On Wednesday afternoon, my brother Danny calls me from his car. “Dad’s on NPR,” he says. In the background, I hear voices, though I can’t make out the words: a woman, eager, impressed, and then, speaking slowly and carefully, savoring his own response, my stepfather. My brother stays quiet on the line. Suddenly the interviewer laughs in delight. “Christ,” my brother says.Two weeks ago, my stepfather published his ninth book. For an obscure writer, he has been rather prolific; since he married my mother, he has produced a novel or a book of short stories roughly every three years. Five novels, three story collections, and a memoir of a year teaching tennis in Grenoble while his new family—his pregnant wife, her precocious daughter—lived in the servants’ quarters of an old-fashioned hotel. (I figured prominently in the memoir, as the chatty, good-natured four-year-old I had apparently been.) We moved back to the States the week the memoir (The Highest Meadow) was accepted for publication. St. Martin’s printed 15,000 copies, but it did not sell.
The year we spent in Québec, where my mother homeschooled me, nursed my brother Danny, and cooked using a wood-burning stove while my stepfather wrote wrapped in a blanket in the woodshed, was described in the novel Minds out of Time. By the time it was published, we were in South Carolina, living for free in my grandparents’ beach house on Sullivan’s Island. The house was tiny, set on stilts a few feet back from the dunes. All day a chilly, gritty draft blew under the doors and through the uninsulated walls. My mother, who’d spent every summer there as a child, was happy. My stepfather wedged his desk in a storage room under the kitchen and wrote. At night the beam from the lighthouse shone, at comforting intervals, through the windows of the bedroom Danny and I shared.
Minds out of Time got more attention than The Highest Meadow. There were reviews in the news magazines and an appreciation in Harper’s, even a profile in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin (“From Dean’s List to the Wilderness, with Family in Tow”). My stepfather gave his first reading at the Sullivan’s Island library, where the book was proudly displayed for a whole month. When my third-grade class trooped in on a field trip, I eyed the familiar cover (a photo, its edges mock-smudged, of a family that was not our family, in front of a cabin that was not our cabin) with a vaulting sense of thrill.
We left South Carolina a year later. My stepfather’s spirits were high; he’d written another novel (A Beam of True Radiance; the lighthouse figured prominently), and a story collection was due to be published as well. Success seemed certain; everyone agreed that a glorious future of literary fortune and fame lay just ahead. With the advance from the novel, my parents bought a Volkswagen bus, which we drove 13,000 miles in four months, either camping or staying with up-and-coming writers whose friendship my stepfather wanted to cultivate. Finally we stopped in a town near Durango and rented the first house we saw.
A Beam of True Radiance came out to decent but unenthusiastic reviews; the story collection made no noise. My stepfather’s career trajectory started to seem as if it had been designed by a sadist—crumbs of encouragement and hopeful portents scattered along a trail that went precisely nowhere. After every book, he and my mother pulled Danny and me out of school, packed up the bus, and took us back on the road in search of new material. Whenever we stopped for a few days, my stepfather ferreted out his own books in the public library, checking the date stamps to see if anyone had borrowed them. Usually no one had, and then he hated that town. But he never gave up.
Still, he kept getting published, through all the houses we lived in and all the trips we took, through his divorce from my mother and remarriage to the woman he’d left her for, through the year he and his new wife spent in Alaska in a hut with no running water, even through the affair with the daughter of a dean that got him fired from the University of Oregon and ended the second marriage. Once he’d been in The Best American Short Stories; once he’d been mentioned in Esquire as a Writer to Watch. Once he’d been almost a contender for a Guggenheim. Twice he’d sold the rights to movies that never got made. Never had anything generated enough buzz to warrant an interview on NPR.
“I can’t quite hear,” I say. “What’s he saying?”
“About the cow,” Danny says. “That goddamn thing about the cow giving birth in Canada.” There is a murmur in the background, the interviewer sounding serious and appreciative. She asks a question, earnestly. My stepfather answers. He seems to be talking very slowly, though it’s possible I don’t remember his voice; he has not spoken to me since shortly after he left my mother, fifteen years ago.
“Well, he’s never been on the radio before,” I say. We have all heard the story about the cow a hundred times. “He’s never had the chance to tell it to the world.”
