Schroder: A Novel (8 page)

“But Mommy’s lawyer is a woman, right? Or has she changed lawyers? Or is Glen just a friend who’s a lawyer? Oh, who cares. Right? Who cares? I don’t care. Do you care? I don’t.”

I looked back out at the passing traffic. I thought of my estranged wife confabulating with Glen, whoever the hell he was, toasting another legal victory over a homemade meal. And I almost laughed—a shrill, shattered laugh—thinking of the poor Papa Bear in the story who says,
Who’s been eating
my
porridge? Who’s been sitting in
my
chair?
I reached back and made sure Meadow’s seat belt was snug across her lap and gave her an inscrutable tap on the leg. Then I accelerated so quickly the tires shrieked. I nearly clipped the Pepsi deliveryman as I swerved around the side of the building and pulled out onto the two-lane road going the opposite direction, right in front of a huge Sysco truck. In my driver’s-side mirror, the Tahoe jerked forward, circling the asparagus stand and leaving the roadside pullover in a cloud of dust. This was just the goosing I needed; Grandpa was giving chase. Behind me, he kept trying and failing to pass the Sysco truck across the double yellow lines, the oncoming traffic wailing past. His willingness
to drive at such risk was a thrill and made me want to see how far he’d go. At a congested intersection, I led him into the right-turn-only lane, toward the highway, only to cross two lanes at the last second before the light turned green to go left. I was heading north again, on Van Rensselaer Boulevard, and had lost sight of Pop-Pop in the bottleneck he created as he tried to avoid being shunted west onto the Thruway. A cantata of horn blowing. My jaw tingled. I suppressed a whoop of victory.

Who had we been kidding anyway, me and Hank? He was justifiably suspicious of me since the day he met me, and he’d been generous to wait this long to hate me openly. I felt something like gratitude for that. He had always been, to my mind, the kind of upbeat, clannish father I assumed every American was awarded at birth. I stepped on it. We were now going sixty miles an hour through stop-and-go traffic on Van Rensselaer.

I was hesitant to glance back at my passenger. I wasn’t used to spending long periods of time with Meadow anymore. In the intervening year since we’d ceased sharing the same roof, she’d conquered kindergarten, and was a big girl for six, taller and smarter than any of her classmates, and I hoped I’d come out OK as she sat in moral judgment of me back there in her zebra-print booster seat. I reminded myself that even as a toddler, she’d been unsentimental. She didn’t like drippy speeches or ardent kisses, and so I decided to skip the emotional appeals, the flimsy self-justifications for what I was doing. They barely sufficed anyway.

“Traffic is terrible,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“You doing all right back there?”

“Actually, I’m thirsty,” she replied, her voice slightly strained.

“Well, let’s get you something to drink. What would you like? Jelly-bean juice? Hm? Monkey milk?”

“Actually, could I have a Mountain Dew? Mariah drinks Mountain Dew. Her mother lets her.”

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll stop just down the road a bit and we’ll find you a Mountain Dew. We’ll do the dew. Can’t be that bad for you if it’s
dew
, right?”

“Yeah. And can I watch
Star Wars
?”

“Maybe. Listen. One thing at a time.”

“OK.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got this under control. All right?”

That’s when Grandpa reappeared, like a zombie who staggers forward with his head blown off. The fender of the Tahoe was rumpled—I could see this from far away—and he was now driving with fresh desperation, flashing his headlights. Did he really think I would stop? Did he think I would heed him
now
, both of us with our gloves off? I was not in violation of the terms of my allotted visitation period. There was nothing in our parental agreement that said I couldn’t drive around the outskirts of Albany at high speeds. No, I thought, looking into the rearview mirror. Not today. You’re going to have to kill me.

Somewhere early on in my post-divorce social suicide, I had represented a client in the purchase of a foreclosed bungalow in Loudonville. After the transaction, we became friends, this client and I. He was also single and gave off a whiff, as I must have, of redundant abandonment. When he decided to
go away for the summer, whom else did he call to watch over his property, and occasionally run the engine of his new Mini Cooper to keep the battery from dying, but me? I had already visited this friend’s house once and had sat in the garage with the Mini Cooper running, noticing with dispassion that it wasn’t just a Hollywood plot device; you really
couldn’t
smell carbon monoxide. And it was this Mini Cooper that came to mind—with wonderfully changed function, as an Escape Car—as I headed west on 378, the wounded undercarriage of my father-in-law’s Tahoe throwing sparks in the increasing distance behind me.

MOST BEAUTIFUL WATER

The first white men who ever came across Lake George were handily captured, on account of them standing there gawking at its beauty. It’s still an oceanic, slate-blue tableau when you come across it a half hour’s drive north of Saratoga Springs, propped there in the Adirondacks 320 feet above sea level. Its basin stretches from the town of Lake George all the way north to Ticonderoga, its western border a series of goofy little pleasure towns filled with motels, waterslides, and pancake houses.

Driving northward, full of anticipation, Meadow and I sang. We sang our favorites, like “Yellow Submarine” and “Kentucky Woman.” She’d been amused by the Mini Cooper we’d switched for my Saturn in Loudonville and did not ask any questions about why we were driving it or whether or not we were still being pursued by Pop-Pop. We were together again. It was easy. For the first time in a year, I felt some hope. I felt like I had finally taken back some control. No more rope-a-dope in divorce mediation. I knew that we were going to make it to Lake George. I knew that, and I didn’t give a shit about what happened after that. Frankly.

