Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  How did you get rid of it?

  “Why are you crying, hon?” April was saying now. “Don’t cry. Come on, John. That makes me feel like shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my face. “I’m sorry. You’re gorgeous. You’re good. I like you. It’s just—It’s been a long time since I felt so”—I searched for the word—“acceptable.”

  “All right. Sure. That’s all right.”

  “You make me feel acceptable. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not really. I just make love because I like to do it.”

  “Well, that’s good. Good for you. I’m just a lot sadder than I appear. Ergo the random outbursts—” Here I leaned over her naked body for a deep drink of vodka from the bedside table.

  “Come here,” April said, pulling me to her by the neck, and I lay across her like that, crying and apologizing, and topping off our drink and listening to her talk until everything smoothed out and made a sort of sense, and that was me falling asleep. My dreams were only mildly disturbed as the body beside me stirred and resettled and the night labored on and I pretty much forgot I had a daughter and more importantly I believed she had forgotten about me.

  I didn’t wake up until the morning, when dim light fell across my face.

  Disoriented, I looked up. There was my daughter in the doorway, staring at me, her hair scorched white.

  SILENCE THEORY

  It occurs to me that I haven’t really mentioned my research here in the body of my text. I don’t want to burden the prospective listener with subjects too esoteric, but on the other hand, it seems that my not mentioning my research belies some form of embarrassment? And given that I woke up today regretting yesterday’s confessions (see here, re: Delaware Bay) and am now practically impaired with bitterness that a) I felt such tender things about you, Laura, in the first place and b) I then immortalized them by writing them down, I think now would be a good time to change the subject. Let’s not forget that my audience here is diverse. I’ve got a legal obligation to humanize myself. For my own defense. Other people might want to know, how did I contribute to society? What did I care about?

  I care about pauses. Actually, I collect pauses. Back in the year 1990, fresh out of Mune, after studying many of the most significant moments in human history, I thought it might be cool to collect all those moments—literary, cultural, political—when something was not said or not done. Hesitations, standstills, lulls, ellipses. All kinds of inactivity. I called it “Pausology: An Experimental Encyclopedia.” The work stemmed from my longtime interest in the concept of “eventlessness” (which I would define as moments in history when nothing was happening, producing a significant insignificance).

  At first I thought I was doing something groundbreaking. I was writing antihistory. History’s negative. Then I realized the obvious, that the material I was trying to collect was totally undocumented. One summer I hired a research assistant through my old prof at Mune, and we spent most of the summer just trying to figure out how to begin. After Meadow was born, I had to adjust my ambitions and reckon with the fact that there was no way that my encyclopedia would ever be “complete.” And after a while, looking over the bits and pieces of promising chapterlets and indexes, I thought, well it could make for an interesting coffee table book. I don’t know. People kept asking me, “How’s the book? Making progress on that book?” The truth is, I had told too many people about it to stop.11

  For all of his brilliant writing, playwright and unofficial pausologist Harold Pinter loved moments in which the characters did not speak, leaving us now with plays chock-full of excruciating or “pregnant” pauses. Although Pinter later came to repudiate his famous pauses, he happily wrote 140 of them into Betrayal and 224 into The Homecoming, which, if faithfully acted, led to some satirically long, theater-clearing performances that will fuel bad undergraduate repertoires for generations to come. I’d like to draw a connection here between dramatic pauses and marital pauses. Both dramatic and marital pauses vary in duration; the shortest, or most minor, are easily ignorable (“…”) but do signal some form of inner struggle; other beats are longer and more loaded with effortful suppression or confusion (pause), but the longest pauses (silence) are the ones no one should have to bear, and speaking personally I would have rather been flayed alive than to stand there with my wife having nothing to say, as in nothing left to say.

  Therefore, anyone interested in Pinterian pauses could save the cost of the ticket and spend an evening witnessing someone’s disintegrating marriage. Here’s an excerpt from mine:

  Ham Sandwich: A Marriage for Laura

  WOMAN

  Looking up from her schoolwork

  Oh. I didn’t know you were here.

  MAN

  Yes. I’m… here.

  WOMAN

  Well… you might as well sit.

  MAN

  Where?

  WOMAN

  Anywhere.

  MAN

  Next to you?

  Silence

  WOMAN

  Is she asleep?

  MAN

  Who?

  WOMAN

  Our little girl.

  MAN

  Oh, yes. She was very tired. But happy.

  WOMAN

  Happy… Happy…

  Silence

  MAN

  And you?

  WOMAN

  Startled

  Me?

  MAN

  Are you…?

  WOMAN

  I don’t know.

  Pause

  I don’t know.

  MAN

  Might we…

  WOMAN

  Oh. I don’t know anymore.

  MAN

  Do you…

  WOMAN

  No.

  Pause

  Not anymore. I…

  Silence

  Pause

  MAN

  Well. Would you like a ham sandwich? I’m going into the kitchen. I could…

  WOMAN

  Yes. All right. Thank you. A ham sandwich would be nice.

  MAN

  All right.

  He stands

  WOMAN

  Wait.

  MAN

  What is it?

  WOMAN

  I don’t really want a ham sandwich. I’m not hungry.