“Harriet, it’s in Blue Moon Country and about six short stories,” my brother says. “If she’d done her homework, she’d know the story about the cow.” He exhales in disgust. “This is boring the crap out of me,” he says, and the voices suddenly stop as he snaps the radio off. “Who’s calling Mom? I’m coming over. Are you going to call Mom?”
The truth, which Danny knows, is that I do not want to listen to my stepfather being interviewed on NPR. It is one thing to dump your wife, but quite another to cut off all contact with a child you helped raise from preschool until college, which is what my stepfather has done to me. I do, however, have a copy of the new book, which I now take down from a high shelf in the living room. It is Danny’s, sent to him hot off the press, inscribed on the title page. I stopped getting mine when my stepfather and I stopped speaking, but they still come to Danny, who passes them on, unread, to me.
We all live near Charleston—Danny and I in downtown Charleston, near my work at the Historical Society and his at the hospital, and my mother fifteen minutes away, in a beach house she inherited on Sullivan’s Island. We are all estranged from my stepfather. My last contact with him took place a few months after he moved out. Danny, who was only 12 when he left, stayed close to him for six more years, until my stepfather reneged on his promise to help with college tuition, forcing Danny to turn down Yale. This wasn’t the end of the world, of course—Danny went to Vanderbilt on a full scholarship and then to the medical university here in town. But he never spoke to my stepfather again.
The new book is called A Famine of the Heart. It is set in El Salvador and concerns an American NGO worker named Karen who falls in love with a guerrilla leader called El Jefe. It is not, to my mind, the worst thing my stepfather has written. That might be The Lost Cause, the story of an African exchange student’s sojourn with a dysfunctional New England family. Or it might be Cerrado, which explores the struggles of a cleaning woman named Ximena and her son Jaime in a fictional suburb of San Diego. But A Famine of the Heart is no slouch. There is a good bit of Marxist pillow talk, plenty of marveling over the sameness and difference of a blonde female body and a coffee-colored male one, whose skin is as smooth as sandalwood, as fragrant as the jungle, as warm as the fathomless rivers flanked by impenetrable jungles of mystery that wind through the center of this land of oppressed and ancient people…
Danny bursts through my front door, still in scrubs. He is shaggy and unkempt. He has lost a great deal of weight since his wife, Melissa, a nurse he met during his residency, left him six months ago. They were married for less than a year. Danny has taken it hard.
“I called Mom,” he says. “She was listening. She practically hung up on me so she wouldn’t miss a single word that came out of Dad’s mouth. Get this—she talked to him! Last week,” Danny says, panting a little. “He called her last week and she talked to him. She’s all excited about the stupid book. She wants us to come to dinner on Saturday.”
_____________
My real father died suddenly of melanoma a month before my birth, leaving my mother a widow at 19. In subsequent family lore, my father’s death was deemed a kind of blessing in disguise, a cloud whose silver lining far outstripped whatever might have happened had he lived. Without his death, my mother could never have met handsome, brilliant Mark Sanders, and there would have been no Danny, no adventures, no travel, no stories, no books. In any case, even if my father had lived, what were the chances they’d have stayed together? “We were so young,” she’d say dreamily, at some point in every discussion of their short, shared past.
I seldom thought about him, though my mother made sure I knew certain basic facts: his birthday, his love for dogs and duck hunting, how happy he’d been when she found out she was pregnant. That he came across as bland was not her fault; my stepfather simply obliterated whatever shallow impression my father might have made. The stories my mother told me about my father felt faded and overhandled, leached of detail, like the photos she’d dutifully pasted in the thin little album she made for me.
When I was eight, my stepfather published a story in the Sewanee Review called “Posthumous Child.” The child in question was scrappy, bold, and charming, and made the best of life despite being saddled with a grieving mother. I loved it, and reread it every year on the anniversary of my father’s death. On those days I swanned around with downcast eyes trying to look both plucky and tragic; sometimes I proceeded, with awed Danny in tow, to a pile of dirt I’d mounded, where I would lay down a handful of flowers and muster a few fake tears. My father’s real grave, my mother said, was in Cincinnati, where he’d grown up. I have, to this day, never been there.
_____________
Driving to our mother’s house on Saturday afternoon, Danny is furious. “She said she didn’t bear him any ill will,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. It is at least the fifth time he has told me this. “She said it did no good to hold grudges. Grudges! Like he’d stepped on her foot or something. I told her it would be a cold day in hell before I talked to him again, and she just laughed. She said she hoped he did get famous this time, she said she thought he deserved it. I told her the only thing he deserved was a kick in the teeth.”
