God and Jetfire (35 page)

It was, in fact, what I wished I had done when I was pregnant the first time. Consulted no one; considered Jevn but listened to myself. I might have kept him, or I might have given him up a few weeks later when I was really ready. It didn't solve anything now, but lying in bed broken inside and out, I felt powerful, like I was beginning to make out a mysterious terrain, and I'd planted some kind of stake in it.

*   *   *

Beginning that March, I caught glimpses of San Francisco's teeth as they snapped at me, blindly, through the cold haze that hovered about Sutro Tower, just visible through the high window above my bed where I lay, avoiding painkillers and swallowing turmeric on a jade pillow and an amber mat. The city and all its inhabitants were floating lightly on the back of an animal, living for the day. I turned thirty somewhere within the fog, celebrating with a twelve-piece mariachi, two old Iranians, and an Argentinean, each of whom took a bite out of a candle-punched Little Debbie they'd run out and bought at the gas station next door. It felt fitting that I didn't know anyone present, that I was in a Mexican bar with Middle Eastern men, and that the weather was nothing like January. The deeper my affection for this strange place, the nearer I came to its underside. Amid all the weightlessness, the teeth were real. You couldn't tie the city down and not feel it was looking for every opportunity to throw you, wild thing that it was, earthquake-prone and climatic lone wolf, lest you think you own it more than the next person basking in its wonder. Its special skill was to make you, and everyone else, feel like the only one.

*   *   *

The accident forced me to delay plans to go to the East Coast, and so by the time I got there, it had been eight months since I last saw Jonathan. When I arrived, still learning my body's new limits, he was inhabiting his own body more fully. Cartwheels and forward rolls. And he'd grown closer to his siblings. They were always playing together in ways that made room for everyone's interests and inclinations.

“Pretend I'm Black Beauty!” Sarah was a racehorse, preparing for a derby.

“Pretend I'm Jetfire!” Jonathan was a Transformer—part robot jet, part farmer boy. Andrew was a silent but concentrated threshing machine, pulling up grass with both hands, sometimes fistfuls together, sometimes one at a time. Or, not a threshing machine, but a helicopter, he corrected me. One that operates upside down to chop the grass, to feed to Black Beauty.

“Sarah, pretend that Black Beauty tells Jetfire—”

“Jonathan, Black Beauty is a horse, and horses can't talk.”

“Well, Black Beauty is also a Disney character,” Jonathan reasoned, “and so is Garfield, and Garfield is an animal that can talk!” My son was always changing, and I was always learning him anew, but this was consistent: he was perpetually looking for loopholes. Sarah ignored him, preparing for her race. Tromping around on all fours in the grass, whinnying. Jonathan began to align himself with her.

“Transformers can't fly in horse races, Jonathan! It's not fair. It's only for horses!”

Jonathan shrugged. Unfair advantages were easy come, easy go. Then that game dissolved, or evolved into another.

“Pretend I'm having a baby,” Sarah said.

“And pretend I'm flying a jet!” Jonathan elaborated.

And magically, they merged. Sarah was a woman giving birth to a baby. Jonathan was the pilot of the crashing plane on which she was delivering. Andrew was still, contentedly, a helicopter–threshing machine. The plane crashed and they rolled down the hill and piled on top of one another like real brothers and sisters. Elbows and ankles tangled and indistinguishable. Blissfully unaware that their bodies would not only isolate them from one another but would someday betray them altogether.

I helped weave the scenarios together, adding elements or story lines as needed. I was the race announcer, then a flight attendant. I had to think fast. They were no longer satisfied by simply being turned upside down or chased. There had to be a story to connect things, and it had to be compelling to all of them. At some point, I became the woman on the plane who was giving birth. Sarah was still interested in what it looked like, and Jonathan still had no such interest. Childbirth for him served only to heighten the drama of a crashing plane.

“Attention!” he said. “Attention, ladies and gentlemen, the engine is on fire, and we are turning around because someone is in labor. AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH crassshsshshshshshshshshshhhhhhh!!!!!”

