by Dan Deweese
And we were in that state when Sandra stepped into my office that morning to announce that she was leaving. The blouse she had been ironing was the very one she was now wearing. She looked crisp, clean, and confident. “And do you think you can talk to this kid?” she said.
“Which kid?”
“Ira.”
“No. Because I told him not to date her in the first place, but then he was allowed to. So now he’s not going to respect anything I say.”
She looked hard at me—she already had her tournament game face on, it seemed. “I’m aware that you and I disagree on things. But now is not the time for you to sit around sulking, and blaming things on me because I said something that upset you. The person you’re punishing by acting this way is your own daughter, and it’s selfish and stupid.”
“Can I tell you something?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“But are you listening for real?”
“Say what you want to say,” she said angrily—exactly the state I had been hoping to produce in her.
“You do not understand what it’s like to be an insecure and angry young man.”
“I know that.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve acted like you understand exactly what’s going on here and how to handle it, but you don’t. You’ve told me I don’t understand what it’s like to be a teenage girl, so now I’m telling you that you don’t know what it’s like to be that boy. And what you need to understand is that that boy will not be spoken to.”
“You can’t talk to him at all?”
“He won’t be spoken to. He will pretend to listen, and he will nod, and then he will ignore everything that was said. So I don’t even intend to try. And just so we’re clear, I’m not sulking. I’m angry at you.”
“And you’re throwing a big tantrum.”
“Right. Because no matter what I do, you characterize it as immature. When I tried to keep Miranda out of the relationship, I was being stupid. And now that I’m refusing to try and help you get her out of the relationship, I’m again being stupid. Either way, it doesn’t matter, I’m being stupid.”
“You are obsessed with being right!” she said. “And you think that the only way you can be right is if I’m wrong. It’s incredibly frustrating to try and talk to you when you’re this way. I feel like you’re still nine years old and following the rules your mom gave you for when she was gone in the evening, like as long as you don’t answer the door and don’t speak to anyone, you’re allowed to watch as much television as you want, and you’ll be praised for it.”
I laughed. I felt I had finally decoded her, and everything was clear. “Again, you’re saying I’m immature,” I said. “This is your stock response, and psychologizing my childhood, which you weren’t there for and know nothing about, is just a variation of the same thing. I’ll be going to work today, then I’ll come home and measure that doorway, and I’ll go out tomorrow and buy a new door. I’ll bring it home and spend my weekend working on fixing the whole thing, while also keeping an eye on our daughter. What a child I am, right? How immature. You have a good time at your little tournament.”
The issue of whether my rhetorical analysis was correct or not seems hardly important now—or less important, at least, than recalling when and why I began to think Sandra was a code I needed to break in the first place. But of course that was the shift that had been occurring so slowly and consistently that it had acquired the feel of seismic inevitability. Continents shift because they ride on plates. Why do the plates shift? I don’t know. I have never known.
Sandra’s response was simply to leave the room. I stayed there, listening to her take her bags out to her car, and then return for a few more things, and take those to the car. I listened to her walk upstairs, and heard the muffled tones of her saying good-bye to Miranda, who was still asleep. When I heard her come back downstairs, I thought she might come back into the office one more time, so I sat there, staring at the empty web, and wondering where the spider went when he wasn’t there. But then I heard the front door rattle shut, followed by the sound of Sandra’s car starting. She hadn’t come back to say anything more to me. She just left.
So when I pulled into the bank’s parking lot less than an hour later, I was glad to find Grant already there, waiting. It was still early, and the streets were empty, but the sun was already high and bright, which is, I assume, why Grant was wearing sunglasses in addition to his jeans and black T-shirt, though the sunglasses made me feel a bit paranoid. I didn’t even have a chance to say good morning and ease into the discussion, before he said, “So you want to go ahead with it.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“It’s the only reason you would ask me to meet you in person.”
“Okay, so I’m not subtle. How long do you think it would take?”
“To get him out of town? Not long. I already met with him last week, for an interview.” On seeing my surprise, he laughed. “I was going to do it even if you weren’t okay with it,” he said.
“I thought it depended on whether you got that job.”
“I got it. They called me yesterday. I’ll do most of the line I proposed, but not the blender. They won’t let me do the blender, for some reason.”
“Congratulations, then.”
“Thanks. And so I can hire the kid and have him down there almost immediately. I’ll send him for a weekend to scout things out, then extend the trip so he can set up the office down there for me, and then I’ll offer to ship all his stuff down and get him set up in an apartment, and that’ll be it.”
A long-legged dog—thin, ragged, and panting—loped past alone, without casting us so much as a glance. Part of me expected a police car to roll up, and an officer to step out and ask us what we thought we were doing. “How much money do you need?” I asked.
“None,” he said. “I’m hiring the kid, and he’s going to work for me. That’s all there is to it.”
“But it’s going to cost you a lot.”
