Breakfast With Buddha (2 page)

One of these conversations—it was April, the maple trees were in bud, we sat indoors—was devoted to the North Dakota Question.

“You’re procrastinating on this,” Jeannie said, in her typically straightforward fashion.

“Thanks.”

“You’ve always had North Dakota issues. You’ve always avoided them.”

“It’s not issues. It’s a house. Land. It’s five or six old oak tables and chairs and so on. . . .
Issues.
You sound like my sister.”

“Which is another issue.”

“Your siblings are more or less normal—you can’t relate. You grew up in central Connecticut. No one has issues about central Connecticut.”

Jeannie laughed. She has beautiful chestnut hair, just touched with a streak of gray now, and she has so far resisted the temptation to cut it short. We were in the kitchen and were drinking, I remember, a cold, fruity Vernaccia;
I reached across and refilled her glass. Above our heads, something that might have been called music thumped in Anthony’s room. I glanced at my wife and saw that, around the edges of the North Dakota Question, a familiar kind of empathy and understanding floated. Aged love, time-tested, what could beat that?

Jeannie twirled her glass. My parents’ marriage had been solid but tumultuous, their relationship composed of weeks of tender mercies and a stoic, high-plains peace, interrupted by volcanic arguments over something as simple as the way my father put his toothbrush in the holder, or how Mom cooked the oatmeal. I wondered if they’d been having one of these famous fights when the front bumper of the pickup smashed through Pop’s door at seventy miles an hour.

“You’re going to have to drive out, you know that,” Jeannie said at last. “Cecelia has to be there and she’ll never fly. And you’ll need to rent a trailer to cart the stuff back.”

“Movers could do it.”

“Movers can’t sell the house.”

“Real estate agents can.”

“You should go and make your peace with the place. You know you should, Otto. And you need some time away from us and away from work. It’s been years since you’ve had a real break.”

“I could fly and meet her there.”

A frown. Then a shriek and door-slamming somewhere above us. We waited a few beats to see if it was anything serious. No.

“And leave Cecelia to drive there and back?” Jeannie said. “Alone? In her fourteen-year-old Chevrolet, with her twenty-year-old maps? She’d end up in Honduras.”

“She could intuit her way. Consult the spirit guides.”

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

“She made it out for the service okay,” I said.

“Okay? Getting off the train in Fargo instead of Minot and having to hire a car and driver with her last hundred dollars? You and I at the Amtrak station watching passengers get off, the train pull away, no Aunt Seese? That’s your idea of okay?”

“Reasonably okay,” I said. And then, “What about this? What about we make a family trip out of it? Two weeks in August. Just the four of us in the minivan. Aunt Seese takes the train.”

It was one of those offerings you know are dust before the last syllables are out. At work, on a fairly regular basis, I was on the receiving end of similarly frail proposals. The author of a book that sold three hundred copies saying she had an idea for a new project, an exhaustive treatment of the Bulgarian sour pickle. She could make it work, she knew she could.

Jeannie set down her glass and began to count on her fingers: “One, we trade Cape Cod for greater Bismarck, which means sea breezes and seventies for tornado warnings and ninety-six in the shade. Two, our dog and our two beautiful offspring sit in the back of the same car for three thousand miles, round-trip. Three—”

I held up my hand. “You had me at two. Look, let me at least run it by the kids. I have the vacation time. I could take three weeks instead of two, one on the Cape, the rest for the Ringlings on the Road. We could visit some chefs I know, historical sites, have some first-class meals, make an adventure out of it.”

Jeannie looked at me for a three-count, a touch of amusement at the corners of her mouth. She said, “I have two words for you, my love.”

“And which two might they be?”

“Not . . . likely.”

And on that note our sixty minutes of alone time ended.

THREE

During dinner I
decided not to go anywhere near the North Dakota Question. Jeannie cooks, the kids set and clear the table and sweep the floor, I like to wash the dishes. Though we are fairly relaxed in our parenting style, we have two rules: show basic respect for the others at the table; and no books, magazines, schoolwork, or electronic devices while food is being consumed. Natasha and Anthony had apparently been arguing about something upstairs, and they passed the meal buried in slightly different versions of adolescent sulking, Natasha picking at her food, Anthony wolfing it. During cleanup they muttered and snarled, then pounded off to their separate door-slammings and various algebras.

