Amity Gaige - Schroder

Who had we been kidding anyway, me and Hank? He was justifiably suspicious of me since the day he met me, and he’d been generous to wait this long to hate me openly. I felt something like gratitude for that. He had always been, to my mind, the kind of upbeat, clannish father I assumed every American was awarded at birth. I stepped on it. We were now going sixty miles an hour through stop-and-go traffic on Van Rensselaer.

I was hesitant to glance back at my passenger. I wasn’t used to spending long periods of time with Meadow anymore. In the intervening year since we’d ceased sharing the same roof, she’d conquered kindergarten, and was a big girl for six, taller and smarter than any of her classmates, and I hoped I’d come out OK as she sat in moral judgment of me back there in her zebra-print booster seat. I reminded myself that even as a toddler, she’d been unsentimental. She didn’t like drippy speeches or ardent kisses, and so I decided to skip the emotional appeals, the flimsy self-justifications for what I was doing. They barely sufficed anyway.

“Traffic is terrible,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“You doing all right back there?”

“Actually, I’m thirsty,” she replied, her voice slightly strained.

“Well, let’s get you something to drink. What would you like? Jelly-bean juice? Hm? Monkey milk?”

“Actually, could I have a Mountain Dew? Mariah drinks Mountain Dew. Her mother lets her.”

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll stop just down the road a bit and we’ll find you a Mountain Dew. We’ll do the dew. Can’t be that bad for you if it’s dew , right?”

“Yeah. And can I watch Star Wars ?”

“Maybe. Listen. One thing at a time.”

“OK.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got this under control. All right?”

That’s when Grandpa reappeared, like a zombie who staggers forward with his head blown off. The fender of the Tahoe was rumpled — I could see this from far away — and he was now driving with fresh desperation, flashing his headlights. Did he really think I would stop? Did he think I would heed him now , both of us with our gloves off? I was not in violation of the terms of my allotted visitation period. There was nothing in our parental agreement that said I couldn’t drive around the outskirts of Albany at high speeds. No, I thought, looking into the rearview mirror. Not today. You’re going to have to kill me.

Somewhere early on in my post-divorce social suicide, I had represented a client in the purchase of a foreclosed bungalow in Loudonville. After the transaction, we became friends, this client and I. He was also single and gave off a whiff, as I must have, of redundant abandonment. When he decided to go away for the summer, whom else did he call to watch over his property, and occasionally run the engine of his new Mini Cooper to keep the battery from dying, but me? I had already visited this friend’s house once and had sat in the garage with the Mini Cooper running, noticing with dispassion that it wasn’t just a Hollywood plot device; you really couldn’t smell carbon monoxide. And it was this Mini Cooper that came to mind — with wonderfully changed function, as an Escape Car — as I headed west on 378, the wounded undercarriage of my father-in-law’s Tahoe throwing sparks in the increasing distance behind me.

The first white men who ever came across Lake George were handily captured, on account of them standing there gawking at its beauty. It’s still an oceanic, slate-blue tableau when you come across it a half hour’s drive north of Saratoga Springs, propped there in the Adirondacks 320 feet above sea level. Its basin stretches from the town of Lake George all the way north to Ticonderoga, its western border a series of goofy little pleasure towns filled with motels, waterslides, and pancake houses.

Driving northward, full of anticipation, Meadow and I sang. We sang our favorites, like “Yellow Submarine” and “Kentucky Woman.” She’d been amused by the Mini Cooper we’d switched for my Saturn in Loudonville and did not ask any questions about why we were driving it or whether or not we were still being pursued by Pop-Pop. We were together again. It was easy. For the first time in a year, I felt some hope. I felt like I had finally taken back some control. No more rope-a-dope in divorce mediation. I knew that we were going to make it to Lake George. I knew that, and I didn’t give a shit about what happened after that. Frankly.

It was unseasonably warm for June. We rolled the windows down and sailed our hands in the air. We didn’t stop, and we didn’t stop. We didn’t stop in Saratoga Springs; we didn’t stop at Lake Luzerne, or Glens Falls, or anywhere. We didn’t even slow down until we’d entered the Lake George strip and Meadow started shouting Popcorn! Candied apples! Frozen lemonade! The water parks and go-cart tracks had opened early, and tourists like ourselves were walking around half-dressed and jaundiced from winter. We had been here the summer before, Meadow and I and you-know-who-you-are, I mean our family, in what we might term Year Zero (to be followed by the post-divorce epoch, or Annum Repudium ), but neither of us mentioned the fact.

We parked on the street and ran down past a band shell and a playground and straight onto the small, hard-packed public beach near the dockside. Meadow wound her way through the sunbathers right out onto the sand and to my surprise waded into the water with her clothes on. She stopped only when the water soaked the hem of her tangerine-colored shorts.

“Daddy!” she cried, turning back to me. “It’s cold .”

“Of course it’s cold, silly,” I said, rolling my khakis up to my knees. “It’s two hundred feet deep. Come on. Let’s buy you a suit?”

“No, Daddy! Not yet.”

I smiled, secretly pleased, remembering how impossible it always was to tear her away from whatever her attention had seized upon: a bottle cap, a ladybug, the removal of sticker-backing goo from a glass bottle.

I put my hands on my hips and looked around at the crowd of bodies. Some were inching their way into the icy water; others were spreading out picnics, parcels of tinfoil, coolers of ice, everyone trying to save a buck, bringing bologna sandwiches from home or smoking generic cigarettes like Basics or Viceroys, because we were all into it by then, the recession, we were all inside it or knew that we were about to be. An attractive young family was lounging close to the waterline near Meadow. I smiled at them, all four of them, that idealized American square — a large, good-looking father rapt by the movements of the distant steamboats, a strawberry blond mother in a sturdy bikini, a sarong wrapped around her waist, and two focused children digging in the sand.

I said aloud, in their direction, “A day like this just melts away the stress.”

The petite mother glanced my way. “It’s too pretty today, isn’t it? My problem is, when it’s this pretty, I just want to keep it. I just want to box it up and keep it and have it last forever.”

“Oh, don’t think like that,” I said, taking a step or two in her direction. “That’ll just make you sad.”

She smiled, tilting her head slightly.

“Anyway,” I said, “you know where you keep a day like this? You keep it in your heart. That’s the box you keep it in.”

My eye on Meadow, now almost up to her waist in Lake George, I grinned down at the woman’s children. “Hey, you two. Strike gold yet?” Below us, her children ignored me, just as her husband ignored me. The woman’s cheeks reddened. I probably could have kissed her on the mouth and he would have kept on muttering about the steamboats. I felt a rush of fellow feeling. My pity for her and for me and for her kids and for my kid and even for you, Laura, came over me in a wave so sudden and so felt that I almost lost my balance. I closed my eyes. I feel , I thought to myself. I clenched my hands open and shut. I feel . I’m alive .