I remember we’re low on formula, so I swing by the store for some cans of Similac.
CHRISTMAS COMES AND goes. It is hard on everyone and there is a pall of subdued quiet to everything. My mother cooks a modest dinner. It’s just us. No relatives. No party. We exchange small gifts. Chip, in a valiant effort at keeping the status quo, gives me an NRA belt buckle. A pewter eagle clutching two rifles in its talons, with the inscription “Use it or lose it.” He finds this very amusing. I give him an oversize Knicks jersey with the name “Moretti” on the back, which he has been dropping hints about wanting.
I shower James Jr. with presents, just like I planned. Reusable diapers, a new blanket, little footed pajamas. At the mall, my father and I decide to go dutch on an unnecessarily large stuffed giraffe.
It isn’t the best holiday we’ve ever spent as a family, but I feel in a weird way it’s not the worst either. There is a certain closeness I feel to everyone. I’m on the seesaw, as always. It oscillates now between intense feelings of guilt about my secret plan to desert them and skin-crawling moments of despair when I want to bolt from the house and never come back. I haven’t fully committed to any real course of action, nor have I told anyone that I’m thinking of going away for a while.
I have $1,791.45 in my savings account. My last paycheck from the John W. Manley School should be on its way shortly. In my notebook, I do a quick breakdown of my “finances.” All divvied up, there are three months of Sallie Mae payments, plus a little left over for me to live off, if I eat nothing but cheese sandwiches and sleep on couches. I don’t plan on smoking weed for a while, so there’s a cutback. If I decide to go, I’ll probably just take a few changes of clothes, my Walkman, some tapes, my notebook. Up and down. I am adrift in limbo. I have been there for some time.
THE REST OF the house is quiet. My mother is at the grocery store.
I am in the kitchen, warming a bottle. I listen to the walls. I wait for a pipe to clang.
Upstairs, the baby is crying. I hear my father’s hushed voice. I tilt my head, trying to make out what he’s saying. I turn off the stove. I climb the stairs to the second floor.
My father is in Elissa’s room. He is at the window, rocking James Jr. gently in his arms. After a while, the baby is quiet.
“Lunchtime,” I say, stepping into the room.
My father is smiling at the baby, making faces.
James Jr. begins to squirm again.
“Want me to take him?”
My father hands the baby over to me. I cradle his head in my hand and rest his tiny body in the crook of my arm, the bottle in my free hand. I’ve gotten quite good at this maneuver of holding bottle and baby at the same time. It is a delicate ballet that causes me a little discomfort—the shoulder will be stiff forever, I think. Still, though, it is accomplished. I sway back and forth.
“There you go,” I say, guiding the rubber nipple into James Jr.’s mouth.
The baby moans softly and begins to drink. After a moment, he coughs and spits up a little onto my arm.
“Gross,” I say, but it doesn’t bother me. I hold the baby to my chest. His head smells like talcum powder. I turn back to the window. The garage seems far away, across the yard. The trees are bare and shaking in the wind. I decide then, at that exact instant, that I will stay. The radical move I will make, the thing I will do to shake myself out of the rut I’ve fallen into, will not be to run away. I will do the opposite. It will be the harder thing, sure. It will be the choice that means more work and more responsibility, and yet, it also seems to fit well with the proclamations I made to Dave and Wally that day in Dave’s living room—eons ago, it feels—when I told them I could grow up whenever I wanted. When I told them “adulthood” was a challenge you either took on or shied away from. I will be that person. I will help out instead of hinder. I will be there for people, even if it means sacrificing some things. Even if it means putting off my own happiness for a little while. I am needed. There are people whom I care about—love—who need me.
We need each other, for we are moving. We are leaving this house. My parents have decided on the Victorian, the one on the Yonkers-Hastings border. Things will be changing yet again. I will change with them, as best I can. And at the same time, I know I won’t be here forever either. Elissa was right. She always was. Nothing stays the same. Nothing lasts. There is no true permanence in this life. Things begin. Things end. I will move out when the time is right. When it makes sense, I will have a life outside my family. It is inevitable. Until then, I will be here. We will all be here.