When the sink was clean, dishes stacked, I made my way up the stairs carrying my hopelessly optimistic family vacation plan in both hands like a pot of dying geraniums to a sick aunt.

I knocked on Natasha’s door and found our scholarly daughter at her computer, headphones on, the walls around
her papered with soccer players from the U.S. women’s team and posters of teen boy rock stars with flat stomachs and pouty lips. Still sour-faced from the argument with her brother, she took off the headphones and, somewhat reluctantly, turned to me. I pulled up a chair. I noticed for the thousandth time how much she resembles my mother through the eyes. A high-plains, gray-green, pioneer directness, as if, beneath the freckles and long lashes, lay windswept stone. At moments, I worried that, like my mother, she would make a steady, dependable, but not particularly warm wife. Then again, I’d come home two hours early one afternoon that winter and discovered her and her genius boyfriend, Jared, making out on the living room couch, and there had been plenty of warmth there. An abundance of warmth.

I said, “Tasha, you know I have to go to North Dakota to settle Gram and Gramps’s property.”

“I know, Dad.” A glance at the computer screen. Maybe Stacey was writing to say that Neal’s new hairstyle wasn’t as cute as his old one, or that Ilene’s choice in skirts that day had been off the wall. It was important to answer such things without delay.

“Well, I thought it might be fun if we made a road trip out of it. The four of us. Jasper, too. We could try camping, or stay in nice hotels, or a combination. Swim, eat, see the big sights. A family adventure. What do you think?”

She looked at me for what seemed the span of her childhood, then said: “Camping, Dad? With, like, my brother the disgusting beast?”

“Okay, so minus the camping out of the equation. What do you think of the idea?”

The look in her eyes was suddenly the look of a thirty-year-old. It is a law of the universe that your words come back to you—and in exactly the same tone of voice. “Dad,” she said, “be sensible.”

I
AM AN UPBEAT
sort of person, in general. It’s a valuable temperament in the book publishing world, where there are eighteen failures for every success and where the tidal sweeps of fashion knock even the most sure-footed soul into the hard surf at least once or twice a year. It’s a valuable temperament in the rough waters of raising teenagers, too. And so, though I’d gotten exactly nowhere with Natasha, I stepped down the hall and knocked on Anthony’s door, thinking that, if I could convince him to come out in favor of the family road trip, then he and Jeannie and I could gradually work Tasha free of her resistance.

That spring, Anthony was going through the ordeal known as puberty. His nose and ears were growing too fast for the rest of his face. His skin was breaking out. Dark hairs were showing themselves above his top lip. His sister, of course, never tired of reminding him of these troubles, and Jeannie and I were often having to act as referee. When I went into his room, I found him lying on his bed tossing a baseball into the air and catching it, over and over again, in a sullen hypnosis.

“I remember doing that,” I said, sitting sideways on the bed and squeezing his lower leg once. Anthony was at the age where he did not particularly like to be touched. “Some nights I’d try to get to a thousand catches.”

“On those boring North Dakota nights, huh, Dad?” He stopped tossing the ball and looked at me.

“They could be pretty bad. But it’s a cool place in other ways. You’ve never seen the real countryside there. Wild buffalo. The Badlands. Native American stuff.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s like a different world,” I went on, encouraged. “Gram and Gramps liked it there.” I saw a familiar shadow come over his pimpled face; he and my father had been close. “Still sad about them, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I have to go out there, you know, to settle the estate, sell the house.”

“When?”

“August. I should drive, and August is the only time I can get away from work for that long. Want to go?”

“Where?”

“North Dakota?”

“Driving?”

“Sure. I thought we’d make a family adventure out of it. All of us.”

“Nah.”

“What about just me and you, then?”

“Nah. I was thinking of going out for football. I was gonna ask if I could stay at Jonah’s house when you guys go to the Cape.”

You’re 135 pounds, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I had been a 135-pound football player myself, seen a total of about fourteen minutes playing time, and had a lot of good memories from those days, and one shaky knee.

“What if we made the trip before football?”

