by Margot Kahn
Exile
My friend and I are sitting across from each other in the museum café. We have just looked at an exhibition of paintings by the English artist John Constable, clouds and trees and rolling fields of the English countryside. According to a placard, the artist once said: “The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things.”
My friend and I have known each other for over thirty-five years, and we are telling each other stories. We are talking about the paintings, our lives, books, people we know. And she says to me that she awoke that morning thinking about three houses: a house where she was once a caretaker; a friend’s house in Massachusetts; and the house in which she lived in Vermont for three years with her husband to whom she is longer married.
I don’t know why it is that I remember these rooms so well, she tells me. But I remember them viscerally, physically. I remember how it felt to stand at the sink running the water, or to pull open the drawer of a desk, or the angle of the sunlight as it fell across the kitchen floor in the house in Vermont. I remember the feel of these rooms much more than I even remember the people in them. I can just recall their faces, but it is the rooms that I remember with the most detail.
And I suggest to her that it is possibly because remembering the people associated with those rooms may be so difficult, so painful. A friend who is no longer a friend, a lover with whom intimacy has passed. And she says, Maybe that’s it. But I’m not sure it is. I think I remember those places, she says, because they are the rooms that are forbidden to me now. I know these rooms continue to exist, but I will never be in them again.
And this is something that perplexes me. We spend our time and money trying to make the places in which we live accommodating, open, and gracious. We desire the rooms we live in to be hospitable and human, and we do what we can to make them so. But in the end, it may be the ones that remain forbidden to us that we remember most clearly. And it is the rooms from which we are exiled that may fasten themselves most tenaciously to our memory and imagination.
Akiko Busch is the author of Geography of Home, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, and Nine Ways to Cross a River. The Incidental Steward, her essays about citizen science and stewardship, was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Natural History Literature category of the 2013 National Outdoor Book Awards. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She is on the faculty of the MA Design Research program at the School of Visual Arts and is currently a visiting teacher at Bennington College. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Furthermore Foundation, NYFA, and Civitella Ranieri. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
Plane Crash Theory
Dani Shapiro
These are the first words I’ve written since J. fell down the stairs, unless you count lists. I have lists in my pockets, lists tacked to the bulletin board above my desk. Small lists on Post-its ruffle like feathers against walls and bureaus. Chunky baby food, milk, Cheerios. Diaper Genie refills. Huggies overnight diapers. This is what I do now. I cross things off lists. The more items I cross off, the better I can breathe.
J. was just seven weeks old when we moved from Manhattan across the river to Brooklyn. We bought an old four-story brick townhouse with a dogwood out front. A green-painted front door with glass panels led into a foyer with a pale pink chandelier dangling overhead. An antique cherry banister curved in one fluid line up two steep flights of stairs. The staircase itself was polished, with creaky, uneven steps.
My husband and I looked at a lot of places before we decided to live in Brooklyn. Manhattan was out of the question—we needed four bedrooms—so we explored Montclair, South Orange, Hastings-on-Hudson. We considered the country. Litchfield, Sag Harbor. During a trip to Seattle, on a sunny day when we could see the mountains, we thought about moving out west. We kept reminding ourselves that we’re writers, and writers can work from anywhere. But Brooklyn won us over—so close to our friends, to everything we knew. And then, after a parade of realtors showed us dozens of narrow, dark Victorians, we fell in love with the brick house. The night after I first walked through the house, it filled my dreams. I was in my eighth month of pregnancy, and my dreams had become colorful, baroque. I floated through each room, focusing on the wide-planked orange pine floors, the intricate, crumbling moldings.
