They say the recession made people look inward. Out of work, folks suddenly had time on their hands to contemplate the fabric of their souls. People who had driven themselves into the ground for decades were suddenly baking bread, reading poetry, creating sand mandalas, and asking probing questions of their priests and rabbis. I’m not saying it was good for us. I’m just saying we tried to make the best of it.
As for me, I guess history will count me among the legions of promising young Realtors whose careers were in ascension when the real estate bubble burst. Throughout 2006–2007, I had been selling properties at a steady clip. Just ranches and bungalows in North Albany, condos in refurbished multifamilies in Pine Hills. Small-fry, starter homes, but lots of them. Not bad for someone who was barely trying. At my best, I was representing ten to fifteen properties at a time, all of which vanished from the market before the next insert in the Sunday paper. I was doing so well that I simply stopped taking calls. My success—albeit in a field for which I had little respect—appealed to my latent exceptionalism. And so, although it was the recession that brought me low, I was well into the process of subverting my career when it struck. In fact, it was probably at the pinnacle of my career (Clebus & Co. Realtor of the Month February 2007) when I lost interest. Having proved myself so handily, it was my nature to grow bored and look for a new challenge.
The moment Meadow was born, I knew she was exceptional. First of all, she didn’t cry. Although I understand that a newborn crying is a sign of life and of vigor, I dreaded the cliché of it. To be honest, I had little interest in her until that moment. I never really wanted children. That is, I never really wanted children, but I wasn’t prepared to take a stand about it. I didn’t not want children. But Meadow didn’t cry when she was born, and this piqued my interest. I peered at her in the silver scale as she punched at the emptiness, and I thought, I’ll be damned, there’s something in this.
Then I let two years go by before investing more than a passing interest in her. She was a sweet but somehow not yet relevant presence, not yet here. Besides, she was yours, clamped to your breast. A father gets the message.
And so I didn’t sweat fatherhood much those early years. I was a provider. It made me proud that I could give you time at home with the baby. I enjoyed my erratic work schedule and used it to further my recreational soccer career. I became friends with my clients and with them took three-hour lunches in the winter, spontaneous trips to Saratoga in the summers. I often came home at the end of the day with cleats over one shoulder, skipping my way up the stairs, and until I heard Meadow’s crowing from behind the apartment door, I sometimes forgot that I even had a baby.
You, of course, Laura, had changed. Meadow was your life. After you gave birth to her, you spent a disheveled year at home. You mashed your own baby food, fretted about environmental poisons, and generally ignored your careerist impulses. Sometimes, when I came home, the kitchen was chaos, as if it had been ransacked, with no sign of either of you. I would climb the stairs, and there at the top, in the steamy bathroom, you and little Meadow would be secreted in the bathtub together, clothes—your big blousy shirts and her little onesies—strewn like lovers’ clothes across the threshold.
It doesn’t take much effort to go along with someone else’s vision of life. For Christ’s sakes it doesn’t take much effort to go along with anything. But then, one day, a force of reckoning comes to your door demanding a word with you. For me, that day occurred when I came home from soccer and Meadow—eighteen months of age, a whisper of a being—pointed to my sweaty face and said, “Daddy rains.” It made me pause, just as I had when she didn’t cry. How does a child so young compose such a pretty sentence? She looked up at me. I was thirty-four—not an old man, but old enough to spy the burnt edges on the scroll of my life. This child. Did some clue to my life lie here?
So for me, for us, the economic slowdown presented an opportunity for spiritual growth in the form of me going bust and you getting a coveted job at the new experimental charter school in North Albany. By springtime of ’09, the real estate market was as dry as a desert. It seemed as if its previous health, the happy exchange of sellers and buyers, was a fairy tale. And this is how I came to be Stay-at-Home Dad of the Year. This is how I came to be left on the porch that fall with my three-year-old child, who was really a stranger to me, while her mother drove off in my company car, looking very pretty, actually, in a flounced blouse and touchingly mature pearl earrings.
Do I remember my first days alone with Meadow? I sure do. I remember looking down at her, her thumb snug in her mouth, her Stinky Blanket under the other arm, and me filled with complete terror. The neighborhood was as silent as a tomb. The leaves on the oak trees were still. An acorn pinged off the hood of a car. I could hear my blood in my ears. I waited for someone to approach down the street—anyone. I longed to make the sort of meaningless small talk I was so good at. How would we fill a day, two people with such a different sense of fun? I felt overwhelming pressure to do something outrageous or entertaining. I worried that she would just pick up Stinky Pillow and walk away from me. What I didn’t know was that she was helplessly bound to me already. It was me who could have wandered away from her. I could have left her outside of the fire station and walked away and—after a year or two of effortful self-justification—would barely have thought of her again.9 My daughter stood barely looking at me, as if embarrassed by her position, the ligature of her polka-dotted underpants visible above the elastic of her corduroy rompers. My heart flipped. How abandonable a child is.
