krānti) is a Vajrayāna Buddhist meditation practice describable as a “transference of consciousness” or “mindstream.” —Wikipedia 6.20.2009I WAS GRATEFUL THAT I NEVER RECEIVED THE VOICE’S ASSESSMENT of Lena or me, that I was neither mentioned nor addressed directly. There were comments on what we encountered, though, the content of the patter overlapping with an image that flashed across a TV screen, a person driving the car beside us, a squirrel on a branch, a fresh berm at a building site. I’d see Lena’s eyes alight on something and seconds later the voice would rush out a series of connected phrases, usually too swift and polysyllabic to be memorable to me, even when they were in English.
I got used to watching Lena’s attention fasten onto a scene as only a baby’s attention will, without seeming to focus—that round-eyed, often unblinking gaze of passive-seeming intake. But unlike with other babies this would be followed by commentary as the voice bounced over the object or landscape like a sound wave, a light wave, a stream of particles. I didn’t get the feeling it was moving her, only that it was following her eyes, her fingers, her tongue. The model was accompaniment, not possession.
And what words came did appear, sometimes, to pass a kind of judgment. Their position seemed to be guided by aesthetics rather than morals—or no, that wasn’t it either. More like, the morals were the aesthetics. What was ugly was wrong, but what was ugly was not the same as, for instance, what was brutal: ugliness was less the jarring or crude than the false or dishonest. Based on some standard I could never measure, the voice would be dismissive of systems or events, individuals or ideas, products of human ingenuity. It would rebuke the odd politician or captain of industry, engineer, or physicist; it would take even artists or musicians to task for crimes against humanity. And yet somehow the impressions I took from it were both less and more than opinions. They glittered like sun on water and glanced off again before I could fix my eyes on them.
Only a small number of the voice’s observations were given over to the conditions of my life and Lena’s, the rooms and scenes we moved through, but periodically there were upticks in interest. For damaged persons we encountered on the street, when we crossed paths with someone sick or in pain or disabled, often the voice would let loose a benediction, recite a snatch of poetry or hum a piece of music. To a shakily walking grandmother: “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.” To a kid with Down syndrome, “The Carriage held—but just Ourselves—and Immortality.” Of all the lines of poetry, those were the only two I wrote down right away and looked up.
For an emaciated man we passed in the halls of a cancer ward, where we were visiting someone else, the voice had the famous lines from Chief Joseph after the battle that finally defeated him, which I searched via key words.
I want to have time to look for my children; maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.
Upon Ned’s entry into our space there was always the same phrase, a faintly aggressive chant. In fact the chant was a tipoff that Ned was arriving. Typically it started up on cue a few seconds early, before I even recognized his presence.
You can keep your Army khaki, you can keep your Navy blue, I have the world’s best fighting man to introduce to you.
Google revealed this to be a Marine Corps cadence, one of the verses cadets call out when they’re marching.
But Ned was never in the military.
A NEW GUEST came to us today. She’s maybe a decade younger than I am, probably in her mid-twenties, and according to Don may stay a while.
She has an air of recovery, or so I thought as my daughter took her through the tour. She was nice to Lena in the cautious way of people who aren’t used to the company of children but react graciously when it’s imposed on them: patience, no talking down, a genuine interest.
Lena says the woman is a princess—probably because she’s slim, tall and pretty, with long hair—and has spun a tale about her already. The princess fell from her throne through the deeds of an evil troll. She awaits an act of magic, here beside the sea. Lena says a team of seahorses will arrive pulling a giant white shell, and in the shell the princess will be borne away to her own kingdom.
At this point the story gets convoluted, because the princess can’t be taken away; that would mean her leaving us. Instead she will sleep in a shimmering palace on the waves, a palace hidden from us now that hovers invisibly beyond the whitecaps. A bridge of waves will stretch from the beach outside the motel to the princess’s ancestral home, a white castle of pearl, and we will walk over this bridge to banquets held in our honor, for we may live there too. Inside the castle keep, a special room will belong to us, connected to the princess’s royal chamber by a spiral staircase. The chamber is full of sparkling fountains and cushions of cloud. It features a four-poster canopy bed and live-in midget ponies.
The ponies are velvety to the touch and curl up on the bed like dogs, their legs tucked beneath them.
But Lena reassures me that we won’t have to sacrifice our lodgings at the motel for this resplendence. No, we’ll still treasure our motel home. We’ll still frequent these faithful lodgings with their yellowing shower curtain and moldy grout between the tiles. We’ll have two houses, she says, that’s all—“one for regular and one for special occasions.”
I’d go with her. I’d take the miniature dog-ponies and the pillows of cloud.
PEOPLE WHO SAY they feel the presence of the Almighty hovering close to them, their personal savior, or tell how faith dwells in their hearts—the advantage they have is that if God overwhelms them, they’re free to retreat. Or if the knowledge is so overwhelming it can’t be contained, sometimes they let it out with shaking and strange articulations, crying and falling, ecstasy. I admire the idea of this, though I’ve never shaken in ecstasy myself.
I like to imagine I could, under the right conditions.
My point is, abandon to the spirit has an appointed time and place: the spirit can’t be on you all the time. I never thought of the voice as God, while it was with Lena and me; such a thought would have been an outrage. When I write about God right now, that three-letter word—so loaded, so presumptuous—it’s a word that I use in hindsight, as close a description as I can get of that stray cascade of ambient knowledge that distinguished itself from the static of everything else and filtered down to me.
