She was barely past blob status—when not smiling, she still looked, from certain angles, alarmingly like Alfred Hitchcock—but she was his.
9
Brian hadn’t spotted me yet. He was leaning against a lamppost, reading, eternally Proust, pausing to glance up and down the block. I thought, “Oh, there’s Brian.” I’d expected him to look fundamentally changed, but he appeared much the same: gentle bookworm with a loose posture. Not the monstrous guy who danced through my imagination, saying over and over, “I don’t want what you want.” Even from fifty feet away, the contours of his face filled me with the same diffuse sense of well-being that they had from the beginning. I turned the feeling away; this visit was for Gracie. I was tolerating his presence, at best.
He looked up again and saw me. There was something soft and unguarded in his face. I hoped I looked more reserved.
He stowed Proust and walked over to where I’d parked.
“Spiffy car,” he said.
A faded blue Volvo, which he’d helped pay for.
“Glad you like it; you’re a shareholder.”
We smiled; it felt tantamount to moonwalking.
When we got to the studio I showed him inside and went next door to my mom’s to get the baby. I had dressed her up for the occasion. Most babies are naked when they meet their father. Amelia-Grace was in her white cotton sack with rosebuds embroidered on the collar, the same dress she’d worn home from the hospital. It had swum around her as a newborn but fit her now. Somehow it seemed right that he should meet her in the first real clothes she’d ever worn. I carried her to the studio. “Believe it or not, behind that door is your dad.”
Brian was standing in the galley kitchen, hovering by the door. He looked at her, looked at me, looked at her again. I can’t remember what he said. Or if he said anything at all. I do know he cried. A discreet cry, so as not to alarm the baby, who remained cheerful and curious. She reached up and pulled off his glasses, batted at his face. He had brought her a plush rainbow hippo; she gurgled at the colors and reached for the ribboned edges of the hippo’s ears. Brian watched her and watched her and watched her.
The visit was short, three days, maybe four. He spent most of that time staring at her, taking her in. When she cooed instead of her regular flute squeaks, he noticed. When she hiccuped or burped or sneezed, he noted it. When she smiled, his universe expanded. Surely no one had ever been looked at with more interest. Not Neil Armstrong bouncing on the moon, nor Muhammad Ali dancing around the ring, not even the little dude in his manger adored by his wise men. None of them had enjoyed a steadier, more absorbed gaze than the one Gracie received now, from her father.
His pleasure in her was matched by an equal or greater fear of inadvertently doing her harm. He wasn’t really comfortable holding her, even sitting down, unless she was strapped against his chest in the Snugli. He held her like a man mistakenly entrusted with a rare, precious object.
The last day of Brian’s visit we drove up to Lake Lagunitas, a reservoir in the foothills of Mt. Tam. We parked about a mile below the water and walked up, Brian carrying Gracie in the frontpack. I carried all the gear required to go anywhere with an infant. As we labored up the hill, Gracie pulled off Brian’s glasses, flung them to the ground, and laughed. Brian stooped down, holding her with both hands. “Can you get those for me?” He couldn’t let go of her, even with one hand. I put the glasses back on his face. Gracie laughed and threw them down again. And again. She seemed to enjoy watching this dance. Finally, Brian tucked the glasses into his pocket, after which Gracie laughed some more for no discernible reason. When she laughed, she bobbed up and down with the pleasure of it, a mischievous Harpo Marx. Through all this, Brian clutched her to his chest. She didn’t seem to mind the extra security; it put no damper on her antics, her head bobbing, her nascent sense of humor.
By the time we reached the summit, it was late afternoon. The water’s surface was an oblong gray oval, reflecting high silvery clouds and an occasional pocket of blue. There was no wind. We spread out a blanket and lay the baby down to gaze at the scythe-shaped shadows of eucalyptus leaves playing across her face and arms.
