Storytellers

Posted on by Justin



 No one remembers the former generations,
    and even those yet to come
will not be remembered    by those who follow them. - Ecclesiastes 1:11

 
Strip malls, he thinks. This whole town, this whole country, is strip malls. It’s impossible to tell American cities apart anymore. They’re all strip malls.
            For his mother, Fort Wayne inspires the warmth of early adolescence, when she still rode her bike around Six Mile Road with the neighborhood boys – the Mancewicz brothers, Jimmy Conley, Pat Leary, and Tommy Vendetti. How strange that while the rest of the country is giving away its land to capitalism, her hometown is being reclaimed by nature. She still remembers the hazy July morning when she showed up on her bike as if it were any other morning. Except this morning, none of the boys would talk to her, and when she tried to keep up with them, they kept pedaling faster and faster. She fell behind slowly, her legs moving and burning to keep up, her feet slipping off the pedals as she willed the bike to go faster. Her face was hot with tears and anger; she couldn’t understand what was happening. Finally, by the old McLouth steel mill on Fort Street, her legs gave out, the bike sliding out from beneath her. The cuts on her knees gave her an excuse for coming home in tears. Fort Wayne is the emptiness of that remaining summer, and the fullness of what came before.
His father drives silently, the town having no effect on him at all. It glides past, like so many Midwestern towns over the years. The banality of commerce. He thinks about his father, who is slowing down, if only incrementally. Instead of mowing the lawn and weeding the garden in one day, he now does half the yard before lunch and the other half after. The house is becoming too much for him. At what point will it be too much?
He worries; winters in Wisconsin are difficult.
They’re on the last leg of a road trip through the Midwest – Detroit, Green Bay, Chicago, Fort Wayne, and then back home to Philadelphia.
He is twenty-eight and back in the United States for the first time after many months away. These are the places of his youth, too – the places that no one in Istanbul has ever heard of. His past, to all of them, is a blank. It’s a narrative he controls.
He will soon be leaving again, and already the weight of this departure looms, transfiguring this forlorn landscape – strip malls, used car lots, endless traffic and fast food chains – into something poignant. For better or for worse, it is his blood, the very atoms of his identity.
“What about here?” his father asks, looking in the rearview mirror. His son can see his father’s wispy hair (why doesn’t he just shave it off, like he used to?), his pale blue eyes, the deepening lines etched into his cheeks, as if they were soft stone. When did Dad stop being attractive? Was there a day when it happened, or did he age many years in the ten months he’s been in Istanbul? Would it be possible that, if we never looked away from a person, they would never age?
“What place?” he asks.
“Here,” dad replies, turning into one of the strip malls. “This restaurant. Seafood.”
“Seafood in Fort Wayne?”
“Lake perch, I bet,” his father says, and without having to say anymore, this triggers a shared memory, which neither one of them quite lived but which both of them have romanticized – Friday night fish fries at the VFW hall. The son has inherited the father’s penchant for storytelling and for embellishment. In Istanbul, a lovely Czech woman with morose eyes asked him how he learned to tell such good stories.
“From my father,” he said. “By listening to him preach.” And though he couldn’t remember a single sermon, he suspected it was true. He’d heard enough of them – hundreds – that the rhythms of his father’s stories were worked deep into his memory. Almost implicitly, his stories worked their way towards a unifying moral. It was a habit he couldn’t break, and more than anything, he felt that this was the strongest remnant of the Midwest inside him.
Sitting quietly in the front seat, his mother remembers when her grandfather – step-grandfather, technically, but the marriage happened before she was born, so though she does not have his blood or DNA, she loves him fiercely – would take her and her cousins down to the Detroit River to sit on the rocks and fish in the grey, murky waters. All they ever caught were groupers and catfish, none of which were edible.
“Well,” she says. “I need to pee. So let’s stop somewhere.”
“Yeah, I need to pee, too. This looks fine,” he says. If he has inherited stories from his father, he has inherited his mother’s bladder – as well as her darker blue eyes, her well shaped chin, and her coarse walnut-colored hair, which she wears straightened and dyed and which he wears cropped short.
They sit outside on the patio, which is a small patch of cement. There are two tables covered by immense umbrellas which advertise a cheap Mexican beer that is owned by a Dutch company. The strip mall is newer, its bricks not yet faded by sunlight, its awnings and signs not yet made cheap and tawdry by shifting tastes and brutal Midwestern storms.
