Surprise Me (23 page)

Maybe he should stop shaving and grow a foot-long beard, let his hair have its own way and fall across his shoulders in busy waves, stop washing his clothes and dispense with all footwear. But he doesn’t do any of that. Instead he finds he takes better care of himself here in Winnock than he ever did before.

The walking everywhere has helped him lose twenty pounds. The fact that he has to shop and cook his own food now and that it is simple and fresh makes him feel better. Gordon Tibbett’s grocery has become his twice-weekly destination. And Marie, Gordon’s wife, who is old enough to be his mother and treats him that way, helps him choose what to buy and gives him tips on how to cook it.

Although their conversation never strays far from the culinary realm, she somehow lets him know she’s proud of him—for making it on his own, for turning a corner in his life—and Daniel has come to depend on these conferences in the middle of the produce aisle to anchor his week and point him in the right direction.

And he sleeps well at night! For the first time in over ten years.

All these things are a revelation to him—the waning of his anxiety, the feeling of well-being, the pleasure he takes in walking everywhere. Could it be that it has taken him fifty-six years and so many mistakes to find the life he should have been living all along?

The only thing he regrets is his loneliness, but he has formed a shaky truce with that. If the price he has to pay for peace, for his newly won freedom from anxiety, is isolation, he will make that bargain every time.

But then there is Alina—so close in physical proximity, just across the meadow, and so distant still.

Despite her admonition that first day that she had no time or inclination to be involved in his life, he tried the first few weeks to extend a tentative hand to his daughter. He would cross the meadow—the DMZ, as he thought of it—and show up at her studio door. Always knocking first, he would step gingerly across the threshold.

The spotted dog, some kind of beagle-bloodhound mix, he guessed, with its long, floppy ears and loose-jowled face, always curled up at Alina’s feet, would raise its head and growl, a low, sustained warning that he wasn’t wanted. And his daughter, hunched over the potter’s wheel, gently guiding a mound of clay up into a cylinder, one hand inside, the other matching on the outside surface, coaxing, urging the spinning clay into a delicate shape, wouldn’t look up.

“Knock, knock,” Daniel would say softly as he stood a few feet inside the barn, in an attempt to evoke a private joke they had shared at a time when all was well between them. “Knock, knock,” he would repeat hopefully.

At three and a half, Alina had become obsessed with knock-knock jokes. She had learned them from the older kids in her nursery school, and she would throw herself into Daniel’s arms when he walked through the door in the evening and demand, “Knock, knock, Daddy.”

“Knock, knock,” he would comply, frantically searching his brain for a new one.

“Who’s there?” Alina would ask.

“Ummmm…Lettuce!”

“Lettuce who?”

“Lettuce in, it’s cold out here.” Daniel would shiver with a convincing chill, and Alina would rock with laughter.

“Another one!” she’d demand.

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Figs.”

“Figs who?” she’d ask, her eyes big with anticipation.

“Figs the doorbell, it’s broken.”

And Alina would be gone, lost in a puddle of giggles. There was nothing better in the whole world, Daniel felt in those early years, than watching his tiny daughter hiccup with laughter.

But in New Hampshire, the soft repeating of “knock, knock” got him nowhere. Instead Alina, head bent to her task, would ask sharply, “What is it?” as if he were a deliveryman or an annoying salesman come to the wrong house. What did he expect, that she would remember, that she would want to participate in a childhood ritual that was twenty-five years old?

“Do you have a broom I can borrow?” he would ask, chastened. Or “a tea kettle,” or “a bar of soap…”

“Walk in to Don and Tom’s. You can’t keep borrowing things from me.”

She would never once look up at him. Never call him Dad. And he would feel dismissed. “Okay,” he would inevitably say, and shut the door of her studio, leaving Alina to work.

So he waited a while. He settled in. He watched her from across the meadow with longing. He didn’t think he was asking for a lot—a cup of coffee and some conversation once in a while. A meal together, maybe.