Until this moment we’d been in near perpetual motion, feeding the baby, walking the baby, changing the baby. Side by side but not face to face. Now we sat on opposite sides of a picnic table and looked at each other. For what felt like a long time, we said nothing. The birds chirped. The light pooled on Gracie’s blanket in amber patches. Gracie produced an ongoing babble reminiscent of a fish tank, a comforting, steady stream of watery sounds.
“I am sorry I hurt you,” Brian said, very simple and very direct, because that was his way.
“Thank you,” I said.
We sat there a while longer, looking at each other, glancing over at Gracie on her blanket. She was asleep now, with her head tossed back, her ear cocked upward as though listening for an answer to a question only she could hear.
“Have you seen this?” I lifted the silky hair at the base of her neck. There was her strawberry birthmark.
“I hadn’t,” Brian said. “Thank you for showing me.”
It began to get dark. The picnic table was wooden and old, splintering. I pulled at slivers of the wood, prying them free. Brian said again, “I am sorry.” I stared down at Gracie, watching her chest move rhythmically with the deep breath of sleep. He was sorry? What did sorry even mean in this context?
What I wanted most from him was curiosity. I wanted him to ask me how it had been to be alone and pregnant. Ask about the day of her birth. Every blood transfusion. I wanted him to say, “Tell me everything.” But he didn’t ask, and I didn’t say. Nor did I ask him what his time alone, as his daughter had been born across the country, had been like.
Still, some measure of forgiveness arose between us. Not much. Not a tidal wave of forgiveness, more like a capful, a thimbleful. We loved someone in common; that was a start.
The product of our mutual astonishment was lifting her head on the blanket by our feet, turning her face for our approval, our smiles. Her own smile was utterly undefended, a smile of abandon, a crinkle-eyed smile. She smiled like that every time, throwing herself into it. Now, for the first time, she added to the smile the slightest lift of her left eyebrow.
Brian laughed. “That’s a very lofty gesture for an infant.”
“It’s your patented left brow lift!”
“Is it?” he said. But I could tell he agreed.
We packed up our things and headed down the trail. It was fully dark now, and the walk back seemed more treacherous than our jolly walk up. Brian held Gracie snug against his chest. The fact that he lived in fear of dropping her ensured, I hoped, that he never would.
There was no moon yet and few other hikers on the path. We crunched along in silence, branches tossing around over our heads, the reservoir a sleek black expanse at our backs. In a few hours Brian would be on a plane headed home to New York; the baby and I would go back to our studio, our sleep loft, our devoted Lulu, our beloved clan of friends and uncles and grandparents. None of them would feel as right as this: the three of us walking down the hill in the dark.
A young couple walking in the opposite direction stopped to admire Gracie. “Your baby is a cutie,” the woman said. She was talking to us both, assuming, as anyone would, that she was ours. Not mine and sort of his. But ours. Neither of us said anything. Who would impose on strangers with a long, painful explanation of their relationship history? Um, actually he left when I was pregnant, and he just met this baby the day before yesterday or the day before that. We smiled stiffly, walked on; the spell was broken. We were semi-strangers living on separate coasts who happened to have a baby in common.
The next day we drove to the airport making halting small talk. We’d left the baby, loather of long car rides, at home with my mom. Alone together we were awkward. Without her burbling in the backseat, our whole premise for being in the same car was questionable.
“You did great with her,” I s
aid, to say something.
It was true. Brian had made it successfully through the entire visit, despite his worries or because of his caution, without injurious incident. Saying good-bye, he’d told Gracie, “I’m so glad I didn’t drop you,” and kissed the top of her head.
I thought that leaving her again, to fly back across the country, was a form of dropping. But I certainly wasn’t prepared to ask him to stay. I was confused about what kind of time I wanted to spend with Brian, if any. Still, this visit was an unmitigated good for Gracie; she officially knew her father. And he knew her.
Standing beside the curb at departures, I felt as though anything were possible, as if Brian might fling himself back in the car and beg to stay; or get on the plane and lift out of sight for all time. Or that, lacking the courage to move definitively in either direction, we might grow old loitering, staring at the ground. We hugged briefly. Mumbled our good-byes.