He remembers their road trip from some years before. His parents drove out two days early and he followed with his younger sister, who had just turned eighteen. They were realizing how much they had in common – music, an aversion to offices, a weakness for alcohol and casual sex. Stopping at a bed and breakfast outside of Detroit, on the island of Grosse Ile, they’d had dinner at a bar on the island’s southern tip. From there, they’d watched a storm roll in over the flatlands, the wind shaking the bar’s shudders and the lightning coming down dense as rain over the black water and the low buildings of the suburbs. The house band closed up shop early and he shared a six pack of Bell’s with his sister while they talked about their love lives. They went back to the hotel and smoked a joint on their balcony as the residue of the storm fired in the distance.
The parking lot is mostly full; it’s rush hour. Out on the four lane street, the traffic is so persistent that none of them even notice it. The light is beginning to turn golden, precipitating the autumn leaves. It’s warm, but not humid.
“This is so nice,” his mother says. “The three of us out here like this.”
His father smiles, waits for his son to say something. All trip long he has found ways to tie things back to his new life – to bring up that he lives in Istanbul, where he is a writer. It is an implicit reminder: I am not of you anymore.
It makes sense, in a way. And he’s proud of him, but a little embarrassed by his constant need to remind everyone of where he is. When he was twenty-eight, the boy was learning to crawl. They were living in a duplex outside of Chicago and he was taking classes at U-Chicago during the day, working as a hospital chaplain by night, and writing much of his dissertation on the El. He would’ve loved to have gallivanted around Eastern Europe. Maybe he could have. But growing up where he did, it wasn’t something one thought to do. Their relationship, he supposed, was progress – the aperture of possibility would open further and further. Though, he feared, this would be the last generation in which that would be the case. His boys lacked the discipline to ever make real money, to own a home. And besides: the world had changed, too.
“Do you know what the shelf life of a shopping mall is?” his son says.
“About twenty-five years, tops,” he answers.
His son shakes his head. His ex-girlfriend’s parents were architects. They liked to complain that nothing was built to last anymore – that survival in their profession meant building structures that would practically be falling apart within twenty years. Hell, the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta hadn’t survived twenty years. Everything in America began depreciating the second it touched your hands – which, he supposed, was a somewhat apt metaphor for existence.
In Istanbul, he lives with a French woman and an Australian woman. There, his Americaness is something he embraces, a role he plays willingly and with verve: the Midwestern boy in the big city. He adds an extra drawl to his accent. He hosts hamburger nights and has learned to make a killer apple pie. His French roommate likes to call him out for his American-isms: his low-grade spirituality (“God does not exist; of course Americans cannot accept this fact; you must – how do you say – hedge your bets?”), his tendency to put peanut butter on anything and everything; she mocks his accent mercilessly (“would you like some meeelk”; “can you knead the doooogh”; “I’m going to meet my friend Baaaaaris”). He speaks warmly of America, defending it against accusations of meddling, of soullessness, of hypocrisy.
“I don’t know why you’re so invested in defending this monolithic idea of ‘America’,” his Australian roommate often criticized. “Look at me and Celine: we say, ‘Fuck Australia, it’s racist” or “fuck France, it’s full of xenophobes.’ But you? You fucking refer to America using the royal ‘we.’”
It is a symptom of his nostalgia – for the late night drives through the Philadelphia suburbs, for summers spent on the lake in Wisconsin, for the strip malls and abandoned malls and the strange comfort one feels when walking into a McDonald’s.
(In fact, during his rare moments of total loneliness, he’ll often stop by McDonald’s for a cheeseburger or take the Taksim metro out to one of the monumental shopping centers, Kanyon or Cevahir.)
Maybe it’s all cheap, an idea sold to him by commercials. But it’s the only foundation he has.
Of course, now that he is here, he is reminded why he left the place. It’s difficult for him to project anything but disdain at how disposable the culture feels. And it reminds him how, even in Turkey, this culture is infecting everything – buy, buy, buy. The belief that if you buy the right things, your future can be secured. If you root yourself deeply enough to this world, you cannot leave this world. He thinks about how strange it must be to die on a day like this, to die inside the comfort of your own living room.
But the news is being reported like it always is. All my stuff is still here. The neighbor is cutting the lawn like they do every Tuesday. How can I die if all this ordinary stuff is happening?
