But I knew something else about her, and this, probably more than any other factor, made my daughter the girl she was.
Emily hadn’t just inherited my dark eyes and low forehead; she had also inherited another family trait: complete and utter dorkitude. Dorkitude can emerge at any time in a child’s development, but with Emily I first recognized the signs when she was in kindergarten.
I used to watch them on the playground—the five-year-olds headed toward coolness. The boys had last names as first names: Carter, Simpson, and Bailey. Their moms dressed them in tiny leather aviator jackets and blue jeans. They were the lords of the seesaw and the kings of the jungle gym. The girls—all Taylors and Haleys—wore leggings, sweaters, and size two plastic clogs, which they somehow knew how to run in without falling. They hung in clusters near the swing set, teaching one another the dark art of playground gossip.
After scanning the play structures for Emily, I would almost always find her near the base of a large tree, playing with the handful of kids who had no kingdom. These were the stateless kindergarten refugees trying to create their own world out of the leftovers.
Emily would see me and run over to the fence. “What are you doing?” I’d ask.
“Pretending.”
“What are you pretending?”
“We’re pretending to be dogs.”
Emily pretended to be a dog for over a year. Then she pretended to be a florist.
Somehow, when it came time to collect the gamine beauty, the athletic prowess, the competitive and aggressive ballet dance-ice-skating/kung fu talent that children these days absolutely must possess, my daughter and I were waiting in line for the bus to the public library.
Every year on Emily’s birthday we had a party in our apartment building for the handful of girls she liked the most. Emily was the only kid in her crew who lived in an apartment—the other kids lived in “real houses” with driveways and front lawns and had one of each parent: one mom and one dad. Their own birthday parties were festivals of fun, often featuring a popular ballerina-clown for hire who went by the name Princess Patty and whose act involved dancing, magic wands, fairy dust, dress up, and make overs. Princess Patty gave me the creeps, mainly because she wore bright red circles of rouge on each cheek and talked in a squeaky voice making her sound as if she were hopped up on helium.
For Emily’s eighth birthday we had cake in our living room, and then I took all of the kids on the Metro down to the National Mall and went to the planetarium. I was surprised at how few of the kids had traveled around town on the train or had visited the tourist destinations on the Mall. The Mall was where Emily and I went to ice-skate and ride the Victorian carousel on Fridays. It was where we went after touring the Capitol building or the National Gallery for the umpteenth time. We considered it to be our own front lawn.
After the planetarium show, I brought the girls back to our apartment. While we were waiting for their parents to pick them up I asked them to tell me what they wanted to be when they grew up. Reflecting the high-flying careerist hopes of their parents, they weighed in with their well-considered choices. Hannah wanted to be a movie star. Caroline was considering a career as a diplomat. Elizabeth was thinking about being an economist, but she wasn’t sure yet; she was also considering running for Congress. Isabel wanted to be a plastic surgeon—not one of those plastic surgeons who just does nose jobs, but the kind who goes to the Dominican Republic and fixes kids with facial deformities, she pointed out.
We came around to Emily—the birthday girl and last in the group.
“I want to be an optometrist and sell eyeglass frames in a shop,” she said.
I’ve been a dork for a long, long time. An aggressive strain seems to run through our family, infecting random members with the desire to be contra dancers, sing madrigals, and join the AV club. We don’t have math or science smarts, so unfortunately in our clan the dork-trait most often publicly manifests itself not by excelling at academic subjects but by singing Elizabethan music and strolling—while wearing a very unfortunate costume.
I actually made it all the way through high school thinking that I had escaped the family curse. I played sports, got the lead in the school plays, was a good student, a cheerleader, and the vice president of everything. Then in college, I noticed the signs of sudden and advanced dorkitude when, quite of my own volition, I joined the university’s madrigal choir. Unfortunately, our debut performance was on the same night I was supposed to go out with a guy I was dying to get to know better. Rather than preserving my self-esteem by rescheduling the date, I took him to the student union—our performance venue—and just after our first beer, said, “Um, I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later, like a superhero descending from Mount Dorktopolis, I emerged from the bathroom wearing a velvet cape and mop cap and stood with the rest of the similarly costumed group under a prop Victorian lamppost, singing, “Hey nonni nonni.” We then strolled, arm in arm, in circles around the small room.
