by Sara Dillon
PLANNING FOR ESCAPE
PLANNING for ESCAPE
A NOVEL
SARA DILLON
Copyright ©2015 Sara Dillon
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Book One
Greensboro; 2006
I have always planned for escape. Well, just that once I didn’t, but that’s a long time ago. Surprisingly long ago.
It was so cheap to rent a place in Greensboro in early September. All the summer people were gone, the cottages and even the houses on the main road were more or less empty. I didn’t take a camp by the lake; that would have been too eerie and damp. Instead, I took a small white house in a field just outside the town, a kind of ideal really. I took my kids, Emmet and Madina, of course. Madina was confused about why she was leaving her school when the vacation season was already over. Why are we going back up to Vermont? she kept asking.
They played together in the front garden. I saw them sway back and forth on the old tire swing.
Madina is so tall now, I thought. I saw her passing by near the bushes and early fall flowers; she had Emmet by the hand. A car went by now and then. We could see the town from the front room; near enough and just nicely far away. Not like renting rooms right down on top of other people. This sort of location was what my sister Una and I would call in but out. We had company, but not too much.
The house had a phone number but I was darned if I could find the piece of paper it was written on. I’d never got around to buying a cell phone, and I didn’t know if it would work here anyway.
The television was complicated. I tried to use the remote but it was too hard and I just gave up, sticking the contraption in a drawer.
Gramma’s car looked funny in that particular front yard, the Buick that seemed to last forever, that never completely broke down, though we thought many times it might.
We called it Gramma car or Mumma car; my mother was Gramma, I was Mumma. Emmet would look for exact matches of that rare car type, the 1992 Buick Skylark, kicking his legs and calling out, Mumma car, Mumma car, whenever he saw one. It might be aqua blue or beige instead of our silver grey, sort of like a cousin to our car.
Emmet tumbled out of the tire swing. I heard Madina’s voice shouting Emmet, you drive me crazy. Then she was picking him up again and he let her scoop him this way and that.
I liked the windows, the curtains, everything. I liked the corner of lake I could see from the window, the edge of the general store, the stand of secretive trees and the dark green slope of a lawn with bushes all around. Clouds passed over the late afternoon sun. The phone didn’t ring since I didn’t know the number and so couldn’t tell anyone what it was.
Emmet, Madina was telling him, eat your num-nums, eat your num-nums. She was making a gesture towards her mouth, which he imitated but still did not eat his num nums. There was a table set up outside the back door, for us to have supper there if we wanted, but it was September now, just barely, and already there was a chill in the air.
I had taught a few law school classes that August, and then I began to think. I knew somehow that it couldn’t go on. I read some Hopkins. I rifled through my book collection, what was left of it. I’ve lost bunches of books with every move, though some I’ve enjoyed losing.
When we reached Hardwick on our way to Greensboro, we drove over the bridge where Daddy went to help with the flood of 1927. Everyone in my family is so old when they have kids that just a generation or two reaches back into the mists of time, skipping over the industrial revolution, and Daddy had been gone so long already. Madina and Emmet’s little voices sounded so young and fresh in the back seat, it was amazing they could be my children, when it was my Daddy who had run away from the very house we were passing, to throw sandbags in the flood of 1927. It didn’t make sense, really. I rarely tried to explain it to anyone.
The thing was, at some point, it just had to end. It was mid-August, and only law schools could begin in mid-August. August, of all the terrible and sacred times, the month of dog days and the death of summer and the death of the heart, the accumulated heat—August. Only people with no feeling at all, tiny bits of charcoal where feeling might be, would begin anything of the kind in mid-August. It’s the time when we ought to be at the beach, staring at the changing light, watching the odd formations of sand as summer walks away once again. Instead, there I was standing up in front of a classroom, row upon row of faces, very bored faces, and I was talking about things I couldn’t feel and didn’t care about, and I knew it had to end, it just had to.
It was August, and I was muttering about global trade law and policy and the history of economic integration and the GATT evolving into the World Trade Organization; and on it went, the European Union, the postwar system of human rights and states reporting to intergovernmental and supranational organizations, and suddenly I saw systems of rules colliding like a series of Ferris wheels gone off their rails. Outside in the city, it was still August, the parks were withering, the sprinklers going full blast. The fretting in the room was palpable; the students utterly uninterested and nervous all at once. Maybe a few were fighting back feeling.
To do law requires that one pretend to have no feeling of any kind; so it was hard to tell how many might be fighting back feeling; maybe I was projecting.
No one could have any idea how funny it was, me at the podium, talking about law, pushing back the old lines of poetry and the memories of wine and cheese parties. Balance of payments and subsidies, and then, Rescue me, calling out from the four corners of. . . .