And yet we all die while ordinary stuff just continues to happen – the reporting of news, the cutting of lawns, the purchasing of new televisions.
It’s a dangerous illusion, he thinks – one that causes people to lead small, scared lives because death is so far outside the structure of the suburbs.
He smiles at his parents, who are themselves comfortable. The system, he thinks, has delivered the three of them safely to this point; can it all be so bad?
The waitress, a pretty Midwestern woman with short blonde hair and thick hips, takes their order. As always, his mother’s order – a salmon Caesar salad – is complicated, requiring multiple additions and subtractions. He and his father lock eyes, shaking their heads in mutual understanding.
“What?” she says after the waitress leaves.
“Nothing, dear,” his father says, taking her hand.
“You two with your guy jokes.”
“No, it’s just every time you order, it’s like pulling teeth,” her son says. “I don’t get how you guys eat as much as you do. My stomach can’t handle it anymore. It’s just … too much.”
She reaches across the table with her napkin to swat him, and all three of them laugh. It’s a critique she’s gotten used to her from husband every time she returns from the supermarket.
“Hell,” he always says, “how much did you buy? It’s just the two of us here.”
And to be fair, she feels worse than anyone whenever she has to go through the fridge and toss out the stuff that’s gone bad – the three half eaten packages of blue cheese, the four different kinds of stuffed olives. It’s not how she imagined she would be at this age. She never wanted much money, for instance, and thought she could be plenty happy without it. She was happy without it, during those early years when her husband was finishing his PhD and she was home with the two boys. Hell, their version of a fancy meal back then was going to Red Lobster once every few months. They ate a lot of mac’n’cheese mixed with hot dogs.
But now that she’s come into unexpected money – and money that she, herself, has earned – well, it is nice, isn’t it? It’s nice to get whatever she wants at the grocery store. It’s nice to order whatever she wants on a menu. Sure, it wasn’t ever something she aspired to – and how could she have, growing up alone with her mother in Detroit? Hell, she’s the only member of her family to actually leave Detroit. This is uncharted territory, and though it isn’t what she aspired to, now that she’s here, she might as well enjoy it.
“Hey mom,” her son says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you. I’m really happy to be here with you guys.”
She smiles. “It’s fine, sweetie. I’d already forgotten about it.”
Still, he feels like a spoiled brat for teasing her. His mother has forgiven him his many missteps – the money he wasted finding his way, the years of uncertainty where he bounced from menial job to menial job – and even in the midst of these mistakes, she never said anything to pressure him (unlike his father, who was rightfully pissed) or to make him feel like the failure he felt like he was.
“Whatever makes you happy,” she always said, “I support. That’s all I want for you.”
Her capacity to forgive astonishes him. She’d forgiven her mother for being absent, drunk, and vindictive. She’d forgiven her husband for straying. She’d forgiven her children for their wayward years. And she never made it look difficult, never made it seem like there was any other alternative.
            “I guess I just think life’s too short and we’re all too imperfect to hold a grudge. I always worry that I’ll kick the bucket while I’m on bad terms with someone. Anger’s such a small, petty thing against death, don’t you think? It’s why I always tell you guys I love you, every single day.” She did. Even after he moved to Istanbul, she texted him before every single flight she took. “The only thing I’d never forgive was if somebody every hurt one of you three.”
            He’s struggled to enact this principle in his own life.
            “I still feel bad,” he says.
            “Really, sweetie. It’s fine. I was just remembering when you and your brother were little, and we’d play those epic hide and seek games in the Valpo house. We’d turn off all the lights, and you guys would run around with these glow sticks. It was so much fun.”
            He smiles. “Do you remember when we found that sex toy?”
            His mother breaks into laughter, white wine spilling down her chin.
            “What?” his father asks. “Where the hell was I for this?”
            “Oh, god,” she says. “I’d forgotten that. You two were running around the house like little hooligans, screaming about the giant plastic penis you’d found. You guys loved it.”
            All of them are laughing now.
            “This is what happened when I was away from home,” his father says.
            “We had absolutely no idea what it was for. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”
            His father’s phone rings.
            “Hey, dad,” he says, reclining in his chair. He wears dark sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the third button, exposing ample amounts of graying chest hair. Almost immediately, his tone grows somber.
