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I waited awhile. She seemed to be sleeping, her breathing serene and regular. I buttoned my raincoat. Suddenly she opened her eyes again and looked at me. Her eyes were still bright, but they merely stared at me. Without recognition or curiosity. Empty eyes. I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. She made a kind of moaning sound and turned away on the bed, pulling the blankets around her.

I counted to twenty-five and then to fifty and did it all over again. I cleared my throat and coughed tentatively. She didn’t move; she didn’t respond. I wanted to say, “Nana, it’s me.” But I didn’t. I thought of saying, “Meg, it’s me.” But I couldn’t.

Finally I left. Just like that. I didn’t say goodbye or anything. I stalked through the corridors, looking
neither to the right nor the left, not caring whether that wild old man with the wheelchair ran me down or not.

On the Southwest Turnpike I did seventy-five—no, eighty—most of the way. I turned the radio up as loud as it could go. Rock music—anything to fill the air. When I got home, my mother was vacuuming the living-room rug. She shut off the cleaner, and the silence was deafening. “Well, how was your grandmother?” she asked.

I told her she was fine. I told her a lot of things. How great Nana looked and how she seemed happy and had called me Mike. I wanted to ask her—hey, Mom, you and Dad really love each other, don’t you? I mean—there’s nothing to forgive between you, is there? But I didn’t.

Instead I went upstairs and took out the electric razor Annie had given me for Christmas and shaved off my moustache.

“
Mine on Thursdays” came into being on a Sunday afternoon in the fall of the year when I accompanied my daughter Chris, who was then about ten years old (she is at this writing twenty-two and a graduate student at American University in Washington, D.C.) to Whalom Park, an amusement park a short distance from our home.

On this particular Sunday, I was under assault by a migraine headache: a riveting pain in that vulnerable spot above my left eyebrow in partnership with nausea sweeping my stomach. But I’d promised to take her to the park and did so, pretending, to myself and to her, that I felt fine, just fine.

Our forays into the park were almost but not quite timid. She never showed any inclination to go on the more spectacular rides. For which I was grateful, having long ago lost any inclination toward those rides, if any inclination had ever existed.

That day, Chris was content to stroll the park, go on the merry-go-round and some of the other innocent rides while I watched as usual, delighting in
her delight. We then wandered toward a new ride, something called the “Trabant,” located near the Ferris wheel and midget motor cars. The Trabant was obviously a popular ride: the line was long. And Chris obviously wanted to try it. She said the kids at school thought it was “super.” “But it’s a little scary,” she said. In repose, the Trabant looked docile enough, although she said the cars went “up, down and around.” I remember thinking that a ride that went up, down and around would devastate me completely that day.

“
Want to give it a whirl?” I asked, tentatively.

She looked brave in that heartbreaking way kids look when they are attempting to be brave but aren’t, really.

“
Do you want me to go with you?” I asked, hoping she’d say no.

She shook her head. Then, sighing deeply, she took the plunge and we rushed for her ticket. The line had diminished, the attendant called “Hurry, hurry.” We bought her ticket; she took her seat and strapped herself in. I almost joined her at the last minute. But didn’t. Then the ride started.

The next few minutes were excruciating. The ride was a whirling, tilting nightmare. Dizzying, dazzling. And unending. I caught occasional glimpses of Chris’s face as her car shot up and down and around. She held on for dear life. Sometimes her eyes were tightly closed, other times they were wide with horror. I stood helplessly by, trying to hurry time along. Once, our gazes held for a split second, and it seemed to me that I saw betrayal in her eyes. My betrayal of her. A father
wasn’t supposed to abandon a child like that. Would she ever forgive me?

The ride finally ended and she disembarked. She came toward me on fragile legs, as if she were walking a tightrope. Her hand trembled as I caught it. Was she avoiding my eyes? I told her I was sorry, that I should have gone with her, that I didn’t think it would be so—so terrible. She assured me that it wasn’t
that
bad, that, sure, she’d been a
little
scared but it was nothing, really, nothing. We both knew this was a gentle lie. For my sake.

As we walked along hand in hand, the idea for the story that eventually became “Mine on Thursdays” came forth. I had been thinking how lucky I was that our love for each other was so simple and secure that my betrayal—if that was the word—of her a few moments before did not threaten us. Yet, what if our love wasn’t secure? What if that small betrayal in the park was only one more of many betrayals? What if it had been a final betrayal?

