Follow Me (44 page)

Without the letters from your grandmother, my dear Sally, I get no news of you. Not that I’m fishing for an invitation. Given
what you’ve heard from me so far, I wouldn’t expect you to want to meet me. You must think I’m a creep. Or at best, a clown.
My students think I’m a clown. I’ve just come from class, my last class of the day. I’m covered with mud. I went and slid
into the gully behind the parking lot this morning, intentionally, I slid down a mud slick on an inflatable tube, a snow tube,
you know the kind, and I asked my students for help getting out. This was the day’s problem: to find the easiest way to pull
Mr. Boyle out of the mud. I do this annually in my study of forces. I begin with a marble, I roll a marble down an inclined
plane of cardboard and we discuss why the marble rolls straight and not to the side. We talk about how force can be divided
and the components can be added together to equal the original force. And then I take them outside and ask them to pull me
out of the mud. They talk about pushing me from behind, that’s always the first idea, they want to get behind me and push.
But then I remind them to consider how a force can produce components in useful directions. And sooner or later someone notices
the rope I’ve left at the top of the slope. They always figure it out. We talk about the amplification of force. I ask them
how we might use the rope. Someone is bound to suggest tying one end of the rope to the tube and pulling me, so they try this,
but it’s not enough to get me moving. What they have to do, the solution, is for them to tie one end of the rope to the trunk
of a tree and a couple of them take hold of the rope in the middle and walk to the side. It works every time, the pressure
on the rope moves the tube forward a few feet, then they tighten the rope again and do the same thing over, the tube moves
forward, they tighten the rope, and so on. I can tell the kids really learn the concept, but I always end up covered with
mud. There’s a new physics teacher in the high school, he has promised to one-up me and demonstrate the same concept in reverse
by walking on a tightrope. He says he’s going to walk on a rope stretched between the school and the garage, but you know,
he has yet to do it, I think it’s all bluster, he prefers to teach his students with textbooks and study packets. But you’re
probably wondering what any of this has to do with the story I’ve been telling. I guess I just feel like spinning wheels in
the mud today. That’s what I was doing for a couple of years after I left your mother. Wherever I went, I couldn’t really
move on. I was stuck, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And then about you. I knew I had a daughter, your grandmother wrote
to me about you after you were born. She went to great lengths to assure me that you, her namesake, were normal and healthy.
She’d clearly been afraid that you would be born deformed as punishment for your parents’ sins. It hadn’t occurred to me to
have that fear. You know, your grandmother sent photographs of you over the years, the first one was your birth announcement,
another when you’re two and sitting on a pony, another one, let’s see, you must be about five, and you’re holding some flowers.
I have all your school pictures from first grade to twelfth grade. I know that you had braces for two years. I know you wore
your hair long for a while, then shoulder-length and parted in the middle. You got glasses at the age of ten, and then you
must have gotten contacts, or else you just became self-conscious and took off the glasses for the photographer. But maybe
it’s uncomfortable for you to hear that I have pictures of you. I’m a stranger, after all. You have a right to be uncomfortable.
You should feel free to stop listening at any point. That’s the way to shut me up. Just stop listening.

Dearest Sally, I was telling you about how I jumped from the bridge. Or fell. I guess the image of the gorge was in my head
from talking about it the other day. Last night I dreamed that I was walking on a tightrope over the Tuskee gorge. I dreamed
that it was snowing, and I was trying to walk from one side of the gorge to the other, and your mother was there, she was
standing on the bridge watching me. And she was holding a baby. I was on the tightrope in the middle of the gorge, and I saw
your mother waving at me, and I tried to wave back, and I slipped. I slipped and I fell, and you know how it sometimes is
in dreams when you’re falling, you keep falling for a while. I was falling through the gorge, and I was thinking to myself,
what an idiot I am, what a fucking idiot to think that I could try to impress your mother by walking from one side of the
gorge to the other on a tightrope. I woke up, I was awake before I hit the water, but all today I’ve had a heavy feeling from
the dream. I guess what I want to tell you is that it breaks my heart to think about all the lost years when I was too afraid
to contact you. I’m still afraid. Time is passing. It’s ten past four and ten seconds, eleven, twelve. But, but, okay, there’s
nothing to be done about it, we can’t relive our lives, that’s spilled milk. And I wouldn’t choose to give up the part of
my past that produced my two younger daughters. Hey, did you know, by the way, that homogenizing milk adds, adds nothing to
its nutritional value? People get confused about that. They tend to think the vitamin D comes from the process of homogenization.
