Lone Star
Page 14
On the way home from one of the outings to the dull outlying villages, she suddenly turned into the parking lot of a secondhand store. I need to buy some more whiskey glasses, she said. The previous night, she’d broken one in the sink, they were always breaking. The secondhand store consisted of several floors, we went inside, and she disappeared deeper into the store, behind racks filled with glasses and more glasses.
My dad and I veered automatically toward the used books. Without realizing how we’d gotten there, we found ourselves before a crate of old paperbacks in something that I can only describe as a mindful trance. People who spend their days in used bookstores know what I’m talking about. There’s something about sniffing old books that makes you completely giddy, the smell of yellowed paper must be the most comforting perfume in the world.
We read the spines. They were old American sci-fi novels, my dad’s favorite genre, colorful and shabby. In my twenties I discovered that we had overlapping tastes in literature: Borges, Calvino, Cortázar, etc. We swapped writers, he gave me Philip K. Dick, and I gave him Cormac McCarthy. Over the years we’ve visited so many small bookstores and secondhand shops that a larger conversation has emerged between us, which these individual shops are simply random backdrops for. A conversation about literature and thus, of course, a conversation about the world.
I stumbled onto a title I thought would be right up his alley. And it was. We strode to the register to pay. He set the book on the O-shaped counter. An older woman informed my dad of the price, 70 euro cents, and two things happened at once: My dad began fishing out small change from his pants pocket and spreading them out on the counter, and his wife came storming toward us from the other side of the store, suddenly, carrying her mustard glass and shouting: She can pay for herself! She has her öwn money!
She drove. They bickered about something, not the 70 euro cents she’d been nervous he’d spend on me, but something equally inconsequential; I couldn’t make out what my dad said. When he gets angry, his voice becomes throaty, sort of barking the words in a deep bass, like a sneeze: goddammit, this book is for me, and then it’s over.Even in the backseat, I could feel his shame, but he said nothing about that, the episode with the 70 euro cents. The humiliation, being discussed as if I weren’t present, had made me so angry my teeth hurt, but I too said nothing.
The entire time this silence, this even for myself unexplainable acceptance of the outrageous.
Sabrina turned out to be the most boring.
Why did no one object?
Why did we just sit there gawping like an audience at a play?
We drove on a two-line highway behind a dense row of cars. In the opposite lane, a similarly dense pack of cars and trucks zipped past us. She sat behind the wheel, straight and erect, no longer with a crown of wild yellow hair piled on her head, now it was a sleek, close-cropped, lead-colored pageboy. She wasn’t calm but irritable, the traffic made her irritable, other drivers made her irritable. Suddenly, a small opening appeared in the opposite lane and she jerked the wheel and drove out. Only then did we discover a tractor trailer approaching at breakneck speed, the opening behind us disappeared, and she pressed the pedal to the floor to overtake what turned out to be five or six cars, the truck was now blaring its horn, and at the last second she reached the head of the line and swerved into our lane with squealing tires. The sound of the blaring horn faded behind us in a distant whir.
What a jerk! She was furious. At the morons behind us who couldn’t figure out how to drive faster, and at the idiot who’d blared his horn at us.
My dad protested again, peevish and low, but his protests went unheeded. Drooped on the passenger seat, he’d made a few ghost movements, involuntarily yanked on a ghost gear stick, discretely spun a ghost wheel as if, with these movements, he could gain control over the vehicle. Look at a bowling lane, I read somewhere once, and you’ll be able to see even the most rational professor of philosophy twist and turn to make the bowling ball strike the pins—after the ball has left his hand. Our tendency toward magical thinking sits deeply within us. My dad is no better than the philosophy professor at the bowling alley. He drives a ghost car, but no matter how many ingenious movements he made on the passenger seat, he could not have prevented a collision.
This was the second time in only a week that she’d nearly been in an accident. On a country road she’d driven out between two cars and barely avoided a head-on collision with an oncoming car. It was the kind of thing I’ve only seen in American movies. Now I sat there, panic thick in my throat, a hostage in the backseat, my dad a hostage in the front seat. But like now, that incident made her neither frightened nor humble, only more irritable. Apart from his, Goddammit! You can’t take those kinds of chances, neither of us said anything. Neither of us insisted on taking the wheel. Neither of us said: That’s enough! and tossed her driver’s license into the hedge with the fish skins.
•
I said nothing because he said nothing. But why did he say nothing? Our silence causes me to think back to the apartment that he and I had once entered together. My mother’s and my first apartment. Hanging in my room was a poster with an image of a little boy sitting on the potty, wearing a sailor’s cap and a seaman’s coat. Below this it read: Even tough guys have soft bottoms. It was an ad for toilet paper. But I couldn’t read, all I knew was that the boy was staring directly at me. It made me self-conscious, and I got into the habit of lying down behind the headboard of my bed whenever I changed my clothes.
