Swim Back to Me (23 page)

“That’s the wrong attitude,” the midwife says. “You have to think you can do it.”

“I can do this, I can do this,” Lise cries; and then she does.

Lise in the rocking chair with Danny curled in her lap. Danny asleep in the very center of Dean and Lise’s huge bed. Lise on her side on the couch with Danny next to her, his mouth around her nipple. Danny staring at Dean while Dean stares at Danny. Every moment feels consequential, essential to preserve somehow and yet also infinitely repeatable. Dean watches Lise watching Danny, and his eyes brim and overflow. Lise watches Dean watching her, and tears stream down her cheeks.

Dean has never been so tired in all his life. Two-fourteen in the morning, 3:45, 5:03: walking, walking. His shoulders have never felt so sore, his upper arms. Danny wants to be held. He’s five days old, seven, and Dean still hasn’t set foot in the office. Gregor and Jan arrive one afternoon while Lise is asleep, and answering the door with Danny in his arms, Dean hardly hears their greetings and exclamations, his only thought that at last he can go to the bathroom. They’ve brought gifts for Danny—a navy blue sleepsuit, a copy of
Goodnight Moon
, and three different lullaby tapes, but the thing that touches Dean is a huge dish of lasagne, good for at least four dinners. He hugs them both.

The day of Danny’s two-week checkup arrives and Dean is ready with a list of questions for the doctor. The blister on Danny’s upper lip, the sucking blister—could it pop and what would happen if it did? The spitting up—is it normal for there to be so much of it? The cradle cap, the hiccuping, the way one of his toes sort of curls under the one next to it …

In the living room, getting ready to go, Dean buckles a sleeping Danny into his car seat, drapes a blanket over the handle because it’s misting a little outside, and turns to Lise just as she’s zipping the diaper bag.

“I’ll go start the car and get the heater going.”

“Good idea.” There are rings around her eyes, a small smear of what looks like mustard near the cuff of her white oxford shirt, which is actually his: since Danny’s birth she’s been living in his shirts—for their looseness, for how easy they are to unbutton for nursing. She follows his glance to the smear. “Oops,” she says.

“Tough times call for tough people.”

“Still, I think I’ll change. There’s no one at a pediatrician’s office who won’t know what that is.”

She heads for the bedroom, and Dean takes the blanket off the car seat to look at Danny. He’s still asleep, one round cheek resting on his shoulder: his drunken-old-man look. “You nailed Mommy,” Dean says. “What a thing to do.”

The doctor’s office is crowded, full of small children swarming all over a colorful plastic play structure or tapping insistently on the glass of a large aquarium. Dean sets Danny’s car seat in a relatively quiet corner, and he and Lise sink onto the bench next to him, each of them sighing a little as they sit down.

Lise picks up a magazine, and Dean rests idly for a moment, then stretches across her to look at Danny. He touches Danny’s forehead, his cheek, his impossibly tiny fist. Danny’s fingers scare Dean, how fragile they are: little matchsticks in flimsy padding.

A nurse comes into the waiting room and says, “Daniel?,” and Lise’s on her feet waiting well before Dean gets it. He lifts the car seat and follows her and the nurse back to a small examining room, where the nurse asks questions about feeding and sleep and then tells them to undress Danny. She leaves and reappears when they’ve got him down to his diaper, which she untapes, then she carries him to the scale, whisks the diaper out from under him, and slides the scale’s weights around until she’s arrived at his.

The pediatrician comes in a little later. He asks Dean, who’s been holding Danny, to set him on the examining table, and then he listens to Danny’s chest, rotates Danny’s legs, presses his giant fingers into Danny’s abdomen. Dean stands just to the side, so alert he realizes he’s waiting for Danny to learn to roll over and to roll to the edge of the table: if he does this, Dean will be ready to catch him. Danny’s awake now and quiet, and when the doctor finishes his examination and loops his stethoscope around his neck, he and Dean and Lise gather and stare at Danny, watch as his ocean-deep eyes move from one of them to the next.

