Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town

by Chris Bohjalian

  My grief--the grief of most Americans--is for the loss of that feeling of invulnerability we've savored since the Cold War ended. In that regard it's very real. Likewise, our sorrow for what the victims endured before they died and for their families who are left mourning is with us every single day.

  Nevertheless, when we talk this week of the anniversary, let us not simply recall where we were a year ago. Let us not merely sit before the mind-numbing parade of images--the towers, the Pentagon, the living, the dead, the missing who will never be found--that are monopolizing our TV screens and being used to sell a small library of new books.

  Let us honor the victims instead by discussing as well energy policies that do not demand foreign oil, and behavior that is less dependent upon fossil fuel. Let us talk of peace in the Middle East. Let us celebrate our incomprehensible bounties while imagining how we can share that largesse with the rest of the world. And, yes, let us envision ways to spread democracy--ways that do not involve the carnage that comes with all war.

  In short, let us talk this week not only of where we were, but also of where we can be.

  Chapter 9.

  CANDY HEARTS WOULD HAVE BEWILDERED ARMENIAN GRANDPARENTS

  MY ARMENIAN GRANDPARENTS did not invest much energy in Valentine's Day. They took it about as seriously as they took Arbor Day.

  Nevertheless, I view their marriage as one of the great love stories to which I am attached by blood. I know it wasn't perfect: Leo and Higoohi Bohjalian had a relationship as complex as any, and their happiness together was leavened by their share of disappointment, discontent, and deeply personal dissatisfactions. But it was also a liaison that traveled successfully from Istanbul to Paris to a suburb of New York City, and a marriage that lasted half a century.

  Moreover, it was a marriage that succeeded despite the fact it had been arranged by their families before they met, a relationship brokered by a seemingly endless array of aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, while my grandfather was living in the United States and my grandmother was living in Turkey.

  My grandfather had immigrated to America at the beginning of the twentieth century, after spending his adolescence as--consider this an exercise in creative resume writing--an "importer-exporter": He was a hashish courier between Egypt and Europe. In Manhattan he went from washing windows to repairing watches for an upscale Wall Street firm that specialized in clock restoration. No one in my family is quite sure how this career change was managed.

  He was either very good with those watches or he'd saved a lot of money from his days as a courier, because he built a three-story brick house twenty minutes from Manhattan that I know from old photographs was every bit as large in reality as it is in memory.

  And then he needed a wife, which was where my grandmother came in. My grandmother's father had been killed in the murky, violent miasma that swallowed a million Armenians in 1915, but she and her mother were spared. And her mother--my great-grandmother--was willing to broker her lovely daughter to Leo since this successful man planned to bring her to that fantasyland of freedom and opportunity and (more important) safety.

  Everyone convened in Paris in 1927 for a summit, and the deal was sealed--and, soon after that, consummated. It was touch and go whether my married grandparents would get my grandmother through Ellis Island in early 1928 in time for my father to be born on American soil.

  When I was a child, I occasionally stayed with my grandparents when my parents were away, and so I glimpsed how the two of them lived.

  The day would begin with my grandmother preparing for my grandfather his usual breakfast: a fried lamb chop and American cereal. My grandfather loved American cereal, and he used to mix Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes in a dish the size of a punch bowl. Then he went to his office in Manhattan, and I would explore the house in which my father was raised. Occasionally, my grandmother would try (and fail) to interest me in dense books of Armenian hieroglyphics.

  In the evening when my grandfather returned, he would play the oud--a sort of Middle Eastern lute--and then my grandparents would talk . . . forever. Sometimes they spoke English, but often it was Turkish or Armenian. They would talk for what seemed an eternity before dinner, they would talk during dinner, and they would still be talking when I went to bed. Sometimes they would adjourn to the basement where my grandparents had an ornate pool table, and there my grandmother would quickly dispatch my grandfather. Though she never learned to drive, she could have made a very good living hustling pool.

  When my grandfather wasn't at work, my grandparents were inseparable, their own small world of two. They needed no one, and my sense is they thought the notion of a day to celebrate romance with chocolate candy and paper hearts was somewhere between harebrained and inane.

  Even so, their marriage ended only when my grandfather, then a very old man, passed away one night in his sleep, after a day spent playing his beloved oud for his beloved wife.

  Chapter 10.

  ON MOTHER'S DAY, GRANDMOTHER BRIEFLY RETURNED

  THE WORDS--two syllables, really--should have been spoken by a toddler: "Who dat?"

  My grandmother was just shy of eighty at the time, and as she asked her husband, my grandfather, this question, she was pointing at me with a hand so gnarled by arthritis that she was actually aiming her knuckles at me, rather than the tip of her finger.

  "That's Christopher," my grandfather said.

  "Not Warren?" she asked, turning away from me for the first time since my mother and I had arrived in their front hall in Florida.

  "No," he answered calmly, "it's not Warren."

