A Doubter's Almanac (42 page)

They, too, were concentrating.

Up on the porch sat my mother, happily reading. She was another ant, I understood then, trembling with her own intention. My sister was pausing now and then to glance up at her.

Before the sun reached its peak, the main hull had grown to length. We stood back to admire it. When I whistled—my father whistling in return—my mother looked up, then set down her book and clapped. The main deck was twelve feet long by then—exactly the length of my sister and me head to toe, with one of my high-top sneakers laid between us—and six feet wide. A dozen courses in length, a dozen and a half in width, and two in height. Four hundred thirty-two hollow, truncated biconics of DuPont polyethylene terephthalate, corrugated at their bottoms, lashed with duct tape to exclude a volume exceeding the water-equivalent mass of any combination of Andret family who might wish to brave an expedition. The whole thing rested like a gray iceberg on the sand.

We broke for lunch.

—

A
FTER WE FINISHED
eating, Paulie and I walked down to the shore again by ourselves. I began taping a course for a side rail, but Paulie just sat down on the sand. “Go ahead and relax,” I said.

“I am.”

I looked out at the lake. A mass of bottom weeds had been torn loose by the wind the night before, and now the waves were edging them toward us. “No, really,” I said. “No problem. I’ll do the rest myself.”

“I heard you, Hans.”

“Good. Because I was just wondering.” I pulled out a length of tape. “Because if you really did hear me, then maybe you want to help.”

She watched me with a disdainful smile. Then she said, morosely, “You’d do anything, you know?”

“Excuse me?”

“You think you’re a rebel, but you’re the worst kind of conformist. You’d do absolutely anything he thinks of.” She nodded toward his shed, where through the window we could see the top of his head.

“You’re full of it, Smallette.”

“If he asked you to stab yourself in the chest, you’d say, ‘Should I put the knife back in the drawer when I’m done?’ ”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t you see how futile it is?”

“What do you mean, futile? We just built a boat together.”

“Half of one. What about the sides?”

“I’m working on them by myself.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Well, then what
do
you mean? We could finish it today if you helped.”

“I’m talking about
him,
Hans. He doesn’t give a damn. Don’t you see that? He only cares about one thing.” She pointed toward the shed.

“He helped us all morning, Paulie.”

She laughed. “Well,” she said, “let’s see if he helps us tomorrow.”

—

E
VEN AT THE
age I was that summer, I was precocious enough that I could have discussed with my father whatever mathematical endeavor he’d embarked upon. But I never even asked him about it.

That kind of curiosity—a curiosity about the man beyond the effects he had on my own life—wouldn’t arrive for years.

Paulette was right: he never did help us again with the boat. The next morning, while my mother made breakfast for the two of us, we heard the porch door slap shut and a moment later watched him make his way out to the shed.

My mother glanced over at Paulie. “I’m sorry,” she said, slipping more eggs onto her plate. “But if it makes you feel any better, what he’s working on right now could be of major significance.”

My sister didn’t even look up.

It took Paulie and me the whole day to build the transom. Then another day for the bow and the side rails and then an entire weekend to lash all the parts together. We matched up the deck and the rails, then wedged the necks of the deck bottles through the diamond-shaped gaps in the sides. The whole thing had been my father’s idea, and it had been the prospect of working with him that had driven both of us to the task. But we finished alone.

Paulie was right: I did want to please him.

But something else was happening, too: every day now, I found myself ingesting a smaller dose. By the end of that week, I wasn’t sure whether I was even rolling anymore or whether the magnitude of the task Paulie and I were doing had simply produced in me a state of meditation that was no different from the drug’s.

Late on a Sunday afternoon, we made the final assembly on a patch of beach near the waterline. When we’d taped together the straps between the gunwale and the transom, Paulie stood back and rested her hands on her hips. “Look,” she said quietly.

I slung my arm over her shoulder. “A boat,” I said.