One day during the waning days of his first summer in Winnock, he was seated at his kitchen table, laptop in front of him as he made notes about his last year at Chandler, when Stefan and Isabelle had seemed to move in counterpoint to each other, Isabelle filling him up with hope and Stefan pulling him into the mire of despair. And he happened to look up, out one of his long uncurtained windows, to see an enormous animal—a moose, he realized after a second or two of wonder, six feet high at the shoulder if he was a foot—wading into Foyle’s Pond, seeking the cool comfort of the pool on a hot August day. Daniel had a perfect view as the bull slowly splashed his way toward the center of the water, his full antlers spreading out ridiculously from his head, four feet across. And slowly the animal sank below the surface till only those velvet-covered protrusions, like massive butterfly wings, rested on the water’s surface.

Daniel got up quietly but quickly, his first thought that he had to tell Alina, had to have her come see this. How extraordinary the animal! How majestic and impossible—those antlers! And then he stopped himself. He knew what she would say: she’s busy, she’s seen moose before, she doesn’t need to share anything with Daniel. She isn’t interested. And so he sat back down and watched the animal rouse itself and tread out of the pond in a stately march, dripping streams of water from its shaggy fur. A singular moose, whose presence revealed a solitary man.

The only thing Alina consented to do, and only because it was a necessity, was to drive him two nights a week to Spring Hill Community Adult School, where he taught a course in “The Novel.” The drive was usually conducted in stony silence. After weeks of attempted conversation, Daniel gave up. What was there to say when even his innocuous small talk was met with monosyllabic answers or, worse yet, mutterings and sighs? He could have understood her reluctance to engage with him if he had tried to delve into heavy-duty stuff—if he had wanted to revisit her childhood or impugn her mother or make excuses for his own behavior—but all he was asking from her was a polite conversation about local events or national news or a book she had read or even the weather. Of course he hoped that this impartial conversation might lead to a more intimate one, but he didn’t tip his hand. He deliberately kept the topics light, and Alina deliberately refused to engage.

Alina drove Daniel to his class stone-faced. Conversation about the possibility of rain wouldn’t change the way she felt about him one iota. He owed her an apology, a deeply felt, wholehearted apology. And that was not forthcoming.

When Daniel found a student to drive him to and from school, both father and daughter were relieved.

Daniel discovered, to his surprise, that he looked forward to those evening meetings. He found that he felt comfortable with his students. They were familiar to him, reminiscent of his mother’s friends, taking him back to his days in Erie.

They are middle-aged women, waitresses and school nurses and retired nursery school teachers and housewives who have raised their children and now have time to consider some minor pleasures for themselves, like reading. And like his mother they have a talent for making the best of things and not complaining when they do. Salt-of-the-earth women, some would call them.

And there is a core group who have taken his class each semester. Pauline, small and tightly wound, who always gets the conversation going with her idiosyncratic but definitive opinions, divorced for many years and working at the Granite State Diner for all that time. And Marge, whose soft and pillowy body is perfect for her numerous grandchildren and the infants and toddlers who come to her in-home day care. She is the conciliator in the group and is somehow able to reel in the conversation when it gets heated and contentious. And then there’s valiant Sarah, who never finished college but wishes she had, whose husband is at home and bedridden and whom she’s nursed without complaint for many years. Sarah comes to each class as a respite, grateful and happy for those hours each Monday and Thursday night that focus on anything but bedpans and medications. Her effort to dress up for the evenings—a little lipstick, small pearl earrings—isn’t lost on Daniel. And Bev, whom he sees every morning, her two boys raised and out of the house, one in the military and the other up at Granite State College in Concord, whose no-nonsense attitude endears her to everyone. It’s Bev who calls people on not finishing the assigned book or not having something to say. Everyone has to contribute, and Bev is the one to insist on participation. Without ever speaking about it, she and Daniel have formed an implicit team, both committed to reading and discussing and celebrating each two-hour class to its fullest.

