My god, we were terrified. You were up that whole night, sick, we thought, if not genuinely ill, though maybe you were just feeding off of our panic in that tiny basement room. I bounced you and bounced you until I lost my nerve—all that screaming, your red face—and when your mom took you and put you on the edge of the bed to rest a moment, rolling you back and forth, right off the edge you went, tumbling over the bedframe and onto the floor. We both looked at each other and thought, This is it. We can’t do it any worse. The next morning, first thing, we loaded up the car and drove across California, into the mountains and up the hill to the family cabin by the lake, to find Yu-Yu, who met us at the car and carried you into the cabin. You went limp in her arms right away. She said she had never seen two adults look so exhausted, which we were, which is the sort of funny story one tells a child years later, knowing he won’t really understand why we were so scared about something that worked out okay, which is, I think, more and more, the story of my own life. Of course, your stomach was fine. I wondered, even then, whether the nurse was messing with us, if hers wasn’t a kind of black humor among those who answer the phones in Beaverdam, Ohio, at the witching hour, half asleep and abundant with caution, who chart worst-case scenarios against the dull repetitions of new parents and split the difference, searching the web for news and gossip as they nod and smile, laugh and wheedle and neutrally reassure. It’s fine. Go see the doctor. Go to the emergency room. Go back to sleep.
“Does any of this ring a bell?” I asked you on a bike ride the other day. I wanted to know what you remembered of the Big House. You said, “Zaitie Candies,” and I remembered right away something else I had forgotten: those giant bags of M&Ms we kept in the top drawer next to Zait’s recliner, the one he would gingerly reach across with his homemade grabber (wooden plunger handle, nails, rubber bands, plastic claw) to pinch the edge of the bag and put a heaping scoop into your grubby paws as you smiled and jumped, climbing up onto his lap and prattling on about your day. There was a table next to the chair covered with all manner of balms and medicines. You knew not to touch them. Our first year in the Big House, Zait would come down the stairs still to ride his stationary bike, read mail, and watch television, sometimes even taking the Volvo down to the medical school to eat lunch with his old students, many of whom were also retired, a few dead: Zait the centenarian former dean in his derby cap and cane, and later, in his blue wheelchair, a red-and-black plaid university blanket across his lap to let everyone in the hospital know he was a big deal, ever dapper as back home, where he really held court, he took hours to get ready to receive his guests. Still, he always made time for you. He would pause to pull you up onto his lap, say a quick hello, and then gently call out to either of his daughters, “Come take the boy, won’t you, dear? Down you go. Say dear, would you mind checking the mail?” and Linda would take your hand and lead you down the stairs to Gail or your mother or me, whoever was home from work at the time in our family commune, our multi-generation compound with the big guy upstairs in the Big House and us in the basement, sometimes just me and Sam playing in the living room that faced west, so bright in the afternoon that we had to close the curtains to keep from baking the sofas, where you would join our game but first send Sam upstairs to get his candies too.
“Zaitie Candies,” you said you remembered, “and the birdies,” because of course the Big House had an aviary. It was next to the trellis, along the wooded path by the cottage. “Welcome to Narnia,” a friend used to joke every time he came over to visit. It is true that the yard was overgrown those last years, making rather a Hobbit home of coziness among the trees overhanging the stoop, the dense hedge of flowers and shrubs along the street, the persimmon and citrus trees down the side yard, where three tiers of garden sloped sharply to the road. There was oleander all up and down the drive, kumquats, a lemon tree struck by frost that produced sour, rindy fruit, and the magnificent Braeburn apple tree from which the family made all spring and summer every variety of crisp, pie, crumble, bake, and cake, the tree that died the summer we moved out and is now all stump. We would sneak under it and across the property to the neighbor’s pool, a Busby Berkeley affair of slides and stones and trees and fountains, where you could wade in the shallow end while we all beat the heat. The neighbor convalesced in an empty room overlooking the pool. She would sometimes complain to the nurse, though Linda smoothed it over, as she always did. Linda was in cahoots with everyone at the Big House.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to tell you a story about your beginnings in this world. I want to tell you that story now, before I forget any more of it, or before it simplifies into something that feels less important, a story that animates the past rather than reveals it, the three or four stories any parent thinks to tell if only to prove that he or she was there and paying attention: that you dressed like a fireman for two years straight, ate lentils with curry powder and raisins as often as meatballs and noodles and pie, that when you fell off the bed we drove you to the mountains and everything was just fine, because, like most new parents, we didn’t know any better than to worry about things we hadn’t yet figured out.