Brian looked up. “Thank you for making room for me with her.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. A traffic cop swooshed her hand through the air. Time’s up. I got back in the car, Brian walked into the terminal. Everyone back to their corner.
By the time I arrived home, there was a message on my machine, left from the gate before he boarded. “Hi.” Long pause. “I’m just calling because…” Dead air, followed by muffled airport sounds. “The last few days have been the happiest of my life.”
10
In the days that followed, I pictured Gracie as a balloon and below her, holding the string, hand over hand, were Brian and I. We would tether her here, the two of us. But beside my hope was a destructive impulse of unsettling proportions. If I let the image linger, I could see myself stamping on Brian’s feet, kicking out his knees, biting his face, scratching him off the string. This girl is mine. Back, the fuck, up.
Five pregnant months of falling asleep alone except for Lulu, four months of caring for Gracie solo, transfusion by transfusion. My one-handed life. The way he’d left without a clear plan of when he might return. Or even if. Fuck him, fuck him for saying such a thing. Only bless him too.
I didn’t share that message with anyone. Not my mom, not Cassie, not Suzi, not even with my therapist, Virginia.
I’d known Virginia since I was five years old. She was my mom’s therapist before she was mine. Fairly common in the ’70s and ’80s when there was a more gestalt approach. Frowned on today. But it worked for us.
My mom found her during a tumultuous time: she was in her midtwenties with a young daughter to support, a drug-addicted boyfriend, marginal work, and overbearing parents who wanted, above all, for my mom to look, act, and be uncontroversial, which was the one thing my mom could not do, even if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. Enter Virginia, with her warmth, humor, tolerance for untidiness. She was the calmest, sanest person in my world by a wide margin but also antic, playful.
In the beginning my mom would drag me along to her sessions to be babysat by one of Virginia’s teenage daughters or to linger at the pasture fence, chatting with her horses. My favorite was an obstinate pony named Loggermoss. Who would name their pony Loggermoss? I’d thought. What did that even mean? I asked Virginia once, and she’d said, “Oh, I can’t remember, but isn’t it fun to say?”
Virginia was often late, fluttering into her office with a coterie of bags clinging to one wrist, trying to fluff her wispy hair, apologizing. But when she sat down, you had her undivided attention. It was like sitting in direct sunlight. She illuminated whatever was in the room—the crux of your problem or apex of your potential.
As a rule, I told Virginia everything. But during my first session after Brian’s visit I did not tell her The last few days have been the happiest of my life. I wanted to hold on to those words, to turn over the obscure promise in them, a stone in the palm, casting off heat. I wanted to think about what they meant without anyone else’s voice in my head.
I did tell Virginia that Brian had spent every minute of his visit fretting about dropping the baby. Wasn’t that courting disaster?
“I think that’s called being Jewish,” Virginia responded.
“Fine,” I said, “if he cares so much, how can he tolerate being away from us now, again, even for a minute?”
“Are you asking why he can’t turn on a dime?” Virginia said. “Do people operate that way?”
“I don’t care how people operate,” I said. “Why would I even consider taking a risk with someone who has already hurt me more than I even knew I could be hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Virginia said. “Why would you?”
I scanned her long, thoughtful face. I knew that Virginia had raised her (surprise) fourth daughter, alone. She’d gotten unexpectedly pregnant very late in life, and the father had opted out. Given her own history, I kept expecting Virginia to advocate for single parenthood over the more messy enterprise of partnership. Maybe even advocate against men altogether. But that didn’t seem to be her drift. She seemed to be alert, as ever, for the possibility of growth.
In the 1980s, in the wake of Pol Pot, Virginia had traveled to the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. While there, she sponsored several Cambodian families for relocation in the Bay Area, where, ultimately, she helped them find work and settle into new lives. If people could lose everything—country, livelihood, identity, beloved family—and still find a way forward, however tentative, then surely there was hope for someone with problems as modest as mine.
Virginia carried this infuriating belief: no matter how bad things are, they might be made better.
