by Peter Wright
A moving van sits in front of the split-level. Men in blue jumpsuits wrangle a sofa through the front door, and their voices drift across the open lot. Beneath my boots, a suction-kiss, these last three days of rain and the river out of its banks. Chestnut lopes ahead, his short legs lost in the grass. Chestnut, named for his red-brown coat, is our glorious mutt, his hiccupping limp and fur-hidden scars carriers of a secret history. He’s my first dog, and I recently admitted to my mother that I’d had no idea how much I’d love him. “How could you not?” My mother tussled the dog’s head. “Remember that.”
“What?”
“Love has a way of surprising us.”
I lift my chin and watch my breath mesh into the gray. I imagine the changes to come. The trucks of my uncles’ construction company, my father their gofer laborer, just as he’d been through high school and as an undergrad. My uncles with their callused hands and rough manners and practical knowledge; my father the little brother they both teased and protected, a botany major, doctoral fellowships in England and France and the author of a pair of books unread by anyone outside his field. My father is the youngest department chair at the local university he’d attended as an undergrad, his hometown returned to in order to marry the high school sweetheart he’d never stopped loving. He ambles through the weeds, stork legs and wide feet. His hands clasped behind his back. His gaze upon the ground and his thoughts snared in his world of grasses and insects. Each, he’s fond of telling his only child, unique. Each a miracle.
I pause beside one of the stakes planted at the lot’s center. I brush back the windswept strands that have escaped my ponytail. Chestnut circles back, and I crouch and stroke his head. “Good boy.” I wrangle my chin from my scarf’s folds and plant a kiss behind his ear, not minding the stink of wet fur. I’ve seen the blueprints, and as the chill sinks into my lungs, the house rises from the empty space. Rooms and steps and windows. Toilets and sinks. The kitchen. My bedroom. The home where I’ll grow up. The home I’ll leave only to return to again and again. A college student. A wife. A mother. The years stretch ahead of me, a corridor of shadows and blinding light.
I join my father by the tall oak. “Can we keep the tree?” My boot’s toe traces a shallow root.
“Do you know what kind it is?”
“Are you serious?”
“I wouldn’t bet against you, but still.”
“Oak.”
“More specific?”
“Pin.”
“Would you like to keep it?”
“Unless there’s a good reason to get rid of it. Give me a boost.”
He bends his knees, hands cupped and fingers laced. I place a foot into the cradle and he lifts. I scramble onto the lowest branch and sit. I consider him, this higher perch, the perspective of a parent looking upon their child. How vulnerable he seems in this framing, as if he were falling away, shrinking, the way he and mother often do in my dreams. Confession number two: in my school days’ invisibility daydreams, I occasionally picture a world without my parents. I guess this is common, a combination of budding independence and my greatest fear. Sometimes one is gone (cancer, a car wreck—but I can’t, not even in a daydream, picture them divorced); sometimes both (plague, a natural gas explosion), and there are times I become so swept up that I begin to weep, my chest and throat tight, my reality overwhelmed by the nightmares of my imagination.
I gaze up and plan my route. My thoughts leapfrog—the next step and the five after that. The first reaches easy, the branches solid and wide. I’ve always had a knack for climbing—trees, jungle gyms, rainspouts. “My little monkey,” a nickname given by my mother after I mastered escaping my crib. The branches around me a puzzle, an arrangement of pieces, another testing of grids and boxes and waiting steps. My father and Chestnut below, a straining of necks.
“Careful,” he says. He brushes away the bark I kicked onto his jacket.
“What?” I sway, a wavering of hips, my free hand clawing the empty air.
“Please don’t kid,” he says. Chestnut barks.
I contemplate my next move and grasp a branch. “One should always have a plan,” I say. I can’t see his face, but I imagine his grin, my words an echo of his favorite advice. I hoist myself to the next perch and welcome the horizon of rooftops and power lines. The breeze colder here. The gray above splintered by thinning branches. I consider the earth below. The branches would slow my fall, a few broken bones, but probably not death. Then another thought, and I remove my scarf. An allegiance to possibilities, the kind of morbid scenarios that keep me up at night. The magicians who accidently hanged themselves. Poor Isadora Duncan.
