And Now You Can Go (21 page)

Freddie had a good voice and often made up songs. One night, my mother and I heard her in the basement singing: "You are gone, you are gone, we were wrong, you are gone, we were wrong. You wanted a son and had none. You are gone, you are gone."

"Do you hear that?" my mother whispered.

"Freddie," I called, standing at the top of the stairs. "Come up here. Lets bike to the beach."

That was the same week my physics teacher taught my class the concept of infinity. I cried about it every night for months. Infinity was both ancient and undiscovered. I closed my eyes and saw infinity as a woman from the future, wearing a silver helmet and roaring like a dinosaur.

If my father was never coming back, I wanted to know how long never was, how long infinity lasted. It was the waiting for him that weighed me down, pulled me to the floor of my room. I'd roll on the carpet from one wall to the next, and back again. I could spend an hour rolling.

At six o'clock every night, my mother and Freddie began making dinner. This was the time when my father used to take the bus home from work. When he used to come home, my mother and Freddie would be in the kitchen and I'd sit in the living room, doing my homework—my excuse for not cooking—and looking out the window. I knew the bus's schedule: 6:00, 6:09, 6:18. My father was never later than the 6:18. When I saw him approaching from the bus stop, I'd get up and open the door. I knew my father's walk, could spot it from fifty yards away. He'd had polio when he was younger and still walked with a slight limp that he tried unsuccessfully to hide. One Christmas my mother bought him a walking stick, and he snapped it into thirds.

After he left, I didn't look out the window and I didn't join my mother and Freddie in the kitchen—the change would have meant something, but I wasn't sure what. Instead, every evening as they tied on aprons, I'd make my way to the roof.

Our roof was flat, without railings, and covered in small gray stones over tar paper. I'd sit on the edge, my heels resting against the front of the house. Sometimes I'd accidentally knock a few stones over the side and they'd hit the pavement, hard as hail.

I could see all the other roofs on our block. One family had a picnic table on top of their house, another a lawn chair. But most rooftops were bare, like ours. I'd hear the cars on

Nineteenth Avenue accelerate and brake. I could smell their exhaust. The fog fell like a hammock over our house.

Soon after I'd settled in my usual spot, I would try to count infinity. "Knowledge Is Power," read the sign above the entrance to my school. "Know your enemy," my father had always told me. I would count infinity by counting days that I'd have to wait. X =
infinity, find the value for x
. I'd count how many days I had left of high school. How long I'd have to spend with the girls who had once led me on the scavenger hunt, with boys who made cracks about my stomach, my breasts.
There's that day, and that day, and after that day, there's another, and after that one, another
, I'd tell myself.
And then another, and then another
. At some point, usually around two hundred, I'd start to shake. The waiting. Waiting was not a verb. I wanted my father to never have left, or to never return.

After six o'clock, the men on our street started coming home from work. The bus stop was a block down from our house, and I'd watch the men walk up the street, making their way to their families. There were usually at least five of them, never talking to each other, each walking at the same tired pace. None of them had a limp. I hated them all.

One of them, Mr. Nagarro, walked at half speed. He had ten children, and my suspicion was he wanted to prolong his time alone. One night he stopped halfway between the bus stop and his house, and stood there for almost an hour, reading a book. It was amazing, him reading while standing. I saw his wife look out the window, a child on her hip and another holding her hand, as she awaited his approach. But Mr. Nagarro had situated himself beyond her range of vision.

Mr. Jackson was a secret smoker. He'd light up as soon as he got off the bus, and extinguish his cigarette beneath the miniature cherub sculpture on his small brown lawn. The head of the cherub had broken off and been glued back. Close-up, you could still see the thin line.

The muscular man who wore sneakers with his business suit was Mr. Tuttler. A year before, my mother and I were driving downtown to buy her a dress when we passed Mr. Tuttler coming out of the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater. I didn't know exactly what went on in there, but knew it was a men's club.

"Was that—" I started to say to my mom.

"Yes," she said. "Yes it was." And we were both silent until we got to Macy's.

I'd keep both palms flat on the roof, never wanting to stretch too far forward; as the men walked beneath our house, I'd lose sight of them. Sometimes I'd imagine they'd climbed the stairs to our front door, that they'd come in and were sitting down at the dinner table.

