Stranger, Father, Beloved (11 page)

His mother visited the school frequently, and when Michael received his academic awards at the end of the year, she stood in the back of the room in an elegant black dress. She helped him keep track of his prescriptions for Valium, and they tried it in combination with Thorazine to see if it would relieve his anxiety. She adored him and doted on him. Often, in their all-night study sessions, Alex and Michael would eat the snacks of crackers and cookies she sent in care packages. She had been so lovely, with her pretty face, nice teeth, stylish clothes and jewelry, and long legs. She pinned a diamond brooch on her black dress, simply because he loved the brooch and loved her style. But beyond the beautiful exterior, there was something even better: an authentic, loving spirit, proud of him always, the best of feminine grace that came from mothers.

Michael imagined the house being packed up and sold once his mother died and all the boxes and old paintings in the attic being
carted off. The tranquility of the house would be disrupted, as new owners would move in and tear into it, updating it, pounding into its flooring, and removing the older kitchen appliances such as the oven and stove, which worked just fine and which he had grown to love.

Soon enough it would happen, though, and there wasn't much he could do to stop it. Michael was stuck on the Peninsula with his family—he had been the one who had demanded they move and stay there, despite the unfavorable climate for his son's asthma, and he could hardly now abandon it to come and live in his mother's house after she passed away. The house would have to be sold; the perfection of the place would have to be sacrificed. The elegant and tasteful family of possessions that decorated the shelves and tables would be removed and dispersed. The jewelry would be given to the female descendants, and they would wear it cautiously, unable to shake the associations each piece had with death and passing. It was an impossible thought. For now, though, he had this place, his mother's house, away from his own home and family. It was an uncomplicated space, and he could lie in the grand room almost as if he were back in college on one of the holiday breaks, his life unwritten, no ties to anyone. It felt that way with his mother sleeping in another room. Michael shut the door to his room and stretched out on the big bed, the silence in the house all-encompassing.

He remembered all the weekends he and Alex had come here to stay with his parents. His mom had fussed over the two young men, and they had slept on the third floor after watching shows on the TV set in the den. His father had been away fishing, so it was just the three of them in the house. His mother had brought them powdered doughnuts in the den as they watched TV, and she had washed all their clothes and made them breakfast. At dinner, she had listened to them talk about what they were learning in their classes, how they had impressed this professor or that with a well-thought-out com
ment during class, and she beamed at them both. Michael would have done anything for his mother, so proud was he of her beautiful face and smart dresses and pearl earrings.

Recalling those happy days, he fell asleep easily.

The next morning was a Sunday, and Michael knew that John would be beginning work on the gazebo that day. He decided to drive back home from his mother's house a couple hours earlier than planned so he could join John. The thought had occurred to him in the middle of the night when he woke up in his nest of covers. He hoped he might see some trace of the joy John felt being around his wife. It pained him to leave his mother, but he would have to go at some point that day, and he wanted to be around John. He could help out and be part of it all somehow. He wasn't that good with tools, but he could certainly follow orders. He could saw planks. He could pound nails if he were told where to place them. The trees and sleeping houses whizzed past him in the early-morning light, soft jazz music coming from the radio. It would be nice to be part of building something real and lasting for his family. Maybe he would elicit Max's help. This could be a way for Max to learn to be more manly, less of a spectator, and more in the action of life. These were the types of projects a father was supposed to do with his son.

He arrived home a little after ten, and Nancy was in the kitchen with Max. He told his son about his idea, and Max got up, looking confused. Nancy beamed at Michael as he took the boy out to the yard. John had papers spread out on the ground with rocks holding down the corners. Ten feet over, boards and beams lay in a rudimentary configuration. He turned, smiling with surprise, when he saw Michael and Max.

“Want some helpers?” Michael asked, feeling easygoing. Max looked to Michael and John again, a bewildered look on his face.

“Hey, little guy,” John said to Max, getting down on one knee. A wide smile illuminated Max's face, and Michael suddenly felt very proud of his son. It was nice to have a quiet little son who didn't terrorize the house or make a fuss. With his little baseball cap on, Max was quite handsome. John would have liked a son like this, Michael thought.