“Danny,” I say. “Enough. Let her talk to him, if it makes her feel better.”
“But why would it make her feel better?” he asks, his voice too loud for the car. “Why would she want to congratulate the guy?”
All week, Danny has called me with updates. Since his appearance on NPR, my stepfather’s Amazon rankings have shot up: At present, A Famine of the Heart is 32nd in Amazon’s Fiction category. Googling his name turns up reviews from all over the country, most of them glowing. It seems certain that the book will make the New York Times bestseller list, if not this week, then next. My mother has also called, though only once. “Danny’s quite angry with me,” she said when I picked up the phone. She did not give me details of her conversation with my stepfather, and I did not ask. But there was a lightness in her tone that I had not heard in years.
When we get to Sullivan’s Island, we find my mother in the living room, where she has spread out all of my stepfather’s books on the coffee table. “Harriet!” she cries, ignoring Danny. “Can you believe all this excitement about your father? Oh, dear,” she says, flustered. “I mean, Mark. Have you seen the reviews?”
I tell her that I have read them diligently. “It’s okay to call him my father,” I say. “I always did.”
“Well,” she says. “I know. But the publicity? The Wall Street Journal interviewed him, can you stand it? I’m sure the Times will do a review. I just hope he doesn’t get that horrible woman,” she says, suddenly sounding worried.
“I’m sure it will be a good review,” I say. Though I am not, strictly speaking, sure. We have all been here before, though never quite this far along in the game. A devastating review, one that somehow managed to send him not just back to square one, but beyond it, would actually make more sense.
“You got all his books out?” Danny elbows his way past me to the sofa. “Is this a curated exhibition of the work of Mark Sanders, The Writer Whose Career Went Nowhere?”
“Not completely nowhere,” I say. “There was the almost-Stegner, remember?”
“Yes, yes,” Danny says. “The almost-Stegner, the near-Pushcart, the never-quite-movies. Jonathan Yardley.” Yardley reviewed my stepfather’s fifth book, Ever Ever After, in the Washington Post, praising the writing but not the hero, a middle-aged man whose artistic ambitions were thwarted by family obligations. “By constantly ignoring and belittling his responsibilities, he comes to seem not just hapless, but deliberately repellent,” he wrote. My stepfather blamed Yardley for Ever Ever After’s subsequent failure to sell.
“God, look at the cover for Blue Moon Country,” I say.
Danny holds it up with a grin. A baby-faced cowboy hoists a saddle, staring soulfully into the distance; at the bottom, in miniature, the same cowboy embraces a violet-eyed woman whose hair is in disarray. “No wonder he hated it,” Danny says. “It’s so tacky.”
“That’s not why he hated it,” I say. “He was worried people would assume it was a Western. It was supposed to be the Great American Novel.”
“Weren’t they all,” Danny says.
“Oh, but think how unusual he is,” our mother says. “So much hard work over the years, keeping going even when it looked like he’d never make it, and now it’s finally paid off.” She runs her fingers over the books. “All those fun trips we took, all those exciting times. I’ve been rereading some of the stories, and there’s so much I’d forgotten. We really did have some wonderful years.”
“Jesus, Mom,” Danny says. “One successful novel and the whole slate’s wiped clean, is that how it is?”
“Moderately successful,” I say. “I mean, so far. Let’s not get carried away.”
“It makes no sense,” Danny says. “It’s like he got less famous over the years, and now this.” He turns my stepfather’s books over one by one, putting them in chronological order. Arranged in sequence, the books do seem to chart a career’s steady decline.
“You know what fad he completely missed?” I say. “The fake-cozy, Oprah’s-book-clubby title. The Honeybee Society of Blimey, England, that sort of thing.”
“The Orchid Seller’s Daughter,” Danny says. “The Final Tea Party of Mrs. Serena Chowdatty.”
“Oh, you two, stop it,” our mother scolds, but she is smiling. “We actually used to do this, sit up inventing titles. And once I made the mistake of laughing—he’d come up with something that was like, I don’t know, bad Hemingway crossed with drunken Faulkner, and I just assumed it was a joke.”
“Dad can dish it out, but he can’t take it,” Danny says.
“Neither can you two,” my mother says.
“Oooh, you landed on Boardwalk! You’ll have to take down all your houses,” I croon, imitating my stepfather.