Emily, who had a 50 percent chance of being normal like her father, manifested early onset—presumably because I was raising her. Symptoms included an acute interest in books and reading, musical talent, the desire to go to museums, and the inability to either throw or catch a ball. I compounded matters by refusing to expose her to the same media most other children enjoyed. She was raised on NPR and old movies—mainly because that’s what I like. I understood the impact of this choice when I heard four-year-old Emily imitating Terry Gross one day from her booster seat in the back of the car. “Hi, I’m Terry Gross, and this is… Fresh Air-r-r-r-r-e,” she said, drawing out the last word in a breathy way that I realized was exactly as the radio host did. One Halloween, the same year all the other kids seemed to be Power Rangers and Powerpuff Girls, Emily chose to dress up as Laura Ingalls Wilder, complete with a bonnet and accented by her own prop—a wooden spoon.
Like the rest of her dorkitudinous clan, Emily was happily unself-conscious about her character trait. This was a huge relief to me because it meant that my young daughter would willingly accompany me to a one-man show celebrating the life of Noël Coward, a documentary about Nazis living in Brazil, an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan, and, it turned out, Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. As I explained it to her, if you have a choice between going to a regular Thursday in fourth grade and attending the historic impeachment hearings of the forty-second president, it’s pretty simple—you should choose to attend the hearings, and of course she did.
Middle school is hard enough for any girl, but Emily returned to school from vacation having to tell her friends that her mom took her to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, instead of to Disney World or the beach. She also bore the shame of never having shopped at The Limited. Fortunately for Emily, her sense of herself seemed to inoculate her from the worst slings and arrows of adolescence. She excelled at finding kids to befriend and had great taste in people, even in the terrible minefield of seventh grade. She seemed able to spot a “mean girl” at a great distance and using an exchange student as a human shield, would make her way to clarinet practice or off to choir. She won a coveted spot in the Washington Children’s Choir, and I was relieved to see her thrown together at rehearsals twice a week with those of her kind—the smart kids with quirky personalities who never got the memo that they weren’t cool.
Emily’s quirkiness served her well when she was entering ninth grade and had to change cities and start at a new school. She never seemed to worry about fitting in because she never assumed that she would. She quickly found her home, participating in theater and music at her school, and we explored new museums, discovered the opera, and found movie theaters to go to together.
Fortunately, Emily’s school in Chicago was small and easy to navigate. The madrigal choir found her in no time. This choir had costumes, loads of costumes—and not just the matchy-matchy uniforms she was used to in Washington, but gowns made of velvet with contrasting bodices trimmed in braid. The boys wore doublets
and knickers, puffy-sleeved pirate shirts, and pointy velvet hats that looked vaguely ecclesiastical, like something the pope might wear on vacation. Emily told me that at least a few of the boys were reduced to wearing their mother’s panty hose under their knickers.
It was Emily who first called the near tragedy that befell her madrigal choir the Apex of Dorkitude, though I worried that declaring something to be an apex at such a tender age might set a person up for disappointment later. We have examined the evidence, however. We’ve run it through the lab, called in the forensics team, and have concluded that what happened on the stage of the Frances Parker School in Chicago that soft spring night in Emily’s ju nior year of high school was without question a turning point, the fulcrum on which her character teetered and was tested.
The madrigal choir was having a dress rehearsal in preparation for their spring concert, to be held the following night. A handful of parents had gathered in the large auditorium to watch the twenty or so kids run through their numbers. The kids strolled onto the school’s stage dressed in their velvet frippery, looking like they’d escaped from a bus and truck show of Kiss Me, Kate. Emily, the tallest of the group, towered over the tenors—a knot of tiny ninth grade boys still waiting for their voice change and accompanying facial hair.
