Even when you felt better and wanted to go back to the playground, I knew it wouldn’t last. Your neck hurt to slide down the pole and touch the ladder, even just reaching for the bar. You would get a grip, sling your leg out, and stop mid-slide. You thought it was the fire pole that made your neck hurt, then the stairs, the slide, even the lower part of the climbing wall. Everything hurt. You waited for the pain to pass, inconsolable. You were so angry. There was no convincing you to quit. That night, falling asleep, you would roll over and wake yourself, grab your neck and yelp, and then just as quickly settle back and fall asleep.
In the end I took you to the doctor. A sprain. A simple diagnosis. Your neck hurt the next day, and for a while you were cautious on the wheel, but you kept going right back to it until you lost interest and moved on to the big slide and climbing wall. One evening I watched you take giant leaps into the surrounding sand, catching your legs under yourself and rolling forward, racing back up the ladder and out along the painted edge, the sand gathering in cupfuls at the toe of your sneakers, which trailed from the park to the car to the Big House. I carried you, limp and satisfied, inside and covered you for the night in your fire truck bedspread. It was both a terror and great comfort to me that you were always so physically willing to take risks, even after such an injury. I knew it meant that as you got older, you would be less likely to freeze at danger and more capable in the natural world. When your mother was your age, she would set out with her bigger cousins into the woods with a promise to come home at dinner. You’ll do that too, one day, though for now you wing small notches in your belt, oblivious and confident, perfecting your form as each new leap throws sand across the previous divot, making the sand a little looser as you drop out of sight for a few seconds, lulling the confidence of a father who thinks, He is fine. The next time I look over he will be standing again and racing back to the top.
*
Rice at the burrito shop was either white or brown. I always ordered the white rice piled moderately high with black beans, fajita vegetables, diced tomatoes, corn relish, guacamole, and salad. It didn’t look like so much food on the plate, but the staff took good care to stretch the burrito. You, too, never changed your order: brown rice, black beans. You refused to eat anything else. We did it every week, more or less, for our last two years in the Big House. Every Tuesday, after preschool, we split a large apple juice in two paper cups. If Raul was working the cash register, he comped the sides and asked you how you were doing. Sonja remembered your name too. I tried to remember to ask her about the teaching degree she’d start in the spring. Sonja comped us the apple juice too. Whoever was working the register, we usually paid a little less than ten dollars for our meal. When we changed preschools, we did it every Wednesday. Chipotle Wednesdays, you called it.
You liked the music they played over the loudspeakers. You liked to dance to certain songs when they came on, waving your arms back and forth, bobbing your head. It was not artful dancing, but we found a groove, in the booth, waist up, you trying to snap your fingers, both of us pumping our fists. I loved the way you smiled when you danced, rice on your chin. Your mom and I tried a few times to dance with you too: little dance parties in the bedroom or upstairs, while we made dinner. We used to do that all the time, just the two of us, in our apartment in the Mission in San Francisco. I loved that you loved to dance. You never drank much apple juice. When you were done eating and bored with dancing, you tried to climb on the stacked high chairs by the door, or if you were really tired, you would stand up from the booth, climb under the table, and run for the door. Magnetic locks. Double-latched. One time, you stood behind the giant water meters at the edge of the lot. I asked you what you were doing, and you said you were cooking beans and rice. You held out two scoops, and when I took them, you smiled. It was hell to ever get you back into the minivan. You were out cold before we left the parking lot.
Back at the Big House I would slip your shoes off your feet, unbuckle your seat belt, and scoop you into my arms, cradling your head into my shoulder. We would walk down the stairs, through the garden, and around to the side door, where I rolled you into the bed, covered your back, and tucked your plush monkey under your arm. Once, when your cousins accidentally took the monkey back to Berkeley, I drove north to the city and across the bay to get it back. It was the night the Giants won the World Series. Even in the fog, I could see the fireworks over AT&T Park, tiny bursts of brushed light that filled the sky and disappeared. Like in an old spy movie, I met the dad at the end of his driveway. I drove back through the city and down the peninsula, arriving home a few minutes before midnight. Everyone said I was crazy to have insisted on making the trip, but it is one of my favorite memories of your dopey and happy toddler face, how you reached out and grabbed the monkey, turned in the bed, and fell instantly asleep.
*
There was a stretch there, just after Sam was born, when you and I spent all day together, twelve or thirteen hours punctuated by a quick and quiet break in the afternoon. Often we would nap during that break, you in your Ikea toddler bed by the door, me in the king-sized bed across the room. I would settle you in bed with a bottle, after a few books. Usually, I could count on a half hour of rest. I had to be careful to be quiet enough that you would not hear me and so call out, or run around to my side of the bed. Still, I loved to see you, eye-level, staring up over the tall mattress. You would half-climb up to look me in the eye, or I would open my eyes and see your towhead and beautiful blue eyes, smiling. You were my 100 percent alarm clock. As I fell asleep, I would wake myself at least once to double-check the door was clicked shut, the lock turned, the blanket on your back. You couldn’t turn the door handle yet, but you could wander into Zait’s garage unchecked and grab all varieties of danger by the blade, beaker, or power cord. Always, you woke energized and loud, sometimes a little out of sorts. I woke charmed and lucky, always in a better mood; no better way to see the world again after sleep.