“No crying in Monopoly!” our mother shouts, exultantly. “There is no crying allowed!” She is smiling, her color high. “Oh, I should have put my foot down, I should have stood up for you. Think of making your own children so upset over a game.”
“Usually only Danny got upset,” I say.
“It’s true,” our mother says. “Danny, you were a terrible sport.”
“Dad was the bad sport!” Danny says. “I was five. Remember?”
“I remember you had to take bathroom breaks so you could cry, whenever you were losing,” our mother says, her eyes sparkling. Just talking about my stepfather has done this to her.
“Right, because it’s totally normal to make your kindergartner cry over Monopoly,” Danny says.
“I expect there will be interest in some of the older books, now. Maybe they’ll be reissued,” our mother says, hopefully.
“Maybe NPR will call you for an interview,” Danny says. “Tell us, Mrs. Sanders, what was it like being married to a hack?”
“It was wonderful,” my mother says defiantly. “We had so many adventures. Most people don’t have as much excitement in their whole lives as I did during the sixteen years we were together.”
“Mom, please,” I say. “Look who you’re talking to. We were there, remember?”
“Then I would think you’d want people to read your father’s books,” she snaps. “Especially you, Harriet. Why, he wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages about you. And Danny’s backpack makes an appearance in A Famine of the Heart. Did you recognize it?”
“I recognized that tortoiseshell barrette,” I say, which is unkind of me. The barrette my mother is wearing is an accessory to several of the new book’s most mortifying sex scenes. Karen wears her hair up because of the humidity, but El Jefe likes to take it down before they make love.
My mother’s hand flies up to her hair. For a moment she looks 20 years younger. Danny, who has not read anything my stepfather has written since their estrangement, stares at her. “What did he say about the barrette? Jesus, Mom, are you blushing?”
My mother unclips the barrette, then holds it out to me, smiling sweetly. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “Harriet,” she says. “Danny, darling. You both need to learn that there’s nothing to lose, and absolutely everything to gain, when you forgive someone.”
_____________
It’s true that my stepfather wrote about me. But he also worked details from everything we did into everything he wrote. A low grade on a math test, the school play you didn’t get the lead in, your first boyfriend, the names you doodled in the margins of your spiral notebooks: Any of these could, and did, turn up in my stepfather’s work, either as subplots or as tiny shards of truth scattered in an incongruous, even absurd context.
My mother showed up often, first as helpmeet, later as harridan. Danny was an all-purpose vehicle capable of transporting any character into excesses of swoony parental instinct; my stepfather was particularly fond of describing the smell of his head. I knew I could never compete with that; my stepfather had never known me as a baby, and we shared no blood ties. But I craved the beam of his attention, and the desire to be written about came, for me, to resemble a kind of mania.
With one eye toward posterity, I deliberately pursued pastimes rich in literary potential. On my own I took up stargazing, butterfly hunting, and birdwatching, knowing that a child who collected cocoons or wore her binoculars to supper would soon show up in a story, or that my stepfather would invent a plot whose significance turned on something astral—a meteor shower, perhaps. At supper, if he asked me about Orion, or which warblers were likely to migrate in which spring months, I knew I had succeeded, and I was utterly fulfilled.
In his fiction I was both daughter and stranger, bonded to the story’s hero in a way that showcased his best and brightest self. An encounter with my fictional doppelgänger often pointed the narrator toward truth. It seemed to me that my stepfather reduced Danny and my mother to stereotypes, but that the characters he based on me were vivid, indelible, and true. I was difficult and rare, his stories seemed to say, a child he loved without biological imperative, fascinating on her own terms. I could not think about all of this too much, lest I give myself away. But at night when my stepfather sang us to sleep and darkness hid me from him, I would luxuriate in dreams of the future. He would be famous—I never doubted that. And I would be immortal.
_____________
In the car on the way home after dinner, Danny whips my mother’s copy of A Famine of the Heart from under the front seat. “I swiped it,” he says, turning on the dome light so he can read the back jacket in a sonorous voice. “‘Twenty-five-year-old Karen went to El Salvador as part of a team to relieve hunger. There she meets the handsome, charismatic Jorge, a doctor whose real work is carried out in secret as the head of the Marxist opposition to the country’s military government. They fall in love, and Karen must face a terrible choice.’ Good grief,” he says in his own voice. “How the hell is this the book that finally makes it big?”
