The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  I knew how to reach him but I seldom tried, partly because Emily was too timid to talk on the phone. He called occasionally and let me know whenever he was planning a trip to the States. Three or four times a year he would fly to New York and take the train to DC, stay in a hotel, and visit for a couple of days. Sometimes he took Emily to his hotel and they would swim in the hotel’s pool, watch cartoons, and eat room service meals. They seemed to have a very easy, loving, and warm rapport, and I liked seeing the two of them together. Occasionally she stayed overnight with him, and then I would meet them for breakfast the next day. The three of us would walk through the zoo together or do some other touristy thing.

  It was a few days before Thanksgiving, five months after his most-recent visit, when my ex-husband knocked on the door. I put on my excited face—a mask of joviality that I hoped would obscure my anxiety, but which instead transformed me into a masquerade of phony-happy. I gathered the backpack and the little suitcase on rollers that Emily would take to the airport. Our four-year-old had disappeared into her room, the point farthest from the front door of our apartment.

  I thought that we had become adept at separating. I was eager for my little girl to have her father in her life. Unfortunately for all of us, this time she had to leave me in order to do that.

  This trip was going to be different. He would be staying with his family in New York over Thanksgiving. He had come to Washington to retrieve Emily and then take her back to New York for a few days. It would be fun. This is what I focused on when discussing it with Emily. They would go to the Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving Day! They would see Santa Claus and the Rockettes and grandparents and cousins!

  “Everybody loves New York,” I said to her as we packed her suitcase. “That’s where Sesame Street is. They have the best pizza and the funniest people, and that’s why everybody wants to live there.”

  Emily was quiet.

  “Are you coming too?”

  “No. I’m going to stay here for three days and then I’m going to take the train to New York and come and get you and we’ll come back together on the train. That sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

  Her eyes got watery. Blink blink.

  “Why don’t you pick out three friends to take with you?” I asked her. We scanned the stuffed animals lined up on the bed. “Oh no—they all want to come!” I scolded her teddy bear for crawling into the suitcase.

  “Do you want to know what I’m going to do while you’re away?” I asked her. She nodded. I tried to come up with the least enticing activities I could think of.

  “I’m going to eat vegetables and vacuum the apartment. Then I’m going to the bank and the post office, and I’m going to drop off the car at the garage.”

  “Will you take the car to Greg?” (Greg was our mechanic.) “Won’t he wonder where I am?” she asked. I pictured her empty car seat.

  “I know he’ll ask about you. So what should I tell him?”

  “You can say that I’m in New York with my dad,” she said.

  I SCREWED UP my first good-byes with Emily when she started nursery school. When I delivered her to the classroom, her teacher Gay greeted her warmly. “Let’s find you a job to do,” she said and took Emily by the hand. I lingered by the threshold of the room. Emily looked back, saw me, and ran into my arms. Much clinging ensued. It was as if we were auditioning for a silent movie melodrama; she was being sent to the orphanage, and I was about to be pushed out onto an ice floe. I decided to stick around until she felt better. But she never really felt better while I was sticking around. I watched the more seasoned parents bringing their veteran nursery schoolers into the classroom with a cheerful good-bye and a quick exit. Even the kids who cried tended to stop very quickly once their parent was gone as the teacher swiftly moved them from the parent into the classroom’s embrace.

  I saw how selfish it was to linger and cling, how it impeded Emily’s progress and reflected my own inability to let go of her. The message I needed to convey instead was that it was OK to be apart and that she could trust herself and the people around her. She needed to see that she could live in the world and have experiences without me and to learn that hello follows good-bye and that people do come back.

  By age four, we had mastered the nursery school drop-off. She was less sensitive, and I was too. This departure for New York felt loaded, however. I wasn’t leaving her. This time she was leaving me.

  “Emily, get your stuff because your dad’s here…,” I called out, singsongy.

  I opened the door. He looked exactly the same. He always looked exactly the same. I rarely saw him in person, but I saw him often in my mind’s eye—and whenever I looked at our daughter. He had adopted the national costume of the country he was currently visiting and was wearing sneakers, chinos, a suede jacket, and like every other man that particular year, a baseball cap. He had spent the night in a nearby hotel and had a cab waiting to take the two of them to the airport.