Chestnut charges, disappearing then emerging from the ruts and weeds. Hackles raised and frenzied barks. Our protector, fearless and loyal and ignorant of his size. The approaching man with a thinning comb over and a self-important stride. Shorter than my father but thick in the chest and waist. He stops and plants his fists against his hips. He forsakes hello for a questioning of what my father’s doing. A tone reminiscent of my gym teacher or the sour woman who weighs my mother’s mailings at the post office. The man glances up, and I pause my descent. Chestnut’s yelps abandoned in favor of sniffing the man’s pant cuff.
His name is Slater, and a brief exchange establishes him as the new occupant of the original owner’s house. I sit on the lowest branch. My sneakers dangle above the dropped leaves. Slater offers a grudging “Welcome” before diving into his interrogation. The size of the house we’re planning. How early the crew will start. Do we have plans for a pool. Do we own more dogs. My father’s attempts at humor and connection unacknowledged. I listen, present yet wandering into another future, the day’s promise dimmed by the notion of living with this man’s scowls. I take a breath and remind myself that first impressions can be misleading, a pep talk that fades the longer our new neighbor prattles on.
The conversation between my father and Slater ends with a stiff handshake. Slater marches off, a retreat marred by his stumble over a stake among the weeds. He looks down then glares back at us.
“I’m not passing judgment,” I say. “At least not yet.”
“Thank you.”
“But he does seem super pleasant, and I think he forgot to ask you a few questions. Like what church we go to and who we’re voting for and whether or not we think the moon landing was a fake, which I’m pretty sure he does.”
“Give him time.”
“What choice do we have?”
“Exactly.” He reaches up, an invitation. A pose he’s struck a hundred times. A game of leap and catch we won’t be able to play much longer. “Come on, monkey. Let’s go see your mother.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I want to be called monkey anymore.”
He nods. “Fair enough.”
Midsummer, the morning already prickly and thick. Thunderstorms earlier, but now the sun blazes, the wet lawns and shrubs offering a scent tropical and green, and I bike through a dreamy mist. School’s out, and I relish the break from junior high idiocy, relish the season’s late, lazy nights and the mornings’ luxury of closing my eyes and chasing my dreams back into sleep. I’m taking an online statistics course through my father’s university, and truth be told, I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would, its parallel realms, its calculations of what the next breath might hold. I crest a small hill, and as I coast down the other side, the breeze cools my sweat. Overhead, the hiss of sagging electrical wires. The call of cicadas hidden in the trees.
Let me fill in a few gaps along my narrative’s Z-axis. Our club hockey team stumbled through a 0-8-2 spring season, a record my father suggested might build more character than a championship. Unfortunately, he offered this advice on our way home from our last game, and I’ll stick with my contention that my response of “Fuck the fuck off” was, given his timing, appropriate and syntactically creative, if not actually correct. My invisibility campaign went through its own fade, an unspectacular ev
olution of feeling more comfortable in my own skin. There was a brief flare up on the Missy Blough front, an incident that may or may not have involved me placing a wad of watermelon gum on her locker dial. There were other developments—the parties and dances I wasn’t invited to, our high school math quiz club that took first place at State. My mother signed her second poetry collection. My father published a paper on phosphate runoffs and algae blooms. The three of us spent hours surfing decorating sites and noting the designs that struck us, storm doors and medicine cabinets and light fixtures, our new house unbuilt yet becoming more real with each click.
I pedal on. The beachy scent of sunscreen rises from my neck. My long braid sways between my shoulders. Heat lifts from the macadam, from the metal and glass of parked cars. Two miles separate our apartment from the lot. A pair of facts—the average female skull is 7.1 mm thick and kinetic energy equals one half mass times velocity squared. Of course I wear a helmet.
