Making Toast (13 page)

Sammy asks me why we have years. We talk about what a year on Earth consists of. We consult his “Interactive Planetarium,” a talking map of the solar system that answers questions. We learn that years differ from planet to planet. One year on Jupiter equals nearly eleven years and ten months on Earth. One year on Neptune equals nearly 165 earthly years.

January 20. “James!” says Ginny. “Do you know who’s President of the United States?” Bubbies says, “O-ba-ma!”

A few days later, I begin the new term at Stony Brook. Back to one course, I teach a workshop called “Writing Everything,” in which I have the students write a short story, an essay, a poem, and a play. I try to help them see the usefulness of the demands of each form to the other forms. It has been a month since I was last in Quogue. When I get to the house, Kevin has left a gift for me on the kitchen table—a brass plaque with black antique numbers indicating the amount of his bill for the work he did on the deck. When I phone to congratulate him on his joke, he says he’ll send me a bill for the plaque as well.

“I have a DVD of Stephen giving his valedictory speech,” he says. “Would you like to see it?”

On his regular Tuesday-morning visit, he brings a portable DVD player. We sit side by side at the kitchen table, our backs to the sun, and watch the 2007 Mattituck High School graduation. The little screen shows the graduating seniors—white gowns on the girls, bright blue on the boys. Stephen steps to the podium. He looks a bit like his mother and his father, but has his own handsomeness and a rich, musical voice. The gold valedictorian’s medal hangs on a white ribbon from his neck. At ease speaking in public, he does not refer to himself, but rather addresses his classmates. He uses the metaphor of a Monopoly game to recapitulate their high school years—the “currency” of their education, the intellectual real estate they acquired. He says, “At least most of us avoided jail.”

He removes his mortarboard and replaces it with Mickey Mouse ears to reminisce about the seniors’ trip to Disney World. He turns his back on the audience and faces his classmates sitting behind him. Everyone laughs and cheers. “Where are you and Cathy sitting?” I ask Kevin. “In the front row,” he says. “We recorded everything he did at school, even the most boring band concert.” His eyes are red.

The dead have occupied much of my time this past year—books and poems about the dead, conversations with other families about their dead. I read death into innocent remarks and innocent texts. At the time it feels accidental, but I know it is not. I should try to get away from the subject. It is not infinitely interesting, as thinking about it ends only in a grim shrug. In any case, there is more to do. And I grow weary of my anger.

Ginny and Harris may feel that their lives have prepared them for our current circumstance. I do not. I doubt that my life has prepared me for any situation, because until Amy died, I had always believed that good things would simply befall me. Except for a few disappointments, probably less than my share, I’ve led a charmed life. I am learning what most people know at a much younger age—that life is to be endured, and its rewards earned. Since my rewards these days lie in the survival of my family, I am content to try to earn them.

But all this comes slowly to me. I have not been a long-distance runner, and now—at the time when my legs are weak and my wind diminished—I need to confront the long haul, which runs counter to my nature. I must train myself to deal with the world as it is, as Amy did, while not treating the assignment as a chore. One of the few pieces of writing I have done since Amy died was a book review for the
Washington Post Book World
. The novel was David Lodge’s
Deaf Sentence
—about a retired linguistics professor, Desmond Bates, who is losing his hearing and who is also deaf to life until, against his will, he visits Auschwitz, where the silence teaches him to hear. He reads a letter from a prisoner in the camp to his wife, discovered in a pile of human ashes. One sentence rises up to Desmond: “If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time.” As far as I can tell, this is how to live—to value the passing time.

Carl and Wendy have decided on a name—Nathaniel A. The A has no period after it because it’s not a middle initial. It’s A.

We proceed into the new year, like any family, marking on a wall in the playroom how many inches the children have grown. Jessie hardly ever plays the drama queen these days. She no longer confuses disappointment with catastrophe, and she recovers from mishaps readily. She reads very well, and I can make more sophisticated jokes with the Word for the Morning. She disciplines herself. Earlier she had grown uninterested in her piano lessons, but she persevered. A new teacher, Maja, praises and encourages her. At a recent practice session, she was playing not just with her fingers, but with her emotions.

