Schroder: A Novel (9 page)

We all looked. In the near distance, but with commitment, Meadow was indeed swimming, her head held stiffly just above the water, a big grin on her face. Just then the sun reemerged from the sky’s lone cloud, spilling outrageous light across the surface of the lake, which now seemed to be filled with boiling gold. I shielded my eyes and watched Meadow swim.

“Will you look at that,” I said. “I didn’t even know she could swim.”

“You didn’t—” The woman stepped forward. “Is she all right?”

“Oh, very,” I said. “Look at her. Solid. She must have learned last year.”

“But is that safe? I mean, no one else is in the water, it’s so cold.”

“You’re right, I should join her. Excuse me.”

I was wearing tan khakis, rolled to the knee, and a short-sleeve blue-checkered dress shirt from Eddie Bauer. I flipped my wallet and keys backwards onto the beach and waded out into the frigid water until my shirt belled around me. When the water was at my chest, I pushed off. Leaning my ear into the water, I swam a lazy sidestroke past my daughter. “Hello,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.” She treaded in my vision, her glasses speckled with water. “This water is heart-stoppingly cold,” I said. “I mean, I think my heart just
stopped.” Our laughter rang out over the water. From the beach, people stared. I could see my redhead looking beautiful and puzzled. Some things you can’t explain, you just can’t, no matter how sympathetic nor how moving in her own right is the listener.

STEAMBOATS

She wanted to ride the steamboats. We chose the
Minne-Ha-Ha
.

“Ha-ha-ha,” we said. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

We ran up the gangplank, dodging the crowd, because we wanted the best view of the paddlewheels. We hung as far over the rails on the upper deck as we safely could, and after a toot from the calliope, the boat left the dock, and we were showered with a chilly mist from the paddles. Meadow screamed, drawing other children to us, several of whom stuck their heads through the rail bars until their parents called them back. We didn’t care. I mean, we were wet already. Behind us, the shoreline fell away, and a chaos of seagulls hung over our wake like bridesmaids holding a veil. The wind picked up, soft and clean.

She said, “Here’s a joke. Where does a dog do his grocery shopping?”

“I don’t know. Where?”

“The Stop ’n’ Smell.”

“That’s brilliant.”

“I made it up. I can roller-skate, you know.”

“You can swim, you can roller-skate. What else can you do?”

“I can fly.”

“Of that I am skeptical.”

“Knock-knock,” she said. “Orange.”

“Wait. You forgot to let me ask who’s there.”

“Who’s there?”

“Ha! No,
I
ask
you
.”

The steamboat chugged up the eastern bank of Lake George. Dusk was falling as the boat came about, and we saw the yellow ball of sun disappear in a glint through the keyhole of the northernmost mountains.

“Poof,” she said. “Good night!”

“Yeeeeer outta here, sun,” I said.

“Yeeeeer out, sun!”

“You’re goin’
down
, sun.”

“Way down,” she said. “All the way downtown.”

“You’re goin’ down
state
.”

Grinning, she climbed a metal bench on the deck. “But I
can
fly,” she said. “Watch.” Stretching her arms out for balance, she placed both sneakers on the armrest, and started wheeling her arms, looking ungainly.

“Careful,” I said although she was well clear of the railings. Her shorts were bunched up over either thigh accordion-style, and her T-shirt rode up over her belly as she seesawed above the bench. When she jumped, her wind-knotted hair trailed like streamers.

“I’ll eat my hat,” I said. “You
can
fly.”

“I told you.”

“Come on, you crazy kid. Your lips are purple.”

We entered the warm inner cabin, where most of the families had fled from the afternoon bluster. An infant given free range was crawling across the tacky linoleum floor, batting an empty soda can in front of her.

“I’m hungry, Daddy.”

I looked around the cabin. “We should get you some dinner.”

She pointed. “How about something from that venting machine?”

“Brilliant,” I said. “It can vent us some dinner.”

Famous Amos cookies and a Yoo-hoo for her. Grainy hot coffee for me.

“Voilà,” I said, choosing a bench. “Dinner.”

Underneath us hummed a powerful motor. The vibration was loud and emptied my mind. I watched the green wall of mountain pass on the starboard side, near enough to see the play of songbirds in the branches.

Meadow said, “Daddy, am I allowed to marry you when I grow up?”

Involuntarily, I winced and looked at my shoes. “Nah,” I said, warming my hands on my paper cup. “You can’t. Besides, you don’t want to marry me anyway. But that’s sweet of you to ask. Truth is, you really ought to find someone closer to your own age.”

“Mariah’s my age. Am I allowed to marry Mariah?”

“In certain states.”

“I’d like to marry you. That’s my choice. Knock-knock. Daddy? Knock-knock.”

I looked at her, trying not to look as sad as I felt. “I love you, you know.”

“I know. Knock-knock.”

“I love you with my whole soul,” I said. “I wish I could explain it.”

“I know it already.”

“Good.” I smiled. “So you know what a soul is?”

“Sure,” she said, straightening. “The soul keeps the body up.”

I watched the vast sky absorb the darkness, my head buzzing, my heart too full.

“You have a wonderful way of putting things,” I said. “You have a wonderful way of seeing things. You have a wonderful mind.”

“I know,” she said, shrugging. “You say that all the time.” She fished in her bag for another cookie.

A blur of happy sensations and half-glimpsed intentions, and we were back inside the Mini Cooper, Meadow strapped into the booster seat, tucked under a large new beach towel that read “Queen of American Lakes.” We were driving again. North. The moon doggedly following us through the gaps in the trees. I turned on the radio. Al Green.
I’m so tired of being alone. I’m so tired of on-my-own.
In the rearview mirror, I watched Meadow surreptitiously stick her thumb in her mouth. Immediately her eyelids grew heavy.

