Broken river, p.3
Broken River, page 3
So far, a week after arriving here, life has gone pretty much according to her desires, if not better. Her room is awesome. The window really does look out onto the trees, and she sees squirrels and crows all day long. She hasn’t befriended any, but that was just idle fantasy. She has written 14,734 words of her novel (she counts each day’s output in the evening, before going to sleep, and pencils the total at the bottom of the day’s last page) and has persuaded her parents to let her be homeschooled, just for the fall, before they enroll her in the public school in Broken River, which she is not so secretly hoping never gets around to happening. Broken River seems to her a meager, sad little place, with its empty storefronts and depressed-looking old people heaving themselves up and down the sidewalk, but it has its charms—an old-fashioned (though abandoned) movie theater with a marquee bearing the now-fragmentary names of movies from three years ago, an old-fashioned (not abandoned!) drugstore counter that serves ice-cream sodas (“Not old-fashioned, either,” her father corrects her, in her head: “Retro”), a busy and not-at-all-old-fashioned coffee shop, complete with the horrible sucking sound that results every time somebody orders an expensive drink. Actually it reminds her a little bit of Quayside—certain neighborhoods in Quayside, anyway, where it’s all white people. Broken River is all white people, and every other place they’ve had to drive thirty or forty minutes to get to this week—WalMart, Home Depot, and the like—has been all white people. That’s fine, their family is also white people, but Irina cannot help but think that these people are hiding from everyone else, either out of fear or because (she hopes) there is some secret appeal to this part of the world that they don’t want other kinds of people to find out about. For what it’s worth, she hasn’t figured it out yet herself.
She has spent a lot of time out in Father’s studio, helping him, or perhaps mostly watching him, get it set up. He is clearly excited about the space, which is a twenty-foot square with cement floor, sloped metal ceiling, and clean, white walls. He has been lecturing her on the operation of the forge—it is new, stainless steel, “heats up fast, Irina, really fucking fast”—and on the positioning of his anvil and his wheeled rack of blacksmithing tools. He is quite geeked about the wall-length rack he made, out of plywood and two-by-fours, that holds his supply of thick slab glass—some clear, some milky, some smooth and shiny, some sandpaper-rough—and iron and steel, sheets and bars of the stuff. As he talks, which he has been doing pretty much incessantly since their arrival, she walks up and down the wall of glass and metal, running her fingers along the edges of the slabs and sheets and bars, gripping them with her fingers, trying to budge them. If her mother were out here, she would shoo Irina away from the wall of heavy materials, any one of which could fall on her and injure her, or shatter and cut her; her father does not. Her explorations have given him pause—many times he has stood, interrupted in midsentence, staring at her dazedly, his forehead creased as though with concern—but she isn’t sure if this is because he’s worried about her safety or just surprised and alarmed to realize that she is there, that she exists, that he has a daughter, that the daughter is her, that they have moved hundreds of miles from home to this strange, isolated place, and that this is their life now.
If it’s the latter, Irina understands. She feels that way, too: alarmed, amazed, uneasy. It should not be a secret to her father that she is a little bit afraid of him, a little bit in awe of him, a little bit skeptical of his status as an adult responsible for her upbringing. She’s had friends, though not great ones, and she has met their dads. Her dad is not like their dads, not even back home in Brooklyn, where everyone’s parents are weird or creative. Her friends’ dads smiled when they saw their daughters, kissed them hello and goodbye, explained things to them (often things that didn’t really need explaining, to be honest) in a bright and really kind of corny tone of voice. These dads kept their beards trim, their jeans cuffed, their glasses polished, their balding heads buzzed. Her dad, on the other hand, talked to her friends as though they were adult women (or maybe he talked to women as though they were children? She is very proud of this insight and jots it in the margin of her notebook for possible eventual insertion into the novel), asking them if they wanted a cup of coffee or what they were working on or what they thought of various books there was no chance any of them had read. Her dad didn’t comb his hair and beard, he grew them as long as her mother could stand (she was the one who periodically hauled him into the bathroom and sheared them off with clippers), let his glasses grow hazy with sweat and dust. Her dad was as much ape as dad. He was an ape dad! It was an ape dad who loped around the studio, fondling the tools, rearranging and reorganizing the work table, the hooks on the pegboard, the standing fans. It was an ape dad who made these big weird scary awesome things that he sold, apparently, to people in New York.
“You are not to return for one year,” Irina heard Mother tell Father one night a few months back, while they lay in bed after sex (and yes, she knows what sex is and what, unfortunately, it sounds like), meaning that he is not supposed to set foot in New York City, not even to sell his sculptures. “The service can deliver them. You don’t need to be there. Gert will take care of everything.” Gert is the woman who runs Father’s gallery, or rather it is her gallery in which his sculptures are sometimes shown.