One day my mother entered the room when I was tugging on my tights. She asked me what in the world I was doing. I explained. She said: Well, why didn’t you just say so? And then she removed the poster, and abracadabra, it was gone before I’d even put my tights on. It left me feeling a kind of intoxication at words. Weren’t they an amazingly effective means to communicate with? Well, why didn’t you just say so? Just by saying words I could make something happen, get that poster taken away, for example! What an incredibly easy way of getting what you want!
But my dad said nothing about her driving, and I said nothing.
Our own lives were at stake, and each other’s, but apparently we preferred voodoo to speaking up.
Later that evening we took the dog for a walk, we were alone, and out of nowhere he said: Dutch people are not known for their generosity. He was no doubt referring to the incident with the 70 euro cents. Carefully I broached the subject of her driving, saying that I was nervous, not just for my own life during the course of the week, but because every time he visits her in Belgium, he climbs into the passenger seat and allows her to drive. He said that he was nervous too, but it was pointless to discuss it. He rode with her as infrequently as he could and hoped for the best when he did. She will never learn. This seemed a good time to ask about the bollard in front of the house. The house stood on a corner, and it had one of those fixed, wrought-iron posts that prevent cars from driving up onto the sidewalk. I’d noticed that it wasn’t standing upright as usual but poked from the ground at a crooked angle, with the cobblestone and grass protruding around it like a rotten tooth. Had she collided with it on her way into the driveway, I asked, and my dad replied darkly that someone had been mad at her.
I tried to picture the scene. Was I to understand that someone had driven into the bollard as an act of revenge? Or had tried to tear it from the ground with their bare hands? He said: She makes enemies everywhere. And then we didn’t discuss it any further.
◊
The day after I returned from Belgium, I got an email from my dad. The same afternoon that I’d left, she’d been in a car accident. She’d gone out to buy medicine, and it was pouring rain, the roads were slick, and visibility was poor. She drove around in the rain to find a pharmacy, and when one appeared on the other side of the street, she made a spontaneous U-turn into the opposite lane.
Before she could straighten the wheel, a car carrying four Poles slammed into hers from behind. Both cars were totaled, but according to X-rays no o
ne, herself, the Poles, or the dog she’d brought with her, suffered any serious injuries.
All this happened a year ago. The legal consequences were a long, drawn-out affair that continued through the fall and into the winter, as authorities tried to figure out who was responsible for the accident. Back and forth with the authorities, speed calculations, brake mark measurements, months of wrangling. At one point the police turned up, broke into her garage, and confiscated her car. For a long time, she and my dad believed the confiscation was part of the investigation into the accident, but it turned out to be the bailiff: She hadn’t paid a bill. Finally, a decision was made. She was liable. The four Poles hadn’t been driving too fast and hadn’t been drunk. They hadn’t been selfish idiots, either. They’d been driving along in their own lane, and when she veered, suddenly, onto their side of the road, they weren’t able to brake in time.
During our Skype conversation when it became clear that she no longer wanted him to visit me, my dad brought up the accident again. One thing was the X-rays and the doctors’ diagnosis; another was the reality that he could see firsthand. The accident, as he put it, had brought many problems to the surface. He was convinced the collision had given her a permanent injury. Apart from a chronic infection in her gullet, which she’d developed by eating too much raw meat, she’d become depressed—and, additionally, had developed neurological issues that manifested in very painful (and to the doctors inexplicable) muscle spasms that began in her left arm and traveled up to her shoulder and then her chest and throat. In Belgium, these spasms occurred up to several times each day, but now that she’d joined him in Madeira, several weeks might pass between bouts.
He didn’t say so, but he implied that it was her presence in the apartment in Madeira that made it impossible for him to travel to Copenhagen. It was implied that she was the window that was closed, and that he didn’t have the strength to open it. It was implied that if he left for Copenhagen, it would trigger one of the mysterious neurological attacks.
Summer is over in a week or two. They sit in the apartment that she should have bought instead of the house in Belgium a year or two ago. I haven’t seen it, but he says that it’s positioned atop a cliff. The university is below, at the base, and every day he walks down a steep stairwell carved out of the cliff, works seven or eight hours, drinks tea with his colleagues, and in a little bit, when we’re done talking, he’ll walk back up.
Soon he will return to St. Louis, and she will head to Belgium. He says that she no longer wants the house there. She’s grown tired of the town. The confiscation, the accident, and her sister, there’s no longer anything holding her in Belgium. Now she wants to move to Bosch, an old town just outside of Amsterdam. She’s looking for an apartment. But only after something is sold, he says.
i was right. following the summer when my head was getting too large to fit through the wrought iron fence, there were no more summers in St. Louis for me. My dad wrote that he still had nightmares about what he described as ‘the hostility between you and C.’ That is, between me and his wife. Had I been hostile? Maybe I had. That wasn’t at all how I thought about it, hostility as something that lay between us, something we both worked at, like a project, a drawing or a house we were building. My dad had no interest in living in that house. It gave him nightmares. For my part, I thought he was too passive about everything. Especially her. Why this never-ending reluctance to deal with it? Why didn’t he say anything? Every now and then, he wrote, he plucked up his courage around her, but that was an exhausting and, in the end, futile endeavor. And regardless, one day I would learn that relationships between people who’ve known each other for a long time are never quite as simple and clear as it might seem from the outside. He also wrote that it was surely difficult to be a child of divorced parents (he didn’t know much about that since he hadn’t been so unlucky), but he knew that one needed to accept one’s stepparent. That it was the only way to maintain a relationship with your siblings.