She has even moderated her jealousy. She tells me she understands why I play with Caitlin—“she has no one her own age.” And, she and Ginny have grown even closer. Harris tells Ginny how Jessie misses her when she is gone. Events like birthdays and a school play, which seem to shout of Amy’s absence, leave their marks. Jessie was darkly silent after the play, in which she was a great success. Yet her buoyant nature prevails. And she looks out for her brothers. She rarely quarrels with Sammy, and she is tender with him when he needs that. One night, when I was reading with her, Sammy came in, teary-eyed from contemplating monsters. Jessie invited him to sleep with her in her bed. When James is upset, she sings him “We are the strong men.” He had a stomach virus and threw up all over the kitchen. Jessie immediately went to comfort him.

On my most recent visit to Jessie’s class, Mrs. Salcetti asked me to talk about
Children of War
, a book I wrote in the 1980s in which I interviewed children in five war zones around the world. Introducing the subject, I told the second graders that one of the sad and difficult things about children everywhere is that they have no power. Jessie raised her hand. “That’s not true, Boppo,” she said. “We have the power of thought and kindness.”

Sammy is able in so many things, he often collides with his own standards. He, too, reads very well. Ginny and I visited his kindergarten class, where many of the children read on an advanced level. He shows a near-scholarly appreciation of things learned. His exclamation to Harris about penguins derived from a school project that culminated in a Penguin Museum created by the class. Sammy led me around the exhibits like a docent. “That’s the Emperor Penguin! You can tell because he’s got the orange and yellow and is taller!”

He takes to the responsibilities Pam Merritt has given him. He and his friend Diana are assigned to wheel the shopping cart containing their classmates’ lunch boxes to and from the cafeteria. Very carefully, Sammy lines up the boxes beside the lockers. He has also ceased making farting noises by placing his hand on his underarm and raising and lowering his elbow like the pump of a well. He could make the noise using his hands alone, and his knees, too. For a few weeks, that was his principal avocation. Ms. Merritt blamed Harris and me for teaching Sammy the farting trick, but neither Harris nor I could ever do it. We told Ms. Merritt that Sammy was self-taught, a natural.

James is a little boy now. He continues to show a temper and a will. One night when Harris was away, he wanted to sleep with Jessie. “Jessie needs her sleep, too,” I told him as I carried him into his own room. He shouted, “Bad Boppo! Bad!” Most of the babyness is going fast. I miss it. He has rejected his booster seat, even though that requires his taking meals resting on his knees on the chair. He is starting to drink from a “big boy glass,” instead of the sippy-cup. He requests (and is granted) his own Word for the Morning. He used to have his breakfast toast cut in small squares. Now he wants “real toast”—two halves. He plays Perfection and Connect Four. He is consumed with projects, such as putting keys in doors and in desk drawers, and removing them again, toting an unplugged-in space heater one-third his size from place to place and turning it on and off, standing beside the karaoke and listening, and taking the remote from one TV and replacing it with another, making it impossible for anyone to watch either set. He is the busiest person I have ever known.

In school he plays independently. One morning, Ginny and I were early picking him up, and observed him from the car where he could not see us. He and his preschool classmates were on the playground. He climbed aboard a large, wide, wooden play ship not far from Amy’s bench. He wore a blue knit wool Georgetown cap and his silver winter jacket, which hung open. Ms. Franzetti, also aboard the ship, zipped it up for him. At 11:30, the children arranged themselves single file to return to the school building. Teachers guided them, like hovering giants. James studied his feet as he followed the yellow line. They took a class picture in which he looks like a little Etonian, in a green-and-black striped rugby shirt with a white collar and a faux coat of arms on the chest. He wears a vulnerable yet mature expression, and appears to be five or six, not two. We have the picture propped up on the kitchen counter. “Who’s that?” I will ask him. “Me!”—with happy pride. I do not like that picture.

