For dinner, Kit makes a risotto that includes the sun-dried tomatoes he found on sale at the supermarket. The children hate the taste and claim that it ruins the flavor of everything else, even the peas and the cheese.
“Too salty,” says Fanny.
“Don’t we get chicken or something real with this?” demands Will, restored to his formerly imperious self. “Is this because she’s a vegetarian now?”
When Sandra offers to open a can of chicken-noodle soup, Kit shouts, “No! This is dinner, this! It’s a perfectly fine dinner. Eat it or don’t. Or just eat your salad and go to bed hungry. This is not a restaurant, in case nobody noticed.”
His wife and children stare at him, as if he’s turned into a werewolf.
All conversation is stifled. The children look at the risotto and pick at it, sulking. Fanny pushes the dried tomatoes into a neat pile on the side; Will eats almost none of it, leaving a plate of cratered soggy rice that Kit will later be tempted to scarf down, just for the brief comfort of starch, but will ultimately scrape into the garbage. When everyone has finished eating, Sandra orders the children to their rooms: time to read. “Will, you especially. And let’s double-check your assignment book.”
“I do the homework! I just forget it,” he whines.
“Then you have to find a way to remember to remember.” Before she follows him upstairs to get him settled and focused, Sandra tells Kit, with a decorum he finds almost creepy, that she liked the risotto very much and wishes the children had, too. She doesn’t mention where she was for most of the afternoon, though her absence usually means she’s with a client.
Kit checks the laundry; well, at least he can sort and fold the clothes Sandra put in the dryer. As he places them in the basket, he feels like a child hoping to gain favor with a parent—or like one of his mother’s high-school students, working toward extra credit (except that his grades, if he were a student, would not be good to begin with). Upstairs, he hears Sandra cajoling Will toward a shower. Reluctant to join the bedtime fray, he leaves the basket of clean clothes on the dryer and wanders into the living room. It’s dark and cold, the only light in the room cast by the ring of streetlights around the asphalt loop in front of the house.
He turns on a lamp, sits on the couch, and peers at the stack of books on the wooden chest that serves as a coffee table. When was the last time someone actually opened one of these books—weighty volumes on Italian gardens, trees and shrubs of the northeastern United States, the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron? He frees the atlas from the bottom of the pile and opens it to North America.
He still does not fully understand what drew him to the art of people who live in so vastly different a world from his—though most people would say, Well, of course that’s it: the differentness. That’s what you love. Yet except when sunk in the pages of a book and looking at gallery walls, Kit has always thought of himself—not proudly—as clinging to the familiar. Canada and Mexico are the only other countries he’s seen, and only at the urging of others. He had been studying the art of the Inuit, from Cape Barrow to Baffin Island, entirely in books and dusty anthropology museums when one of his professors challenged him to get off his curatorially lazy arse. With money he’d saved from art-handling jobs over college summers, Kit flew to Toronto, rented the cheapest car possible, and embarked on a journey along the coast of Hudson Bay to Umiujaq, Akuliviq, and Quaqtaq, places whose names he now touched in the atlas, one finger tracing an itinerary defined by a hard edge of water.
After poring over the map for a while, he realizes that the house has grown quiet. In the empty kitchen, he listens at the foot of the stairs: silence. Once in a while she goes to bed early after getting the children settled with books for their bedtime reading. But she almost always comes down to say good night. Kit is the family owl.
Never mind; just as well. He returns to the living room and pages through a book of Monet’s Giverny paintings: old friends from way back. Neighbors’ house lights go out, but the streetlights keep their vigil. He feels the artificial heat retreating from the room, the timer on the thermostat quelling the furnace.
The dishes in the sink, he tells himself.
He is most of the way through rinsing when, tired and careless, he drops a glass on the soapstone counter. It shatters with surprising drama, and when Kit turns off the water to clean up the glass, he hears Sandra get out of bed.
When he stands up from sweeping the shards into the dustpan, she is leaning against the kitchen table, facing him. “All day,” she says, “I’ve been thinking hard.”
