by Monica Wood
“You wouldn’t be so damned amused if you’d had your country defoliated by a bunch of criminals.”
“I thought you said she was American.”
“I’m talking about her ancestors. It’s the same thing. Sorrow has a way of seeping down through generations.”
“Don’t blame me, I protested that war.”
“By hanging a banner from your dorm room on Harvard Square?”
This little exchange is only one demonstration of the dangerous nature of this trip. In fact, my daughter is furious with me for a labor strike over which I have lost control. For eight endless months—the exact duration of the final rotation in my daughter’s Ph.D. program in psychology—I have been engaged in a cockfight with a rock-solid labor union in Abbott Falls, Maine. Clearly my daughter has spent too much time watching the news and not enough time on her studies, because this excursion strikes me as therapeutically suspect, the sort of thing that could attract a juicy malpractice suit were she to try this with a real patient. And the fact that she’s been reading aloud Asian poetry instead of Woody Guthrie lyrics makes me very, very nervous. I have a sixth sense for a trap, and it’s kicking in right now as she jams the poetry book into the side pocket of my luxury-leather interior.
And then I’m thinking of that lesbian Vietnamese-American poet and the notion my daughter has that one’s ancestors’ woes translate through the generations. I have a moment of sympathy for both of them, but especially for this daughter of mine whose only apparent goal is to reveal to me the chalk-white soil of my arid inner life. She is a grown woman who from all accounts can orchestrate with skill and conviction and extraordinary kindness the therapy of bulimics and borderlines and bipolars and maybe even a few bunged-up-in-the-ordinary-way stragglers, but when faced with her own father becomes fixed and judging and short of compassion. I know she feels this now, because I, as a child of parents myself, experienced it once. Only parents can reduce you like this. Maybe it’s even their job.
“Everybody writes about despair,” I tell her. “How about a nice little poem about candles?”
“Pull over,” she says, “I’m hungry.” Hoping she might give me a reprieve for obedience and cut the weekend from two nights to one, I pull docilely into the parking lot of her choice and escort her into a shabby diner with air you could spread on toast.
The waitress is a hollow-eyed coatrack with hair that looks burned at the ends. My daughter is pleased at this turn of events, pleased with the poor woman’s long-suffering shuffle and the way she slips two menus onto our table in a low, underhand slide that no doubt mimics the way she slips her fingers under the Plexiglas divider that separates her from her penitentiary-dwelling husband during their weekly visit; I imagine she’s encoded this gesture so far into her muscle memory that she knows no other way to move her hands.
Yes, sir, my daughter is pleased, because I do not frequent places like this as a rule, and she claims I have lost touch with what she refers to as the common man. What my daughter knows about the common man could fit into the little black zipper compartment of her Prada bag. Her mother and I raised her in Montauk, where she took voice lessons and drove her own boat and subsequently trotted off to, respectively, Harvard (B.A., History), Columbia (M.S., Psychology), and Tufts. My daughter is a smart woman—she entered college at sixteen—but not in any useful way that I can see. In this sense I failed her more severely than my own parents failed me.
What my daughter believes about the common man is that the common man wants nothing more than respect and recognition. Plus a roomy dining-room table on which to feed his five noble, sad-eyed children whose superior intelligence shall never be known because of people like me intent on keeping the tired tired, the poor poor, and the masses huddled. Unlike me, however, my daughter has never been a common man. What the common man wants is money, and that’s all she wrote.
“I hate you, Daddy,” my daughter says to me after we order grilled cheese and coffee. “I hate you so much right now.”
“Well, there’s something. There’s a word I understand.”
“I love you, too.” Her eyes begin to water and I’m hoping she won’t choose this moment to make a scene. She was an even-tempered girl until she fell in with all these mentors and program evaluators. “It’s very hard to talk to you, Daddy. You don’t understand how closed off you are, how totally withholding.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I tell her. Which I’m not. What I am is tired and worried and thinking of a meeting in New York where some asshole mediators are putting my balls in a vise and I’m not even there to say Ow. I am trying to be a good father.