  Warren was her son--my uncle. I was twenty-two then, and so my Uncle Warren had to have been in his mid-fifties. He was tall and blond and had jumped from an airplane into France as a member of the 101st Airborne in the Second World War. He had a movie star's chiseled jaw. A person would have had to work hard to confuse us.

  "Who's Christopher?" she continued, and my grandfather patiently explained to her that she had a daughter named Annalee and I was one of Annalee's boys. Annalee, at that moment, was surveying the kitchen, discovering that my grandfather had installed child-guard locks on the cabinets because he was fearful that his wife would confuse Drano with Cool Whip or Windex with tea.

  This was the last time I would see my grandmother, a Mother's Day weekend visit my own mother and I made together to Florida not quite two decades ago.

  My grandmother's descent into Alzheimer's had not been as swift as we had feared, but it had been steady. It had taken close to five years for a suddenly cantankerous obsession with temperature (always it was either too hot or too cold) and a benign forgetfulness to evolve into full-blown dementia. Still, my grandfather was determined to keep her at home, a testimony both to the impressive depths of his love for her and his faith that he could provide her better care than a stranger. One of my mother's reasons for our visit was to convince my grandfather that in fact he could not: My grandmother needed the ministrations of a nursing home.

  Nevertheless, my mother was also hopeful that her own mother would be sufficiently lucid for one last Mother's Day brunch at a restaurant on the ocean, or to enjoy one last walk along the beaches of Longboat Key in search of shells. These were pretty unrealistic desires. My grandmother was no longer even tying her own shoes or cutting her own meat. Consequently, I was expecting a fairly somber long weekend. And, in truth, most of those three days were either poignant reminders of my grandparents' love--such as when my grandfather gently would wash my grandmother's hair in the sink because she could no longer do it herself--or unpleasantly grim indications of their situation. Twice that weekend I was awakened by my grandmother shouting that there was a burglar in their house (me), while during the day she continued to presume I was Warren.

  Still, my grandmother had one last surprise.

  She was an organist, and for years had played show tunes and Christmas carols at the Macy's department store in White Plains, New York. Between her arthritis and her Alzheime
r's, however, she rarely touched her own organ at that point in her life. On Mother's Day morning, the day my mother and I were going to return to New York, she surprised us both by playing--badly, but recognizably--the wondrously saccharine, mawkishly sentimental ballad "Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms."

  It was among my mother's favorite songs, even butchered as it was by my grandmother. She told her mother how much she loved it.

  "I remember," my grandmother said, and then she sighed.

  She would die soon after that. I am not sure she ever had the slightest idea who I was that weekend. But for one moment on Mother's Day, she recognized her own daughter, and even on their final day together she remembered what made that woman, once a girl, smile.

  Chapter 11.

  THE LADIES' ROOM JUST INSIDE TOMORROWLAND: A SHORT STORY

  This is the only short story in this book, the only piece of writing that is fiction by design--rather than fiction because my memory has become a spaghetti colander. I have included it because although it is wholly invented, it does express the panic I certainly experienced (and the anxiety that I believe any sentient parent must feel) the first time my young daughter ventured alone into a bathroom in a public place.

  HE LEANED AGAINST the cement wall, a father who was no longer young with a daughter who was, and listened briefly to the sounds of the toilets flushing.

  He checked his watch, noting the speed with which the second hand was traveling around the small clock's face--the black line was moving in tiny fits and starts, and he wondered if it had always moved like that and he had simply never noticed, or whether the battery was about to go--and memorized the exact time.

  It was 5:17. Five-seventeen in the afternoon.

  His daughter had entered alone into the ladies' room at exactly 5:17--5:17 and seven seconds, if he was going to be precise (and he was)--in the afternoon, the sky just starting to darken as the sun fell somewhere far to the west of Frontierland.

  It was January and the days were short, and he realized that if they stayed for the fireworks at 7:00 P.M. (and, it was inevitable, they would), he would have to hold on tight to his daughter's hand as they tumbled into the roiling stream of people leaving the park at one time for their cars. He'd never witnessed the exodus firsthand, but he'd heard, he'd heard: Virtually the entire human contents of Disney World converging on Main Street at once--a horde tens of thousands strong being funneled together toward the turnstiles and the trams and that ridiculous, retro metro monorail.

  It was like a fight for the lifeboats, he'd been told, in which a man's most noble instincts would be subsumed completely by the urge to flee . . . and live.

  Yes, he decided, he would insist that his daughter hold his hand. Or allow herself to be carried. Or accept the fact that he was going to tie her to his back like a thirty-eight-pound, three-and-a-half-foot-tall papoose. But he would not lose her.

  She had just turned six, and--though she still believed that Snow White was precisely who she said she was, and Cinderella really did live in that phantasmagorically garish castle that served as the Magic Kingdom's centerpiece--these days she was feigning the walk, the distance, and the incredulity that marked an adolescent.

  She was an only child, the youngest girl in her first-grade class, as well as the smallest. And though there were other girls and boys who lived with only a mother or a father, she was the only one who lived with a single parent because half the equation had died.

