I Will Do Better, page 17
Tonight, though, I did not feel blown to shreds. Anything but.
“I think that’s what we got,” I said. “Oh—”
Searching through my hard drive, different keywords. “Wait,” I said—
Diana as a teenager, back during the eighties, part of the cast for this, a homemade horror film, done with her friends. She is young, lithe, and has a frizzy perm, cotton candy hair that seems, if not exclusive to, then claimed by Southern women of the time. A bit of typecasting: Diana plays the pie-eyed optimist. She has one line of dialogue, which, I remember now, we always enjoyed repeating to one another: “The world is a mixed-up and crazy place, and we just have to accept people for who they are.”
“Yes,” I said, then remembered something else. “Right.” Clickity click.
That one clip from her pregnancy, taken at the baby shower she had with her friends. Diana had long wanted to learn the famed dance from Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In this clip, she is front and center and blimp pregnant, surrounded by the friends she loves. Everyone moves to the left, points, moves to the right. Diana is a bit behind, a bit slow. She’s having the time of her life.
I hadn’t ever thought of showing them. I can’t quite tell you why: most likely I hadn’t believed Lily was old enough to understand them. Next to me, she still might not have been old enough to understand, or even follow, the actions. Did it matter? Whether or not Lily could create order from these happenings, they were her mother. Mom. Ethereal to her, cosmic, a concept. She hadn’t known it was possible to even consider her mother as a person, let alone to witness Diana as flesh and blood—a teenager trying to act, a pregnant woman laughing as she danced behind the beat.
Lily stared at the screen, waiting for more.
I clicked that file shut. My heart was pumping pretty good, another moment when I wasn’t completely in control. The photos were painful but also filled me with momentum, made my hands move quicker, my thumb directing the laptop mouse pad. I made little throaty noises, found the proper folder, started going at it, opening photos—from BlackBerrys, T-Mobile Sidekicks, photos sent from friends’ iPhones: Diana and the swaddled newborn; Diana and the moon-eyed, mostly bald baby; Diana and the not-quite-bald-anymore infant—the growing little girl with the massive forehead that Diana schlepped in her baby carrier while she taught. They opened in a flash and I got a straight snapping jab, not just the memory, but all the attendant information, in this case when Diana was first diagnosed, that summer in New Hampshire. The image was Mommy in her hospital bed, cuddling Lily, both of them happy, gorgeous, bald. What also came with it: the doctor and me talking outside the nurses’ station, him explaining the complexity of the disease, Diana, later that morning, asking me to find an organic market where they might have all-natural baby formula.
Hundreds of these. There had to be. Almost three years’ worth of photos.
I showed another one to Lily now: this is what your mommy looked like; this is what your mommy did with you. I wanted her to see it all, to know everything.
Here is what Mommy did. And here you are with your mother; this is what you did.
Again and again Lily witnessed what had already been so apparent: Lily did indeed have a mommy. And no matter how tired Mommy might have been, no matter what horrid treatment she’d just been through, the woman in the pictures was overjoyed to be with her daughter: that joyous spirit present, her love for her child bursting through.
This. This is what we had, all the memories that I could show, the stories I could repeat—
And the stories that Grandma Peg would be telling, like about Diana falling off a horse when she was six and breaking her arm.
And the stories from her godmom, Susannah, and from all of Diana’s other friends and relatives.
If we looked at enough pictures and watched enough videos and told all the stories—if we created new memories, imprinted new ideas—who knows? Maybe …
The little girl was yawning. She shut her eyes, seemed snug beneath the comforter, ready for sleep, giving in. Then she opened them, just barely, the thinnest slits. A satisfied look. Lily reached out, her hand almost making it around my wrist. “When I wake up tomorrow,” she said, “I think the lights will be on.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lily’s prediction turned out to be wrong. The lights and electricity remained dormant, our apartment cold and dull.