“It’s one flight and a few nights in a hotel. That’s nothing, and I can write it off. I’m telling you, the kid is going to do actual work, and a lot of it.”
“Do you even trust him to do actual work?”
“Not really. And especially not when I’m not there watching him. But whatever he doesn’t do, or whatever he does wrong, or steals, or lies about, it will give me the reasons I need to let him go six months from now. And really, he’ll probably quit on his own before we even get that far. A lot of people exactly like this kid move to Los Angeles and within a few weeks decide that they’re actually an actor or a director. And I’ll be happy to encourage him in that.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. It seemed Grant was right—everything was taken care of. “Is this what you meant when you told me I shouldn’t ask for permission?” I said. “That I should do what I want, and argue with people about it after it’s already done?”
He laughed. “I suppose. Are you angry at me?”
“No. And at least you pretended to ask me about it. That’s something.”
“A show of respect,” he said.
He drove out of the lot just as Catherine pulled in—they traded a wave through windshields, I think. And after Catherine parked and joined me at the front door while I unlocked it, she said, “So you’re doing business in the parking lot now?”
“Only for friends.”
“The manager meets you in the lot,” she said, eyebrows raised. “It’s even better than the drive-through.”
I RECALL A SENSE of calm settling over me—a serenity that colored that entire weekend that Sandra was away. Miranda and I ordered pizza Friday night. She didn’t mention Ira, I didn’t mention the broken door, and the two of us ate while happily making fun of an entertainment gossip show on television. Miranda didn’t mention going out, and fearful of breaking the spell, I didn’t ask. After dinner, she disappeared up into her room
. She was lying low, it seemed. Was she hiding from Ira, though, or was her sudden presence an effort to appease me? Two birds with one stone, I decided, which was fine with me. He had scared her, and she had probably scared herself a little, and if she was going to use the need to mollify me as the motivation to remain safe at home for a few evenings, well—go on mollifying, I thought.
Later in the evening, I climbed the stairs and knocked on her door. There was a bit of shuffling before she told me to come in, and I found her on her bed, a book in her hands and multiple sheaves of notebook paper spread around her. She was apparently so absorbed in her book, in fact, that when I told her the two of us would have to fix the front door in the morning, she didn’t even raise her eyes from the page as she mumbled that that sounded fine. The mood of lighthearted laughter we had enjoyed while watching television earlier had disappeared, it seemed. And when I asked her, for the first time, what had actually happened to the door, she just shrugged, her eyes still on the book. “It was just an accident,” she said. “I’ll pay for it.”
“I don’t care who pays for it,” I said. “I just want to know what happened.”
“He broke it accidentally. He said to tell you he’s sorry, and he’ll help pay for it, too.” With a dramatic excess of wrist, she flipped a page.
“Could you put the book down and talk to me? I want to know what’s going on.”
She carefully closed the book, a torn paper bookmark in place, and adjusted the wrap on her palm. “Nothing’s going on.”
“A front door doesn’t get broken on accident.”
She rolled onto her back and sighed, contemplating the ceiling. “We were having an argument.”
“About what?”
“Stuff.”
“And where was your mother?”
“At a movie. With Margo Talbot.”
“So you were here by yourself while this guy was breaking down the door?”
She finally looked me in the eye then, and with a complete and utter lack of intonation said: “Yes.”
Was she hoping I would investigate? That I would keep asking questions, so that she could reluctantly give up the information that some code was preventing her from giving voluntarily? “You don’t have to tell me what you were arguing about,” I said. “But I can’t fix the door unless I know how it was broken.”
“He kicked it. I was mad at him and I wanted him to leave, so I pushed him out the door and locked it.”
“And he kicked the door hard enough to break it?”
“Yes. He got upset and kicked a door. That’s all that happened. And he didn’t think it was going to break, and he’s sorry.”
There was no way he could have kicked it only once. It had to have been a sustained attack. But Miranda continued to offer me a look of opaque blankness that matched her tone of voice.
“Were you scared?”
“I was angry. But it’s normal for people to argue.”
“Why do you like this guy? You don’t seem to have a good time with him.”
“He’s a good person. He’s just had a hard time in life.”
“It’s not your job to help people.”
“It was an accident, Dad.” She returned to reading—or pretending to read—as if the conversation were over.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow what?”
“We fix the door.”
“Okay.” She turned another page in her book, though she couldn’t possibly have read that much while we’d been talking.
“I want to show you how to do it.”
“What do you mean?” she said, looking up.
“I want to show you how to fix the door. How to use the tools. You need to learn how to do it.”
“How to fix a door?”
“You’re old enough now. You need to understand how to do some simple things.”
She looked at me as if I were speaking in a foreign language. “Okay,” she said.
I thought: She’s safe here, in her room, with her books and notebooks, and her clothes draped and stacked in various spots, with her little stereo and clock radio and posters of Paris and Rome. She is okay here. “What are you reading?” I asked.
