I Will Do Better, page 15
Heading over, I gently reached for the paper.
“Please?” I said.
Her grip was rigid. “HEY.”
I did not pull hard, got the poster free.
Still no singing donuts. This wasn’t some charming musical sequence. Just her repeating, “HEY.”
Two steps to get back over to the wall. I felt numb; at the same time, I felt myself plummeting.
Where were we headed? Was this all veering out of control? Maybe so. Don’t the best love stories perpetually straddle that edge?
I withdrew pushpins from some other wall drawings.
“Yeses and noes,” I said. “Side by side. Each one alone. Both in this together.”
On the wall of our living room, I pinned this new, tender page.
CHAPTER TEN
October 12, 1962. One week after leaving her husband and moving with her children to London, Sylvia Plath, age thirty, wrote a poem in longhand about her father, Otto Plath. (He’d passed when Sylvia was eight.) Plath compared her dead father to items including a black shoe, a bag full of God, a vampire, a Nazi, and a swastika; she labeled herself a Jew going to Auschwitz, titled this poem, “Daddy.” For a decent chunk of her adulthood, Sylvia had been diagnosed as clinically depressed. She’d been institutionalized, had received electroshock therapy. In the poem she explicitly connected Otto to her former husband, and flat out blamed her father for her unhappy marriage. The narrator of the poem had to be rid of both men, had to kill both father and husband: “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——” “Daddy” ends with a stake in Daddy’s “fat black heart”: “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
Four months after writing the poem, Plath put her head in an oven and ended her own life. Both of her children were home.
“Daddy” has long been a lodestar for gifted girls with propensities for melodrama, an inspiration for emotionally scarred young women with a desire to express their pain through art. Really, it is a touchstone for anyone, particularly young females, with an axe to grind at their family patriarch—as well as the patriarchy in general.
All of which is valid. No one claims otherwise.
If you are a father, though, this poem is an absolute terror.
It is the written embodiment of everything you do not want your grown daughter thinking about you. Simultaneously, the events surrounding the poem’s writing act as an embodiment of what you do not want happening to your grown daughter. The total, worst-case scenario: what might happen if you are too strict, if you do not listen to your child, if you are absent—even if you are present in your daughter’s life but cannot have a relationship with her as a young adult or as a mature adult because you die too soon. (Doctors in Plath’s time didn’t know how to treat diabetes properly, plus along the way you might have gotten gangrene and had to have your leg chopped off—all of which happened to Plath’s dad, who, though German and strict, was not an actual Nazi.)
You do not want your little girl putting her head in the goddamn oven.
You don’t want her life ruined, period, and you sure don’t want her looking for reasons why.
And, okay, you know you are going to fuck it up some—like that Larkin poem promises: “They may not mean to, but they do.” But you surely don’t want your daughter ascribing her fucked-up marriage, let alone her fucked-up life, to actions you took, for instance, in the middle of an emergency when she was four and you were freaked and trying to protect her.
“Daddy” is near the farthest end of the toxic masculinity continuum, next to the locked-in-closet nightmares, the leather belt spankings, the molesters.
The other side, however, represents a kid left on her own.
No guidance. No assuring hand to help her.
OCTOBER 19, 2012. A week or so before Halloween, the wind picked up, as did news reports: a tropical storm was becoming more intense, approaching the Eastern Seaboard. This wouldn’t be good. Broadcasters listed steps to make sure your family was safe. In our home, however, the pressing question was: Would we still get to go to the West Village on Sunday? Sunday was the day of the annual Halloween festival there, the posh boutiques up and down Bleecker Street opening their gilded doors, distributing candy to the costumed offspring of entitlement. A woman who did wardrobes for movies lived in our building; she went out of her way, procuring for Lily a Disney Cinderella dress, truly to die for, shimmering metallic blue, replete with frilly shoulders and hip flounces. I went on eBay and scoured up a tiara of plastic jewels, some silky elbow-length gloves, also light blue paper booties that covered her sneakers. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, Lily beamed ten thousand watts.
During the bus ride across town to my sister’s place, she told me, “I don’t like peanuts so you can have all my Snickers.” I sort of mumbled approval—it was the third time she’d said this—and kept gazing out the window: the overcast sky, the western rim of Union Square, trees appearing as dark shadows, their bare branches swaying in the wind.
We made sure the kids didn’t grab too many candies, thanked all the shopkeepers—those quick, perfunctory thank-yous even as their little bodies were starting for the next shop. Lily and Declain booked ahead; Crystal and I called out, reminding, “We have to be able to see you.”
At the park, the festival was going full blast, running kids and stray costume parts anywhere you looked. Lily got her face painted to look like a kitten. She waited to get her hair done in the French braids I had neither the patience nor dexterity to manage. We all took a hayride around the block.