            “Oh,” he says. “Oh, man.” He shakes his head. They all know what’s happened, and from across the table, his mother takes his hand, squeezing it and smiling.
            His father removes his sunglasses and vigorously wipes his eyes. They’re already red from the martini he’s drinking.
            “Shit, Dad. I’m so sorry. We should have … she should have left Monday. She shouldn’t have stayed on for us. This was more important.
“God,” he says, almost to himself. “Six hours. She couldn’t hold on six hours.”
            He remembers, for the first time in a very long time, the last time he saw his grandmother. His father had called him in the middle of the night.
            “I’m sorry to wake you up, but it’s not looking good. They’re not sure how much longer she has left.”
They were living in Indiana then. It was a five hour drive under normal conditions, four if he sped like crazy and avoided any cops – and if he got lucky with Chicago traffic. He didn’t bother packing a bag, and left almost immediately, filling their Volvo station wagon and buying a mug of coffee and a pack of Camels. He smoked almost all of them on the drive, flying past the darkened skyscrapers of Chicago that were like spires of black ice against the late breaking winter dawn. He cracked his windows while he smoked, enjoying the cold as he sped down empty Wisconsin county roads, the fallow fields covered in a thin crust of snow, dead corn stalks poking out like remnants of a past civilization.
She was still alive when he got to the hospital, and he was the last person to see her alive. She’d never been a big woman, but hooked up to a ventilator, she looked very small, an over-dried raisin – as if she were already shriveling into non-existence. He took her hand, which was still surprisingly warm, and prayed with her, though he didn’t know if she could hear. She was the one who’d taught him scripture, reading to him from the Bible she received from her father on her wedding day.
Now her daughter, his aunt, was gone, too.
“How’s mom doing?” he asks his father.
Across the table, the son watches his father and tries to recall his great aunt. He’d only seen her a dozen times, but he’d always felt some kinship there. She was a poet, an artist, a devout liberal in a family of Evangelical Christians. But mostly, he felt that he was straining for significance. It reverberated inside him with the force of a rock being thrown into the opposite side of a pond.
“Well, tell her we love her,” his father says. “I’ll call her later, okay? I love you, Dad.”
He hangs up and sighs enormously, blustering his lips and hanging his head, exposing the bald, slightly sun burned top of his head.
“Aunt Debbie?” his mother asks.
His father shakes his head.
“I’m so sorry, honey.”
“Damnit,” his father says. “Ah, damnit. She died six hours before mom got there. Six hours. She should have left Monday. Their damn Midwestern politeness,” he says, blowing his nose. “She didn’t have to stay with us. This was more important.”
“She wanted to spend time with us. And with Luke,” his wife says, referring to their grandson. “Think of how much fun we had?”
“There will be more time with Luke,” he says.
“Will there be?” she says gently.
Once again, her husband blusters his lips. It’s a sound the son knows well. His father is remarkably easy to identify by the sounds he makes – the snorts and coughs and mutters. He and his brother always joke about it; they can walk into a public bathroom and tell what stall their father is in almost immediately.
She puts her hand on her husband’s shoulder and rubs it gently. He lightly brushes her hand away.
“Sorry,” he says.
“No, it’s fine.”
“Six hours. Six fucking hours.”
“Well,” his son says, “she chose to spend her time with the living. She has so many good memories with Debbie, memories of her when she was full of life. This way, that’s how she’ll remember her.”
His father almost smiles. “I’ll always remember the first time we visited them after they moved to South Dakota. I would’ve been your age, young one,” he says, pointing with humorous aggression at his oldest son. “And you would’ve been Luke’s age. It was July, hotter than shit, and I decided to take a walk. Because it was so hot, I went out in just shorts and a pair of sandals. As I’m walking out the road, I come across Aunt Deb, cutting the grass in her swim suit. God, she would’ve been my age.
“She shut off the mower and called out to me, ‘better put some real shoes on. Be safe out there. You don’t wanna surprise any rattlers.’ She was barefoot, by the way.
“‘What about you?’ I called out.
“‘Oh me? Rattlers don’t scare me none.’ Then she flashed this smile I still remember. The kind of smile that let you know she was one, tough broad. ‘I’ll just run ‘em right over.’”
The three of them laugh. He does a surprisingly accurate impression, capturing the strange combination of upper Midwestern languor and Texas twang that was Deb’s voice.
