He cuffed her mussed hair, the bear teaching the cub to scuffle. "I'm deeply disappointed in you."
A voice from the doorway pronounced, "I'm deeply disappointed in Jan."
Diana waved as we three jerked around.
"Jesus. Don't sneak up behind people like that." Harold put hand to sternum. "That's a Lentz stunt."
"Don't let him give you a hard time, Meen. That problem is famous for being missed. And I happen to have been present when your dad made his acquaintance with it."
"Whoa. Hold on. Positivism prohibits our talking about that topic."
Mina stuck her tongue out at the bluster. Then she turned back, rapt, to Diana. Whatever problems sister Trish had with the woman, here shone only February adulation.
Mina's eyes fell matte in disappointment when Diana said she couldn't stop. "I expect a private showing sometime," Diana told me. She touched the two Plovers goodbye, and added a hand-brush for me.
Harold turned back to Helen. He scratched his chin in thought. Did physiology create that cultural cliché or had culture constructed the bodily release? The split was, in any case, linguistic.
"It's astonishing, Rick. I've never seen pattern-matching on this order. But of course, your grab bag of networks has nothing to do with human comprehension. This is to a twenty-two-year-old text-explicator what a gifted cockatiel is to Our Man in Leipzig."
He was right. Helen would never be able to decode Harold's reference, let alone figure out how he alluded to my love of Bach without the two of us ever having mentioned the topic.
"Okay, okay, you guys. Enough boy talk. I want a turn to try something. A girl goes into a music store. She flips through the bins of CDs. All at once, she starts to jump up and down and clap her hands. She opens her purse, and just as suddenly starts to cry. Why?"
I transmitted the story to Helen. "Why did the girl start to cry?"
Helen labored. In my ear, I heard a digitally sampled sob of empathy.
"The girl saw something sad in her purse."
Harold snickered. "She's still missing a little something upstairs, Ricardo." And always would be, his grin informed me.
Mina rushed to the defense. She probably made new girlfriends of all this week's high school pariahs. "Yes. But at least she knows how to pare things down. That must be tricky. Life is 99 percent extra stuff most of the time."
"Dr. Plover." I coded the gush in fake formality. We have this inverse rule, about how much you mean and how directly you can say it. "Your daughters are brilliant."
A button-bursting grimace. "Some of them are more brilliant than others."
"But we don't name names, do we, Daddy?"
He cuffed her again. This time, he kept his hand on her neck. Oddly, for her age, she suffered the touch.
"This one was always a real sharpie. She loved to fiddle with anything mechanical. No two clocks in the house ever gave the same time."
"Were you impatient to get names for everything?" I asked Mina.
Dad answered for her. The liability of owning parents who know too much.
"She generalized in startling ways. Always on the track of something urgent. The cues we set her were never the things she was after. Once, she pointed out the window at a bird. 'What that?' Remember, Snook? I think you said 'What that?' until you were four. You were very patient with our corrections of that one. She pointed and asked for the name, and I said, 'Goose.' Stickler for accuracy.
"Two days later, she points at a robin and says, 'Goose.' I tell her, 'No, sweetheart. Robin.' But I think, maybe I was too intent on that Christmassy, good-tasting nexus, where the kid would have been happier with 'bird.' Then she points at an airplane and says, 'Goose,' and I think, 'What's a good generic term for flying things?'
"When she gooses a jogger, and then falling leaves, and then a scrap of paper blowing across the yard, I wonder if we've birthed the reincarnated soul of Kaspar Hauser here. You know, how he used 'horse'—the one wooden toy he was given during seventeen years in subterranean nursery-prison — to mean any animal at all. I ask myself, could those evil poststructuralists be right? Do we live at the level of the arbitrary signifier, in a place where there can be no meaning because the thing being signified lies suffocating?"
Mina rolled her eyes. But she sat still for the end of the story. As if she'd never heard it.
"When she makes a break for the front door, and starts jumping up to grab the unreachable handle, calling, 'Goose, goose,' I finally hit on my idiocy. The word she had been looking for was To move fast. To be free. To escape.' "
Harold exhaled. "We tended to give her nouns, where all she ever wanted was processes."
"I've done my homework," C. pleaded at the end of a day. She'd slam shut the massive translating dictionaries or hurl a pen at the holder, not even trying to hit. "Can we go for a walk?"
Unconscious repetition of an old litany, her oldest. Her first spoken sentence. Good girl outside. C.'s requests sunk into me and snapped off. You promised me this would work out. None of this would have been necessary, with someone simpler than you,
The return to school turned out humiliating beyond expectation. More time had passed since she was twenty-one than either of us realized. Her classmates were children and her teachers sticklers for blasé condescension. She sat in molded-plastic desk-chairs and did busy work, little of it bearing on the translating of texts. At least once a week, and not limited to Mondays, she came home crying at the senseless debasement.
And it was my fault. She never said as much. But her every frustration slapped me with a paternity suit. When C. grew furious, I felt let off easy. When she was sweet with suppressing vehemence, I stood accused. Wronged, I became ridiculously reasonable. "I was just going to suggest a walk. Name your destination."
I was angry with my friend. She with me. Neither of us knew where the rage came from. It seemed petty betrayal even to voice it, so we never did. And so I nursed a martyrdom, and the two of us slipped imperceptibly from lovers to parent and child.
We still traveled, during her school breaks. We went farther afield, not because we had exhausted the three countries we could walk to from E. We needed the increasingly exotic. Someplace not walkable from where we were.
We went to Italy one term vacation. We stayed at a friend's fixer-upper villa in the little Lombard farm town of P. In preparation, I undertook a crash course in the language. For a moment in my life, I could read snatches of Boccaccio, Collodi, Levi. Four years later, I remember nothing.
We packed light. We always did. Maybe that doomed us as much as anything. We arrived with nothing, rented bikes, and, for a week or two, had never been happier.
We thought we knew how to see a town. "Mechelen falls," C. liked to joke. "Leuven falls." She kept every clipping, ticket, and photo of our conquests. She pasted them into the same album where we listed all the books we read out loud to one another.
But in Italy, in the sunny South, we met our sightseeing match. Mantua did not fall. Cremona did not fall. We did. Even the dustiest backwater towns routed us. The post office, the shoemaker's shop: any old hole-in-the-wall sat spackled over with crumbling Renaissance fresco. Guidebook stars fell everywhere, like summer meteors in shower.
We learned how trains run in a republic. We climbed campaniles and pored over baptisteries. We gnawed on osso buco and carried around slices of panettone in our pockets. For a few days, we lived our own invention. C. forgot the degradation of her return to school. I delighted in writing nothing, not a single word. We were well. We could live forever, futureless, at peace with one another.