So the voice wasn’t God to me then, but in the months after Ned heard it, when I couldn’t think of it as hallucination anymore, I was confused and stowed my questions in a locked compartment. Some things were unexplained; well, some things had always been. But I listened to it differently once I couldn’t believe it was my own confabulation anymore. I gave it more credibility.
My brain’s a little above average, according to standard aptitude tests, but not far above: I was always bad at calculus, I had no patience for high school chemistry. Whatever intelligence I have isn’t rated for the ornate subtlety of the divine. Most of the time the voice was still wallpaper or elevator music as it streamed past and over me, citing, listing, cajoling, eulogizing, heckling. If I stopped what I was doing and concentrated on it, it quickly dazzled the faculties.
But there was no aspect of feeling chosen, no conviction of being purposefully anointed. We might have been sitting in a lounge chair on the green grass of my lawn, reading, when suddenly a bank of cumulus moved in and rain began pattering onto the pages of my book and the skin of my arms and we had to go in. I never believed the nimbus had chosen her or me or us on the basis of special qualities. I have other failings but I’m not subject to visions of personal grandiosity.
When I looked at holiday crèches or paintings of the infant Jesus I recognized the parallels—that Jesus as an infant had been believed to contain divinity, at least in retrospect—but there the similarity ended for me. I didn’t think Lena was a prophet or a messiah.
More or less, in the time after Ned heard, I put off the question of causation, deferring inquiry.
The question of origin was too much for me.
LENA’S SECRET PRINCESS is named Kay and hails from the fair land of Boston. She’s a med student there, or possibly a resident or a nurse. She has a hospital job holding babies, according to Lena, so maybe she’s assigned to a maternity ward. She seems reluctant to discuss her work so I haven’t pressed her.
I let Lena eat lunch on the bluffs with her and they went out wrapped in scarves and wearing puffer coats, though it was mild, for Maine in fall, and the big jackets were overkill. They spread a blanket on the dry grass. I could see them from the back window in our room—the room’s best feature, a picture window that offers a view of the cliff edge and the sea. Lena chattered constantly—I watched her small head bobbing and her hands moving—and Kay smiled indulgently as she followed Lena’s gestures. And yet somehow Lena seemed to be looking after Kay, not the reverse; the young woman’s face was shuttered, and only when Lena spoke did she become animated.
It’s one of the bargains I’ve made with myself, to let Lena have the company of relative strangers as long as I’m nearby and can keep an eye on them. I try to compensate for the lack of other children in her life and the rarity with which she sees her extended family. Of course, it doesn’t compensate for that; she’s an extroverted little girl, always has been, and likes to caper and perform. People are Lena’s game.
For her a trip to the post office in town is a trip to see Mrs. Farber, the gum-popping straight talker who presides over the counter; a trip to buy groceries to stock our kitchenette is a visit to Roberto, the skinny cashier with the soul patch and exuberance about cartoons. She knows all the cashiers’ favorite colors, pet names, and birthdays. A trip to the big-box store a couple of towns inland is a carnival of anecdotes during which Lena recounts our previous trips at great and exhausting length. She has perfect recall of people she’s met even once. “Julio, he’s a Pisces that means fish, cars are his hobby, like racing cars that go fast. He has a niece named Avery, the tooth fairy brought her a charm bracelet with clovers on it. Faneesha likes those yucky cookies with figs in them, she learned to tap-dance in Michigan but once she ran over a worm that came out flat.”
I COULD OCCASIONALLY discern what I thought were shadings of emotion in the voice, shadings of will. Maybe those shadings were my interpretation, but thinking about it now I’m not surprised, because after all the voice was words, sometimes converted to music or other sound, and I don’t see how words can follow each other without implying emotion. Even the effort to control emotion is an act of words, while every effort to control words is an act of emotion.
I didn’t catch much at a time but there were recurrent themes in the patter that I learned to recognize. The voice made light of what it held to be false ideas—for example, the yearning for an all-powerful father who grants wishes and absolves. On that subject it seemed to evince something like condescension, rattling off mocking wordplay when we passed a church marquee or once, another time, while I stood at the front door trying to get rid of a Witness. Omnimpotence, the voice said more than once. Omnimpotent being, omnimpotent force. A great and ancient omnimpotence.
Sometimes it sang an eerie lullaby. Oh little man, tie your own shoes, it would sing, on the heels of a passage about the all-powerful father. There was a fire-and-brimstone sermon it liked to recite by an old-time preacher; it interspersed this text with laugh tracks and sang the cradlesong afterward. Oh little man, dry your own tears. Oh little man, there is no knee. There is no knee to dandle on. Bury your dead, oh little man. Let darkness fall over the land.
Property was an object of mockery too—the ownership of land, of pets, and even of inanimate objects seemed held to be an elaborate charade, maybe a shared psychotic disorder. The voice inflected words like owner or rich with irony—as though these should be bracketed, in perpetuity, in quotation marks. Once it said Fool, you are owned by the sun.
I couldn’t find an attribution anywhere. No results.
But in general such great swaths of what it said were borrowed or adapted that they were already familiar—part of the background of culture somehow, part of the landscape of the commonplace. I sometimes wondered if all of it was borrowed, if it was all pure appropriation, a colorful textile made only of copies.