What if? What if?
My mind raced, and my emotions kept pace at the sidelines, the way it always happens when a story idea arrives, like a small explosion of thought and feeling.
What if?
What if an incident like that in the park had been crucial to a relationship between father and daughter? What would make it crucial? Well, what if the father, say, was divorced from the child’s mother and the incident happened during one of his visiting days? And what if …

Mine on Thursdays

To begin with, it took more than two hours to drive from Boston to Monument, twice the usual time, because of an accident near Concord that caused a traffic backup that turned a three-mile line of cars into a giant metal caterpillar inching ponderously forward. Meanwhile, I had a splitting headache, my eyes were like raw onions and my stomach lurched on the edge of nausea, for which I fully accepted the blame. Ordinarily, the night before my Thursdays with Holly, I took it easy, avoided involvements and went to bed early. But yesterday afternoon, I’d had a futile clash with McClafflin—all arguments with employers are futile—and had threatened to quit, an empty gesture that caused him to smile because he knew about all my traps. This led to a few solitary and self-pitying drinks at the bar across the street, leaving me vulnerable to an invitation to a party in Cambridge, a party that turned out to be nothing more than pseudo-intellectual talk, plus liquor, the effect of which was pseudo: promising so much and delivering little except a clanging hangover and the familiar and desperate taste of
old regrets. Somehow, I managed to survive the morning and left at my usual hour, aware that McClafflin was watching my painful progress through the office. And I thought: “The hell with you, Mac. You think I’m going to leave her waiting uselessly, while I take a cold shower and sleep it off. But Holly expects me and I’ll be there.”

I
was
there, late maybe but present and accounted for, and Holly leaped with delight when she saw me drive into her street. I made a reckless U-turn, knowing that Alison would be watching from the window, frowning her disapproval. The scarlet convertible in itself was sufficient to insult her cool gray New England eyes and my lateness was an affront to her penchant for punctuality (she’d been a teacher before our marriage and still loved schedules and timetables). Anyway, the brakes squealed as I pulled up in front of the house on the sedate street. On impulse, I blew the horn, long and loud. I always did things like that, to provoke her, killing myself with her, or killing whatever was left of what we’d had together, like a dying man hiding the medicine in the palm of his hand instead of swallowing the pill that might cure him.

Holly came streaking off the porch, dazzling in something pink and lacy and gay. Holly, my true love, the one person who could assuage my hangovers, comfort my aching limbs and give absolution to my sins.

“Oh, Daddy, I knew you’d come. I just knew it,” she said, flinging herself at me.

I dug my face into her shampoo-scented hair and clutched the familiar geography of her bones
and flesh. “Did I ever stand you up?” Then, laughing: “Don’t answer that.” Because there had been times, of course, when it had been impossible for me to come.

“Wonder World today, Dad?” she asked.

The sun hurled its rays against my eyeballs, penetrating the dark glasses, and the prospect of those whirling rides at the amusement park spread sickness through my veins. But aware that Alison was there behind the white curtains, I assured Holly: “Whatever you say, baby, whatever you say.” Wanting Alison to know that somebody loved me. “The sky’s the limit.”

Holly was mine on Thursdays, and during the two years of our Thursdays together, we had made the circuit many times—shopping trips to fancy stores, movie matinees, picnics on Moosock Ridge, bowling, Wonder World in season—all the things an adult can do with a child. I’d always been careful to indulge her, basking in her delight. We shared the unspoken knowledge that we were playing a special kind of hooky, each of us a truant, she from that well-regulated and orderly world of her mother’s and I from the world of too many martinis, too many girls, too many long shots that had never come in.

For some reason, I thought of my father. Occasionally, Holly and I journeyed out to the cemetery where I stood at his grave and tried to recall him. I most often remembered the time, a few weeks before he died, when we sat together at the nursing home. After long minutes of silence, he’d said: “The important thing, Howie, is to be a man.”

He began to cry, tears overflowing his red-rimmed eyes, and I pitied him, pitied all the old people who could only look back, look back. After a while, I asked: “What’s a man, Dad?” Not really curious but wanting to say something.

My poor father. Who’d had too much booze and too little love and no luck at all, at cards or dice or all those jobs. And all the deals that had collapsed.