“She dies,” I say. “Karen. She saves El Jefe’s life, but later dies giving birth to their child in the jungle, because they’ve gone into hiding. The baby is a boy.”
“Oh, perfect,” Danny says. “And that little boy grows up to overthrow the CIA.”
“El Jefe names him Daniel,” I say. Danny is very still beside me. “It was what Karen wanted. There’s a very moving scene. The reader never knows whether Karen hears her lover’s final words to her, or whether she knows that their child is alive, and a boy, named for her beloved brother.”
Danny ducks his head suddenly and says nothing. I keep my eyes on the road and wait. Danny weeps easily and frequently since Melissa left him, though he recovers by the time I pull up in front of his house. There is a suspicious brightness in his eyes when he kisses my cheek good night, but his walk up the steps is almost jaunty. At the door he turns and waves, my stepfather’s book cradled in the crook of his arm. “Thanks for getting rid of all her stuff,” he says, and disappears into the house.
“To my Danny, always a presence, even in absence,” reads the dedication to A Famine of the Heart. In my copy at home, Danny’s copy, there is more: On the title page, my stepfather has written: “To my longed-for son, with hopes that our paths will meet again, in this jungle or the next.” I’d gotten the book from Danny the week before, when he’d called and asked me to come and get rid of the things Melissa had left behind. “Dad’s latest, I assume,” he’d said when I arrived, tossing me a wrapped package. “There are more books plus some sheets and things. I’m late for work. Take all of it,” he’d said, glaring frantically around the living room, which was a disaster. “Don’t clean up. I’ll do it later.” Then he fled, slamming the door.
There wasn’t much. Melissa had left some sheets and towels, monogrammed with her married initials. She’d left the wedding picture that had once stood on her bureau, and about a dozen books, which Danny had tossed into a box. The Annotated Lolita was on top. “Happy birthday to my darling wife! I know you’ll love this as much as I do. And I hope you know how much I love you, too,” read the inscription, in Danny’s backward-slanting cursive. All the books looked brand new. All were written in. They were presents, then—the books Danny had picked out for her during their time together.
Here they all were, our favorites: Franny and Zooey. Under Milk Wood. Portnoy’s Complaint. A veritable Sanders family canon, the books my stepfather gave to Danny and me at strategic points in our development, with inscriptions that flattered us into thinking we were finally adult enough to appreciate them. Here was One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I’d received from my stepfather my junior year in high school; Danny gave it to Melissa on their honeymoon. His handwriting nearly covered the title page, gushing about marriage, quoting Neruda, pledging everlasting love. I was suddenly furious at Melissa. She was no intellectual, and she’d made no secret of her utter lack of interest in literature. But would it have killed her to take a few books?
Time will tell whether I become less attached to Danny if ever I have children of, as they say, my own. For now, my feelings for him hover perpetually between the sororal and the maternal, or what I imagine maternal feelings to be. Like a mother, I would risk or even give my life to save him; but a good mother would probably have been happy to see Danny married to the girl of his dreams, and I was not. Pert, dimpled Melissa irritated me from the moment Danny introduced us—this after babbling about her for weeks—and though I had been waiting, since she walked out, for Danny to confide in me about their marriage, so far he had let nothing slip. Never mind; I could wait. I folded the duvet I found on the floor by the sofa, where he’d evidently been sleeping for weeks. I washed his dishes and watered his plants and carried the garbage outside. I drove to Goodwill and dropped off the towels and sheets, and I threw the wedding picture away. But I could not bring myself to toss the books, with his eager, sloppy dedications on his title pages. I’d have to get rid of them eventually; Danny is an inveterate snoop, and he has a key to my house. For the moment, I shoved the box under a pile of blankets in my bedroom closet and closed the door.
_____________
On Sunday, A Famine of the Heart is there, number 14 on the New York Times list. A strange sensation comes over me as I stand with my paper in the kitchen, reading my stepfather’s name over and over again. It is not sadness or pain, not even nostalgia, but rather the feeling that my mother and Danny and I have gone astray, that life should have deposited all of us elsewhere than it has. We should be together for this. At this very moment the collective dream we always nursed, then gave up on, is coming true.