If he were to say About what? he would sound like a fool. He sets the dustpan full of sharp fragments on the counter, rather than cross the kitchen to dump it in the garbage.
“You know I’m doing everything,” she says, “not to go out of my mind these days. Not to lose it completely. Don’t you?”
He nods.
“And I’ve started therapy again. I know we can’t afford it, but I need …” She takes a deep breath, as if she’s pulling in air after sobbing. “You know what, Kit? It’s time for you to go. Go and find out.”
“Find out what?” he says, but timidly.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Her arms are folded, her bare feet pressed arch to arch on the cold stone floor: Sandra as monolith, a deity robed in flannel, possessed of the truth. Behind her, from one end of the table to the other, lies a shadowy clutter of objects, Dutch still life rendered suburban: three geraniums in off-season bloom, a tumbled stack of schoolbooks, a wineglass bearing a ghostly halo of milk, two yellow pencils (one stippled with tooth marks), a pair of drugstore reading glasses tossed on an open magazine—no, a gardening catalog, a grid of green photos—and a wooden bowl holding a cantaloupe, a red pepper, an acorn squash, and three bananas past their prime.
Kit focuses on this random composition rather than on his wife’s face. He does indeed know what she’s talking about, and he has no viable protest to offer—unless he wishes to tell her once and for all that his mother’s feelings come first, which would give any woman reason to send a husband packing. In a way, Kit has to wonder why they haven’t arrived at this place long before now. Yet if he were to reach across the counter and switch on NPR (which Sandra believes he does by habit in order to shut the world out, not welcome it in) and if one of its many placid voices were to announce that the planet has just ceased spinning, he would believe it.
And supposing the earth stands still just now—if he does not move or speak—will she reconsider, modify her terms?
But what she says next is “I do mean go. Actually. Physically. And you know what, Kit? I need a break from this … inertia of yours, and I think you need to move, I mean pry yourself free from a place that’s become so familiar you simply can’t see it.”
Is she telling him he has to pry himself free from home? Will she now say something about loving people by setting them free? (Of course not. Sandra is immune to bunk.)
This is it, then: the edge of the cliff. He will jump, or she will push. He’s the guy in that overwrought painting by Friedrich, the framed poster that his least favorite colleague hung in the unisex bathroom between their offices, back when Kit had an actual office. That guy in black, gazing off into the roiling mists—though Kit doesn’t share his gothic panache.
Look at the situation objectively, like an umpire, and Sandra is right: it’s time. Kit has struck out. Fouled out, to complete the metaphor. Blown all the chances he’s had—most of which he has probably failed to notice.
“Kit!” she insists after a moment, the way she might call out one of the children’s names after saying it three or four times without getting a response.
“Sandra,” he answers quietly. “I’m listening, Sandra.” Even when he says it in fury or exasperation or disappointment, he loves the sound of his wife’s name.
Her voice, reflecting his, softens—or maybe she’s afraid the children might hear. “You can’t keep telling me that you’re strugg
ling with it. Kit. Honey. You could have solved the meaning of life in all the time you’ve insisted that’s what you’re doing. You could have gone off and gotten a second Ph.D.” Could have finished your book, she very kindly does not say.
She sighs. “The point is, you can’t not do this. You have no idea what it’s doing to you. What it’s doing to us, this … blind spot of yours.” Her gaze shifts down, to her feet—which must be awfully cold by now. Sandra is not a wearer of slippers. She does not, ordinarily, spend any time around the house in a state of undress. When she looks up again, she says, “Kit, I don’t think you’ve come close to trying.”
Now she pauses deliberately, even generously. He knows she’s expecting him to argue, giving him time to make his case. Another silence widens the gulf between them—or no; the ice maker clatters forth a new batch of cubes, a sound that somehow embarrasses Kit, as if a bystander is chuckling at his plight. Shaking her head, Sandra says, “Look at you. It’s like this doesn’t even move you. Like you’re paralyzed. You’re breaking my heart, do you know that?”