“To be a man,” my father said, wiping his cheeks, “is to look at the wreckage of your life and to confront it all without pity for yourself. Without alibis. And to go on. To endure—”

It had been a long day and I had been impatient to get away from the ancient abandoned man who called himself my father. I left shortly afterward, thinking: he’d always had a way with words, hadn’t he? And what had it gotten him in the end? A wife whose early death had given him an excuse to drown himself in bottle after bottle, while his son, whose birth was the cause of that death, was shunted from uncle to aunt to cousin. Yet, he had tried hard to be a father, in his way, always showing up on holidays, bundled with gifts and stories of great adventures in the cities he visited on his sales routes.

Now, Holly and I drove along soft-shaded Spruce Street and I was relieved that a trip to the cemetery was not on the agenda that day. Holly chatted gaily. She told me about the neighborhood carnival she and her friends had staged and how their names had appeared in the newspaper because they’d donated the proceeds to charity. She described the shopping trips for school
clothes, because September loomed ahead. She brought me up to date on all the things that make up the life and times of a ten-year-old girl, and I barely listened, taking pleasure in her presence alone. She wore pigtails, and she was dark, unlike Alison, who was blond, and this secretly delighted me. Holly prattled on: there was a fabulous new ride at Wonder World, “The Rocket Trip to the Moon,” that all the kids were crazy about, and could we go on it, Dad, could we, huh, please?

“Why not?” I asked. All the “why nots” I had tossed her on Thursdays, like bouquets of love. I agreed so quickly because I knew she would change her mind at the last moment. Holly was shy, timid, and she usually avoided the more adventurous and perilous rides. Ordinarily, she was content to stroll through the park at my side while we made up stories about people passing by. She liked the merry-go-round and the distorted mirrors in the fun house and she was reluctant to attempt such daring exploits as the roller coaster or the loop-the-loop. For which I was grateful. Particularly on days such as this when my head pounded and my stomach revolted at the slightest movement.

“How’s your mother?” I asked, the question ritual.

Usually, the answer was ritual, too. “Fine” or “swell.” As if Holly’d received instructions. But today, she hesitated, sighed, and said: “Tired.”

“Tired?” I was searching for a parking place in the busy Wonder World lot.

“Oh, she’s been on a committee to get blood donors—”

That was Alison. Conscientious and community-minded and always willing to help. She had a desire for service to others and she dearly loved Monument and had no wish to venture to other places. Which was part of our trouble, or at least the beginning of it all. I had always regarded Monument as a starting point, not a destination. Alison and I had met the summer I’d been planning to leave, ready to knock on a thousand doors in New York City, seeking a job, something, anything—just to get away. But Alison had been so beautiful and I had loved her so incredibly that I’d remained in Monument, writing obituaries and other equally dismal stories for the town newspaper. However, I was always aware of the world outside of Monument and I had wanted to see it, to know a million people, visit a million places, all of which was ridiculous, of course, and eminently impractical. Sometimes, my frustration would burst out. “Alison,” I’d plead, “let’s try, let’s pack up and take our chances. I don’t mean go to the other side of the world. But somewhere. The world’s so big and Monument’s so small, our lives are so small—”

Alison had held up little Holly, who smiled at me in her infant innocence. “Is she so small, too, that you can’t be a father to her?”

Defeated, I remained in Monument but spent more and more time away from that confining claustrophobic apartment. In a bar or cocktail lounge, there were kind shadows and when you’d consumed just the right amount of beer or rye or whatever, all the sharp edges blurred and Monument itself receded. Inevitably, if you go often
enough to a bar, a girl walks in. And, finally, Sally arrived. She was a member of a television unit dispatched to Monument by a Boston station to capture, on tape, the one-hundred-fifth birthday of Harrison Shanks, the oldest man in the county. Sally and I had a drink or two; she confessed that she was only a secretary for the film crew, an errand girl, really. Laughing, she reversed the cliché and wondered what a fellow like me was doing in a place like that. Meaning Monument, of course. She leaned against me warmly, a frankness about her body. Alison hid herself in tailored suits or loose, comfortable sweaters while Sally wore clothes that made me constantly aware that she was a woman. Sitting beside her on that first night, before I had said two dozen words to her, I felt as though I had known her body before, probably in a thousand adolescent dreams.