James Jr. stirs in my arms and stops drinking from the bottle. His eyes open. He looks right at me.
I CALL GABBY’S cell phone. It goes to voice mail. I’m happy about this. I leave a message. I put the ball in her court, as they say.
“Sorry I’ve been a little out of the loop,” I say. “There’s a lot going on. Don’t know if you’ve heard. Maybe you have. Okay. So, we’re moving. That’s happening. There’s a lot of stuff to pack up. Stuff to throw away. I’d like to see you, after we get moved. If you feel like it. Or whatever. Yeah, so call me back, I guess. Okay. Bye.” I hang up.
“Fucking idiot,” I tell myself.
THE HOUSE IS full of boxes. Boxes and boxes. In the living room. In the foyer. Everything in its proper box. My mother has labeled all of them. Kitchen Stuff. Books. FRAGILE—Fine China. Baby’s Stuff. Chip’s Clothing. Cal’s Records.
Chip is out in the driveway yelling at the movers, a pair of burly men in back braces who seem completely detached from the emotions of the day.
“Careful with those wing chairs,” he is telling them.
There is a Dumpster behind the moving truck, full to the brim with the things we are not taking with us. Things we are shedding.
I walk through the house. Meals we’ve eaten in the kitchen. Movies we’ve watched in the TV room. The feel of the stairs underfoot. The second step from the top makes a sound like the creak of a door. No one ever got around to fixing the leaky kitchen faucet. I go to my bedroom. Chip’s bedroom. The baby’s room. All empty now. Echoes everywhere.
There’s no third-floor bathroom in the new house. I’ll have to make some adjustments. We all will. The piano in the living room has been sold, hauled away already. No space for it where we’re going. The pool table in the basement makes the cut. Chip is very happy about this. He has grand plans to create a “man cave” in the basement. Chip has taken over the financing for the new mortgage. He’s worked out a roughly sixty-forty split between him and our parents. For the time being, my father’s disability and Chip’s salary will join forces to pay the bills. It’s a good thing he’s around. Having no job at the moment, I’m back to freeloading.
In time, you come to know a place. After a year. After decades. You know it so well you forget you know it so well. You stop seeing it for what it is. And then one day you are walking through it for the last time.
I don’t want to think about it, but I do. I allow myself a little bit of nostalgia, which normally I hate. I look in the closets. I flick on lights and look at the fixtures. There is dust in some of the corners. There are cracks in walls that will have to be plastered over.
My mother is in her bedroom putting the last of her clothing into boxes. My father is sitting on their bed, which has been stripped to the bare mattress. He is holding James Jr.
“Please try to keep Chip from insulting the movers too much,” my mother says.
“The baby is completely unfazed by all of this,” my father says.
“Do you guys need any help in here?”
“We’re almost done,” my mother says. She is holding a pink dress. One I haven’t seen her wear in years. “Do I want this?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
From outside, there is the sound of a horn blaring.
I go to the window. Chip is hanging out of the driver’s side of the moving truck, leaning on the steering wheel. I throw up the sash and stick my head out. The a
ir is cold.
“What’s the problem?” I yell.
He lays off the horn.
“Let’s go already,” he calls out. “These boxes aren’t moving themselves.”
There’s a feeling of wanting to be closer to things. Of wanting to keep them a certain way. Call it an ache, felt only when the passage of time is clearly visible. Or when, at the edge of change, you are reluctant to let a particular moment go. The idea is to hold on to time. To live inside it. But this can never really be. The moment is always gone. Even before you’ve thought to cling to it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These people read and encouraged and listened and spoke and were colossally responsible for aiding this book into existence.
