Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  I picked up my cell phone and thought about calling someone. I wanted to talk to my father. I looked up his number, which I’d left in my cell phone, as if, by doing so, I could make him less gone. An elderly family friend who died recently asked Wib, in the last days before she went, “But how will we keep in touch?” Such a plaintive question. Wib tried to give her an answer that fit within the framework of her beliefs but that was also loving and true. She said she recounted the conversation to the woman’s daughter, who said, “Oh yes, she asked me the same thing.” “What did you tell her?” asked Wib. “I said we’d talk on the phone,” the daughter said.

  I hit send. Rationally, I just wanted to hear his voice on the outgoing message. But Benet is too sensible not to have disconnected the phone. I knew this, but still I called. The recording started, “This number has been disconnected or is no—” and I snapped the phone shut and looked out the window. The tears hadn’t even left my eyes yet, my nose hadn’t started to run, but my shoulders must have shaken a little, because from the backseat, Dolan asked:

  “Mummy sad?”

  “Yes, honey,” I told him. “Just a little.”

  “Babbo?” he asked. He knew that when I cried, it was usually about Babbo.

  “Yes, sweetie. I miss Babbo.” I reached back and took hold of his slender knee.

  AT LEAST TWO YEARS BEFORE his illness began, my father had sent us all a list of household possessions and asked us to tell him which things we wanted. He would then devise a way to distribute these items—mostly furniture and artwork—equitably. My father was always equitable with all six of his children.

  No one had wanted to deal with the list and all that it implied. Then once he got sick we really didn’t want to do it; it would have seemed too much like we were anxious to get our “stuff” before he died. Now that he was gone, it was up to us to conduct a lottery and split everything six ways. We gathered at Alison’s house the night after his memorial service, got liquored up, and tried to joke our way through the process. As individuals, we clutched at certain items that meant the world to us—But I love that wooden candlestick most!—but knew as we did so that they meant just as much to the collective. There were many moments of dismay as we dismantled the household that had once been all of ours. The next day, Benet watched with some disgust as those of us who were departing dug through boxes and opened drawers in the Barn Chamber, collecting our items. It wasn’t our finest hour. I no longer regret not getting my mother’s carnelian ring, but I do regret feeling a kind of desperate need to have it. The possessions, after all, had lost some of their magic when their owners left them behind.

  I shipped a few objects and went back to California with the family’s everyday silver in my suitcase. The forks are squared off, heavy, comfortable in the hand. The knives are rounder. Nothing matches; it’s a set only in that my parents kept it all in one drawer. Except for holidays, when the much vaunted Danish silver had come out, this was what I had eaten from all my childhood. I put it into the silverware tray in my narrow kitchen in Menlo Park, where it gleamed against my motley collection of flea market flatware. I felt like a criminal, having taken anything out of my parents’ house. I felt as though I had just robbed my own home. Except that my home was no longer my home.

  A week later, the box with my mother’s lamp in it arrived. It was the second item I had asked for in the lottery. It always sat on her bedside table. Made of stainless steel, it was originally a kerosene lamp, long ago converted to electricity. The shade is white porcelain, which gives the light a soft, warm glow. It’s a pretty object. But the reason I bid for it in the sibling auction was because of the noise it makes when you turn it off or on. When I pull the metal cord, the rattle of it bumping through its housing sends me hurtling through time and space to my own childhood, when I would lie in bed, listening to my mother prepare for sleep in the next room. Dolan, I thought as I unpacked it, would come to know that rattle and feel its comfort as I did. I wished I had an actual house for him, a place to call home.

  But when you are not yet two, home is a simpler concept. That winter, Wib flew out and we took Dolan up to Sea Ranch, a modern, eco-friendly community built on the bluffs looking out over the Sonoma Coast. We rented a house with weathered shingles, a hot tub, and a good kitchen. On the second night, we drove out in the late afternoon to get some groceries and came back just at dusk. As I pulled the car into the driveway, Dolan sang out from the backseat.

  “Home. We’re home.”