  MAN

  Well. Would you like another kind of sandwich? Egg salad? Roast beef? What about an ice cream sandwich?

  WOMAN

  Like I said. I’m not hungry.

  MAN

  What about a pretzel? A fruitcake? Lamb with mint jelly? WHY IS EVERYTHING I OFFER YOU INSUFFICIENT?

  Silence

  END OF PLAY

  But that’s not very funny.12

  Well, Harold Pinter wasn’t a very funny playwright either.

  I’ve always been fascinated by—and uncomfortable with—pauses. My research forced me to see that short pockets of silence were everywhere and that even sound needs silence in order to be sound. There are tiny silences all over this page. Between paragraphs. Between these very words. Still, they can be lonesome. So for all my project’s shortcomings, I’d say the worst is that I haven’t shaken the lonesome feeling that pauses give me. Sometimes I still wish there weren’t any silences at all. And so it is with some reluctance that I give you this one.

  MEN AND WOMEN

  When dressing in your underclothes, you used to loop both straps of your bra over your shoulders and then bend over, catching your breasts, as it were. Then you would reach around and hook the clasp, adjust the fit of the cups, and then you would stand, perfected. I often watched this ritual from the bed. I would wait for it. I liked the way it evoked a bow, the way that when you stood, you seemed to invite applause. I appreciate the tease of undressing, but there is nothing so transfixing as a woman dressing, article by article, fitting her toe through the ruffled hole of the panty, or drawing closed a zipper, pinky erect, saying, with her whole form, Maybe later. Of course I n
ever really felt worthy of all that. It always seemed to me that as a man I was so much uglier in comparison. Take my male toilet. I would stand there in the bathroom with white bits of deodorant caught in my underarm hair, penetrating my own nostril with the whirring pole of an electric nose-hair trimmer. You left a scent of camellia in your wake. I left tiny whiskers in mine. My footfalls were heavy. Yours were soundless. You could handle glass. I looked like an idiot holding a champagne flute, a real gorilla. I’m grateful, really, and also sad, that you were so beautiful.

  FÜNFTER TAG OR DAY FIVE

  The beautiful weather could not last forever. While April and I slept, clouds slid into the sky above Lake Champlain, and with them, the mood had darkened. Back in Cabin Two, Meadow rattled the bottles in the half fridge, looking for something not there. She was tired of cheese sandwiches. Why hadn’t I bought any cereal? she wanted to know. Normal people eat cereal for breakfast. And fruit. Fresh fruit. Three to five servings a day. Everybody knows that. I watched her move about the cabin, still trying to get used to the color of her hair. Unfortunately, it wasn’t goldenish like Rapunzel’s. It was a parched color, like dried corn stalks. She must have done it wrong. I followed her around, holding the dry rope of it in my hands. Glancing in the bathroom, the smeared towels and sink basin made me feel sick.

  After she’d walked in on me and April, I’d dressed quickly, and run after her. And now she would barely look at me, and I could understand why. I was in need of a shower. And a Laundromat. No. I was in need of a bonfire. I needed to burn my clothes and start over. I smelled of cigars and April and rain and vokka and my face was bloated as it is sometimes in the mornings after drinking. Meadow sat at the tiny cocktail table that functioned as the cabin’s dining area, resting her big white head against the heel of her palm as she bit off the corner of the last piece of Roman Meal, staring down at the plastic tablecloth. Jesus, I thought, what would her mother think? I was almost more afraid of that than of legal ramifications.

  And our getaway car! I looked out the window to where the thing sat in the mist. What sort of rube steals a car with a white racing stripe? The car was useless. We had driven it all over North Hero, and earlier, to Swanton. It was a moving trap, a fucking advertisement. The only place in which I knew we were invisible was right where we were, but we couldn’t stay here. I could see that Meadow had lost the fragile enthusiasm she’d first had for our trip. Hell, she’d been doing me a favor the whole time. I could see that.

  But what did I want? Just a little more time. But for what? What spectacular thing was I going to do with it? I didn’t want to be exposed—how much I was about to lose—but I knew I was going to lose it, now or later. I grabbed a nearby chair back, squeezing until it hurt. There was something more to do. I wasn’t done.

  “Meadow,” I said. “Look at me, please.”

  Not changing her position, she looked at me.

  “Why are you sad? Don’t you like your hair?”

  Her hand flew to her head and brought a swath of it to her face. “Actually. I like it lots.”

  “Well, maybe we should change it back. I hate to say it, but I kind of miss your real hair—”

  “No. No, thank you.” She shook her head firmly. Her eyes moistened, but she refused tears. She seemed shy of me, as if she’d realized that her association with me was far less beneficial to her than she’d previously thought.

  “So. What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She shrugged. “I just don’t understand why we have to be friends with April.”

  “Oh,” I said, relieved. “Well, we don’t have to be friends with April. April and I are ships in the night. April and I are—two articles of clothing that got accidentally tangled up in the dryer. April and I just had some comfort to give each other. I had some comfort to give her, and she had some comfort to give me. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No. Why go to all the trouble? Why not just keep it and comfort yourself?”