Without whom I would be lost:
Tim O’Connell, Ethan Bassoff, Matt Lombardi, Chuck Adams (and the entire Algonquin team), Josh Anzano, Dave Liebowitz, Steve Moore, Steve Lowenthal, M.P. “Snakeman 5000” Berdan, Ron “Morelli 1” Morelli, Justin Jarboe, Stephen Walsh, Morgan Workman, Melissa Mamatos, Minju Pak, Marina Robinson, Matt Cowal, David Gates, Jon Dee, Darcey Steinke, and everyone at Beginnings Nursery—especially Jane, Claudine, LeeAnn, Lilla, and Ellen.
I love you all. Peace.
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac
A Note from the Author
Questions for Discussion
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
When people want to know if my novel is autobiographical, I always feel like saying, “What work of fiction isn’t?” It’s all based on something, even when it’s not.
The wackiest and thereby most vexing period of my life (so far) was my midtwenties. I found that handful of years, roughly from twenty-three to twenty-six, and the extended period of postcollege floundering that went with it, to be stranger and far more coming-of-age than high school and my teen years (encapsulated for me by a white suburban upper-middle-class bubble) ever were. I knew I wanted to try and express the emotions, the anxiety, the excitement, the antsy-ness, the wonder—and the lurking, unspecified dread—that informed that period.
My father really does have multiple myeloma. My family really did lose their house. I really did work at a preschool for autistic kids. My grandmother really did mistake a picture of Osama bin Laden for God. My brother really did think he was reverse discriminated against by a Metro-North train conductor. But almost everything else in the book is exaggeration, or complete invention. I do not have a sister. I rarely smoke weed. I don’t know any live-action role players. My father did not carry a gun around in his bathrobe, although it might have been interesting if he had.
I graduated from college in May 2000. And much like Calvin Moretti, when it was over, I had no idea what to do with myself. I knew one thing: I didn’t want a job. Furthermore, I had no idea how to get one. Nor did I know what people actually did at “real” jobs. So I decided to go back to school. Get a master’s. Two more years of partying, I thought. I started a film MFA at Boston University. I was twenty-one. Long story short, I dropped out after a year and wound up living back home after being on my own for five years. My youngest brother, Tom, was still in high school. Almost immediately, I retrograded back to my high school self—both in how I viewed life and how I dealt with my parents and the people around me. I was jobless, broke, and largely without motivation. The next eight months became, without a doubt, the strangest and most surreal and intensely formative period of my entire life. I was completely adrift in the world without any direction in which to steer myself. No one was forcing me to grow up. It didn’t seem like I had to. I’m a huge fan of coming-of-age stories. But I felt like I hadn’t read any books (or watched any films) that took on this idea of my generation’s grossly delayed plunge into adulthood. When I did come across some piece of art that attempted to tackle the subject, there was often a romance component as the fulcrum. Or the thing would be bogged down by pointless pop-culture reference. Or, worst of all, it would fall back on grossly inaccurate and contrived dialogue to attempt to convey how young people talk to each other. A sort of “look how cool and hip and funny they are” mentality. I wanted to consciously avoid those trappings. I didn’t want love to be a motivator for Calvin. I didn’t want friends, or “good times,” or anything like that. What I wanted to do was put on the page a snippet of someone’s life at a crossroads.
I was also really interested in the generational divide I saw between my parents and me. My father was a homeowner, had a career, and had his first child (me) all before he turned thirty. I’m about to turn thirty-three and have done none of those things. This strikes me as noteworthy, or at least of some interest. Before starting to write Sleepy Hollow, I looked back at novels and films I liked that I thought fit the bill. Art about people who were too old to be experiencing the feelings they were experiencing. At twenty-three, I should have been moving past any coming-of-age experiences. But there I was, trying to puzzle out in which direction I wanted my life to go. And where I wanted it to go.
