This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

by Johanna Skibsrud

  THE LIMIT

  “DO YOU WANT TO DRIVE?” Daniel asks Anna. All of a sudden—he doesn’t know why. As soon as he says it he wants to take it back. He wants to laugh like it was a bit of a joke that he had with himself, but then he can’t because he hates the kind of man who would laugh like that, even if he is that kind of man.

  Anna is thirteen, and lives in Milwaukee with her mother. Daniel hasn’t seen her in eight months, and still he’d had to wrangle with Diane for weeks just to get her out here for four days. Now he wonders if he should have gone to all the trouble.

  “What!” Anna says. “Now?” Now Daniel is happy that he said it. It’s been over twenty minutes since he picked her up at the station but this is the first time that she seems to actually be there. The first time that she seems to be actually talking to him—and not to some cut-out version of himself, the way it had seemed to him before. Answering his questions too politely—as if she were practising for someone else.

  They have just taken the last exit heading out of Sioux Falls. There is still another twenty miles before they get to the old place, where Daniel’s mother still lives, even though he’s been after her for years to move into town. “Sure,” Daniel says. And tries to find some reason that this might be a good idea. “I was your age when I first learned,” he says, finally. Even though it’s not true. Then: “Why not? This ain’t Milwaukee, you know. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I noticed,” Anna says. But not unkindly. She looks at him, interested now. Wondering what he’ll do next.

  He pulls off onto the side of the road. “Here,” he says. “Let’s switch.”

  DANIEL HAD NEVER HAD any intention of being an absent dad. He wasn’t the type. That was for guys who moved around a lot and couldn’t commit to things. But now, bam. Intended or not—here it is. His daughter beside him in the car, and not a single thing to say to her. Not even anything to point out on the road as they pass. The whole goddamn state, he thinks suddenly, looks pretty much the same, if you don’t get too technical. Usually, he likes it this way. Usually, he likes to get out past Sioux Falls and have the landscape suddenly fall away, as if it didn’t exist anymore—likes the way that there’s still some things that remain, like that, unchanged. Or at least that change so slowly that a man like him can keep up, and understand.

  That is not the case with, for example, Anna, who has grown so much in the past eight months that he found himself embarrassed when he went to meet her at the train. He went forward awkwardly at first, as if maybe she wouldn’t know him. As if maybe he’d have to wave his hands around to get her to notice him, and say something like, It’s me, it’s your dad. Maybe she wouldn’t even want him to hug her anymore. Daniel thought about that—too late, with a little flurry of panic in his chest—when he did hug her, and his arms felt long.

  It would be a shock to any man, he told himself, on the way out of town, to see his daughter tall, so suddenly, like that. To see his daughter looking suddenly like the sort of daughters other men had. Who snapped their gum, and wore lip gloss, and had breasts. There was supposed to be a progression toward these sorts of things.

  THEY ARE ONLY ABOUT seven miles from the Knutsen farm when Daniel pulls the car over. They can already see it, even from that distance. Or what’s left of it. A couple of years back the place was sold to a local developer and pretty much flattened—but Daniel always forgets. He always expects to see it anyway. For the tree line to appear on the horizon in the old, familiar way. But then it doesn’t.

  Once, the trees had been so thick the Knutsens had lost an entire herd of buffalo to them. They’d got separated up inside the woods and couldn’t find their way out again. The police and the fire department had to be called—just to get rid of them. It’s funny to think about that now. About how the buffalo had stood around all night, shivering in woods that don’t even exist anymore. Even so, Daniel keeps expecting them. Right up to the last moment when he passes the raked gravel lot where the old farmhouse used to be.

  That had been the year Daniel was eleven. In fact, it was the afternoon of his eleventh birthday—after Daniel had had his presents, but before the birthday cake—that his father picked up the phone when it rang and said into it, “I could have seen this coming.” The buffalo had been at the Knutsen farm for only a month. Less—his mother said—if you calculated all the time that it took to get them out of the truck and into the pen. Which was pretty much forever. A full day, anyway, that’s how long it took old Mr. Knutsen, and the six Knutsen boys, and the tractor trailer man, to get those buffalo where they were going. They just didn’t want to get out of the truck. And then, of course, once they were out and into the pen, they didn’t want to stay there. The morning Daniel turned eleven they bust up the fence the Knutsen boys had spent all spring fixing, and that was pretty much the end of the buffalo.

  A month before, when the buffalo first arrived, Daniel’s father had said, “Those Knutsens, you got to hand it to them—they got an eye to the future.” But when the buffalo got out and all hell broke loose, he said, “I could have seen it a mile away.” Daniel didn’t say anything. His father seemed so confident that he had known from the beginning how things would go now that they had actually happened that Daniel thought his saying that before about the “eye to the future” had only been a kind of a joke. Daniel was just beginning to realize that adults did that sometimes—said things they didn’t mean. And it wasn’t because they couldn’t think of the right way to say what they meant—they probably could. It was just what they did. Sometimes they even said the very opposite of what they meant, and liked it that way. They thought it was funny, and that whatever it was they said wasn’t meant to be taken seriously anyhow. Hardly anything that grown-up people said, Daniel was beginning to realize, was meant to be serious.

