Before I had Lena, when something upset me I talked to my friends about it in the standard way. But after she was born, when that ragged, uninvited disruption entered my life, I found I couldn’t talk about it to my friends. Maybe we weren’t close enough or maybe I was averse to risk. It can’t be taken lightly, the rumor of mental confusion.
So this hybrid document is what I have instead, my journal entries mixed with thoughts that came to me later. I don’t mean for Lena to read it—it’s password-protected—because I understand that even if I fantasize about telling her, it would be the kind of unburdening adulterers sometimes do, a kind of selfishness dressed up as truth. The rules of sound parenting weigh against it. No, I write for myself or for no one. I have no stake in convincing an audience of my trustworthiness; my welfare isn’t of general interest. I’m someone who was rained on for a period of months, rained on by word instead of water.
When it comes to my daughter, trustworthiness is the first thing I offer. I value it above all else.
BEING WITHOUT a car made me nervous, but on the other hand I’m nostalgic for trains, and Lena, it turns out, loves them. For her a train is a social bonanza: a long container of possible friends with the added bonus of scenery out the windows. It’s far superior to our sedan, where she’s limited to my company.
Skipping down the aisle of the café car—where a drooping, whey-faced man looked at us glumly as he wiped down the counter in front of a near-empty display of potato chips—Lena said she wanted to live in the train forever. That’s how she expresses approval, sometimes adding a touch of the morbid: “I want to eat ice cream forever and ever, till I’m even older than you are,” she’s said to me before. “I want to stay in the motel that long, I want to walk on the beach.” At her age even a day has an eternal quality, so that forever and ever is less a linear stretch of time than a form of reassurance. “I want to live on this exact train forever and ever till I die. Until I die, Mommy! Until I die!”
I told her about sleeping cars and she decided we needed that kind of train instead, where we would have curtains to draw across our bunks for privacy, supplies of chocolate bars and chips, warm sweaters for fall and tank tops for summer; we would ride in our train over green hill and dale, mountain and plain, bedazzled by the sights, enraptured by our fellow travelers.
We finally stepped out onto the platform of the old station near my parents’ town. The sun was low in the dull-gray sky and a wind whipped our hair around. Lena was perfectly happy to forget about trains in favor of the reward of seeing her grandparents again. She clutched my hand and scanned the station wide-eyed, though she can only have half-remembered what my parents look like.
But she knew them right off, probably by their tremulous smiles. I was looking along a row of lockers, past restroom doors and soda vending machines, trying to cultivate the vigilance Don had urged. But all I saw was a couple of teenagers slumped on a bench beside their old-school boombox, belligerent sounds issuing.
“Nana! Grumbo!” cried Lena, and ran forward.
Her pet name for her grandfather, invented I’m not sure how, has always been redolent of a booze-soaked clown—ill-suited to the personage of my father, whose bearing afforded him, in the past, a quiet dignity. These days he doesn’t know his name, he draws a blank equally on his history and the identities of his family, but still the mantle of that dignity hasn’t entirely dropped from him. He holds fast to my mother when he walks, a dreamy look on his face suggesting a dim and lovely scene back in the recesses of his mind, a hidden spring from which he alone may drink.
Lena hugged them excitedly, ambassador of affection. Young children are the standard-bearers of visible love, I thought, watching. After we grow up and get sparing with our physical affection, children are sorely needed to bridge the gap. I love my parents but the urge to touch them seems to have mostly faded. Without Lena we’d be stranded in the lonely triangle of adulthood, the lovable child I ceased to be hovering sadly between us.
“Do you still have the kittens?” squealed Lena, who remembered kittens from a visit when she was three.
One day she’ll separate herself with an adult coldness she’ll be unable to control, uninterested in controlling; one day she’ll probably touch me as rarely as I touch my parents now. She’ll come and go, returning only for visits.
The thought is so acute, the outcome so near-certain I cringe, thinking: This is why parents want grandchildren. Really they want their own children back again, they long to feel that vanished and complete love.