It’s easy to be confused. In general, I mean, it’s easier to be confused than not confused. I was confused, obviously, when
I jumped off the bridge into the river. I haven’t made the extent of my confusion clear yet. What I mean is that there’s more
to tell. I came to realize that I’d been wrong, I’d been misled. I don’t blame your grandmother, I mean, she was trying to
help, she was trying to do what she thought was necessary to save me, to save us, your mother and me, from worse torment down
the line. To her the horror would have been discovering the truth, what she thought was the truth, ten years later, after
we’d been comfortably married and had established a life together. Imagine that, imagine if your grandmother had found out
about me in 1984 instead of 1974. By 1984, of course, I was long gone. Let’s see, by 1984 I was married to Donna, and we had
the two girls. Oh, it occurs to me I’d told you about the dog, my dog Pig. I forgot to mention that he died when I was living
in Buffalo. He was old, I don’t know how old since I didn’t know his age when I found him, but he just faded, faded away,
he got weak and bone-thin. He slept at the end of my bed, and one morning I woke up and he was as stiff as a board, he hadn’t
made a sound during the night, he hadn’t suffered at all. That’s the way to go. Much better than drowning in a freezing river.
Well, I think I’ll stop here for the time being, I have a stack of tests to grade, but I’ll be back.

And here I am again, it’s Tuesday, and the crocuses are blooming out front. They’re mostly the variegated kind, purple and
white. I’ve lived in this complex for two years. I bought a house after the divorce, a little Cape, but I sold it when my
youngest daughter moved out to California. I think I prefer having neighbors on the other side of the living room wall, it
makes me feel more a part of the world. It’s easy to grow isolated, I find, to go to work, come home, and turn on the TV.
I know I have a tendency to get comfortable with isolation, too comfortable. But on the other hand, I know complacency’s a
danger. I’m not going to sit around and yell at football players on the screen. Did I tell you about that peace rally I spoke
at a few months back? Did I mention that some men, they were probably fathers of my students, shot me with a paintball gun,
a red ball, as I was walking back to school? Did I tell you about that? I still wear the coat, and it’s still stained with
red, red paintball paint. Isn’t that appropriate? On the other hand, there’s the danger of self-righteousness. Like I was
saying earlier, it’s easy to be confused, what with all the invitations to believe. What do you believe? I’ll tell you, I’ve
decided that what matters is how we believe rather than, than, than what we believe. I mean, how we believe matters more,
whether we believe fanatically or flexibly, or, or absolutely or uncertainly. I’ve learned this, you know, in part because
of your grandmother. She believed that I was her son, and I believed her. Why shouldn’t I have believed her? She had evidence.
And if the evidence hadn’t convinced me, she demonstrated her certainty with the money she gave me to get lost. And so I went
on and made a new life for myself. I was telling you, wasn’t I, about Detroit? For a little more than a year I worked in Detroit
washing dishes in two businesses, I worked a double shift every day, seven a.m. to three and five to midnight, and on my pay
I wouldn’t have even been able to afford the rent. But I had the cash from your grandmother. This helped cover the bills.
And when my car died I bought another one, a snappy ’67 Bel Air convertible. I remember the roof was ripped and every morning
in the winter there’d be an icicle hanging inside. I’d always forget to look for it, and I’d take my seat and bump my head
against the icicle, and it would crumble and fall inside my collar, down my neck. Ha, that’s a memory I haven’t thought of
for a while. I lived in Detroit, spinning wheels, as I said, and then I decided to go to Chicago. One of my friends from Roslyn,
Deano Colletti, he lived in Chicago, he had a job managing a trade show venue, and he invited me to come visit. So I visited,
and I ended up staying there. I met Donna at a party, she was a friend of a friend of Deano’s. Donna was studying nursing
when I met her. Gee, I don’t think we’d dated for more than a month when we started talking about marriage. She was eager
to settle down and have kids. And she got me thinking about a career for myself, a real career. I told you I took night courses,
I got my teacher certification in 1977, and Donna and I were married that same year. I worked as a substitute for a while
in the Chicago schools. Marcia was born in 1978, Tracy in 1980, and in August of 1980 I was hired by the Vergonia district.