  Any way you looked at it, though, the Knutsens were forward thinking—everyone admitted that. This was unusual—especially in those days—in their postage-stamp-sized corner of the world. It had been a surprise to Daniel the first time he looked at the state of South Dakota on a map and saw the way that it could be made to look so small—the exact size and shape of a postage stamp. Whenever he got outside, and wandered around, like his mother was always bugging him to do, everything always seemed so big. Even his own tiny corner of that other tiny corner of … but when he started thinking about it, it made his head hurt, and he had to stop before he ever got anywhere near to thinking about the entire state of South Dakota. It seemed that everything just went on and on forever, because even if he ever got to be able to think about South Dakota, that would be only the beginning of thinking about everything else.

  Once, he told his mother about trying to think about that. He said: “I start off real small, and then I try to think up, bigger and bigger, as slowly as I can, but then my mind gets fuzzy and I can’t think anymore. How come?” His mother had laughed—but in a nice way that wasn’t really directed at him, and which Daniel always found vaguely comforting. “You just can’t think about those things, honey,” she told him. “You’ll find out there’s a lot of things like that.”

  It wasn’t the answer he’d been looking for, and maybe it was because he could always get a yes from his dad when he couldn’t from his mother, and the other way around, that he believed that, in this case, too, if he wanted a different answer he’d just have to keep looking.

  DANIEL EASES THE GEARSHIFT into Drive. His hand is overtop of Anna’s and, once the stick has clicked in at D, he says, “Now just step on the gas, just a little, just a little.” Anna doesn’t step on the gas. His hand is still on hers, and underneath that is the gearshift. “Which one’s the gas?” she says. Daniel tells her which one, and they lurch forward, going too fast, and then a second later they stop entirely, with a bounce. “Okay, okay,” Daniel says. Anna looks like she might cry. One of her eyebrows is all knit up and she’s got a hold of her top lip with her bottom teeth. “Okay,” Daniel says, “that’s okay. Try again, just ease the gas on, and don’t
get scared.” He’s taken his hand off the gearshift and has put it on the wheel, just above where her right hand is knotted around the rim.

  “Are you sure about this?” she says. That look on her face.

  “No,” Daniel jokes. “I’m not sure about anything.” And he laughs a little, but she doesn’t, and then he feels stupid. “Except that”—he tries to rescue himself from the joke—“for the next five minutes, even with you at the wheel, we’re going to be ab-so-lute-ly fine.” He taps the rhythm of the word absolutely out on her hand on the wheel, which is gripped very tightly. Then he adds “kiddo”—after the fact. It was something that he used to call her. Not too long ago, though it must seem like a long time ago to her. He hasn’t used the word on her yet this visit, and isn’t sure, even as he says it, that he should. It’s okay, though, when he says it. It comes out okay.

  This time the car starts more smoothly. Daniel thinks with some surprise how easy it is to forget how many things get learned—and so quickly. Simple things. Like driving. Like riding a bike, or tying your shoes. Even that used to be a real effort, he remembers. How he had got it wrong so often, and how his father had shown him, taking his hands in his own, again and again.

  That was why he’d wanted a kid in the first place. Even when he was a kid himself, he’d always thought it would be nice to have someone, like that, to show things to. To say, Look, here’s how it works. I’ll show you.

  THE DAY THE BUFFALO ARRIVED, Daniel’s mother and her friend Cheryl, who worked at the meat-processing plant off the main highway, took Daniel to watch them be unloaded at the Knutsens’ farm. Cheryl had delicate fingers and her nails were long and narrow at the tips. They were always a different colour each time Daniel saw them. When the buffalo came, and they went to watch, Cheryl kept her hands on the steering wheel, and he could see them from his position in the back seat. Sometimes she lit a cigarette, and he watched the way she did it. It seemed more complicated, and therefore more beautiful, when she did it, because her nails made everything seem difficult, and out of reach. Cheryl’s hands were different from his mother’s hands. It wasn’t that his mother’s hands weren’t nice—they were. It was just that they were—hands. With short pale nails, and medium-sized fingers. Cheryl’s hands didn’t look like hands at all—or if they did, they looked like they were meant to belong to someone else, who didn’t live where they lived, or didn’t work at the meat-processing plant near town. Once he’d heard his father say, “With those hands you oughta be a secretary or something, Cheryl—show ’em off,” and his mother had got mad and said, “She ought to be more than a secretary,” but then she didn’t say anything else, or suggest what “more than a secretary” might be, which was something that Daniel, and maybe even his mother, didn’t know.

  Cheryl parked the car just a little ways up the road, at some distance from the house, and then she and Daniel and his mother sat there for most of an hour and waited. For a long time nothing happened. They saw all the Knutsen boys running around in circles in the yard. There was hollering, but they couldn’t tell what was being said because they were still some distance from the place, and they had the windows shut tight. His mother smoked a cigarette, which was something he’d never seen her do before, and the car filled up with so much smoke that his eyes stung. But he liked it that way. The way the smoke fogged everything up so that it seemed like a long distance between the front and the back seat. Like there was all sorts of room suddenly for things to take place in, if they were going to.