I would never finish that poem, no matter how much free time I might find, damn it. It is all gone, I kept thinking, all gone, not to sound too much like Gramma, but it is all gone.
Madina! Keep an eye on him, he could run into that road!
I will, Mom, I am, she answered in her new tone of annoyance and being put upon. I am doing that, Mom.
The exchange
I began to obsess on the landscape paintings that hung in the hallway of the law school, near the elevator banks. For one thing, I wondered how it would be to have your artwork e
nd up decorating a law school’s walls. A law school, can you imagine, you could tell others, detached, amused.
Ikitai, I kept whispering in Japanese as I stood staring down the soft and vague and indistinct lanes, the rows of trees in the dusk, ikitai na, ikitai. . . . I want to go there. Then someone would come along and I would make a quick switch into rational mode. Things are going well, projects underway, I am dynamic and in demand. I may even get to present in the plenary session.
For quite a while since I hadn’t expected any more new lives; I mean, even a cat runs out. And well, the cat knows. It is hard to admit, hard to say, but once you say it, it does get easier to realize—no more new lives. No more; sorry. Like, no more cookies before dinner, to bring it back to the family way. Lights out, all over, all gone. No more.
But I started to think, Well, at least I had been brave enough to see it, and maybe, at least, I had the right to go sit in a Morris chair, in the kind of place the elder Darcys all eventually died, and take in a Vermont evening, right? Wasn’t that a fair trade? My idea of love, any version or vision of it, in exchange for just one day that would spin on and on.
Attitude, Madina, I hear that attitude starting again, I called.
She wasn’t listening. I had become repetitious.
I’d always been repetitious. Natural selection, and this was my forté. A good thing science and the wheel did not depend upon me—nor the discovery of fire. I’d been on a search for feeling, nothing else. Well, that had been a flop. It was hard to know if I’d really given up. I was sneaky, stubborn, and there it would unexpectedly reappear, a fresh and pure gardenia hidden away in my pocket.
In the morning, we shopped at Willey’s, where we could get everything we wanted, even decent wine. It was strange to be there out of season, so quiet. I’d only known it as crowded and with beach sand underfoot, people looking for plastic dinnerware and swimming tubes. It was a relief to be there when summer had finished, in the earliest part of the fall; the manageable twist of buildings, the bend of the road through town. I was careful to hold tightly to the kids’ hands; it was a sharp corner even though the road had become largely empty of cars, and you never knew.
Up until now, at least for the last few years, it had all been the same pattern: coming to Greensboro with Una’s family in early July, renting a house, poking around Willey’s, the Miller’s Thumb, going to look at Daddy’s old house up the road in Hardwick, an outing to Crystal Lake; then back to Boston and another year of classes.
Now that I’d arrived back out of season, I could do some considering.
To be honest, my fall from grace had probably happened a long time ago. I’d always been so thrilled to be alive, if I can put it like that, as if I’d been promised some enormous present of happiness, just for me. Because I was the best, the greatest, the one with the most heart; and then swish, it just went quiet. Like, gone.
I understood Emmet. He’d learned within a few days of leaving the orphanage to raise his little hands in a gesture of bewilderment when I said, All gone. He would look around with a pained expression, like a little old man, inviting you to help search for what he had lost. More, he began to say, haltingly at first, more? It had a teeny whine in it, plaintive, more?
I kept furtively driving by Daddy’s house, the well-kept red house in the flat part of Hardwick. It looked neat and prosperous and I kept thinking of Daddy and his sister playing in the yard as little children. It was like I had collapsed time by coming back here, especially out of vacation season. Daddy never knew my kids, he died long before I got them.
I felt his friendly and permanent presence up and down the street he was born on, his strange way of caring and not caring. Someone once accused me of talking about him like he was a saint, some awful date who was jealous, I think, but in fact he was as close to a saint as people come. In the sense that he had no malice. He also didn’t give a darn about most things, just wanted to be left alone to go out to coffee with Gramma and let the world go by.
The summer flowers had gone by, the clouds were rolling in. I drove past his house again and again, slowly and drinking it in each time. The kids were getting restless in the back. Madina wanted to know where she would be going to school.
I’m not sure, Madina, we’ll talk about it soon, I said, trying to maintain that everything-is-all-right tone one affects with children, really out of mercy and because you don’t want them to be upset.