Days passed as they do without my interference. Over the years, the address on the envelopes changed. Parkovsvej, Geelskovparken, Ådalsparken, Bøge Allé, Bybækterasserne. Now we lived on Præstøgade in Østerbro, and the letters kept coming. The envelopes, the paper, the handwriting was the same. The old letters still lay in a moving box in the basement. My grandmother’s letters were also there, and my sister’s. My American family was in the box. Every time we moved we brought the box with us. In this way we moved around with my American family. Though it was only half-filled with letters, it was heavy, and we needed two of us to carry it. My mother lifted one side, and I lifted the other. Over time, as we moved, new letters swelled the stack in my rooms. I stored them in a bundle fastened with a rubber band. The rubber band cut into the paper. I replaced the rubber band with a silk ribbon. It was not only practical but pretty, a way of organizing and elevating, of making the ordinary meaningful.
The English language dragged a heavy load through the letters. It clopped across them, so to speak, like the Budweiser Clydesdale’s on Fourth of July, tugging a wagon with blue-white-red tassels. All the things the load contained. That load was my dad’s, not mine. The language determined that. Other kids sat safely in their summer houses now, a fire in the fireplace and the October wind rustling in the leaves. Playing Monopoly, no doubt, and telling silly stories about the locals, laughing with their dads at all the inside jokes that didn’t need to be spoken. They didn’t have nightmares, their dads. There was no hostility between anyone. Did he know me at all? I didn’t know where to end or begin. I’d eaten other breakfasts, fished in other marshes, laid under other starry skies. I had to start over every time the Clydesdales clopped, I tried to heft something of mine onto the load. Translated school, my classes, my grades. Translated the system, the entirety of Danish culture. Long summaries of parent-teacher conferences. My English teacher was named Kirsten. Did they interest him, these long unsolicited explanations by airmail? The Clydesdales tugged, or tried to tug, but they looked so dumb bearing that load.
•
It is said that one dog year is equal to seven human years. But what is a human year? Not a simple thing, a human year. How many teenage years pass, for example, in an adult year? How many teenage minutes in an adult month? A month felt like one year. It seemed a reasonable conversion factor to me. My dad talked, on the other hand, about how fast time moved. For him it was the opposite, one year felt like one month. It was a recurring theme in our letters. Time that passed. Time that ran away from him. He would have written earlier, but the time got away from him. Maybe that’s what he meant when he talked about 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film I hadn’t seen. I’d tried, but I fell asleep before the apes left the scene. To me, the film felt like an eternity. It was supposed to represent life passing in the blink of an eye, but it lasted an eternity. Every single day without a letter was itself an eternity. I tried to pretend as if I didn’t detect the buzzing of something when I walked home from school, a question gathering at the edge of my consciousness. The possibility that one of these striped envelopes would be lying on the mat below the mail slot when I let myself in, it demanded a great deal of energy when I walked up the stairs, to shed myself of the fantasy of a letter on the mat, to blithely focus on the ordinary. Then the key in the lock, ignore my racing heart, don’t look at the mat first. I looked at the mat first. The depth and severity of separation was becoming clear to me. The mat was empty, or: usually there were one or two window envelopes along with the local newspaper. Then reining in my disappointment, reeling it in with indifference. There would be a letter tomorrow for sure, or the day after tomorrow. How long had it been since he got mine? How much time passed varied, from when my dad handed his letter to the ladies in the mailroom with all the cubbyholes, to when it lay on our mat in our entrance way. If I was lucky, and the letter coincided with a transport, it might take three days, more often five, sometimes ten. Best to assume ten.
On the envelopes I wrote: Write as soon as you get this let
ter. Write! Pick up your pen now! This instant! I thought about all the writing implements in his breast pocket.
Still, a month might pass, sometimes more.
We never discussed my return the following summer. Instead he came to Copenhagen, just like when I was little. There was a two-day conference on computer simulation at the Technical University of Denmark. Maybe he would bring my sister, if he could find a way to convince her mother. Maybe you have some ideas? I didn’t. I thought long and hard but couldn’t figure out what might work. He arrived without my sister and stayed a week at the Hotel Østerport—just like in the old days. We rode the harbor tour. There were white plastic seats. We exchanged the Chinese restaurant with a Burger King. There were also white plastic seats. I’d put a scarf in my hair, but I don’t know if he noticed it. I kept sliding down the seat, it was too curved. My dad didn’t pick up the camera from the table. The frame of his glasses was now of metal. His hairline had receded.