by Lily King
When I get off, I only have twenty minutes left. I want to ride the Scrambler, the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Shaker, and the Ferris wheel. I can’t decide which, so first I get some more fried dough. This time I shake out the cinnamon sugar and the powdered sugar until it is tick-gray. Delicious. Then I get in line for the Ferris wheel, which is on a long ramp leading up to its base. Two little girls and their mother are ahead of me. The girls are trying to decide which color compartment they hope to get. The compartments are round, with a column in the middle that holds up a matching metal umbrella. The girls are hopping with the same mix of sugar and excitement that I feel. I wish I could ride with them, and am almost on the brink of asking when Neal taps my foot.
He’s on the ground below. “Hey.” He looks like he’s forgotten the rest of what he was going to say.
The girls and their mother get into a green compartment. One of the girls is crying. She wanted blue.
I look at the long line behind me. “Are you trying to cut?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, you’d better hurry,” I say, and he hoists himself up by the metal railing and threads his body through the bars.
Our basket arrives. It’s blue and the little girl is howling above us. I give the man enough tickets for both of us then we crouch down to fit beneath the rim of the umbrella and sit on opposite sides of the circular compartment. The man drops a bolt through three rings on the door. We rise up a few feet and stop. I have no earthly idea what to say to Neal Caffrey. And really, I don’t want to talk. I want to go up high and look down at the town and out across the pale water.
“Oh Jeez,” Neal says as our basket rises again, much higher. It stops close to the top and swings a bit. “Oh shit.”
“Don’t tell me the winner of the Renaissance Cup is scared of heights. Look how gorgeous it is from up here.” I turn to see the harbor spreading wider and wider below us as we ascend, and then the open ocean beyond, dotted with islands, and the beginning of night lying flat against the horizon.
“Please don’t do that. Please don’t move around.” He is leaning forward, gripping the circular bar.
“You mean like this?” I shift my weight the slightest bit, a little forward, a little back.
“Please don’t,” he whimpers.
I’m a little shocked by what a baby he is.
We move and stop again, right at the very top. All the color is gone from Neal’s face, and his eyes are clenched shut.
“It’s beautiful up here. The harbor is full of boats and the water is so still.”
We begin to move again, dropping down.
“Okay,” he says, exhaling. “Okay.”
“Do you want to get out?’
“No. I’ll get used to it.”
“Are you sure? They let kids off all the time if they start freaking out.”
“No. I can do this.”
We circle down and around several times. He keeps his eyes closed. He says he’s sorry a few times. He tries to smile. I can still see the boy in him if I squish up his features, darken his freckles, thicken the hair slightly. When he smiles I see the same square teeth, the gap between the front ones gone. He must have had braces sometime after eighth grade.
Very carefully he leans back in his seat. “I thought you were leaving. I thought you were already gone.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe Berkeley is a little overrated after all.”
“Unlike fried dough and the Tilt-a-Whirl.” He smiles and I see his teeth again, and the gap, even though it’s been closed up.
“Exactly.”
“Seriously, Daley. What happened?” He is squinting, peering out at me through tiny slits.
“Seriously, the chair of the department won’t give me an extension. I had to be there Wednesday or not at all.”
“I thought your father was doing okay.”
“He is. But he needs help getting where he needs to go.”
He doesn’t say anything. I can’t tell what he’s thinking or what he knows about my father. There’s probably a lot I don’t know.
“How long have you been living here?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “A long time.”
“How long?”
“Nearly ten years.”
“Jesus.” I thought he was going to say one or two. Ten years means he dropped out of college. I don’t do a very good job disguising my horror.
He laughs. “I know. I’m Ashing’s own George Willard.”
We read Winesburg, Ohio in eighth grade. I’m smiling, but his eyes are sealed tight now. “So aren’t you going to tell me to get out while I can and follow my dreams?” I say.
“No, I hate advice,” he says, then adds, “Live your life. There. That’s my advice.”
“Are you living your life?”
“No.”
I laugh. “You didn’t have to think very hard for that answer.”
Our compartment stops and swings. Neal groans. People down below are being let off. We will be one of the last.
“I wrote an essay about you in graduate school.” There is something about his eyes being shut that makes me able to speak my thoughts.
“What?”
“You called my chest concave, and I wrote that that moment was my initiation into the world of the male gaze.”
“I never called you concave.” He sounds like he knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“Not to my face. But Stacy told me.”
“I didn’t. That’s not what I said.”
“Well, I got an A on the essay.”
Our compartment stops suddenly at the base of the wheel and the man slides open the bolt and swings the little door wide. “Great ride,” Neal says to the man.
We head back toward town. The way he walks beside me, a sort of long bounce, reminds me of his performance in The King and I. There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know, I can hear him sing. I laugh out loud.