“Is this from the vulture story?” his son asks.
The vulture story, like many of his father’s stories, has become a part of family lore, burnished and polished by constant re-tellings and grown to mythic proportions by embellishments and exaggerations. He must have heard the story a hundred times, between family road trips and sermons. American families serve, in some way, only to propagate their own myth.
“I still remember when we went out to South Dakota when I was like fourteen and we went out to the ‘cliff’ where the vultures tried to eat you and it was barely a hill,” he says.
“It was the wrong spot,” his father says. “It was a cliff, damnit. An immense cliff, the view stretching for miles and miles to the horizon.”
“Uh huh,” his wife says.
“It was! Damnit, my aunt just died. I don’t need my integrity called into question.”
Against their better judgments, they all laugh, his wife laughing so hard that she snorts with glee at his indignation. As the laughter clears their systems, they sit in the silence of the late day traffic. A strip mall in a forgotten Indiana town.
His wife sighs, and it’s like a shift in key in a piece of music.
“You know, we all need to be prepared. These next years are going to be hard years. Very hard years.”
“We’ve had hard years before,” her son says. They have been through an affair, a long move, an addiction, and all the fights and recriminations that come with those things. He often reminds people of these things; strangely defensive, he assumes – sometimes correctly – that people see him and assume his life has been easy. Which it has been, in most ways. But he wants them to know that there have been traumas, that he understands pain. And he does, but he’s not sure why he needs people to know this – why he is so defensive.
“Yes, but not like we’re about to go through,” his mother says, finishing her wine. “You guys have never really dealt with a serious death. And we’re about to go through a lot of them, in the next five, ten years.”
“A generational shift,” his father says. “We’re becoming the geezers.”
She smiles. Aging bothers her less than it bothers him. As she’s gotten older, she feels that she’s become a fuller person – a better partner and mother because she has a life outside her family. She excels in the business world. Her husband had most of his professional success young, as he broke into academia, got his first book published, reached tenure, gained his own congregation. Since then, the successes have been more moderate – the steady accumulation of accolades that a solid, if unspectacular, career is made of. He’s made the world a better place though, she doesn’t doubt that – provided solace to congregants in moments of need, guided a handful of students along the path to fruitful careers of their own. She wonders, sometimes, what more he would have wanted.
“It’s funny,” her husband says, “looking back on the vultures. It feels like a turning point for me. Almost a trial by fire.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little obvious?” she teases.
“No, I mean it, I was your age,” he says, pointing to his son again. “Do you feel ready to be a father?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Honey, I don’t think you’re ever ready to be a parent for the first time,” she interjects. “That’s just natural.”
“Well, okay, maybe it is. So what? I still didn’t feel ready for it. Those first few years, I felt like I was just guessing, and like every guess was wrong. It was … well, not one of the toughest periods of my life, but it was difficult, especially for my faith. I remember thinking, ‘if I can’t even be a father, how can I be a pastor or a teacher?’
“And then Debbie gave me that little benediction.”
His wife lifts her eye brows, a move she always does to undermine him at parties. It means she’s had a bit too much wine.
“What?” he says, his voice reaching a higher octave.
“You’re calling that a benediction?”
“Absolutely! Go in peace. That’s basically what she said. What could be more of a benediction than that?”
She shakes her head and he dismissively waves a hand at her.
“Look, it’s not your story, is it? No. And in my story, it’s a benediction. And then I go out into the hills, to the edge of a cliff – and it was a real fucking cliff,” he says, pointing at his son, the exaggerated anger in the gesture approaching the comic. “And then while I was sitting there, pondering about life, burnt to a crisp in the sun, I notice these vultures, way up against the high afternoon sun, barely specks they’re so high up.”
“Dad, we know the story.”
“Yeah, well my aunt just died, and so I’m going to tell it again.” The son shakes his head, but it’s a gesture of affection; Dad’s drunk, and he’s also hurt. He likes to play the aggrieved card (so does his younger brother, in fact), as if the world is aligned against him. Which, if one thinks about it, the world is aligned against all of us to varying but ultimate degrees. Perhaps it’s neither for or against; it’s simply indifferent.
“And I’m mesmerized by these vultures up there. Even from afar, I can see how immense they are. Just incredible birds and they’re up there, riding the currents, the updrafts and down drafts. It was beautiful. It was like watching music in physical form.”
