I brace myself for him to come sprinting out of the building. I stare at the green door, the institutional handle, the black mat on the granite stoop. I wonder if there is another exit, if my father is already halfway home. The sky dims. Streetlights come on. A few teenagers walk by, look sidelong into the car, speak loudly. Mallory’s old piano teacher, no longer young but still brilliantly blonde with her excellent posture that we used to imitate, passes by with a limping greyhound. At 8:09 the green door swings open and a cluster of eight or ten people emerge, my father among them. Several of them shake my father’s hand. He nods goodbye to the group of them.
“Okay, let’s go,” he says before he’s all the way in the car.
I decide not to ask him about it and he volunteers nothing.
I fix him a steak and french fries for dinner. I make myself a salad with avocados and put some on his plate, though I know he won’t touch it. He is at his place at that table without a drink by his plate. It’s dinnertime and my father is not drunk.
“Good steak. You get it from Brad?”
“Brad wasn’t there. It was Will behind the counter.”
Usually any mention of Will Goodale, the third of the Goodale sons, is enough to launch him into a tirade. Will is a crook, a pig; they shouldn’t let him within twenty yards of the place. He is going to singlehandedly sink the business that his father started in 1933. Old Mr. Goodale. They don’t come any better than him. There was a gentleman. Always wore a coat and tie to work, every day. He didn’t deserve a slob like Will for a son.
But all he says is “Huh,” and returns to his steak.
I want to say encouraging things, but to make a fuss might be the wrong move.
Over his ice cream and chocolate sauce he says, “I think I’ll go over to the club tomorrow and hit a few balls.” He looks up. There is a terrible amount of despair in his face. “Do you want to come?”
“I’m sorry, Dad.” How am I going to say this without starting a fight? “I can’t go to the club.”
“Sure you can. I know you’re not a member, but you’re under the roof.”
I take in a breath. I try to speak as gently as possible. “I can’t support an institution that chooses its members based on their skin color, religion, and bank accounts.”
“All right.”
All the fight has gone out of him.
He does the dishes and goes to bed.
The next night I drive him back to the church. The woman with the stringy hair is outside smoking. My father says something that makes her smile and then goes inside. I watch her lean against the wall and blow smoke up into the trees until the library clock across the street says five past seven and she goes in, too.
I get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk. I have no idea what to do with myself. After my mother died, I started studying. I’d never really studied before, never applied myself, as my report cards in high school always suggested I do. But I worked hard my last two years in college to get into Michigan’s graduate program in anthropology, and I worked much harder there, my sights on Berkeley from the start. For so very long, my life has been about deadlines, weeks at a time indoors, nights without sleep, reading, writing, and typing. I have been a slave to professors, to students, to the computer room, to syllabi, and then to my dissertation, a behemoth at five hundred and eighty-six pages called “Spirited Play: Zapotec Children’s Understanding of Life and Death.” When I was finishing it in the spring I didn’t see anyone for twenty straight days. I stayed in the apartment of a friend who’d gone to Nagasaki for her fieldwork on the hibakusha, the “explosion-affected people.” I stocked up on rice and beans and water and chained myself to the desk. I slept in the chair, head on a book, for a few hours at a time. When I ran out of toilet paper I used a sponge, which I scalded with hot water afterward. I had only the vaguest sense that that was disgusting. At the time it felt efficient. When I was done and had defended it, Jonathan took me to the Upper Peninsula for a long weekend, but talking was difficult, and everything in the natural world seemed to be moving at an alarming velocity. The wind felt so heavy against my body, the new leaves whipping around so fast. I had a sense that some force was at work, not a neutral force but an angry, aggressive force that made me afraid of the physical world. Jonathan expected me to relax, to luxuriate, but I didn’t know how to anymore. I felt as detached and remote from my life as I had when I came back from my fieldwork in Mexico. He was patient and took me on long walks in the woods and across sandbars, and I did slowly, slowly, let down, but within a few weeks I was back on deadline, with three articles to revise for publication and a hundred final undergraduate essays to grade.
Since then I’ve often thought proudly back to those twenty days of pure mind-life. Jonathan and Julie refer to that time as the lock-down, and I freely admit I became a freak, but I liked it. There is a part of me that could live in my head quite happily, a part of me that longs to return there, that doesn’t need or want the body. But now on the sidewalk in Ashing, removed from any intellectual demands and thrown back into my child mind, which senses only the visceral — the smells of my father, low tide, wet dog, and the sounds of seagulls and church bells and station wagons — I feel the need to let my mind wander. Does it know how to wander anymore? Do I know how to think without a book or a notebook or a computer screen? I think of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their walks through the chalk hills. I suppose a walk would be a good start.
The sun has dropped behind the library and the sky has gone lilac white, waiting for night. Most people are home, fixing dinner. The library is closed, Goodale’s too. Only the gas station is open; a man in a loosened tie is filling up his Audi, his gaze unnecessarily fixed on the task. The sub shop has lights on, teenagers in the booths. Then there is a row of dark storefronts, places and awnings that didn’t used to exist: a kitchen store, a pizza parlor, a fancy stationery shop. There is only one light at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. As I get closer I see it is a small wooden sign lit by a bulb above it. LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS.
Concave. The creep.
His store is tiny, not much bigger than a walk-in closet. All the walls are shelves; a freestanding bookcase runs down the center. Books, new and used, are squeezed in tight, their spines carefully aligned with the edges of the shelves. More books are stuffed in horizontally above them, and even though it’s all neatly done it has the chaotic feel of a professor’s office. There seems to be no cash register, no counter, and no owner.
My educated adult self pleads with the adolescent to step out of the shop. Proving to a jerk that you have finally developed breasts — not huge ones, by any means, but proportional — is a stupid reason to be in a bookstore. But then my eye catches on a Penelope Fitzgerald novel and what looks like a new Alice Munro collection, and soon I’m squatting on the floor, trying to find Independent People, which Jonathan is always urging me to read; it’s there, and so is Song of Solomon, which Julie worships and I haven’t read yet. Then I see that there’s actually an anthropology section all on its own, not combined with sociology or general science, and there are both volumes of Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology and The Collected Letters of Franz Boaz. They are not the rarest of finds, but I specialized so early in Zapotec children that I didn’t get a very broad base in my own field. There’s even Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, my first bible, which I lent to someone once and never got back. I have a tall stack of books in my arms when Neal steps through the door. I completely forgot about him.