We ran out of money shortly after J. was born. It was my fault. I was giddy, on a postnatal, hormonal high. I was a mother! I wanted everything to be just right for my little family. The parlor needed an armoire for Michael’s record collection. The baby’s nursery had navy-blue curtains hanging to the floor and a hand-loomed rag rug. We had thousands of books, so we found a carpenter to build in shelves. And as long as he was already there, we had him install library lights, extra electrical outlets. You never know when you’ll need them. I pored over “shelter magazines”: House & Garden, Metropolitan Home. I looked at photographs of other people’s shelters. A shelter with a small Mondrian above the mantel. A shelter with an eighteenth-century writing desk in a child’s room. We relined the fireplaces, built closets, installed an alarm system, and before I knew it, we were broke.
Eighteen steps lead from our front hall to the second floor, to J.’s nursery and our bedroom. They are steep and creaky. Along the curve of the wall, near the top of the staircase, there is an indentation in the wall shaped like a tablet, like half of the Ten Commandments. I am told it’s called a coffin.
Things don’t go wrong all at once. There are small things—invisible things—that constantly go wrong. Wires fray inside a wall. A van speeds through a yellow light. Someone leaves a Q-Tip in the baby’s crib. These small things almost always just scatter and disappear. Big wind comes along, and—poof!—they’re gone. But once in a while, they start sticking to each other. If this happens, you find yourself with a big thing on your hands.
Whenever we’re on an airplane taxiing down the runway, I ask Michael to explain this to me. He calls it Plane Crash Theory. I know he wonders why I need to hear it again and again. But I do. His theory is simple, scientific: in order for a commercial airliner to crash, many things have to go wrong in sequence. Many unlikely things. No single event causes an accident. It is the sheer coincidental accrual and velocity of these failures that sends two hundred people plummeting into the ocean. This makes Michael feel better. He finds comfort in these odds as he settles into his seat and cracks open a newspaper as the jet takes off. Me, I think it’s as likely as not that I’ll be on that particular plane.
Michael and I have always lived hand to mouth, though from the outside it doesn’t look that way. We occasionally get a big check, then go months—sometimes years—without any money to speak of coming in. We bought the house with the expectation that a big check was on its way from Hollywood. It was a done deal. What we didn’t realize was that done deal, in the language of Hollywood, does not, in fact, signify a deal that is done. The producers are on vacation in Hawaii. Larry (who’s Larry?) is on the golf course and can’t be reached.
Here are the things we didn’t do when we moved to Brooklyn, because the check didn’t come. I still have the list tacked to the refrigerator: fireplace screens, seed garden, repair roof hatch, basement beam. Last on the list was runner for staircase.
J.! He was perfect, with a burly little body. Late at night, while Brooklyn slept, he burrowed into my soft belly as he nursed, and I watched him with bewilderment and joy. Where had he come from? He seemed to have inherited a temperament that didn’t exist in either my husband’s family or my own. From a grumpy, depressed bunch of people comes this smiling boy. In the darkness of his nursery, I stared out the window at the glowing red face of a clock tower in the distance, and thought obsessive thoughts of all the things I had read about in the baby books. He could choke on a button, or the eye of a stuffed animal. He could suffocate in his own crib sheet. He could strangle hi
mself with the cord of his purple elephant pull toy.
This is what I do with happiness. Kayn aynhoreh, my grandmother used to say, repeating this magical Yiddish phrase to ward off evil. Kayn aynhoreh. I need to think of the worst-case scenario. If I think about it hard enough, it won’t happen.
There is a cage in our basement. I’ve never gone down there. The stairs are dark and rickety; the third step from the top is loose. The cage is made of rotting wood poles and chicken wire. It was built earlier in the house’s history, a less affluent time. Maybe it was once a rooming house. When we moved in, Michael found an axe propped in a corner of the basement. He’s not in the least spooked by it. This is one of the reasons I married him. He’s been using the axe to tear the cage down. Sometimes, I hear the crash of metal, and he emerges, covered with dust.
We come from money, my husband and I. Not huge family fortunes, but from first- and second-generation Jewish parents who made good, who have more than one house and drive the cars they swore they would never drive (those Nazi-mobiles) and take first-class round-the-world trips. Parents who wish we had become doctors or lawyers instead of writers. I’m saying this because we could have put our pride aside and asked. We could have said, Mom, Dad, we’re short on cash. We need a couple of thousand. The staircase is slippery. We should do something about it. Put up a runner.
