I don’t believe that. That’s the pouty Gossip Girl version I make up to scare myself when I can’t sleep. I knew you for a year and a quarter, the real you; I knew you from day one. You had a generous and hilarious spirit and I’m betting you have it still.
I suppose all I really want to tell you, my daughter, is that I love you, and I won’t stop. Even though—I admit this through clenched teeth—I suspect your life’s been just fine without me in it. On the whole, it’s for the best that you haven’t known what you’ve been missing. And yeah, you might have been different if I’d had the chance to look after you for sixteen years instead of one, but I don’t care: However you are, I don’t want you to be any different.
The other reason I’ve gotten around to writing to you this year is to tell you some news, which I’ve left till the end because I don’t know how you’ll feel about it. Or how I feel about it, if I’m going to be honest. Did your mom and your stepfather…have you got any brothers or sisters? Well, you’re about to get another.
I gave in, last Christmas, and not just because it wasn’t fair to Jasmine. Something in me finally said yes. Maybe it was turning forty. Maybe I got sick of avoiding small children. I guess I thought I can’t ever go back to being not-a-mother, so I might as well try another roll of the dice.
Jasmine got pregnant first go (so I wouldn’t have time to change my mind, she jokes). He’s due i
n November. I say he, but we don’t know yet; all I know is that I’m praying for a boy, so he’ll be that much less like you. But that’s ridiculous, really, because babies are babies. He or she, this one will make little goatlike cries like you did, kick the air, spit up on my shirt, have little scratchy nails and a look of wonder. Some things will be different, but some will be so much the same that I could cry just thinking about it. I’ve decided to be YaYa again: Anything else sounds wrong.
Sixteen years is a long gap. The received wisdom’s changed again: no solids till six months, crib bumpers and walkers are banned, and it’s all about slings. I’ll be careful this time; I won’t fuck around metaphorically or literally. The laws have changed in our state, thank God, and I’ll get all the paperwork done as fast as it can be. This child will get to keep his mom and his YaYa—with all our pros and cons—for life.
You can’t imagine how scared I am, Lang. Not just of the usual bogies: umbilical cords wrapped around throats, SIDS, car crashes…Jasmine getting that mad Mussolini stare, mine mine all mine, and refusing to sign the adoption papers…. Between you and me, I’m terrified that after a decade and a half of grief and nostalgia—whining, some would call it—it’s too late for me. That I’m damaged goods: that my capacity to mother is not just a little creaky but totally rusted up. That I’ve gotten used to my life, and I like it the way it is. That—this sounds so blasphemous, I wouldn’t say it aloud—that I’ll miss being childless.
Wish me luck? Wish us all luck? I hope some day you can meet this kid, Lang. In the meantime I’ll raise him to look at your picture and say his sister’s name.
Till next year, always,
your YaYa
THE SILK ROAD RUNS THROUGH TUPPERNECK, N.H.
BY GREGORY MAGUIRE
“Come here,” he says.
But I don’t. He is—everything—everything I want in an impossible way. The skin and silk of him, the tension of his bare foot on the sustain pedal, the shimmer of pale blazing afternoon sun in the stray hairs at the nape of his neck, the whole heat and heft of him in the third-floor rehearsal cubicle with its ancient A/C unit laboring, laboring. Shivering with effort and not cooling anything down.
The fly-gobbed window shakes in its frame, I in my ribs.
But it’s not only the obvious consolation that I want. It’s that other thing too. The secret of him.
“I can’t hear you from over there, Roukh; the racket. This useless contraption roars like a turbine.” He leans into a minor diminished chord, then strums it as a triad. “Faroukh, we got a song to finish. What are you waiting for?”
I am waiting for what I can’t have. I am waiting for my voice to settle. In the next room, Abby Desroches and her partner are in the thick of their assignment. The walls are meant to be soundproof, but the toast-colored insulation panels are falling off, and besides, Abby and her lyricist have their door open because of the punishing heat.
I closed the door behind me when I came in.
“Shoot, Faroukh, we got forty minutes before they lock the gate to the pool house. What’s the matter with you? Get over here.”
Faroukh has left a good two hours to get through security at Minneapolis-St. Paul. It is three and a half years since 9/11, and things have calmed down a good deal, but traveling with the little ones is never easy. He’s learned by ugly experience that while some jittery travelers are soothed by the sight of babies and toddlers, others can easily imagine that anyone with almond-colored skin would happily pad their children’s pull-ups with Semtex in order to take out an airliner.
He’s talked himself into this journey, and now talks himself through it. At one extreme, Midwesterners, so insulated in the American heartland, think of themselves as the moral as well as the geographic opposites of Middle Easterners. On the other extreme, Midwesterners cling to a preternatural sense of fairness. He’ll just deal with what he finds. It’s the luck of the draw.
He parks Matthias on the carry-on and hoists little Jamesy to his hip, and dials home. Gets the machine.