I’d started reading in philosophy, every so often, and that was when I came upon its first word to me, the sound I’d heard in the hospital before it spoke English. That word was Phowa, or poa, meaning “mindstream” in Sanskrit—the transference of consciousness at the moment of death, was one meaning.
Phowa (Wylie: 'pho ba; also spelled Powa or Poa phonetically; Sanskrit: sakrānti) is a Vajrayāna Buddhist meditation practice describable as a “transference of consciousness” or “mindstream.” —Wikipedia 6.20.2009
Sometimes there were brief flickers of foreboding, brief intimations of the voice’s departure, but I tried not to invest too much in those. I didn’t want to be disappointed so I didn’t hope too hard. When I caught a glimpse of a future leave-taking, a tiny slip of possibility, I didn’t trot out the streamers or confetti or whistles, the bejeweled gowns and conical party hats, the jeroboams of champagne.
I waited quietly, holding my cards close to the vest.
CURIOUSLY TWO MORE guests have arrived at the motel right on the heels of Kay. By the standards of this place, it’s a madding crowd.
They’re two middle-aged men, a couple, and I can’t help but feel that they, like Kay, are in some state of dismay. Maybe it’s conjugal, a conjugal problem, but I feel like it’s something else. One of them seems to be consoling the other half the time, he has a steadying hand on the other guy’s shoulder practically whenever I see them.
They checked in at the cocktail hour—I have a glass of wine before dinner most days, while Lena and I play “Go Fish” or “War”—and shortly after that we heard a knock on our room door. When I opened it there was Don, the two men standing behind him, politely waiting, and Don peered past me and asked Lena if she wanted to conduct a tour. Typically she has to pester him for that; she’ll run along the row of room doors to the lobby as soon as she sees a car pull in and beg to be the tour guide, and Don will check with the new guests to see if they’re sufficiently captive to her charms. But this time Don sought her out, and it thrilled her, of course.
So we set out, the four of us—Don peeled off toward the lobby again—and I talked to the balder of the two men while Lena kept up her monologue with the other, a gaunt, handsome blond called Burke who seems to need consolation. The balding one, Gabe, said they wanted to take advantage of the off-season rates, they don’t go in for tanning anyway, the cancerous harm of the sun’s rays; winter beaches are just fine. Nor do they like to swim, he said, except in pools that are very clean. They also do not fish, surf, parasail, or favor any other ocean-related activities.
It became clear to me—as we stood near the ice machine and I listened to Gabe rattle on about bikini- and Speedo-clad crowds lying on beaches, the rude spectacle of this—that the two men knew Don, that Don was a personal friend of theirs, and that was why he’d felt all right bringing them back to our room.
At that moment I saw Don coming out of the lobby again, this time with Kay; they walked with their heads inclined toward each other, talking low. And it struck me with certainty that Don knew Kay, too. In fact it could well be that everyone else staying here already knew Don; that Lena and I were now the only guests who had not known Don before we came to stay at his motel.
I felt a little jarred.
And now I couldn’t remember how I’d found the place, when we first came to stay. Had I driven past a billboard? Had I sorted through online reviews of budget motels? But I couldn’t remember a billboard or a review. All I recalled was driving up the long gravel road in an exhausted reverie, hardly thinking, and turning into the small parking lot, shaded with pine trees. I’d liked the peeling wooden sign.
Welcome to THE WIND AND PINES.
I had a feeling of unease, flashing back to the movies I’d watched when the voice was first with me, a vision of black-clad people leaning over a baby carriage. I thought of a sedate old apartment building that was in truth a hive of sinister insects, where behind the ornately carved doors, in sleepy luxury, the neighbors quietly worshiped some dark beast.
I wondered, if I asked Don how he knew them all, whether he would tell me a simple story about how he’d gotten to meet them or would avoid answering my question. I felt a temptation to try this, to confront Don shockingly, demanding information.
But my misgivings are absurd, I realize that. The motel is Don’s home, and motel managers can have friends to stay like anyone else.
WHEN THE VOICE fell silent relief washed through me like bliss. I know everyone has reliefs as the days run their course: the feeling of relief is as familiar as a hiccup or jolt of fear. But this relief was the swiftest joy of my life.
Lena said her first word early in a day, so indistinctly that at first I took it for a murmur. She crawled across the rug and began idly banging on my shoe with a red sippy cup. I was skimming the news on my computer, a mug of coffee at my elbow, when she repeated the word, Ma-ma, Ma-ma, until I pulled out of my reverie and looked down.
Then she stopped saying it, her mouth falling open as she gazed at me. And in the wake of her utterance a new silence fell around us like a sheath.
I sat in startlement for a few seconds—it seemed to me that the silence had its own soft, rising hum.
This was it, this was how it happened: this was its departure. Her first word had supplanted the voice. And suddenly I knew, in a rush, what had been suggested to me, what had been hinted at opaquely in the preceding weeks—the voice had a life cycle. It passed through those who were newly born, in the time before they spoke, and when they spoke it moved on, displaced by the beginning of speech. It lived in the innocence before that speech, the time that was free of words.
The end, the end, I thought: the beginning.
I picked her up and laughed, bouncing us both around.