I poured out some dregs of dry cereal for her, tried to get a handle on just what kind of playing field we’d be dealing with. From the transistor radio, the news was as follows: the metropolitan subway system had flooded, with the MTA chairman calling the hurricane “the most devastating event in the history of the 108-year-old system.” Local schools were still canceled. The Halloween parade too. “Trick or treating will happen another day,” I said. I mentioned that she still had all her candy from the West Village festival. “That’s something, right?”
Lily’s flat expression meant she understood each word but did not want to accept their collective meaning, their inherent truth. She shivered, the glazed bricks of this old building were acting as an incubator for the morning’s cold.
Without power, chill and gloom solidified this apartment as a dead zone. Staying put wasn’t an option. “All right,” I said. “We have more adventure ahead of us today.” Oddly enough, I felt a rush as I spoke, found myself believing my words, looking forward to figuring this out. My mind started: the radio had just made clear that subways were out, which meant fewer options for us; anywhere we’d go had to be via foot, maybe a taxi, if I could find one. I began to triangulate: visits to that bank vestibule would allow us to recharge, meaning I no longer had to parcel out my phone and computer usage. Which meant: okay, open the laptop.
This is how I discovered that the late-night mass email I’d sent— from my phone, asking anyone for playdates—had received untold responses. A list of parents from Third Street. One or two dashed-off sentences at a time, mostly good wishes. Like the majority of our building’s residents, they’d already fled the city. My sitter had checked in to cancel her scheduled visit, which made sense: Who’d expect her to show up in the middle of this? Friends also were touching base. Buses were beginning to run over the Brooklyn Bridge: Did we want to take one and use an extra room in Park Slope?
Down my inbox I clicked, considering each offer, my universe expanding with goodwill, even that cheesiest of words, “gratitude.”
Then I saw A’s name. Our first contact since I’d ended things.
It hurt her to think of us being without power. She did not know if I even had access to email, and she did not want me getting wrong ideas. Her roommate was stuck upstate. I was encouraged to take Lily and get into a taxi. We could shower, recharge the batteries, nap. If necessary, Lily and I could take her bed. She would sleep on the couch.
It’s gorgeous, a kind and selfless gesture, arriving directly out of some classic, much-anthologized short story. All I had to do was take the invitation, grab us a taxi, take A up on her kindness. Just ride up into Queens and tear off that scab. If I didn’t want to do that, then a variant of the concept: move in the opposite direction, ordering the cab across the Brooklyn Bridge, into Fort Greene. We could ride things out with the nice married couple who hung out with Lily on Saturday nights.
Manhood. Just what does it mean to be a man? There have been lofty notions: responsibility and duty have been thrown around a decent amount, especially with regard to fatherhood. But let’s be honest: Men also might have an ego and insecurity at the same time, which results in a territorial lack of familiarity with other boroughs. Men might not want to impose. Men might not want to be at the mercy of people they don’t know all that well. Men might refuse to be put in more emotional debt, or might just respond to the gut instinct that says, Nah. Men need to prove shit to themselves. Men have martyr complexes. Men separate themselves, alienate themselves, refuse to read writing that all but glows from on the wall. Men ignore people who, out of the blue, because they are concerned for a little girl, emailed. Men, or some men—or one man—decide, We can play this to the end.
I did not answer A’s email. Lily turned down both of the outfits I’d selected for her. Instead, she walked directly to her chest of drawers, selected her own clothing. I let her pack a baggie of her favorite Halloween candy, pretended I did not see her sneak that miniature-sized Milky Way, the lump of chocolate in her cheek. Final dregs of Pirate’s Booty, check. Quarters from Change Lake, check. Helping ease her feet down through her tights, helping her get into her jacket sleeves, securing her backpack, checkity check check.
“Do we have to?” she asked.
“You just take your time, turn on your light.” I locked both locks on the front door. “Just like yesterday,” I said. “You’ll do great.”
Halfway between the second and first floor, she became rigid. Extending her arms, Lily shook her hands out in front of her. Her breaths were deep; color flooded to her face.