We settled into the new house over the long, hot summer. I rarely left. I was captivated by J. and spent hours doing nothing but singing the Winnie-the-Pooh song to him. Saturdays, we had a routine: We walked with J. in his stroller to a farmers’ market at Grand Army Plaza; I circled the market buying goat cheese, banana muffins, and grape juice, while Michael and J. played in the shade. It was the first time in my adult life I had a full refrigerator. I kept the grapes in a Provençal bowl we had brought back from our honeymoon.
One day during that summer, Michael and I were driving through the city, heading home after visiting friends who had just given birth to a premature baby. Michael turned right from 34th onto Broadway, and drove straight into a swarm of police officers. They had set up a trap and were pulling cars over for making an apparently illegal turn. Michael, usually a calm guy, lost his temper. He screeched to the curb, and got out of the car. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, or the heat, or visiting a three-and-a-half-pound baby in the neonatal intensive care unit. I saw him waving his hands at the traffic cop, who didn’t meet his eye, shrugged, and began to write a ticket. Michael opened the car door, grabbed a camera we happened to have handy, and began snapping photos. The corner of 34th with no sign. The traffic cop himself. He got back in the car. “I’m going to fight this,” he said. I wondered if he’d bother, or just forget about it.
That coffin, that empty space, bothered me. Broke as we were, I decided that something belonged there. But what? Fresh flowers? An empty vase? I gave it a lot of thought. Then, I bought an arrangement of dried sprigs of herbs, baby roses, big bulbous things that I didn’t know the name of that drooped from the edges of a cracked white urn. I placed it in the coffin, and it filled the space nicely, with some of the dried arrangement pushing out into the stairwell in a burst of color. A bit precarious, perhaps: but hell, it looked so good that way. I could picture it in one of those shelter magazines.
September. Back-to-school time for me. Leaving for my teaching job in the city was impossible. I would walk down the front steps of the house while Michael and J. waved bye-bye from the door. I could barely breathe, but I didn’t say anything. Just waved at them, blew kisses at J., and wondered if I would ever see them again.
On the subway, I would hang on to the pole and stare out the smudged window at the graffiti on the tunnel walls. I thought of J., of Michael, of anything safe and good, anything to pull me back, but thinking of them only made it worse. I was underground, with no way out. Moving farther away from them by the minute. Was this what having a family meant?
Of course, J. needed a babysitter. We interviewed fourteen women for the job. Who do you trust? We talked to cousins, sisters, best friends of babysitters of friends, and friends of friends. Finally we chose Marsha. She was young and pretty, with a Louise Brooks bob and big brown eyes. She was so gentle, so sweet, that her eyes seemed to be constantly brimming with tears. She had a little girl of her own. She pulled a photo from her wallet; I liked how proud she was of her child. Marsha would never be one of those babysitters I saw in the park, talking to her friends with her back turned to my baby.
One morning, when the train pulled into the station, I stood on the platform, paralyzed, watching as the doors opened, the rush-hour crowd pushed its way in, and the doors slid shut again. This had never happened to me before. I climbed back upstairs and stood on the street. I wondered if I should just walk the two blocks home. Call in sick. Give up for the rest of the semester. It was too hard. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. An off-duty cab was approaching, and, impulsively, I flagged it. The driver stopped for me. As we rolled down Flatbush, we got to talking. He said his name was Tony. He came from Nigeria. He lived nearby, and was on his way into the city to begin his shift. By the time he dropped me off at school, he had given me his number. I told him I’d call him the following week to pick me up on his way in. Maybe that would make it easier.
On her first morning working for us, Marsha put too much detergent in the wash while she was doing the baby’s laundry. The water flooded my office and dripped through the old floorboards to my bedroom closet below. As we frantically mopped up the mess, I tried to comfort her. I told her it was just an accident. Nothing was ruined. It could have happened to anybody.