For a while, after she said that first word and the voice fell silent, I was worried it would return. This reflexive, ritual worry recurred whenever I found myself in an anxious frame of mind.
But the voice didn’t return, and by and by I persuaded myself to stop fearing.
And during the new silence I spent weeks, even months in an altered state—the euphoric state of a lottery winner, as I imagine it, or maybe a newly minted Nobel laureate, a state of incredulous rapture. I’ve never won a lottery, I’ve never been given a prize, but I had this. I floated wherever I went, my baby in the stroller ahead of me or on my back—my tiny girl toddling contentedly beside me, holding my hand. I smiled a lot, people said, shone like a bride.
Ignorance is bliss, few sayings are so demonstrable, and I was blissful without the voice, I drifted on thermals. I loved the freshness of the new quiet and sometimes sat deliberately in a hushed room, picking out faint noises from the street. And the opposite too—I played favorite songs loudly, held Lena and danced with her. Excitedly I prompted her to speak, I asked for repetitions of the word Mama, for other words, whatever. I would lean down over her little face with such joy in the movement!—lean close to her, lean eagerly—no one between us, nothing but sparkling air.
Since the voice fell silent I’ve often been able to put the whole episode behind me. There’ve been many days, many nights, whole weeks when I’ve been able to forget the untenable aspects of that time, the first year of my daughter’s life.
I’ve frequently been successful in my denial strategy, and it’s probably this success that has allowed me to live a life that, aside from my domestic problems and our flight, could almost be called normal.
SINCE GABE AND BURKE arrived, the routine has changed. Actual maids come now, since the linen laundry is more than Don can handle by himself. They’re a couple of teenagers from town who do their work with earbuds in and haven’t introduced themselves to us.
Plus Don has opened up a spare room off the lobby and begun to cook. The food he offers is simple and good—special dishes for Lena, a children’s menu with pancakes or cinnamon rolls in the morning, macaroni and once bite-sized hamburgers at night. These didn’t tempt Lena since she doesn’t eat meat and never has; she feels too sorry for killed animals.
The motel guests have been gathering in the café for breakfast and dinner, and since Don keeps limited hours—as befits a chef with a base clientele of five—we’re usually all there at the same time. And it’s not just the guests anymore; stragglers from town have also been appearing here. First there were two or three old people wanting a break from microwave dinners, then a portly state trooper; Faneesha, the UPS driver, came at the end of her rounds and was instantly commandeered by Lena. Every night there are a couple more customers.
The first evening it felt strange to dine in the room off the lobby. I hadn’t realized how much of a restaurant’s mood comes from an illusion of permanence. The place seemed like an oversize supply closet, despite the flowers and candles and checkered tablecloths. But already by the second dinnertime it didn’t seem preposterous to call it a café—even the lighting seemed altered, though the lamps and candles were in the same places. It had gotten more welcoming overnight.
Lena was intent on the patrons, and on the fourth night she hit the jackpot: a kid came in who was only a year older. He was with his father, whose attention was captured by a cell phone, and the boy too had an electronic toy, a glossy plastic robot that emitted tinny music and recorded the children’s voices to play back. The two of them traded it to and fro, giggling at the senseless insults they made the robot pronounce. Lena got so enraptured she forgot to eat.
I was absorbed in the question of Thanksgiving, whether Lena and I should visit my parents. They’re not too far from here, but on the other hand Ned knows the house. I was weighing the risks while the guests talked and laughed and Don carried food back and forth with the help of a teenage girl from down the beach. A song was playing in the background, a sad folk song about a love-struck, gunshot bandito dying alone in the hills, and I looked out over the ocean, reached to rest my fingertips on the cold window. I thought of other Thanksgivings, suffused in an amber glow.
When I turned back to the room again, my fingers still tingling, the guests all seemed familiar. It was one of those soft sinkholes of time when separate elements coalesce—we were a blur of sympathy, the air between us pockets of space in one great body, one saltwater being, unplumbed depths where the ancestors came from, primeval well of genes . . . the feeling stretched like a generosity, the gift of oneness. Who cared about those differences we had, those minor distinctions that kept us apart?
But then that lofty idea turned trivial, from second to second its shine faded. It’s your commonality that’s frivolous, I scolded myself, you want to think we’re so many eggs under the down of a nesting bird—you want to be held there forever, sheltered in the warmth of a body that watches over you. You want it as almost everyone wants it, to pretend that we’re one. To let the burden of our separation be lifted at long last.
That was all it was, I told myself: desire. Was it the case that every hopeful sentiment, each stir of communion and vision of eternity, is nothing but a projection of desire?
It’s what we want that we see, not what is, I thought. Scraped bare, we’re nothing but machines for wanting.
I felt a maudlin pity for us. Together now for the blink of an eye, I thought drunkenly, before we tread off into separate futures and one fine day, though motes of our bodies still persist, the last traces of our inner selves vanish. The private selves evanesce, the secret worlds that only we knew. The nameless company of ourself, that warm sleeve of being—goodbye, old friend.
With the voice, very rarely, I’d also felt these moments of loss, as though I was looking back at myself from somewhere past my death. At times I’d felt a cold freedom then, when my irritation faded and tears caught in my throat. The long view, the far distance of the stratosphere, clean and thin as high air. The axis where distance and closeness met, the axis on which the world spun.
