Schroder: A Novel (12 page)

“Sure,” I called. “That makes sense.”

“All righty, then,” she said, and clapped her hands. The dogs ran off, glancing back at us. The woman turned and labored back toward her porch. I once again surveyed the view—the splintery farmhouse, the lake, my daughter, dew netted in her hair.

“Excuse me!” I called, scything my way toward the old woman, until I managed to rip myself free of the field. I swatted
the grass from my pant legs. She blinked back at me with opaque blue eyes. “Pardon me for being so slow to respond. My daughter and I—” The field spat forth Meadow, looking impish with thistles in her hair. “My daughter and I are taking a little road trip together and we do, actually
do
need a place to stay. For a day or two before we head on.”

The woman’s eyes shifted vaguely in Meadow’s direction. “How did you hear about me? Someone in town?”

“No,” I said. “No, to be honest. I don’t even know which town you’re talking about. We’ve been driving all night.”

The old woman looked disappointed. “The thing is, I like people to come recommended. You never know. It’s just me out here. You never know.”

“Oh, I totally understand. But we’re just a dad and his little girl, who needs a place to change out of her pj’s. She could use a nice little cabin to rest and change.”

The woman nodded, but I could tell now she had no idea Meadow was wearing a nightgown. Aha. She was perfect; she couldn’t even
see
. I redoubled my efforts.

“This might sound like a whole lot of hooey to you,” I said, “but I believe we
were
recommended. By the land. We were drawn to it. Sorry—” I squeezed my eyes with my fingers. “I’ve been driving all night. I completely understand your policy. Come on, sweetheart.”

“Well,” the woman said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “you can come and have a look at Cabin Two. Cabin One is rented, so you don’t get a choice. I don’t know”—the woman spoke to the ground as she walked—“the other one is rented to someone
else
who wasn’t recommended.”

“The economy is terrible,” I said, taking Meadow’s hand. “We’ve all lost so much.”

“I don’t offer breakfast or any conveniences,” the woman continued. “I don’t have innerweb. Hell, I don’t even have a phone. But most guests, to tell the truth, seem to get a kick out of that. Where you from?”

I squeezed Meadow’s hand, gave her a wink. “Canada,” I said.

Meadow’s eyes widened, then narrowed with conspiracy.

The old woman led us down a gravel path that ended at the lake in a small horseshoe beach with hard gray sand. On either side of this beach stood what looked like two refurbished tool sheds spruced up with a little latticework. The chocolate brown structures were so small that they appeared as two dollhouses standing in the woods. The old woman grappled for a key ring on her belt and shouldered open the door. Meadow ran inside and bounced upon one of the narrow, iron-framed beds. The room was musty and unswept and smelled of wet wool. An oval rope rug lay on the floor, and a dozen small apothecary bottles lined the sill of the cabin’s single window in the dimness.

“Well?” the old woman waited. “What do you say?”

What did I say? What
should
I have said? Should I have said no—no, we’d better turn around and go home? I failed to save my marriage, and I failed to protect my rights as a father, and I failed in my resolve in so many ways, and now my exceptionally intelligent child must return to Our Lady of Chronic Fatigue and her deadening education, and her conventional grandparents, and her merciless mother, and we must never speak of this, and must never wonder what we would have gained if we had just said yes? And I! Should I have said, Actually, I’m needed back at my rental on New Scotland Ave. so that I can spend another evening in the shower stall scrubbing
the soap scum off the sealant with a toothbrush, a glass of Canadian Club nestled in the soap basket?

I stepped inside the tiny cabin and sneezed from the visible allergens.

“Thank you,” I said, pumping the old woman’s hand. “We love it.”

WHEN IN DOUBT, DON’T

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
.”

“
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
.