With this vague gleaning of one another’s vulnerabilities, we were off. We quickly exhausted the territory of the apartment, whose dolls and crayons had always bored me. To be outside was better. We both could breathe there. We played in the wet sandbox and the wet grass. We discovered that we could stand inside the hedge that bordered our property and thereby go unseen by the mail carrier. We discovered that on the other side of the hedge, summer’s late blackberries still clung to their scary-looking vines. We debated whether or not the hedge was ours and therefore the blackberries were ours also. (We decided yes.) We found, in the neighbor’s yard, an overgrown garden. We discovered that the scent of mint leaves, when crushed between thumb and forefinger, stayed on the skin for hours. We made grass stew. I noticed that my daughter was able to combine her mother’s scrupulous attention to detail with her father’s relentless sense of wonder. I came to see that her apparent ordinariness (her fondness for glitter and for high-pitched screams of excitement, etc.) was a kind of camouflage for the truer, inner child burdened by extraordinary perception. The child—I quickly came to see—was gifted.
O tiny imitator! Compact mirror! Within days Meadow was using words and phrases that I had used casually, almost aloud to myself, thinking she had not understood. A boo-boo was a laceration. A burp was an eructation. Acorns were ubiquitous. I never talked down to her. I had always loved words. My early experiences learning English satisfied me, if nothing else did, by the language’s interesting consonance with German. And so, almost casually, I threw in some foreign words, phrases from Spanish, Japanese, and even my buried native tongue. She retained every word. Anything you threw at her stuck. Naturally I wondered what else she might be capable of.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G.
One day, I sat her down with some old Clebus stationery and several sharpened pencils.
“This,” I began, “is an A. The sound” (I said) “of A is ah or the sharper aa, as in cat. If you add a y, the sound is the same as how you say the letter—ay. Like day.”
“Aaay,” she said. “Can I have a graham cracker?”
“Sure you can. Just as soon as we finish what we’re doing. B. B sounds like buh. Buh.”
“What other words start with the sound buh?”
“Hamburger,” she said.
“Good try. Try again.”
“Bug.”
“Bug! Yes! Bug.”
H-I-J-K-LMNO-P.
And by the end of that fall, she could read. She was three years old.
Is it now safe to say that I made my share of mistakes? Sure. Can I now say freely that she took a couple of knocks in my care? That twice I lost her in the Grand Union—I had to do the grocery shopping, too—and she had to be raised on the PA system? That once, at home, we were visited by the fire department for something unwise we did with the smoke detector in the name of science? But the thing I will never apologize for is teaching her to read. I don’t care how it makes me look.
Ask her; she’ll tell you. We had fun together. Our days were full. I was getting the hang of parenting. I was no longer bitter about the busted real estate market or my lack of earning potential. I could accept the unique humiliation of asking my wife for pocket money. I even unearthed my manuscript from beneath its sward of bills and took up—at nap times—my independent research. And all this should have been good but for a single problem.
Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y, and Z.
“Where have you been?” you said, your face in a literal sweat, as you stepped out of the apartment and onto the porch. “I’ve been losing my mind here, Eric. Pacing around for two hours. Two hours! It’s dark. It’s November.” You fell to your knees and began to search your daughter’s body with your hands, making her laugh. She was bundled in her parka, hood up and cinched. I was confused. Why wouldn’t she be fine?
You looked up at me. “Do you even know what time it is, Eric?”
“I guess we lost track of time, hon. We’re sorry.”
“We’re sorry? She isn’t in charge of getting you guys home on time. Jesus. I was out of my mind with worry. You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have left a note? My poor peanut. Are you cold? Where were you?”
“The liberary,” Meadow said from behind her scarf.
You sighed, routed. As a middle school teacher, you had to support library use.
“Come in, come in,” you said, ushering us into the apartment, which glowed with golden light. “You two worry me sick.”
Throughout the winter, this sort of conversation repeated itself with little variation. I could see your evident exasperation with my time management, lack of schedule, etc., but as far as I was concerned, I was a trustworthy guardian—a man of strong build, multilingual, a good problem solver—so what were you so wound up about? As far as I could tell, a parent got through his or her day via a mix of structure, improvisation, and triage. This took complete concentration. Thinking about you or about how you would have done it would have been an unhelpful distraction. Did you want us to stay home all day watching the window?