  Finally, Cheryl turned around to look at him, his face smeared up against the glass. He had got bored of watching the Knutsen boys run around, and didn’t believe in the buffalo anymore, so was not even really looking out of the window at all. Instead, he was just sort of staring ahead, trying to keep his eyes open without blinking for long periods of time, which made his eyes sting even worse. When they’d been open for a particularly long time he discovered that he could make them unfocus pretty easily, which made the world go all blurry. So he concentrated on doing that—on getting his eyes to unfocus, and then, quick as he could, he’d focus them in again. Focus, unfocus, focus, unfocus, his eyes went—but to Cheryl when she turned around it probably just looked like he was doing nothing, just staring off into space.

  “Let’s take this kid home,” Cheryl said, and his mom looked back at him then too, and said, “You had enough, sweetie?” As if the buffalo had been his idea.

  Later that day, Daniel’s father got the word that the Knutsens had finally got their buffalo unloaded into the field. He hung up the phone and said, “Well, we got some new neighbours, ladies.” Daniel’s mother and Cheryl were sitting on the couch, their feet tucked up under them, drinking something with ice, which clinked in the glass. “Damn,” said Cheryl, “I would have liked to see them all charge out of there.”

  And then not a month later, Daniel’s father was on the phone again, before the birthday cake, only this time he had a different look on his face, saying, “I could have seen it coming a mile away.” Or maybe it was “I should have—I should’ve seen it coming”—maybe that’s what he’d said when he hung up the phone.

  “Don’t anyone go outside,” Daniel’s father had instructed them then. He seemed to like the way that sounded: the words alarming, but the voice in itself composed, and calm. “We got twenty mad buffalo storming around out there. I want everyone to stay put till we get all this taken care of,” he said. Then he went out to the shed and came back with his rifle. His mother sat with Daniel at the kitchen table, where he’d been doing some homework, and she had been looking through a magazine, and helping him from time to time when he ran into problems with long division.

  “Oh dear,” she’d said, when his father first went out, “I don’t like the sounds of this.” Then she got up and used the telephone herself, and Daniel heard her giggle a little into the phone in the other room—she was probably talking to Cheryl—but in that way she had sometimes, when she didn’t mean to be giggling.

  By the time Daniel’s father had got back, she was sitting at the table again, reading her magazine. She and Daniel looked up when he came in, and he seemed to remember something then, and put down the rifle, and went back outside. He’d leaned the rifle up against Daniel’s mother’s chair, which was closest to the door, and it looked silly to see it like that, next to his mother.

  When his father came back he was carrying another gun, and he said to Daniel, “Daniel you can come too,” and then he extended his hand out with the gun in it, so that Daniel was supposed to get out of his chair and walk over to his father, and take up the gun.

  He had shot a gun before. Many times. His father had taught him, and by now he had been out with his father for two deer-hunting seasons in a row, although technically he was supposed to wait until he was twelve. Sometimes his father had gone out for grouse with him, too, but he had still shot only in practice and never for real, even when his father had purposely held back on a shot he could have taken, and said, “This one’s yours, son.” He would always just come up with some reason that it hadn’t made sense to fire, but he didn’t know why he did that, every time. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to kill the bird. He wanted to kill the bird more than anything.

  “Oh, come on, don’t,” Daniel’s mother said, when Daniel got up to take the gun from his father, and put on his boots, and follow him out to the truck. “This is not messing around, you know. I thought you just told us both to stay inside. That seemed like a plan to me.”

  “You stay in,” Daniel’s father said, and went out, so that Daniel had to shove his boots on quickly to not get left behind. His feet weren’t all the way down into the boots when he started for the door, so they made him walk funny. His mother had got up and moved out onto the porch in her slippers. She was probably cold.

  “You be careful,” she said, when Daniel waddled past with his feet not in his shoes, and his gun in one hand, outstretched, away from his body. “You be careful with my son,” she yelled, a
little louder than she needed to, for his father to hear.

  THEY DRIVE FOR ABOUT three minutes, very slowly. Anna is concentrating hard on the road, and has her jaw set tight, her hands all tensed up on the wheel. Daniel lets go of the wheel after a while himself, and then watches her—frozen like that, not a muscle in her body moving—and yet moving—the outside world passing steadily. He digs back in his memory for some brief moment that would show him how all of this was inevitable in some way; that this was the way it was supposed to be with them. Some brief memory. Anything. From when Anna was small. If he can think of one thing, he will certainly share it with her, and then she will see the way he has always known her. And still knows her. And will.

  But he can’t think anything.

  Then, after about three minutes are up, Anna pulls the car expertly off to the side of the road, and puts on the brake. “I’m done,” she says.

  “But you’re doing so well!” Daniel says. He brings his hand down briefly on her arm, which is off the steering wheel now, and lying in her lap. The movement is intended to be conciliatory, but it comes off more as a bit of a slap.

  “You drive,” Anna says, as if it were a disgusting thing to do. “It’s your car.”