  He wore roughly the same mask as mine. He was Wink Martindale. I was Kathie Lee Gifford.

  “She’s feeling a little shy, I think. I’ll go get her,” I said.

  He stood in the doorway.

  I went into Emily’s room and scooped her up into my arms. Right away I realized that this was a mistake. This sort of transfer called for a businesslike leading by the hand. I felt her arms tighten around my neck. I feared that one of us would not survive this particular embrace.

  I carried her out toward the door. Her dad stepped in, stroked her back, and told her how excited he was about the trip. “Where’s your suitcase—do you think you’d better get it? We need to get in the taxi and then go to the airport!” He sounded like a game show host. “You’ve just won a brand-new car!” I half-expected him to gesture over to where Carol Merrill was standing, stroking a side-by-side refrigerator.

  I tried the no-nonsense approach.

  “OK. Let’s stand on your feet and get going. I’ll walk you and Daddy down to the lobby.”

  She held on tighter around my neck. This is going to leave a mark. I am going to have the world’s largest kid-hickey.

  He reached down and picked up Emily’s Beauty and the Beast backpack and little suitcase. We exchanged glances. He looked completely hapless. I hated that look and the way he tended to wait until I told him what to do. I also hated the fact that I told him what to do. I didn’t want to be in charge, now or ever.

  “OK. Let’s go. Let’s just go.” Emily was wrapped around me; I could feel her feet lock against the small of my back. Surgically removing her from me would require a team of specialists, including, of course, a shrink. Like many parents, I occasionally pondered which of my mistakes would land our daughter in therapy. Look no further—we have a winner!

  Our only option was for her father to literally peel her away from me and carry her away by force. This seemed more a kidnapping than a fun parental visitation featuring Santa Claus and the Rockettes—and we would all surely suffer. Emily had already demonstrated the unfortunate combination of an elephantine memory and an unforgiving nature. She had still not forgiven her aunt Rachel for a two-day stint of babysitting earlier that year, during which time she rode a pink bike with training wheels, was spoiled silly by her older cousin, stayed up past her bedtime, and ate her lunch off of a TV tray while watching soap operas. If she found that unforgivable, how was this going over?

  We boarded the elevator. Emily was snuffling and sniffling. I felt the beginning of a sob rise up through her body; my solar plexus was like a radio receiver, feeling her emotions rocketing into my own gut as we walked through the lobby and toward the entrance of the building. Charles, on duty that day, looked at us and shook his head. He opened the passenger door of the taxi. I wasn’t wearing any shoes. I attempted to unpeel one of Emily’s fingers from the back of my neck, but she tightened.

  “I’m coming to the airport with you. OK now. I’ll ride along with you,” I said. I wondered, Would they allow a barefoot mother with no ID to board the aircraft?
Would the flight attendant serve me enough alcohol to render this scene forgettable? Would my ex-husband’s girlfriend be joining them in New York on this particular visit? If so, what would they ask Emily to call her? His family had a WASP-y tendency to adopt unfortunate nicknames. Emily’s grandparents had asked their grandchildren to call them Ta Ta and Num Num. Would my poor little girl have to refer to her daddy’s girlfriend as “Kiki” or “Bun-Bun”? Could I refer to her as “Nitwit” and get away with it?

  The taxi driver looked at us through the rearview mirror. Emily’s face was buried in my clavicle. She was doing a low, guttural motor rev, like a moped in need of an oil change. Nobody said anything.

  The drive to National Airport took about fifteen minutes. I pointed out our favorite sights as we passed them. “Look—there’s the Washington Monument! Oh—I can see some of the planes now! They look very small up in the sky! There’s the Jefferson Memorial!” I stroked her back and murmured into her ear, “Everything’s going to be all right, honey. You’ll see. And I’ll come and get you in three days, just like we talked about.” Her panic softened into something that felt like sadness. I felt it in my joints.

  We pulled into the departure area outside the terminal, and my ex got out of the taxi and walked around to our side. He opened the door and quietly grasped Emily under her arms. I felt her legs unlock as she transferred her cling from me to him. Nobody asked anybody to say good-bye. Nobody waved bye-bye.