And here I still am, looking at the swollen buds on the sycamore tree outside my window. My hair is gray. I have arthritis
in my knees. I have to go to my doctor twice a year to have my earwax flushed out. I wonder if that’s relevant. Do you want
to hear about my life with Donna? I don’t think I need to go into detail. I’ll just say that we were content with each other,
but I could never shake the feeling that we’d come to each other on rebounds from failed relationships. In the year before
we’d met, she’d been in love with a med school student, they’d had an affair, but he was already engaged to someone else,
which Donna found out only after he went away for the week and came back married. She was still reeling from the humiliation
when we met. She thought marriage would make her forget her true love. I thought the same thing, I guess. It worked for a
while. But what happened, what made it all go sour for us, was the med student, now a doctor, a very successful neurologist,
he divorced his wife and, and I guess it was early in 1998 when he contacted Donna, and she, well, she was still in love with
him, despite how he’d treated her way back when. She’d forgotten about the humiliating part of it. She got all tangled up
in another affair with him. She couldn’t keep her secret for long. I found letters she’d written to him, I found a necklace
he’d given her for her birthday. Donna and I were divorced in 1999. She’s all right now, but she had a hard time, I’ll tell
you, when the doctor ended their affair abruptly again, for the second time. He’d met another woman, a younger woman, and
Donna was just devastated, you can imagine. Donna and I, we’re good friends now, but we’ll never get back together. That’s
just not something that interests either of us anymore. Too much has changed. Rather, too much has been revealed. We know
each other too well to think we could live together again. It was hard on the girls, yeah, but, but they’re doing fine, I
guess. And I’ve had time to think about other things. I’ve had time to think about your mother. Even before your grandmother’s
death, I realized that I had some lingering questions. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her directly. We exchanged letters,
your grandmother and I, just to communicate the basic news of our lives. We rarely mentioned your mother. And I never asked
your grandmother about my father. I knew only that he was her cousin. Her cousin, huh. That’s not as bad as a brother, is
it? Well, I wanted to know more about him. I needed to put the facts in order so I’d be sure of my past. I started by contacting
old friends from Long Island. And one thing led to another. It took me a long while, several years, to piece together the
truth. I’m going to tell you what I learned. But I don’t have the time now to go into detail. I’ll pick up where I’m leaving
off.

It’s the fifteenth of September 2006. Dear Sally. I’m beginning a new tape. Do you recognize my voice? Do I sound the same?
How long has it been since I last spoke into this machine? Too long. The trouble began with a migraine I couldn’t shake. I
even ended up in the emergency room for a night back in the spring. Then a few days later I had a setback. The doctor sent
me for tests. And then while I was waiting for the results from the tests, I got a call from Marcia. She’d been in a car accident.
She wasn’t badly hurt, thank God, only a broken wrist, but it was her left wrist, and she’s left-handed, and she needed surgery.
I flew out to LA on a Thursday and stayed with her for two weeks. I told her about you. I’d never told Donna or anyone else
about you, and in the spring I told Marcia and Tracy that I have another daughter. I said that I’d been thinking about getting
in touch with you, though I didn’t tell them about these tapes. They’d think I was crazy, making tapes for you. I am crazy.
But they said they want to meet you. Anyway, Marcia’s doing fine now, the cast is off. My migraines, well, they weren’t migraines,
it turned out. I thought they were migraines. There were some days when I was out in LA when I’d close my eyes, and I’d see,
I’d see the northern lights. I’d see quivering flames of light, violent, I mean violet-tinted light. I’d see electrons colliding
with air. There’s a video I show my students about auroras. I call it the northern-lights-in-a-tube video. It shows scientists
making auroras in miniature, in a tube in a lab. Anyway, it wasn’t migraines making all the trouble, as it turned out. I had
a tumor, a small tumor lodged right behind my optic nerve. I tell you, hearing news like that.… Well, I came through the surgery,
and the tumor, the biopsy was clean, there’s no malignancy to worry about. But what a summer. Tracy and Marcia helped out,
they took turns staying with me. And at one point I realized that I’d missed your birthday. I’d been hoping to finish these
tapes and send them to you by your birthday. Here’s a late happy birthday, dear Sally. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday
to you. A day to make a wish, a whole year to make it come true. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the gift of this story for
your birthday. I had to go on sick leave in the spring, I couldn’t finish the year. You know what I heard when I saw my students
last week? They said that the substitute for my classes told them that girls don’t have an aptitude for science and math because
of, because of hormones. The boys got a kick out of that, for sure. And one of the girls asked me if she could have special
privileges for her learning disability — the disability of being a girl. It will take me a while to undo the damage. But,
well, here I am, back on my feet, talking to you again. I’m alive. For a while there… I’ll say simply that I’m glad to be
alive. Alive, alive, alive. There’s much to add to the earlier segments of this story. But, you hear that? There’s the doorbell.
Wouldn’t you know.