I am rinsing my coffee cup at the sink when Danny lets himself in. He is rumpled and unshaven, and his breath, when he kisses me hello, is foul. I show him the paper, and Danny sucks in his breath, then bangs the kitchen table, exultant. “I read it!” he says. “I stayed up half the night. It’s amazing. Dad’s downplaying the whole thing, but you can tell he’s excited.” He stops, then looks right at me, guilty but defiant.
“You talked to Dad,” I say.
Danny grins hugely. “I stayed up half the night,” he says again. “I called Maureen.” Maureen was my stepfather’s agent for most of our childhood. They live together now, in western Colorado. “I finished the book and then I called her. It’s two hours earlier there. She wasn’t upset.”
“So she put Dad on?” I imagine kind-eyed Maureen, blowsy with sleep, trying to make sense of Danny’s exuberance on the phone. Maureen wrote me once, years after the last time my stepfather did. She said she thought of me often, and that she missed seeing my mother and me. I meant to answer her, but then I had a sudden vision of my stepfather’s getting the mail—he was fanatic about the mail, and always got there first—and either opening the letter himself or waiting to read it after she had. He would have, too. You left opened mail around at your peril in our family. At any rate, after that I could not think of a single thing I wanted to write back.
“I woke her up,” Danny says. He has clearly botched the script he worked out for himself in the car on the way over, and is struggling to regain his composure. “I wanted to talk to someone, because I’d just finished the book, and you and everyone else were asleep,” he says, exhaling loudly. “So I called.”
“And then she gave the phone to Dad?”
“No,” Danny says, a little calmer now. The worst is over; he has told me what he feared. “Dad’s in Paris. Maureen gave me the number of his hotel. It’s six hours later there, so it was morning. He has translators, and a French publisher, Harriet, it’s huge. I got him before he left, he had to go for an interview. He talked to me until he had to leave.” The glamour of it all—an overseas call, a French hotel room, an interview with translators in attendance—has lit my brother’s eyes with reflected glory.
“You’ll want your copy back, then,” I say. “It’s on the coffee table in the living room. It’s inscribed.”
Danny bolts from the kitchen after the book, but he talks loudly enough that I can hear him all the way across the house. “He wants to talk to you. He asked all about you, if you’d read the book, what you thought. We talked about you for a long time. He wants you to call.”
I am suddenly grateful for my little brother’s youth, for his clumsiness and cluelessness, because even this feeble, secondhand report of interest from my stepfather affects me like a depth charge. If I speak, I will stammer; my face is suddenly hot. Danny, when he comes slowly back into the room, does not look at me. He is reading the inscription in my stepfather’s novel, which he holds reverently.
“Damn,” he says, after he finishes. His eyes are shining; he is transformed. “He loves me. He’s loved me all along.”
_____________
My mother went berserk when my stepfather refused to pay for Danny to go to Yale. For years she’d been diplomatic. There was no reason to deprive Danny of his father, she had told me; even if my stepfather did deserve to be excoriated for leaving, the collateral damage to Danny, who was still young enough to be summoned for custodial visits, was unthinkable. But after the tuition debacle she held nothing back. And Danny quickly followed her lead.
To my surprise, my stepfather did not respond by cutting him off. Instead, he courted Danny. He wrote him letters, he sent inscribed books. He continued to mine Danny’s childhood for details, and to use idealized versions of Danny’s present life in stories. College students who paid their own way or got scholarships instead of sponging off their overburdened parents were suddenly tangential heroes in several stories written while Danny was at Vanderbilt. When he went to medical school, noble doctors began to litter my stepfather’s plots. Danny did not read any of this, of course, but I did. I read everything he wrote, though it had been years since anything I’d said or done or wore or wanted showed up in a novel or a story. He stopped writing about me the way he stopped talking to me, suddenly and completely, like a door slammed shut.
_____________
Danny sleeps on my sofa for the rest of the afternoon, then goes on call at six. When he leaves, he hands me a folded piece of paper. “Dad’s hotel phone,” he says.
I have tended, over the years, to imply that my stepfather and I stopped speaking at my insistence. The basic ingredients of the narrative—unfaithful father, wronged mother, broken home—are sufficiently evocative that I have never needed to lie to get my point across. I used to worry, in the first few years after the divorce, that my stepfather would publish something that contradicted my version of things, would tilt the story somehow in his favor, but so far he has not. This has left me free to tell whatever tale I want, and I have managed things so that even Danny and my mother believe that I was the instigator of our parting. I almost believe it myself.