  “I do comfort myself,” I said, my voice thick with my own double meaning. “I comfort myself all too often. It’s not the same. Everyone wants to be comforted by someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Frustrated, I grabbed the air with both hands. “Why? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you like to be held and kissed? Don’t you like to be babied sometimes by me or your mom, or by Mom-Mom or Pop-Pop or Stinky Blanket?”

  I saw her memory snag on the words, and her eyes filled up instantaneously with tears.

  “Oh, no,” I said, grabbing her hands. “Oh boy. I didn’t mean to—”

  “I miss my mommy,” she said, tears falling onto the table-top. “I miss Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop. I don’t like this vacation anymore. I don’t care about Mount Washington. I don’t want to go there anymore. I don’t want to go there with you. You’re not good.” She looked at me with an expression of disapproval I’d never seen on her face before. “You’re not good! You told me you were going to be right back! That I wouldn’t be alone!”

  “Oh, Meadow. Please—”

  “And you were nowhere! You were away.”

  She snapped her hands back from mine and swiped at her eyes. She stood up and walked out. The slam of the cabin door resounded through the cove.

  I grabbed my wallet and keys and followed. She was already indistinct in the morning haze, marching toward the road. She was carrying, with some difficulty, the bucket with the frog in it.

  “Hey,” I said, catching up to her. “Let me help you. Tell me the plan. Talk to me. What are we doing?”

  She kept walking, her eyes red but dry. I peered into the bucket. The frog was floating spread-eagled in two inches of water. Meadow had covered the top of the pail with salvaged chicken wire to prevent his escape, but it looked to me like he was pretty much dead. I took hold of the handle, careful not to touch her hand. We entered the field we’d crossed with her on my shoulders days before. This time, we skirted the edge, passing the frugally darkened windows of our hostess’s farmhouse. We were soon on the main dirt road, walking uphill. Cows observed us from behind electrified wire. I was surprised at how fast Meadow could walk without stopping, and how far. After some outbuildings on the crest of the hill, the road began to dip again, and we could see, in a field below us, a small pond.

  “Good,” said Meadow, as if she’d known it would be there. “That’s where we’ll put him. Then he can have the place to himself and he can start his own family.”

  “Or maybe he’ll become a poet and write a book called Frogs Come and Gone.”

  “No,” she said, eyes narrowing. “He hates poetry. All frogs do. Amphibians are allergic to poetry.” She took a couple of steps forward and then looked up at me, hard. “You can come. But only if you don’t touch him with dry hands. That’ll kill him.”

  I fell to one knee. “Sweetheart,” I said. “If you want, when we get back to the cabin, we can pack up, and I’ll take you straight home. I’ll take you straight home to Mommy. I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be angry at me. Say the word.”

  She said nothing, but the expression in her eyes softened, and she finally wiped her brow with the arm of her oversized sweatshirt. She gave the bucket a yank.

  “Come on,” she said, and we continued to the pond, over which the sun was now wearing through cloud cover.

  THE TANGERINE AND THE FOX

  Listen. I don’t see myself as some kind of Socrates, but from my point of view, it doesn’t seem fair to hold a child back from her natural curiosities. Some kids—kids like Meadow—like to ask the hard questions whether or not you’ve brushed up for them. Take the example of the tangerine. She saw a forgotten tangerine that had pruned and hardened in the fruit bowl back in Pine Hills, and she wanted to know what would happen to it next. Would the tangerine keep shrinking and finally disappear? We observed it. We noticed that approximately seven days after we first observed the process of hardening, a process of softening began.

  “Decomposition,” I said. “The reverse of growing.
But first the dead thing has to dry out. Like with rigor mortis.”

  “Rigamordis?”

  “Yeah. When a body dies, the body first becomes stiff, like”—and here I did a vampy imitation of a dead body, which made her laugh—“and eventually the same thing happens to the body that happened to the tangerine.”

  “It gets stiff; then it gets mushy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything that dies eventually gets mushy.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Even we will?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Even we will get mushy someday. Everything dies that is alive. It’s important to accept that up front. You do less running.”

  Soon after, when we found the dead fox in the backyard, I tried to use the fox as an advanced example of the tangerine. We put it in an old milk crate and put it respectfully behind the lawn-mower shed. And we watched it, day to day, as the sun burned away its flesh and flies took it away in infinitesimal pieces and the wind blew away its form, until it was almost a carpet of copper fur, sinking back toward the earth. We spent hours watching the fox decompose. I know it sounds weird, but it didn’t feel weird at the time. In fact, I thought of the fox as something of a pedagogical success. Which is ironic, as vis-à-vis you, her mother, made tense by advanced stages of marital conflict, the fox was The Final Straw.

  “I need to talk to you,” you said one morning, your eyes hard.

  We were at the breakfast table. It was a Saturday, early summer. You were almost done with your first year of teaching, and while we should have been looking forward to the summertime together, the time seemed, to me, touched with a danger I couldn’t fully admit. Weekends had become a strain. You’d let me sleep in. Then when I awoke, you’d suit up for a run. This morning that I remember, Meadow must have filled you in on some of our recent experiments while I was still in bed. You gave me a significant stare across the table.