How Happy to Be (24 page)

I pause outside of this house, which is the house Elaine built with more of her inheritance, after I was safely gone from the West, after my father took off for good, when she briefly became a lesbian. This house is on the other side of the island from the compound; neutral ground, then, and I’m grateful for that because this is the house in which I will see my father for the first time in seven years. My outline of a father. He is, like it or not, the top of this genetic rope my baby is climbing and I’m here to get his version of things.

A bumper sticker on the front door reads,
NUCLEAR FREE
ZONE
, and before I can knock, a small face appears in a crack in the doorway. “Do you have any cruise missiles with you?” it asks.

“No,” I say truthfully.

“Ballistic missiles?”

I pat my backpack to check. “No.”

“Guns? Red meat? Hate lit-er-ature?” She says the last word like she’s just learned it.

“Franny, be good!” Elaine scoots the child – a blur of blond and skinny legs – out of the way and opens the door to throw her arms around me.

“We’re so happy you could come. Oh, Max, it’s wonderful.” Elaine’s eyes water.

“Who’s this?” I ask and the creature scurries off.

“One of my students, Franny Baumgarten. She’s staying with us this week while her mother’s in the city. I was hoping it would be a madhouse here, but sadly, it’s just the immediate family, plus Franny.” Elaine makes little air quotes around the world
family
. “Did you see your father on the way in?” asks Elaine. Franny hovers behind a large plant.

“
The
Franny Baumgarten? I owe her a letter.”

Elaine has old stained-glass windows inside too, leaning against the walls, some suspended with chain, their rotting wooden frames barely intact. Any wall free of glass is covered by woolly weavings dangling from curtain rods; if you lean back in this house, you risk being cut or cuddled. Elaine shows me where I’ll be sleeping, in a spare room underneath a horse-sized loom.

Franny Baumgarten awaits us in the living room, perched on a stool, feet dangling, poised behind a harp three times her size. She misinterprets my glance as a challenge, narrows her eyes, and begins to strum frantically. The result is like a box of bottles dropped in an alley for recycling.

“Franny! Please respect the quiet!” Elaine shouts.

Franny hops away on two feet, rabbit-style. The stained glass rattles.

Elaine shakes her head. “I don’t think one should own anything more valued than a child’s pleasure, but I
would
be sad if one of the windows shattered. I think I’m getting too attached.”

“Elaine, you live on an island. You’re not attached to anything.” She beams; this is a high compliment.

“Go see your father. I think he’s nervous.” As soon as she says that, my own nerves scurry across my back.
Father
: this is not a word that rolls easily off my tongue. In the beginning of our relationship, John used to tease me because I never mentioned my father. He thought it was curious and, after a while, sad. I tried to explain: He didn’t want the part. My childhood was a collective experience, so how could he have been definitive, singular? John kept waiting for me to put my head in his lap and cry. Later, he didn’t find my reticence that amusing; he called me cold, and said I could never really give in to anyone. “Work it out, Max,” he said angrily, slamming the door (and this disapproval links to another one: Theo on the walk to the university that night, confounded by me. “What are you doing, Max?”)

I know that if he can, my father will be outside. I walk to the back of the house, and there he is in this fenceless yard, bent over scraps of wood, hammer in hand, building a small house, a miniature of the big one. It’s too large to be a birdhouse, too small for a tool shed.

There was always something about his hunched, thin frame that looked like an old man even when he was young. Now that he’s older, the body matches the face, cheeks lined and drawn. He is wearing shorts and the skin around his knees hangs in sagging parentheses. My father, who lives his life like a boy floating down a river, is now in his sixties. He straightens and turns, offers a little wave. I wave back and immediately trip on a two-by-four. I throw my hands forward and fall into a near-perfect push-up position, knees on the ground, belly protected from impact by my straight
arms. It’s the opposite of thought. My father offers a hand to help me up.

“She’s a little clumsy,” he murmurs, like he’s remembering something. This I had forgotten: My father is without metaphor. He is all observation, no judgment. Maddening then, it’s comforting now, if only because I know it so well.

He pulls back to look at me, picks a weed out my hair.

“Weed,” he says. I nod.

“Hi, Dad,” I say. I would like his eyes to well up. I would like some kind of buckling, but his face is composed, his eyes alert. More alert than I remember them, ever.