“What?” I asked.
She summoned her courage: “I don’t want you to fall again.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Daddy’s good.”
“No.” Her voiced echoed through the stairwell. “When you were running and fell and had to go to the hospital. It was my fault.”
I heard my pulse in my ears. I put my hands on the sides of her head, took my time brushing down her hair. I smiled at her, kissed her forehead.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You were three. You couldn’t have done anything bad.”
Her eyes stayed with mine. Her breathing seemed to calm.
“We were playing,” I said. “It just happened. It was an accident. Whoopsie.”
She nodded just a bit. She seemed to hear. Her cheeks were red, shining wet.
I sensed it wasn’t over; there was still something wrong. I maintained our eye contact, kept looking at her, kept breathing.
“Mommy?” I asked.
Lily gave another little nod.
“I can’t stop thinking of the videos.” Her words came out all at once, almost a shout. “It is my fault.”
“No.”
“It is.”
“Mommy just got sick,” I said. “Everyone tried to help her. The doctors tried. Everyone who loves Mommy tried.”
I touched my forehead to hers. “It could not be your fault.” I tapped my head against hers a second time. “She lived for you. You are her baby.”
Again I said, “She lived for you.”
With this, Lily’s shoulders heaved. Something inside her gave way, loosening, not becoming undone—not that—but something inside her unclenched, softening. She was still sobbing, her face was a mess, a crimson rictus, at once pain and relief. But that was okay. “I live for you,” I said. “Daddy lives for you too.”
Lily responded by touching the top of her head to my forehead. We pressed into each other and then she slipped off and leaned into my shoulder, burrowing, digging her face into the rough fabric of my sample sale coat. She released a snort, staying in my shoulder for a time, until, with what almost seemed a shyness, she withdrew, a bit, and wiped her snot on my collar.
THE BLACKOUT WOULD last another four days, ending early Friday evening, when, with little warning, the lights and television went back on inside the apartment.
We couldn’t know this on that morning, of course.
What we could know—what we could do—was this:
On the front step of our apartment building that last morning of October, with the clouds breaking and patches of faint blue peeking through along the rim of sky, I could reach out my hand to Lily. Lily could put her thin little fingers around the tattoo on my ring finger. We could stand there; electricity could run through her thin little fingers; nuclear power could run through my tattooed ring finger. Our connection could throb through our veins, could pulse through our hearts, could erupt through our bodies. Ahead of us, we had the day, the city, the world, leaves, the wind; we had the universe, the known, the mystical, the metaphysical, the profane, the profound— all ahead of us, waiting.
In a Zen tale, a young monk, brand-new to a monastery, asks how he can help, what he can do. An older monk asks, “Have you eaten?” The younger monk nods. Says the older monk: “Wash your pot.”
Do the next right thing is that idea.
I could call my sister and see how she and her kids were doing. I could strap Lily into the stroller and wheel her across Lexington Avenue and come upon a crew from Con Ed at work around a manhole and ask if they’d figured out what was wrong and have them say, Not a clue. I could push the stroller across the west side of Union Square, where the farmers market usually was, and come upon a fleet of parked utility company trucks and ask how long it was going to take to get the lights back and get the same shrug that those workers were giving the other thousand people who’d asked in the last hour.
Superdad here hadn’t taken care of laundry before the storm. Lily and I were both tattered, needing showers. Potentially, we could finish with my sister and head north, toward the flagship Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth. Once there, I could procure Lily packs of underwear and socks. She could try on a few cute outfits. I could find snow boots in her size blessedly on sale.
Ahead lay her first haircut. Ahead lay her first loose tooth. One particularly terrible Mother’s Day I’d take her to a dance recital to get her away from all the festivities, and the ushers would make a point of handing a red rose to every mom in attendance.
