Daniela took a deep breath. “I’m trying to show you — my life.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I was hot, and tired, and I didn’t have the energy to tell her she was twenty-three, that this wasn’t yet her life, this was an unpaid job she did a couple days a week with a bunch of other theater kids lucky enough to live in New York.
I just wanted to get out of there. I hated midtown, especially in summer, and though I was a tourist myself, I didn’t want to be surrounded by them, so I turned away from the theater and started up the block. The disappointment was all over Daniela — in her face, in the heavy way she walked — but the last thing I wanted was to have a conversation about any of this. All I wanted was to get through the rest of the day without making things worse, my flight back to Maine that evening the light at the end of the longest, most excruciating tunnel.
We just kept heading uptown, in the vague direction of her apartment, neither of us saying a word. She’s just guarded around everyone but her mother, I tried to tell myself, but I saw the way her entire face opened up when an acquaintance called to her from across the street, how she joked so effortlessly with the lady at the coffee cart. I loaded her up with groceries and a new fall coat she didn’t need, and after a while even the bustle of the city couldn’t cushion our silence, so I suggested we slip into an afternoon movie. It would have seemed impromptu and fun if we were different people. But I could feel how depleted that afternoon was making us both. We passed popcorn back and forth and I studied her soft profile as the screen colors flickered across her skin, wondering if I could come up with anything new to say before the credits rolled and the lights came on.
BUT NOW it was up to me. If I needed things to be relaxed, I had to make them that way. So when Daniela shuffled into the kitchen in the morning, still in her pajamas, I handed her a mug of coffee and said, in a tone I hoped wasn’t too falsely cheerful, that I had the day all planned.
“I’ll show you around town, and we can walk through campus. For lunch there’s a decent fish place on the water,” I said. “Or you can stay in and write, if you need to. You can even bounce ideas off me.”
“No,” Daniela said. “Let’s check out the town.”
But she didn’t move. Instead we both sat there holding our mugs and staring at our laps, and suddenly it was like this could have been any one of our visits — in Burlington, Durham or, the last time she was allowed to stay with me as a kid, when she was ten and I still lived in Albany.
It was one of those interminable winters like the kind I’d known in Prague, where you don’t see the sun for months and your life seems like it’s being filmed in black and white. That year had been especially hard: Saul Sandalowski was hosting a South African performance poet, always apologizing for losing touch but things were just so busy. Even my old friend Ivan, who had immigrated to Toronto that fall, would go silent when I called and tried to talk politics. We’d been close friends since university and saw each other every week to work on the Chronicle, and at first I’d thought his silence on the phone was the residual fear of tapped lines. But after a few conversations I sensed he just wasn’t interested — he was working double shifts at a sporting-goods store, trying to save enough to move his wife and sons to the suburbs, and after we joked around and updated each other, our calls grew shorter until they finally ceased altogether.
But in the midst of my self-pity, a small press in Minneapolis had asked me to write an introduction to a new anthology of dissident writings. It felt good to be on a tight deadline again, and what I really wanted to do the Sunday of our father-daughter weekend was brew a pot of coffee and stand at the sink eating cereal straight from the box, thinking aloud. But every time I walked into the kitchen Daniela was there, wanting a push-up pop or a cheese-and-cracker pack or some other kid-friendly snack I’d forgotten to buy. Or to show me the imaginary city she’d built out of water bottles and paper-towel rolls and my coffee canister, the grounds of which she’d spilled all over the linoleum. And when I snapped that I was busy, she followed me into my cramped office and said she’d work then, too.
So she crouched on the carpet with her Hello Kitty pencil case and began, amid my piles of papers, a story. It was hard to stay annoyed while she sat writing with an eraser tucked behind her ear: her vision of an academic. I loved watching her bent over those pages, and I even loved the smelclass="underline" the room smelled fresh with pencil shavings. We were quiet for hours. Every so often she’d sense my presence and look up, but then, just as fast, she’d return to her story, and I loved that, too. I loved it because I got it. I knew that feeling of wanting more than anything to stay uninterrupted in your head, because there your thoughts came out with confidence and ease, as if, at that moment, a little bit of your life was lining perfectly into place.
But when I looked at her story that evening, I was disappointed: she was merely writing her way into a book that already existed—Daniela, the Witch and the Wardrobe—without even changing the other characters’ names. And I was more than disappointed when I discovered that the paper she’d used to write and illustrate it on were the first eighteen pages of my introduction. These were still the typewriter years; I’d have to retype the entire piece before the morning deadline, and I still had a stack of student essays to grade.
Daniela saw my frustration and crawled onto my lap, still in her pajamas, her breath warm and a little milky. But she was too big, and beneath her weight I felt hot and crowded, and at that second I’d known what I had feared all along: I just didn’t have it in me to take care of another person.
“Get out,” I said, pushing her off. “You just gave me about five more hours of work.”
But Daniela didn’t move. Instead she stood there swallowing as if willing herself not to cry. Her hair was falling into her face and she kept pushing it back with her hand. I carried her into the spare bedroom and slammed the door, then walked into the study and slammed my door, and I didn’t emerge until Katka’s headlights glowed through the window. Daniela stood in the doorway of her room. She had changed into corduroys and a sweater, and when her mother walked inside, she seemed to express everything that had happened just by blinking. It was deeply uncomfortable watching my daughter wordlessly tattle on me. I’d only ever seen that kind of unspoken closeness once before, between my father and the other men out in the dairy in Moravia. They’d survived ice storms and village raids together, and though they rarely said a word to each other, even as a boy I knew an understanding existed between them that I would always be excluded from.
“Give us a couple minutes, Daniela,” Katka said, flicking on the television for her and following me into the kitchen. Usually during these Sunday night pickups I’d turn on the kettle and Katka would drag a chair to the table and fill me in on Daniela’s friends and parent-teacher meetings and any news she heard from her family in Prague. She always had good stories from the brownstones she cleaned, about the arguments she overheard and the untouched cartons of yogurt and juice those rich people let rot in their refrigerators. We’d laugh as though we were above them in some way, and sometimes, sitting together long after our tea mugs were empty, it would feel as though Katka weren’t talking with me simply for our daughter but because she truly enjoyed my company.
This time Katka stood against the refrigerator with her arms across her chest, and before I even opened my mouth I knew anything I’d say, even “You want something to drink?” would sound loud and defensive.