The truth is confusing, even tedious, and would not make good fiction. My stepfather moved out right after I graduated from high school, and I wrote him a 10-page letter in August. In the letter, I played up Danny’s bewildered unhappiness, hinted darkly that he was even more devastated than he seemed. I skipped over my own feelings, except to state categorically that I would never deign to meet his new girlfriend under any circumstances whatsoever.
My stepfather wrote me back right away. He did not apologize, but he did try to explain. I was in no mood to be reasoned with. I had never been a rebellious child, never even been unruly—I was too vain, too alert to the possibility that I’d be written about in less than glowing terms. But now I imitated every spoiled teenager I’d ever seen on television or in movies, throwing myself into the role of wronged daughter with gusto. I wrote letter after letter that fall, sending new installments before he’d had a chance to respond. I was shrill and repetitive. I even copied the letters I wrote into my journal, rereading them from the beginning, the better to stoke my fury.
It took him a semester to stop writing back. That fall his letters grew shorter and more infrequent, and he ignored entire swathes of my invective, which only made me angrier. Sometimes he wrote postcards that had nothing to do with anything at all. These might have been legitimate efforts to make a fresh start, but I saw them only as insults. I had come too far, I felt, to take such easy bait.
The last thing he ever sent me was a short story called “Commencement.” It concerned a devoted man whose wife and daughter made him intolerably sad. His wife was cold and seemed to be having an affair; his daughter, whom he adored, had grown distant and disapproving. Possibly the mother was poisoning her against him. The story alternated between flashbacks to happier times—the daughter was the source of much of her father’s joy in life, and his relationship with her mother was once easy and carefree—and sad little vignettes describing his present loneliness.
The plot, such as it was, was designed specifically to manipulate me. I wrote back immediately, outraged. Did he think I was so easily bought? I attacked the story with glee, ripping the narrative apart, mocking the language as pretentious and precious, belittling the protagonist, pointing out ways his stupid little daughter was nothing like me. I told him I now understood why none of his books had ever been bestsellers. I told him he was a fraud. By spring semester, when I still hadn’t heard from him, I hid his letters and the manuscript in my dorm-room desk, and left the whole mess of paper there for the janitors when I moved out.
_____________
“Harriet!” It is Danny, calling Monday afternoon from his car with the windows down by the sound of it. “I need you to find something for me. Remember Melissa’s books? I wanted to look something up, in that story he wrote about you. The one in Best American. Was Melissa’s copy in with the other ones?”
My skin prickles. “The story about me?”
“Yes, yes, the one with the test with the kids and cookies. Marshmallows. That psych experiment.”
I have no idea what he is talking about. “ ‘Fireflies’ was the story in Best American,” I say. “That’s in Fool’s Gold, which I have. It’s your copy, come to think of it. Inscribed and everything. You probably want it back.”
“Oh, I want them all back,” Danny says. “I even want the old ones back, but I got rid of those when I got so mad at Dad. No, there’s another one in Best American, a new one. Last year. Dad gave a copy to Melissa and me as a wedding present.” He sneezes, loudly, and I jump. “Kind of a lame present,” he admits.
“I don’t have it,” I say, though I am already in my room, kneeling on the closet floor. “I took everything to Goodwill, remember?”
“Oh.” Danny is disappointed. “Dad says he’ll send me a copy, but he’s still in Paris. You know the story I’m talking about, right?”
“With the test about the marshmallows,” I say. It’s here, a thick paperback, the familiar Best American logo on the cover. How had I missed it?
“Not about them!” Danny laughs. “Well, maybe Melissa threw it out. She never liked it when I read to her. She said she used to pretend to be asleep so I’d stop.”
“Doesn’t surprise me at all,” I say. Finally, to hear my brother badmouth Melissa! But all I can think about is the book in my hands.
“I talked to Dad about her for a long time this morning,” Danny says. “I told him everything. There’s something in the story that’s meant for me, he said. He’s different now, like Mom said. He’s not angry anymore. I even told him I haven’t read any of his books since high school, and he laughed!”
“That’s great,” I say. According to the table of contents, the story in Best American is called “Delayed Gratification.” It first appeared in Tin House.
“He helped me see what Melissa was trying to get away from. I was like Mom, really. Always trying to hold on. But you can’t hold people against their will. Would you criticize a drowning man for trying to breathe?”