She actually turned the book over to check the cover. “Crime and Punishment,” she said. “Did you have to read it when you were in school?”
“I don’t remember. Would I like it?”
She chuckled in the little amused way I understood was at my expense, though maybe not maliciously. “I don’t think so.”
After breakfast Saturday morning, we headed to the hardware store, where the jingle of the entry bell followed by the aroma of solvents and cleansers announced the commencement of the spell that never failed to work its power on me. The aluminum bins of carefully sorted nails and nuts and bolts and staples, the waxed aisles of tools, the rows of pipes and wires and buckets and rags, the cans of paint and their attendant brushes, the sandpapers and push brooms and saw blades, and the yard out back, where the scent of freshly hewn lumber filled the air: there was no problem here that couldn’t be solved. Miranda and I walked past shelves filled with loose windows of all shapes and sizes, and then turned into an aisle where a seemingly endless queue of front doors hung along a wall, so that not one of the doors opened onto anything but the next door. “They’re like dominoes,” Miranda said happily. “If we swing the first one hard enough, it will open all the others.” When she reached for the first door, though, I quickly put my hand on her arm and said, “Don’t try.” She laughed. And after choosing a door similar to the damaged one we already had, we headed home to make our repairs.
The afternoon was hot and nearly silent. My red aluminum toolbox lay open on the porch, tools scattered about, while I led the project and Miranda made notations in pencil on a small pad of paper: the height of the door, the width, the depth of the jamb, the placement of the hinges and strike plate. Our glasses of iced tea sweated on the porch railing, the ice cubes glinting in the sunlight. When I suggested you couldn’t just break solid wood and I was surprised Ira’s foot wasn’t broken, Miranda reminded me there had already been a crack in the door large enough that you could see light through it during the day—Sandra had complained about it more than once, and that’s where the door had split. “Well, this one will be able to take whatever Ira can dish out,” I said.
Miranda shook her head—not angrily—and said, “You need to stop. Why do you hate him so much?”
Pretending not to understand why I disliked Ira could only have been an emotional affectation at that point, pretend bafflement at a reaction she actually understood perfectly well. But her thoughts on people and the world seemed entirely in play, as if she had decided not only to discard her childhood identity, but also to open up to inquiry every system of sane thinking and every scrap of common sense. Everything that had once been proven would now have to be proven again. “You’re my daughter,” I said. “So if you’re going to have a boyfriend, I want it to be someone nice. Not someone who smashes doors in a rage.”
“Did Grandma Carrie act this way when you were a teenager? Was she this super-critical of everyone?”
“I’m not being super-critical. And Carrie didn’t have to worry about who I was dating, because I didn’t date anyone in high school.”
“Why do you call her Carrie? Didn’t you ever call her Mom?”
“Not really. Maybe once in a while, as a joke. Most of the time we just called each other by our names.”
“And you didn’t date anyone at all? Ever?”
“There were only about fifty people in my whole graduating class, Miranda.” Miranda knew my mother had been seventeen and unmarried when she had me, and that my father, only eighteen himself at the time, never lived with us. In her youth, Miranda had asked me more than once to describe the two-bedroom apartment Carrie and I lived in across the street from the bowling alley—she referred to it as if it were one of the wonders of the ancient world. I did my best not to use the modest means of my own chi
ldhood as something to hold over Miranda, and I suspect she avoided asking much about it for the same reason: when she was making a demand, there was no way her own situation could look anything but fine in comparison to the years in which my mother would slip over from the bowling alley on her evening break, make me dinner, and then walk back across the street to finish her shift. I was allowed—encouraged, in fact—to watch television until I fell asleep on the couch, and I still have fond memories of the little independent station that showed, in my memory, almost nothing but Star Trek episodes and sci-fi films from the 1950s. My favorite of these was Forbidden Planet, not just because of the film’s otherworldly soundtrack, but also because it was about a single parent and child marooned on a distant planet. Over the course of my childhood I probably saw that movie twenty or thirty times on that station, identifying every time with the father—as if I were the parent, and Carrie my daughter. How I had flattered myself into believing that I, a boy watching television, was actually taking care my mother, who was working night after night in the run-down bowling alley to provide for us, is beyond me. But I sustained this belief throughout my childhood. It’s hard to know if it was simply the relative economic poverty of my childhood that made Miranda bashful about her own demands, or if she also sensed the little self-flattering narrative I had invented for myself in that childhood, and felt sorry for me on that account, too. She didn’t need to feel sorry for me at all, but I always sensed a shift in her demeanor when the subject of those years came up.
“But still,” she said, “I’m sure people went out. I didn’t grow up there, but I know that even in small towns, people have boyfriends and girlfriends.”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t,” I said. “I worked at the bowling alley on the weekends when I was a teenager. And Carrie always knew where I was, because she was working there, too.”
“I still think guys that work at bowling alleys can date, Dad. It’s the perfect situation, really.”
“Well. Maybe the boys in our class outnumbered the girls.”