“Doesn’t the dentist want you to stop sucking your thumb, sweetheart?” I said, remembering some injunction delivered via Pop-Pop. “So your teeth don’t get bent out of shape?”

“I’m not sucking my thumb,” she mumbled, mouth full.

“You sleepy?”

“Nope. I’m wide-awake. I’m going to stay awake all night.”

“Good. Then you can keep me company.” I smiled at her
in the rearview mirror. “Turns out, I don’t like the quiet. G.K. Chesterton called it ‘the unbearable repartee.’ Silence, that is.”
⁵
I was driving—just driving—Lake George constant alongside, the moon skipping through the branches.

“And it’s too quiet without you around,” I said. “No knock-knock jokes. No songs. I feel like I missed a year of your life, really. It’s not your fault. But you can swim and I didn’t even know it. It’s like my life’s been on pause, but yours—yours kept going.” I laughed at myself. “God. Your mom used to hate this about me, how I would just talk and talk—”

Predictably, there was no response from the backseat. Her thumb was suspended in front of her mouth, but her head had fallen to one shoulder, her glasses resting on the bulb at the end of her nose.

People say that I’ve found a way

To make you say that you love me

Hey baby, you didn’t go for that it’s a natural fact

That I wanna come back show me where’s at, baby

We lost the radio signal somewhere north of Ticonderoga.

WELL-WORN DREAMS

Let me tell you more about that scenic byway north alongside Lake George, about my state of mind. Dusk had fallen, leaving only the outline of the Adirondack foothills on the east side of the lake, black behemoths in the purple dark. Stars were clustered above the neon signs of innumerable roadside motels. The motels themselves were indistinguishable, their names infinite recombinations of the words
cove, lake
, and
cozy
. The air through the gap in the driver’s-side window tasted clean and atmospheric, as if siphoned from virgin space.

When I had driven through this thicket of life, into the northern darkness, a truly keen sense of longing had washed over me. I realized that my situation was irreparable. I was like a dead man, appealing my death. It made me too sad, to realize how late and how insufficient such an appeal would be. But why couldn’t this have been mine?
This
world, this world of togetherness. These towel-dried families trekking under the streetlights barefoot like migrating turtles, four or five to a room, sleeping below a ceiling fan, dreams leaping from head to head, the baby curling now against his sister, the
dad—suddenly awakened—lazily counting his brood, one two three kids and a wife, the wife (old friend, how could you still be so pretty?) in the midst of some well-worn dream. Walking to the ice machine in his boxer shorts with a bucket. Moths swarming the spotlight. Midnight, a touch of Canadian Club in a plastic cup. Why couldn’t I be him? Even the boredom, the functional alcoholism—I would have taken it. I would have been grateful for it, every day.

But the dead man, his soul in ascension, goes north. I drove a little farther than I had planned. (There’s a lot of road up there.) I knew only that to go further from one thing is also to come closer to something else.

Closer, but to what exactly?

Further, but from what?

The guilty mind accelerates, its pedal stuck. Thoughts come with too much velocity. This is its own punishment. Whenever headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, or I saw a car catching up with me from some distance, this velocity took effect. As the lights came closer, filling my rearview mirror, I could not help but drive faster. To speed, like my mind. Only once the cars passed me would I feel myself reeling from the sudden deceleration of my mind. The red glow of the taillights left me nauseous. I knew I was doing something wrong. But many wrong things had been done to me. And sometimes wrong things are done in the service of rightness.

I passed a sign that read, PARADOX, 2 MILES, and laughed bitterly.

Meadow stirred in the backseat.

“Daddy?” she said sleepily. “Are you OK, Daddy?”

“God yes, I’m great. I mean, it’s great to be with you. Go back to sleep.”

And that’s when we lost Al Green, and all I could raise on the radio were a couple of angry men talking about Manny Ramirez. I spied the black smear of Lake Champlain to the east.

There is no such thing as forgetting.

Unsettled by the sight of Lake Champlain’s dark expanse, I fled the back roads for the thruway. I searched the contents of my friend’s glove compartment and to my relief found a flask with a crusted nozzle and took a swallow. The dashboard glowed spaceship green. The radio signal, as I said, had been lost. It was close to midnight by then anyway. No one seemed awake with me. No one seemed alive at all. In the backseat, Meadow slept, the beach towel pulled to her chin. I considered waking her up, just to hear the sound of someone else’s voice.

The lights of Plattsburgh relieved me. Plattsburgh is a snarl of a town, surprisingly impoverished, barracks of transient white people hanging about, their children wide-awake all night. The clear lack of a police presence in Plattsburgh suggested it as a good place to stop. I needed a break. And to recover my wits. Meadow slept on. I parked under the spotlights of a heating-oil company parking lot, got out, and walked as far away from the idling car as I responsibly could. The huge drum lights from the port were at my back. My long shadow lay on the scrub grass. And that was when I began to breathe shallowly. My throat tightened. My hand went to my throat. Good God, I thought, not now. This had happened to me before, of course, but not for a long time. It had happened to me a lot when I was little. The cure for this had been—back in the dark days of Soviet-style medicine—long, lonely steam showers, my mother’s form a blurry silhouette waiting
for me on the edge of the toilet, periodically asking me if I felt better yet. I do not want to suggest that my life, and the series of mistakes I was making, was fated. And yet, and yet. It had been years since I stood gasping for air like I did standing in the parking lot in Plattsburgh. I felt that I had just woken up in utter darkness only to be blinded by a bright, sourceless light. I was finally awake, but who was that beyond? Who held the spotlight?