Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

“Why should I have to guess at what you’re upset about?” Charlie was saying in the passenger seat. We were continuing the argument that had begun in the parking garage after the parade, in which we’d cursed at each other in the few seconds when Haim was settled in his car seat in the back and we’d closed the doors before getting in the front. (“We should talk about this,” I said. “Why, so you can go on telling me why it’s OK that you’re such an asshole?” Charlie had hissed over the top of the car. “You can go fuck yourself,” I’d hissed back, and grabbed open the driver’s side door.) Now she said, “Why can’t you just tell me?”

“What I’m upset about,” I said, “is that you have to ask. That’s the whole thing you’re failing at; that’s what empathy is. You’re supposed to imagine yourself in my emotional position in a real enough way to not only know what it is I’m upset about, but to anticipate it. And I shouldn’t be having to explain this to you.”

“Oh, is that what empathy is?” Charlie said, and sighed.

“Jeddey, jetty, jedi,” Haim said. He was just getting into the Star Wars movies, and liked to try to say the harder words over and over again to himself. Despite his intelligence, it seemed his speech development had been skipped over in the hurry, and he often had trouble.

We were quiet for a minute.

We slowed to a stop in a long line of traffic, and Charlie put her hand over mine on the knob of the gearshift. “I don’t want to be angry,” she said.

And isn’t this what we wanted? Hadn’t this been the plan? We’d talked and talked about having a baby those first months in Iowa. It had seemed like a crazy idea at the time, but then at the end of one long argument about it, Charlie had sat down on the couch and cried, her shoulders heaving, trying to turn in on themselves. When she calmed down enough to speak she talked about her various failures: in being the concert pianist her early instructors had wanted her to be; in finding the mathematical proofs whose moving pieces she could no longer all hold in her head at the same time; in being a happy, well-adjusted wife. At the time, she’d just gotten the job at the law firm, which handled only family law, and spent most of her day filing, copying, and talking on the phone to confused, enraged women and men who had just been served divorce papers, or watched their children be taken from their own home.

“And maybe I’m just not one of those people who can find in a career the kind of meaning that can sustain a life,” she said that night of the decision, her face drawn from crying. “I just think, I just really think that maybe I’m supposed to find meaning in something else — that maybe what I’ll be really good at will be loving our little kid. I can feel that. I just know it’s true in my heart.”

For weeks I said I didn’t know; I talked about how we didn’t have any money, how if we had a kid now we’d have to take money from my mother for a long time. I talked about how much we fought, how we weren’t quite ready, and Charlie listened but then she said, “I think this is one of those things where you’re never quite ready. Where the only way you learn how to have a kid is by having one. You figure it out as you go, I think. For instance, I think we’d fight less if I was pregnant. I think we wouldn’t want to fight. I think we’d be better people because that is what our lives would require of us.”

And she wasn’t wrong, really. We had only the one bad fight while she was pregnant, and never argued at all while Haim was a baby. It was only in the middle of his second year, when he started to resemble a separate person, no longer our little ball of love and chubby rolls, that we began to fight again.

There was only one time that I doubted anything in those years. Charlie was five months pregnant, and going through a phase where she was so fatigued, she climbed into bed at about six p.m. and slept through the night. Usually, I lay with her for an hour or two because she said this was the only way she could fall asleep. It was a Saturday, though, and I had been invited to a party thrown by my fellow students in the masters program. It was at seven thirty, and after ten or so minutes of lying still with Charlie, I got up. I felt anxious. I wanted to take a shower and get ready.

“What are you doing?” she said, and I told her. She didn’t say anything after that.

The party was in an old, warm house. A cool drizzle had begun to fall in the twilight as I pulled in. Inside the front room a couple amps and an electric organ were set up and a few of my colleagues were playing together. In the kitchen a group of women were pouring bottles of alcohol into a pot on the stove, making something they called “blood.”

After about an hour I texted Charlie. I was thinking that I wished she was there with me. There was something refreshing about the way these new people looked at her, about knowing they were looking at her and not seeing Attica and all that had happened there.

What are you up to? I sent her, hoping she was still awake.

After a few minutes she texted back. I’ve packed , it said. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone.

I suppose I should have thought she was joking, should have paused at the unbelievable, melodramatic way she was doing this. But a few weeks earlier, Charlie had come home and not been able to recognize my face.

“It’s different somehow,” she’d said, looking at me almost with wonder. “It’s like, you don’t look like you. Or you do, but just not you you.”

“It’s like,” she said later, “imagine if you had an identical twin. You look like your own twin, if that makes any sense. I know it’s you, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like you. Like you’re an impostor of yourself.”

This kind of dissociation had happened once before, in Attica, right before everything fell apart. Back then I was obsessed with the medical implications, an official cause, maybe Capgras Syndrome. Then, when everything happened there, I spent days wondering if my wife was schizophrenic, if she had some kind of early-onset dementia, if maybe even she’d had some kind of traumatic brain injury years ago without knowing it. But by the time it happened again, by the time Charlie was saying this pregnant, I understood that she was not sick, that there was nothing actually wrong with her. This was not dissociation, I thought, standing in the bathroom door, watching her watch me. This is the imitation, subconscious or not, of dissociation, of delusion. Just as back then her wandering down the shoulder of the highway had been, this was Charlie getting scared, and attempting to leave me.

That was three weeks before the party. Then I got the text. I’ve packed , it said. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone . I wasn’t even surprised, just ill. I stepped outside of the crowded kitchen, into what was now a steady rain.

“Where are you?” I said into the phone. “Tell me where you are, and we’ll talk about this.”

“No more talking,” Charlie said. “I have nothing more to say.”

“Come on,” I said. “Just come back home, I’m going to my car now, I’ll come back and we’ll talk about it.”

“I don’t want you to try and bully me out of it,” Charlie said. “I’ve decided.”

The wife of the poet who was hosting the party stuck her head out of the back door.

“Come in, come in!” she called. “You’re getting all wet!”

I waved to her that I was OK.

“I won’t try to talk you out of anything,” I said. “I just want to see you.”

Charlie didn’t say anything. There was the sound of children laughing. Until that moment I’d thought she was bluffing, was sitting in our bedroom, the suitcase open dramatically beside her.