by Amy Seek
* * *
I flew to California in August, and for the rest of the summer I sat at the front of a vast open office with desks arranged like seats on a bus. Each landscape architect faced the back of the next one’s head and only befriended them via e-mail. Taking lunch, social conversation, and hobbies were all frowned upon. Our work was so exactly not about horticulture, we weren’t even allowed houseplants at our desks. There were no siestas or summer Fridays as you might have hoped, from the little you knew about California, and nobody left work early to go surfing. Happy hour was held in-house on Fridays and meant bottled beer in the windowless conference room, after which some people would go home, but many kept working. What was exciting was that I would be getting a paycheck on a regular basis, and I could start paying back several years of school debt.
I was introduced to the project I’d be working on by its project manager, who took over my very large desk with drawings and folders and trace paper. Over his shoulder the windows faced south and the hill rose along the side of the building. As people walked by, the long, horizontal window framed first their heads, and then their coffees, and then their knees. The project was a five-hundred-acre decommissioned military air base we would be converting into a park. We were competing against other design firms to win the project. I asked if we had any particular concept, some kind of an angle.
“Blue.” Mark put a few sheets of trace paper down on my desk, diagrams drawn in marker. Red scribbles to indicate a circulation system, paths and trails and roadways and plazas, across the park. Blue scribbles for lakes and canals. Green scribbles for landscape typologies—woodlands, meadows, lawns. I was to make the scribbles into digital lines.
“Here, start with that.” He began to walk away.
“Wait, but blue is the idea?”
“It’s about water.” He turned back around. “Recycled stormwater, recreational water, water for wayfinding. Yeah; blue. I think Hong Joo has space for an exploded axon, so build the diagrams as layers in one Illustrator file.”
He disappeared up the stairs. Upstairs was where most of the senior people worked. Out their windows, you could see the round peak of Potrero Hill, and you could easily slip out the back door to get a coffee, and everyone would think you were just going to the bathroom. Unless you turned left, in which case the downstairs staff would see your knees, and your waist, and then your head, and know you’d probably be coming back with a coffee.
* * *
I’d brought one suitcase and a little duffel bag–like cat carrier containing Haystack, mutely acquiescent beneath the seat in front of me on the plane. I was accustomed to leaving. What was strange was that this was a permanent position, which meant I had no particular plans to leave again once I got there. I left thirty-three boxes in Tennessee. I left a piano there, too. Thomas had gotten it for me as a surprise, and it was so heavy, it took eleven water polo players from his team to get it into my tiny apartment. We put it where my kitchen table used to be. Hauling it back to Tennessee, I warned Dad that we’d need help getting it into the house, but he planned a system of tangled pulleys and ropes and, for show, had Mom tug it into place with her pinky.
I looked out the window at states I’d never thought about, and all those states were real: Missouri, Iowa, Nevada. They meant real distance from my life on the East Coast. I thought it might be better this way. The geographical distance would release me from any impulse to reconcile those two realities, my life with and without my son. Now far away, when I saw him, I’d be able to focus on him fully, and when I returned to California, I could be fully present there, doing the job I’d given him up to do.
* * *
At around seven one evening, Mark called my extension to take my dinner order; for the tenth night in a row, we were getting delivery. When we worked past eight, we got dinner paid for by the office; one of the perks that kept people working well past dinner every night. I asked for the pad thai, and then my cell phone rang. It was my father, calling from the East Coast.
“Th-this is Walter. Am I calling at a bad time?”
“I’m still at work!” The sun had set far beyond the rise of the hill to my right, and I’d missed it entirely. One thing I’d hoped: that once I got out of school, I’d leave work at a reasonable hour and have time for other things. I hoped that living on the West Coast, I’d see some sunsets.
“Oh! Goodgoodgood! I’ll—I’ll leave you alone. Do me a favor, call me when you get to a good stopping point. Bye now.” It was exactly what my dad wanted to hear: I had a meaningful career that promised some level of financial security. I wasn’t a single mother, and I wasn’t eating dog food. All his fears about my future relieved. Unmitigated disaster, mitigated.
Several hours later I was still at work, revising diagrams, editing photomontages. At about five in the morning, I found myself on the concrete floor beside the printer, looking at the ceiling, wakened by the sound of the refrigerator door slamming shut.
“You’re awake!” Brian said. He was carrying his coffee out of the long bar of a kitchen, its gray cupboards stocked with artificial sweeteners, coffee filters, and tiny packets of soy sauce. The printer was full of pages I was going to retrieve and collate for the proposal booklets. I’d fallen asleep waiting for them to print.
“We decided to leave you, thought you probably needed the sleep.”
* * *
I told Paula about the beautiful landscape but all the late nights at work when she picked me up from the airport and asked, “How’s California?” Jonathan had been smiling at me through the reflections in the back window as I approached the car carrying Jevn’s old blue duffel bag.
“And how are you doing?” I turned back to look at him. He was wearing a bright blue Superman shirt. He asked if I wanted to see how high he could count. He made it slowly to twenty. Paula explained that by the time they got to Boston, it was too late to enter the kids into public schools, but since Erik had flexibility in his new teaching schedule and she could make time while she was finishing her dissertation, they decided to try homeschooling.