*   *   *

When the story fell apart, we went inside and the kids scattered. Up the stairs or into the playroom, in all directions. Paula offered me a cup of coffee and I lingered in the kitchen with her.

“Isn't he looking so much more like a little
boy
?” she said giddily, like it was a good secret. He didn't like being talked about, so she told me quietly that the latest thing was, he'd just learned the concept of having something in common, and he was applying it all the time, like the whole world was a matching game—but we quit talking when we heard Jonathan leaping down the stairs. He stopped short at the kitchen door and looked at us silently for a moment, like he really didn't want to know what we were talking about. He asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I put down my coffee and followed him.

My hip was burning and I was trying hard not to limp, but Jonathan strode, loose and comfortable, and I felt proud—not because I was his mother but because I had the sense I was being seen in the neighborhood with one of the cool kids. He looked around, scanning the terrain, like he'd know an opportunity if he saw one.

“How's soccer going?” I asked him, nonchalant as he was, making conversation. But I was genuinely curious. Paula told me he didn't like it, and I wanted to know what he'd say about something he didn't like.

“It's okay,” he said, pointing us across the street with an easy flick of his wrist.

“Yeah?” I was trying to be cool, but. “Does that mean you like it?”

“I like it,” he said with a shrug, “but I don't really like going to practice. But I have to
pretend
I like it because there are adults there. And I have to pretend I like all the other kids.” He was using his hands to explain it to me, his palms facing upward, then rolling his hands on his wrists to expose his palms anew, and then again, with every point of his explanation.

“Oh!” I said. I was charmed by his forthrightness. And I could relate. I remembered getting confused as a child, always doing things I didn't want to do because I couldn't know until I tried, and I was supposed to give everything a chance. I knew that for Paula and Erik it wasn't a big deal whether he played soccer or any sport at all. That they had probably encouraged him to have an open mind and a positive attitude and to try it out; that's what parents were supposed to do. But understanding your own desire could be so complicated, what a fine line it was, between healthy self-doubt and negating yourself entirely.

“Well, I don't like soccer at all,” I said simply, so he would feel free to say it.

He smiled broadly. “Something in
common
!”

Then he turned to see if I'd registered it, too. I smiled back.

As we walked, going nowhere in particular, I would have liked to have talked about the deeper things we had in common, the inescapable things like our blood and our breath. But while he marveled at our similarity, I was forced to consider something else. That we now stood at such a distance that we could reflect on each other; something in common was an incidental bridge that gave a view of the vast space between us.

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

I woke up to another beautiful day in San Francisco. A beautiful day, tempered by a midstride shivering down my right leg, the weird warmth in my calf, a clicking weakness as my hip shifted loosely in its joint. The sound of the leaves when the wind blew was the first hint of fall, and I wanted more than any other time of the year to run. Fall was the year's sunset. And there
was
a fall in San Francisco, and that I could detect the subtlest signs of it made me feel at home. By now, more than a year since I arrived, I'd seen a full cycle, the city in her grandest and in her tenderest, early-morning moments.

For a moment I lay in the dark. I turned to orient myself and gasped: the full light of day was glowing around the edges of the blinds. Greg closed them at night, even though his bedroom cantilevered like a nest into the cool shade of a ficus tree. I had intense FOMO for morning light, but he was content to miss it entirely. We had been dating for a couple of months, but lately I was talking a lot about my plans to return to the East Coast.

“Do you know how hard it is to be in a relationship with someone who is always leaving?” he would ask me.

My experience of San Francisco had radically changed after the accident. For weeks, I could do little more than sit in my window, watching the day pass. Now I was biking occasionally, wearing cycling shoes that let me both pull and push using only my left leg. But what was drawing me back was recent news that my grandfather's health was declining. I felt like I should put myself back within range of my family.

We got up and got dressed, and as soon as we stepped outside, I said, “It's
so
beautiful today!”

He sighed and smiled, annoyed. “Can't you think of something more precise to say?”