*
Why did we leave the Big House? There was no space for the new baby in the Pain Cave. We wanted our own place and had saved enough to rent one. We wanted to stake out on our own to find that first home that might one day become our own eventual big house, the next iteration of family dinners and kids’ Christmas parties, a big garden with fruit trees and sandboxes and a terrace covered in planters, even our own fishpond. Instead, we moved into a condo two towns over. We put planters in the yard and moved all of our city furniture into the small rooms. We came back to the Big House every few days for dinners and afternoon hangouts. Toward the end, Gail installed baby monitors throughout the house, to keep tabs on Zait during the day. He had stopped coming downstairs. He worried that no one would hear him if he fell. We gave him a bell, then a small air horn, and finally, the monitors. The day he broke his ribs, I heard a kind of thumping, which I think was Zait signaling through the floors. I helped him into his chair, where he sat a while before we got him down the stairs and to the hospital. That was a year, I think, before he died. After that, Gail and Linda kept the monitors on day and night. Zait’s daily routine—conversations, phone calls, naps—echoed throughout the house. He stayed mostly upstairs, shuffling between his bedroom and his office, dressing for the day and answering his mail, watching television at night and reading his journals, to whose editors he wrote elegant, if shorter, letters by longhand on his university stationary, at night watching Walker, Texas Ranger with his daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who visited more frequently.
*
Your mother says we recognize instantly the people in our tribe. She means those lifelong friends we spend most of our lives seeking out. The tribe that she and I found together began in the Peace Corps and continues even today, as we find them, in all directions of an affection that means, as it did at our wedding, the more the merrier. Even her old roommate and I still go to movies every couple of months. No one really goes missing or is lost too long from that tribe. I found a part of it at the Big House. I mar
ried into it, and it is perhaps the most exotic quality of the family into which I married—the one that you and your brother now continue—that they are always in mind, somewhere in the world and loved, with kids and dogs and favorite beaches and playgrounds, in new cities and countries. Whoever is sick or well, arriving in or departing from the world, everyone is accounted for, even when they are gone and always remembered.
Katie and I never visited the Big House. We never met Gunga and Yu-Yu, Linda and Zaitie. Still, I like to think that Katie and I were a part of that tribe, in our own way, long before I loved your mother. We met up with her at Peace Corps reunions in Chicago and Wisconsin and once in Seattle, at a friend’s wedding in a home with a family and character I recognize now as tribal too, with wild blackberries on the fence and a giant grill where we cooked whole salmon for the pre-wedding dinner, drinking whiskey on the back porch and sleeping in campers across the property. Katie used to say that she had made all the friends she needed by the age of nineteen. But then, at her funeral, a tribe, much larger than the one she described, arrived from around the world and then seemed to follow at a distance, clumped together in the procession, physical incarnations of each stage of her short life: childhood, school, work, whatever life continued past college. Separately, they did not seem any more a tribe than a clique, a minor cult whose purpose was fierce devotion to a loving memory, but it always surprised me how that tribe persisted; taken together they were every part of a life, and they kept her at the center.
Will you be mad at me one day because I loved someone before I loved your mother? Will you question my devotion to your mother and this life we have made for you? I wonder if there is any right way to talk with you about the fact that I was married before, and just as quickly I wonder, Will you really care? I think about what I don’t know in the lives of my own family—what I might never know, but also, what I have sometimes imagined, those stories I tell myself when veracity and origin can never be substantiated. What is the right age at which to tell any of this to a child? Do I wait until you ask? Will I say the right things if you do? I imagine my default motive here is honesty, but also disclosure. I don’t want you to feel that I have left anything out. That’s one reason I want to tell you about the Big House now, before too much time passes and we live in other places, before the present moment becomes so large and inevitable that the before and after are less interesting to you. Like every part of parenting, I guess, I want to tell you what you need to know. I also don’t want to say too much. Some things will only make sense when you’re much older or when—if—they happen to you.
Perhaps, if you do read this, take what you need and discard the rest. Take into the world a history that makes the most sense to you and test it against everything else you know and learn, even me and my stories of this place that you might only remember for how we remember it. Remember yourself in it when we talk about you. Surely, I’ve done this with the sliver of a sliver of Zait’s life that I witnessed during my time in the Big House. A whole life I do not know preceded our arrival there. A whole life you will know followed it. What else can a history do except work these few places where the sense seems most likely? And if you see, in the life before mine, and the marriage before this one, some sense of a precedent by which you might still make better or more sense, then I hope, please, that you’ll go after it. I have made my record for you. It is surely imperfect. But it is honest. It is all that I know how to do. More than my desire for your happiness and well-being, your affection and need for the world, your companionship and friendship and care in it, I want you to know that I have been happy in my affection. There is an integrity to this life, however you need or want to inherit it, a life that you explain to yourself, as you take this life apart and strip it for yourself, so that it will seem beautiful and special and dear, as you are to me. Thank you for that. And if the rest of the story never quite makes sense, if you sort through what I know and find more questions than answers, then let me offer one last insistence.