“It starts August 3, Dad.”

“All right. But in principle you’d like to go, right?”

“Not that much, to tell you the truth. I’m into, like, my
own private space these days. You know, all that time in the car together, motel rooms. Not my thing.”

T
HERE IS A PATIO
at the back of our house. It’s the usual setup—outdoor furniture, potted plants. Standing or sitting there you can look down toward a stream that cuts its weak flow into a brush-filled ravine. It’s all we have in the way of wildness, and some evenings, sitting in a patio chair facing those trees as darkness fell, I’d feel a fleeting sense of some other way of life, less domesticated, less safe. Not free of family obligations, exactly—I loved being part of a family—but with fewer of the responsibilities of modern American middle-class suburban life. Fewer of the particular concerns and duties that are payment for the safest, richest, easiest lifestyle in human history.

That night, after the visits with Natasha and Anthony, I went out and stood on the patio and stared off into the trees. Our faithful dog, Jasper, came and leaned against my leg, a silent pal. Though Jasper was more affectionate these days than either of our two kids, I knew they loved me. I knew they’d swing out away from Jeannie and me over the next years, then come circling back. When they were in their twenties and thirties, we’d all be close. . . . But by then they’d have their own lists of concerns and duties, their own oil changes, doctors’ appointments, and business meetings, maybe their own kids. Very possibly their careers would pull them a thousand or two thousand miles away, leaving Jeannie and me to grow old the way my parents had, buoyed by a phone call once or twice a week, flowers on Mother’s Day, hectic visits. Why were we all so proud of a style of living that splintered the family like so much dried-out firewood?

I heard the screen door close and recognized the scrape and tap of Jeannie’s shoes on stone. She came up beside me in the dark. Jasper moved over and leaned against her knee.

“No go on Dakota?” she said.

“No go. I’ve been out here pondering the meaning of life.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Not so bad. They’re good kids. Just drifting out into their own orbits already. It’s natural, it’s right. Though I guess I have this image . . . I don’t know. . . .”

“Of some perfect, endless family life?” she said. “All happiness and McDonald’s commercials?”

“No McDonald’s, but, yeah, I guess so. Something that doesn’t just dissolve in a burst of cell phones and grumpiness, then whoosh away into biannual visits.”

“You’re an idealist by nature, my love. I just go along, taking what comes.”

“What comes is pretty good.”

“More than pretty good,” she said, and then, “I’ve always thought work solved the idealist part for you. I mean, a beautiful photograph of a glistening lamb chop with purple new potatoes and asparagus. There’s some imagined eternal perfection represented there, something lasting. Your books are . . . unmottled. Is that a word?”

“It’s the eternal part I’m thinking about, I guess.”

“Nothing we can do about that, honey.”

“I know, sure. But does that mean we have to just go along with everything, live like everybody else lives, by the same assumptions? Is that the best we can do?”

“It’s your parents’ dying. You lost them, and now you’re worried about losing the children, which won’t happen.”

“I just don’t want to look back with regret, that’s all. If there’s any chance to look back.”

“What do you have in mind? Go and live on a Greek isle?”

“I don’t know. At least the family would stay together longer if we lived on a Greek isle. Do things as a unit instead of flying off into iPods and e-mails and jobs on the other edge of the continent.”

“You took a job 1,800 miles away from your parents.”

“I know it. And I love our life, I do. I just . . . question it sometimes lately, on some level. I can’t describe it. I’ve been feeling this way for a while now, even before my parents died. Midlife, maybe. I don’t know.”

For a few minutes we were quiet. Jasper trotted away on the scent of a porcupine or squirrel, or because he didn’t like the conversation, didn’t like hearing about death and abandonment, couldn’t imagine a life without Tasha or Anthony there to scratch him behind the ears as they lay on the couch in the TV room. Aside from the occasional skunk, there was no danger lurking for him in the darkness, nothing to fear. He hadn’t known his parents, or siblings, didn’t have children, probably didn’t worry about what would happen to his loved ones and to his soul after he died. Off in the distance, beyond our little stream, we could hear traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway, a steady drone of tires and engines, even at this hour. Everyone going, I thought, always going, always hurrying, but headed where?