“Can I hold him?” the doctor asks Lise, and while Dean’s wondering what’s odd about this, Lise nods, and the doctor lifts Danny and cradles him against his chest. “He’s a nice little bundle,” the doctor says, and all at once Dean understands that what he’s feeling is the awe of ownership, amazement that permission is his and Lise’s to give or refuse. Just two weeks and he’s an expert on Danny, on his Dannyness, each day placing into an infinitely expandable container every new thing he knows to be true about his baby. He thinks of what he knows about the dead baby—about
Jasper
—and it’s next to nothing: he liked to be flown through the air like an airplane, he loved to have his father tickle his toes. Dean’s had it all wrong: it isn’t that Lise had a baby who died, but rather that she had a baby, who died. He looks at her, creases around her eyes as she smiles at Danny, and he feels a little space open up in his mind, for all she can tell him about her firstborn.

The doctor turns to Dean now, holding Danny out like an offering. “Dad?” he says. “Do you want him back now?”

Things Said or Done

B
y the way,” my father says, “I’m probably dying.” Except for sleep, we’ve been together nonstop for the last thirty hours, ever since we met at the Hartford airport yesterday morning, but he has chosen this moment to unburden himself: this moment, when we’re carrying folding chairs through a windowless corridor in a neighborhood community center in Berkeley, California. Well, I’m carrying folding chairs, my elbows sticking out as the bottoms of the chair backs dig into my curled fingers, while he is empty-handed, strolling back toward the storage room.

“Sure, ignore me,” he calls when I don’t respond.

“You’re probably dying,” I call back.

Up ahead, the once homely rec room is growing more festive by the minute. Three young women with bare feet wind garlands of flowers up the frame of a makeshift gazebo, and five neat rows of chairs are arranged on the linoleum floor, with a center aisle for the bridal procession.

“My piss smells like raw meat,” he calls. “Plus I’m always tired. I’m thinking kidney disease.”

“Sounds right,” I call back.

I enter the room and set the chairs down for a moment. In the dry California air, my hair, which is curly enough, frizzes with static, and I find a clip in my pocket and pin a section away from my face. Beyond the grimy clerestory windows puffs of cloud float across the sky. It’s a crisp September day, auspicious for a wedding. The groom is my middle-aged brother, the bride a very pretty twenty-three-year-old girl who was until recently an intern in his lab at the University of California. Her name is Cressida, but on the plane yesterday my father began referring to her as “Clytemnestra,” and because I made the mistake of objecting, he won’t give it up.

Cressida’s mother directs me to start row number six with my chairs. Like her daughter, she is tall and long-limbed, and she’s as calm and unfussy a mother of the bride as I’ve ever seen. According to my brother she is fifty, a year younger than I, but somehow I feel as if I am by far the less mature of the two of us, probably because in this context she is all mother, whereas I don’t have children—unless you count my father.

I head back to the storage room, expecting to find him, but he seems to have vanished. Cressida’s younger brother, a high school senior with sleepy eyes, has discovered a cart with wheels, and I help him load a dozen chairs onto it and dispatch him down the corridor, glad for a moment of solitude. We’ve been working since nine o’clock, an early call after a rehearsal dinner that lasted till well after midnight. Like the wedding, the rehearsal dinner was arranged and catered by Cressida’s family, though they allowed my father and me to make a gift of the wine. It took place in their backyard, where a giant paella was served at picnic tables crowded with jars of daisies. There were about forty of us, family and close friends, and toward the end of the night Cressida’s mother made a point of telling me how sorry she was that my mother wasn’t arriving until today, which was nice but didn’t conceal—in fact, communicated—her bafflement that a retired librarian who lives alone could be too busy to spend a full weekend at her son’s wedding. It isn’t busyness, though, it’s history: decades of it, beginning with my mother’s decision to leave my father when I was sixteen. She had, for twenty years, tried to hold him together, but there were just too many pieces of him for that, and now she keeps a steady and inviolable distance.

“Ha,” he says, appearing in the doorway with his hands on the hips of his baggy khakis—pants so old a wife would not allow them and a daughter shouldn’t, but I can’t do everything. “There you are. That woman, the mother, is about to tell us to take a meditation break!”

“That woman.”

“Meditation and/or stretching. That’s what it said on her list.”

I frown to show I can’t believe he looked at her list, though of course I can believe it.

“Sasha,” he says, “she left it lying on the piano. I’m supposed to walk right by that?”

“As a matter of fact you are. Where were you just now?”

“Went to see a man about a hearse.”