“You ready to do some guy stuff, buddy?” Michael said down to Max, who looked up expectantly and didn't answer. It occurred to Michael that Max had no idea what “guy stuff” was. Who better to teach them than John? John was not macho, but he was a guy's guy and could probably throw a football very well and understood all the intricacies of pipes that ran below a house—two things that Michael could not do well.

Michael held the boards in place and John gently hammered in the first nail so it pierced the wood in a tiny stab; the wood held it, and there were several bangs needed to drive it all the way in. Max held the hammer as it wavered over the nail. He looked up at Michael, who nodded with encouragement. Max brought it down, and the small thud sent the nail in deeper. He blushed with astonishment and looked up again at John and Michael.

“Great job! Let's do another!” John said. He was very good at this dad stuff. Michael suddenly wished that John had been his own father—he would have turned out all right then, with no faulty wiring. Though his father had not been mentally ill, he had not been a normal father by any means. His silence had been laced with disapproval of his children, and he had kept himself at a distance from Michael. How he had loved to look through the glass door and see his father standing before a canvas of a still life of flowers, paused,
with a paintbrush in hand, considering his next stroke. How he would have loved to learn to paint alongside his father, but he would never have dared to disturb his father's painting; it was his sacred time to himself. He remembered that in later years he had asked his mother if she and his father had ever been in love. Without hesitation she had replied, “No, we were not in love, we were obsessed with each other.” And Michael could see the fascinated looks they sometimes gave each other, which indeed hinted at obsession or some sort of watchful compulsion. His father was fascinated with his paintings in the same way; he would study them as he painted them, with a cunning eye to detail.

The hammer was lifted by the small hands and then brought down again and again throughout the day. At one point Michael helped with a bang to get the nail back to straight stature, but Max seemed to enjoy that part too. Nancy brought them iced teas, refreshment they needed, but when Michael saw her in the yard, his face and mind darkened. He had forgotten about her for a moment, and there she was, never far away. Once he took the iced tea with a lemon wedge clinging to its side and drank down the sparkling golden liquid, Nancy said, “Wow, great job, guys! I'll let you get back to it,” and she collected their glasses back on a tray and walked away. Michael's heart warmed toward her more with each retreating step.

John used his electric saw to split the wood into the exact size needed, and Michael and Max continued with little nail projects. They gave Max the project of collecting the extra sawed-off wood bits and placing them in the shiny black trash bag on the lawn. It was a mild afternoon, breezy and warm, and the flowers John had planted at the edges of the yard bloomed white, fuschia, bright yellow, and
violet. More insects were interested in their yard due to the flowers—they zoomed from flower to flower, something Michael would never have noticed if he had not come out on this Sunday. Something that would never have happened if Michael had not brought John into their world. The edges of their world were flowering, structures were being built. An injection of goodness was filtering in. His mind was cooperating with him that day. It was still; no tremors of paranoia were filling in at the edges. He forgot about his pills, and they seemed to sleep in his pocket, unaware of their duty. Normally his soft hands caressed the sides of the brown plastic container when he stood among people.

Two hours in, Max sat down near them and twirled a leaf in his hand, then began to move the dirt with the edges of a sharp rock. He was content there, so Michael helped John with the measuring and sawing, and pretty soon, the foundational boards of the gazebo were intact. The gazebo would be a place to sit and look at the flowers, a place for people to sit and whisper secrets in the shade. It would be here soon. Maybe he could come out here when he couldn't sleep in the fall with a blanket wrapped around him and a cup of hot tea in the moonlight, while the world slept around him. At the end of the summer, he and John could sit out here with a six-pack and admire their work . . . it would be late evening. John would have no one to go home to, he could stay for dinner, heck, he could stay over. They had a guest room. Maybe he'd want his own room?

Nancy brought them out ham sandwiches, and they ate sitting on the grass. Michael saw a bush rustle in the corner of the lawn and looked for the fox, for his sparkling, mysterious eyes, but he did not emerge.

“Thanks for the help . . . nice of you—” John said to Michael in between bites.

Nancy had taken Max in to wash his hands before he ate his sandwich.