I thought about all the new books I could order, buy them online, novels and poetry, stuff I never had a chance to read anymore. I’d been a failure, really. Once many years ago Yukito’s sister had said to me that an artist had to be ruthless, not bothering about ordinary things or even people, only about art. I considered that an affectation at the time, that she didn’t know what she was talking about. But maybe she’d been right after all; I had talent but not enough ambition, not enough backbone; too independent to have real contacts and too dependent to strike out on my own, an awful combination, even though I had once thought it quite marvelous.
I blew it, really.
Would I even sit down and try to write something up now, since I certainly couldn’t say I didn’t have time, that wouldn’t wash, I had nothing but. I could blame it on the kids, just couldn’t get down to it because they were calling me all the time. Or blame it on my worries, my tendency to lie awake and stew; but not on writer’s block, I didn’t like that one, the idea of a block, it seemed like a jinx to call it that.
The lake in Greensboro, Caspian, same name as the Caspian Sea, was steel blue and the grass was shining in the meadows. It had gone woodsy up here in recent years, but there was still a lot of meadow. It would last my lifetime anyway. That was thinking like an old person, wow, what was that all about. We went to the little beach and got out of the car. The kids started running down towards the rocky water they’d played in a few weeks earlier.
Wait for me, and Don’t go too far! I called out almost automatically. No wonder they didn’t listen. Kids, not too far! Wait! Wait!
Emmet paused when he saw the freshwater gulls wheeling about. He was still afraid of animals of all kinds, even birds. He turned towards me and started running in place to show how frightened he was.
Not afraid, I said soothingly; it’s not scary, not a scary gull.
Goldengrove
I just had to get away from those lawyers. I had a right to. After all, I did. Even at my age, I caught myself thinking about things like taking off for the Aran Islands and trying to become as good at Irish as a native speaker. At certain crazy moments, it seemed it could still be done. It wasn’t too late. Seek out the remnants, though maybe there were no remnants left. They disappeared so fast, the final firesides. At other times, I knew it was impossible, appropriate to my young self. I was beyond that, especially with kids in tow.
I’d always done everything that was asked of me—everything. I carried heavy bags and shoveled snow and sat through lectures and learned classical Japanese grammar and taught bills of lading and incoterms and even marine insurance, as implausible as that seemed. I kept on going.
I rented those weird apartments in Dublin and pretended to be a law lecturer. I even went in on Sundays to my office, driving in furtively, up the winding path to the castle that housed the law faculty, running down the corridors because I was afraid of the dark. It was a measure of my sense of being a fraud that I couldn’t stay away from it. I spent every spare moment in guilty preparation of things I cared nothing about; The Sale of Goods Act, priority in liquidation, examination invigilators.
Twice or three times a year, at the end of my visits home from Dublin, my sister Una and her husband Sven—I guess he was her husband—would come to the Boston airport and say goodbye to me; either in the winter dark or the summer dusk, and I cried every single time. I left with the feeling of being forced to go, aware of it not making any sense, standing up in front of students who really just wanted to know how to get a job in a solicitor’s office, talking from a small platfor
m about goods passing a ship’s rail. Worse yet, about charges on big-ticket items in a bankruptcy and what the silly old High Court might think of all this, the crux of the reasoning, the legal bon mot.
I attended faculty receptions like an idiot, nodding to the red faced judges who were of no interest to me nor I to them, talking to myself, silently repeating a rat’s ass, I do not give a rat’s ass about law or the legal profession, not a rat’s ass about judges or three part tests or stare decisis. Margaret are you grieving, I would say to myself, laughing quietly as I headed for the Belfield bus, over Goldengrove unleaving, but no one was listening. It was all a cod, a fraud.
I did take an Irish language class, just me and a bunch of young European Erasmus students, singing Mó Ghile Mear in a depressing classroom with dull overhead lights. I told Gramma’s cousin, Brother Clement, that I could escape when I knew enough Irish. I could teach it eventually. It wouldn’t take me that long, I said. I was in the West then, at the monastery, smoking and drinking a brandy. The rain was beating on the window. I’ll get out of it, I told him.
And he winked at me and said, I’d say you will, I’d say you will.
So back and forth I went. Dublin to Northeast Galway, wearing a hole in the road. I couldn’t stop. Will you be out this weekend, girl? Will you? Will you? That was my cousin Bridie talking. But after I got Madina, at the very end of the 1990s, I called it.
That just had to end, too.
I escaped from Dublin and ended up first in New York, with more lectures and more lectures to write. I would wake up at four a.m. with the buzzing of the alarm, the lights of Manhattan barely a distraction in my anxiety to be ready for the day. Hoping to get in a few hours of reading, scribbling notes, sipping my coffee, vaguely aware of the ships passing by in the dark so close I could almost touch them. Then out would come little Madina, right away, as soon as I got up, whining, rubbing her eyes.
