The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (242 page)

“Ariane!”

And now here’s Daddy after all, smiling and waving, coming toward me. He’s wearing shorts, sandals. There’s a breaching whale on the front of his T-shirt, sunglasses folded and hanging from the neckline. He’s tan, slimmer than when I saw him last.

It’s only when he approaches that I realize he hasn’t come alone. There’s a woman with him—a pretty, slim brunette. Fortyish, maybe. Nice tan. She’s wearing a loose-fitting blue top and paler blue cropped pants, the kind I’d wear if I wasn’t so short and stubby-legged. Is she Asian? Who is she? Why is she smiling at me? What’s going on?

Chapter Fourteen

Orion Oh

W
hen I get back to Viveca’s with the groceries, Ariane’s already up. Out on the deck, staring at the snatch of ocean you can see from where she’s standing. The sliders are open, so I can hear the birds singing in the trees, the surf lapping the shore in the distance. It’s cooler this morning, and breezy. She’s wearing her hair longer these days, and the breeze is lifting it a little, fluttering her nightgown. Pregnant: I still can’t believe it. Wasn’t it just the day before yesterday when I was down on my hands and knees in the living room, giving her and her brother pony rides?

I glance over at the microwave clock. Five after nine. I’m glad she slept in a little. She had a long travel day yesterday, and by the time we got back here, she looked beyond exhausted. Crashed early, even by East Coast time. We talked a little about her decision to get pregnant and then went up to bed. . . . She’s heavier now, and that can’t be all baby weight. Not at this stage. She took that last breakup pretty hard, and she’s always been an emotional eater, poor kid. But she’s such a pretty girl, as pretty as she is sweet. Of the three of them, Ariane’s always been the kindest and most level-headed, although I’m not sure how well thought out this big decision of hers was. Raising a child is hard enough when there’s two of you, let alone just one. My mother didn’t have it easy. And neither did I, for that matter. My
nonno
did his best, but it wasn’t the same. No dad to help me with my Pinewood Derby car or teach me how to ride a two-wheeler. The pain in my gut about my absentee father had gradually curdled into a hatred of him because of his defection. But it’s her life. I just wish she lived a little closer to home so we could pitch in after the baby gets here. Gets
there
, I mean. She’s so committed to that soup kitchen of hers that she probably won’t consider coming home. I can at least suggest it, though. I’m still her dad. I don’t
have
to sell the house.

“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty,” I call out to her.

She turns, looks in and gives me that beautiful, brave smile of hers. “Hi, Daddy. Where have you been?”

“I drove down to the little market in Wellfleet for a few things.” Sleeping Beauty: wish I hadn’t just called her that. Last night, she told me the reason she decided to go the sperm donor route was because she came to the conclusion that a handsome prince was probably never going to show up.

She comes inside. Walks into the kitchen and gives me a hug, rests her head on my shoulder. “It’s so good to see you,” I tell her. “I’ve missed you.”

“Missed you, too, Dad.” As she breaks away, I see that her eyes are glistening with tears. She pulls out one of the stools at the counter and sits.

“So anyway, I got you some bananas. And this.” I hold up the box of Cream of Wheat. “When your mother was pregnant with you and your brother, that was about all she could stomach for a while. She ate so many bananas that, after you guys were born, I was relieved to see you weren’t monkeys.”

She smiles. “Thanks, Daddy. I can’t promise I’ll be able to keep them down, but I appreciate the effort. Mama had morning sickness, too?”

“With you and your brother, yes. Not so much with Marissa.” Ariane says something about someone’s Y chromosome theory, which I don’t get. But before I can ask her about it, she wants to know if Annie breast- or bottle-fed her and her brother. “She breast-fed all three of you. Andrew gave her a little trouble at first, but you took right to it. You were a regular chow hound.”

“Still am.” She laughs. There’s another thing I wish I hadn’t said. We haven’t seen each other in almost two years, and so much had happened since then. Think before you open your mouth, Dr. Oh, I advise myself. Proceed with caution the way you did with all those college kids you sat across from in your office. . . . But hey, she’s my daughter, not one of my patients. I need to relax, let this initial awkwardness between us subside. I may be her
divorced
dad now, and she may be pregnant, but we both just need to get reestablished. And if I’m too tentative with her, she might get the wrong idea—assume I’m judging her about her pregnancy. Which I’m not, really. It’s her life, not mine.