“What?”
His eyes seem abnormally large now that they are open, and I laugh again.
“Jesus, what?”
“Nothing. Or, rather, too many things.”
“I think I liked it better with my eyes closed.”
“Why?”
“I feel like every time you look at me you’re asking, Why are you here? Why are you here?”
“I’m not. Honestly, I was just thinking about what a good King of Siam you were. That’s all.”
“Same thing.”
When we reach his shop he pulls out keys from his pocket.
“You’re going back to work?”
“I live here. Up top.” He points to a few dark windows on the second floor.
“I thought you lived with your parents.”
“I’m pathetic, but not that pathetic.”
I worry for a moment that he’ll ask me up, but he says good night and disappears into the dark store. A few seconds later a light goes on above, though I can only see the ceiling from where I’m standing. He doesn’t come to the window. I’m not sure why I thought he would. I start walking again. When I pass the sub shop, three teenage girls are coming out, still drinking their sodas.
“C’mon,” the first one says, tugging the next one by the sleeve.
“No!” she says jerking her arm away. “I told you it’s not true.”
“C’mon. He lives right down there. We’ll go ask him and find out.”
“No!” she shrieks as the other begins to run down the sidewalk. The third girl is doubled over laughing. But she is all talk, the first one, and when she gets to Neal’s door she only pretends to knock. Eventually the other two drag her toward the carnival.
My father is outside the church, smoking a cigarette with the man in work pants from the first night. This man looks a little like Garvey, the way he holds his cigarette backward, pinches it between thumb and forefinger, the lit end hidden by his palm. I wave and get in the car. Next to him, my father looks old, his hair no longer sprinkled with gray
but an even silver. His stoop is more pronounced, his neck angling away from the back collar of his blazer, leaving a gap. His sidewalk conversation is always jocular; he speaks to people, men and women, as if they are about to go out onto a field. Take it easy, he always says upon leave-taking, take it easy, says the man who has never taken it easy. But right now with this guy my father is listening, nodding gravely, looking up over the top of the library across the street and then saying something serious. They speak for a few minutes after their cigarettes have been pressed out on the walkway, and then they pat each other on the arm and separate.
My father gets in the car and lets out a long breath.
I start the engine and pull out into the street.
“I tell you, no one’s got it easy, that’s for sure.”
I look at him. There is pain on his face, pain for someone else. My father is feeling compassion.
The dashboard starts beeping.
“What the fuck is that?”
“It wants you to put on your seatbelt, Dad.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Is it going to tell me when to piss, too?”
He leans toward me to snap in the buckle—it’s tricky, you have to go in at just the right angle. He groans, then gets it, then says, “What’s that smell?”
“I don’t know.” The Datsun is old and has lots of smells.
“Food or candy or something.”
“Fried dough?”
“Disgusting. You’re eating that crap before dinner?”
“Two fat slabs of it.”
“Just like your mother,” he says. He’s right. I’d forgotten that. It’s just like her.
We pass Neal’s lit windows, then the carnival. The Ferris wheel makes its big turns. A feeling is pooling inside me, flooding my chest and up into my throat and down the backs of my calves. It’s a minute or so before I recognize it. Happiness.
16
My father plings across the linoleum in his golf spikes. He can’t find his five-iron.
“That goddamn Frank musta swiped it.”
He goes to look in the mudroom again.
“That kid was never any good. I don’t care what kind of snazzy job he has now or how many zeros he gets in his paycheck. He stole my fucking golf club!” He clenches his fists. His face is bright red. The dogs dance around him, misunderstanding his excitement.
I know I’ve seen the striped rubber handle of a golf club somewhere. Then I remember. “It’s in the poolhouse.”
“What?” he says, but he’s remembering it, too.
He marches across the grass and returns with it. I can tell he wishes he hadn’t found it. It makes him madder. “Now I’m late. Now I’m really late.” But in fact he’ll still be early to the club. Tee off isn’t till nine.
When the dogs have returned from chasing his car down the driveway, they clamber around me while I unload the dishwasher, waiting for our walk. Just as I’m about to fasten on their leashes, the front doorbell rings. The dogs jerk away from me, howling and scrambling as fast as they can toward the sound, barking even louder once they get there. No one but the mailman ever comes to the front door, and he rarely has reason to knock. The dogs are going crazy. It’s someone very unfamiliar to them. Neal Caffrey? I go to the door.
But it’s not Neal through the windows. It’s Jonathan.
For him to be standing right here now, he’s been driving since he hung up the phone yesterday morning. He’s wearing one of his better shirts, the striped one he defended his dissertation in. I quickly drag the dogs by their collars back into the kitchen and shut them in, then run back to yank the sticky front door open.