It had required more than 750 bottles and a dozen rolls of tape. The pitch of the deck was steadied by a keel of oversize jugs.

“We did it, Hans.”

“I guess we did, Paulie.”

“We,”
she said. “You and I.”

That evening, when Dad emerged from the shed, he watched us lift it into the shallows. We carried it across the muddy bank and set it gingerly down on the surface, where of course it floated. High on its beam. Dad went back to the house and returned with his camera, then snapped pictures of the two of us as we held our arms together across the bow. He walked up to the cabin again and came down with the garden hose. I took it from his hands and filled the jugs in the keel. As the last one reached its brim, the whole craft sighed and settled into its draft.

Now my mother came down from the porch. She walked up the dock like the Princess of Wales and lifted her skirt elegantly over the transom. “Splendid,” she said. “Splendid, splendid, splendid.”

On the deck, she kicked off her sandals and shook her hips. The craft, which was the size of our Country Squire but which—with the keel jugs empty, anyway—weighed no more than Bernie, stood firm. Bernie, as though to acknowledge the equivalence, lowered himself off the dock and pushed on it with his paws. The rails hardly dipped. Even the minnows came out of the shadows to look.

“What are we calling it?” said Paulie.

“How about the
Victory
?” said my mother in her British accent. She glanced slyly around.

“The victory over what?” said Dad.

“Over nothing,” said Paulie.

“The
Victory
was Nelson’s command ship,” said Mom. “It was fleet command at Trafalgar.”

“And this is our Trafalgar,” said my father.

My mother laughed. “Our what?”

He laughed, too. He didn’t laugh that often, but when he did it was almost a bellow. The sound filled the cove. My mother watched him.

“Do you perhaps mean our
Waterloo
?”

“Oh,” he said. Then, “Perhaps I do.”

Paulette said, “We can build a
Royal Sovereign,
too.”

“Good, Paulie,” said my mother.

“The
Royal Sovereign
was Nelson’s second-in-command,” said Paulie.

“I know that, Smallette.”

“No, you don’t, Hans.”

Mom turned to the deep. “I pronounce you, then”—here she gestured grandly over the bow—“the HMS
Victory
. Congratulations to the entire family of Andrets, boatbuilders and scholars.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

My father stood with his camera on the dock, shaking his head distantly, laughing more softly now and smiling queerly down at all of us, like a man I’d never seen before.

—

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON,
Paulie and I started on the
Royal Sovereign.
Paulie was the one who insisted. She wanted to refight the great Battle of Trafalgar.

I carried down the bags of bottles to the beach. She’d just come out from a swim and was pulling off her wet bikini top by extracting it from her sweatshirt. (As a younger boy, I’d been fascinated by this trick, which I’d first seen at the public pool in Tapington. But by elementary school, I knew enough topology to trivialize it: in the topological world, size was utterly irrelevant, and things stretched or shrank at will. If you imagined my sister in her bikini top, wearing a sweatshirt that grew continuously (or if you imagined my sister shrinking continuously) until the sweatshirt was miles away from even touching her, it was obvious that she could change whatever wet clothes she wanted, without removing the dry clothes that covered them.) She pulled the dripping top out of the armhole of her sweatshirt, as though it were a ferret that had crawled up her sleeve, and hung it on a branch.

“The great Battle of Trafalgar?” I said. “They were both Nelson’s ships.”

“Correct.”

“That means they’re both on the same side, Paulie. How can we reenact a battle with one side’s navy? Answer that one.”

“It would be a metaphor.”

I looked at her.

“For our family, Hans.”

By the time Dad came out of the cabin and walked past us to his shed, we were at work. By the end of the next afternoon, all the sections were complete; and by the end of the one after that, we were running the strapping around the deck. “You know,” Paulie said as we set the last jug into the keel. “We just have to stick together now.”

“Who does?”

“You and I, Hans.”