But back then, at those rare times of elevation, the common ground had felt like truth. Now it was only a wish.
Drunkenness, I thought, could pass for a connection to God.
At my elbow Lena was making the plastic robot dance and laughing at it. There were plenty of people around. I should have felt content but I was distant, like an elder sitting apart, watching others that spun and shrieked, so busy in the midst of life.
IT WAS AT the tail end of that golden summer when the voice went quiet, coming down off the high, that I realized we had to leave Ned. I had no more patience for his complete detachment, his reluctance to come home and rudeness when he did—a rudeness that positioned us as his unpleasant burden. In my own home I had to feel like someone else’s dead weight, and I couldn’t keep carrying it. We had to leave Ned and the string of young women in whose name he missed our weekly family dinners, who left their sunglasses in his spotless BMW, and after the BMW was gone, in his more electable Ford truck.
Neither the car nor truck ever contained a baby seat. Later I racked my brain trying to recall a single instance when Ned had driven the baby anywhere, but I came up with nothing.
I do remember, though, that one of his girlfriends wore lacy pink boyshort underwear, which found its way into the pocket of a jacket I took to be dry-cleaned—I hadn’t checked the pockets beforehand and the panties were handed across sheepishly afterward by a drycleaner. They hung in their own plastic bag, a doll-sized scrap of fabric dwarfed by the hanger.
The drycleaner had cleaned them for free, he said to me shyly.
By then I’d known for a while that I didn’t love Ned. But now, rather than existing in an amiable neutrality toward him which I’d tried, even before Lena was born, to cultivate and fit into the space where love should be, I’d come to actively dislike him. I turned the corner one day with nothing else to preoccupy me and caught sight of my own dislike, plain as day.
It couldn’t be talked away, couldn’t be handled in therapy (which Ned, in any case, would never have gone in for). It was as solid as a dining room table. His coldness toward me I might have tolerated for Lena’s sake, had he been any vague semblance of a father, but his dismissal of her got more and more unbearable. I had the devotional urgency of new mothers and couldn’t help feeling that a baby was a standing debt, a debt to a forming soul.
His lack of paternal feeling was unsurprising, in the end, since he’d never promised anything else. And it was true I’d forced him into parenthood by having Lena instead of getting a D&C as he wanted me to. I’d told myself that when the baby was born he’d come around a bit. I never expected him to be a candidate for Father of the Year, but maybe, I hoped, part of a circle would be described, a slow curve into warmth. Surely a real, living child would thaw his chill. It was what happened, I believed.
Now I’m not sure where I got that belief—maybe from a TV movie. I committed a cardinal error of women, by which I mean an error to which women in particular seem prone: the error of expecting someone else to change toward them, to grow into alignment. I expected love, change, and alignment from Ned, and all these expectations were baseless. The category of children was as alien to him as if he himself had sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. His own dim trailer park childhood had ceased to exist after he emerged from it—in his mind, despite the odds, nearly a perfect man.
It didn’t help that around that time he was nurturing his budding interest in politics. He wasn’t a candidate yet, he wouldn’t be for a while, but he was angling, forging careful alliances. Though he’d never professed religious faith, he started attending church “for the connections.” He gathered new opinions around him like sacks he was hefting—sacks that bulged ominously, misshapen sacks full of hidden, gross things. Tired catchphrases would spring from his conversation in passing: “No handouts for welfare mothers,” say, but also, a fetus was sacred.
It was hard not to take his remarks personally when they concerned, as they often did, categories such as motherhood or women. But at the same time the remarks felt like objects to me—prefabricated items he had purchased quickly in a store, items he was busily stuffing into his shopping cart without close scrutiny.
“BURKE’S BUYING DRINKS for everyone,” said Kay, twisting in her chair to talk to me from the next table. “It’s his birthday. We only have beer or wine, but Don’s serving a pretty good Shiraz.”
I accepted the pour of wine into my glass and raised it; we toasted Burke, Gabe saying something I didn’t catch about rare hothouse flowers (Burke is a horticulturist). There was a rowdy crowd from town that night, some large-bodied, friendly-looking women out celebrating a remission; one of them had a tumor that had responded well to treatment. Everyone drank on Burke’s dime and I embraced once again the sentimental illusions offered by wine—what was wrong with them, after all? I’d clearly been hasty.
“You know what they say about horticulture, right?” Gabe was saying, still on his long-winded toast. “Dorothy put it best: ‘Well, you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.’ ”
I watched Burke laugh and raise his glass; I recalled a half-joke the voice had told. Have you heard the one about the Buddhist fly? It was a lovely iridescent fly, ran the riff, that flew through a room buzzing I am one with the universe, I am one with the universe. The fly felt the descending peace of its enlightenment, the liberating lift of air beneath its gossamer body. How beautiful it was! How beautiful the very air! How blessed was its flight!
The swatter fell.
You were not one with the universe, my friend, said the voice. But now you are.
But Don was serving a good Shiraz. In its flow I decided Lena and I should go see my family, we should sit at the table with them and be thankful for what we had. I recalled our dusty old centerpiece of orange-and-red silk leaves and decrepit Indian corn, which my mother always trots out with an enthusiasm that borders on the poignant.
I HAVEN’T FILED for divorce and custody yet, though I could and probably should—partly because I know it would hurt Ned’s career and therefore anger him, partly because it also presents complications for me, since I removed our child from him without a written agreement.