First, though, I want to tell you about your first home, that magnificent and ancient homestead, the Big House, in which you were the fourth and last generation of your mother’s family to be born and to begin your childhood. I want you to know something about how we made our life there, and became a family, by ourselves and with everyone who lived in it: your mother and me and you and Sammy; Yu-Yu and Gunga, your grandparents; Gail’s sister, Aunt Linda; and your great-grandfather, the mighty Zait, who until the day he died, 102 years old, rattled around the upstairs, reading medical journals and making his oil paintings to hang on the walls and along the staircases, writing complaints to doctors and utilities and consoling letters to the spouses of his dead students, more and more of whom he continued to outlive, until the evening he no longer did, that curious night we drove over from our new home with dinner for the family, only to find Gail sitting on the stairs, smiling at you and telling us that it was probably time. Later, when you asked where Zait had gone, she looked at you and said, “Belmont,” the city where the nursing home had taken his body, which was a literal enough answer that you were satisfied with it. You never asked again.
This is not a story I want to embarrass or confuse you, or even worse, to bore you. There is so much love in this world for you. All the malevolence and unreason in the world doesn’t hold a candle to such affection. And if I say “first life” and “second life,” it is only to acknowledge a sequence. You were loved and beautiful right at the start of a life that now continues to begin, as any good creation story should, with mythos and wonder and fact, as beautiful and spontaneous as any theory of the universe that accounts for how nothing becomes something, transforming everything that wasn’t into something that is, bending the light a little, spinning the planets, and slowly pulling the smallest things back into darkness, to disappear, as though they were never there to begin with.
The goldfish might see things differently. Surrounded by us, taking the measure of our routines when we noticed him, he survived all of the intervening months in his white square next to the calendar, until the calendar was no longer of use. I have my memory of what went well under his watch. All of the studies seem to agree that a child is shaped into whomever he will become by the age of two, and now that you are past that age, by that logic, the plaster is set and dried. Does it matter whether you remember that beautiful house, our time there, so long as you know that you were there, before you knew where there was? That now we are here? You may even wonder, What was it like?
You were born and raised in an idyll. You grew up in a beautiful home, surrounded by loving people who kept it well enough to see the idyll and compel your imagination. You lived there for three years: just long enough to see it with your own eyes. The first time I visited the Big House, I was floored by that place. Your mother and I weren’t even dating. And even as I came to ta
ke it for granted—to see the Big House as ordinary and very typical in its own way, and exceptional in many other ways—I believed it was good for us, and very, very good for you. I am happy that you were born there. And here’s the honest truth of the matter. What is there to do with any idyll besides love and then grow accustomed to it? I have to believe that’s true. Otherwise, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why we chose to leave it before we had to.
*
Your bed faced a door that opened into a magnificent garden, most of which you could not see through your window. We curtained the sill in the morning so that you’d sleep later, which you never did, and during the afternoons, when you also didn’t. On the sill, in front of the curtain, was a painting of a rubber duck next to a framed photograph of your mother holding you in the hospital. The painting was a watercolor by your second cousin. In the photograph, I wedge beside you and your mama in the mechanical bed, smiling and leaning in, friendly, and surprisingly, seemingly at ease. What I remember of those first days is the certainty that I would drop or break you, that I might neglect you in some accidental yet entirely irrevocable way. I dashed around the maternity wing, asking every nurse I could corner to show me how she changed a diaper, or hushed a baby, or angled a bottle. I took notes and compared methods and tried to secret the complimentary pacifiers away, lest your jaw malform its ligature and leave you one day sucking dinners through straws. All those successive surgeries to help you smile. Such was my urgency, to find no comfort that most fathers worried in this way. My worry had to be exceptional. I came home that first night to sleep a few hours in the empty room in the basement, but raccoons had trashed the bathroom and tracked mud around the new crib. We had left the door open to circulate the late summer heat, as we did most nights, though the raccoons hadn’t come before and they haven’t returned since.