I am ashamed about the barking, ashamed that he looks different to me here on the front terrace of this house. “You’ve gone in the wrong direction, Mr. Magoo.” It comes out funny, like I have a frog in my throat, because I’m already crying.
“I know it,” he says, and he wraps his arms around me. He smells like coffee and Doritos and, when I press my nose into the side of his neck, our life in Michigan. I try not to shake.
When I trust my voice, I say, “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I called from Des Moines, kept going as far as Omaha, and turned around.”
I feel weak, as if I haven’t eaten for a while, though I just had cereal. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to have to say anything more. I kiss him and he kisses back. I feel him growing hard against me and I press into him, but he pulls back. And then he drops his arms and we are separate again.
I’m still holding the dogs’ leashes. He stares at them in my hand. His eyes are red and his mouth doesn’t seem to be able to hold a shape. I’ve never seen him not in full possession of himself.
“Come in.” I step toward the door.
He shakes his head.
“My father’s not here.”
“I’m not afraid of him. Do you think I’m afraid of him?”
“No.” I feel very small, very young. I want to say something that will return him to me. I flail for the first thing that comes to mind. “I saw this raccoon the other day. It had knocked over our trash can, torn into the bag, and was sitting on top of the barrel eating a piece of Swiss cheese, just holding it in two hands like a newspaper and nibbling at the top.”
He smiles at my effort. He takes both my hands. He’s about to say something serious, then changes his mind. “What’s an elk? I might have seen an elk. Right beside the highway. In the median strip. It had these antlers.” He drops my hands and spreads out his arms. There are huge round sweat stains under each one. “They went out to here. It was absurd. I don’t know why he didn’t just fall over.”
I try to laugh.
“You need to come with me now.”
“Jon.”
He looks up at the house, which seems its largest from this spot on the front terrace, fanning out with rows of old windows and shutters on both sides and up three stories, and then the dormer windows on a very tiny fourth floor that’s just storage but makes it seem absurdly tall. “I don’t understand one thing that has happened in the last two weeks.”
“I need to stay a little bit longer.”
“No, you don’t. You need to leave now.”
“I can’t be the next person who gives up on him.”
“You would not be giving up on him. Daley, you’re his grown daughter. He knows you need to live your life.”
“He’d feel abandoned. And he’s already come so far. He likes AA. He likes those meetings.”
“Why are we talking about AA? What does AA have to do with our life? Daley—” He steps away and presses his lips between his teeth.
“He won’t go if I leave. I know he won’t.”
“Then he’s not really doing it for himself, is he?”
“Not yet, not entirely. But he will, when he gets stronger.”
“How can he grow stronger when you’re here letting him be weak? That’s not how people grow stronger. He needs to do it on his own.”
“He needs something to lean on right now. I’m like a splint for his broken leg.”
“At what cost, Daley? The splint eventually goes in the trash. Has it occurred to you that your mother and your stepmother tried for years and years to be splints, too?”
“But they wanted more from him than I do.”
“Oh, Daley, you want so much more than they ever did. You want the daddy you never got. You want him to make your whole childhood okay.”
“This isn’t about me. It’s about him.”
“I know it doesn’t look like it’s about you. You’ve got it nicely cloaked in a gesture of great sacrifice.”
“Jon, we would be stronger if I had a better relationship with my father.”
“This is what I mean.”
“I’m just saying it has its advantages.”
“Daley.” He takes me by both shoulders. His eyes are bloodshot and sad. “You can’t stay here. Everything is at stake for you. Don’t you get that? You lose this job and—”
&
nbsp; “And I lose a job. That’s all. I will be a person who lost a job.” Across the street Mr. Emery has come out of his house and is standing in his driveway looking at us. Jonathan doesn’t notice. I shake off his grip on my shoulders. “I have this window of time, right here, right now, to help my father. It’s the only window I’ll ever get. And I’m the only one who can do it.”
“It must feel good to play God.”
Why do people keep saying this? “He has been sober for eleven days.”
“I know a lot of people I could try and save, and it would be futile for me to try. You know that.”
“This is my father, Jonathan.”
“Why was having a father never important to you until right now, right when we’re about to move in together?”
“Please don’t make this about us. It’s not about us.”
“What the hell is it about then? A week ago it was you and me and California, and now it’s this creepy town and a house built by the goddamn pilgrims and the bigot in residence.” He moves toward the steps, to his truck parked in the semicircle below. And then comes back. “Have you already called Oliver Raskin?”
“Yes.”
“And this is fine with him?”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s giving the position to someone else.”
Somehow this is the thing that makes it real for him. I watch his eyes fill up. “Why are you sabotaging your life like this?”
Julie cried for my joy, and now he is crying for my loss. But I feel very little. All these words feel like mashed-up cardboard in my mouth. Mr. Emery, I see, has gone back inside.