“I know,” Father said, groaning, “I know.”
They didn’t know how loud they were. Or maybe they did but figured Irina tuned out any kind of information that wasn’t obviously relevant to her. Irina, in fact, didn’t tune out any information that reached her from the adult world. She was very eager to reach adulthood and wanted to be able to step into the role with the ease of a seasoned professional. She asked one friend, Sylvie, if her father had ever had an affair, and Sylvie, even though she was thirteen, didn’t even know what that was. “It is where he meets another woman who isn’t your mom and he falls madly in love with her.” Sylvie said, “That’s stupid,” and Irina said, “But has he?” and Sylvie said, “No!” and pretty soon Sylvie’s mother was calling Irina’s mother to tell her to come get her. (There was a long pause, and then Sylvie’s mother said, “I’m sorry, Eleanor, I cannot put a twelve-year-old girl alone onto the subway,” and Irina saw which way the wind was blowing, excused herself, and slipped out of the building to sneak off to the F train. Very probably she will never see Sylvie or her mother again.)
Personally, Irina herself doesn’t see how it’s possible to be with one person your whole life, or even overnight—“You would have more friends,” Mother once said to her, “if you would agree to more sleepovers,” to which Irina replied, “Exactly”—and if a day arrives when the idea of removing all your clothes in someone else’s presence does not horrify her, she thinks that she will not feel compelled to limit herself to one lover. She intends to be a novelist, a famous one, like her mother but more so, and also much more frightening and intimidating than her mother, who even on television appears like a fairly normal person—somebody’s mother, in fact.
Their house is small. This part, she didn’t expect. The front door opens onto the kitchen, and between it and the stairs lies a living room where her parents have put books, a sofa, and Father’s two giant, frightening sculptures. The kitchen is disproportionately large and has big windows on two sides and so is Irina’s favorite room besides her bedroom. It’s everyone’s favorite, actually. Upstairs there’s a narrow hallway from which Irina’s room, her parents’ room, and her mother’s study may be entered; all three are basically twelve-foot boxes. There is also a spiral kitchen staircase with tiny steps you can’t even fit your entire foot onto, and Irina habitually uses it instead of the main one because it is weird. On the outside of the house, which is brownly shingled and frankly kind of ugly, the spiral staircase is contained in what looks like half of a cardboard toilet-paper tube somebody glued onto the exterior wall. There’s a little turret on top, for no evident reason.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the house is that something bad happened to the people who used to live here. They are dead, anyway. This is apparently one of the reasons the house was empty for such a long time and thus needed to be renovated before Irina and her parents moved into it. Irina is aware of this fact only because she overheard two workmen talking as they were installing a new refrigerator: one of them said, “You know this is where those people got killed,” and the other one said, “Yeah, except it wasn’t in the house,” and the first one said, “But still,” and the second one said, “Hey,” and then kind of tilted his head at Irina, who was sitting at the kitchen table wearing headphones, but, cleverly, the headphones were not plugged into anything. This is a trick Irina would have played around her parents as well if her parents made any effort whatsoever to conceal what they said to each other.
In any case, the identity of, fate of, and story behind the previous inhabitants of the house is something Irina intends to research while she is here. If the results are interesting, maybe she can incorporate them, somehow, into her novel. Because at the moment, the novel has no real plot—it’s just descriptions of things. That’s what Irina is good at. She believes that she inherited this deficiency from her father, who is a visual artist and does not require narrative to make something of value. But if that’s her cross to bear, she will do it stoically.
It’s 11 a.m. Not yet time for lunch. Mother and Father are working. The novel isn’t going anywhere, not today. But it’s a sunny summer day and the woods outside are beckoning. She closes her notebook and shoves it under the mattress, then goes out to the studio.
Irina’s father is wearing goggles and thick gloves and is bending a glowing iron bar around the edge of an anvil. It is somewhat disappointing to her that her father doesn’t do more pounding with a hammer. This is what you’re supposed to do with an anvil, isn’t it? Instead Father mostly bends. She is not sure if the lack of pounding is the cause of his underdeveloped upper arms or the result of them. She says, “Father, I’m going to the woods. Can I borrow your phone?”
He doesn’t look up. Instead he plunges his iron bar into a metal bucket of water on the floor, and the water roils and bubbles and hisses, and steam surrounds his face. Then he straightens, holds the bar up to the skylight, turns it in his hand, squints critically at it. Frowns. “Sure, it’s on the bench.”