It took me years to leave, years of deciding and planning—far longer than it had taken me to get married in the first place—and by the time I was ready it was past Lena’s fourth birthday. I should have divorced him before we left, when he had no legal leverage over me. I don’t know why I didn’t—ineptitude. I must still have been spellbound, and I didn’t know how serious his politics would get, I didn’t anticipate a fight. I expected a quiet, long-distance divorce about which he would be indifferent, as he was about me, as long as he got to keep a lot of money.
Or maybe I was afraid, just afraid to take a direct and final action. Maybe it was common cowardice.
When I told him we were leaving he never once objected: there was no tension around our departure. And I only decided to evade him later, when he started stalking us instead of asking for a visit. It was only in the White Mountains that I knew his motives were strong and impersonal, as, with Ned, any motives must be. It was then that unease crept into me.
But there’s no proof I didn’t spirit her away against his will, only a few emails after the fact that wouldn’t bind anyone legally.
WHEN I DECIDED to make the trip I hadn’t told Don the details of our domestic situation. He only knew I wanted to keep a low profile at the motel—that much was obvious. So I finally took him into my confidence about Ned, I told him the story. I included Ned not wanting a child, his proven disinterest, until his Alaskan PR campaign, in a family reunion; I left out, needless to say, our visitation by the possibly divine.
To my relief Don didn’t see me as a kidnapper. Rather he was alarmed for us, he tried to convince me to skip the dangers of a Thanksgiving in my parents’ house and spend the day with him and the other guests. He promised to cook a prize turkey, with something vegetarian for Lena; he would bake pies, pumpkin, fake mincemeat, and pecan.
But I felt bad for keeping her from her grandparents so long, and from my brother Solomon, Solly for short, and others in her family she’d spent too little time with—only a rare Christmas, a few weeks’ summer vacation she’d been too young to remember well. Alaska is far from Rhode Island. On Ned’s side she’d never known relatives; even if he hadn’t been estranged from his parents, he wouldn’t have taken her to meet them since he never took her anywhere.
We had to go, I said. I was betting Ned wouldn’t dare approach me in my family’s presence—my family with whom he’d always played the part of a thoughtful, upright man, my family without whose financial gifts to us he never could have started his first business, from which all else had sprung.
I was more afraid, I told Don, that he would corner us afterward, because it was when we were away from my family that he could coerce me effectively. An in-person encounter between Ned and me is my main anxiety. The prospect fills me with the fatalistic certainty that I wouldn’t be able to pull away from him right off, not with Lena’s eyes on us. Somehow I’m certain of this despite its weakness, its irrationality, despite the fact that I know it would be wrong, dead wrong for me and for her too.
If Ned gets to us physically I fear he’ll outmaneuver me. From the day I left him and felt the welcome release of distance the prospect of his presence has terrified me. Always since then, whenever I think of seeing him again, I’m a deer in the headlights.
If he was watching my parents’ house for the holidays, some men in suits and leather shoes might follow us when we left.
“If you have to go, have someone in your family drive back with you,” suggested Don.
“But he could still follow us, and then he’d know we were here,” I said. “From then on. And we’d just have to move out. I don’t want to go yet, and Lena doesn’t either.”
Don nodded.
“If you want, I can meet you somewhere in my car. We can do a switch—you go into a store, you go through the back, we leave in my car. Whoever was driving your car could bring it back here once he’d given up and stopped following them.”
I was startled that he’d go to such lengths to help us.
“There are different ways to do it,” he said. “But the key is, you have to be careful. Don’t think of complex dodges as ridiculous. It’s worth it.”
He said he’d known a woman who was abused and had helped sneak her in and out of shelters. But always, sooner or later, she would lose patience and decide to make a generous gesture, she would throw caution to the winds and be caught and beaten again.
SOMETIMES I CONSIDER wishfully whether, when she’s grown up, it might be possible to tell Lena about the voice and stop being alone with it. I keep this record for that reason also: not to feel so alone.
Before I had Lena, when something upset me I talked to my friends about it in the standard way. But after she was born, when that ragged, uninvited disruption entered my life, I found I couldn’t talk about it to my friends. Maybe we weren’t close enough or maybe I was averse to risk. It can’t be taken lightly, the rumor of mental confusion.
So this hybrid document is what I have instead, my journal entries mixed with thoughts that came to me later. I don’t mean for Lena to read it—it’s password-protected—because I understand that even if I fantasize about telling her, it would be the kind of unburdening adulterers sometimes do, a kind of selfishness dressed up as truth. The rules of sound parenting weigh against it. No, I write for myself or for no one. I have no stake in convincing an audience of my trustworthiness; my welfare isn’t of general interest. I’m someone who was rained on for a period of months, rained on by word instead of water.
When it comes to my daughter, trustworthiness is the first thing I offer. I value it above all else.
BEING WITHOUT a car made me nervous, but on the other hand I’m nostalgic for trains, and Lena, it turns out, loves them. For her a train is a social bonanza: a long container of possible friends with the added bonus of scenery out the windows. It’s far superior to our sedan, where she’s limited to my company.
