But in the wintertime it’s quiet here and there are weekly rates. The carpets aren’t much to write home about, having an ashy cast. The tables in the rooms are brown Formica with black cigarette burns; our shower curtains are mildewed. I like their pale-blue imprint of daisies. I also like the cliffs, the rocks, the trees and the gray water stretching to the east. I like the sharp nearness of pine needles against a blurry sheen of sea.
And my little girl loves it. She loves the people and the place; small events make her giddy with pleasure. She spins, cartwheels, races and laughs easily. She doesn’t have much, but she doesn’t need much. She has her books and toys and art supplies. Some of the toys are old and bedraggled, since she doesn’t want to throw out anything—the second I suggest a disused toy might be taken to the charity bin in town she feels a rush of protectiveness and clings pathetically, lavishing praise upon the object that had been utterly forgotten until then.
Watching her protect a ratty mouse, a dog-eared, broken-spined, finger-smeared picture book, it’s almost possible to believe that everything in the world is precious, that each humble item that exists has a delicate and singular value.
It’s possible to believe that all matter should be treated tenderly.
LENA WAS BORN in a hospital in Alaska. Up to that time I taught as an adjunct at the university and her father was in business: and he’s still in business today, though he’s expanded his purview.
I was fond of Anchorage. It’s a sprawling city of mostly ugly buildings, but no other city I know has bears roaming downtown. I’d be picnicking with the baby near the central business district, watching the sunset from the Cook Inlet shore, and black bears would come rustling through the undergrowth a few feet away. Feeling a tug of panic, I grabbed Lena and retreated to the car, but still I treasured having them so close. The moose roamed Anchorage too, and you could encounter them on a casual run through city parks—more dangerous than the bears, if you believed the statistics.
Of all the actions I’ve taken, leaving Alaska was the hardest. Not because I enjoyed living there, though I did, but because it’s a bold move to take a child so far away from the man who’s her father. Even when he doesn’t accept the position.
I did have his approval at first for our departure. The part of the split he resented was financial: he didn’t like that I took half the value of our savings account and our CDs with me. (I left the stock, I left the mutual funds, but still.) Aside from money quibbles he was glad we’d left, at first; for more than a year he didn’t mind at all. He’d been indifferent to me for a long time, as he’s indifferent to most people who aren’t of use to him.
As for Lena, he hadn’t wanted her in the first place and he never warmed to her. Our leave-taking gave him the same liberty it gave us—namely the open-ended chance to be who we were, instead of trapped.
I’d send him the occasional email telling him what she’d learned, what she was doing, an anecdote here or there to keep her real. I clung to the belief that any father would want that, and more than that I felt I owed it to her, to try to keep him existent as a father, however marginal. He rarely responded to these, and his occasional replies were brief and rife with hasty misspellings.
But over the past few months he’s decided to make himself a candidate, and candidates want family since family looks reassuring on them. So now we’re useful again and he’s searching for us. I think he wants a moving snapshot for the campaign trail, two female faces behind him as he stands on the podium.
When I first met Ned he claimed not to have any politics. I should have known enough to be wary of that, but instead I made excuses to myself. Politics were for crooks, he said. But later politics grew in him like metastasis, branching into a network threaded throughout his veins and nerves and bones. It’s not that he’s left the business world behind, it’s just that he now believes politics are a sector of his enterprise.
His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which “values the sanctity of every human soul,” and also “believes in the greatness of the American family.” The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren’t you. Ned believes in “the American family” the same way processed food companies do, companies that make products for cleaning floors or unclogging toilets—the kind of easy code that makes public speech moronic.
But even if he’d been a genuine family man, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of his platform.