I loved my sister—I’d realized it again that week, working at her side in the shade of the cedars while the adrenalized generosity of even my diminished dose misted through me. I loved her, even if we would always be in battle. “That’s a little dramatic,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“It’s intended to be.”

“He’s busy, Paulie. He can’t play around with a couple of kids.”

“He’s not
that
busy. And we’re a couple of
his
kids. He gets this little fantasy going, then he leaves it to us to finish.” She measured out a length of tape and in an even voice said, “He’s unreliable. That’s what it is.”

“So?”

“So, I never know if he’s going to come out here with some idea like this or just sulk around like an asshole inside that shed.”

I whistled.

“Shut up. It’s the truth.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no better word.”

“Which word, Paulie?
Asshole
? Or
shed
?”

“Unreliable.”

“Oh, come on.” I touched her elbow. “Things could be worse.”

She looked at me as though I’d slapped her. “Not really. There aren’t many things that
could
be worse. Not for a girl, anyway. There’s not much worse than having an asshole for a father.”

I held a length of tape against the gunwale, and she pushed it sullenly into place. I drew out another, and we attached this one across the bow. But when I handed the roll to her for the other side, she wouldn’t take it. Her eyes were damp.

“You don’t understand, Hans. It’s like
quicksand
. I keep trying to push myself up, but the ground keeps sinking. That’s him. He’s the quicksand I grew up on.”

—

W
HEN
I
ENTERED,
Dad was at his desk, using a screwdriver to scrape the rust off of something. Mom had sent me out to the shed with a sandwich.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Humanity,” he answered. He set down the screwdriver. “Humanity trying to defeat its limitations. Otherwise known as a dynamo. This one powers a lantern.”

“Okay.”

“But it’s just another example of man against God.” He blew rust from the desk blotter. “Which, if anyone asks, happens to be the purpose of life. Look at this.” He held up what looked like a flashlight crossed with a pistol, set onto a stool from a dollhouse. When he squeezed the handle, a metal gear turned, and after a few pulls a bulb on the end began to flicker.

“God appears to be winning.”

He laughed. “For the moment perhaps. It’s still pretty rusty.” He bent forward and began digging at the teeth again.

“Can I ask you a question, Dad?”

“You already did.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, back. What’s the question?”

“Are you happy?”

“Nope. Nobody is.”

He hadn’t even stopped to think about it.

“What about when you’re working?”

“Working?”

“On mathematics.”

He set down the dynamo and looked straight ahead, so that I saw his face in profile. In the corner of the shed I could see that there were a few other rusty gadgets, too, along with some old tools. “Do I look like I’m working?”

“No.”

“Do I look happy?”

“I guess not.”

I glanced up then and noticed that there were also more boxes on the rafters. All of them, at least all the ones that I could see, said
WRONG
.

“It’s not about happy, Hans. It’s about not giving up.”

He turned back to the dynamo then, and I set down the plate with the sandwich on it.

“Happy isn’t even a real idea,” he said. “It’s just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn’t even know what it means.”

—

A
T SUNSET,
P
AULIE
and I unveiled the second boat. I waited in the shallows while she walked up to the cabin to retrieve our parents, who took their places on the beach. At the side of the dock, the
Victory
and the
Royal Sovereign
were tied toe rail to toe rail. Stable of keel, shallow of draft, moored abreast of each other in the lowering sun. In the perfect calm, they looked as though they’d been set out for display on a glass table. Next to them, the minnows made their perfect shadows of the hulls, now in silver, now in black.

Mom held her hand over her mouth. Dad stood beside her with an appraising look.

The Reluctant Cartesian

A
S WE WALKED
up from the water a few mornings later, my father glanced back at the dock, where the boats were still moored. They looked like a pair of naval statues glinting in the sun. “Impressive,” he said. “Quite impressive.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He turned and peered into the distance, toward the curve where the road left the highway and crossed into the meadow. He knocked me on the shoulder. “Our Trafalgar,” he said amiably.

“Our Trafalgar,” I answered, just as amiably.