It was unseasonably warm for June. We rolled the windows down and sailed our hands in the air. We didn’t stop, and we didn’t stop. We didn’t stop in Saratoga Springs; we didn’t stop at Lake Luzerne, or Glens Falls, or anywhere. We didn’t even slow down until we’d entered the Lake George strip and Meadow started shouting Popcorn! Candied apples! Frozen lemonade! The water parks and go-cart tracks had opened early, and tourists like ourselves were walking around half-dressed and jaundiced from winter. We had been here the summer before, Meadow and I and you-know-who-you-are, I mean our family, in what we might term Year Zero (to be followed by the post-divorce epoch, or
Annum Repudium
), but neither of us mentioned the fact.

We parked on the street and ran down past a band shell and a playground and straight onto the small, hard-packed public beach near the dockside. Meadow wound her way through the sunbathers right out onto the sand and to my surprise waded into the water with her clothes on. She stopped only when the water soaked the hem of her tangerine-colored shorts.

“Daddy!” she cried, turning back to me. “It’s
cold
.”

“Of course it’s cold, silly,” I said, rolling my khakis up to my knees. “It’s two hundred feet deep. Come on. Let’s buy you a suit?”

“No, Daddy! Not yet.”

I smiled, secretly pleased, remembering how impossible it always was to tear her away from whatever her attention had seized upon: a bottle cap, a ladybug, the removal of sticker-backing goo from a glass bottle.

I put my hands on my hips and looked around at the crowd of bodies. Some were inching their way into the icy water; others were spreading out picnics, parcels of tinfoil, coolers of
ice, everyone trying to save a buck, bringing bologna sandwiches from home or smoking generic cigarettes like Basics or Viceroys, because we were all into it by then, the recession, we were all inside it or knew that we were about to be. An attractive young family was lounging close to the waterline near Meadow. I smiled at them, all four of them, that idealized American square—a large, good-looking father rapt by the movements of the distant steamboats, a strawberry blond mother in a sturdy bikini, a sarong wrapped around her waist, and two focused children digging in the sand.

I said aloud, in their direction, “A day like this just melts away the stress.”

The petite mother glanced my way. “It’s
too
pretty today, isn’t it? My problem is, when it’s this pretty, I just want to keep it. I just want to box it up and keep it and have it last forever.”

“Oh, don’t think like that,” I said, taking a step or two in her direction. “That’ll just make you sad.”

She smiled, tilting her head slightly.

“Anyway,” I said, “you know where you keep a day like this? You keep it in your heart. That’s the box you keep it in.”

My eye on Meadow, now almost up to her waist in Lake George, I grinned down at the woman’s children. “Hey, you two. Strike gold yet?” Below us, her children ignored me, just as her husband ignored me. The woman’s cheeks reddened. I probably could have kissed her on the mouth and he would have kept on muttering about the steamboats. I felt a rush of fellow feeling. My pity for her and for me and for her kids and for my kid and even for you, Laura, came over me in a wave so sudden and so felt that I almost lost my balance. I closed my eyes. I
feel
, I thought to myself. I clenched my hands open and shut. I
feel
. I’m
alive
.

When I opened my eyes, the woman was staring at me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m great,” I said. “Never better, in fact.”

Along the weathered dockside people strolled quietly. But for the creaking of the dock boards and oars in their oarlocks and the chanting of vendors and the distant churning of the steamboats, the crowd seemed hushed, awed. The world was softening, opening up.

“Spring always feels like such a victory,” I said. “Like you did something good to deserve it.”

“That is
so
true,” said the woman. “Plus, it was such an icy winter. Icy and slushy and eewy.”

“One of the worst. At least in my personal history. But”—I looked at her—“I guarantee you, it’s going to be an extraordinary summer.”

She smiled again, displaying two pearlescent front teeth with a pretty little gap.

“Really? How do
you
know?”

“I just do. Butterscotch!” I called to Meadow. “Come back a bit toward shore, OK? The sign says, ‘no swimming.’ There’s no lifeguard yet.”

“I’m not swimming, Daddy,” she called without turning. “I’m
fishing
.”

My friend and I exchanged a pair of knowing looks whose covert purpose was legitimate eye contact with one another.

“Are you and your daughter staying on the lake?” the woman asked. “It’s going to be a beautiful weekend, they say. Unseasonably warm.”

“No,” I sighed. “We’ve got to head home. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

“Where’s home?”

“Canada.”

“Oh. You’re Canadian?” The woman blushed again, and I detected a faint note of disappointment, as if she’d already become attached to me. “I always expect Canadians to look different. But they never do.”

“It’s how we speak,” I said. “You have to wait until we start talking about how sooory we are.”

The woman laughed, sweeping her foot in the water. “And your girl’s mother? She’s back at home?”

“Yes.” I turned to face her. “My wife’s back at home. Waiting for us.” In the background, my friend’s husband dimly became aware of me. “She keeps calling us. ‘How many miles left now? How many more hours?’ She misses us.”

“Of course she does,” the woman said. I watched her face, slightly rosy with the thought of it, whatever
it
is, the universal dream, the dreamed us. The wind played with the beaded hem of her sarong. She pulled one delicate foot out of the sand and the sand made a crude suctioning sound and the steamboat tooted in the distance and I finally looked away from her and across the lake at the hills.

“Isn’t that something,” I said, overwhelmed. “The way the light is growing long on the hills across the lake. Look at that. The way the hills seem in a different dimension over there. What an afternoon. You’re right, you know. This day should not be allowed to end. We
should
be allowed to keep it. You know what? This is the first time this year that I haven’t felt like jumping off a bridge.” I looked at my companion. A breeze blew her apricot-colored hair off her brow, which was pinched sympathetically. “I know you don’t even know me, but I’m glad you’re here. I mean, I’m glad you’re here with your family. Your family makes me happy.”

“Oh,” she said.

“It’s good, don’t you think? It’s the point, don’t you think? Togetherness. Like this. In families.”

She gazed back at me, her expression uncertain.

“Hey, Tex,” the husband bellowed. “Your kid is swimming in her clothes.”