Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

It is here, during these four hours in his week, that Daniel’s loneliness abates for a while. During class and during the time he reads and responds to Isabelle’s e-mails.

After her confession that she no longer believes she can write, Daniel answers her right away.

Isabelle,

Who does?

Daniel

Daniel,

Don’t be glib. I’m pouring my heart out to you. At least take me seriously.

Isabelle

And Daniel stops himself from answering back quickly — and, yes, glibly — and thinks about what to say.

It’s well after lunchtime now at Bev’s, and it’s quiet in the empty shop. Bev is in the back, baking; she has the radio on to an oldies station, and Daniel can hear the Beatles’ poignant “Yesterday,” interspersed with the pinging of cookie sheets against the wooden baking tables and the slam of the large oven doors as Bev takes out her finished goods.

Daniel is alone at his round table beside the front window, laptop plugged into the Internet connection Bev was smart enough to install when it became available. He’s nearly as comfortable here as he is in his tiny cottage with its stone walls that cry in the wintertime. What to say to Isabelle?

Isabelle,

Whether your relationship with this transnational emergency worker has worked out or not has nothing to do with your ability to write. That is innate, within you, and already proven.

I am a witness to it. Don’t try to con me. I know what you’re capable of.

Daniel

Too harsh? Daniel wonders after he’s already hit Send. Too late to worry about it. He wrote what he believes about her. She should be able to take it in.

He paces in the small shop. “Bev!” he calls into the back, and she appears, her hands and forearms dusted with flour, obviously in midtask.

“Can I stay a while longer today? Would that be all right?”

“Bakery’s open. Anyone can stay as long as I’m open.”

“Okay. It’s just that…I want to see if I get a return e-mail.”

“Your student?”

“Yes.”

“A special student?”

“She has talent. That’s rare, you know.”

Bev nods, certain that there’s more to this than simply writing talent, but she doesn’t pursue it. It’s none of her business, even if she’s dying to know about this girl.

“Holler if you need something — I’m just in the back.”

He sits back down at his computer and there it is — Isabelle’s reply.

Daniel,

How can you be so dismissive?

Isabelle

Oh, no. She misunderstood.

Isabelle,

I’m trying to remind you of what is real. Of what you should be grateful for. Of what you can build on. It’s within you.

D.

Daniel,

Maybe. Maybe not. But, ultimately, so what? I have no access anymore. Certainly you of all people understand that. Just telling me I can do it doesn’t begin to solve the problem.

I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. I seem to be doing that more and more lately. My parents are scandalized by my life or lack of life. I don’t talk to my mother. My father calls to tell me how worried he is about me. My son’s father feels most alive when he isn’t here.

Only Avi finds me worthy of his attention. So maybe what I was always meant to be is a mother and not a writer.

I.

Isabelle,

Damn it, you’re infuriating!!!!!

D.

—

SITTING ON HER HIGH STOOL behind the front counter of Noah’s Ark, Isabelle smiles. Oh, Daniel. How glad she is that she’s found him again.

Fanny Hershfeld has been teaching Avi to play Scrabble. Even though he is only five, he got the hang of it immediately. From the time he was two, courtesy of Sesame Street, letters, and then words, have been his constant companions. When he was three, he would call from the backseat of the Jeep, safely strapped into his car seat, “Mommy, do we ‘got milk’?” pointing to the billboard with the bright blue Cookie Monster surrounded by a hill of chocolate chip cookies and looking forlornly around for his milk. And Isabelle would reassure her son, their eyes meeting in the rearview mirror, that, yes, they had milk in the fridge. “Let’s get more!” Avi would chortle, because he had been burned several times by Isabelle’s unreliable memory, and she would always answer, “Okay, on the way home,” because she couldn’t swear that a carton would be waiting for them when they got there.

By the time he was four, Avi was reading simple Dr. Seuss books by himself— The Cat in the Hat, Yertle the Turtle, and Green Eggs and Ham, a particular favorite because he thought it was hysterical when that strange creature called himself “Sam-I-Am.” So when he passed his fifth birthday, Fanny felt he was ready for Scrabble.

Now they have their routine. They meet in the backyard at the wrought-iron table under the persimmon tree—“a neutral zone,” as Fanny calls it, for there is no mistaking that each time they sit down to play, they are embarking on a Scrabble battle. Once Avi understood the basic rules, he wanted no more help from Mrs. H, as he prefers to call her. “I can do it myself,” he told her, a refrain Isabelle hears every day about most everything, from making his bed to riding his two-wheeler.

Q is often a problem for him because he doesn’t know how to spell any words with q in them, except quiet, but that is a minor issue, since there is only one q in the letter box.

Fanny has agreed to an epic Scrabble game while Isabelle drives to the San Francisco airport to pick up Casey, home from Cambodia, where he has been attending to victims of the overflowing Mekong River. It’s October, Halloween is little more than a week away, and the weather is starting to be nippy. Isabelle brings a sweatshirt out to Avi when she tells him she’s leaving. He takes it but stashes it on his lap, doesn’t even look up, too intent on rearranging his little tiles, trying to find a word. His father’s frequent comings and goings no longer occupy his world. They are a given, a fact of life, and he doesn’t ask to go to the airport anymore for the send-off or the return. There’ll just be another one soon, and if he’s doing something compelling, as he almost always is, he has no interest in a long ride to the San Francisco airport.

Isabelle made sure she wouldn’t have him with her this time, because she isn’t bringing Casey back to their house. It’s taken her six years and endless discussions with Deepti to have the conviction to say, This isn’t the way I want to live . She is done with the suddenness of Casey’s departures, with no continuity in their lives, with the distinct realization that her needs, Avi’s needs, pale in comparison to Casey’s need to save the world. Now she has to gather whatever courage she can locate to tell him all this on the drive home. Now she has to deposit him at Art and Louisa’s and not look back. Can she do it? She has no idea, but she knows she has to try, and having Avi with her would make that impossible.

“You gonna take all day?” Fanny asks with her smoker’s rasp as she watches Avi ponder his letters. She shows him no mercy simply because he’s five. The only concession she makes to his youth is that she leaves her ever-present cigarettes in the house.

“Wait a minute.”

“I’ve been waiting.”

They adore each other, and Isabelle is grateful that Mrs. H has slipped into the grandma role without ever being asked.

Amazingly, her own mother showed up on her doorstep, unannounced, over a year ago, on July 28, the day of Avi’s fourth birthday, her apologetic father alongside, holding their suitcases.