“Mom, after twenty, what is it?”
Paula was looking hard across me to see if she could make a left turn.
“One second, Jon, I’d rather not have an accident if possible!”
She pulled out, waving breezily at the two lanes of traffic that had made way for us. She did not forget his question.
“Twenty is a two with a zero beside it, right? Well, after twenty, you start over, with a two with a one beside it, and then a two with a two beside it. So twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Just like you did after the number ten.”
There was a long pause in the backseat, and I could see my son in the rearview mirror, looking to the side, out the window. I was sure this lesson was too complicated to convey without props and paper and everyone’s full concentration. He squinted, thinking hard. But then his head fell back and he smiled, “Ohhhhh! I get it!”
“That’s what this homeschooling movement is—actually, we’ve learned Boston is a kind of mecca for it! It’s funny, as if homeschooling isn’t radical enough, they call it unschooling. There’s no curriculum; you just take advantage of opportunities, according to the child’s natural curiosity. And one of the great benefits, we’ve realized, is that without the time spent getting in line, and passing out work sheets, and disciplining troublemakers, there’s so much more time in the day for the kids to just concentrate on playing and being kids.”
They always approached new ideas with the exact right amounts of enthusiasm and thoughtfulness and skepticism and humor.
“I thought I was going to use homeschooling as an excuse to go see all the historic sites in Boston this year,” she said. “I had no idea I was going to be thinking so much about what being educated means!”
We arrived at their new home, an upright two-story house with a big front porch. When we got out of the car, my son stood tall, higher than my waist and way too big to pick up. He hugged me, and I realized I h
adn’t anticipated the loss of the sustained contact we’d had when I could hold him. It was just lost, between one visit and another. He led me to the kitchen, where Erik gave me a hug and said hello, and where a chessboard was set out, ready to play. Jonathan challenged me to a game.
“I can’t believe you know how to play chess!” Between one visit and the next, there were things lost and things gained.
Jonathan said that I could go first. “That gives you the advantage,” he informed me. My father had taught me how to play, and just as he had, I made my moves with great deliberation. Part thinking hard, part pure intimidation. I cunningly calculated as many moves ahead as I could process. But just as I released my pawn, my index finger the last to lift off, Jonathan moved his like it was hot to the touch. “Your go.” I glanced at him, skeptically, and then examined the board. With every move, I was setting a trap, like my dad had done mercilessly to me. My hand lingered over my knight as I surveyed the threats of the new terrain. As soon as I let go, Jonathan’s bishop sped across the board.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.
I looked up at him and smiled. “I don’t think you do.”
But I was bluffing—he probably did know, exactly, what I was trying to do. That’s why, when his brother and sister stuck out their tongues and made crazy faces for my camera, squeezing each other out of the frame, he was always shying away from the lens. He’d turn warily to me as I played with my phone, trying to take a photo when he wasn’t looking—“Are you taking a picture?” he’d ask, and then I’d put it away. He seemed hurt, as if he knew I was going to parade photos of him to my friends; all the pride of a mother without the loyalty. His guarded looks weakened me; they filled me with fear. He’d been recording every wrong since his birth, and now that he was fully articulate, he could demand an explanation. He might tell me how angry he was that I left in the first place and that I was always leaving, back to school, or back to work, or now to California. And yet, as terrifying as it was, only in such a moment would I be free to tell him how much I wanted to have him with me.
* * *
Paula called us into the dining room to eat. We gathered around the table, and Sarah directed me to sit beside her.
“But she’s my birth mother,” Jonathan said.
“Amy’s sitting next to Jonathan,” Erik affirmed by setting a wineglass at my place.
We had pasta with vegetables for dinner. It wasn’t a big bowl of food; they didn’t seem to eat very much. I had begun to pack a few of my own things, a couple of apples, a bag of almonds, because over the course of a weekend there I often found myself hungry. I was used to eating much more. In California, I hosted extravagant breakfast parties—there were eggs and potatoes and crepes and a fancy rhubarb drink I got out of a magazine and big fruit salads and banana bread. Cooking was a way of caring about everything and everyone at once. It was how I cared about the groundwater and the topsoil and about my new friends in California. It was one of the ways I’d cared for Jonathan when I was pregnant—and it was hard to watch him pick listlessly at his food.
But it was not for me to say anything, there, at the dinner table. It was also not for me to say alone to Jonathan, either, that I thought he should eat more vegetables and complex carbohydrates and good fats. What did I know about getting a child to eat, anyway?
* * *
Over the weekend, I’d take opportunities to send texts to friends and orient myself to the horizon of my life on the other coast. And when nighttime fell, I savored a few moments brushing my teeth in the bathroom alone. It was then I’d notice that when it came to housekeeping, Jonathan’s family was like my grandmother, who—aside from basic upkeep of the rooms neighbors might see—could think of many things more important to do than move dust around, endlessly. Or maybe this was just what having three young kids and two meaningful careers looked like. There were sticky places from spilled mouthwash and lotions and toothbrushes with bristles soaking in water left on the countertop after someone washed his hands. Bottles were toppled over. Washcloths belonging to no one, or, worse, to everyone.
