“So, Mom,” I said. “Do you want to do the Jumble?”
She thought this over. “Do the what? What do you mean?”
“The Jumble,” I said. “You know. The puzzle. In the newspaper.”
“The—?” Mom thought about it for a long while. She’d never heard of any Jumble.
“You know,” I said. “It’s a word game.”
“Oh, that.” She thought things over for a while, as if she were searching for just the right words. “Jenny,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper. “I’m beginning to think—” She paused again. “I think my Jumble days are through.”
My father and I set sail. First stop was Trinity College, up in Hartford. After that we went to Williams, Wesleyan, Middlebury. He let me do the driving. I shifted the VW Bug as Dad sat placidly in the passenger seat chain-smoking L&M Kings. The car, which he had bought new in 1963, had no seat belts. I would total it just a few months later in a spectacular wreck on the first day of my senior year. I’d nearly lose my right ear in the crash. But they’d put it back on all right.
It was the summer of 1975. Gerald Ford was president. Saigon had fallen to the Vietcong back in April, the same week this girl Dell had broken my heart. First rejection, then communism. I watched the last chopper take off from a roof in Saigon and thought: Figures.
At Trinity, the dean of admissions got up in the middle of our interview and went over to the window. “Hey!” he said. “I see a rat!”
I didn’t apply there.
At Wesleyan, I heard the Grateful Dead playing from a dormitory window. Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more. People were sitting on Foss Hill, reading books. Someone threw a Frisbee to a dog. On the sidewalk I saw a crushed-flat can of Maximus Super beer. I’d never seen an actual can of it, but a friend of mine had a poster with this beautiful girl on it, holding a can. I wanted to look like her, although I did not share this longing with my father.
I figured Wesleyan would be a pretty good place to go to school, if they had cans of stuff like that lying around.
THIRTY-SIX YEARS LATER, Zach and I set sail on the very same ocean. We drove all the way to Ohio to visit Kenyon and Oberlin. On the way home we stopped off at Gettysburg, took the college tour, and then crouched behind the wall on Little Round Top, imagining Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Twentieth Maine staring down the Alabamians. My gentle, pacifist son picked up a long stick, turned in my direction. “Affix bayonets!” said he.
Before that, he’d been behind the wheel of the Hyundai as we drove from Oberlin, Ohio, to Gambier. He didn’t have his license yet. As we hurtled along the highway, we listened to the radio. The Youngbloods came on: Some will come and some will go, but we will surely pass. We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading on the grass.
As my son weaved from one side of the road to another, I clutched the oh-my-God strap on the passenger’s-side ceiling, quietly reviewing the Lord’s Prayer. At one point we had to merge onto a six-lane highway as giant tractor-trailers barreled toward us, air horns blasting. “What am I going to do?” Zach cried as we accelerated toward our certain deaths. “Where am I going to go?”
“You can do this,” I said, hoping that saying this would make it so. “I know you can do this.”
We failed to die. That night we sat at the edge of the Kenyon campus at an inn named after the college. I drank a cocktail that was Kenyon purple. I had stayed at this same place with my father back in the summer of 1975. He’d tried out the bourbon.
Over dinner, Zach and I talked about some of the things he might study. He was getting more and more enthused about theater, although he said he would also major in bio because “you have to exist in the world.”
“You know what I want to do, Maddy?” said my son. “Next year, for my senior project? I want to direct a full-length play.”
“Which play?”
“I don’t know. What plays do you think would be good?”
It didn’t take me long to come up with a suggestion. “Our Town’s good.”
“Our Town?”
“By Thornton Wilder.”
It had been my class’s senior play, back in high school. I still remember looking out at all the adults in the audience, tears streaming down their faces. I couldn’t figure it out. What were they all so upset about?
EMILY: I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up.
I described it to him. It was the story of a small town, not unlike the one we lived in up in Maine. It was about the preciousness of life and how hard it is to be aware of the gifts we have been given.
“Plus,” I said to my son, “it will make all the adults cry their brains out.”
Zach looked thoughtful. It was the same look I’d seen when he’d crouched behind the wall at the end of the Union line. “Hm,” he said. “I have to admit that’s appealing.”
“It’d be an incredible amount of work, though,” I said. “You, directing a whole play.”
“You don’t think I can do it,” he said. From the Kenyon campus, a young couple approached. They had books and sunglasses and a Labrador retriever.
“Of course you can do it,” I said. “Have I ever doubted you?”
I sat there in the twilight with my purple Kenyon cocktail. My father and I had had a conversation like this, thirty-six years earlier, perhaps at this same table. I told him I wanted to be a writer. Dad looked at me with concern. You don’t think I can do it.
“It’s not that,” Dad had said. “It’s just—I don’t want you to go hungry.”
The young people on the quad threw a Frisbee, and their dog caught it in his mouth. I sipped the Kenyon cocktail. Zach was watching the couple and their dog.
“I am going to direct that play,” said Zach. “You’ll see.”
Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
I THOUGHT A LOT about my father on that trip. It was hard not to wonder about the many ways Zach resembled my own seventeen-year-old self, not only with his long hair and glasses, but in his humor and imagination and ridiculous, buoyant hope. And if Zach was walking in my shoes, was I not walking in those of my father, vagina notwithstanding? Was I not, after all this time, still more of a father than a second mother to him? What was the difference?
If you’re a father, Edward Albee had said to me, it means you’ve had sex with a woman, your wife or someone else, and impregnated her.
I hadn’t known how to respond to this. I’d sat in Edward’s incredible loft, surrounded by primitive sculptures and modern paintings, flabbergasted. You think that’s what it means? I’d said. Seriously?
You never birthed those two, Edward replied. Isn’t that a different quality of parenthood?
It was a different quality of parenthood.
But there is a lot more to parenting than birthing, just as there is a lot more to a novel than its opening sentence. James Joyce, for whatever it’s worth, had once managed to write a novel that didn’t even have an opening sentence. riverrun past Eve and Adam’s from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Does it mean making, Edward had asked, or is it the being?
I think it’s the being.
There was a time once when motherhood and fatherhood were states as simple to define as woman and man. But as the meanings of male and female have shifted from something firm and unwavering into something more versatile and inconstant, so too have the terms mother and father become more permeable and open-ended. I understand the reluctance many people have to embrace this thought; a world in which male and female are not fixed and unmoving poles but points in a wide spectrum is a world t
hat feels unstable, unsafe, unreal. And yet to accept the wondrous scope of gender is to affirm the vast potential of life, in all its messy, unfathomable beauty. Surely, if we make room for the mutability of gender, we have to accept that motherhood and fatherhood themselves are no longer unalterable binaries either.
How many different kinds of fathers and mothers are there? My friend Richard Russo had loved his father even though he’d essentially been abandoned by him. You can either take what he’s offering—maybe he should be offering more—but you can either enjoy it and let the rest go, or you can be bitter and resentful.… For me, it was … just an easy choice. He was endlessly, endlessly entertaining. Augusten Burroughs, on the other hand, was still trying to come to terms with his father, a man whom he’d long thought of as a monster, although Augusten’s dad surely had never chosen monstrousness for its own sake. But what’s a father? What did you really take away from [your sons]? You took the ability for them to call you Dad, or Deedie to call you her husband.
Dr. Christine McGinn had told me that gender is a mystery and said, I think it always will be a mystery. She had been born male, but she’d changed genders, and using the sperm she’d saved, she and her wife had had twins. There she was: Christine McGinn, her babies in her arms, breast-feeding. And every one of us is in heaven.
Timothy Kreider was adopted and raised by a loving family. When he made contact with his biological mother and his half sisters at age forty, he felt the world move beneath him. I felt totally blindsided by this affection for them. I mean, I adore them horribly. I can’t help it.
Veronica Gerhardf, our former nanny, had become pregnant herself in her late twenties, then learned that her child would be stillborn. After the birth, she held her lost child in her arms and wept. She named her Penelope, after Odysseus’s wife. She spent all day making this quilt and then at night she spent her time unraveling it so that she’s never done. For us it meant the task that is not completed, the end that is never met. It meant the promise unfulfilled.
Only 7 percent of American households, according to the Population Reference Bureau, now consist of married couples with children in which only the father works. As it turns out, the biggest outlier in our culture is not same-sex couples, or transgender people, or adoptive parents, or single fathers, but the so-called traditional American family itself.
What does it even mean, at this hour, to call anybody traditional? Surely it is not the ways in which we all conform that define us, but the manner in which we each seek our own perilous truth.
DJ Savarese, considered retarded at birth, wound up going to Oberlin. You are the dad I awesomely try to be loved by. Please don’t hear my years of hurt. Until you yearned to be my dad, playing was treated as too hard. Until you loved me, I loved only myself. You taught me how to play. You taught me how to love. I love you.
Every single family in the world is a nontraditional family.
I used to worry about my sons, about the ways in which our family’s difference would be a hardship for them. One day, when he was about eight, I’d dropped Zach off at a bowling alley for a friend’s birthday. I looked at the other kids there, putting on their rent-a-shoes, trying out different bowling balls. There were white kids and African-American kids. One boy was on Ritalin because of his attention deficit disorder. One girl’s mother was in the hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. One kid was being raised by two dads. Another one had six fingers on one hand, four on the other.
As my son entered the bowling alley, all the kids cheered. They loved him. “Hi, Zach!” they shouted.
Then they looked at me. What could they say to a father who had become a woman? What possible words were there for these children to describe the world we lived in now?
“Hi, Maddy!” they said.
ON THE WAY back from Gettysburg we pulled into my mother’s house. They had her in a hospital bed on the first floor now. She didn’t recognize Zach and me at first, but after a moment her face lit up and she spread her arms wide and gathered us all to her.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” said Mom. “Now you can take me home.”