“I was glad to . . . hope we didn't slow you down, me and my team,” Michael said, and his body tensed. Anxiety flushed through him again, through the wires, and then vanished, leaving him a little more tired than before.

“No, not at all. Tomorrow I'll have my guys with me, but you two are welcome out here anytime. It's hard to do it alone—no conversation. You know?”

Michael did know how hard it was to do it alone. He certainly did know that.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The morning seemed to burst down upon the earth instead of revealing its hues gradually. It was uncommonly hot, and the world appeared prepped for the odd and the absurd. As Ryan rode to the class with Jill in the morning, she noticed a man walking at the side of the road in black pants and a black shirt, who, as the car approached him, jumped and tapped his heels together. Jill was overexcited by the anticipation of the energetic movement class, and she sipped from her travel mug of tea and hummed to herself. She was unusually quiet, and a sly smile kept creeping onto her lips, but she said nothing.

“Why are you smiling like that?”

“I just think you are going to really like this. I do. I know you'll have a strong reaction to it, like I did when I was young,” Jill answered.

“I don't know what you're talking about, but you're creeping me out. You can't bring me back to your hippy-dippy days, Jill, much as you'd like to,” Ryan responded.

Jill winced once but then kept smiling to herself. She flipped on the radio and began humming along to the Cars.

“We're almost there,” she said and banged the flat of her hand against the wheel to punctuate her statement.

The energetic movement class was surprisingly crowded with middle-aged women and men, and the room was decked out in garnet-colored curtains that almost matched the rust-colored carpet. The first half of the class consisted of flowing movements of squatting and reaching, with audible deep breathing. Next, everyone lay down in rows and the teacher, a young, petite woman named Dari, came around and gently put her hands on each person for several minutes. Ryan had to wait twenty minutes before her turn came, and the absurdity of lying on her back for no reason in particular began to make her angry. The room seemed shrouded in mist, which alternated from hot to cold as it grazed over her skin. The lights were dimmed, and the entire experience had the reverence of a sacred ceremony. She imagined how she would laugh in Jill's face once it was all over. Then she felt Dari kneel down next to her, and two small warm hands pressed down on her, one hand on her thigh and one below her heart.

She opened her eyes and looked up at Dari, who was staring down at her, clear-eyed and smiling. Ryan snapped her eyes back shut.

“Try to relax your head. Here, I'll cradle your head in my hands. Try to soften your neck.” With surprising skill, the tiny hands scooped under her neck and held it. Ryan's head began to spin, and her legs went numb. She wanted to slip into sleep but firmly jerked herself back from the edge each time she began to drift off. Dari released one hand, and she heard a gently spraying sound above her head as she released aromatherapy into the air. An earthy smell tinged with sweetness wafted down. Quickly, both hands were moving under her neck, rubbing, pulling, and she felt suddenly delirious. Exploding images accelerated through her mind, and she tingled all over. Then
her head was placed back down with tenderness, and Dari had gone on to someone else.

After the class, Ryan did feel energized, but she did not admit it to Jill. Instead she shrugged her shoulders and gave a little yawn; she couldn't bring herself to tell Jill she had actually liked the class. She didn't feel like returning home, so she suggested to Jill that they surprise Carol by attending one of her games. While they were cruising the streets in Jill's beat-up Toyota, Ryan felt the sudden urge to stop by, pick up Max, and bring him out into the sunshine. When they pulled up to Ryan's house and went inside, Max was playing on the living room rug with his giant plastic insect toys—a bee, an ant, a caterpillar, and a fly. The toys could be disassembled and reassembled to make stranger and stranger insect hybrids. Max ran to her carrying a giant ant with glittery wings and threw his arms around her waist.

Her mom came into the living room from the kitchen after hearing them come in. Ryan had noticed that Jill always nodded excessively whenever she was around Ryan's parents. She looked around a lot and nodded her head as if approving of all she saw.