The group clumped in together in the center of the stage and started to sing. Swaying occurred. Many of the kids looked uncomfortable; they tugged at their gowns and brocade vests as their eyes conveyed their mortification at their predicament. The soprano section, accustomed as they were to going through life wearing belly shirts, mini skirts and UGG boots, looked like they wished the earth would open up and swallow them whole. (I assumed their parents had made them join the group to pad their high school résumés.) Emily was placed in the back of the group, next to a super-size boy baritone. In her blue gown and slippers, I noticed that she looked completely at ease and ever so slightly in love with herself. She was simply singing, and the music was doing what music does—it was taking her someplace. Watching from my seat in the auditorium, I couldn’t help but reflect that my girl had what appeared to be complete immunity from the desires of the herd.
I could see Emily’s future spinning out like an old-timey film strip: she would read textbooks for plea sure. She would laugh loudly at her own jokes. She would in all likelihood attend a Tolkien convention. She would go to a costume party dressed as a Wookie. She would leave at least one ladies’ room during a blind date with a trail of toilet paper stuck to her shoe. When true love hit, she would punctuate the moment by vomiting. There would be an episode of driving through town with a bag of groceries resting on the hood of her car while passersby waved and hollered. My daughter would lead a singular life. I said a little prayer to the God of Normalcy that it would also be joyful.
The group was singing their first chorus of “So Well I Know Who’s Happy” when I heard a cracking sound. One board of the stage had splintered and was starting to buckle. Like a paramecium inching across a microscope slide, the group angled and shifted as one organism, moving slightly stage right and, prompted by their conductor, continued to sing.
“So well I know who’s happy
Too well I know who’s happy
Fa la la la
La la la la la la la”
That’s when the old wooden stage decided it could no longer contain this teen collection of velvet and harmony. Out of nowhere and with the swiftness of a lightning strike a crater the size of a Buick opened in the stage. Singers fell sideways and backward—arms flying, velvet billowing—and were swallowed in quick succession into a four-foot-deep sinkhole. Three legs and feet—one wearing a sneaker and two in slippers—remained above the stage line. They waved upside down briefly before disappearing.
Witnesses to natural disasters always note how quickly they happen. That’s because disasters, like good romances, contain the element of surprise. For a moment, I wondered if the sopranos had gotten their wish. Could teen mortification actually be potent enough to violate the time/space continuum? Did they create a vortex of sorts, carrying the group back in time to the 1600s and placing them in a small town in Derbyshire—where they would finally realize their dream of fitting in?
I was the first parent to the stage. I stood at the edge of the great hole and looked down into it. It was a scene of velvet carnage—a jumble of seemingly unrelated legs and torsos. Gowns were flipped over heads. Puffy sleeves had caught the air and like balloons expanded to their full size. I heard soft moaning but otherwise the group was alarmingly quiet. The school’s janitor joined me, and we started to pull out the sopranos. Though they seemed basically un-hurt, the moment they tasted freedom, the girls of the section checked their hair and then choked with sobs as they ran to their parents in the audience, some of whom seemed to be already phoning their lawyers. I saw many therapy sessions in their future. (“Doctor, what does it mean? Last night I had that dream about the tuning fork again. And I seem to have developed an irrational fear of brocade.”)
One by one we pulled the kids out of the pit and sent them limping off to their parents’ embrace. Miraculously, no one seemed seriously hurt, ironically it was probably the acres of velvet that broke their fall and spared them from physical (if not psychic) injury. Emily was on the very bottom of the scrum, under a pint-size tenor who was splayed on top of her. His panty hose were ripped, and his knee was a little bloody. He sheepishly brushed back a tear as we helped him out. I looked down at Emily. She was a big velvet X on the floor. Silently, she sat and then stood up, brushed a piece of flooring from her skirt, and held her arms aloft to be hoisted out. Once on the lip of the stage crater, she looked out at the assemblage—by now there was a small crowd, including the head of the school and half of the basketball team—and then looked at me.