“Thank you.” She goes to the workbench, picks up the phone, and puts it into her pocket. Father is moving to the forge to heat his bar again. He says, “Don’t answer it if it rings. I’ll call them back.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t fall off a cliff or into a river.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t fall in a lake, either.” He’s looking at her now. She stands in the open doorway, her hand on the knob. “Or a hole, don’t fall in a hole. Don’t threaten a bear, especially a bear cub, especially if the mother is around. Don’t get eaten by wolves or carried away by pterodactyls. Don’t get alien abducted. Don’t spontaneously combust or become a drug addict or a prostitute. Don’t marry an asshole.”
“Stop bossing me around,” says Irina. “I’ll marry whoever I want!”
“That guy’s no good for you. Don’t let his fancy car fool you.”
“You don’t understand me, or Chad! You’ll never understand our love!”
“Fine!”
“Fine!!!”
Outside, she wakes up the phone, finds the maps app, opens it. There is central New York, and there is Irina, a blue dot. She was delighted to discover, a few days after moving in, that the woods surrounding the house are adjacent to a state-owned nature preserve that is crisscrossed with walking paths. These paths are actually documented in the maps app on the phone, and Irina has figured out how to drop a pin representing their house on the map, so that she can always be directed back to it as long as there’s a cell phone signal, which there does in fact seem to be everywhere near the house. She walks north, through her parents’ land, to the sign that reads THREE VALLEYS WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT AREA STATE OF NEW YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION. Catchy name, New York! Now the path becomes wider and better groomed. She walks for five minutes or so to where there actually is a cliff she could fall off of, if she isn’t careful. The path goes left and right and is marked by yellow paint marks on trees; she has previously taken the path to the east, so now she goes west. The path is crooked, following the line of the cliff, which she peers over from time to time, not without some anxiety. Father was not kidding: the dropoff is steep, and though she might survive the fall she would most likely end up drowned in the river two hundred yards below, and her body would be carried away. She wonders where the people got killed—the previous owners of the house. Were they thrown off the cliff? Why did it happen? Did they mess with the wrong people? Were they innocents who happened across the commission of a heinous crime, and knew too much? Were they bad guys themselves? It’s hard to imagine criminals living in their house, which is so awkward and charming and peculiar. The house is a nerd. They’re living in a nerd!
After a while the path slopes down and the cliff face becomes less sheer, and pretty soon she is walking along a ridge that leads her to the river itself. It’s just barely a river—she would call it a creek, really. But the maps say it’s a river, the Onondakai. She finds a sunny grassy patch by the water and sits cross-legged on it: “Indian-style,” a teacher of hers once said, and was corrected by an aide who told her that was racist. The aide did not last long! She googles the river and finds out that it got its name from a Seneca chief. The name means “destroy town.” She imagines the river rising, inundating a village, sweeping the houses and people away. On the other hand, the town it runs toward is called Broken River: are the two at war? She wishes she had brought a notebook so that she could write all this down for her novel—maybe that could be the plot, the waters of Quayside are rising and only her protagonist can fight them back.
The phone rings in her hand. No face appears on the screen, no name, just a number.
Father has asked her not to answer, and she doesn’t intend to answer, but who can resist answering a ringing phone in their own hand? Also, the ringtone is shrill and unsettling—a nondescript beeping that sounds like a digital alarm clock. It is out of place here in the woods, by the river, and it needs to be stopped. She swipes the screen and raises the phone to her face.
“Hi, this is Irina.”
“Oh! Hello,” says a woman. She stutters for a moment, then says, “I’m trying to reach—is this Karl’s number?”
“He’s—I borrowed his phone.”
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“If you call again in half an hour, he’ll answer.”
“I’ll do that, then.”
Irina ought to just hang up now, but instead she says, with a precipitous kind of feeling, as though she is falling off a different kind of cliff, into a different kind of river, “I won’t mention that I talked to you. I wasn’t supposed to answer.”
“All right …”
“So maybe you won’t mention it, either?”
“No, I won’t.”
“So we’re cool then.”
The woman does not sound entirely comfortable as she says, “We’re cool.”
Irina hangs up. She feels bad. She wants to be on her father’s team, but only in the most abstract way. Because she believes she takes after him and wants to protect him from a world that doesn’t appreciate him enough. On the other hand, she senses that she has just involved herself in a part of her father’s life of which her mother might not approve.
The phone is still glowing in her hand. For reasons not entirely clear to her, she is suddenly mildly angry with her father, and she pokes the phone icon, imagining that it is his shoulder: Hey! Hey, you! His call history pops into view. Father doesn’t make a lot of phone calls, but there is one number, with a 212 area code, that he has called about five times in the week they’ve been here, and it’s the one attached to the lady she just spoke with. The conversations are long—like, forty minutes to an hour—and occur at the times (lunch until dinner) when he’s typically in the studio.
