by Amy Seek
“It’s okay,” he said, pointing us across the street with an easy flick of his wrist.
“Yeah?” I was trying to be cool, but. “Does that mean you like it?”
“I like it,” he said with a shrug, “but I don’t really like going to practice. But I have to pretend I like it because there are adults there. And I have to pretend I like all the other kids.” He was using his hands to explain it to me, his palms facing upward, then rolling his hands on his wrists to expose his palms anew, and then again, with every point of his explanation.
“Oh!” I said. I was charmed by his forthrightness. And I could relate. I remembered getting confused as a child, always doing things I didn’t want to do because I couldn’t know until I tried, and I was supposed to give everything a chance. I knew that for Paula and Erik it wasn’t a big deal whether he played soccer or any sport at all. That they had probably encouraged him to have an open mind and a positive attitude and to try it out; that’s what parents were supposed to do. But understanding your own desire could be so complicated, what a fine line it was, between healthy self-doubt and negating yourself entirely.
“Well, I don’t like soccer at all,” I said simply, so he would feel free to say it.
He smiled broadly. “Something in common!”
Then he turned to see if I’d registered it, too. I smiled back.
As we walked, going nowhere in particular, I would have liked to have talked about the deeper things we had in common, the inescapable things like our blood and our breath. But while he marveled at our similarity, I was forced to consider something else. That we now stood at such a distance that we could reflect on each other; something in common was an incidental bridge that gave a view of the vast space between us.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I woke up to another beautiful day in San Francisco. A beautiful day, tempered by a midstride shivering down my right leg, the weird warmth in my calf, a clicking weakness as my hip shifted loosely in its joint. The sound of the leaves when the wind blew was the first hint of fall, and I wanted more than any other time of the year to run. Fall was the year’s sunset. And there was a fall in San Francisco, and that I could detect the subtlest signs of it made me feel at home. By now, more than a year since I arrived, I’d seen a full cycle, the city in her grandest and in her tenderest, early-morning moments.
For a moment I lay in the dark. I turned to orient myself and gasped: the full light of day was glowing around the edges of the blinds. Greg closed them at night, even though his bedroom cantilevered like a nest into the cool shade of a ficus tree. I had intense FOMO for morning light, but he was content to miss it entirely. We had been dating for a couple of months, but lately I was talking a lot about my plans to return to the East Coast.
“Do you know how hard it is to be in a relationship with someone who is always leaving?” he would ask me.
My experience of San Francisco had radically changed after the accident. For weeks, I could do little more than sit in my window, watching the day pass. Now I was biking occasionally, wearing cycling shoes that let me both pull and push using only my left leg. But what was drawing me back was recent news that my grandfather’s health was declining. I felt like I should put myself back within range of my family.
We got up and got dressed, and as soon as we stepped outside, I said, “It’s so beautiful today!”
He sighed and smiled, annoyed. “Can’t you think of something more precise to say?”
He would kick me out on a Saturday morning so that he could work, when it seemed self-evident to me the only thing to do was to jump on his motorcycle and head north to the headlands. I wanted to work, wanted to practice mandolin, but the day came in my windows and pulled me out by my rib cage, despite my injury. Sometimes even the night did, like one night when the moon was almost full and the air was unusually mild, and I rode my bike to his house, pounded on his door, and, when he opened it, invited him for a ride to the ocean. We would pass through the world in its midweek slumber and see the buffalo in Golden Gate Park on the way. How magical to find them snoring in the moonlight! He had twisted his face incredulously and cited the time and the day of the week—exactly the reasons I wanted to go—as reasons we should not.
“I mean, your profession has to do with aesthetics,” he reminded me, “and yet every day you say it’s beautiful. It seems like you could be more articulate, and then maybe we could have some kind of conversation about it. As it is, you declare so emphatically that it’s beautiful, I have no choice but to agree! Okay, it’s beautiful. It’s cloudy; it’s beautiful! It’s sunny; it’s beautiful! How can you expect me to really engage with that?”