I stop and straddle my bike at my route’s busiest intersection. “Promise you’ll walk your bike across,” my parents ask, and I usually do. The traffic whips along this stretch, people trying to beat the light, half-thinking turns in and out of gas stations and strip malls, the world and its hurry, its ringing phones and crying children, places to be and the clock always ticking. A deeper concern waits in my parents’ goodbye stares and last-minute urgings to Be safe . . . please, their apprehensions shifting from distracted drivers to their distracted daughter. I will, I answer, but sometimes I worry myself. My daydreams. My drownings in thought. There have been mornings where I’ve surfaced with a sleepwalker’s jolt. A turn missed. A surfacing onto an unfamiliar street and my bike’s wobbling stop as I blink away the cobwebs.
I press the crossing button. A summer’s experiment—the altering of my thumb’s rhythm, the seconds counted between pushes. My theory—a rapid cadence would indicate a single, impatient pedestrian while random pulses might suggest an ever-growing crowd who’d be rewarded with a quicker crossing. My hypothesis so far unproven, yet I’m not so cynical as to believe the button is merely a placebo to soothe an agitated populace. Somewhere tucked within the system, a pulse must await, and when I discover the pattern, I’ll share it with my parents and statistics teacher.
Delivery trucks buzz through the intersection. A gutter tide of windswept papers and coffee cups tumble around my tires. The evaporating haze dreary and flecked with grit. In the lot beside me, an inflatable tube man dances. Flailing arms and tasseled hair, a permanent smile. The hum of the tube man’s blower and the plastic’s ruffle resonates in my handlebars. The dancing shadow falls over me, the flicker of sun and shade, movements I visualize on an undulating graph, another rhythm waiting to be understood.
A barking voice breaks my drift. A black pickup and a sedan at the red light, the pickup’s engine running, its driver’s-side door flung open. A man clambers out, a muscled torso and tight T-shirt. The sun glistens on his sunglasses and shaved head. The pickup’s bumper plastered with red-and-white stickers, a red-lettered decal on the cab’s rear window—Holy America. One America. The sedan’s driver remains in his car, and on his bumper, a different vein of stickers, none of them red and white. The bald man shouts, his arms flung in wild gestures before ramming his fist into the driver’s side window. With the third blow, the glass shatters. The light turns green, but the bald man is lost in his rage, deaf to the angry horns. The opposite lanes slow. Drivers and passengers stare, the adults no better than the junior high mobs anticipating a fight’s first punch. The bald man yanks at the door, cursing and growling, more animal than human. I freeze, stunned by the first-person witnessing of this summer’s violence, the ugly manifestations of McNally’s ever-more-rabid calls for a new order, righteous and lean, a nation singular and God-fearing. The cellphone videos replayed on the nightly news. Bus stop beatings. Horrible words exchanged in supermarket aisles. Rampaging gangs, their faces masked by bandannas. The cruelty repulsive both on the surface yet also deeper, its flicker burning in my gut and sinew, the recalled shock of my fist meeting Missy’s mouth.
The bald man reaches inside the broken window but then steps back. He holds out his hands, a begging wave, his knuckles streaked with blood. A pistol in the hand that emerges from the shattered window. The honking of the nearest cars falls silent. The sedan’s tires squeal, a shower of pebbled glass, a charge through a light just turned red.
* * *
From a distance, it’s hard telling my father apart from his brothers. All of them ropy, sawdust in their black curls. All of them gangly yet deft afoot, the sidestepping of cords, the ducking beneath beams, the heel-toe crossings of planks laid across the mud. The haze lingers beneath the spreading oak, a parcel of mist stirred as I prop my bike against the trunk. Only from this distance do the brothers’ differences announce themselves. My uncles’ necks browner, the crow’s feet etched by sun and cold, the hitch in the backs knotted from years of labor.