“How’s Garrett?” I ask pleasantly, referring to her fish-fingered also-ran of a fiancé.
“Fine,” she says. “You don’t address me by name, Daddy, have you ever noticed that?”
I have noticed that. I am in fact deliberate about that, and if she were such a crackerjack first-in-her-class future therapist it may have occurred to her that she has the same name as her mother, and that when I address her by her mother’s name I feel as if I’m embroiled in one of Emily’s old battles, with rules and exceptions and loopholes that make running five paper mills feel about as daunting as calling the numbers at a church bingo. It might also have occurred to her that because I had come to despise her mother at the time she died, I keep forgetting that what my daughter still feels is a wallop of grief, which is simpler, I’m guessing, than the messy assault of thoughts that visited me when I heard of Emily’s sudden death.
I didn’t say I was a wonderful man, only that I was trying to be a good father.
“Is this it?” I ask.
“Is this what?” my daughter asks.
“Is this what you brought me along for, to eat in a punky diner and tell me you hate me?”
She narrows her eyes, which reminds me, as I have been reminded eerily often since we got into the car in front of my office on West Fifty-seventh Street early this morning, of my dead ex-wife. When I saw my daughter flagging me at the corner, I thought with all my heart that she was my wife Emily of long ago, that lovely, tender-lipped brunette who had a way of reeling toward you as if compelled by unknowable forces to reach a destination just beyond your own shoulders. My daughter Emily, like my wife Emily before her, has not once put enough clothing on her body. Against this cold October day—forty-five degrees at eight this morning—this day on which we were to head north, she armored herself with a flimsy sweater and a pair of sandals. Seeing my daughter do this, the heels of her sandals clicking madly on the sidewalk, I recalled reluctantly that I once loved the original Emily so much that the first time she refused to marry me I stayed up all night weeping beside the dirty river that divided the pitiful towns we came from.
“I said I loved you, too,” my daughter tells me.
“So noted.”
The waitress, whom I now suspect of suffering from the final stages of cancer or TB, brings us each a flat, oozing grilled-cheese sandwich with a side of chips that she delivers with that same underhand slide.
“What’s your name?” my daughter asks her.
The waitress’s eyebrows, two wavy penciled lines, lift. “Randi,” she says. “With an i.”
“Randi, this lunch looks delicious,” my daughter says. “Thank you, Randi.”
The waitress swallows what I take to be a bellow of repressed laughter and whisks away. Suddenly I feel like one of my daughter’s experiments, and I remember, for no reason I can unravel, since I have talked to my daughter only twice since the commencement of a labor action that has me eating Tums like peanuts all day long and half the night, that her dissertation is something about modeling. As in “being an example.” As in taking socially backward, therapeutically challenged individuals who are stuck halfway between an institution and a garden party, and bringing them into the world by baby steps with the intention of “modeling” decent, socially correct behavior without adding the stress of direct instruction.
“That was Mom’s disserta
tion,” my daughter snaps at me when I point out my discovery. Then she narrows her eyes again. “My dissertation is about something else entirely.”
For the next fifteen minutes, which pass in prickly silence, I feel—well, I don’t know how I feel. The words that come to mind are my daughter’s words, and Emily’s words before her, squishy therapy words like vulnerable and exposed. I feel the way I used to feel going shopping for shoes with my mother, afraid of meeting anyone I knew, afraid of their knowing how my mother shopped: get the cheapest pair one size ahead, after which I would spend three-quarters of the school year goose-stepping to keep the shoes on.
