The UnAmericans: Stories (14 page)

“Listen,” I said, “just tell me what the play’s about.”

“I honestly have no idea.”

“You expect me to believe that? Daniela probably lets you read her diary.” I looked out the window at the clear night. I caught my reflection in the glass, warped and blurry. The critics, I knew, would call the father character “unsympathetic” and “unreliable.” My neighbors would read about it in the paper. My students would laugh. In one night in some dim Off-Broadway theater, Katka’s version of the story would become the official one. My entire legacy as the Quietest Man would be erased and for the rest of my life I’d be known as The Egomaniac, The Itinerant or maybe, simply, The Asshole.

“I asked her,” Katka said, “but Daniela said talking about her work too early would kill it.” She said the last two words as though she were wrapping air quotes around them. But I knew it made her proud to hear our daughter trying to sound like an artist, and suddenly Katka seemed to be purposely flaunting their closeness. That’s how I felt this past summer in New York, anyway, seeing them together at brunch. Over waffles Daniela had talked about her temp job and the new play she was working on. She’d just read
Catastrophe
, and watching her enthuse over Beckett, I remembered first encountering Anna Akhmatova’s poems and feeling like I was sliding back into a conversation I’d been having for years with the writer. Even the new vocabulary Daniela was trying out—she kept talking about the “exhibitionist nature of the theater”—was offset by her genuine ease at the table: she was so animated, talking with her hands, moving the salt and pepper shakers around to enact her favorite parts of the play. Katka seemed to be reveling in every second of it, and for the first time I wondered if our daughter’s desire to be a writer allowed Katka to finally accept the fact that she no longer was one. As I watched them, squeezed in the corner booth, swapping food off each other’s plates without even asking, it seemed as though their relationship had morphed into a genuine friendship.

I knew that should have made me happy, but I hated the way Katka had kept mentioning Daniela’s friends by name that morning. I hated the way Daniela talked about the professors she’d stayed in touch with after graduation, and when she said she was going to see one of them read at the National Arts Club, I wondered if she was intentionally rubbing it in that I’d never been invited to talk there (though how could she have known?). Even Katka’s supposedly nice gesture of heading back to Queens to give us time alone had felt like an aggressive challenge: how would we fill the day?

But Daniela seemed to have it all planned out. The moment her mother said goodbye, she led me down Amsterdam, pointing out her morning running route and the Greek diner where she stopped after work. We walked and walked, long after I craved refuge in some air-conditioned store, and before I knew it, we were in the theater district.

She stopped in front of a theater, small and brick with a ticket-seller who waved to her through the glass booth, then went back to reading his magazine. “I’ve been ushering here a couple nights a week,” she said. “They let me see free shows.”

“That’s nice.”

“The guy who runs it, he said he’ll read my script when it’s done.”

She was staring up at the marquee, and I knew that if Katka were there, they’d already be fantasizing about her play being sold and all the glorious things that would follow. But I was afraid it would have been cruel to indulge the dream. This was the theater that would end up taking her play, but I didn’t know that then. That summer afternoon, it didn’t seem possible that my daughter would have her name up in lights. I didn’t doubt she was intelligent—she’d always done well in school; all her life teachers had commented on how hard she worked, how creative she was, how nicely behaved. But she had always presented herself to the world in too apologetic a manner for me to take her ambitions seriously—because it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it was different to be an artist or writer or thinker here in America. That one didn’t need to be a persuasive speaker, or have a charismatic presence, as so many of my colleagues had back in Prague. Daniela simply needed to live as an observer, sitting discreetly in a corner, quietly cataloging the foibles of those around her.

“I know it’s not one of the fancy places,” she said. “But it has a history. Yulian Zaitsev did his gulag plays here.”

“Zie-tsev.”

“What?”

“
Zie
,” I repeated. “You’re pronouncing it wrong.”

Daniela didn’t respond. She looked like such a mess in a loose black t-shirt with her hands stuffed in her denim cutoffs, her face blotchy and raw in the heat. “This is my life,” she said, quietly.

I could barely hear her. I felt as if we were on the loudest, most obnoxious street in the world. Cabbies were having detailed conversations with one another entirely through their horns, and throngs of people kept pushing past us, their foreign, sweaty arms rubbing against my own.

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.

B
UT 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 smell: 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.

“Daniela’s not staying here again,” she said.

“You don’t even know what happened.” I went into the study and came back with Daniela’s scrawlings all over my introduction. I fanned the evidence across the table. “Tell me you wouldn’t have yelled.”

Katka began to gather Daniela’s things from the floor—her backpack, her schoolbooks, her socks, balled beneath the table—saying that from now on I could come to New York to see our daughter. “Do you have any idea how much Daniela looks forward to these weekends?” she said. “All her friends have birthday parties and softball games back home and she never cares about missing them when she’s coming here. I’ve always known you saw her as a burden, but you had to let her know that, too?”