The Turk Who Loved Apples (31 page)

It had been okay before, too. Almost from the moment Sasha was born, in December 2008, it was determined she would be a traveler like her parents. Within a month, we'd driven her out to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a snowy Frugal Traveler weekend on Cape Cod. (While pulling her infant carrier out of the car, I slipped on the ice, banged my knee, and dropped her. She was fine.) And just two weeks later, Jean, Sasha, and I flew off to Italy for another lengthy Frugal Traveler excursion: a week in the chill damp of Venice, and another in foggy Milan.

That Italian expedition, undertaken with not a little trepidation, was eye-opening. I mean, we hadn't chosen Italy at random—everyone we'd consulted had talked about how child-and-baby friendly Italians were—but we simply didn't expect the level of hospitality and attention we received everywhere. “
Cara!
” exclaimed Italians—female and male, old and young.
“Che meraviglia!”
Sasha became known as
la principessa
, or
la piccolina
, or even sometimes just
Sascia
, with a dramatic Italian intonation. She slept quietly in our arms at trattorias, and slept quietly, nestled in her Ergo baby carrier, at the Palazzo Grassi and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Only once she did erupt into tears in a public space—inside the Palazzo Ducale, whence the doges of La Serenissima managed their sea-spanning empire—but that was because we'd accidentally broken the unspoken covenant between traveling infant and traveling parents: Keep me warm, Sasha was (preverbally) saying, keep me clean, and keep me well-fed, and I will sit, sleep, and look cute as long as you want. I don't need toys, I don't need entertainment, I don't need activities beyond the everyday dandling. But deny me any of my preferred comforts, and I will make you suffer.

In the Ducale case, we'd neglected to warm her milk bottle sufficiently—by nestling it between her body and ours in the baby carrier as we walked—and her subsequent wails echoed throughout the cold stone corridors. Quickly, though, museum employees came to our rescue, and guided us to an unused room where Jean could breastfeed.

Apart from that one failure, we kept the covenant throughout the trip, ate, drank, and shopped well while managing not to spend too much money, and ultimately convinced ourselves that, yes, we could do this. Two weeks after we returned, we were off again, to Taipei for a family visit, and then to Minneapolis on a business trip. Frankfurt for a wedding. San Francisco—just me and Sasha, not Jean—for another Frugal challenge. Cape Cod again. Taipei again. Not once did we hesitate to book a flight. We'd mastered Italy with a six-week-old, after all. This was almost becoming easy.

I can't say for certain that this is what Jean and I had hoped for when we decided to have a child, because that decision itself is shrouded in the fog of memory. What I do know is that, once upon a time, Jean and I were happy to be childless—so happy that we planned to remain that way. We were living in a sixth-floor Lower East Side tenement, making decent if not incredible money, eating out when we wanted, staying up late and sleeping late, flying to Mexico for vacation if we felt like it. While Jean was not quite as adventurous as me, she proved herself relaxed and adaptable. On one of
those Mexican vacations, a road trip from Mexico City to Oaxaca and up the Pacific Coast, everything went wrong: The airline neglected to bring our luggage, so when we arrived and Jean got her period—surprise!—she had no pads, and only thong underwear, and it was Saturday night and everything was closed, and then a few days later, she lost her Taiwanese passport in Oaxaca City, and we spent a frantic few hours trying to find a phone number for Taiwan's semi-official representative office back in Mexico City, and then we survived a harrowing drive through the cold, piney mountains, where overturned trucks lay placidly in the highway and groups of men surrounded our car and forced us to stop for “
cinco minutos!
” until, from around the bend, we heard music, and a stream of children in costumes—skeletons, vampires, witches, ghouls—flooded toward and around us, accompanied by their mothers and sisters and aunts, and then they all vanished into the rearview distance, and we drove out of the hills and I got sick (
Giardia, you old so-and-so! Where ya been?
), and we kept driving and driving—a thousand miles in all—and throughout Jean remained cheerful, overjoyed just to be on the road together, even if when we got to each new hotel I'd retreat sickly to bed with a bottle of Gatorade while she went swimming in the pool and ate roadside tacos. It might not always go smoothly, but this was our life together, and it was fabulous.