He has lapsed into his preacher voice.
“And I was thinking about you,” he points yet again to the son, “and you,” he takes his wife’s wrist gently, feeling the wiry tendons beneath the tender skin. “You were pregnant with Jackson then. We’d just moved to Valpo. And I was just thinking about what all it meant, how scared I was to be raising you guys because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. No idea how I was going to make life okay for you.
“But mostly, I was just watching those birds. I got so lost in them that I didn’t realize how low they’d gotten. They were circling, and it occurred to me that they kept getting lower and lower and lower. They were right above me, and now I could see their wingspan,” he spreads his arms as wide as they’ll go, “and I could see their talons,” he curls his fingers, “and these babies were huge, absolutely huge. The kind of things that could rip right into you.”
His son smiles. He recognizes the beats in the story, knows them as if it were his own story. Some years later, while eulogizing his father, he will tell this exact story and he will use this exact beat, this exact turn of phrase.
“I realized I was being hunted.”
His wife shakes her head. “You were not being hunted.”
“I was!” again his voice breaks into a high octave. “I was burnt red. They thought I was an animal hide. They thought I was dinner.” He looks at both of them, smirking. They’re suppressing laughter. “Ah, fuck you. I won’t tell the rest of it. You know how it ends.”
“They don’t eat you?” his wife teases.
“Hey, it was a turning point for me. I swear. A baptism by fire! I was petrified out there. I could feel it in my chest. When I came back, there was Debbie, standing in the grass just like she’d been before.
“‘Rattlers didn’t get ‘ya?’ And I’m telling you: I felt different. Altered. Transfigured. I was ready to be a father then.
“Better late than never,” his son says.
“Honey, this is your mother’s influence,” his wife says.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s the storyteller in her, which you inherited. You guys attach meaning to places where it doesn’t exist.” He felt that, beneath this, there was some deeper critique – of his faith, which he’d also inherited from his mother.
            “No, it’s just seeing more to the world than most people see. It’s looking harder at things.”
            The eyebrows. Again.
            “I’m just saying: I’ll always look at that moment as a blessing she gave me. Whether that’s how she saw it or not, it’s how it is now.”
            She reaches out and takes him by the wrist. “Okay, honey.”
            He smiles at his son warmly. Why is he being so indignant? It’s late summer. The sun is clear. They’re traveling well, with a grandson and another child awaiting them back in Philadelphia. He has, with a few missteps, guided three children into the world. He’s finished one martini and another is on the way. His aunt is gone, but she’d been gone for years, the whole continent between them. He is still here.
           
As the dinner rolls on and the evening sun sinks lower over the flat, strip-malled horizon, his parents have more wine. Neither of them feels like going back to the hotel yet and neither does he. They have three days left. After that, who knows when? The innocuousness of the town makes the larger world seem tenuous. He could come back, settle in a town like this, get married, whittle away his days with the landmarks of life here, the minor events blown out of proportion – the high school football games, the NCAA tournament, the proms and graduations. The rhythm of it all protecting him and also bearing him closer to death. It’s all very seductive when you’re about to leave it.
            He and his father want to go to a baseball game. What could be a better way to cap a late summer evening? A minor league baseball game between two irrelevant teams in a forgotten Midwestern town. They’d stay for a few innings, smell the grass and the leather, listen to the humdrum sounds of the disinterested crowd, have a beer or two, and then go home. Do it a hundred times and it’s meaningless; do it once and it’s a memory.
            His mother objects, vigorously at first, but they slowly bring her around on the idea.
            “We’ll only stay a few innings,” he says.
            “It’s dollar beer night,” his father adds.
            This is their best argument: dollar beer. His father offers to buy her ice cream in a miniature baseball helmet. Eventually, she relents.
            They arrive very late, parking on a residential block just a block from the stadium.
            “So this is downtown Fort Wayne,” his father jokes as they walk down the ramshackle street. It reminds his wife of her block growing up – the story-and-a-half houses with the two windows on the first floor like eyes, the front door like a nose, and the window cut from the peaked roof like a freckle on the forehead (this freckle was where her room was and she would lie against the open window in summer, listening to her relatives playing Euchre on the porch below, the clink of their beer glasses, their arguments over decades’ old feuds, the origins of which no one remembered anymore).