I sank into myself as we walked to the coffee shop. I remembered the time my sister took me to a formal dinner in China, where there were strict traditions we had to observe. She elbowed me away from the glass with the tallest napkin—it was for the guest of honor—and she whispered that I shouldn’t eat the rice that would be served at the end of the meal; that would insult the host, who would think we were still hungry. I watched her quietly for other cues. The dinner began when the host placed a carrot, finely carved into the shape of a bird, on the turntable and sent it spinning. The bird made the rounds, greeting every guest, and when the device came to a stop, the host handed it to me—me! Not the guest of honor!
I took it in both hands and thanked the host, but everyone kept looking at me, like I hadn’t yet done what I was expected to do. I couldn’t see my sister clearly out of the corner of my eye. I cradled the bird in my hands and looked around, smiling graciously, but they were waiting for me to do something. And so I held the bird tightly in one hand and took a bite. What else do you do with a carrot bird? But I knew right away that wasn’t what I was supposed to do because all the jaws dropped. I looked at the headless bird in my hand and had to get rid of it, so I chewed and swallowed the whole thing as fast as I could while everyone just watched.
My boyfriend reminded me I had the wrong responses. I’d forever be a foreign guest chomping heads off birds instead of admiring them beside my plate, or whatever it was I was supposed to have done. Everyone else was built for this world. Beautiful things made them do sensible things like plan picnics or get married. But beauty imprisoned me, demanded a response. All my settings were miscalibrated. I loved things so much I destroyed them; I gave up the things I wanted most. Running was the most acceptable way I’d come up with to handle the beauty, and now it hurt to even walk.
I told Greg I’d try to be more precise, but inside I took another step toward the East Coast.
* * *
That fall I boarded a plane for Thanksgiving. It was, to my surprise, already winter in Boston. It took a moment for me to accept I’d missed an entire East Coast fall, and I resolved I wouldn’t miss another. Erik picked me up alone from the airport; the kids were watching the end of Jonathan’s basketball game. When we found them in the gym, Jonathan ran up to me and hugged me like he really knew me. I picked up Andrew, gave Sarah a hug, and as soon as we got back to the house, the kids and I took off for a walk in the woods.
Andrew rode on my shoulders. He was quiet and thoughtful, but he had no hesitation about doing dangerous things. When he jumped off a rock, Jonathan, always more circumspect, would jump off the same rock. Few things about Andrew were very much like Jonathan, or Sarah like either of them, and every part of that seemed good for everyone.
I introduced a game.
“If I see something beautiful, I’m going to point to it, and if you see something beautiful, you point to it. Look! There!” I pointed to the bright blue doors of a building.
“Yeah!” Andrew said, satisfied.
As we walked through the woods, Andrew pointed at a church, a bridge, the mill. Sometimes the rhythm of the game got ahead of him and he was pointing without contemplating, it seemed, whether he really thought something was beautiful.
“That’s beautiful!” Andrew pointed in the direction of some trees.
“What’s bea
utiful about it?” I challenged him, invoking my boyfriend.
“I don’t know; it’s just beautiful!”
Jonathan and Sarah walked their bikes ahead of us. Jonathan was wearing a puffy red coat that went down to his knees. Sarah led the way, but as they approached the steps of the bridge, they stopped and waited, their bicycles too heavy to maneuver. They were whispering while they waited for us, and I heard Jonathan say something about Jevn. He and Sarah giggled. I leaned down to lift his bike up the steps, bracing my lower back as my physical therapist had taught me. Then Sarah’s.
“What were you guys talking about?” I asked. “Did you see Jevn recently?”
They both burst into laughter.
“I saw them almost kiss!” Jonathan laughed as he ran over the bridge. I smiled and followed them, shaking my head. I didn’t want to seem shocked at the mention of Jevn’s name, but it had been a while. The last time I’d seen him was in a framed picture in the living room on one of my recent visits. I was unsettled and intrigued, but I tried not to seem surprised about that, either. There was Jonathan, squeezing Jevn around the neck from behind, both of them stretching their smiles and squinting their eyes to the limit. The way Jonathan wrapped his arms around Jevn, like seeing him was pure pleasure, I thought it must be simpler to be a father. Jevn never left my mind entirely, but I was still surprised to learn he had a girlfriend serious enough to be introduced to Jonathan.
