Amity Gaige - Schroder

Butterscotch?” I said in the darkness. “You still awake?”

Meadow shifted beneath her sheets. “Yep. I’m awake.”

I propped myself up on one elbow and looked across at Meadow’s bed. “Are you having a nice trip?”

“Oh, yes. I liked playing Merman and I like our new car and I like having so much junk food. And I’m glad Mommy said yes to our vacation. I was worried she’d say no. She must be changing her mind about you. I’ve told her and I’ve told her. I guess it’s not hopeless.”

I winced in the dark. “No. It’s never hopeless.”

“But it is funny.”

“Yes, it is funny,” I said. “Life just gets funnier and funnier the longer you live it.”

I stared up at the ceiling of our cabin. The night was moonless. As if hearing my guilty misgivings, Meadow clicked on her flashlight. The beam roved across the ceiling, illuminating the cobwebs.

“Hey, Meadow,” I said. “How about, if you don’t mind, we play pretend while we’re on vacation? You can be some other girl you want to be, and I will still be your father but I’ll have a different name, you know, like John. You can pick your own name. Some name you’ve always liked. And I’ll call you that and we’ll make up stories about our life. Like, you can have the little sister you always wanted—”

“Oh, I don’t want one of those anymore.”

“All right.”

“I would prefer a hermit crab. But I want a real one, not a pretend one.”

“Well, what kind of pretend pet would you like to have?”

Meadow thought. “A Portuguese water dog? Like Sasha Obama got?”

“OK, OK. That’s great. You’ll have a Portuguese water dog back at home. And we’ll be from Toronto. And my name will be John, and your name will be—”

“I think you should be mayor.”

“Of Toronto?”

“Yes. Mayor John Toronto. And on the Fourth of July, you get to launch the fireworks.”

“OK. And your name? What should I call you?”

Meadow considered the ceiling. “Chrissy.”

“ Chrissy? Really?”

Her eyes flashed angrily in the dark.

“OK,” I said. “Chrissy is good. In case we need a code name.”

“And I have blondish goldenish hair. Like Rapunzel.” Meadow sighed. “I’m wide -awake, Daddy. I’m absolutely wired .”

“Me too. Would you like me to read aloud from Birds Come and Gone ? Maybe that’ll put us to sleep.”

Wedged next to the le Carré novels of our cabin’s small bookshelf, we had discovered an ancient pamphlet of poetry by a dead society lady named Kitty Tinkerton Bridge, who wrote rhyming poetry about birds. Lacking other appropriate bedtime books, we had read from Birds Come and Gone and had both come to appreciate Bridge’s amateurish but somewhat musical verse, and it had become a kind of ritual to read from it.

“All right,” sighed Meadow. “Read to me.”

As I opened the book, I heard the slap of the screen door across the path. Given the otherwise dead silence in our remote cove, I could only assume that the resident of Cabin One was home.

Technically, fraud is defined not by the act of lying but by the intent to benefit from lying . If you lie for fun, or for the various other reasons that we lie (e.g., to avoid physical pain or recrimination, or to perpetuate heartbreaking self-delusion), that is not necessarily fraud . I suppose my first fraudulent lie was told in a distant wing of the West Berlin Rathaus, in 1975. It also happens to be one of my few clear early memories. My father was speaking with a West German man in civilian clothing. The man had fuzzy hair that he wore in a kind of blond atmosphere around his head, as well as a shirt whose top two or three buttons I assumed had come undone accidentally, because this sort of experimentation with male décolletage had not yet arrived in East Berlin, from whence we had just emigrated hours before. The man and my father had been arguing most of that time. My father’s brother-in-law, the man who was to let us live in his garage apartment, had left hours ago, leaving us with his address and assurances that we’d be processed soon. But the blond West German seemed to be losing patience with my father.

“But I need some sort of confirmation, you see.”

“You have confirmation,” said my father. “You have two exit visas.”

“But you are married. There is no certificate of divorce, which you are instructed to produce, not just there, but here. You have nothing—”

“I had one hour to report to Friedrichstrasse. Did you want me to dig up the body?”

My father’s voice was rising in pitch, as it did whenever he felt persecuted by other people’s stupidity. Finally the sponge-haired man looked at me and called out into the hallway. A pretty brunette came to the door. The blond man whispered something to her, and she smiled at me.

“Well, hello,” she said.

She disappeared for a moment, only to return with a small silver canister, which she held out to me. I remember this clearly: The can was aluminum, with a pear-shaped hole for drinking, which was still preserved, until the woman peeled it off, by a tacky silver sticker. The canister was beautiful, a tiny powder keg. I vowed to keep it.

“Thanks!” I exclaimed.

“Drink it. It’s juice,” said the woman, lingering prettily in the office. “How old are you, sweetie pie?”

I held up one spread hand.

“Five? My, my.”

My father glanced down at me in the folding chair beside him, with a look I could only describe as aggrieved, and despite the fact that my cuteness was overshadowing his entreaties, I guzzled my juice with relish.

“What a Süßer . What a strammer kerl ,” the woman said to my father, using two phrases that were in German but beyond my ken, because although there was love in East Germany, sober, private love, for certain, there were — you’ll have to believe me — no endearments. I loved the lurid sound of them immediately.

“Look at him,” the woman continued. “Sitting so patiently. So poised. His mother would be so proud of him. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” said my father, looking pale. “My wife — my late wife — doted upon him.”

The man with the blond hair looked down at me in exasperation. “It’s true, then, what your father says? Your mommy has died? We need to know that she isn’t missing you.”

My eyes went wide. I was not surprised by the news that my mother was dead — I knew that was a complete fiction, as I had just seen her that morning — I was only surprised that I was being addressed. After hours of sitting in a windowless room full of folding chairs, my father bargaining with everybody he could find, no one had yet asked a direct question of me.

I clutched my canister. I would keep it forever and I would play with it. We did not have silver juice canisters in East Berlin. I knew that my father and I had an understanding. I would say what he needed me to say and he would protect my right to my juice canister. I could feel his large, fading heat beside me, his hands still smelling — as they would forever after — of the inkpad from the border crossing at Friedrichstrasse.

I looked across the desk at the blond man. He inspired no feeling in me. But when I glanced toward the doorway, I saw the brunette with her soft cheek pressed against the doorjamb. And even though I knew my mother was still there —somewhere, on the other side — I slipped into a black-and-white reality in which I had lost her entirely, which was closer to the truth, anyway.