In the photo, I look tired and happy. Your mother, of course, is exhausted but she looks beautiful. You favor her, especially around the eyes. You have my nose and broad shoulders but most of you is your mother’s, and I don’t mind that. I rather like it. I trace so many good qualities of our family, as we raised you, to a lucky coincidence of resemblance and inheritance: that someone taught us, from the start, how to be a happy family for you so that, even if we didn’t quite know it, we might study and watch the model, and mimic its moving pieces, learning the rest as we went at it, by suggestion or by force of habit.
Zait and his wife bought the Big House in 1955 so that it might become the family homestead. What it accumulated in the intervening sixty years was equal parts etymology and living museum. The Big House was big. It housed nearly everyone. I can’t imagine how Zait saw what it would become any more than he saw the continuity of so many future years. And yet, they continued. On his hundredth birthday, family and friends gathered on the lawn to sing, eat, and drink together. That evening, he kept his routine, watching Walker, Texas Ranger and talking with his daughters about the relative virtues of slow-motion karate. “That Norris fellow,” he liked to say, “is pretty good, don’t you think?”
Those three years we lived in the Big House we got to know its every routine, habit, and peculiarity; in those immodest moments, sometimes my own, which accumulated every ideal to the flaws and perfections of intimate witness; in every way we knew and lived it, the Big House was a paradise, our founding myth, larger even than it looked: regal, antique. Even when the garden flooded, the foundation wore through, unrepaired, the roof leaked, and the water heater was shot, these were only the kind of problems that someone would have tried harder to solve if Zait hadn’t been right at the end, or hadn’t believed it for decades even when he wasn’t, a sheer game of numbers he won, and won, and won. He refused to buy expensive hearing aids because he did not expect to get his money’s worth out of wearing them. He canceled the insurance policy on the house and then reinstated it. Sometimes, I still forget how loudly we spoke to him; our voices, magnified, making a startling contrast in the normal speaking world. I remember the bright, even pitch of his voice, though, especially when he told stories and recited poems.
There is a low point of trees and overgrown shrubs just past your window where the water sometimes collected, with only the bright blue sky—it was nearly always sunny there—to frame it. In the converted garage out the other side of the basement, you poked around wrenches, nails, saws, acids. You hosed pots or looked under rocks for pill bugs in the garden behind the cottage where Gail and Bob lived. We called that cottage the Little House. Your mother was born there. When she was your age, she went back and forth for large family dinners in the Big House. As Gail kept the Big House going, she and Bob ate dinner with you and me and your brother and your mom and Zait and Linda, every night. After dinner, Gail or Linda sat up most nights with Zait late into the evening, watching television or reading, watching him I suppose but usually chatting and laughing with him—we could hear it through the ceiling. “Still breathing,” Gail would sometimes joke in the morning, and if he was fully awake and beginning his long morning routine in the bathroom, she would disappear into the kitchen to soft boil an egg or plate his tinned fish with toast, and brew weak coffee. Always, Gail arranged his breakfast with the morning paper. She sat and waited for him, chatting on the phone with her sisters or reading a book, often watching you.
There was a grate in the hallway of the Big House that ran a vent to our apartment in the basement, the converted room and bath I cheerily referred to as our “garden apartment,” though the family preferred its former moniker, “the Pain Cave.” Pipes ran in both directions crosswise to the space. The ceiling over the television and sofa was wrapped in old white sheets. When I called my parents and siblings on Skype, I liked to joke that I was calling from the space station. My sister, your aunt, asked once, “So, how do you like your new family?” At such moments, I usually pivoted, reflexively, to you and your baby brother. “The boys,” I would say, “love it here.”