She could have made her accusation, the part about paralysis, ten years ago—when he had just landed his first teaching job, when Will and Fanny were beginning to differentiate inside their mother’s belly, when everything looked as rosy as Sandra’s much-admired complexion—and even back then, Kit would have seen the truth in it.
One a.m. now, and here they stand in the kitchen, the pulsing heart of their small house, a room that Sandra painstakingly stripped of cheap varnishes, retiled, and repainted over several years during rare, brief intermissions from raising twins and (because raising twins cost more than they had expected, never mind conceiving and bearing the twins to begin with) landscaping other people’s lives. It’s a lovely kitchen now, a place guests are reluctant to abandon for the living room or the dining room (though Sandra has made those rooms lovely, too). It’s a kitchen they might have to abandon, soon and permanently, if Kit can’t find more than the fleeting adjunct position—for God’s sake, sweetheart, any real-live job, as Sandra put it the last time she opened a credit card bill.
Does she mean any real-live job he could bluff, bribe, or cajole his way into? Kit is no more a bluffer or a cajoler than Sandra is a wearer of slippers. He’s past forty, qualified to teach not software design or even auto repair but, and sometimes he wonders if this much is true anymore, the history of art. His mother warned him about the arts when he was in college, warned him from a position of knowing firsthand. (Never mind that she makes a decent living out of her affinity for music.) She had suggested to Kit that he major in economics, engineering; how about geology? As if he could suddenly flip a switch and become the kind of guy organically adept at numbers and charts. Did she think some specialized male hormone would suddenly suffuse his system at nineteen or twenty, flood his head with quantitative mojo?
The only light in the room glows from inside the hood of the stove. “Since you won’t answer me,” says Sandra, “I’ll just barge right ahead and make a suggestion here. Go see Jasper. Go visit the only guy who ever came close to being your father. I know he knows. How could he not? And honestly, how could he possibly be expected to keep it a secret from you?”
“I could do that,” says Kit, though he doesn’t know if he can.
“At this point, you need to do just about anything.”
“Well.” He laughs. “Anything?”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
Kit looks at the dustpan, the remnants of the busted glass. He thinks, for the hundredth time that day, of the leaky roof, the stained dress. He wishes he weren’t the sort of man to see metaphors everywhere around him. He says, because he knows he has to say something, “So this is it then.”
“Yes,” Sandra says with an almost-cheerful decisiveness, “but you’re the only one who can say what ‘it’ is.”
“Let’s not be coy. The big it is my paternity. My father. My real father. Right, Sandra?”
“Kit, I’m not the only one who wonders, am I?”
It isn’t easy to be married to someone who knows the right answer to nearly every question, someone who appears irritatingly dominant to half the world at large yet who deserves to dominate, if only because she happens to be so damn smart. Even in the midst of a heated argument, she makes space for others to speak—you can get a word in edgewise with Sandra, as many words as you like—because, or this is how Kit sees it, she knows there is no debate she can’t win, no matter how long it takes.
But that’s his mother, too, isn’t it? Almost his mother. Almost.
Kit’s mother married for the first time when he was nine years old. Jasper Noonan was a widower with two sons, Rory and Kyle. Fifteen and thirteen, they were decent to Kit—they never complained, for instance, that while Kit got a room of his own, they had to move in together—but they were a club whose membership had closed at two. His mother’s certainty that they would become Kit’s “instant brothers,” typical of the aggressively sunny outlook that seemed to steer her through life, soon proved a benign illusion. At least Kit’s Lego castles and army formations, laid out like a red-and-white Bauhaus military encampment, deployed from bed to bureau, from closet to bookcase, remained as secure from destruction as they had in the apartment from which his mother moved them a month before the wedding.
