Travels in Vermeer Read Free Page A

the split, there’d been nightly screams and threats and shattered plates and smashed furniture. Upstairs, in my bed, I tried covering my ears with my pillow. This break-up didn’t disturb my inwardness so much as drive me deeper and more sullenly within myself. I even began using my alleged “slowness” as a crutch, an excuse for the daydreaming that was my principal survival mechanism.
    At that time, my father, a biochemist, accepted a yearlong visiting position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There were rumors of another woman. At the end of the year, when he finally showed up one day unannounced at our house, my mother attacked him with his own golf clubs, shattering most of the glass in his car before he managed to back out of the driveway.
    After the divorce and after my father had returned to Missouri, my mother tried several times to force him to take me. What she said was that she couldn’t afford to feed five children on a music teacher’s salary. What I heard was that she didn’t want me. He didn’t want me, either. And I didn’t want to go with him. Several times that year, my mother made me ask him. She’d dial his number, then hand over the heavy black receiver. He always said: Tell her no.
    One Friday afternoon, in April, my mother suggested we go for a drive. I had just turned thirteen, so I presumed the outing had something to do with my birthday. But when we approached her red VW convertible, I saw, with a sinking feeling, that my thin twin mattress was stuck implausibly in the back of it.
    â€œWait, why is my mattress in the car?” I asked.
    â€œDon’t worry,” she said, “we’re getting you a new one.” Okay, I thought. We rode for a mile or two, through newer and newer suburbs, she with an odd smile frozen on her face.
    â€œLook at that beautiful lake,” she said, as if I’d never seen Fairview Lake before.
    Finally, she pulled into a strange apartment complex with a small parking lot. “Get out and help me with this mattress,” she said. We unloaded it at the edge of the lot. “Better drag it over there onto the grass,” she said.
    While I was doing that, I glanced up just in time to see her duck back into the car.
    â€œNo,” I pleaded. “Don’t.”
    I stood behind the car to block her from backing out. She shifted into first gear, and drove forward over the curb. I remember how she glanced back once, with that same paralyzed smile, then jounced downhill across the lawn, and back to the street again.
    This was the first time I’d seen where my father lived, in a modest brick four-plex. I sat on the curb, completely desolate, and waited a couple of hours for him to return home from his lab on the University of Missouri campus. He always worked late, six days a week.
    Finally, at six p.m., he pulled into the parking lot, walked past me wordlessly, unlocked the back door of his ground-floor apartment, and disappeared inside. I waited another minute before I followed him.
    He didn’t kick me out; he knew he couldn’t.
    Back when the family was still together, my father kept a heavy, pigskin razor strop hanging on its own nail in the kitchen. Spankings were carried out with a grim sense of ceremony; the other children had to stand and watch. Probably this wasn’t too unusual in those days, nor was it what made me resist living with him after the divorce. What I resisted was his silence. He simply didn’t converse with his children. In the next few years I spent with him, he’d come home late, fix a martini, and that was pretty much it.
    My father had many fine qualities: a relentless imagination and a stunning array of interests, from progressive politics to gardening to classical music to avant-garde film. I could say much the same of my mother, a classical violist and lifelong music teacher. But neither had much aptitude for parenting.
    That’s why I