The next evening, with alerts about the storm all over the web, I made a final run on the local drugstore for extra batteries. At the bodega, we got extra bags of Pirate’s Booty, boxes of mac and cheese, anything edible still on the shelves that wouldn’t need refrigerating (in the event power stayed out awhile). Afterwards, I fastened Lily inside our trusty if beaten-up stroller; we set off for an Italian restaurant in the Flatiron District. I’d become friendly with the agent of a writer I worshipped; the agent was in town to sell books to editors. Another friend, Amber, would join us. (Whenever she visited, Lily referred to her as “Glamber.”)
Rain hadn’t started falling when Lily and I got to the restaurant, but the staff was boarding up the front windows, removing tables from the back patio. The place was open, and if all the tables were nearly empty, they were still covered in white tablecloths. The restaurant had a full freezer of meat, fresh pasta, vegetables. “Take your time,” the waiter said, lighting the candles at our centerpiece. “Work has to get done, with or without you.” Rather than let food spoil, they kept hauling out loaded plates, extras gifted on top of our ordered meals, even as staff bustled to lock the place down. A waiter brought crayons; Lily colored, stopped, picked up again, returned her attention to the agent and Glamber, trying to follow, even sliding into their conversation: “I hope the storm isn’t too bad. We got groceries for if it is. I bring my coins from Change Lake to the store. I get a chocolate ball but today my friend gave me it, so I did not have to pay.”
Lily leaned toward the various complex dishes, sniffed, scrunched her brow, crinkled her nose. She asked what each person was eating. No, thank you, she did not want to try. Shook her head no, she did not want to try.
Okay. She would try.
“It’s good. I will have a second bite if I can get dessert.”
“Your daughter is ridiculously charming.” The agent dabbed a napkin into her water glass, wiped sauce from Lily’s chin.
“She spends a lot of time with adults,” I said.
“Well, it’s really paid off.”
“Can I have cake?” Lily asked.
“To Lily.” Glamber raised her glass for a toast. “More socially at ease at four than I am as a grown woman.”
We emerged from the restaurant into light rainfall, the sky a special effect of unholy gray, the streets empty except for random stragglers. I fastened Lily back into the stroller, rolled out its little plastic guard. Her eyes were drooping, those chubby cheeks gone a bit slack. Even so, her face was delicate, a bit glowy, as if powered by an inner light that was on low power. It felt odd, this sensation, as if I were detached from myself, floating … wait, not floating, but at once detached and appreciative. How special my daughter was. What a fun, great kid.
WIND SHOOK THE panes in our living room, which would have been concerning, except our ceiling also shook if the upstairs neighbors forgot to take off their shoes. “What’s some extra rattle?” I said. Besides, the rainfall didn’t seem serious. All those biblical expectations, this monster hurricane was looking like one big blumpo. “We’ll be just fine,” I said. We went in for bedtime and I left the television on in the living room, believing that Lily was already weary, she’d fall asleep quick, and I could catch the end of the Knicks game. Another example of how little I understood about kids. As was the case after so many major nights, my daughter felt both affectionate and needy. She clung to my arm, asking me to read another story, working to extend the festivities for as long as she could. She rested her head on my chest; strands of her hair scratched my cheek. We cued up twenty-one-year-old Julie Andrews singing live, in black-and-white, “In My Own Little Corner,” from a 1957 broadcast of Cinderella.
When I came out of the bedroom, the television had gone dormant. In fact, all the lights—including the cable box signal and those little green doodads at the ends of the cord breakers—were off. If a different shade of night hadn’t been coming in through the windows, the darkness would have been uniform, impenetrable through the apartment. Flipping switches brought no response. Opening the laptop, however, provided some screen glow. The router was dead and there was no internet, but I wrote for a little bit: Why not take advantage of the lack of possible distractions? Then I thought to keep the charge, put the computer to sleep. Same for my cell.
I’d kept payments on my landline, in part for emergencies like tonight, but with the emergence of smartphones, all the major phone companies had been ignoring the city’s physical wiring, meaning my landline had no dial tone. Thank goodness I still had my trusty source for Mets games and late-night sports talk: my seventies-era transistor radio. Fiddling its knob to a news station, I heard about the storm’s impact on the East Coast. I heard that a malfunctioning generator on Fourteenth Street blew out the power throughout downtown, even into the east side of Midtown.
I found the two long flashlights I’d bought from one of the police supply stores next to the precinct on the other side of Third, unscrewed their bottoms, loaded each one with new batteries. I also unwrapped a small square light; attached to a head strap, it looked like something a child from a previous century would wear going down into a coal mine. Why would a police supply store have a kid’s coal-mining flashlight? Fucking Manhattan is why. Terrified parents who bend over backwards when prepping for emergency situations, is why.
The next morning, Tuesday, the apartment looked pretty much like it always did, except for the dead cable box and cord breaker lights. We dressed like normal. I explained that school was canceled, but we couldn’t play computer games right now. I tried to get Lily to eat some cold cereal and bananas, loaded supplies into my backpack. We put on our jackets, grabbed the stroller. I crouched to a knee, waited for her to meet my stare.