“But, Mom,” I said. “You are home.”
I could see disappointment and betrayal play across her face. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “Not you too.”
Zach gave me a hard look. “I’ll carry our stuff upstairs.”
The aide pulled on my elbow. “Just play along,” she said.
“How are you feeling, Mom?”
“Well, I have a lot of pain in my back still. But the main thing is, I just want to get out of here. If I were back in my own house, I know I’d feel better.”
The aide gave me an urgent look. “Have you seen the doctor recently?”
“Well, your uncle Dave was here,” she said. “He made me a strawberry pie.” This made a little bit of sense, since my uncle Dave was known for making pies. On the other hand, he had died seven years ago, so if he’d come by to visit my mother he’d brought that pie from a long way off.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me,” said Mom. She looked around the room, which was filled with her favorite paintings, a green sofa, a big green chair.
“What have I done for you?” I asked Mom.
“Bringing all these things from my house. Setting everything up to look just like my room. Did you have this place built right on the side of the hospital? It must’ve been so much work.”
I looked at the aide, who was now sitting down on the sofa with the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Mom, we didn’t build a room on the side of the hospital and fill it with your things and make it look like your house. This really is your house. You’re at home, just like you wanted to be.”
My mother gave me the same look she used to give me back in high school. “I can always tell when you’re lying,” she said.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m not lying. This really is your house. You’re right here. I’m with you.”
She shook her head in disappointment. “Jenny, she said. “I was counting on you to be the one person who would tell me the truth.”
“But, Mom—”
The aide, who had clearly been through this conversation before, cleared her throat. “Mrs. Boylan,” she said, “the doctor is coming tomorrow. We’ll talk about all this with him then.”
“Tomorrow,” my mother said. “All right then. Jenny, you make sure you’re here when the doctor comes. And tell your father I need to speak with him.”
I felt my throat close up. “Okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”
I WOKE THAT NIGHT from a strange dream. I turned on the light and found myself in my high school bedroom. I had often dreamed as a child that I would wake from a mysterious slumber and find myself magically transformed to female. Back then, though, I’d always imagined myself waking up as a young woman, some sort of beautiful teenage thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that someday I would sit up in the middle of the night as a mother of two. I lay back on my pillow thinking how strange it was that most of the wishes I had ever had in this life had come true—although almost never in the manner that I had expected.
A phrase came to me from the dream world I had just left. “My mother is a fish,” I said out loud. Then I turned off the light and went back to sleep.
In the morning I remembered this whole incident and thought, My mother is a fish? What?
It didn’t take too long to recall the line from Faulkner. The little boy Vardaman thinks it. In As I Lay Dying.
I DESCENDED THE STAIRS to the kitchen, got a cup of coffee, waiting to see what my mother was up to. “Guten Morgen,” she said to me. I looked at the aide, whose name was Monica.
“Don’t look at me,” said Monica. “She was like this when I got here.”
“Meine Schwester,” she said, taking me by the arm. “Du bist so schön.”
My sister, you are so beautiful.
German had been my mother’s language until the age of seven, when she and her family had come to Ameri
ca through Ellis Island, fleeing the chaos of the Weimar Republic in East Prussia. It had been important to her, at one point, that I understand the difference between Germans and Prussians. The Prussians were scholars, she said. The Germans? Were not. Other times, she felt bad that Prussia was a country that they didn’t have anymore. “They carved us up between Russia and Poland,” she said sadly. “I come from a country that no longer exists.”
The country might not have existed anymore, but she seemed to have settled happily back into its language after eighty-seven years. Using what was left of my high school German, we had a nice little talk together, although in order to sustain it I had to pretend that I was my aunt Gertrude.*
My mother looked tired and sad. “Es tut mir Leid,” she said. “Aber müssen wir nach New York zuruck gegangen. Wir müssen ihn finden.” I’m sorry, but we have to go back to New York. We have to find him.
I knew where she was headed with this, and it was not a particularly good place for her to be traveling. After my mother’s family had landed in America, my grandfather had abandoned his family. He would be gone for years at a time, only to turn up unexpectedly, drunk as a gas station. I used to have to pull him out of the pigpen, my mother used to explain. I was afraid the pigs would eat him. One time he showed up with part of his third finger missing.
Then he disappeared for good. Years passed. The suspicion was he’d finally fallen into a pigpen someplace where there was no one to pull him out.
The phone rang at my aunt Gertrude’s house in 1965. The New York City morgue was on the line. “We’ve got your father,” they said.
My mother and her sister took the train to Manhattan, got off at Penn Station, walked over to the medical examiner’s office on Thirty-third and First. On the wall was an inscription in Latin: TACEANT COLLOQUIA EFFUGIAT RISUS HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.
Let conversations cease. Let smiles fade away. For here is the place where death is glad to help the living.
The two sisters were brought into a room where a body lay upon a table. A man in a white coat pulled back the sheet. They didn’t recognize him at first. Then they saw that the body was missing a finger.
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