This is an old family joke—it means he was in the bathroom. He claims it started as a misunderstanding of mine, that as an appealingly morbid little girl I heard “hearse” when someone on a TV show said he needed to see a man about a horse. I don’t remember this, but if it happened I’m sure I only pretended to mishear, that the apparent “mistake” was a calculated move to please him. Beginning when I was very young, he conferred specialness on me and then required that I earn it, and I was only too happy to comply, dividing my efforts between precocity (memorizing at age seven the prologue to
The Canterbury Tales
, for example) and fussiness (insisting on two thick foam rubber pillows for sleep every night; refusing ever to wear green). We lived in tacit agreement that I could be anything but ordinary. Like him, I was to breathe only the rarefied air of the never-quite-satisfied, and the more difficult I was, the more entranced he became. Which is not, it turns out, the best preparation for life. Or marriage, as my ex-husband would certainly attest.

“Anyway,” my father says, leaning against the storage room door and peering with apparent fascination at the back of his forefinger, “it can’t be good.”

“Your finger.”

“My health! Something’s wrong. My piss smells like chocolate.”

“I thought it was raw meat,” I say, but then Cressida’s brother returns with the empty cart, and my father gives up both the promise of a minor skin injury and the opportunity to be offended by me, both so he can lay a trap for the boy. Feigning nonchalance, he asks what’s next on the schedule.

“Schedule?” the boy says.

“What do we do after the chairs are in place?”

“It’s fine,” I interject. “We’re happy to do whatever.”

“Yeah, but there must be a schedule,” my father says. “A
list.
”

“I don’t know,” the boy says. “My dad just got here with the programs, I can ask him.”

“The programs!” My father glances at me: this is getting better and better. “What is this, a concert?”

“Well, they’re not really programs. More sort of souvenirs? With photos and poems and stuff?” The boy shrugs. “They’re nice.”

At the word “poems,” I turn my back on my father and begin loading chairs on the cart. Long ago, in another lifetime, he was a professor of English, and he still has proprietary views on what should be called poetry and what should be called—well, not poetry. I hope if I don’t look at him he’ll keep his mouth shut.

“Oh, um,” the boy says, face reddening, “now that I think about it—my mom’s going to try to get everyone to do partner massages.”

I shoot a murderous look at my father and say, quickly as I can, “She wants to make sure we don’t work too hard. That’s thoughtful.”

The boy glances over his shoulder and leans forward. “Do you mind not telling Peter? I told Cress I wouldn’t let my parents do anything dumb, and—you know.”

“Sure,” I say. “No problem.”

He pushes the cart away, and now I have to look at my father again: he is grinning triumphantly, showing off his crooked yellow teeth. “What did I tell you?” he says. “Partner massages! Only in California!”

“That’s what you told me.”

And told me and told me. We’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast that offers—unexpectedly, I admit—an afternoon class in self-massage, and after my father made the obligatory joke about how we used to call that masturbation, he declared that in no bed-and-breakfast anywhere else in the country would there be anything offered in the afternoon but sherry or tea. Then we discovered there was a clothing-optional hot tub in the backyard, and it was as if he’d won the lottery. The thing is, we lived in California once ourselves, and his scorn can’t erase the fact that he thought of it as paradise when it was his.

My father is not an easy person in the best of circumstances, but he’s especially cantankerous when he has to see my mother. It’s been thirty-five years since she left him, but I remember it vividly: his heartsick weeping, his enervation, his despair. He was supposedly job hunting at that point, having been “let go” by the Connecticut boarding school where he’d gone when higher education didn’t work out, but after the initial shock of her departure he abandoned his search and hung around in his pajamas all day, waiting for me to get home from school. “Come talk to me,” he’d plead as soon as I entered the house, and he’d lead me to the study, where he’d been sleeping since she left, on the hard foam pallet of a Danish modern sofa. While I perched on a sliver of windowsill, he’d sit behind the desk and ask if I thought she’d ever come back, or even, incredibly, why she’d left, as if he’d been away for the bulk of their marriage and needed me to tell him what had happened. (He wasn’t away. Years later, in that cultural moment when the words “present” and “absent” cast off their classroom meanings and entered the crowded realm of the psychological metaphor, I joked to friends that if only my father had been
more
absent, things might have worked out between him and my mother.)