My father seduced my mother on the gravelly shoulder of an asphalt road full of thumbtacks. He was coasting down the hill she’d been puffing her way up on her bicycle. When he offered to throw her three speed in the back of his truck she looked him up and down once, taking in blue jeans with ridiculous cuffs, a cowlick, hands deliberately held palms up to let her know he had nothing to hide. She’d just broken up with a man who played violin outside her window. She’d been riding uphill to break the spell he was trying to exert over her. Even at this moment he was still in town standing underneath her room, still playing, dirges now, in between blowing loudly into his handkerchief. Her front tire was blown in more places than she had patches in her gig bag.
“Men wear me out,” she said to my father. “I know it was a guy who dumped the tacks.”
“I’m on my way to the post office,” he said. “I thought you might need help, is all.”
“Not unless you could mail me a tire,” she said.
***At the gas station she lifted her bike out of the back of the truck, said thank you and began unhitching her front wheel from her frame. She leaned the lame bike against an air pump and separated the tube from the tire with her hands. She wiped the black off her fingers onto her shorts, and headed for the ladies with the tube. He was suddenly at her side, the door of his pickup still ajar.
“Excuse me?” she asked, watching his shoulder keep pace with hers. She was hot and sweaty now. She had holes to find and glueing to begin. She had had enough of a man’s eyes looking doleful, bewildered, eager.
“Thanks,” she said, “again. I don’t need anything else.”
“There’s a better way to check for leaks than looking for bubbles underwater.”
“No doubt,” she said.
He stepped in front of her, blocking her, smiling at her, and took the tube right out of her grasp. She wondered who was watching, if the mechanics had her in their sights. She was not a woman who wanted to be seen struggling with a man over a tire in a gas station. She was a woman who wanted not to appear as if she were struggling at all. He held the tube to his lips, and began to slide it between his fingers, holding it so close to his lips she could only imagine the space between skin and rubber.
He took his time, grazing her tire as if waiting for the perfect, unhurried kiss, as if both of them had all the time in the world. He marked each hole he passed with the faintest indentation with his thumbnail. She was rendered speechless.
When I was thirteen my family spent a week together, driving to the Grand Canyon in our Fairlane station wagon. We were going to camp on the edge, and examine the world from a precipice. This had been my mother’s idea and her description. The idea of standing on the edge of something and looking out farther and wider than you’d imagined possible appealed to her for reasons I didn’t apprehend. Last year, while we lay next to one another in her mechanical hospital bed, our feet sticking out the rails to stay cool, she brought that trip up again, recalling her idea that standing and gazing out over all that orange and purple and burnt umber stone would be the most freeing experience in the world. “I wanted to see a place I couldn’t cross,” she said. “Where you couldn’t ever get up close to the other side.”She’d been thirty-four on that trip. She had spent entirely more time in front of her wringer washer than she’d imagined she might, in that now distant moment when she pulled my father’s hands with the tube still in them down to his belt buckle. Right there in front of the mechanics. She’d filled the sudden emptiness in front of his face with hers.
Before our trip, my father’s comment in our kitchen to no one in particular, save the chugging refrigerator, was that life at home was precipitous enough. But in an effort to show his good intentions, he had borrowed a neighbors’ canoe for the odd chance we might find a river to put in. On the highway the straps holding the narrow green boat to the roof rack banged in the wind. The bow lurked over the windshield like a hood and he was forever asking my mother if she thought it was shifting.
“For heavens sake, Hank,” she kept saying, “leave me alone.” I was sprawled across the folded-down back seat, watching the swift passage of yellow and green desert, trying to decide how large a flame had erupted and how deep a hole had been blasted when the meteor being promised by the road signs had crashed up ahead.
“It’s not a hole that knocks your socks off,” my father informed us. “It’s more of a depression.”
“How would you know?” my mother snapped.
“How would I not?” he said.
I wanted to see the crater. I’d begun to think there might be cool souvenirs I could bring home and show off. I began imagining a small suede purse, with fringe, with a stamp on it that said Arizona, and inside, a piece of tektite, the black globular stone that shows up around meteor sites. Whether tektite is a piece of earth, melted and reformed on impact, or a piece of a falling star, I didn’t know then, and I still don’t now. I only knew that with it I could make a large impression on my girlfriends. I could use it for seances.
My father said no, absolutely not, we were on a timetable, he wasn’t going to spend our vacation looking at two holes in the earth. My brother hit me out of boredom. I began making comments as to the narrow capacity for fun and adventure my family always displayed.
Then we were on the shoulder. I was standing alongside the car in the shade it cast with the canoe on the roof. My legs felt like pieces of tektite from the hot wind blasting underneath the car.
My choice, my father said, squinting past me into the wasteland of sage and stone, was to hitchhike, or take the roof. I could lie on my stomach, protected from slipping by the bars of the rack, with the canoe to soften the wind and dim the sun’s heat. He wasn’t going to listen to anything else I had to say, or not say, the rest of that afternoon.
He was trying to elicit repentance. I was glad to be out of the car.
When we pulled back onto the highway it felt like flying up there, my arms outstretched, my mother’s sunglasses propped on my nose for stopping bugs, my brother jealously handing his water bottle up to me from his open window whenever I knocked on the metal beneath me.