  He gave the driver $40. “Can you take her back?” he asked, nodding to me. The driver said yes. My ex looked my way. “Sorry,” he mouthed. I winced.

  I settled back into the seat and sniffed. The driver looked at me again in the rear-view mirror. He was Egyptian, I guessed. I glanced at his license hanging from the sun visor and it said nasir.

  “Oh my. My my. That is very sad,” he said. He reached over to the passenger side and pulled out a box of Kleenex and handed the box back to me.

  “Oh well.” I so often wanted to be jaunty and yet I so seldom was. I took out a tissue and blew my nose.

  “Give me back the box, OK?”

  I gave it back to him.

  “I mean I’ve seen some sad things and that is definitely sad,” he said. He took out a tissue and blew his nose on it. “I’m crying here myself.”

  I said a prayer to the Egyptian god Sun Ra for this man to please ignore me. I pictured Emily walking through the metal detector and wondered what I would do while she was gone. No doubt my fun kidless activities would mainly involve me sitting alone in a movie theater, buried in a bucket of popcorn.

  The driver put the taxi into gear and started to pull away. “You know, it is what it is. This has to happen sometimes and you can’t do anything about it. You just have to go along with it,” he said, expressing a fatalism unfamiliar to my ears.

  “Maybe, but I don’t have to like it.” I leaned forward and helped myself to another tissue, hanging my head through the gap in his Plexiglas barrier. We were a team now, he and I. Perhaps we could teach a “Love ’em and Leave ’em” seminar together at the Learning Annex.

  “Well, even if you don’t like it, you must pretend that you do. It’s for the girl’s sake. If you don’t want her to go, then she’ll know it and she won’t want to go, just like this here.” Yes. God forbid that Emily might not want to be force-marched onto planes and trains in order to spend time with Ta Ta, Num Num, the Rockettes, and Santa Claus. And Nitwit.

  And Papa.

  I HAD MY own singular experience with postdivorce visitation, in 1974, when my sisters and I spent a weekend visiting our father. He had settled in a small town in the far-north region of New York State known as the North Country with Joan, a truck stop waitress who would become the second of his five wives. I don’t know how the visit was arranged—I never remember my father being in touch after he left—but the summer after his departure our mother told us that he would be coming to Freeville to pick us up for the weekend. I was thirteen. My sisters were fifteen and sixteen. My brother had been spared this visit by hitchhiking his way through Scandinavia with a friend.

  Dad drove into the driveway in one of his salvaged vehicles. We each had a paper bag with our stuff in it. Mom assured us that everything would be fine. It might even be fun! She walked us out to his car and gave me a tight hug. We exchanged awkward greetings with Dad, who stubbed out his cigarette in the driveway and said, “Well, let’s go.”

  We got into the car; my sisters muscled me out of the backseat, forcing me to sit in front. Dad talked the whole way, blabbing and bragging about the fascinating countryside in the North Country. He quoted its spectacular snowfall statistics and said that he had his eye on a little farm up near Lowville, where he and Joan lived.

  We arrived at dusk. Joan’s house was set back from the road in the trees. The Black River, which was in fact black, stagnant, and gloomy (Dad said its deep color was caused by the excessive amount of tannin from the trees lining the bank), was just across the road.

  Joan was a bruiser wearing a waitress uniform. She had a prized collection of special edition Jim Beam bottles, the kind you see displayed in the window of the liquor store. One was shaped like Elvis’s head. Another looked like a bear. Otherwise, the place was dark, spartan, and sheathed in old linoleum. Joan had a number of children. Two were currently in juvie and the rest had scattered—perhaps away visiting their own fathers (we never met any of them). There was little evidence of her kids in the house.

  Joan smoked and stroked our father’s arm during dinner. My sisters and I said we were tired and went up the creaky stairs to where we would sleep—an empty bedroom with a linoleum floor. We were given blankets and pillows and slept close together on the floor. “I’m going to get me one of them bottle heads!” I whispered to Rachel, and she laughed. I lay awake for a long time that night, worried about the fact that I didn’t know where the light switch was in the room, in case one of Joan’s cigarettes set the plastic curtains on fire and we had to get out.