“Hi, daughter.” It’s a joke. At the compound, no one said mother or father, but Joyce and Richard and Anne, all things equal.

I don’t know what to say, so I gesture to the small house. “What is this?”

“Oh, this,” he says, like he’s never seen it before. “This is for Franny to play in. It’s a replica of Elaine’s house. She’s even going to fire some stained glass for the door.” He picks up the door, recently cut and dusted with wood bits. He holds it in front of him, between us. It comes up to his chest. An empty square where the window will go.

“Would you like to help me hang the door?” he asks.

“No,” I say. Then, seeing his eyes dart, it occurs to me that Elaine was right: he is nervous.

“I don’t know. Do I?” I say. “What are we talking about here?” He just wants me to hold it, turns out, while he slides the hinges together.

So this is our first meeting in years, the two of us on our knees in front of a miniature house, speaking only of nails and levels. Like this, the afternoon gets cooler and turns to dusk.

“Do you eat animals?” Franny Baumgarten is sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor with a zoo of stuffed animals in her lap while Elaine and I prepare dinner: tofu steaks and couscous. Seriously.

“Yes, but not stuffed ones.” She giggles. She holds up a crudely sewn, floppy-eared, blue checked thing that could be an elephant or a mouse. I’m not sure what she wants from me.

“Cool,” I tell her.

“It’s for yoooooooooou!” she shouts, and she’s having a good time with that long o sound, up and down and around and around, until I snatch the thing out of her hand in an effort to shut her up.

“My God,” I say, fingering its Frankenstein-stitched sides, its lumpy glue-whiskered mouth. “Did Elaine buy this for you?”

Elaine comes in from the back porch, arms laden with basil pulled from her garden.

“Are you still buying toys from Tards-R-Us?”

“Max,” says Elaine. “They’re mentally challenged craftspeople!” But she’s smiling a little in spite of herself.

Franny Baumgarten stands tall, animal minions at her feet, then sprints out of the room, abandoning them. A television clicks on in the living room and Elaine shakes her head.

“I’m sure you never thought I’d have a television,” says Elaine. I rinse the herbs in the sink, swirls of mud on the white enamel.

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it’s inevitable. Everyone has to enter the real world,” I say.

“There’s your problem,” says Elaine. “Television is not the real world.”

Franny Baumgarten screams, “MAAAAX!” from the living room and Elaine and I run in, dripping basil stalks in hand, hurtling toward the inevitable ripped limb, the dangling eyeball, the masked abductor, whatever horror might be on the other end of that scream.

Franny and my father lie on the floor in front of a tiny black-and-white television set. There, on the screen, is an ad that looks like a music video with trumpet-heavy jazz horn blowing and quick cuts of burn victims and tornadoes and wartorn villages and actresses walking the red carpet. Interspersed are more familiar faces, and that’s jarring at first, to see the hard-done-by gaze of Debbie from Life, Marvin’s powder-bronzed cheeks – and then, for a brief brief moment, there’s me, and I’m tossing my hair and glancing over my shoulder, sort of smouldering, sort of ill.

“
The Daily,”
says a deep male voice. “Think it over.”

“Think it over,” repeats Franny Baumgarten. Basil juice drips down my wrist. Who was that fetching woman? Some secret me bred in a Petri dish.

“Curious,” says my father.

“Sultry,” says Elaine.

“That must have been just before I fell off the stool. I look a little woozy. I remember, I closed my eyes for a second and …” Franny Baumgarten begins pummelling Elaine backwards into the kitchen.

“Max, sit down,” says my dad. I lower myself, attempting to cross my legs, basil on my knee, and something makes a creaking sound in my thighs.

“Jesus, I hate sitting like this,” I say. My dad, on the other hand, sits perfectly upright. If you put a magic carpet under the guy he’d be up and off, sending you postcards from Egypt in a matter of seconds.

“Did you perfect that move in the teepee in Arizona?” I ask. My dad smiles. I get all tucked in, limbs in line, and I’m sitting across from him. I’d like to be at a more casual angle – this seems somewhat confrontational – but it might take several minutes to extract myself. So we sit.

“I’ve read your work. It’s very funny,” he says. “And very dark.” I’m a bit taken aback; it’s not like my father to evaluate.

“Do you still love movies?” he asks.