  I turned to look at him, sitting back there, gripping his favorite airplane, and realized that for him, home is wherever we are together. He gave the word back to me.

  SO BEFORE THE AGE OF TWO, Dolan had served as my grief counselor, banished my loneliness, and helped me find a new sense of home. I was ambitious to pay him back in any and all ways I could think of. This is how I came to find myself shivering on a January day by the side of one of Stanford’s many swimming pools, trying to jam my hair up under a nasty rubber cap and fighting the urge to run away.

  For while I have always been the first one in the cold Maine water, and the last one out, I harbored a terrible secret, known only to my siblings and a few friends who noticed and asked. I couldn’t put my face in the water. I swim head up, nose out, like a seal perpetually scanning the beach. When, under great peer pressure, I’ve jumped, I’ve pinched my nose shut with the urgency of an old lady guarding her purse on a busy street. I watched people dive with admiration, feeling embarrassed that I would never be able to plunge headfirst into the water. In a shipwreck, I wouldn’t stand a chance. More important, if Dolan fell off a dock in front of me, I would be of no use when it came to fishing him out. And when it came time for him to learn how to swim, I wouldn’t even be able to teach him how to blow bubbles.

  The swim coach who doubled as instructor to Bowdoin professors’ children during Friday Night Faculty Swim had done me no favors. His method was to drop us all into the pool like unwanted puppies, a trick intended to tap into our survival skills. Apparently my natural instinct was to drown. It’s all Charlie Butt’s fault, I’d tell myself. But inwardly I blamed myself. I knew I was my own worst enemy, and privately I thought I was an unconquerable foe. However, past fellows had spoken of the magical teaching skills of Zora, the instructor for “Advanced Beginning Swimming.” She was a legend in the Knight Fellow program; this suggested, comfortingly, that a fair portion of otherwise successful middle-aged journalists also had swimming issues. In fact, on that January day, I was huddled with two other Knights, Pam and Jo-Ann, amid a sea of Lycra-clad college students.

  The first lesson was fine. Zora talked about breathing and had us do a lot of yoga on the lawn. We practiced bouncing up and down in the water. I sank underneath and blew bubbles out of my nose for the first time. It wasn’t so hard. Then in the second class, we added strokes. Zora beckoned me over after one set.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make it all the way across the pool without breathing once,” she said. “Try to take some breaths, okay?”

  I put my face in the water and promptly forgot everything she’d said about breathing. Gasping and spitting, I almost drowned myself. With each passing lap I became more spastic and frenzied. I kept my head under, but that was the only part of the instruction I followed. At the end of class, I clung to the side of the pool, exhausted and miserable. Zora’s feet, clad in her sporty Keens, appeared in front of me, and she bent down to look in my eyes. “You know, there is nothing wrong with swimming with your head out of the water,” she said gently. “If doing the breaststroke up and down the pool works for you, that’s okay. That’s what my own mother does. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself.”

  In the showers, I started to cry and didn’t stop for an hour. When I finally turned the water off, Pam and Jo-Ann were long gone. I was still weeping. I never placed much faith in the whole concept of repressed childhood trauma, but I truly felt as though I were five years old again. If the lovely and supportive Zora c
ouldn’t teach me, I didn’t think I could be taught. Wrapping my towel around me, I realized how much I wanted to tell my mother and my father about my failure.

  I barely spoke, except to Dolan, for the next few days. Then I called Wib, who also swims in the manner of a curious seal, and told her about the swimming lessons. “You can get yourself out of that cove and around the Bigelows’ boat and back into the dock just fine,” she said. “That’s good enough.”

  But was it? These swimming classes seemed like yet another example of the confluence I was at, between childhood and being a parent. All this time, as the youngest child of Edward and Eileen Pols, I had been a bad swimmer. Now I was Dolan’s mother. For him, I couldn’t be a coward.

  Mum was afraid of pigeons, my inner voice said. She couldn’t ride a bike. But she would have torn apart anyone who came near her kids. Remember how she was with those scary gypsies in Italy? Practically beating them off with her purse? It’s okay to be a coward about little things as long as you don’t wimp out on the big stuff.

