The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [47]
At any rate, at dinner that night, there seemed no alternative to my serving her food, cutting her meat, sitting as close to her as possible. When I got up and went into the living room without taking her down from her high chair (Dana and Stephanie were still eating, Lizzie wanted me to adjust the television set), she allowed the others to leave the table without asking either of them to get her down. Dana said, “I can get you down, honey. Let me untie your strap here.” Leah said, “No! No! Daddy do it.”
I stayed in the living room.
Dana said, “I’ll untie you and you can get yourself down. You’re big enough for that.”
“No! No!” said Leah. “Tie strap! Tie strap!” Dana tied it again. I stayed in the living room. Leah sat in front of her little bowl for ten minutes. Dana sent first Stephanie, then Lizzie as emissaries, first to ask if they could get her down, then if she, Dana, could get her down. Leah was adamant, with the two-year-old advantage that no one knew for sure if she knew what she was talking about, or what any of them were offering. This advantage enables her to be much more stubborn than the average speaker, whose eyes, at least, must register understanding.
After a minute or so, she began calling “Daddy! Daddy!” in a tone of voice that suggested I was far away but willing. Dana and I looked at each other. She looked hurt and resentful, then she shrugged. I got up and took Leah down from her chair. She did not greet me with the elation I expected, but after we went into the living room, she puttered around me, chattering mostly nonsense and looking to me for approval every so often. I said, “Let’s go along with her for a while. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
Dana lifted one eyebrow and went back to her book.
It was nearly impossible. At first I thought the worst thing was the grief at parting: “Oh, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” hardly intelligible through the howls of betrayal. I was only going to the lumberyard or the Quiktrip, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. Taking a child turns the errand into a forced march. “She’ll be good with you,” Dana would say, and she would, and the household would be relieved of screaming, but at the price of constant engagement with equipment. A snap, two threadings, and two buckles into the car seat. The reverse for getting out of the car seat. Opening an extra door for the stroller. Unfolding the stroller, locking it into stroller-rictus, wheeling it around the car, a threading and a buckle into the stroller. Up curbs, through doors, down narrow aisles, all to find a package of wood screws or a six-pack of beer. Or I could carry her, thirty-four pounds. Doing an errand by myself came to seem a lot like flying—glorious, quick, and impossible.
But grief wasn’t restricted to my leaving the house. Leaving the room was enough to arouse panic, and the worst thing about it was that at first I was so unaware, and there was the labor of being trained to alert her that I was going outside or upstairs. Then there came the negotiations. One of the first things she learned to do was to tell me not to do what I had originally intended to do. After all, she had her own activities. “She loves you,” said Dana. “It won’t last.”
There were three more elements, too. I notice that there is a certain pleasure for a meditative person like myself in laying down one thread and picking up another, as if everything isn’t happening at once. One of these elements was that Dana’s choir group was practicing four days a week so that they might join the chorus of the opera Nabucco, which was being given in our town by a very good, very urban, touring company for one night. Dana’s choir director was a friend of the musical director of the company from their days in graduate school. The text of the chorus had to do with the Hebrews sitting themselves down by the waters of Babylon and weeping. Dana sang it every day, but in Italian. It doesn’t sound as depressing in Italian as it does in English.
The second element was our summer house, which we had purchased the fall before,