Max stayed close to Ryan's side, watching her every move. Boredom hung thickly in the air, and it was clear he was relieved to be getting out of there. He had on one of Ryan's favorite outfits of his, green corduroys and a red-and-black-striped shirt, with tiny brown shoes that complemented the pants nicely. He seemed hungry for her attention. In the car, whenever she looked into the backseat, he was staring at her. Only when she would beam at him would he mimic the full, unbridled expression he saw on her lips and grin in response. Often, even as a toddler, he had looked to her, watched her to see how to act, what to do. He would follow her around and see where she
decided to sit and how she held her body. Then he would tentatively come around to where she was and sit in the same position next to her.

At the game he sat on the bleachers and seemed stunned. It was a sunny day, with a brisk wind, and the sun reflected harshly off the silver bleachers. Carol didn't yet know they were there to see her. She charged forward and blasted toward her destination goal, time after time. When the crowd roared for the team, Max looked up at Ryan quizzically and then, after a delay, would raise his two fists and twist up his face and say “
Ahhh . . . rrrr
.”

Sitting there, Ryan felt that they were a family, had always been one. Carol was also a member of the family, for there is always a downer member of a group, a reminder of how not to be, and Carol was it for them. For better or for worse, they were linked. Ryan scooped Max up onto her lap, and he lay back. She had the distinct impression that he was trying to melt into her, merge with her, and, out in the sunshine, this didn't bother her.

When the three of them approached Carol after the game, she seemed pleased, especially since Max was there. Carol had seen him grow up, had even been there the day he had been brought back from the hospital—that was how inseparable the girls used to be. The four of them headed for the parking lot and decided to stop by the ice-cream stand on their way back to Jill's. Carol, in her gray station wagon, followed Jill's car, and they returned to the house with cones.

They all sat in the living room and played Parcheesi. The presence of Max united them all. Max was more animated than usual, and Ryan felt confirmed that it was good to get him out of the dreary energy of their house and into the normality of Jill's. Jill fried up some burgers, and they ate an early supper. As dusk was approaching, they put in one of Carol's old movies, about a pack of wolves
that raise a little boy, and they all settled comfortably around the TV. Carol lay on the rug with some pillows, while Ryan and Max lay on the couch. Jill sat in an armchair beside them. Midway through the movie, as both Carol and Max were dozing, the phone rang. Ryan sauntered over and picked up the receiver.

“Ryan, why didn't you call? I was getting worried.”

“I'm sorry, Mom, I totally forgot. Max is asleep. Can I bring him back in the morning? He seems happier than he's been in months.”

“We shouldn't put such a burden on Jill. You're over there so much anyway. Why don't you two come home?”

“It's no big deal. Jill doesn't care. She likes having us here.”

“Okay, fine. Come back in the morning. But Ryan, we are having a talk tomorrow.”

Nancy felt a tremor of anger when it occurred to her that neither Jill nor her daughter had thought to invite her along to the game that day. The thought had never entered their minds because
she
never entered their minds, except as a means to an end. A small pebble of sadness plunked down into her belly. Every time she was not included, welcomed in, every time other people's eyes passed over her in search of someone else, someone better, it registered in her, a little check mark next to some truth.

She thought back to earlier in the day, when Ryan and Jill had come by for Max. They had seemed like a guilty pair, guilty of something. Nancy had tried to make conversation with Jill, as she always did.

“Great to see you, Jill. It's been a while—almost a year,” Nancy had said, trying to make eye contact with her.

“Yep, it has,” Jill had said and nodded as she scanned the living room and then rested her eyes on Max.

“Mom, can we take Max to see Carol's lacrosse game? I'll take his inhalers and everything. He never gets out much. Let me take him.”

“Mom, I want to go!” He had looked into his mother's eyes, pleadingly. It always bothered Nancy that Max expected her to say no to things, or to be unreasonable, when she never was. As if she would withhold the thing that he wanted. She always let him do whatever he wanted. And he always expected her to punish him when he made a mistake, and she never did. Where had this come from? To flinch when there was no danger present—none of it made any sense.