Skipping down the aisle of the café car—where a drooping, whey-faced man looked at us glumly as he wiped down the counter in front of a near-empty display of potato chips—Lena said she wanted to live in the train forever. That’s how she expresses approval, sometimes adding a touch of the morbid: “I want to eat ice cream forever and ever, till I’m even older than you are,” she’s said to me before. “I want to stay in the motel that long, I want to walk on the beach.” At her age even a day has an eternal quality, so that forever and ever is less a linear stretch of time than a form of reassurance. “I want to live on this exact train forever and ever till I die. Until I die, Mommy! Until I die!”
I told her about sleeping cars and she decided we needed that kind of train instead, where we would have curtains to draw across our bunks for privacy, supplies of chocolate bars and chips, warm sweaters for fall and tank tops for summer; we would ride in our train over green hill and dale, mountain and plain, bedazzled by the sights, enraptured by our fellow travelers.
We finally stepped out onto the platform of the old station near my parents’ town. The sun was low in the dull-gray sky and a wind whipped our hair around. Lena was perfectly happy to forget about trains in favor of the reward of seeing her grandparents again. She clutched my hand and scanned the station wide-eyed, though she can only have half-remembered what my parents look like.
But she knew them right off, probably by their tremulous smiles. I was looking along a row of lockers, past restroom doors and soda vending machines, trying to cultivate the vigilance Don had urged. But all I saw was a couple of teenagers slumped on a bench beside their old-school boombox, belligerent sounds issuing.
“Nana! Grumbo!” cried Lena, and ran forward.
Her pet name for her grandfather, invented I’m not sure how, has always been redolent of a booze-soaked clown—ill-suited to the personage of my father, whose bearing afforded him, in the past, a quiet dignity. These days he doesn’t know his name, he draws a blank equally on his history and the identities of his family, but still the mantle of that dignity hasn’t entirely dropped from him. He holds fast to my mother when he walks, a dreamy look on his face suggesting a dim and lovely scene back in the recesses of his mind, a hidden spring from which he alone may drink.
Lena hugged them excitedly, ambassador of affection. Young children are the standard-bearers of visible love, I thought, watching. After we grow up and get sparing with our physical affection, children are sorely needed to bridge the gap. I love my parents but the urge to touch them seems to have mostly faded. Without Lena we’d be stranded in the lonely triangle of adulthood, the lovable child I ceased to be hovering sadly between us.
“Do you still have the kittens?” squealed Lena, who remembered kittens from a visit when she was three.
One day she’ll separate herself with an adult coldness she’ll be unable to control, uninterested in controlling; one day she’ll probably touch me as rarely as I touch my parents now. She’ll come and go, returning only for visits.
The thought is so acute, the outcome so near-certain I cringe, thinking: This is why parents want grandchildren. Really they want their own children back again, they long to feel that vanished and complete love.
I watched my parents’ beaming faces as they bent to encircle her with their arms—my father doing so in a spirit of general camaraderie, not specific attachment. He doesn’t recognize Lena across time but since his memory went he has learned to obey my mother; he simply believes her when she tells him that he knows or loves someone. He has agreed to go along with it. In a way this trust is the crowning glory of their lives, a final achievement. He knows my mother and through her he accepts the rest.
I’m often teary when I first see them again—my mother a little bit grayer but still solid and known, my father a meek shade diminished almost to nothing.
IN MY PARENTS’ house, where I grew up, it’s hard to convince myself to stay alert for watchers in the shadows. Their neighborhood’s staid, the houses upright and boxy and spacious, the trees sheltering. It’s well-mapped terrain for me and its textures make for a sense that nothing surprising can happen here.
So I’d relaxed my guard by the time Ned called.
Lena was playing with my brother in the backyard, where a rusty swing set and jungle gym remain from our childhood. Solly’s good with children, though he has none of his own—he’s younger than I am and prefers the bachelor life, long work hours punctuated by trips to Atlantic City to play poker and weekends drinking and watching sports with college friends—and Lena’s smitten with him.
I sat on a stool beside the kitchen island, cutting pie dough, and watched out the window as he lifted her up to the monkey bars. My mother was unhurried in her preparations and the house was quiet, though the next day people I barely knew would come teeming in—old colleagues of my father’s, a group from the homeless shelter my mother invites every year, a couple of church friends. When the outdated rotary phone on the kitchen wall rang, she answered it with a voice that faltered at first, though it was perfectly pleasant.
She mouthed Ned to me across the room and I slid off the stool, helpless.
“It’s so good of you to remember us,” she said politely. “Are you having a nice Thanksgiving?”
I went out of the kitchen and lifted the receiver of the hallway phone.
“. . . missing my two girls, of course,” I heard Ned say.
I recognized his angle instantly: loving husband, abandoned callously.
“You know, Lindsay . . . it’s pretty tough to be alone. It’s tough, over the holidays.”
Ned’s automaton nature is well hidden from guileless observers. My mother has never fathomed my leaving him, which was alien to her and which I can’t hope to explain fully—especially as I’ve chosen not to mention, for example, his many affairs or the fact that he pressured me to end the pregnancy. That would upset her too much. I’ve said only vaguely that there were infractions and that Ned and I don’t love each other. But that’s an obstacle whose scale, she seems to feel, falls short of the requirements for divorce.