Whenever anyone asked me about the future, I'd say that Jean and I planned to become the cosmopolitan aunt and uncle to our siblings' and friends' children, returning from far-off lands with exotic gifts (helicopters wrought from Coke cans, obscure Japanese electronic doodads) that would make those kids (not to mention their parents) deeply envious of our liberty. And that was, for a while, in a low-budget kind of way, how we lived.

Until I turned twenty-nine. Then, one day, out of nowhere, I wanted children. I didn't build up to it, didn't go through a series of events that taught me I was fated to be a father. No, it was like a genetic switch had been flipped, and every cell of my body wanted
to procreate. If men have a biological clock, too, then this was my alarm. At best, I could claim that my omnipresent fear of death had finally collided with my fear of failure as a writer—that since I'd not yet produced any lasting words, my only hope for quasi-immortality was to preserve my DNA in a new generation of Grosses. (People have had kids for worse reasons.) Whatever its origins, and however it may have been complicated by the next few surprising years of professional travel and writing, the switch was irrevocable. Jean (who went along with the idea for her own mysterious reasons) and I would eventually have children. It was decided.

Had I known the kind of turn my life was going to take in the next couple of years, I might have reconsidered. It is commonly accepted that traveling with your children is one of the worst experiences imaginable, for parents, kids, and onlookers alike. Which doesn't quite explain why, if it's all so awful, families continue to travel together, on vacations both touristy and adventurous. I mean, obviously, in some ways, families
have to
travel together. The machinery of modern Western life—where vacations, as brief as they are, remain as inescapable a part of the calendar as work and school—doesn't shut down when people have children, or shut them out until the kids are mature enough to handle an intercontinental flight without tears. The war between traveling families and traveling non-parents, waged with unrelenting bitterness in the comments sections of travel-themed Web sites, is a will-sapping stalemate, in which neither side wants to recognize reality: that kids can be awful travelers, that kids can be great travelers, that adults are just the same, and that none of this is going to change anytime soon.

My own memories of family vacations are, as such memories tend to be, rather pleasant. We visited my grandparents in Connecticut; we drove around Scotland, France, and Italy; we took the occasional flight to California or Paris, Paul Simon's
Graceland
played in the station wagon all the way down to Florida; there were years abroad in England and Denmark. Naturally, not every trip
was hitch-free—my mother was hospitalized with a bladder infection near Pisa, my father got pulled over and breathalyzed one night near Yosemite (judgment: myopia, not inebriation), I fought with my younger siblings, Steve and Nell, over the tiniest matters (he's
breathing
). But no conflict was so nasty, no failure so catastrophic, that the Gross family considered swearing off future trips. This was what we did—who we were: travelers.

And I hated them for it. Not because I didn't like the travel, or resented their company, but because I loved both too much. And as an adolescent, and then a young man, I wanted desperately to rebel, to craft an identity separate from that of my family, and yet at every turn I found myself loving and indulging in the activities my parents had established as definitively Gross. Worse, I couldn't compete on their level: My mother had done a grand tour of Europe in the sixties, my father had taught abroad in Paris; they had money and experience it would take me years to acquire, and yet to acquire those things, I knew, I'd have to rely on their finances and expertise for years to come. I never consciously wished to be free of them entirely, like one of the Grimm brothers' orphans, but one night I had a dream that has stuck with me through the years. In the dream, I'm driving away from my family's house, knowing two things: (1) everyone is at home, and (2) within moments, a bomb will blow up there, killing everyone. The most disturbing part? The tone of the dream was cheerful and calm—this was no nightmare. Afterward, I would be free, independent at last.

And independence had always seemed like my birthright. I'd been born in Concord, Massachusetts, and was therefore a child of the American Revolution; independence was in my blood. And I'd been born in Concord only because my historian father had made the town, from the Minutemen to the Transcendentalists, his life's work. I grew up with “self-reliance” and a solitary cabin in the woods near Walden Pond—I was supposed to value independence, and the American embrace of independence, and yet that value was itself a
hand-me-down, as inescapable a part of growing up Gross as curried lamb meatballs for dinner and owning a passport.