Widowed—it is said—a happily married man remarries quickly. He loves marriage so well he rushes back to it, and seeks again merely the thing he knows. I don’t think it’s quite true. The mind might order things first and second, but the heart does not love in sequences. It seeks too many through lines. What I know about being a husband began with Katie and continued past that middle point between two marriages, about a year after her death, when I could not remain inconsolable. No single wire of grief stretched between the two marriages, making music as it moved. No dating profile near misses, faltering too-soons, or graveside speeches with flowers and rain neatly connected the end of one life to the beginning of the next. Just think about the good parts, I told myself at first, and try not to let the rest go. I wondered about the widower I was becoming, who knew so clearly the husband he meant to be next. I did not want to forget the husband I had been first and would never be again.
Your mother is mine. I love her dearly. I used to believe that I loved her more wisely and better after Katie’s death, but that’s the sort of thing a person needs to believe, or says when he is stuck a little between lives. I don’t feel stuck. That first year in the Big House, I would sometimes sit at my desk and listen to music, think of Katie, and wait. When I grieved for her, the movements, so broad, were immediate and obvious. It felt honest and good to still feel grief and loneliness, guilt and horror. It made this life feel distant and fragile and remarkable. I feel more honest in any affection, even my love for you and your brothers, if I refuse the contradiction. I loved that life, and in my own way, I sometimes miss it. I suppose one day I may miss this life too, though never again will I miss anything in that same way. It is an old way, fit perfectly to another life, before this life began.
*
The door from your room into the garden was painted yellow. It stuck where the curtain rod chipped into the yellow wall. We opened it slowly to minimize the damage. You could squeeze your small body easily between the jam and edge, though you often took the long way through our room and up the stairs into the kitchen, out the kitchen door, and down the stone steps, under the laundry line and across the pavers. There was a small plastic sandbox whose lid made the shape of a frog. All green. His eyes were not painted. They were a good place to grab the cover and pull it open and shut, which you could just manage so gradually the eyes disappeared. Also, we forgot to cover it. So many animals and rainstorms dug into that sand. We waited for the end of spring to fill the box with fresh sand. It didn’t rain for the five long months of summer on the peninsula, and when we kept the hose away and the sand covered, you and your brother had a long stretch to play daily in the yard of the Big House, whenever you liked it. The cement wall on the near side of the stairs up to the terrace made a good sunblock to the west. The high brick wall at the end of the foundation absorbed the rest of the sunlight. We dried our towels after swimming on the wire chairs and table, a set gift from my parents when we first moved in. Sometimes we sat there while you played in the sandbox.
Flowers and trees grew in the shade without much watering. Your mother could name all of them. You and I walked down to the lower garden to water from the hose with the low pressure, until you lost interest. If I put my thumb in the spigot you’d laugh. Years from now, you may still recognize some part of that garden as your native realm. I never bothered to learn the flora and fauna of my childhood home. I knew the flowers that spoke with my thumbs when I squeezed them gently, and the telltale shape of poison ivy. There is no poison ivy in Northern California, but there is plenty of poison oak. The lawns are green with vast places for hiding. When we crossed between the houses, no one ever seemed home.
*
I make a witness of this first, very early part of your life so that you might imagine the things you will forget as this life continues. In a few hours, I’ll pick you up from school, and we’ll haggle over where we should go next and which songs to listen to and whether we should swing by Gail’s place that night on our evening bik
e ride through the new neighborhood, which looks nothing like the old one, or head out again to the overpass and watch the cars racing below on the highway. It is so easy to love you, now. There is so much energy and unexpected grace in how you move through the world. Your mind is that great starting place: all sponge. Your most radical sense of the sequences around you begins and ends with love. Here, in your home after the Big House, there are impossible moments of compassion and oblivion that extend the tradition in present bloom: a garden, our tiny fish tank with two goldfish, this family, growing still in every direction. You are bright and small in that vast greenery. However aware, at whatever distance, you are already the very best of us. So perhaps you’ll remember it all as a story. Here’s how you might tell it.
The very old professor lived at the top of a hill in a big blue house with his eldest daughter, who never married, and his second eldest daughter, who was married and had four grown children. The hill faced east to the bay and west toward hills at the edge of the ocean. The professor was 102 years old on the day he died. He was blind in one eye but pretty sharp. He quoted Longfellow at dinners and lectured about microbiology in his sleep. Both daughters had traveled the world in their youth and returned as adults to live in their childhood home and care for their elderly father. The oldest daughter had many friends. She made driftwood horses and sold painted scarves to boutiques. Her sister had recently closed the daycare she ran in the Big House for more than twenty years. At various times in their lives, each of her children had moved back into the basement apartment, alone and with their families, in the years after the professor stopped renting the apartment to his students. Minor improvements—fresh paint, better wiring, new curtains and bath fixtures—successively made it almost a stand-alone residence, with a separate entrance and a closed door off the hallway up the stairs, but no kitchen, so everyone ate their meals together.
Should I Still Wish Page 11