  The two of them had been in the park since 10:15 A.M., and this was the first time that the girl had expressed any interest in going to the bathroom. After a lengthy discussion before leaving Boston the night before, they had agreed that she would be allowed to enter the ladies' room alone when she had to pee, and he would wait outside. He had wanted her to use the men's rooms so he could keep her--or, at least, her ankles beneath a stall door--in plain sight, but she had fought hard against this indignity.

  And, in truth, he wasn't sure that he wanted her in the men's room with him anyway. How in the world do you explain a urinal to a six-year-old girl? Why in hell would you want to?

  But this was their first trip alone, just the two of them, the first time, in fact, that they had ventured together beyond Massachusetts--beyond their street in Newton, practically--since the girl's mother had died in October. They were still figuring things out, and bathrooms were a part of the puzzle.

  "And what'll I do when you have to go to the bathroom?" she had asked, once they had agreed that she would be allowed to venture alone into ladies' rooms. "I don't want to wait around inside the men's room!"

  He didn't want that, either. The truth was they had never been one of those peace-love-and-tie-dye families in which parents and children bathed together or swam naked together or--God forbid--went to the bathroom with anything like visual or aural proximity. She hadn't seen him naked since she was seven or eight months old and he would take her into the bath with him when he'd come home from work, and bounce her around in the shallow water in the tub. He hadn't seen her naked since she'd been in preschool--and, he imagined, she would be appalled if she understood that as recently as two years ago she hadn't cared if he walked into the bathroom to hand her a towel before she started the long climb over the porcelain side of the tub.

  "I won't go to the bathroom until we return to our motel, I promise," he'd said, convinced that this was the only workable solution. After all, what was he going to do, hand her off to some stranger while he disappeared inside the men's room? Leave her standing alone in the open air in the midst of Disney World's crowds and chaos and rides? Not a prayer. He'd sooner cause permanent kidney damage than lose his little girl because he'd had a second cup of coffee at breakfast.

  He glanced at his watch. Five-eighteen.

  She'd been alone in the ladies' room for just under a minute. Perhaps half a dozen women--old and young, some with gray hair, one with a stud in her nose and lines of steel balls along the cartilage of both ears--had come and gone through the arching entrance in the time that he'd stood there.

  He wished he'd been able to find a handicapped bathroom like the one they'd discovered at the airport. It was as big as a studio apartment, but housed a single stall, which meant he could be there with his daughter while giving her the privacy she demanded.

  He wondered suddenly if he looked like a pervert. Here he was, a slightly plump forty-one-year-old in khaki shorts, standing outside one of the ladies' rooms in Tomorrowland. A balding guy whose thinning straw-colored hair was largely hidden by an aging Red Sox cap. He realized he was wearing sunglasses and quickly removed them. He didn't need them at this time of day, unless he had something to hide.

  Which, of course, he did not.

  He tried to ignore the sensation--sensation? who was he kidding, this was pressure--in his bladder and groin that he had begun to feel perhaps an hour earlier, when they had ridden Splash Mountain. All that water. The rivulets that ran down the cavernous walls as their little boat bounced along the inside of the man-made Ozark Mountain. The fact that the ride had made his seat--and then, therefore, his pants--wet. But he could last another two hours. Or, if there was a logjam at the exit, three.

  Still, the sounds of the toilets and the faucets inside the ladies' room, a small orchestra of rushing water barely fifteen yards away, didn't help. But there was nothing to be done. He wished a mother with a little girl--one child, just one, so it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience--would approach the bathroom so he could ask her if his daughter was OK. Someone like his own wife, perhaps. But there didn't seem to be a doppelganger present right then.

  A thought crossed his mind, and the vague unease he'd been feeling about allowing his daughter to leave his sight abruptly became more pronounced: Somewhere in this world were bathrooms with two entrances. It was inevitable. And, perhaps, he had inadvertently stumbled upon one. He had escorted his little girl, that single person on the planet he cherished above all others, to a bathroom that was a free ticket to separa
tion or abduction or (it was possible) something far worse.

  He felt his skin growing clammy, because he understood that one of two things was about to happen: Either his daughter was going to emerge from that second entrance, wherever it was, and become lost forever in the massive amusement park as she searched for her father. Or a child molester or serial killer was waiting just outside that other entrance for a child exactly like his, because child molesters had known all along what he had just discovered: this rare, dual-entranced bathroom. It was a playground for perverts. A rec room for psychos.

  Either way, unless he went into the ladies' room that very second and rescued his daughter, she would be gone from him forever. Unless he took a deep breath that moment and ventured inside the concrete-and-stucco inner sanctum, he would never see his little girl again. This reality was obvious.

  He shook his head and reminded himself there was no reason to believe there was a second entrance. He was being ridiculous. It was barely 5:19. His daughter had been inside the bathroom a mere two minutes. Any second now, she would shuffle out in her sandals and shorts, pushing her hair behind her ears exactly the way her teenage baby-sitters did back home. The two of them would find a place in the park for dinner and then settle in for the fireworks.