Instead of murdering my family, I declared my independence by keeping secrets and going to extremes. I'd borrow the car and drive two hours north with my friends to Washington, D.C., never revealing the destination to my parents. I shunned history and studied math and shaved my head. And then I moved to Vietnam, relishing the shock the news would have on baby boomers—and yet feeling mild disappointment when, after telling my parents about the chaotic traffic and ubiquitous prostitutes, they decided against coming to visit, and asked me, please, just don't go to Cambodia, it's too dangerous. (Next stop: Phnom Penh!)

The funny thing is that my ploy worked. After surviving Vietnam, establishing myself in New York, and embarking on regular overseas trips as an adult, I became within the family the travel expert—the one who knew the best way to buy plane tickets and find neat new restaurants, who was pretty much going to be okay anywhere, without anyone's help. And when I began traveling professionally, I took the opportunity to incorporate my family members into my adventures: my mother joined me for a Frugal weekend in Santa Fe, and my Frugal road trip ended in Seattle, where Nell had settled after college. In both cases, we all got along fine. Mom even drank whiskey with me in some punk-rock basement dive bar, and she turned down my invitation to the coed naked spa out in the New Mexico hills. Perfect. Of course, we were never together all that long—no time for sparks to fly or disagreements to fester. And each little success helped me feel like I was overcoming my travel-bred resentment of my family.

Except when it came to Steve. Four years younger than me, Steve had annoyed me our entire lives—unintentionally, of course. The annoyance was all in my mind, typical first-child resentment, and I took it out on him cruelly, wrestling with him when we were young, and later, when we could really hurt each other, through psychological
means. I ordered him to fetch Lego pieces for me to build rocket ships with, I sneezed on him, I ridiculed him. Once, while he and I were out with some of my friends at a Burger King, I poured an entire orange soda over his head, supposedly to impress my pals.

The idiotic thing was that, even as I did everything I could to demonstrate he was beneath me, I loved and admired Steve. He was a stellar piano player, and would soon find work as a teenage computer programmer, and he had a whole group of smart, creative, well-adjusted, school-minded pals who were utterly unlike the misfits with whom I'd surrounded myself. At times, I was jealous of Steve's circle, and proud of his accomplishments, too. He was so clearly intelligent, inventive, and kind, and I was often happy to have his innocent energy and unquestioning companionship, whether we were exploring the creek behind our house or out skateboarding the next town over.

And despite my misdeeds, we were still in the same house, forced to interact, and still brothers, which somehow still meant something to both of us. Which must be why, the summer before my senior year of high school, I let Steve in on a huge secret: I had a girlfriend—my first. Her name was Amy, she loved the Pixies, and, incredibly, she found me attractive. Please, I asked thirteen-year-old Steve, keep it to yourself. I don't know where this is going. Don't tell anyone, least of all our parents.

Steve swore he'd say nothing, and my dates and first kisses were our secret for two weeks. Until, one night at the dinner table, I decided to reveal everything to the family. I told them about Amy. My father had a smile on his face.

“We knew,” he said.

Steve, it turned out, had told them almost immediately. He was smiling too.

As betrayals go, this was a minor one, but it stuck in my mind. Had Steve really been so oblivious? Was this his revenge? What was I supposed to do now?

Luckily for Steve (and for me), I did nothing. Within a month, Amy and I had split up. And within a year, I'd left for college, Vietnam, life on my own. Steve, too, would leave for school, a semester abroad in Strasbourg, jobs in New Jersey, Cleveland, Minneapolis. For years, we would see each other only at Thanksgiving or briefly during summers. We communicated little, despite the fact that we each spent our days in front of computer screens, and were absolutely fluent in the use of e-mail, IM, Skype, and Facebook. Occasionally, he'd call me up late in the afternoon and ask my cooking advice: What should he do with twenty pounds of ground beef? Did I know how to make duck confit? What about all this eggplant?