“All right, then. What is your dissertation about?” I ask, believing I know the answer already. Her dissertation is about me. About my failure as a father. About my meeting in Tokyo that, unfortunately, coincided with her mother’s funeral. I appear in disguise, of course, as a modality or paradigm shift or some other grad-school ga-blah. For a moment I fear she might have brought it with her, that the purpose of the trip is to corner me into reading an analysis of my fatherly absence, how it turned her into a person who can’t make anything easy, not a simple phone call, not an announcement of marriage, not the caretaking arrangements at her mother’s grave site, not the ordering of a truly hideous grilled cheese.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss my dissertation,” my daughter says loftily. “It’s groundbreaking stuff. I’ve been advised to keep it secret.”
I don’t like secrets. I drink the rest of my coffee, which tastes faintly of dish soap, and get up. “You done?”
She gets up. We have both eaten everything on our plate, like two kids on a first date displacing their other appetites. It strikes me that my daughter and I must be experiencing something like that kind of ferocity, an intent to devour each another in ways we have yet to fathom. I leave a twenty on the table, ostentatiously, an aggressive show of generosity. I learned a long time ago that the best defeat is to give the enemy exactly what he has asked for in a way that makes him sorry to have wanted it. “A twenty?” she says. “That’s a twelve-dollar tip.”
I saunter to the register and pay the bill again, then tell her, “Actually, it’s a twenty-dollar tip.”
Outside she stops me. “That was insulting, Daddy. The woman’s not a charity case.”
“I was being nice,” I tell her.
“No you weren’t,” my daughter says. “You were making a show.” She follows me to the car, steaming. “It’s about interrogating our assumptions,” she adds. “My dissertation. That’s all I can say.”
Words like this usually go in one ear and float into the oblivion of my subconscious, emerging at odd moments, for instance at a cocktail party or an annual meeting. In this case I do not wish to understand what assumptions my daughter is interrogating. Not now, not at a party six months hence.
She stops in front of my new car with her arms folded, assessing the license plate, which reads PAPRMKR.
“You don’t make paper, Daddy,” she says coolly. “They do. Or did.” Then she gets in on the driver’s side. “May I drive?” Of course she is testing me.
“Sure,” I say, tossing the keys in after her. We’re a half hour away; how much damage can she arrange in half an hour? I remain for a moment in the bracing wintry breath of this autumn day, wishing I’d become a weatherman back when I still had choices. To watch the sky and know what it means would be a magical talent indeed.
I open the passenger door. “‘I shall be telling this with a sigh,’” I say, summoning once again the Frost poem I’ve committed to memory.
My daughter stares ahead. “I heard you the first time.”
I settle into the passenger side, and here’s a surprise: it’s comfortable. I adjust the seat, working the controls until I feel strangely off my feet. Just as I remember the salesman’s description of this seat’s having a “cradle setting,” my daughter begins to sing.
This I had forgotten. This I had completely forgotten, that my daughter has the voice of a fallen angel, vocal cords made of silk and smoke. And I think again of my daughter’s notion of ancestry, of handed-down sorrow. Could she believe I exist someplace in those shadowy notes, that whatever operates the heart-lifting thrum of her throat might hail in part from some veiled, sorrowful part of me? She is singing something from church, I believe, a Negro spiritual, not one of the well-known ones, the type of music designed to make committed pagans fall to their knees. An old feeling falls over me, something I had nearly forgotten, and that feeling is surrender. I do not mean the type of surrender that marked my confusing jig-and-reel through childhood to the drum-beat of my parents’ square-shouldered righteousness. That was a surrender of the sort I could overpower, given enough time in the world. No, this is another feeling altogether, reminiscent of seeing a newborn girl, a fearsome melting as you hold her harmless, quivering weight. A terrible dwindling, a long, terrible glance back at who you were just ten minutes ago, before this small, smeared, squalling mass of girl slipped into the waiting world. Her first note, that vocal emanation of outrage, had traces of the vibrato I hear now. The devastating sweetness of it, like warm milk poured from a pan, overtakes me, and the day seems to haze over as a low, protecting cloud. As the fall-blazing trees begin to thicken at the roadsides and the car smoothes us over roads that begin to curve and wind, her words dim, the notes run together, and I am hers, I am helpless before her, and the car fills with an ambiguous, beautiful noise that despite my desire to be led elsewhere, anywhere, leads me harmlessly into sleep.
