Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Is your mom okay too?”

Clarissa stops rotating her head and wrinkles her nose as though I’d announced an unsavory subject, then rolls over on her back and stares skyward. “She’s much worse,” she says, and looks unconvincingly worried.

“Worse than what?”

“Than you!” She rounds her eyes upward in mock surprise. “She and Charley had a howler this week. And they had one last week too. And one the week before.” “Howlers” mean big disputes, not embarrassing verbal miscues. “Hmmmm, hmm, hmm,” she says, meaning most of what she knows is being retained silently. I of course can’t quiz her on this subject — a cardinal rule once divorce has become the governing institution — though I wish I knew more.

I pluck up a blade of grass, press it between my two thumbs like a woodwind reed and blow, making a sputtery, squawky but still fairly successful soprano sax note, a skill from eons back.

“Can you play ‘Gypsy Road’ or ‘Born in the U.S.A.’?” She sits up.

“That’s my whole repertoire on grass,” I say, putting my two hands down on both her kneecaps, which are cold and bony and soft all at once. Conceivably she can smell dead grackle. “Your ole Dad loves you,” I say. “I’m sorry I have to kidnap Paul and not all two of you. I’d rather travel as a trio.”

“He’s much needier now,” Clarissa says, and drags a blade of grass all her own across the backs of both my hands where they rest on her perfect kneecaps. “I’m way ahead of him emotionally. I’ll have my period pretty soon.” She looks up at me profoundly, fattens the corners of her mouth and slowly lets her eyes cross and keeps them that way.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I say, my heart going ker-whonk, my eyes suddenly hot and unhappily moist — not with unhappy tears, but with unhappy sweat that has busted out on my forehead. “And how old are you?” I say, ker-whonk. “Thirty-seven or thirty-eight?”

“Thirty-twelve,” she says, and lightly pokes my knuckles with the grass blade.

“Okay, that’s old enough. You don’t need to be any older. You’re perfect.”

“Charley knows Bush,” she says with a sour face. “Did you hear that?” Her blue eyes elevate gravely to mine. This is bottom-line business to her. All that Charley might conceivably have been forgiven is reassigned to him with this choice bit of news. My daughter, like her old man, is a Democrat of the New Deal bent and considers most Republicans and particularly V.P. Bush barely mentionable dickheads.

“I guess I knew that without knowing it.” I scour my two fingers on the turf to clean off the death smell.

“He’s for the party of money, tradition and influence,” she says, way too big for her britches, since Charley’s tradition and influence are paying her bills, keeping her in tetherballs, tutus and violin lessons. She is for the party of no tradition, no influence, no nothing, also like her father.

“He has his rights,” I say, and add a lackluster “I mean that.” I can’t help conjuring what Charley’s cheek looks like where Paul has whopped him.

Clarissa stares at her blade of grass, wondering, I’m sure, why she has to accord Charley any rights. “Sweetheart,” I say solemnly, “is there anything you can tell me about ole Paul? I don’t want you to tell me a deep dark secret, just maybe a shallow light one. It would be as-you-know-held-in-strictest-confidence.” I say this last to make it halfway a joke and let her feel comradely about providing me some lowdown.

She stares at the thick grass carpet in silence, then angles her head over and squints up at the house with the flowering bushes and the white porch and stairs. Atop the highmost roof pinnacle, in the midst of all the springing angles and gable ends, is an American flag (a small one) on a staff, rustling in an unfelt breeze.

“Are you sad?” she says. In her sun-blond hair I see a tiny red ribbon tied in a bow, something I hadn’t noticed but instantly revere her for, since along with her question it makes her seem a person of complex privacies.

“No, I’m not sad, except that you can’t go with Paul and me to Cooperstown. And I forgot to bring you anything. That’s pretty sad.”

“Do you have a car phone?” She raises her eyes accusingly.

“No.”

“Do you have a beeper?”

“No, afraid not.” I smile at her knowingly.

“How do you keep up with your calls then?” She squints again, making her look a hundred.

“I guess I don’t get that many calls. Sometimes there’s a message from you on my answering box, though not that often.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t answer me about Paul, sweetheart. All I really want to do is be a good pappy if I can.”

“His problems are all stress-related,” she says officially. She plucks up another blade of quite green and dry grass and slips it into the cuff of my chinos where I’m cross-legged beside her.

“What stress is he suffering from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that your best diagnosis?”

“Yes.”

“How ’bout you? Do you have any stress-related problems?”

“No.” She shakes her head, makes a pruny pucker with her lips. “Mine’ll come out later, if I have any.”

“Who told you so?”

“TV.” She looks at me earnestly as though to say that TV has its good points too.

Somewhere high in the firmament I hear a hawk cry out, or possibly an osprey, though when I look up I can’t see it.

“What can I do about Paul’s stress-related problems?” I say, and, God be gracious, I wish she’d pipe up with a nice answer. I’d put it in place before the sun sets. Somewhere, then, another noise — not a hawk but a thumping, a door slamming or a window being shut, a drawer being closed. When I look up, Ann is standing at the porch rail, watching down on us across the lawn. I sense she’s just arrived but would like my chat with Clarissa to come to a close and for me to get on with my business. I make a friendly ex-husband-who-wishes-no-trouble wave, a gesture that makes me feel not so good. “I believe that’s your mom,” I say.

Clarissa looks up at the porch. “Yeah hi,” she says.

“We better dust off our britches here.” She will, I see, out of ancient, honorable loyalty, offer no help with her brother. She fears, I suppose, divulging compromising secrets while claiming only to love him. Children are wise to adult ways now, thanks to us.

“Paul might be happier if you could maybe live in Deep River. Or maybe Old Saybrook,” she says as if these words require immense discipline, nodding her head slightly with each one. (Parents can break up, fall out of love, get searingly divorced, marry others, move miles away; but as far as kids are concerned, most of it’s tolerable if one parent will just tag along behind the other like a slave.)

There was, of course, in the savage period after Ann moved away in ’84, a dolorous time when I haunted these very hills and stream-sides like a shamus; cruised its middle-school parking lots, its street corners and back alleys, cased its arcades and skating rinks, its Finasts and Burger Kings, merely to be in visual contact with where my children might spend the days and afternoons they could’ve been spending with me. I even went so far as to price a condo in Essex, a sterile little listening post from which I could keep “in touch,” keep love alive.

Only it would’ve made me even more morose, as morose as a hundred lost hounds, to wake up alone in a condo! In Essex! Awaiting my appointed pickup hour with the kids, expecting to take them back where? To my condo? And afterward, glowering back down 95 for a befuddled workweek till Friday, when the lunacy commenced again? There are parents who don’t blink an eye at that kind of bashing around, who’d ruin their own lives and everybody’s within ten miles if they can prove — long after all the horses are out of the barn — that they’ve always been good and faithful providers.