They'd be waiting there when I went back downstairs, their shoes off and their hands washed and clean. I'd sit across from them and let them explain themselves. I'd give them

the chance to say they were sorry, and then I'd decide whether or not to forgive them. I'd take a while to reach my verdict—make them wait the way I had.

But before I could decide, the men would reappear on the other side of our house. They always did. It wasn't our doorstep they were walking to. I'd see the tops of their heads: Mr. Tuttler's toupee, Mr. Nagarro's perfect part, the stem on top of Mr. Jackson's beret. I'd continue watching the men as they walked to their houses.
After that day, there's another, and then another
.

I cried about infinity every night until one day in April, when the physics teacher read us an astronaut's account of traveling around the world. The strangest thing about the journey, the astronaut said, was he never knew when he was tired because there was no gravity making his head nod down or pulling him to lie down and rest. He just kept traveling, not knowing when it was night. He was unable to count the days.

When I went up to the roof that night, after hearing about the astronaut, I didn't count days either. Instead, I sat and waited for Mr. Nagarro to get off the bus. I watched him as he stopped halfway to his house and, under the light of the street lamp, read a comic book for five minutes. I watched his wife peer out the window, anxious for him to come home and help her with the lads. I watched him as he slowly walked to his house, and as he walked through the door, I forgave him.

I watched as each of the men, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Tuttler and the others—Mr. Billings, Mr. Richfield, Dr. Hodson, and Mr. Green—got off the bus. I'd follow them with my eyes as they passed beneath the street lamps. I'd follow them as they climbed the steps up to their houses. And I'd forgive each man as he entered the door to his home.

I know a harmless man when I see one. I know sorry men when I see them, too. I've seen a sorry man read a comic book half a block from his house. I've seen a sorry man come home after being away four years. I've seen the change in a sorry man's face—the embarrassment, the grief—and I know how to recognize it in others. I've come home with my mother and sister from the grocery store and seen a sorry man on our couch watching
Wheel of Fortune
.

"Well, look what the fish dragged upstream," my mother said. "What'd you bring me?" Freddie asked.

At my feet, Sarah stirs. "So you'd all forgiven him already." On the ceiling, I can make out the crack that runs from the north side of my room to the center. I look down the bed, in Sarah's direction.

"Yeah," I say. "Does that make sense?"

Sarah doesn't answer, but I can feel her nodding her head yes at my toes.

I leave in late March. On the plane to Dublin I sit next to an old woman wearing a blue bouse and a black velvet skirt. She has long slits in her earlobes, at the bottom of which sit small pearls. Pinned over the top button of her collared blouse is a small gold figure of an owl. After the plane takes off, the woman reaches into the seat pocket in front of her, where she's organized her necessary belongings, and pulls out a book of Mad Libs.

There's no one on the other side of her. "Do you want to play?" she asks me. "Sure," I say.

From her purse she extracts a pen that's designed to look like a tube of toothpaste. She uncaps it, hands me the pen, and places the top back in her purse. I ask her for a proper noun, a verb, a food, a color, and an adverb. I read the story back to her.

The old woman laughs. I wonder if I've ever seen an old woman laugh before. I smile.

"Let's play again," she says, and we do. We go through the whole book of Mad Libs, and when we run out she's sad. Her disappointment shows in her face, which now looks roughly lined, like a head carved from a coconut. She's got a thousand stories, I'm sure.

I tell her I have an idea: we'll play again, and this time she'll ask me for the words.

This gets her attention. She sits up straighter, checks to make sure the fasten-seat-belt light has been turned off, and unclasps her buckle. "But you wrote in pen," she says. She points to the toothpaste tube to remind me.

I tell her that she can just write the new answers, my answers, on top of the old ones. "Okay," she says. "I like that idea. We're getting our moneys worth."

She asks me for a name, a place, an object, a man's name, a number, and an adjective. Then she reads my story back to me and she laughs and laughs, all the way to Dublin.

I owe an immeasurable amount to my agent, Mary Evans, to my editor, Jenny Minton, and to Sonny Mehta, Marty Asher, Jennifer Jackson, and many others at Knopf for their faith in this book. Thank you also to Beatrice Monti and the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and to Dr. Anthony Villanueva for letting me into his operating room.

I am also grateful to my friends—Tonje Kilen Snow, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Alexandra Flynn, Ninive Clements Calegari, Joshua Pashman, Matthew Yeoman, Hilary Kivitz, Joshua Brown, and Linda Saetre.

And especially to my family, for their unwavering support. Thank you.