High in the oak, the rustle of leaves, the squirrels’ acrobatics. I cross the yard, the sun so bright I’m forced to hold a hand above my eyes. Chlorine on the breeze, the backyards of fence-hidden pools, the carry of voices and splashes. I swat away the gnats’ tumbling clouds. The house’s foundation already poured, and the wall beams frame the trees and street beyond. The nail gun’s sigh and spit punctuate the birds’ songs. The house strikes me as a living thing. Its activity and daily growth, its wooden skeleton and waiting arteries of conduit and wire and pipe. I climb the short set of concrete steps and cross the back’s doorless threshold. Shade here, the second story’s new subfloor, and above, the echo of heavy boots. My sneakers whisper across the sawdust. I pick up a pencil and etch the date and my initials on a beam, a daily ritual, each a whisper waiting the burial of sheetrock.
I climb the open stairwell and emerge back into the sunlight. Above, the roof’s slanting beams and a sky of blue and white. I cross the floor to the corner where my bedroom will be. The open air all around and the earth below.
“Howdy, girl.” My Uncle Bill takes off his gloves. “I’m thinking it’s a good time for a break. How about you?”
My father greets me with a kiss that smells of sawdust and sweat. Last night, we sat here in the dark, our fingers sticky with our ice cream cones’ melt, his hand panning the heavens as he shared the stories of Pegasus and Hercules and Draco. Uncle Alex unplugs his circular saw and wraps the cord. I go downstairs to fetch our drinks, my hand numbed in the cooler’s puddling ice. Ninety-plus again today, the eighth day in a row, but I don’t mind. It’s good to be outside, my hands active, my focus beyond my own stewing thoughts. We sit around the stairwell’s opening. My face in the sun, my legs dangling in the shadows. I sip and allow the moment to engulf me. The smiles of my uncles. My father’s face masked behind his brow-wiping bandanna. The hot breeze, a cardinal’s brief perch atop a roof beam. The scene soothes the nerves left smoldering by the intersection’s violence, a witnessing I decide to keep to myself, my parents already worried about my daily ride.
Plans are made—my uncles headed to the lumberyard. Lunchtime calls to subcontractors and wives. My uncles tease me. I’m the youngest of the brothers’ children, a baby’s baby. My cousins in college, others with careers and marriages. Uncle Alex set to be a grandfather in October. Uncle Bill in December.
“Who’s your boyfriend this week?” Uncle Alex asks.
“Same as last week,” I say.
“I forget his name.” Uncle Bill squints. “Herman? Bruce?”
“You’re getting close.”
“Really?”
“No.”
Uncle Alex taps a hammer in his callused palm. “Let young Herman know your family has high standards for any and all suitors.”
Uncle Bill leans forward. “There’s an initiation, you know.”
Uncle Alex: “Many are called but few are chosen.”
I take their empty bottles. I make a point of always working at the site—sweeping, wrapping cords, collecting garbage—my be
lief that a bit of hustle will ensure my keep. I pause halfway down the steps. “I’ll give Herman a heads up, but don’t be too rough on him.”
My uncles take the truck to the lumberyard. My father leaves to caulk the basement windows. Alone on the second floor’s open perch, I stoop and pick up nails. The open walls remind me of the doll’s house I’d played with as a child. The unblocked sun falls warm on my shoulders, the breeze sweet with honeysuckle. On the patio next door, Slater leashes his pug. Slater bends as he adjusts the clasp, but his eyes remain fixed on our house. When my uncles learned Slater occupied a desk in the county supervisor’s office, they understood the odd attention heaped upon their latest project. Agents from zoning and ordinance pay regular visits. They hold levels over the floors, check permits, measure the inches between beams and the feet from sidewalk to the front stoop. The inspectors are old friends, and they part with handshakes and shrugs that express their powerlessness in the matter. At our property’s edge, a new line of stakes, a boundary marking the privacy fence Slater has planned. Beyond the stakes, a growing cluster of red and white yard signs. McNally for America and One America—Holy America. The dog’s leash secure, Slater stands and his gaze lifts to me. I imagine myself from his perspective, a doll in a dollhouse, a girl set against the clouds. I don’t wave and neither does he. With a flick of my broom, I send a sawdust plume over the floor’s edge.
My father advocates patience with our neighbor. Some people need time, he says, and what seems like indifference might actually be a shield. “All of us have been hurt,” he said the other night over dinner. “All deal with it in their own way.”