That afternoon, Marsha and I pushed J. in his stroller to the park. I wanted to give her my guided tour of the neighborhood. The health food store, the pizza place, the Key Food. It was a warm day, just past Halloween, and the playground was full of moms and kids and babysitters. I lowered J. into the baby swing, and he laughed and laughed as I pushed him. He has the most unusual laugh I’ve ever heard in a baby. It’s like he cracks himself up. Everything was funny that day. The leaves falling off the trees were funny. The little girl with her orange plastic pumpkin was funny. Mommy making her silly faces was very, very funny. He was wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and a blue denim jacket. Already, at six months old, he wanted to go higher and higher.
On the morning of Marsha’s second day, we take a family nap together before she arrives. J. falls asleep between us, his little mouth open, his eyelashes blond and long. We hold hands across his sleeping body.
It is a teaching day. I dress in black cargo pants, a black turtleneck sweater, black boots. Tony will pick me up at nine o’clock. I feel pretty pleased with myself at this arrangement. Marsha arrives a few minutes late. Michael is going to catch a ride into the city with me; today is his court date to fight that traffic ticket, and he seems strangely energized by it. J. is in his high chair, being fed strained plums. I take the dog out for a quick walk, rounding the corner by the bodega. A truck honks. You look beautiful! the driver yells. I’m in such a good mood—I’ve figured out my life!—that I yell back, Thanks!
We cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and for once I feel at peace on my way to school. Michael is in the back of the taxi next to me. Tony is an excellent driver. And Marsha is at home with J., feeding him strained plums in his safe, ergonomically designed high chair. It’s a perfect day. The city is a jagged, sparkling cliff along the East River and I notice things I don’t notice on the D train when it crosses the bridge. The small boats, the abandoned Brooklyn Navy Yard, the faint outline of the Statue of Liberty off to the left in the distance. I feel, for a moment, lucky.
We drop Michael off somewhere near the courthouse. He gets out of the taxi, a manila envelope containing proof of his innocence—photos of the corner of 34th and Broadway—in his hand. He has graying hair and a mostly gray goatee, and he’s put on some weight since the baby was born. He’s wearing his usual blue jeans, black T-shirt, green army jacket. We pull away from the corner, and, as I always do, I turn and watc
h as he walks away. In our marriage, I am the one who turns around and watches. He is the one who walks deliberately, in the direction of wherever it is he’s going.
This is the first morning since J. was born that we have both been out of the house at the same time.
As I speed farther and farther away from my neat and well-appointed house (the bookshelves, the sheer white bathroom curtains, the ficus thriving in the south-facing window, the dried flowers bursting forth from the coffin in the stairwell), up the West Side Highway past terrain more familiar to me than my Brooklyn neighborhood, where even the silence and the birds chirping and the car alarms in the middle of the night still feel strange and new, I close my eyes.
When my cell phone rings, it surprises me. It rings from deep inside my briefcase, which is a bag I use only once a week, when I teach. I unsnap the briefcase and pull the phone out from its own special little pocket inside. I’m thinking, It’s Michael. He’s forgotten something. We are speeding towards the 79th Street boat basin. The traffic is light. I flip the phone open.
Even when I hear the screams on the other end of the phone, I don’t get it. Marsha is screaming, J. is screaming. There’s static on the line, I can barely hear anything but the screaming, and I’m thinking, We just left twenty minutes ago. Nothing terrible could happen in twenty minutes. Her voice is shaking so hard all I can hear is, I fell, and stairs, and He hit his head, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
I notice that Tony has wordlessly turned off the West Side Highway and is heading downtown, back towards Brooklyn, pedal to the floor. I tell Marsha to call 911. She’s crying so hard, hyperventilating, that I have to keep my voice gentle, ask, Can you do that? Can you do that for me? I tell her I will call her back in three minutes.