  I decided to go to the next class, just to thank Zora and tell her I might try again in the spring. Then I’d flee. But in order not to feel like such a quitter, I put on my suit. After I talked to Zora, I thought I’d go by one of the other pools and do some quiet head-out-of-the-water laps. Maybe I’d try the breathing routine on my own, at my own pace.

  Zora spotted me as I was locking my bike up outside the pool.

  “Oh good,” she said with a warm smile. “You’re early. You want to hop in and we’ll work on this breathing stuff together?”

  I stood there for a long minute, struggling with my desire to give up. Did I want to change this? Was I capable of fixing a weakness I’ve lived with for so long? Part of me had already given up, and was busily reminding myself that I was hopeless. But was that the same part of me that had been so terrified of having Dolan, only to be proved completely wrong? The part of me that had refused to see the possibility that having a child on my own could be the single most empowering act I could undertake?

  If I’d listened to that naysayer, I wouldn’t have the best thing in my life. I kicked off my shoes, pulled my sweatshirt over my head, and got in the pool.

  By the end of the fellowship, I could dive.

  IN THE MOVIES, change is often illustrated with a montage, a passage into a new life, love, or state of mind covered in the course of a couple of minutes or the length of a song. In the space of time it takes Van Morrison to sing “Brown-Eyed Girl” in the 1991 thriller about an abusive husband, Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts goes from being a woman paralyzed by years of being terrorized to a woman who is ready to get romantically involved again. The movie is silly but embarrassingly seductive, because Roberts at her most vulnerable is so irresistible. She tries on various stage costumes, hats, and wigs (her new love interest is a theater teacher and they are backstage) and starts flashing that trademark sunshine grin. The metaphor is obvious; she’s shedding her own emotional disguise while trying on actual disguises. Critics, including me, are often annoyed by this montage technique in contemporary movies, but the audience tends to accept it at face value. It’s lulling. The montage music is usually catchy, and in this impatient day and age, who really wants to watch the painstaking pace of actual progress in any real person’s life?

  My story of learning to swim, for instance, did not transform me overnight into a better person, willing to accept all challenges and embrace change. But I had to admit, if anyone could actually see a movie of my life—the kind that we unspool in our own heads—this made a logical montage. Replacing a weakness I’d lived with for decades in secret shame gave me the freedom to think about other alterations I could make in myself, including some I hadn’t even considered yet. Through learning to put my head in the water, I realized I could open the locks on many prisons I’d devised, often unwittingly, for myself. Yet again, the key had been Dolan.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lessons in the Impermanence of Things

  MATT AND I STOOD in the parking lot behind the Menlo Park apartment, looking at the navy blue Mercedes next to my Jetta, dwarfing it. My gaze was admiring, Matt’s skeptical.

  “What year is it again?” Matt asked.

  “It’s an ’82,” I said. “But supposedly these things go forever. Did you see the sheepskin seat covers?”

  “Yeah,” he said, without enthusiasm. “How many miles?”

  “It’s in kilometers,” I said. “But pretty close to 400,000.”

  “That’s a lot,” Matt said.

  I ignored him. “Here are your keys,” I said.

  I’d long been adamant that I wasn’t going to break down and buy a car for Matt for fear that I would “enable” those slacker tendencies of his. But whenever I had broached the topic of his getting one, he’d shut it down. “I don’t have any money. How would I even pay the insurance?” I’d come to the conclusion that waiting for him to get his act together was pointless. The fellowship was over, and Dolan and I were about to move back to Alameda. I was going to be teaching at Berkeley that fall. Between that class, working full-time at the paper, and the day care drop-off and pickup, I was sure I’d go mad trying to negotiate our lives with just one car.

  The new me, the one who knew how to swim with her face in the water, had decided to take action to fix a problem. Why cling to my earlier pronouncement? If, by using some of the money my father had left me, I could simplify the complex dance of coordinating a family of three with two households and three different daily destinations, wasn’t it worth it? I’d told Matt to ask his mother for half the money. I’d put up the rest, and I was adding him to my car insurance, which, given the age of the car, wouldn’t cost too much.