My mother’s loyal and chooses to respect my wishes—most recently not to let Ned learn that Lena and I were coming. But she dislikes subterfuge of any kind, which goes against both her instincts and her ethical code; she can’t shake off her early positive impressions of Ned, probably shaped by his good looks and the refined manners he affects in certain company (initially acquired from books on etiquette so he could pass among the rich as one of their own; then honed by practical experience). I believe she’s always thought of Ned as that nice, handsome boy.
And of course my father is now effectively neutral.
My brother, on the other hand, has never trusted Ned; when I first introduced them he said to me privately, “Well, he’s sure as shit white! That is some Crest toothpaste, bright-white shit you got yourself there!” He said it in a joking fashion, grinning at me affectionately and cuffing my arm to take the sting off. I knew what he meant: Ned’s whiteness, unlike Solly’s or mine, has a fifties Boy Scout aspect. It seems to extend deeper than his skin, which is as unblemished as his straight and beautifully formed teeth. And as the months and years passed Solly never warmed to Ned—for which I was eventually glad.
“I can imagine,” said my mother weakly.
“I miss them. I really do. I fully understand, Lindsay, you don’t like to get into a difficult position, an intermediary position, and I respect that and I would never ask it of you. I just—I miss them”—here a quaver came into his voice—“and I thought I’d feel a little better if I touched base with you. It’s a family time. That’s all.”
“It is, yes,” said my mother carefully, after a pause. “Well, Ned. I’m so sorry to hear you’re feeling lonely.”
“I’ve got to admit,” said Ned, sighing, “part of me just can’t believe she doesn’t mean to come back. Part of me still holds out hope. I’ve recommitted myself to the church, Lindsay, and to my faith. And marriage—as a sacrament . . .”
“Yes,” said my mother hastily. “Of course. I’m glad for your faith, Ned.”
“Faith is what pulls you through,” said Ned, “when nothing else will, just . . . nothing. I’ve had to face that, Lindsay. So in that way, this has been strengthening for me. For my relationship with God. At first I didn’t want to see how much I needed this to bring me back to Him . . .”
I felt a wave of nausea at Ned’s string of clichés and my mother’s vulnerability to them so I put down the receiver. I stood there in the hallway, the faint squawk of the conversation still audible, arrested by an image. Ned’s God was a life coach—the kind for whom you had to be at least a mid-six-figure earner. Ned’s God was a superstar, a braggart and a motivational speaker, presiding from an office whose walls were lined with awards, diplomas and framed pictures taken with celebrities. Ned’s God would have to take an interest in the workings of his personal ego.
Even Ned’s Lagerfeld cologne, I thought, would be a matter of no small interest to the God he conceived of.
I smiled at that and the movement of smiling let me lift the receiver again.
Thankfully the talk of religiosity had passed and Ned had moved on to a discussion of his electoral goals, his new mandate to serve the people, and his humble wish for Lena and me to be with him in what was, it turned out, chiefly a humanitarian crusade for public office. He deployed some pieces of text from his website, evoking the twin needs to restore values and build communities (wisely passing over those pieces of his rhetoric that would not jibe with my parents’ political leanings, moderate Democrat). He said the word humbled several times: he was humbled by the growing “grass-roots” support for his candidacy and also humbled by the “tireless dedication” of the campaign’s volunteers.
Finally, it seemed to me, he was quite humbled by his own humility.
Later I’d try to explain his cynicism to my mother, the connection between his recent discovery of the joys of piety and his career. It was painstaking because she doesn’t want to impute evil motives to anyone, much less a son-in-law and in spiritual matters—a generous but inconvenient aspect of her personality. I’d step lightly, not arguing my end too hard, but still she wouldn’t be entirely persuaded.
“I’d just ask, if you do talk to her over this holiday weekend,” said Ned mournfully, getting ready to wrap up, “I’d just ask that you give her my love. She doesn’t take my calls anymore, and so I can’t . . . say it to her myself. But I want to, Lindsay. You know? I may not have given her the . . . well, the full and complete attention that she obviously needed. I know that now. If I had it to do again, I would. There were pressures, of course . . . but I shouldn’t have let my passion for my work come between us. I’d try as hard as I could to give her the attention that she really needs.”
There were subtle stresses on certain words. And I knew. I knew he knew not only that I was in the house, but also that I was listening.
“WELL, DEAR,” said my mother, coming in after she hung up. “Ned tells me he misses you. I must say he didn’t say much about his little girl. I think that’s very strange.”
Probably the harshest thing she’s ever said about Ned.
I mulled it over in my bed that night, what advantage he hoped to gain by calling. If he was letting me know he was watching, why? The element of stealth had been sacrificed, which must mean he wouldn’t be showing up in person. So there was that.
I thought of his false regretful tone, saying the full and complete attention that she obviously needed. The implication, not too deeply buried, that I was secretly demanding, that I was a woman with hidden and deep reserves of need, was intended less for my mother than for me—for me to get a taste of poison, to see how sly he could be.
Maybe coming here physically was too much of a risk, though it was hard to believe his contest for the Alaska state senate was going to expose him to the media in far-off Rhode Island. He’s egotistical, but not unrealistic.
But he knows Solly sees through him, and likely he didn’t want to have to deal with my family—whose money was still in play for him—on their own ground.
I lay restless on the bed I shared with Lena, who was snoring lightly. I listened to the radiator knock. In the end I decided that, along with laying the groundwork with my mother for our eventual “reconciliation,” Ned must want me to feel a threat. To know that he can still touch me.