Unpacking the groceries, I hold up the bottle of ginger ale I’ve bought her. “Picked this up, too. It’s supposed to be good for upset stomachs.” She nods. Says she had some on the plane yesterday and it helped. “Well, let me get your breakfast started. I think I’ll make myself some scrambled eggs. You want some? With some toast, maybe?”

She shakes her head, says she’s still pretty squeamish. “My doctor says not to worry, though—that my body gives the fetus what it needs first. Pregnancy’s sort of amazing that way, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it is. Nothing more amazing than the human body.” I take out a saucepan, scan the directions on the Cream of Wheat box. “You look rested, hon. Did you sleep okay last night?”

She nods. “My head hit the pillow and I didn’t wake up until twenty minutes ago, not even to pee. That mattress is so comfortable, I probably could have stayed in bed all day.”

“Pretty good accommodations here at Chez Viveca, eh?”

“I’ll say. I didn’t really notice so much last night, but when I walked around this morning, I was like oh, my god. This place is beautiful.”

“The best that money can buy. How do you like the artwork?”

“It’s incredible. Before you got back, I was looking at those floral photographs over the fireplace. They’re signed Mapplethorpes. I can’t imagine what those must have cost. What kind of flowers are they? Orchids?”

“The one on the left is. I’m not sure about the other one. Jack-in-the-pulpit maybe. Or jonquils. Your mom’s the expert in that department.”

She nods. Says that, other than Mapplethorpe, she doesn’t recognize any of the artists’ names.

“Me neither. That’s her specialty, I guess: painters and sculptors who were untrained, out there on the periphery. She collects them and promotes them like crazy. Drives up the value of their work.”

“Like she did with Mama,” Ariane notes.

“Exactly.”

She gets off the stool and walks over to the table in the living room. Smiles at the sculpture sitting on top of it. Political satire in papier-mâché, I guess you’d call it. Three two-foot-high figures, their heads and bodies transposed. Bin Laden’s wearing a white late-Elvis jumpsuit. Kim Jong-il’s suited up in an NBA uniform. Ahmadinejad’s a cross-dresser in a Madonna getup, complete with conical bra. “This is funny,” she says.

“Yeah, isn’t it? Especially in light of what Ahmadinejad said in his speech at Columbia. You hear about that?” She shakes her head. “Apparently, there’s no such thing as homosexuality in Iran. Maybe that’s why your mother and Viveca have decided not to honeymoon there.”

The smile drops off her face, Annie’s late-in-life lesbianism having just entered the room with us, thanks to me. “Yeah, right,” she says.

To rescue the mood, I tell her that one of the late night hosts—Jimmy Kimmel, I think it was—referred to Ahmadinejad as Scruffy McWindbreaker. It restores her smile. “Late night TV, Daddy?” she says. “That doesn’t sound like you. You were always such an early bird.”

“Well, when you’re an old retired geezer who doesn’t have to get up and go to work anymore, you can be the master of your own schedule.”

She tells me I’m not a geezer. Asks if it feels weird not to work.

“It did at first. But I’ve kind of been getting my bearings since I’ve been up here. Going to bed when I want, running, reading. And thinking about things I never had much time to think about before.”

“Like what?”

“Family stuff for one thing—my paternal side. I know a lot about my Italian relatives, but almost nothing about the Ohs. Mainly because my father didn’t want to have anything to do with me.” She nods, but I wish I hadn’t put it that way. Does that furrowed brow mean she’s comparing my situation to the one her child will have? “So since I’ve been up here, I’ve been getting kind of curious about that. The only Chinese relative of mine I ever met was my grandfather. My father’s father.”

“Didn’t he own a restaurant?”

“Uh-huh. A dim sum place in Boston. I used to eat there sometimes when I was in college.” There’s a question on Ari’s face and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. If I had a connection to my grandfather, why had I had none with his son? But I don’t want to go into all that with her: my mother’s withholding information until the end of her life, the contempt I’d felt for the father who had wanted nothing to do with me. So I shift the conversation a little because I don’t want my daughter to pick up on my pain, my vulnerability. “So yeah, I’ve been looking into the ancestry thing a little, poking around on those genealogy Web sites. It’s a new thing for me, this curiosity about my Chinese heritage. To tell you the truth, I never gave it much thought before now.” Which is
not
the truth. It’s a bald-faced, knee-jerk lie. “I’ve found a cousin I never knew I had. Ellen Wong. She lives out in Cincinnati. Her grandfather and mine were brothers, the only two who emigrated from the old country. She and I have been communicating, swapping information. So that’s been kind of cool.”

Ari says she wishes she had gotten to know
her
grandparents.