I don’t say anything. I’d forgotten how his voice sounds, slightly muffled, like he’s talking through a cloth soaked in chloroform.

“When you used to disappear to the movies when you were younger, I always wondered if you actually liked movies or if you liked the reprieve they provided. Elaine can’t stand movies, you know. She thinks they take you out of the world.” He raises an eyebrow at me.

“Dad,” I whisper, “are you making fun of Elaine?”

“I love Elaine, but she’s a bit of a flake.”

I laugh.

“Before you leave, we need to take a walk together,” says my father. It isn’t a question, it’s a command.

I look at him, the lines in his face dividing him in pieces, sun-worn provinces. “You sound …,” I hesitate. What is it, exactly? I don’t know yet. “Different. What did those Hopis teach you?”

My dad laughs a snort laugh, inhaling instead of exhaling. “Two years of cognitive therapy in Tucson,” he says. “Very expensive.”

Within a week, I am used to it here. I am forgetting. I sleep in the shadow of the loom. Elaine is weaving Philoemelia in three panels. The rape, the imprisonment, the escape. I sleep under the story of her rape, which Elaine, ever the optimist, has chosen to weave in very bright pinks and yellows.

I start each day with my head over the toilet, and then I clasp my hands together to keep them from shaking. At night I dream sometimes of a girl baby, sometimes of tails and fangs and giving birth to rutabagas and husks of corn. But my afternoons, once school is out, are spent exploring the roads with Franny Baumgarten. She’s taken a shine to me, and likes to lead me around, chattering, kicking at tide pools on the rocks and crushing life forms whenever possible, encouraging me to do the same. I’m slower than she is, flopping along in my father’s gumboots, too big, and
Elaine’s raincoat, too small. The headache cries out for booze, but I don’t indulge.

There are often dogs out on the rocks, and they lumber over uninvited until their owners appear, low on the beach, calling for them, nodding at us. After a few days, the nods turn to waves. Finally, a middle-aged man and a woman approach us. Franny hugs their dog, a freckled mutt just slightly bigger than her. They are curious as to who I am, though they know Franny’s mother. Their prying is gentle, like a couple piecing together a mystery they’re reading out loud. I can tell I’ve been the subject of speculation on the island, the strange woman with Dolores Baumgarten’s daughter. When I mention Elaine, they brighten and murmur affection. “You’re the ex-stepdaughter,” says the woman, and I’m surprised, wondering if Elaine refers to me that way, unused to being called anyone’s daughter. I imagine Elaine saying this phrase casually, maybe on a boat deck, or in the bank on the mainland.
My ex-stepdaughter
. She says it almost as an afterthought, or as the easiest way to explain what we are to each other, and I like this. The “ex” suggests a complicated history, one we have somehow all survived. “Yes, I’m the ex-stepdaughter,” I say. In the upcoming days, people on the rocks smile at us more easily, pleased to have an explanation.

Soon the baby dreams stop and my hands shake less and the headaches loosen and I’m dreaming of places I’m already in. I’m dreaming of the roar of the ocean, the spray plumping up the pages of my book, the useless red fabric of the raincoat sopped to my skin as I walk. The dreams are
friendly, and without symbols. When I wake up, my breathing is shallow, and I’m grateful for the lack of subtext.

So my dad’s gone all cognitive therapy on me. He’s got these little recipe cards that he drops around the house like an Easter bunny, little white cards with daunting typed phrases followed by ellipses: “I need … When you … I felt … If you … I will …” We’re supposed to fill in the blanks, I guess. Elaine ignores the cards. Franny uses them to construct a fan with glue and staples.

I stand in the kitchen fingering one: “When you … I feel …”

Through the window, I watch him hitting planks with his hammer, two-by-fours dangling over the edge of a sawhorse. Franny zigzags behind him, a red towel tied around her neck, nails hanging from her mouth like fangs.

I push open the window, knocking dusty cacti and vitamin bottles that line the ledge.
When you ignore a small child, I feel like poking your eyes with a fork
.

“Franny! Take those nails out of your mouth!” I shout. She skids to a halt, looks around confused, then locates me in the window. She smiles so widely the nails fall from her jaw. My dad continues sawing, oblivious.

Elaine is suddenly next to me. She has a great knack for appearing out of thin air. I didn’t even know if she had feet for a long time because her robes dragged on the ground, like she was just another mushroom extension of the earth.