“Sure, you can take him.” She had packed a small backpack for Max, some juice, a snack, and a coloring book and markers in case he needed a way to occupy himself. Jill stood by the couch in her baggy linen pants and tank top, and Nancy noticed the sweat-stained circles under her armpits. She never would have noticed these kinds of things in the past, but being married to Michael had trained her to look for imperfections. Over the years, his gaze had landed heavily upon her, day after day, and the comments on her choice of clothes or choice of decorations in the house had trained her to look for what was right and best and to abhor things that fell short. She began to wear more expensive sweaters and decorated their home based on ideas from the magazines they received in the mail in the hope that that heavy gaze would look elsewhere or soften into appreciation. Now she realized she had caught the bug herself, pitying those in her view who were less than perfect.

“Would you like to sit down, Jill, and have some lemonade or water?”

“Oh, no, but thanks all the same.” Jill had never accepted her offers of beverages on the rare occasions she had been to the house. It was rude to say no every time something was offered. It showed bad character, Nancy thought. Jill looked like an oversized teenager,
big boned and clueless about fashion. Nancy didn't know what her daughter saw in this woman—why she was more preferable company than herself.

Nancy had had the entire day free after Max left. Book club was that afternoon, but thinking about it gave her no pleasure and she decided to skip it. That month's book was Miranda's pick, and hers were always painfully weird and experimental, almost incomprehensible. Nancy always dreaded the month when Miranda selected the book and led the discussion. She felt Miranda was showing off her graduate degree by choosing books that no one but she understood or enjoyed. The other three women in the group were appeasing, tried hard to show that the themes were things they could grapple with, but they never convinced Nancy. She had joined the group three years ago because Michael's friends' wives were in book clubs, and Nancy, after all, had always enjoyed a good story.

That week they were reading something called
Fall the Tower
by a Chinese author, and Nancy was agitated by each and every word of it. The main character, a man named Scrub, was obsessed with a tower he had once seen on a trip with his parents when he was six. There were twenty-nine pages where he discussed this tower in bed with a woman named Gigi after they finished having sex. She kept asking him questions about it, entranced by his reveries and excited by his tales of the secret rooms in the tower, tales he had concocted entirely in his own mind. They took breaks from the discussion to resume fornication, both incredibly aroused by the tower. It was absolute nonsense.

Nancy knew that Miranda would say something like “The tower is the symbolic thrust of this intellectual exploration.” Her statements
were growing more and more tiresome. It was just a chance for the “ladies” to show off their “college” talk. Nancy was embarrassed by never having attended college, but with each passing book session, she detested more and more the high opinions of the educated. She wanted a good old-fashioned story, clearly laid out, with a hero and a heroine, a villain, and a clear plot. Why did modern plots seem to stray so far from that time-tested formula?

She had loved reading fairy tales to Ryan and Max every night. Michael had hated reading simplistic children's stories—it was as if he couldn't wait until the kids were older and he could begin his tutorial on literature. It was a tough year when Ryan had stopped wanting Nancy to read to her at night, when she was around seven years old. She could remember clearly a series of yawns, and even some mean-spirited giggling, as Ryan had grown bored with her story.

Ryan had gotten up from the bed and said, “I'm going to go downstairs to get some milk.”

After fifteen minutes, she hadn't come back, and when Nancy went downstairs, the kitchen was empty. Michael's study door was closed, but she could hear through it the murmuring of voices. When she'd opened the door, Ryan was on Michael's lap and he was reading to her from
Treasure Island
. She had her eyes closed, imagining each scene. They both had looked up at her, and she could sense the guilty pleasure they took in each other's company. Nancy had pretended to blow the whole thing off—who was she to care who her child picked to read to her? But really she was crushed. That evening, in her mind, had been the beginning of a separation, a gap between herself and her husband, as well as one between herself and her daughter, one that had never been repaired.

Even though Ryan and Michael were no longer close to each other, she felt she had permanently lost her connection to each of
them. It was subtle, but the roots of disconnection grew deeper and deeper. Who would have thought that something so innocent as books and education could cause her to feel isolated from her own family?

Maybe when Max reached high school, he would turn on her also. Once he began to intellectualize, he would see her differently. The objective facts of her status and background would dwarf her motherly charms. Max would become more and more of a bookworm. If he had problems, he would go to Michael for help, Michael who had been so cold to him all these years. The coldness would be forgotten as the first six years of his life became submerged in the realm of the unconscious.