  The Mercedes had belonged to friends from the fellowship who were headed back to Germany, so for me it had sentimental value. Matt had no such connection. His ideal car would be one of those hulking pickup trucks that have two rows of seats and are named after some forgotten Native American tribe or a type of desert wind. But he’d have to buy that for himself someday.

  “Isn’t it nice?” I said. “Look at the sunroof.”

  “It’s okay,” Matt said. For a second, I felt like the mother who just bought her son sneakers that aren’t cool enough. The quick heat of resentment passed through me. Ingrate, I thought. And then I reminded myself what the car would mean to me: independence.

  THE MERCEDES WAS indeed a welcome addition to our lives. Matt no longer slept over on the nights I had to go to screenings; as soon as I’d get home, he’d get in the car and drive away. This made us both happy. I hadn’t thought so much about the psychic toll it had taken on him, to always feel stuck at my place. We immediately started getting along better. When he announced that he was giving notice on his San Francisco apartment to look for a place in the East Bay, closer to us, I felt as though we were making real progress. I wanted us to have separate lives that worked together rather than whatever strange hybrid it was we’d concocted since Dolan’s birth.

  But his month’s notice quickly passed and still Matt hadn’t found a new place. I wanted him to have enough time to find something he really liked, where he’d have roommates who might become friends instead of just strangers sharing a shower and toilet. So I told him he could move in with us for a few weeks while he kept on searching. I bought a trundle that slid under Dolan’s big-boy bed—telling myself, at least it’s not the dreaded bunk bed—and cleared out a closet for Matt. At the end of August, I heard the steady throbbing of the Mercedes’s diesel engine and looked out the front window to see him pulling up at the curb, the car stuffed with all his possessions in the world. His collection of lacrosse sticks lay across the pile of clothes in the backseat.

  Dolan clambered into the armchair in front of the window and propped himself up on his elbows. “It’s Daddy,” he shouted. I got on my knees behind him and kissed his ear. “That’s right,” I said. “But he’s just going to stay for a few weeks. It’s a visit.”

  This wasn’
t the first time I had extended an offer to Matt to stay with us while he saved money for a security deposit and looked for a new place. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that I was living in Kir and Sam’s trailer, and I hadn’t forgotten how hard it was to make a transition. But until now, Matt had always resisted. When he said he thought it would be hard for Dolan to have him there full-time, even short-term, and then gone, I knew he spoke from experience. We were being careful to let Dolan know this was temporary.

  Dolan got down from the chair and went to the front door, which he’d recently figured out how to open. “Daddy.” He beamed as Matt walked up the front steps with an armful of clothing. Matt’s face instantly came alive with love.

  Most of my friends were dubious about this arrangement—“He’s never going to want to leave,” Karen said—and part of me feared they were right. But on a lot of levels, I was looking forward to having him there. For those weeks, or that month, I wouldn’t feel like a single mother calling to ask for help. I’d have a real co-parent. Also, my Florence Nightingale complex was working overtime. His colitis had responded to the steroids earlier that year, but now I worried that it was coming back. If I could feed him really healthy foods for a few weeks, maybe that would help. On the nights when he didn’t eat at my place, Matt had a tendency to get himself a burrito or a vat of creamy tortellini at the corner pizzeria. He’d complain about the ensuing digestive discomfort to me, but be back there the next week doing the same thing. I was plotting all the healthy chicken and fish dishes I’d make for him in the course of September.

  My fantasy life was also rich enough to imagine us settling in together for some What Color Is Your Parachute–style counseling sessions during which I’d encourage him to start thinking in broader terms about his career. The file clerk job had not led to more opportunities at the bond trader. Matt would tell me about other people who had been promoted, and I’d think, If you were more assertive, that could be you. Every time I asked him how work was, his answer was always the same: “Boring.” Occasionally he’d say: “So boring.”