When I wake, I ask her where we are, surprised by the feeling of being in her hands—of being in any woman’s hands, of being at the mercy. My silver-throated captor closes her lips and keeps driving. The weather has shifted mightily, the temperature up fifteen degrees, a low, dense sky with unnerving shrouds of fog moving in and out of our sight. Through the haze I recognize the shirred ridges of evergreens, the crimson-and-gold hills that slope into a valley, the smokestacks chuffing at the valley’s heart. We’re in Abbott Falls, Maine, yes sir, home of Atlantic Pulp & Paper’s northernmost mill. I’ve been here twice in eight months, and have yet to experience an unguarded moment within its leafy borders. It looks a lot like the town I grew up in, which I suppose my daughter knows. We cruise up and down the glum streets, past listing roofs and hopeful squares of lawn on which rain-spotted FOR SALE signs stand like hostesses at a bad restaurant. “This was your plan all along?” I ask her.
“No,” she says, easing my car down one humble street after another. “The plan was to hole up in a B&B, admire some foliage, and figure out how we got to the point where you couldn’t be bothered to fly back for my mother’s funeral.”
“You told me it was all right, Emily,” I say, and her name clangs in this troubled northern air. Emily. It sounds foreign and untried. “Emily, you gave me permission.”
“And you took it,” she says. “That’s how little you ever knew me.”
Except when you sang, I want to say. Or, I want to want to say. I felt like a child when you sang, and also grateful that you were my child. I did.
Instead I say, “I don’t see what you hope to accomplish here.”
“Well, I see that now,” she snaps. “I know how stupid I was to think we could fix everything in a weekend.”
“So this is Plan B? Cruise enemy territory in a brand-new Mercedes?”
She shakes her head. “I couldn’t bear to stop, so I just kept driving.” She pulls over about a block from the mill gate, where I can see an idle picket line. I glance at the glowing face of my watch. It’s mid-shift, thank God, so the line is quiet, a small pack of people, all men, holding signs loosely across their shoulders, the smoke from their cigarettes rising around the veiny, burned-looking skin of their faces.
These people are not, as my daughter believes, noble and bereaved, forced by circumstance to occasionally do the wrong thing. That is a description I find myself wishing she could reserve for me. What these men are is desperate, enraged, and a hair�
��s breadth from violence. They are also shrewd, they read the papers, they follow their own fates with the practiced eye of a stockholder. They know the players, the rules, and how those rules have been pretzeled into legal documents that they naturally perceive as having been tipped exclusively in my favor.
“They’re tired,” my daughter tells me. “They’re hard-bitten and lost. What they want is so ordinary. Don’t you see that, Daddy?”
“The one on the end. Blue-and-red jacket.”
“What about him?” She’s suspicious now.
“He bought your braces.”
She sits back in the driver’s seat and folds her arms, staring ahead.
“The one right next to him paid for your voice lessons. His son footed the bill for Harvard.”
“Don’t make me your accomplice, Daddy.”
“If you want to interrogate some assumptions, my girl, you can start with your own innocence. Why don’t you boycott paper until this is over, put off your dissertation for a few months?”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
This is not true. I do not have an answer for my daughter, Emily. I have never had an answer for her, except that I fear her, or rather the ache that comes from recalling the one way I really did fail her: I folded her in with the other Emily and abandoned them both. She did not have to spirit me to the scene of my alleged crimes to teach me this.
All at once the gate lights come on, activated by the darkening mist. The picket line stirs lightly, a hint of motion that appears to me rife with menace. It is then I remember my vanity plate, the one my daughter sneered at, the one that has been made much of in the news. A sound comes from their midst, a shout of uncertainty mixed with outrage, then the sound takes the shape of a question and the small, edgy pack shifts toward us with the precision of birds changing direction and my daughter is making a sound like a surprised squirrel.