Andrew and I lingered on the bridge, looking at the mill below and the tangle of forest that surrounded it. Jonathan sauntered back to join us. He asked if he could borrow my camera, in case he saw something beautiful. I pulled it out of my pocket, and he assembled his fingers so that the index, long and delicate, rested softly on the shutter release. He glanced up at me to confirm they were in the right places, and as he adjusted them, I recognized them as my own—and I had the strangest sensation that I was looking in a mirror. That those delicate movements were mine; it was like a flickering in my deep muscles as they engaged to support the gesture he was making. He was the image of Jevn in every other feature, but I clung to the sight of his hands, my heart pounding. Long skinny fingers extending from short narrow palms. And an infinite network of tiny lines. Hard and fast evidence of his birth and our connection. It felt like I should grab him by the shoulders and shake him and say, “Jonathan! It’s me!” like I’d found a long-lost son.
But he was never lost. He is mine, I reminded myself, and he is not mine. Equally important, opposite realities. I’d practiced both thoughts so often my heart was a branch bent back and forth, weakened every time.
He clasped the camera and ran into the woods ahead of me. I walked slowly behind. We piled our coats on a log by the stream, and I sat down to rest. While the kids played hide-and-seek, I drew my finger across the crease of my hip; it felt like cutting off my leg was the only way the pain would ever go away.
“Look!” Jonathan handed me the camera. He’d spun it while he was photographing the stream. Leaves had been captured in the ice, and water flowed through cracks in the surface. The tiny middle of the image was in focus, and the outer peripheries were blurred.
“Beautiful!” I said.
He ran off to take more pictures. Sarah and Andrew were crawling on rocks nearby. I followed Jonathan. I held on to his hand, like ballast, so he could lean out farther over the water.
“Do you think we could walk on the ice?” he asked.
“No, see how close the water is underneath?”
We chased his brother and sister. His brother ran slowly, swinging his arms hard like he was trying to fly. His sister caught him easily, in full mastery of her body now, at nine. We played for a couple of hours, and by afternoon the forest had taken shape: the soft carpet of dead leaves in the clearing was our living room, there was our mound of coats, the hollow between the hill and the tree, and the big rock sitting in the sun, home base. Everything we could see belonged to us.
It was starting to get cold. I gathered the kids’ things and called them. Jonathan gave me my camera and put his arms through his giant coat. The neighbors would see us walking home with red noses after our long day in the woods. They might think I am my son’s mother, and I wished that simple mistake could somehow stay suspended in frost on the window glass. I was happy to think it might at least enjoy a tiny life in the passive imagination of neighbors.
* * *
When I got to the farm for Thanksgiving dinner, my grandmother had a surprise for me. She handed me a mandolin swaddled in an old potato sack. The body was round and it pressed into the hollow of my abdomen as I held it.
“That was your great-grandmother Louise’s mandolin,” she told me. “Grandpa’s mother. She used to play every Saturday night. Your great-grandpa played fiddle.” I didn’t know anyone in our family played music! I thought my inclination toward music was proof I didn’t belong in my family at all! I used to play piano like I was blindly patting a wall, searching for the hidden entry into a magical underwater cavern, the world where I was meant to be. But then my mother would call me in to dinner, and the tide would suck away from the shore. I held the mandolin on my lap and pressed into the indentations of Louise’s fingerprints. I understood why, years ago, Grandpa yelled, “That ain’t no mandolin!” when I’d played mine: for him the sound of a mandolin was the sound of this mandolin and the sound of his mother playing it.
But now my grandfather was silent. He couldn’t hear anymore, and he didn’t make eye contact so that he wouldn’t have to tell you so. Still, Grandma told me to hand him the mandolin, and my cousin took a picture of him handing it back to me. He leaned forward uncomfortably as I knelt beside him, the mandolin between us, and smiled. I should have it, Grandma said, since it would mean more to me than anyone, and I felt myself bound in a special new way to Louise and to my grandfather. As long as I could sink my fingertips into the shallow cavities between the frets, I would hold on to the sound of his childhood, and I’d always have my grandfather. But as we left, I heard him ask, “Who was that lady with the mandolin?” and realized he hadn’t known who I was.
