“No,” I said. “No, to be honest. I don’t even know which town you’re talking about. We’ve been driving all night.”
The old woman looked disappointed. “The thing is, I like people to come recommended. You never know. It’s just me out here. You never know.”
“Oh, I totally understand. But we’re just a dad and his little girl, who needs a place to change out of her pj’s. She could use a nice little cabin to rest and change.”
The woman nodded, but I could tell now she had no idea Meadow was wearing a nightgown. Aha. She was perfect; she couldn’t even see. I redoubled my efforts.
“This might sound like a whole lot of hooey to you,” I said, “but I believe we were recommended. By the land. We were drawn to it. Sorry—” I squeezed my eyes with my fingers. “I’ve been driving all night. I completely understand your policy. Come on, sweetheart.”
“Well,” the woman said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “you can come and have a look at Cabin Two. Cabin One is rented, so you don’t get a choice. I don’t know”—the woman spoke to the ground as she walked—“the other one is rented to someone else who wasn’t recommended.”
“The economy is terrible,” I said, taking Meadow’s hand. “We’ve all lost so much.”
“I don’t offer breakfast or any conveniences,” the woman continued. “I don’t have innerweb. Hell, I don’t even have a phone. But most guests, to tell the truth, seem to get a kick out of that. Where you from?”
I squeezed Meadow’s hand, gave her a wink. “Canada,” I said.
Meadow’s eyes widened, then narrowed with conspiracy.
The old woman led us down a gravel path that ended at the lake in a small horseshoe beach with hard gray sand. On either side of this beach stood what looked like two refurbished tool sheds spruced up with a little latticework. The chocolate brown structures were so small that they appeared as two dollhouses standing in the woods. The old woman grappled for a key ring on her belt and shouldered open the door. Meadow ran inside and bounced upon one of the narrow, iron-framed beds. The room was musty and unswept and smelled of wet wool. An oval rope rug lay on the floor, and a dozen small apothecary bottles lined the sill of the cabin’s single window in the dimness.
“Well?” the old woman waited. “What do you say?”
What did I say? What should I have said? Should I have said no — no, we’d better turn around and go home? I failed to save my marriage, and I failed to protect my rights as a father, and I failed in my resolve in so many ways, and now my exceptionally intelligent child must return to Our Lady of Chronic Fatigue and her deadening education, and her conventional grandparents, and her merciless mother, and we must never speak of this, and must never wonder what we would have gained if we had just said yes? And I! Should I have said, Actually, I’m needed back at my rental on New Scotland Ave. so that I can spend another evening in the shower stall scrubbing the soap scum off the sealant with a toothbrush, a glass of Canadian Club nestled in the soap basket?
I stepped inside the tiny cabin and sneezed from the visible allergens.
“Thank you,” I said, pumping the old woman’s hand. “We love it.”
WHEN IN DOUBT, DON’T
They say the recession made people look inward. Out of work, folks suddenly had time on their hands to contemplate the fabric of their souls. People who had driven themselves into the ground for decades were suddenly baking bread, reading poetry, creating sand mandalas, and asking probing questions of their priests and rabbis. I’m not saying it was good for us. I’m just saying we tried to make the best of it.
As for me, I guess history will count me among the legions of promising young Realtors whose careers were in ascension when the real estate bubble burst. Throughout 2006–2007, I had been selling properties at a steady clip. Just ranches and bungalows in North Albany, condos in refurbished multifamilies in Pine Hills. Small-fry, starter homes, but lots of them. Not bad for someone who was barely trying. At my best, I was representing ten to fifteen properties at a time, all of which vanished from the market before the next insert in the Sunday paper. I was doing so well that I simply stopped taking calls. My success — albeit in a field for which I had little respect — appealed to my latent exceptionalism. And so, although it was the recession that brought me low, I was well into the process of subverting my career when it struck. In fact, it was probably at the pinnacle of my career (Clebus & Co. Realtor of the Month February 2007) when I lost interest. Having proved myself so handily, it was my nature to grow bored and look for a new challenge.
The moment Meadow was born, I knew she was exceptional. First of all, she didn’t cry. Although I understand that a newborn crying is a sign of life and of vigor, I dreaded the cliché of it. To be honest, I had little interest in her until that moment. I never really wanted children. That is, I never really wanted children, but I wasn’t prepared to take a stand about it. I didn’t not want children. But Meadow didn’t cry when she was born, and this piqued my interest. I peered at her in the silver scale as she punched at the emptiness, and I thought, I’ll be damned, there’s something in this.
Then I let two years go by before investing more than a passing interest in her. She was a sweet but somehow not yet relevant presence, not yet here. Besides, she was yours, clamped to your breast. A father gets the message.
And so I didn’t sweat fatherhood much those early years. I was a provider. It made me proud that I could give you time at home with the baby. I enjoyed my erratic work schedule and used it to further my recreational soccer career. I became friends with my clients and with them took three-hour lunches in the winter, spontaneous trips to Saratoga in the summers. I often came home at the end of the day with cleats over one shoulder, skipping my way up the stairs, and until I heard Meadow’s crowing from behind the apartment door, I sometimes forgot that I even had a baby.
You, of course, Laura, had changed. Meadow was your life. After you gave birth to her, you spent a disheveled year at home. You mashed your own baby food, fretted about environmental poisons, and generally ignored your careerist impulses. Sometimes, when I came home, the kitchen was chaos, as if it had been ransacked, with no sign of either of you. I would climb the stairs, and there at the top, in the steamy bathroom, you and little Meadow would be secreted in the bathtub together, clothes — your big blousy shirts and her little onesies — strewn like lovers’ clothes across the threshold.
It doesn’t take much effort to go along with someone else’s vision of life. For Christ’s sakes it doesn’t take much effort to go along with anything. But then, one day, a force of reckoning comes to your door demanding a word with you. For me, that day occurred when I came home from soccer and Meadow — eighteen months of age, a whisper of a being — pointed to my sweaty face and said, “Daddy rains.” It made me pause, just as I had when she didn’t cry. How does a child so young compose such a pretty sentence? She looked up at me. I was thirty-four — not an old man, but old enough to spy the burnt edges on the scroll of my life. This child. Did some clue to my life lie here?
So for me, for us, the economic slowdown presented an opportunity for spiritual growth in the form of me going bust and you getting a coveted job at the new experimental charter school in North Albany. By springtime of ’09, the real estate market was as dry as a desert. It seemed as if its previous health, the happy exchange of sellers and buyers, was a fairy tale. And this is how I came to be Stay-at-Home Dad of the Year. This is how I came to be left on the porch that fall with my three-year-old child, who was really a stranger to me, while her mother drove off in my company car, looking very pretty, actually, in a flounced blouse and touchingly mature pearl earrings.