            The box office is about to close, and they pay five dollars apiece for tickets on the first base line, lower level. They didn’t need to pay; there are no ticket agents left and the gate is open. The game is open to all comers.
            They find their seats. The place is about three quarters full, which surprises him: it’s a Thursday night, the game means nothing. The stadium, like almost all baseball stadiums, is aesthetically pleasing for the small ways that it subverts symmetry – the notch in center field, the fifteen foot wall in left field beyond which lies a patio where picnickers sit with their legs dangling over the fence.
His father goes off to buy them all beer and to get the promised ice cream. Once he’s gone, his mother sighs, rubbing her son’s shoulder. She sees something of her own, younger self in him. She’d hitchhiked across the country with her college boyfriend, oftentimes sleeping on the side of the road or at truck stops. At twenty-six, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had no siblings. Her mother had always been paranoid and tyrannical, and the boyfriend told her she shouldn’t go home. But she knew she never would have forgiven herself if she hadn’t gone home, no matter how ungrateful her mother would be.
She found a job working reception at a hospital. One night, in the cafeteria, the hospital chaplain sat down with a cup of coffee. Two years later, they were married. Her mother had recovered by then, and, in fact, is still alive – at least as far as she knows. Mom had never once said thank you, and the two of them haven’t spoken in four years.
She has told her own children – this son, his younger brother, and their younger sister – that if she ever becomes seriously ill, to drive her to a bridge and push her off. And she means it. She does not want their lives put on hold or held hostage by guilt or illness.
She can’t help wondering what it is that will eventually draw her son’s trajectory back into the fold, what will narrow his horizons. It happens to all of us eventually. Life expands and expands, until eventually begins to contract. We start to shed layers – of friends, of things, of memories. She hopes it will not happen to him for a very long time.
“It’s been so good to have you home,” she says. “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, mom. It’s going to be hard to leave.”
“Aren’t you excited to get back to Istanbul?”
He smiles. A ball is hit well into the gap and the center fielder makes a running grab. He remembers playing center field; he wasn’t any good, but he loved being out there, chasing fly balls, the excitement of a ball hit his direction, the automatic geometry his mind performed as his body sprang into easy motion. He didn’t run down many difficult balls, but when he did, the feeling was incomparable. He should use his body more. His father gave up basketball two years ago. He has, at best, two decades of the game left.
“Of course I am. I’ve got a good community there. But, you know, it’s different.”
She smiles, but lets him keep talking.
“It’s kind of like having two versions of me. You guys know who I was, but you don’t see my life now. They know who I am, but they don’t know any of this.”
“Well, you can’t be that different, honey.”
“Maybe not. I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.”
“How long do you think you’ll stay?” she asks.
“I don’t know, mom. I can’t say.”
His father returns with three beers, two mini helmets full of melted ice cream, and a bag of roasted peanuts. The game inches forward, meaningless at-bat after meaningless at bat. During the seventh-inning stretch, a mascot wearing a hammerhead plays a fake organ. They all stand and sing.
 He watches the scene around him, the kids in oversized hats and their parents whose knees are beginning to fail them. He’d like to stop it for a moment, to move through the stadium without being seen, to be able to take a measure of it all, to hold onto some condensed version of whatever it is that courses through them – the ordinariness of it.
He thinks often about time. He always has, ever since he was a young kid. It’s possible he thinks about it more now though. He will be twenty-nine in six weeks, and a year after that, he will be thirty. Before he knows it, he will be sitting somewhere, thirty years old, and remembering this exact moment, when he imagined being thirty. Time sometimes works this way, moving strangely forward, as if the shape of things to come is looming like a field beyond a morning fog. Once it’s unveiled, you say, “of course this is what was out there,” and you feel that you knew it all along, though perhaps you didn’t.
He’ll look back on this night as a turning point, a moment in which one period of his life ended and another began. But in truth, it isn’t like that at all. Nothing is beginning or ending. The next summer, he will return for a wedding, and the summer after for another. The hard years will eventually begin, but there will be no neat threshold by which to remember them. These things can only be told after the fact, with knowledge yet to be gleamed. Most ordinary moments are not sentinels of something larger, thresholds. But some are.
Most of life is difficult to tell about – the quiet moments when nothing is being altered and yet everything is moving, always moving. Eventually, our life becomes a story we tell, emotional beats added in where they didn’t exist because, like the suburbs or families, it’s cleaner and easier to have a system.