Why does anyone write anything? There are more answers to that question than there are books in the world, and none of them really get at the amorphous motivations that drive people to make art. Or at least I don’t think they do. The truth is, I wrote The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac because I couldn’t write anything else. When I sat down in front of my computer and started typing, these were the characters I could conjure, this was the story that I knew how to tell, because these were the things that were happening around me. These were the people who populated my life, for better or for worse.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Calvin Moretti is a twenty-four-year-old who has returned home because he can’t seem to find his way in the world. At the beginning of the novel, he states, “Life is basically standing still. Stalled out” (page 2). What does Calvin’s plight say about him, and about his generation? Are his feelings age-specific, or is there a universal quality to them? How might Calvin’s father, James, have been different at twenty-four?
2. James states that Calvin is the only person who understands him. How do father and son express similar feelings, despite their very different circumstances?
3. Calvin’s mother, Kathleen, seems to be the center pin holding the family together, yet she, too, shows a somewhat “flaky” side by bringing Brigitte, a spiritualist, into the home to counsel the family—and James in particular—about the crisis they are facing. Do you feel that Kathleen has a firm grip on reality? What do you think would happen to her if Chip and Calvin and Elissa all decided to move out of their Sleepy Hollow home?
4. At one point Calvin’s father, James, says, “I’m learning now to live without my dreams” (page 92). Do you think this declaration speaks solely to the loss of his job as a commercial pilot? What kind of statement might the author be trying to make about the status of the American middle class in contemporary society?
5. Many people prioritize their lives by keeping lists, but Calvin seems to be obsessed with list making. How do you think Cal’s obsession is connected to how out of control his life has become?
6. The novel opens with Calvin stating, “I work with retards.” What does he mean by that? How does that statement make you feel about Calvin’s character initially? Do your feelings about him change as the book progresses?
7. Arham, Calvin’s charge at the preschool for autistic kids, is a minor character who nonetheless plays an influential role in Cal’s maturation. How do you feel about Calvin’s relationship with Arham? Do you think that one day Calvin might achieve enough maturity to be a father himself?
8. Is Calvin’s father, James, a “mature” person in the sense of being a responsible figurehead for his family? If your answer is yes, how do you rationalize the ever-present gun and his careless use of it? If no, what role do you think his status as a breadwinner played in holding the family together, both financially and emotionally? What other factors might have made up for his seeming immaturity?
9. Calvin and his friends dabble in recreational drug use to help them escape th
e mundane lives they feel stuck inside. Do you think this drug use is a result of their current stations in life, or do you view it as part of the problem? Do you think it is something that will continue in Calvin’s life, or will he eventually move beyond it?
10. As Elissa’s pregnancy draws to an end, James discovers a new resolve and a determination to care for himself and the baby. How do you feel about this new child’s future in the Moretti household? In general, how do new responsibilities change the way we view ourselves and our families?
11. There are many novels that delve into the lives of contemporary dysfunctional families. Can you compare this novel to others you’ve read? Would you say that the members of the Moretti family—and the relationships among them—seem realistic? Why or why not?
12. In chapter 11 (pages 91–92), Calvin describes a recurring dream in which he has to kill an approaching monster, but he lacks the strength to pull the trigger, no matter how hard he tries. How does this dream tie into Calvin’s real-world fears and anxieties? How does it relate to what happens with his father’s gun later in the book (i.e., the shooting of the deer and the accidental shooting at the wedding)?
13. Romance, or the desire for romance, is largely absent from Calvin’s thoughts and desires. He doesn’t seem to want or need a girlfriend. Do you think this is peculiar to Calvin, or is it a reflection of the isolation felt by many in his generation? What do you think the author is saying about the way Calvin navigates the world? What do you think the author is saying about the future of romance?
14. In many regards, this novel is about, if not the end of the American Dream, the diminishing of the bright, rich future many of us were raised to expect. How do you feel about the future of the Moretti family? What do you think will happen to these characters?
15. Calvin claims to be bad at “life things. Important life things that have meaning, repercussions. Anything that involves talking to people in a meaningful way. Any confrontation where feelings are concerned” (page 56). Do you think he is right about this? By the end of the novel, has he changed? What do you see as Calvin’s future?
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac Page 26