But OK. I really don’t mean for this document to devolve into the jeremiad that I was never permitted to deliver in family court. I readily accept the following charges against me, that:
a) I often forgot to leave notes detailing our whereabouts.
b) I sometimes did not remember how much you wanted to see Meadow at the end of the day and therefore our whereabouts should have been at home.
c) I occasionally omitted mentioning certain not-so-age-appropriate activities or side trips we took, which you mostly found out anyway from some pal of yours who saw us.
d) I was bad at following instructions, especially as pertained to schedules and quotas (e.g., servings of fresh fruit), and probably, yes, I had a certain passive-aggressive reaction to these rules and hid my resentment of them behind a friendly absentmindedness.
But I tried. I took care of her.
One day, while you were correcting me for some oversight after your return home, I watched your pretty face in its shrewish contortions, and your words sort of fell away, and I saw that you were jealous. You were jealous that I got to be with Meadow while you had to content yourself with other people’s children. This realization softened me. I felt bad for you, and for what seemed like the Pyrrhic victory of being a working mother. I apologized for teaching Meadow foreign words that we would then use as code in public. I saw, as you did, that this was a wedge. And so I tried to include you more and leave you more notes and account for every hour we spent, and in general, to be smotheringly nice to you. Your happiness was still my central goal. I wanted you to see that you had everything you wanted. A noble job. A gifted child. A husband who was secure enough to stay at home with his child for a gap year. And a home—we did have a lovely home—a rented duplex on the top two floors of a baby blue tenement on Morning Street.
You cheered up by springtime, but there was still a part of you I couldn’t please. There was a part of you I couldn’t reach. I began to wonder if what you wanted was another child. Maybe you wanted another chance. Maybe you wanted to make sure one kid belonged to you, only to you. I understood that. I understand possession. After all, I wanted you to belong only to me. I brought up the issue that spring, one night in the kitchenette.
“More children?” you said, turning around, a dish in your hand. “Why do you say ‘more’? How many ‘more’ do you want?”
I took the dish from you to dry it. Again we were cleaning up and trying to talk at the same time, something that probably contributed to our irritability.
“One more, then. One more child. You want to, Laur?”
You looked at me for a long moment. Then you turned back toward the sink, saying, “Oh, Eric.” My name, as you turned, was swallowed by the running water. I watched you sort through the dishes caked in spaghetti sauce and waited for you to elaborate.
“You seem discontented,” I said.
“Discontented.”
“Do you object to that word too?”
“Yes,” you said, “I do.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s so cold is what’s wrong with it. Discontented. It’s a word someone would use in Masterpiece Theatre.”
“It’s Latinate,” I said, shrugging.
“I don’t care. I’m your wife, Eric. It’s just you and me here. There’s no audience. The word you should use with me is sad. Or unhappy.”
“OK.” I stacked another dried dish on the countertop. “Are you unhappy?”
You considered it. “No.”
“Well, good.”
“Lonely sometimes.”
“You’re lonely? Why are you lonely?”
“I don’t know. I feel lonely a lot. When we don’t understand each other. I sometimes think we aren’t interested in understanding each other, like we used to be. Sometimes I don’t understand the things you do. Sometimes you seem like a stranger to me. I can’t figure out if I’ve gotten lazy or if there’s a part of you that’s hidden from me. Tell me I’m crazy.”
You looked over your shoulder at me then. I stared back at you.
“I’m just me,” I said. “Eric Kennedy. No big mystery.”
You were slow to turn away.
“Maybe I’m just tired,” you said, rubbing your temples with wet hands. “I don’t know, Eric. I don’t know what’s wrong. I think about it so much, but I never get anywhere.”
I watched your shoulders as you returned to the dishes—scrubbing, rinsing, placing them dripping in the rack. You did, in fact, look lonely. This seemed to me impossible. Impossible in the sense of wondrously bad—inconceivable. It seemed inconceivable that two lonely people could strand one another in the same kitchen. The naked conversations in which we spent our first year abed were not so long ago. God, Laura, I was interested. I came up behind you and put my arms around you. I rested my head against yours. We stayed that way for a long time.
“I’m totally devoted to you,” I said.
“I know,” you said.
“I don’t want anything more than this.”
“It feels good when you hold me,” you said. “It feels good. Don’t move.”