At the south rim of the Grand Canyon late that afternoon, I rolled down off the car roof before anyone opened their door. I took off the sunglasses. Before I walked over to look at the edge, at the cut in the world which did not hide the story of the ways it had been scored and excoriated, I knew for what turned out to be the last time in my life, that, if I got a running start, didn’t flinch, and spread my arms wide, I’d float.
For reasons unknown to me then, my mother refused to get our of the car. In her hospital bed she told me, “I needed to keep it how it was in my imagination. What if I had seen a road switch-backing to the other side?” She rolled away from me and, after a while, she shifted her knees to let me know it was time to readjust the hot water bottle under her hip. “I swear. If the Marlboro man had ridden up right then I’d have climbed on the back of whatever scraggly ass bronco he was riding.”
“Damn,” my father said, standing near me at the rock wall, squinting across the myriad plateaus, trying to ignore my mother, silent behind him in the car. “We’ll never get this boat down there.”
***None of my father’s neighbors knew him when he was a man whose lips searched for the faintest escapes of air. None of them knew him when he was a man with a daughter and a son who grew up describing him to their classmates as frighteningly eccentric, a man who would wrap his shirt around their chests, hang onto the long sleeves like reins, and insist they stand on the wall and lean out over the drop of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Our neighbors compliment me about him, they go out of their way to describe him as endearingly sweet when he tries to lift up a back sash window, or rings their doorbell asking for lemonade, or the toilet.
“I’ll never let you teach me anything again,” my son yelped at me, from behind his crashed bike. I’d let go too soon and told him I was out of time and patience. “You care more about him than me,” he sobbed.
Before she died my mother extracted one promise from me and my brother. “Don’t tie him up.” There are days when the little harnesses people put on their toddlers now have immeasurable appeal. My children fawn over their afterschool teachers more than they do over me. They ask me why Papa is the one who gets to stay home. I can’t explain that daycare for men like my father bewilders him and that I did not turn out to be a woman who can keep track of the escapes and sorrows of both her children and her father hour after hour.He believes in items he can’t see. Peanuts in red and white striped bags sitting on a counter. A three speed red bike with fenders, with patches beneath the tires smoother than a manicure. His mother stirring soup, behind a blowing curtain. Mysterious objects: a Cuban cigar, the queen in a chess set, golf clubs. Things I don’t believe he ever held with the intent to use.
In the mornings he lies in bed while I break up the children’s skirmishes. He listens to the sounds beyond the windows. Door slams, the sound of distant traffic, feet clicking on the sidewalk, motorcycles revving, dog barks. “It’s a net,” he says. “Everyone always leaving or returning. The leaves just shoosh us along.”
He does not want to play cards, or make melted strawberry basket jewelry, or watch TV, or sit and stare. He paces.
At dusk I sit on our front steps and keep an eye on him pacing. My children revel in their sidewalk freedom--we play games to ease everyone’s passage toward their dark rooms and solitary beds. These games involve long lists of directions to follow: Run backwards up to the fire hydrant, bow, hop over to the parking sign, hula like your life depends on it.
My father tries to keep up. He stands bewildered at my side, trying to invent hand signs to tell the story while he swings his hips. But he freezes. “Where’s Mom? Why do we have to leave so soon?”
“She went to the Grand Canyon Dad.”
“Why would she want to go without me? She’s not still peeved?” He gyrates. With his hands near his chin he mimes holding the tire to his lips. I am the only person in the world who knows he’s not signing a man playing harmonica.
He took my mother to a lake in the hills, the one she’d been peddling toward before the tacks. Before he let her unbutton anything of his he picked up rocks--large rocks, the size of basketballs, sharp edged and uneven, remnants of the excavated quarry that was once the site of the lake. Our back yard was full of such rocks, brought back from every trip, except the one to the Grand Canyon. On that trip, we looked back from our pretend flying on the wall and waved to our mother to join us. She had already moved to the drivers’ side. She was turning the key, gassing the engine.“What is it with you?” my father asked her, riding west again in the passenger seat, her purse on his lap.
“You,” she said. “You’re with me.”
He leaned over and barely touched the soft part of her bottom lip with the tip of his index finger. Then her top lip. She sighed a sigh long enough to float through the car and settle on each of us. Then she closed her eyes and he scooted next to her. She let him steer.
From beneath her worn and familiar floral sheet she’d asked me to stretch across her hospital bed, my mother told me more about that first day with him at the quarry. “Each rock has its center, ” he said. He lifted a lopsided remnant of serpentine and granite. He held it, tilted it, flipped it, weighed it in his palm. “You only need to find that place.” He proceeded to build several towers of rocks, not flat side to flat side, but end to tilting end. The contact points were the narrowest protrusions of the rocks, and the results looked almost human, like torsos, with heads, necks, pot bellies, and babies. My mother was the only other person I knew who could build those upended, precarious-looking but quite solid shapes.“This is how you make a family,” he said to my mother.
“Show me,” she said. “Now.”
Heather Baird Donovan was a 1990-92 Stegner fellow in creative writing. She lives in San Francisco.