I glanced at the mirror, surprised to see myself. I looked so out of place amid the squashed tubes of toothpaste in a house that wasn’t mine, a world that only made sense without me. I didn’t want to see myself, or try to comprehend what I was doing there. I looked into my own eyes just long enough to find the contact lenses and remove them, and then I appeared the way I felt: diffuse, dissolved, blurry and all but invisible.
Making my way down the hall, I sensed the intimate comfort of darkness weaving them together as a family. Bodies merged in sleep, trusting that togetherness wasn’t the incidentalest of ties. They were rocked by the same small rhythms, rhythms that would drive them forever when they separated into the world. I heard someone say, Goodnight, Mom! and someone else, Goodnight, Sarah! The darkness erased our distance. I was close enough, in the next room, to say, Goodnight, son, but soon I was fast asleep.
* * *
In the dim light of morning, it was hard not to think about California, where the sunrise rips the sky wide open; where my affections were uncomplicated, and I could express my love freely. Any other Saturday, I’d be getting an espresso in the little alley, going for a run in the hills, riding my bike to the farmers’ market, meeting friends in the park. I wondered if Jonathan could feel my thoughts escaping the room. Or the guilt I felt for letting them. It would never be as simple as telling him, someday, that I hated the life I’d lived without him, or that I longed for him every moment. I loved California, and I couldn’t even picture my life with a five-year-old. And he was happy, too, with his sister and brother and friends and family. I was so glad. Otherwise I’d have given him up for nothing. But if we were happy, each in our separate lives, why continually reopen this wound? I sat among Legos scattered across the floor, trying hard to figure out what I was doing there.
“Do you have any four-ones?” Jonathan asked, and I brushed my hand across the Legos within range, looking for those that had four pegs in a single row. I handed him three of them.
“Here you go.”
He looked down, his fingers working hard to make the joint secure.
He’s mine, I thought—a thought I wouldn’t have allowed myself a few years ago. It seemed harmless now because my feelings about it had grown so numb. He’s my son, I said to myself; I had learned a certain way of being around him, flat and friendly, but I wanted it to mean something when I handed him my four-ones. I wasn’t his babysitter or his aunt or his cousin. I wasn’t a friend. I was here only because I was his mother, and yet that had no simple bearing on anything I was doing, and it was the one thing I would not speak about. I wanted to feel something so that I could at least hand him the Legos in a way that accomplished whatever it was we were here to accomplish.
“What about red one-ones?” He caught my eye, and I began to scan the floor. Did he know what I was doing now?
I found two red one-ones and handed them to him. We stayed silent after that, focused on our work. We piled Legos on top of Legos in a giant amorphous mass. We added room after room, expanding horizontally, low walls of wide, mismatched blocks, furnished sparsely, topped occasionally with antennae.
I had no idea what we were building and only the faintest feeling that it mattered to build it.
* * *
I was relieved to board the plane. A six-hour flight to cleanly separate me from the Northeast. I had no doubts when navigating my connecting airports. I could be myself as I ordered an espresso and then made my way through the narrow aisle to the back of the plane and sank into the seat to watch a dumb movie. We kept pace with the sun, as if time weren’t passing and I’d never been there at all, and the Sierras soon softened into the Oakland Hills. We landed over marbled salt marshes, and I felt so lucky to call it home.
TWENTY-SIX
A single day in San Francisco; a million wonders. A million means of forgetting. Only the skinny arms of the S
utro Tower, holding steady through the fog, to prove the landscape isn’t erased and reinvented fresh on a daily basis. It was a wild place, cold in August and blazing in February, and the only predictable thing was it would all be devoured by the four o’clock fog. There was no continuation of some old trajectory in such a place. There was not even any establishing new trajectories. It was just, keep your balance; continents are moving under your feet.
I put on my running shoes, and my friend Rachel picked me up in front of my apartment. We’d joined a marathon training group, and by the end of February our team was up to nine miles. We parked at the marina and gathered on the lawn while the fog was still perched on the bay. We took off along the sweep of the Embarcadero and then into Nob Hill, where the city grid confronts steep slopes head on. We’d talk about anything we could think of to distract us from the exertion. Run with your ass, run with your ass, we’d remind ourselves in chant to power our stride from the core.
Time really passed on runs that long; the slopes would start to shimmer with golden grasses and slip behind the clouds. The landscape seemed the stuff of dreams—the outpouring of a skillful hand experimenting fearlessly with beauty so richly strange it was hard to believe, even as it passed beneath your feet. Only seven miles square, but inside the city’s folds were vast and varied landscapes, its seasons so slippery it gave no foothold to memory. I had the old familiar impulse: to write it in my diary, to inventory and preserve the fog and the prospects, and the prehistoric trees and the light, but it was too big. I had to run. Running was the only way to grasp it.