Harris has signed up for golf lessons. A 12-handicap golfer (had he the time to keep score these days), he has carved out Thursday afternoons to take lessons from a pro. Since, as he knows, I do not regard golf as a sport, I pretend to be bored by his decision. But it greatly pleases Ginny and me to see him doing something for himself. He has also taken up snowboarding. Once in a while, he has a late-night beer with friends. Lately, he has begun a round of birthday parties with his Bethesda high-school buddies, who are all turning forty. At his own fortieth birthday, a surprise organized by Carl, I watched him with Matt Winkler, Scott Craven, and Ramy Ibrahim, businessmen who went to Walt Whitman High with Harris. They were laughing about old girlfriends, making tasteless jokes, and looking sixteen again. Early on, he used to grab dinners on the run, as he bathed the kids and got them ready for bed. Now he, Ginny, and I usually dine at the kitchen table like civilized adults, while Sammy and Jessie take showers.

And Ginny? After a day that consists of making and packing Jessie’s and Sammy’s school lunches, checking that Jessie’s homework is in her backpack, and getting her ready to be picked up for Spanish lessons at 8 a.m., and making sure that Sammy is wearing his warm jacket and not the sweatshirt he prefers, taking Bubbies to Geneva, then doubling back to Burning Tree to help out in Sammy’s class; after picking up Bubbies and giving him lunch and driving back to Burning Tree to take Jessie to a play-date with Danielle; after getting food for dinner and coming home to check on Sammy and Bo who has come for a play-date, and picking up Jessie at the end of the afternoon and playing with Bubs as he rides his trike, and preparing dinner for Bubbies, Sammy, and Jessie; after going down to the playroom to read to Bubbies and coming upstairs again to go over homework spelling words with Jessie, and making Sammy’s and Jessie’s schedules for the following day, and having a phone conversation with the mother of one of Sammy’s friends who would like him to come over next week; after preparing dinner for Harris, me, and herself; after playing just-one-more game of Uno with Jessie, and seeing that Jessie and Sammy use the bathroom before going to bed, and reading with Jessie, and laying out her and Sammy’s and Bubbies’s clothes for the morning…she kisses the children good night.

Late one morning I am alone in the house. I cannot remember another time when this was so. Harris is at work. Ginny is grocery shopping. Sammy and Jessie are in school. Bubbies is at his gym with Ligaya. I am supposed to be writing. Instead, I wander about the empty places—the playroom, the children’s bedrooms, the halls. The only sound is the whir of the refrigerator.

One hardly notices the objects in a house when people are present. Now I take interest in Sammy’s Redskins wastepaper basket, in Jessie’s fish tank, in James’s quilt with the trains running across it. The house feels cold. I go to Jessie’s keyboard and play a little. Behind me are the kids’ chairs from Pottery Barn, with their names on them. I go to the TV room, but do not turn on the set. I go to Harris’s bedroom and look at the family pictures on his chest of drawers. I go back down to the kitchen. The refrigerator door is covered with more pictures of the family, and business cards for things the household may need, such as locksmiths and taxi services, and a poison help line, and souvenirs of places where Amy and Harris took family trips. The paper napkins lie slack in their wooden holder. Cheerios cling to the inside of a bowl.

Hi, Wend. It’s A. I was just in Toys “R” Us and I, um, got for the boys…. I don’t know if I should leave it on your machine, if they can hear it [laughs]. Anyway, call me back. I want to tell you something that I got because part of it you saw at my house, and it was, like, “Oh look at that! The boys love these!” And so…I told you it came with a whole costume. But anyway, I got them those…I don’t know. But if you’d already gotten them, I’ll just take them back. I just wanted to double check with you. Um. I hope you’re following this. [big laugh] I will talk to you later. Bye.

It is March 1, 2009. At 6 a.m., the sky looks smoky. I set the breakfast table and watch TV, while I wait for the children. The weather people speak of the frost-burdened Midwest and of a record snowstorm rolling up from the south. Bubbies patters from his room in his red pajamas with the feet built in. He comes most of the way down the stairs, opens his arms to me, and jumps. We look out the glass door.