“Yeah, the only one who was still alive when you were born was my mother, but you were too young to remember her. You would have liked her, too. In fact, you resemble her a little. It struck me yesterday at the airport. Of the three of you, you’re my little
paisana
.”

She smiles. “Your little meatball, you mean.”

“Hey, your Cream of Wheat’s just about ready over here. You want me to put a little milk in it? Sprinkle some sugar on top?”

“Okay.”

“And the magic word is . . .”

“Pleeease.”
She says it like she’s six years old again, and I stand there at the stove, smiling, thinking about the breakfasts I used to make the kids on those Sunday mornings when Annie went off to church—pancakes with surprises inside. Coins I’d wrap in foil and stick in the batter, like my Nonna Valerio used to do when I was a kid.

“So what do you want to do today, kiddo? Hang out around here? Go down to the beach and ride the waves like we used to?”

She clutches her belly. “No waves, thank you. But a walk on the beach sounds nice. Can we go to Long Nook?”

“Sure. Or over to the bayside beach if you’re still into shell collecting. That’s closer. But I like Long Nook better. I’ve been running there mornings. Between six and seven o’clock when I can get my lazy ass out of bed. I like it when I have the whole beach to myself. Looks different than it did when you were kids.”

“Different how?” she asks.

“There’s more ocean and less beach. Erosion, I guess. They’ve got ‘no climbing’ signs posted every hundred yards or so at the base of the dunes. And now, on top of that, there’s all these posted warnings about the great whites they’ve been spotting lately. Which is unusual, I guess.”

“What’s that about, Daddy? Global warming?”

“No, not directly. Tracy says it’s about the seals.”

“She said she’s a marine biologist?”

“Uh-huh. Apparently there’s been a population explosion among the seals, and the eating’s too good for the sharks to pass up. So they’re sticking around later than they usually do, cruising closer to the shore.”

“Have you seen any?”

“No, but I’ve seen a couple of seal carcasses along the beach, which I imagine is their doing. Pisses the gulls off when I run by them. Disturb them while they’re picking over the leftovers. Couple of days ago, this one gull started dive-bombing me, squawking like he was giving me hell.”

She smiles. “So that’s why Tracy’s up here? Because of the sharks?”

“Yup. She’s part of a team that’s hoping to track them. Embedding homing devices in them when they spot them so they can study their migration patterns once they start heading down to warmer waters.”

“By the way, I like Tracy, Daddy. I hope she wasn’t too uncomfortable when I got sick at that restaurant we stopped at and just blurted it out about being pregnant.”

“No, no. She understood.”

“Cooking smells make me nauseous lately—fried food, especially. It was so nice of her to help me out in the ladies’ room like that after we’d known each other for what? An hour? It was kind of weird that I told her I was pregnant before I even told you.”

“Doesn’t matter. She just felt bad because it was her idea to stop and get something to eat.”

“Tell me about her,” she says.

“About Tracy? What do you want to know?”

“Well . . . she said she teaches at U.R.I., right?”

“Uh-huh. Associate professor in biology. Sharks are her specialty. She did her doctoral thesis on them.”

“And how did you guys meet?”

I laugh. “At the sushi counter, actually. I was up in P’town doing my grocery shopping. We exchanged a few pleasantries while we were looking over the seaweed salads and spicy tuna rolls. Then I got behind her in the checkout line and we started talking some more. I kept glancing down at the ID badge she was wearing, trying to remember where I’d heard her name before. Then when we were both out in the parking lot, it dawned on me. I’d been listening to her on the radio when I was driving up here a few weeks back. She was being interviewed about the sharks. Holding her own with this doofus deejay. Which I congratulated her for.”

“And since then?” she asks. She’s fishing, I realize, but I’m going to make her work for it.

“Since then what?”

“Are you and she . . . ?”

“Are we what?”

“Dating?”

“Dating? Yeah, I took her to a sock hop down in Hyannis. We went to the malt shop afterward. Shared an ice cream soda with two straws. That woman can wear a poodle skirt like nobody’s business.”

“Come on, Daddy.”

“Where we going?” She rolls her eyes the way she used to at her dad’s corny jokes. “We’re just friends, honey. We went out to dinner a couple of times. That’s all.” Three times, actually. And out for breakfast the morning after she came back here and spent the night. But I’m not about to go into that with Ariane. She’d probably pick up the phone and tell her sister, and then I’d
really
get the third degree. Marissa’s been hounding me about getting a girlfriend since before the ink was dry on her mother’s and my divorce decree.