  Dad spent the next day driving us around, pointing out various rock outcroppings and other unusual features of the countryside, which he found fascinating. He asked us a few questions about school, but it was hard keeping a conversation going, so he babbled along, peppering his monologue with the sorts of made-up factoids and statistics that were his specialty. We ate lunch at the highway diner where Joan worked, and she assumed a prideful sort of ownership as she brought our food. If I thought about Joan I would loathe her, and yet somehow I knew that she would be of little consequence to me. I decided that I would take a stand on Joan only if forced. I wondered why Mom had let us come and worried that Dad would somehow make us visit more often. If necessary, I would get myself enrolled in some sort of residential program that would make future visits impossible. Not juvie, so much, but maybe boarding school. I wondered what Mom was doing with all of her free time and pictured her reading a book, which is what she did whenever she was stuck waiting for us at school or after track meets, basketball games, or band practice. Maybe she was sick of us and liked being by herself.

  My sisters and I spent one more suppertime at Joan’s house, quietly eating while the night closed in on us—the dark creeping through the trees, up Joan’s long driveway and into her linoleum kitchen. Dad gassed on and Joan chain-smoked and stroked his arm. He was working construction building a prison over near Watertown. He’d do that until he started farming again, he said. He’d left a perfectly good farm and family already. Why do that again? I wondered.

  I couldn’t wait to get home. We were quiet in the car as Dad drove us south, and for the first time all weekend, he was subdued too. Compared to Lowville, Freeville seemed light, colorful, and airy. I had never been to Miami, but surely this is what it felt like down south. Warm and summery.

  Dad dropped us off in the driveway next to our old and empty barn and told us, “Tell your mother I said hi.” “Thanks, Dad—that was really interesting!” I said as I grabbed my paper bag and turned toward our house. I noticed th
e colorful petunias tumbling and climbing in one of Mom’s many flower beds.

  We went into the house. Mom was standing on a chair, painting the trim of our living room. The large room looked completely different from when we had left, just two days before. She had painted the walls and trim and rearranged the furniture.

  She shyly said hello to us and laughed about the room. “I didn’t have much to do while you were gone,” she said.

  She was holding a paintbrush. “Well, put your stuff away and I’ll start supper,” she said. I felt like I had been away for two weeks, and the altered room made me feel like a visitor.

  Mom never asked us pointed questions, but during supper I couldn’t stand it anymore and spilled the beans. I described the Jim Beam bottle collection, and then my sisters weighed in with the creepy dark house and the kids in juvie, and Dad’s incessant bravado. Finally, I said, “And Joan—whoa. She’s seriously a battle-axe. No kidding, Mom. Like a professional wrestler.”

  My mother let out a quick breath. I didn’t realize until then that she had been holding so much in. “It can’t be that bad,” she said.

  “It is that bad,” we said, laughing. “Don’t make us go there again.”

  “OK,” she said. “You’re off the hook.”

  I realized for the first time how hard this had been on our mother. Like most kids, I had taken our attachment for granted. I knew I needed her, but did she need me? I’d simply never thought about it. Later she confessed that she was worried that we would want to be with our father and that she would lose us to him. But still—she had to let us go. Her fears and feelings were immaterial.

  Nasir the cabbie had a point—and one that none of my intimates had dared make to me. Sometimes you have to pretend that it’s easy to let go. The only reason to do this is to make life easier for someone else. There are times when the right thing is to willingly board the ice floe. I could try to do that.

  Nasir pulled the cab into the circular drive in front of the building. On Saturday mornings, those few residents who had children tended to bring them out onto the front lawn to play. The kids toddled and pecked like a flock of chickens let out into the barnyard. Charles watched benignly over them and was usually available to keep an eye out if you had to dash back into the apartment for a forgotten snack or toy. Emily was often part of this little gang of babies and toddlers who would careen around on the grass, pushing their miniature strollers or playing with their plastic golf clubs. On this warm fall morning, some of the pint-size regulars were there, along with their parents distractedly nursing that morning’s third cup of coffee. I tried not to look at the kids, though I observed bitterly that it would have been nice if Emily could have spent the morning pushing her toy stroller rather than a suitcase. I gingerly got out of the cab, feeling the pavement under my bare feet and realizing for the first time that I also wasn’t wearing a bra.