He would kick me out on a Saturday morning so that he could work, when it seemed self-evident to me the only thing to do was to jump on his motorcycle and head north to the headlands. I wanted to work, wanted to practice mandolin, but the day came in my windows and pulled me out by my rib cage, despite my injury. Sometimes even the night did, like one night when the moon was almost full and the air was unusually mild, and I rode my bike to his house, pounded on his door, and, when he opened it, invited him for a ride to the ocean. We would pass through the world in its midweek slumber and see the buffalo in Golden Gate Park on the way. How magical to find them snoring in the moonlight! He had twisted his face incredulously and cited the time and the day of the week—
exactly
the reasons I wanted to go—as reasons we should not.

“I mean, your profession has to do with aesthetics,” he reminded me, “and yet every day you say it's beautiful. It seems like you could be more articulate, and then maybe we could have some kind of conversation about it. As it is, you declare so emphatically that it's beautiful, I have no choice but to agree! Okay, it's
beautiful
. It's cloudy; it's beautiful! It's sunny; it's beautiful! How can you expect me to really engage with that?”

I sank into myself as we walked to the coffee shop. I remembered the time my sister took me to a formal dinner in China, where there were strict traditions we had to observe. She elbowed me away from the glass with the tallest napkin—it was for the guest of honor—and she whispered that I shouldn't eat the rice that would be served at the end of the meal; that would insult the host, who would think we were still hungry. I watched her quietly for other cues. The dinner began when the host placed a carrot, finely carved into the shape of a bird, on the turntable and sent it spinning. The bird made the rounds, greeting every guest, and when the device came to a stop, the host handed it to me—
me!
Not the guest of honor!

I took it in both hands and thanked the host, but everyone kept looking at me, like I hadn't yet done what I was expected to do. I couldn't see my sister clearly out of the corner of my eye. I cradled the bird in my hands and looked around, smiling graciously, but they were waiting for me to do something. And so I held the bird tightly in one hand and took a bite. What else do you do with a carrot bird? But I knew right away that wasn't what I was supposed to do because all the jaws dropped. I looked at the headless bird in my hand and had to get rid of it, so I chewed and swallowed the whole thing as fast as I could while everyone just watched.

My boyfriend reminded me I had the wrong responses. I'd forever be a foreign guest chomping heads off birds instead of admiring them beside my plate, or whatever it was I was supposed to have done. Everyone else was built for this world. Beautiful things made them do sensible things like plan picnics or get married. But beauty imprisoned me, demanded a response. All my settings were miscalibrated. I loved things so much I destroyed them; I gave up the things I wanted most. Running was the most acceptable way I'd come up with to handle the beauty, and now it hurt to even walk.

I told Greg I'd try to be more precise, but inside I took another step toward the East Coast.

*   *   *

That fall I boarded a plane for Thanksgiving. It was, to my surprise, already winter in Boston. It took a moment for me to accept I'd missed an entire East Coast fall, and I resolved I wouldn't miss another. Erik picked me up alone from the airport; the kids were watching the end of Jonathan's basketball game. When we found them in the gym, Jonathan ran up to me and hugged me like he really knew me. I picked up Andrew, gave Sarah a hug, and as soon as we got back to the house, the kids and I took off for a walk in the woods.

Andrew rode on my shoulders. He was quiet and thoughtful, but he had no hesitation about doing dangerous things. When he jumped off a rock, Jonathan, always more circumspect, would jump off the same rock. Few things about Andrew were very much like Jonathan, or Sarah like either of them, and every part of that seemed good for everyone.

I introduced a game.

“If I see something beautiful, I'm going to point to it, and if you see something beautiful, you point to it. Look! There!” I pointed to the bright blue doors of a building.

“Yeah!” Andrew said, satisfied.

As we walked through the woods, Andrew pointed at a church, a bridge, the mill. Sometimes the rhythm of the game got ahead of him and he was pointing without contemplating, it seemed, whether he really thought something was beautiful.