Today, though, what else could we do? Well, on our way back from Macy’s, potentially we could take in a most curious site— indeed, that most New Yorkish of images: the famed modernist skyscraper where King Kong had made his fatal ascent. We could gaze upon the Empire State Building, glowing amid the darkened and closed city block, the iconic tower literally emanating with light, spilling excesses from its store marquees, from untold windows. I could ask someone, and learn that the Empire State Building operated on its own power grid, independent from the rest of the city.
We were ourselves operating on our own power grid, independent of the rest of the city, two little flashlight beams amid this wounded, flickering, kaleidoscopic extravaganza.
How were we going to survive?
How were we going to keep doing this?
Day two of a blackout probably wasn’t the time for me to go Vanilla Ice and—yo—solve our massive life issues. It was simply time to wash our proverbial pot, to shepherd my daughter through this world in a way that best shielded her from the blackouts, from the disappointments, from maternal absence, from my own inclination toward grouchiness, from my tired spirals, from my desire to have someone listen to and pay attention to me, from my truly dubious decision-making processes, from my endless onslaught of flaws.
We stood in front of our apartment on East Twenty-Second. Our next steps awaited.
We couldn’t possibly know what lay ahead. But I looked forward to experiencing it—all of the great handful that is life—with my little girl.
EPILOGUE
AS I WRITE this, Lily is thirteen years old, and looks so much like her mom, it often stops me. Her body has filled out into that of a woman; she has braces whose colors get changed with each adjustment, as well as an on-again/off-again Instagram account and hair that she recently dyed a flaming chemical red. She is hell on radioactive wheels. I mean that in the best way: difficult one moment and charming the next, sulking, unreachable, diffident, and then composed, ready to get defensive, go to pieces, or solve a problem at a moment’s notice. Like many young women of her day and age, she’s hit that place where she wants to spend free time with friends rather than doing things with her dad. She’s declared herself to be attracted to girls (my reaction: “Cool”), and has declared herself to be beyond gender, putting her foot down about purchasing a man’s suit for the first bat mitzvah she’d been invited to. Sometimes I think Lily uses social anxiety as an excuse to act spoiled and pissy, like when the sound of silverware scraping on a plate makes her cry. She recently came home from therapy with Dr. Jennifer Melfi—yes, bless her, Dr. Melfi—and stood in front of me, declaring—with Fuck you pulsing through every word—that she was going to get her septum pierced and, whether I liked it or not, I could not stop her, so I might as well support her and let her do it.
I am fifty-three. Lily and I now reside, together, in a different apartment, just a few blocks from where so many of the events of these pages played out. Lily has her own bed now, her own room. We’re on the fifth floor of a walk-up, and each time I head up or down all the stairs, I feel it through my knees, especially when I am hauling laundry or groceries. I am still an adjunct professor, nothing more, and fret about what little hair I have left (a shanda, how little hair I have left). No home equity. Few stocks. Little savings. Still single. By most of the traditional standards of manhood, I guess I haven’t fared so well. At the same time, this last decade has brought a larger societal reconsideration of manhood and what a man is supposed to be, stressed and accentuated the idea of the toxic male, reshaped the traditional white hetero male as a catchall villain, and made clear that the new century’s literature and history will not be written by such men. Maybe there’s consolation in not meeting such standards, but refashioning them, however microscopically.
FIVE WEEKS AFTER the blackout. We’d started counting down to Lily’s fifth birthday. This included a special present for her. I’d been prepping her with a slew of YouTube clips: those black-and-white ones of Julie Andrews, twenty-one years young, live on network television (no way for Julie to know that just around the corner were Mary Poppins and Maria Von Trapp); Leslie Ann Warren in the faded, flowing gowns from her 1965 CBS special. We’d watched the teen star Brandy and the tragic icon Whitney Houston perform their duet (a mid-nineties production, excellent ratings, glowing reviews). Always, we’d returned to one clip, from our current year’s Tony Awards broadcast, a medley, Cinderella and her fairy godmother singing about what was and was not possible. The clip transitions into a ballroom dance scene where the prince and Cinderella fall in love with one another from across the room.