This is my stepfather’s line, of course, from an old story Danny has never read called “The Way She Married Me.” My brother is waiting for me to ask him about Melissa, ready to talk about Melissa at last. But the book is in my hand. I tell him I am getting another call, and hang up.
In the contributor’s notes, which I read before flipping back to read the story, my stepfather explains that the events of “Delayed Gratification” are based on a real study called the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. In the experiment, four-year-olds were left alone in a room with a marshmallow and told that if they could refrain from eating it for several minutes, they would be rewarded with two. Some children cried, and some ate the marshmallow at once and never looked back. But some devised elaborate ways to make the waiting bearable—they sang, they turned their backs, they covered their eyes, they pretended the marshmallow was not real. The researchers watched everything through one-way glass. The children who managed to wait grew up to fare better in school, score higher on tests, and generally succeed in life where their hasty, impulsive counterparts tended to fail.
Two pages into the story itself, I recognize the characters. They are the father and daughter from “Commencement,” plunked down in Palo Alto in the Sixties. My stepfather has written the mother out of the story entirely—her untimely death is briefly mentioned—and turned the father into a professor of child development whose four-year-old daughter Charlotte is a willing test subject. Charlotte waits longer than any of the other children for her marshmallow. Her composure astonishes the researchers, and her father is inordinately proud. He recognizes that his child possesses qualities he himself lacks; he is in awe of her character. She is better than he is, better than everyone, and yet she is also kind. When the researchers enter the room, finally, bearing the extra treats, Charlotte insists on sharing them with the children whose resolve ultimately failed.
The rest of the story closely tracks the manuscript my stepfather sent me in college. Charlotte grows up and grows away, and her father mourns her loss. He knows he’ll never get her back. He misses her terribly. He longs for her. He worries that she finds him cold; really, he is only afraid. He waits for her to make the first move toward reconciliation, even though he knows she will never be the one to make it.
When I finish reading, I check my watch. It is just before five in the afternoon, which means that in Paris it is not quite 11 at night. The sheet of paper Danny gave me is still on the kitchen table. I seem almost to be sleepwalking; I dial the numbers carefully, and the telephone rings in an unfamiliar two-note burst. “Mark Sanders, please,” I tell the receptionist, who puts me right through. There is a brief interlude during which a song in French plays over the line. “Hello,” my stepfather says.
“Daddy?” I say. “It’s me.”
“Harriet,” he says, slowly, delightedly. Tears spring to my eyes. His voice is exactly as it was; I can hear even his breath, its rhythm unmistakable. If I could press my ear to his chest I would recognize his heartbeat.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I say. There is a very slight echo on the line.
“I can,” he says. “You sound the same. Exactly like yourself.”
There is too much to talk about, and nowhere to begin. I realize I am holding the phone to my ear with both hands. “Congratulations,” I say.
“Ah.” I know his tone; he is preening a little, thoroughly pleased. “You read Famine, then. What did you think?”
The truth, of course, is that I thought it was terrible, but I cannot say that. There is a hopefulness to my stepfather’s voice that startles me. “You’ve made it,” I say. “Everything has come true.”
“Well, well,” he says. “And now you’re back.”
“I’m not back,” I say. “I was here the whole time.”
“Danny says you’re doing all right,” he says.
“Danny.” I swallow, start again. “Danny is so happy now.”
“And you?” he says. “Are you happy now, with everything you have done?”
My hands are slippery and my mouth is dry. “I am,” I say.
“That’s wonderful,” my stepfather says. “I always knew you would grow up to be someone extraordinary. You were the child of my heart, you know.” He slows the phrase down a little, savoring it. Probably it will turn up as the title of his next book. “Tell me everything you have done with your life, Harriet. Tell me who you have become.”
I can hear his breathing over the hiss of the open line. I am grateful he is not in the room. If he were watching me, I would have to admit that I have done nothing with my life but waste it hating him. But he is far away, and I wait in silence. If I spoke, I could tell him that the way people behave when they are being watched through one-way glass reveals little about their true selves. Or I could ask him whether he thinks it’s possible that some of the children who seemed to resist temptation were simply paralyzed, unable to decide which course of action to pursue. Or I could lie. There is a right thing to say at this very moment, and I cannot find it. Whatever I do will appear in a story—a mediocre story, but one that will get published somewhere anyway—about a father and a daughter and their touching reunion. He has probably already written half of it. It is up to me to make the ending simple and easy and clear.