I drove home in a state of disequilibrium. I kept turning the radio up to drown out my thoughts and then snapping it back off to hear myself think. Brian had once accused me of unconsciously orchestrating life as a single mother because I couldn’t believe, given my family history, that any man could be a safe father. When he said this we were in a Cuban-Chinese restaurant, I was pregnant, and he had just reiterated his intention not to be my partner or to father this baby in any traditional way. Then he had asked me to split the check. I was so enraged at him, for everything up to and including his refusal to pay for my half of a Cuban-Chinese chicken, that I’d shrugged off his accusation. I’d assumed it was just his way of making himself feel better about his decision. But now, driving down the mountain, slow turn by slow turn, it dawned on me that there might be the smallest kernel of truth in this. My mother had lived with three men during my childhood, and each one, in his own way, had harmed me. Not one out of three or two out of three, but three out of three. It’s hard to argue with those odds.
Had I entered into this unhappiness via my own unconscious imperatives? I had no idea. We act out of a Molotov cocktail of conscious and unconscious desires. And also, we just do stuff.
The next day there was another message from Brian: “Being apart while you were pregnant is the biggest regret of my life.”
I called him back. By way of answering the phone, he said, “Heather Harpham.”
“Hi,” I said.
He handed the word back. “Hi.”
And then we sat in silence. Not a silence from our typical repertoire of silences; not an angry or disappointed or repressed silence, infused with unexpressed resentments. This was a tensile silence, a charged silence. Possibility ran back and forth between us on the stretched, live wire of what wasn’t said. Erotic silence.
Who knew such a thing even existed? Well, someone. Not, until now, me. For a long time we continued saying nothing.
Finally I said, “OK, bye.”
“Bye,” Brian said, and we put down the phone, I hoped, at the exact same moment. A synchronized dance, with a continent between us. Five minutes later, he called back. “I keep thinking about when I can come see you both again.”
11
On Brian’s second trip out, Gracie and I visited him at the San Anselmo Inn, where he stayed. Gracie was now almost six months old and still waking up at night. I didn’t know how this was going to work, an infant at a small in
n, but I wasn’t ready to have Brian stay at the studio, to broach the idea of a reunion to my mom. I knew she’d be supportive of whatever I decided. I knew she thought I’d been, at times, too rigid in not communicating with Brian while pregnant, unbending. I knew she wanted, more than anything else, for Gracie and me to be happy, and if that meant a reconciliation with Brian, she’d be the first to leap for joy. But—given how miserable she’d watched me be for the last year or so—this would take some getting used to. But more than that, I didn’t want to be subjected to the tide of her opinion when I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted.
And so we hung out at the inn. The room was dark, too precious, and smelled of tangerine air freshener. But Gracie thought it was great. A whole new environment in which to be frustrated! She had been lifting herself up onto her hands and knees for the last few weeks, flirting with crawling by rocking back and forth.
Brian set a bright blue glass bottle on the carpet, a few feet out of her grasp. Up she went onto knees and hands, and the rocking began, the heaving, the straining, the spurts and fits of ill-coordinated forward motion. She was reenacting the water-to-earth struggle, trying to get her knees to cooperate. She inched toward the bottle; locomotion powered more by will than physical ability. Gracie craned her neck to look behind her. Was I still there? Yes. Was Brian? Yes.
“Go, baby,” I said. “Go, Amelia-Grace.” Brian said nothing but pushed the bottle farther away. More effort, a shuffling of knees, a stretched and retracting neck, turtlelike. Was she trying to head-butt the bottle? And then her hand went out, fingers open, and the bottle toppled. She looked back at us. We beamed at her; approval and pride ran the circuit of our little triangle.
“The great bottle challenge,” Brian said. It was a garden-variety moment, first crawl, but it felt doubly sweet. Infinitely sweet coming from her in front of us both.
After her glass bottle success, Gracie and I packed up to return to the studio for the night. I leaned against the doorjamb, bags on an arm, baby on a hip. “Bye.”
Happiness--A Memoir Page 8