Two years into Daniel’s stay in Winnock, word has gotten around that “The Novel” is a class worth taking, and its enrollment has grown to twelve students this September, the September Isabelle decides to get back in touch with Daniel.

Daniel runs the class like a book club. Each week the students are required to read one novel and come prepared to talk about it. They have agreed to alternate current fiction—
Memoirs of a Geisha, Cold Mountain,
Toni Morrison’s
Paradise
—with the classics he suggests:
Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness,
which he thinks will be challenging for the class, but he assigns it nonetheless. A paper is due at the end of the semester, which Daniel reads but doesn’t grade. Instead he writes lengthy personal comments, and they are more appreciated than any grade would be. He’s aware that these comments constitute “writing,” something he couldn’t have begun to do in Iowa or Colorado or all his years in Los Angeles at Chandler, when simply walking to campus took all the attention and energy he had.

And Daniel finds now that he’s expansive in the classroom, talking about what makes good writing, using plain words and plain thoughts that feel comfortable to him. And listening. To these women who have lived basic, mostly hard-fought lives and still have optimistic, often thoughtful things to say.

Someone, usually Bev, brings baked goods. There’s an old-fashioned plug-in coffeemaker that Daniel has appropriated from the school’s lunchroom and made a permanent fixture in his classroom. They take a ten-minute coffee break in the middle of the class, but the conversation just continues unabated, far more necessary than the muffins and coffee cake that accompany it.

It is here, during these four hours in his week, that Daniel’s loneliness abates for a while. During class and during the time he reads and responds to Isabelle’s e-mails.

After her confession that she no longer believes she can write, Daniel answers her right away.

Isabelle,

Who does?

Daniel

Daniel,

Don’t be glib. I’m pouring my heart out to you. At least take me seriously.

Isabelle

And Daniel stops himself from answering back quickly—and, yes, glibly—and thinks about what to say.

It’s well after lunchtime now at Bev’s, and it’s quiet in the empty shop. Bev is in the back, baking; she has the radio on to an oldies station, and Daniel can hear the Beatles’ poignant “Yesterday,” interspersed with the pinging of cookie sheets against the wooden baking tables and the slam of the large oven doors as Bev takes out her finished goods.

Daniel is alone at his round table beside the front window, laptop plugged into the Internet connection Bev was smart enough to install when it became available. He’s nearly as comfortable here as he is in his tiny cottage with its stone walls that cry in the wintertime. What to say to Isabelle?

Isabelle,

Whether your relationship with this transnational emergency worker has worked out or not has nothing to do with your ability to write. That is innate, within you, and already proven.

I am a witness to it. Don’t try to con me. I know what you’re capable of.

Daniel

Too harsh? Daniel wonders after he’s already hit Send. Too late to worry about it. He wrote what he believes about her. She should be able to take it in.

He paces in the small shop. “Bev!” he calls into the back, and she appears, her hands and forearms dusted with flour, obviously in midtask.

“Can I stay a while longer today? Would that be all right?”

“Bakery’s open. Anyone can stay as long as I’m open.”

“Okay. It’s just that…I want to see if I get a return e-mail.”

“Your student?”

“Yes.”

“A special student?”

“She has talent. That’s rare, you know.”

Bev nods, certain that there’s more to this than simply writing talent, but she doesn’t pursue it. It’s none of her business, even if she’s dying to know about this girl.

“Holler if you need something—I’m just in the back.”

He sits back down at his computer and there it is—Isabelle’s reply.

Daniel,

How can you be so dismissive?

Isabelle

Oh, no. She misunderstood.

Isabelle,

I’m trying to remind you of what is real. Of what you should be grateful for. Of what you can build on. It’s within you.

D.

Daniel,

Maybe. Maybe not. But, ultimately, so what? I have no access anymore. Certainly you of all people understand that. Just telling me I can do it doesn’t begin to solve the problem.