Kit’s mother had never been shy or defensive about what she called her “unweddedness.” She might have chosen to settle them in a good liberal New England city—New Haven or Portland—where her single status wouldn’t stand out so much, but she couldn’t afford it. As Kit knew, this was the story: he had been born in the same hospital where his mother had been born, in Hanover, New Hampshire. For the first four years of his life, Kit and his mother had lived with his grandparents, in his mother’s childhood room, while she earned a college degree in music education. Once she started teaching at the high school, giving cello lessons on the side, she and Kit moved into an apartment, close enough to Kit’s grandmother that she could continue to help her daughter raise a son. After all, Nana had raised Kit’s Uncle Andrew, who was (in her words) “successfully launched.” Only in his twenties did Kit look back and catch the implication in his grandmother’s metaphor, the image of his mother as a rocket that had fallen prematurely back to Earth.
Early on, Kit had come to believe that he and his mother were, much like those instant brothers, a closed society of two. She had introduced him to a couple of “special friends” before, but not until she became engaged to Jasper, not until Kit noticed the shimmer in her eyes whenever she looked from her sapphire ring to the face of her fiancé—a word she uttered with so much obvious pride—did it occur to him that maybe she had been looking to find a husband all along, all the way back to his birth. Kit’s mother had been eighteen then. He didn’t need math to figure this out. She was prone to saying things like “If I could grow up fast enough to be a solo mom at an age when most of my friends could barely drive a car, then I’ll bet you can strike out on your own to nursery school at four. Just look in the mirror: is that boy ready to make his way in the world? What do you say, Kitten?”
That was the year he’d first asked about a father; every other child in his nursery school appeared to have one. Dads showed up in drawings, in stories told at circle time, and, in the flesh, just about whenever Miss Kannally invited another parent to take a turn in the “What Do Our Parents Do All Day?” spotlight. Kit’s mother (who had played her cello, beautifully, in that spotlight) liked to recall that he had asked her not why he didn’t have a father but simply whether he did. She’d seen this as a positive sign, proof that Kit did not feel deprived just because his friends had something he didn’t. In fact, she would remind him, what had surely compelled him to ask was the persistent curiosity of a girl at whose house he frequently played. (Girls, she pointed out, her tone mildly accusing, were always the curious ones.)
“It does take two people to make a baby, one male and one female,” Kit’s mother told him—her hands, two vertic
al planes facing each other though not touching, as if she were measuring something, expressing a distance. “So yes, there was a second person who made you, along with me. But he was a boy, not a man, and boys can’t really be fathers.”
When Kit asked her why not, she said, “Because they aren’t ready.”
What about her? Was she a girl—or a woman? She told him that having Kit, becoming a mother, had made her a woman.
Then why hadn’t it made the boy into a man?
“That’s a good question,” she’d told him. “But that boy, the one who could have grown up to be your father if he’d wanted, went away and made other choices on his way to becoming a man. He never became a father. And that’s never made me sad. I’ve been very happy to have this family be just the two of us. We do perfectly fine, wouldn’t you say?”
Kit had agreed with her. He hadn’t missed the part about how that other person could have been his father if he’d wanted, but he also knew that this person had never met him. If he had, Kit told himself—if the boy unready to be a man had met the baby that turned his mother from a girl to a woman, maybe things would have been different. For a while, he found some comfort in this thought. At any minute that man might show up, recognize him, and step into the greatcoat of fatherhood. But then, along came Jasper Noonan.
Jasper adopted Kit. To Kit’s relief, all this seemed to involve was signing papers, not sitting through promises to God and a big loud party like the one after the wedding. A quintessentially paternal figure, Jasper spoke, and loved to sing, in a deep sawtooth voice. He sang Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Marvin Gaye, and sometimes, when he didn’t know he wasn’t alone, church songs rigged with words that had no place in church. He was so tall that he ducked when he came in the door of their apartment. His strides were twice as long as Kit’s. A silver whoosh of hair, standing thick and high above his oblong ruddy face, made him look as if he had just stepped from a speeding convertible. Kit’s grandfather had hair the same color. “Is he as old as Papa?” Kit asked.