“Hi, sweetheart. Cleared the first hurdle, a piece of cake. The boys are docile, so they’ve charmed everyone. Look, I forgot to mention there’s a half a bowl of chicken fessenjen behind the orange juice in the fridge—it’ll be bad by Monday, so eat it up if you want. Don’t forget the dog’s water. I know you won’t.” Looks around, clears his throat. “Everyone’s calm. A normal day. Haven’t been dealt a single sidelong glance yet.” Jamesy is starting to squirm. Faroukh concludes the way he always does from an airport pay phone but feels it in deep conflicting ways today. “I love you, honey. Always will. Whoops, there’s our gate posted. Will try to use the traveling-with-young-children excuse to board early. If she’s looking for them, Maman left her headache pills by the TV. Don’t forget to drench the jade plant, either.”
He hangs up. Actually, the gate isn’t posted yet. He can walk the boys a little and try to tire them out. In the curved steel surface of a post, he looks to himself as American as Tom Hanks. He expects to everyone else but his kids he’s a dead ringer for Mohammed Atta.
In any event the boys keep busy running into the plate glass windows of the departure lounge and falling down and regaling the area with peals of bright laughter. Little terrorists.
When he settles in his seat, the airline attendant doesn’t return his nod of gratitude for the extra pillows. Faroukh pulls the window shade down and tries to settle his thoughts. Every leaving is a returning, every returning a departure. Before the attendant has announced they are open for general boarding, Faroukh can close his eyes and imagine the grit gray February farmland that will scroll beneath the wings of the 10 A.M. Northwest flight, Twin Cities to Logan Airport, Boston. The hatch marks made by farm roads edging cropland. The squiggly patterns of suburban housing developments. The loose silken strand of interstate, the lazy steel of frozen river. The present crawling into the past.
From a height of nine feet—the sill of the Concord Trailways bus—I can see the occasional berm of displaced field. Diggers and bulldozers, school-bus yellow, are crawling the wrecked site. Your Tax Dollars at Work. The connector highway isn’t finished yet.
I don’t know I’m on my way to meet Blaise d’Anjou. Nor that the sight of this reshaping landscape will stick with me for a lifetime. I don’t believe I’ll have memories rich enough to last a lifetime—somehow I don’t think I deserve them. At any rate, I hope any such memories don’t begin and end with Laurel Finn and her broken finger. Her broken middle finger.
Though my thoughts try to trace around it, she’s still there in my gut, a figment like an ulcer, an aura stained with something the opposite of charisma. I’m so ashamed. She exploded at me the night before the AP English final, charging me with all kinds of nasty behavior. First I’m disbelieving and silent, pulling my clothes back on. Then I’m begging her to shut up and calm down. Then I’m slamming the car door while she’s reaching either to hold me back or to claw my eyes out. And the door catches her finger. The commotion…Mr. Finn in the ER waiting lounge at Phelps Community calls me a filthy Arab and tells me to stay on my side of the room; if I come within twenty feet of him he won’t answer for what happens next.
I don’t correct his misapprehension about Iranians being synonymous with Arabs. It isn’t the appropriate moment.
Baba shows up with a plastic container of salted pistachios, which Mr. Finn drops in the nearest bin. We drive home in silence.
So I fret and I stew. I stay up all night trying to write Laurel a letter, equal parts apology and accusation and a testimony of love. Rework it, rework it. The next day, sleepless and upset, I blow the AP English final, but good. The exam on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I’ve loved all spring. Suddenly they make no sense at all. Neither do I. Kind Mrs. Harriet Bikovksy turns into a legalistic vulture and refuses to let me do a retake. (Has the Laurel Finn version of my shame already hit the gossip channels around greater Buffalo, New York? Is Mrs. Bikovsky doing the feminist solidarity routine? I thought she liked m
e.)
Since my grade point has plummeted, Colchester College sends the nicest letter revoking my partial scholarship. My only hope to salvage the situation is to take a make-up level-five English over the summer. But the local smart-asses have signed up for all the AP English; the courses are closed. Laurel Finn is going to have a lot to answer for in terms of wrecking my chance to go to college.
Then Auntie Nurjahan over in central New Hampshire happens to ring up Maman one day. They mutter in Farsi about the disaster. Auntie comes up with the idea of my spending six weeks at her place and taking a course at nearby Tupperneck College. I can earn my credits, repair my average. Auntie would love to play house with me.
Baba doesn’t like Maman’s sister Nurjahan, but he likes the idea of my losing the financial aid even less. My folks can’t afford to send me to college without help. An immigrant at the age of twenty from the highlands west of Mashad—he and Maman left Iran in 1961 or 1962—he has seen his own hopes for instant assimilation in the Camelot era of the United States collapse like columns of ash. Prosperity isn’t promised in the Bill of Rights.
They soldier on, Baba and Maman. In the little backyard of our rental flat in Tonawanda, New York, they try to grow peaches and apricots. “When we are young, we move all summer to temporary village in highlands beyond Dizbad,” says Maman, her eyes bright. “Whole village goes—Muki leading prayers, family, grandparents, teenagers, babies, schoolteacher. Everyone walks our flocks to summer pasture, and we make religious pilgrimage. We sing. Is old Silk route. Silk Road, from China and India to markets in West.” She’s describing rural poverty, I know, but she remembers it as if it were the golden time. While here in rich America, everything is expensive and money for college has been tight.