“Hi, kid,” he said. “You didn’t say you were coming. I didn’t think you would.”
He asked her how things were, how school was, as he had when she was in high school.
“It’s all good,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s interesting.”
“Did you bring some poetry with you? Because I never read as much poetry as I should.”
“No,” she said. “Sorry.” She stood for a moment with him and started up the stairs.
“Hey,” he said, “I could take you out to dinner.”
“No. I’m like invited.”
“Another night while you’re here?”
“That’d be good.”
“I don’t go out much,” he told her. “I gotta save my energy. For serenity, you know. ’Cause you don’t give me much.”
Is he kidding? she thought. He wasn’t, but he was hoping for a smile in return.
“Hey, Dad, is there anything to drink in here?”
“No,” he said. “Sobriety in here.”
He was lying about there being nothing to drink. He was keeping a bottle of Jameson, out of defiance of the devil as it were, not drinking it. This was dangerous work, but an admired friend of his had done it. Maud happened to know where it was.
“Mind if I smoke a joint before I go?”
He didn’t answer for a while. He had put up with her marijuana before. He had smoked it in the job. Coke, too, sometimes.
“You know,” he said, “that crap is blood on your hands. Just like cocaine these days. A lot of poor people in Mexico get killed over that.”
He sighed and told her to smoke it upstairs. When she was upstairs she made her sneaky way to the attic, to where her father’s self-challenging liquor was. The bottle was in its box, untouched. He never went up there and she could replace it the next day. On the way to her own room she passed what had been her mother’s small office, pretty much unchanged since her death almost four years before. Inside was a bulletin board on which her parents had tacked up her drawings and various printed writings, articles clipped from school papers and poems she had decorated with colored inks.
Under the board sat an ancient computer that Maud had updated so her mother could go online. The print on the screen could be enlarged. Dad had propped her mother’s picture on the machine and Maud, clutching her stolen bottle, tried not to look at it. Still, she had paused too long not to hear the house of her childhood. His wise-guy voice; Mom, her story voice and laughter. The TV, her own footsteps on the stairs, her parents and her own kiddie ghost.
To get over all that she had to weepily light up her weed and break her nails on the whiskey cap and drink it raw. Poor guy, the hero he was finally trying to be. Because whoever the hero cops were, her dad had not been one of them. She felt terrible about the bottle. The weed was excellent. Dumbing-down weed. No one in this place but me, and I’m not here. She put the dope away and hid the bottle.
“You look nice,” he said when she was going out.
“Really?”
He looked depressed. She laughed at him. She could not stand his company for another half minute. If she could laugh at him, she thought, she could laugh at fucking Brookman.
“Have fun,” her father said.
11
“HOW DID YOU WASH dishes up there?” Brookman asked his daughter. “In the river? With your hair?”
He was helping Sophia wash dishes while Ellie worked in her office, catching up on the mail. Sophia sang Mennonite hymns as she worked.
“The river was frozen, Daddy. I mean, that’s so silly.” She seemed at least as disapproving of the silliness as amused by it. It took her a second to laugh. “With my hair?”
She’s a pocket-size Bezeidenhout, Brookman thought. He thought of saying it to her, but he did not want to render her too perplexed in the process of cultural reentry. The twice-a-year trips between White Lake and Amesbury entailed a passage between the recitation-readings of biblical verses in High-German Gothic script and the latest e-mail abbreviations, and required a measured transition. On occasion Brookman had tried to find out how she was handling it and asked her. He was told the experience was variously cool, very fun and weird, but not really.
“More weird up there or down here?” Brookman asked her that night when they had finished the dishes. He had been to the place twice, long ago. He considered himself well traveled but it was very difficult to feel at home in White Lake. “The last time I was there it felt like there were people assigned to be nice to me. Like two people. Everybody else pretended I wasn’t there. It was before you were born, Sofe.”
“That’s how the people are,” Sophia said. “They’ve known me since I was little, though.” She thought about it for a minute. “If they don’t know you, they don’t know what to say. So they don’t say anything. And you don’t. And pretty soon it’s like you aren’t there. And then they act like you aren’t there. And then you sort of aren’t there.”
“I’ve felt like that in a few places, Sofe. Not only in White Lake.”
“Like they don’t always recognize me in my American clothes. I say like Hi in Muttersprache, and they go, Sophia! The kids. They call other people ‘the English.’ They call Americans ‘the English.’ They call other Canadians ‘the English.’ They call all outsiders ‘the English,’ even if they’re French.”
Ellie was coming down the stairs.
“It’s an unusual community, you know,” she said. “There are very sophisticated people in the Old Synod, you’d be surprised. Very wheeler-dealer some of them.”
“Yes indeed,” Brookman said.
“Daddy’s asking which is weirder coming to. White Lake or here.”
“Oh, ya? So which?” Ellie asked. “As a personal experience?” Before Sophia could answer, Ellie interrupted her. “Of course Sofe is a star exotic in both places, remember,” she said to Brookman. “So her experience is conditioned by that.”
“They’re both weird,” Sophia said. “I wouldn’t want to be there all the time. I’d miss too much. Except sometimes I think I would. Be there.”
“When you want to be a little girl again you do,” Brookman said.
Sophia left the room quickly.
“I made her cry,” Brookman said.
“It’s a tough transition.” Ellie leaned on the sink and smiled at the clean dishes. “Shit, Stevie, you made me cry too.”
“I’m so happy,” he told her. He was very glad about her being pregnant, but he did not really feel happy at that moment. He was glad to veer away slightly from what he knew most made her cry.
“It’s emotionally tiring,” Ellie said. “The trip itself, the wind, the overheated airports and customs. Do you know U.S. customs took an orange from Sofe once? I said to them, ‘Where the heck do you think the orange is from, Baffin Bay?’”
“They wouldn’t know where that was,” Brookman said.
“Ya got that right, eh.”
“The Canadian customs guys, when they’re bad, they’re worse. The Americans act like zombies. Your guys think they’re cute. Comedians. They’re hostile and sarcastic. They do Scotch standup comedy. Boreal wit.”
They stood in silence for a while by the sink. Brookman watched his wife, and though she had spoken of tears she was dry-eyed. He prepared himself for the inevitable. But it did not yet come.
“Once,” Ellie told him, “Sofe and I were in the meetinghouse up there just after worship, and we’re having the chat you two were just having — you know — the difference, up there, down here, blah blah. Which is weirder? Here or the Community.”