I scanned her lovely face. I was ready to jolly her along and prop her up in the way I’d been doing off and on her whole life. I was preparing to seize this teachable moment, even though I couldn’t quite arrive at the proper lesson. I wondered how much it bothered her that I’d yanked her from Washington to Chicago, forcing her to engage in the exhausting and often fruitless ritual of trying to be somebody in a new high school. Emily had heard my story about when I took a date to my college madrigal performance at the student union—what I didn’t think I’d told her was that the boy in question was her father. I wanted her to know that sometimes people love you despite your dorkitude—and sometimes, if you’re really lucky, they love you because of it. I thought of my own greatest hits of embarrassment, like the time at a wedding last spring when I reached into my coat pocket for a pen in order to write down my phone number for a guy and, instead of a pen, pulled out a Tampon. What I wanted to tell her was… you get used to it.
“Well, that happened,” Emily said, as if she had spent her lifetime expecting exactly this and now she could cross it off her life list of humiliations. Then she gave a little bow. There was a scatter of applause. Then she laughed. Of everyone in the large room, she was the only person laughing.
That night the outer envelope of the dorkdom galaxy was stretched tight. Emily punched a hole through it and Chuck Yeagered her way to the other side. And—violating her family’s predisposition, her upbringing, and the expectations of the rest of the world—she came out cool.
TEN
The Marrying Man
MY FATHER CALLED me one day last summer. “Um, it’s your father. I shot a bear and now it looks like I’ve got to go to court.”
I replayed his message a few times. Emily and I stood in the kitchen next to the answering machine, idly looking at each other as we listened. His voice was nasal and gravely and his accent full of flatness and diphthongs. I hadn’t heard it in a long time. He asked me to call back and left his number.
Emily didn’t have a relationship with her grandfather. Though she had met him a handful of times, these encounters were glancing. I didn’t really have a relationship with him, either; my father and I were passively engaged in what a so
cial scientist would probably call a “benevolent estrangement.” After years of feeling bad about him for abandoning our family, followed by more years of fearing that I would make similar choices, I had come to realize that though he and I shared some familial traits—a head of thick hair, the set and shape of our eyes, a fondness for farm equipment, and a tendency to dominate conversations—we had opposite predilections. He liked to leave; I liked to stay. His pattern was to be in touch once or twice a year, always during the summer when he would drive through Freeville unannounced, randomly stopping at his children’s’ houses—most often when I didn’t happen to be home. In many years of living in Freeville during the summer, I had come to regard my father as a sort of exotic summer crop, like a gourd that ripens only when you’re not there to see it. This summertime phone call was my first-ever phone message from him.
I dialed his number. His wife, Pat, answered. I realized I had forgotten her name, so I just introduced myself and asked for my father. “He’s out back with his bees, but I’ll call him,” she said. I heard her Marjorie Main voice sail out the back door. “Charrr-illllllls!!!” I had never heard him called Charles before—it was a bit of a surprise. Back when I knew him, everyone called him Buck, the nickname his mother gave him because he was so jumpy as a child. He was so energetic, he couldn’t sit still, just like a buck, the story went. I think of bucks as being majestic, many-antlered royalty of the woods, so his nickname never quite made sense to me until I realized that the reference was most likely not to a buck, but to a bucking bronco. Regardless, his nickname suited him. It is the name of someone who doesn’t want to be a Charles.
My parents were married for twenty-two years. My three siblings and I spent the bulk of our childhoods on our crumbling dairy farm of a hundred acres on Mill Street—just beyond the Freeville village limits. Now in the summers since Emily and I took up seasonal residency on Main Street, we would occasionally take our kayaks out behind our house and float down Fall Creek, which took us past the farm house and scruffy pastureland of my childhood home. It is nothing to look at—this parcel of land bisected by an unruly creek—yet this little patch of my childhood regularly brings tears to my eyes. I love it beyond my understanding.
The Mighty Queens of Freeville Page 13