The lower garden flooded on the day of our wedding. That was the last time anyone tried to fill the goldfish pond. But the trees, in every direction, grew quite tall. From the living room, we could see all the way to the satellite dish that Zait’s wife insisted the university paint light blue, the better for her afternoon view of the sky. Ami died the year I met your mother in the Peace Corps. Your mother smiles still when she tells me that Ami used to stuff food in the mouths of passing grandchildren, loved to spray prom dates with lawn hoses, and without fail stayed up every night in the living room playing solitaire until she won. A few weeks before our wedding, a little more than a year before you were born, your mother and I wound plastic flowers into the roof of the garden shack and painted it white. It is the character of the home into which you were born that anything could be made beautiful and used again.
*
From the living room, we heard coyotes at night. Sometimes I would see the campus ranger making a late patrol, shining a dash-mounted spotlight in slow loops to weed out any last student revelers. People died there, it was rumored, but you wouldn’t know to look at the long hills filled with day hikers. There seemed so little vegetation to support wildlife, much less welcome it back. I used to walk you through those hills when you were a baby. The sun there was impossible in the morning. It shined down in every direction. No shade. You would sleep and fuss, however I adjusted the sun shade. I don’t miss those walks, though I’m sure one day I will. What is amazing to me now is that we only saw mountain lions in silhouette on metal signs:
Fresh mountain lion tracks have been found in this area. You are advised to never hike alone. Keep children close to you. Do not approach, run from, cower, or place your hand near a mountain lion. Fight back if attacked.
Up and down the hills we made the loop, saying hello to the other hikers, who smiled at you whenever I stopped to move the sun visor or dig out snacks. I never felt unsafe there, but I did sometimes pick up the pace when we walked alone. I suppose most hikers did.
When I was a boy, I liked safe spaces. I im
agined a room in my heart—an actual room—into which I invited Jesus. We sat together. The room was red upholstery, velvet I think, all around. The windows were stained glass and simple. I sat in that room, radiating faith and love. What more could I want in the world? But I was not in the world. I was imagining a room that I never wanted to leave. Perhaps what I felt in that room was faith. It certainly wasn’t religion. In heaven, I asked Jesus, didn’t time get boring? How did the dead keep track of time? I never asked a teacher those questions. I didn’t want to tell anyone how I imagined heaven, much less admit that I talked to Jesus about it. I suspected that my imagination was naïve or flawed or corrupt, a form of sinning unequal to the grace I felt in my safe space. “Scrupulosity,” the Chicago doc calls it now. Then, “shame” felt much closer to the truth. Could such a room exist if I only imagined it? I prayed, suffered, desired, and denied, trying to divine an answer, but when I sat alone with Jesus, I felt, always, loved.
I loved our small room in the basement. I saw enough continuity in the Big House to suspect that there were answers to discover there too, that the Big House itself was one answer to that wellspring of questions from which my curiosity and terror arose. Not that the world was a place to fear or seek shelter from, but that my experience of the world was less vulnerable among people so loving and happy. It is an affection and happiness that I hope continues in our own family, and so, at the beginning of your life. I felt many things during the years we lived at the Big House, but unlike in my heart room, I never felt lonely there.
*
One afternoon, you fell off the hanging wheel on the playground near the Big House. You were so confident and strong on the sliding pole, which you called a “fire pole,” of course. I was sure you’d do fine on the wheel. You were excited to try it. I lifted you up and let you hang on it a few seconds. You hung, laughing, until your fingers started to slip, and then I caught you. We did it again and again. The trick was that the wheel turned at an angle: you started on one side and swung around, down and up, back to the other. Each time, I helped to slow down your momentum just enough to let go and land back on the perch, more or less on your feet. The time you fell, I’m not sure whether the force of the turn threw you or if you just let go. Either way, you hit the dirt with quite a thump. It was one of those falls where the first thing I thought was, oh shit, and then my second reaction, for a split second, was to start to laugh. I checked you on the ground: legs, chest, arms, head, neck. Your neck was where everything hurt. Like a turtle, you just kept popping and wiggling your head. You were screaming, of course.
Should I Still Wish Page 10