“We’re going on an adventure,” I said. “We’re going to see what’s going on outside. “
Three fingers in her mouth, she looked up at me.
“So we need to stay together. You need to follow instructions.”
She blinked, kept staring.
“You know the rules for the bus station? How we act at the airport?”
It took some time and effort to rise from out of my crouch; I ended up using the folded stroller for help, turning it into a complex walking stick. Lily got distracted by this; I could see her taking in my struggle.
All the overhead hallway lights were silent, their usual hum quieted. The elevator was similarly dead.
Four winding flights awaited, a black yawning mouth.
“Okay, we’re watching our steps, right?”
Lily nodded, waited. Now a tentative attempt; she yelped, pulled back. “It’s dark. It’s scary.”
Right. My accident in the lobby. Almost two years previous.
I started to say it was all right, she could do it.
Before the words got out, my good little soldier flipped on her headlamp. A Popsicle of light erupted atop her noggin.
“Hey hey.” The hall echoed with smacking sounds, my hands pounding together. “Ready Freddie and our aim is steady.”
“Correct-a-mundo, Little Bundo,” she announced, and turned the light off, back on, showing me how it worked. Her smile was wide and toothy, letting loose another zillion kilowatts.
THE ONLY TIME you saw people walking down the middle of Third Avenue in Manhattan was during a street festival, when police closed off the street with traffic barriers and there were food trucks and food trailers and booths for socks and crafts and phone carriers, and pedestrians wandered between them all, eating greasy junk, occasionally buying some trinkets or a shirt with a graffitied mailbox on it. Lily loved these festivals; bouncy castles and bottles filled with colored sand were her particular favorites. But this wasn’t any kind of festival; it was like nothing I’d seen before. Stores on each side of the street were uniformly shuttered; meanwhile, the avenue itself was filled with people. Imagine that a giant shock wave had emptied out every single building in the neighborhood, and in some kind of parade gone wrong, everyone who lived within however many blocks was outside, packed here on the street, sort of like a zombie movie, only cognizant zombies, looking around, wandering together, as if part of a collective daze, everyone unsure of what was happening, whether we were all moving into a new, unknown reality. It was more than a little ominous: dread seemed everywhere, worry was palpable—though, thankfully, full panic hadn’t started. Gossip was spreading, news was getting out: the subways were down; the lower half of the city was powerless; Brooklyn was riots galore.
I double-checked, making sure Lily was locked into the stroller. She followed my lead and checked her safety straps, just to be double-safe sure. I kissed her forehead; her eyes met mine, in this moment sharing all sorts of things she did not have the ability to say: that she did not know exactly what was going on; that she recognized whatever was happening as not normal; that she did not know if she should be worried; that she was worried, wanted reassurance, wanted to hear everything would be okay. How much of a toddler’s world moves between safety and the unknown to begin with, between an inner cocoon, that zone where you are secure and all needs are met, and everything out there, all that is waiting to be discovered? What we were doing was clearly beyond her understanding.
“Have you ever visited an aquarium?” I asked.
She looked at me. “What’s an aquar-um?”
“Where all the fish and sharks and dolphins live.”
She kept staring.
“So wouldn’t visiting an aquarium be as new as this?”
I’d confused her enough to calm her, some, which was fine by me. Maybe it would keep her from getting scared. We headed north, crossing Twenty-Sixth, and as I pushed the kid over cracks and ruts in the pavement, I tried to make sure she had a smooth ride, to not run the front wheels of the stroller up into the heels of the man trudging ahead of us. Person after person kept holding up their phone. I couldn’t understand, then got it: making it onto a new block meant another effort at getting a signal; it meant renewed disappointment with your carrier.
I thought of Cormac McCarthy and The Road, specifically the dad guiding his boy through the apocalypse. I couldn’t help myself. I similarly remembered Saramago’s Blindness, the horrible part where every member of society is thrust into blackness. More digressive thoughts kicked in, more dystopian moments: the movie Children of Men, where Clive Owen tries to hide the pregnant woman at the refugee compound; and that Elie Wiesel novel from high school, in which the narrator is forced to let his father die, so he might survive the concentration camp.
That dad-as-Nazi poem.
Grim grim grim. Nothing the slightest bit helpful came to mind. Someone accidentally knocked me from behind, apologized. I said “No problem” but felt myself getting agitated.
If the crowd became a mob, what was my game plan?
How would I protect my child if punches were thrown?
If the lights didn’t come back on for a while and food turned scarce?
What was our escape?
If I’m distracted by someone, if I look to my phone for an alert—if I go piss against a wall—
Some demented fuck takes the stroller and zips.
Some half-witted perv waves a lollipop.
One second everything fine; the next, no way back.
But then it also occurred to me, there had been this Saturday Night Live sketch. One of those weird, limit-pushing sketches that comedy writers moon about, and that always get saved for the end of the show (when nobody is watching). For whatever reason— let’s say a counter to my worst-case, Nazi-in-verse scenarios—I thought of it.