Returning to my childhood bedroom in Tennessee, I felt lucky that it at least never changed. The quilt Grandma made me, my old drawings from art class, a giant chunk of wood from a tree Dad felled. My drawer that held my cat’s tooth and the orange pill bottle with Jevn’s last name. My son would never have this experience. He had already had so many homes. He adjusted well, but when I was in Boston, Paula said he’d realized recently that he’d lost one of his toys, and he wanted to go back to the house in North Carolina to find it. It had been two years since they’d emptied that house, but he said he thought he knew just where it was in his old bedroom, and he assured her it would be okay for them to go inside, because that house was kind of really their house.
Tucked into my childhood bed, I looked at the pictures my son had taken with my camera: fragments of arms and legs, blurry close-ups of leaves caught in ice, so many spinning forest skies. He has my fingers, I thought with that strange satisfaction, and my impulse to grasp and hold on to beautiful things. To find them, again, in their dusty, lost corners, and to hold on to them forever—things he couldn’t possibly keep.
TWENTY-EIGHT
From China, my sister told me a story about a man who joined a group of her friends for dinner, which was served family style. He got radish and beef soup, and as he ladled my sister’s bowl, he deliberately set pieces of meat aside. They had just met, but he hadn’t forgotten that on their way to the restaurant she’d said she was a vegetarian. One of her other friends ordered tomatoes and eggs, remembering from dinners past that it was Julie’s favorite dish. Later, she was tutoring a student in conversational English. They began talking about love. “Love means that you take care of the one you love,” her student said. “If she is cold, you tell her she should wear more clothes.”
My sister thought that was funny. She argued, “Love means you remember.”
I could still picture vividly my sister’s fac
e the moment I signed the papers. I’d dressed for the occasion several times, but in the end we’d both worn delicate linen shirts she bought in China. Hers was mauve; mine was blue. They each had a single button made out of knotted linen at the top. I wore mine with a skirt she’d had made by a tailor in Nanchang. Her face matched her shirt as I wrote my name. Her sadness that day had given me some of my strength. And I counted on her to remember.
* * *
Her son was a year and a half old when I got a call from her. “Guess what little boy is going to have a little sister or brother!” I played along, but I was annoyed; she had no idea what some people have to go through to have children. But mostly I was busy. My office had just approved my transfer to New York, and I was saying goodbye to San Francisco every way imaginable: long last afternoons in the park, last rides out to Stinson Beach, last Monday nights with live music at the bar where I was always meeting people, last breakfast party on my roof, complete with clogging and a mandolin duo. And last espresso with my boyfriend, whom I finally broke up with.
I saw her just a few weeks later, when my family went skiing in West Virginia over the holidays. But she didn’t ski because of her pregnancy, and I didn’t ski because of my injury. Instead, we cooked and played games in the same cabin we’d stayed in seven years ago when I was pregnant. I’d hidden in my room and read The God of Small Things and was compelled to swallow a pickle every time I read the word pickle in that story about an Indian family that operated a pickle factory. We’d told none of my cousins or aunts or uncles who were staying in cabins next door. Seven years had changed so much; now, being pregnant and having children were things to proudly announce to everyone.
My sister had already ordered a birth pool in preparation for a home birth in the kitchen. After Jacob was born, she quit her job teaching English at a university to become a professional homemaker. She had additional freezers and refrigerators for her supply of grains, flours, beans, and nuts. She was part of a raw milk black market, and, concerned about the environmental impact of washing cloth diapers, she taught her son how to “eliminate” on command from birth by sitting him on a toilet at regular intervals and using a range of verbal cues. She and her husband occupied a parsonage in a D.C. suburb with strict neighborhood regulations. The neighbors minded her annual delivery of a pile of sheep manure from the farm, for use in her garden, and they minded that she sometimes “peed” her son out the front door of her house, saying shhhhhhhhhh!—a pre-lingual direction to urinate, and to be quiet about it.
