Heritage

Where is my name from?

She named him Samuel, after his father, and also after Mark Twain, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to have such an inspiration. With a name like Samuel Tennessee Cartwright he was going to be incredible anyway; he could be a great writer, or explorer, or railroad baron, or president. She called him Tennessee, or Ten, but he’d always have Samuel to fall back. His father went by his middle name, too, so maybe he’d never quite figure out who he was in casual conversation, or when he came to visit. She’d tell him if he asked, of course, she wasn’t going to give him a novel for a life; he’d have to earn one. Besides, kids were more likely to ask who their fathers were than where their names were from.

Where is my dad?

He wasn’t gone; but they weren’t together, they never really had been.

They had slept together, the only thing preceding it a certain electrical smile shared between them for the past month. They hadn’t been drunk, only foolish, only giddy: college students during exams week. He was gangly and she inexperienced, and afterwards they had managed to avoid each other for a week, until their mutual group of friends pulled them back together. The instant they had been back in the same room they realized that it wasn’t strange at all. And certainly she had appreciated that none of their friends had noticed anything. These people, their trusted, core people, had never seen or mentioned seeing anything between them. Accordingly, they had concealed it almost mirthfully; quietly joyful when no one had seen that touch, that glance, or felt a quiver in the air.

There was a kindness between the two of them, a satisfied and tender understanding that was not love, but was in fact the tender beginnings of it. The rushing fall that drives everyone mad, the first and sweetest bite of a peach, a door being suddenly opened by a gust of spring wind. They had slept together again, more cautiously this time; they had held hands; and then nothing after that. Awkwardness not being one of the many things that can destroy love, they were unworried, however, poor timing is the ruin of nearly everything else. It had never occurred to them not to move on with their plans in life; unencumbered they went separate ways with whispered promises to write, to keep in touch. She went to the city to work for a magazine; he went to Texas to Teach for America and start work on his Peace Corp application.

But they were encumbered, or at least she was, so deep down it was unrecognizable. She felt the first tremble of life in June. Disbelief, panic; but never anger and never fear. She imagined flying down to Texas to tell him; and he would pick her up and swing her around laughing. She imagined marrying him. It was not unpleasant, a little house with ferns and cucumbers in the summer; a dog, an office with old bottles in the window, his guitar in the living room. Dancing in the evenings, falling in love, getting older with someone warm at her back. She imagined ceding pieces of their lives for one another, then sinking into disappointment until the kid was having two Christmases and every-other-weekends. She imagined raising a child herself, in the city, with a hectic job and no life but parent conferences on her 30^th birthday.

When she told him, over the phone, she was greeted with silence, not cold but choked, and she knew he was imagining the same things, and she told him it was all right. They’d figure something out when he got back. She almost had an abortion.

What did you want to be when you grow up?

When he was a floppy-legged infant, she touched him constantly; greedily stroking his soft skin, his feathery hair, and gazing into his round, round eyes. She loved the way he looked at everything, the way his his tiny fingers closed around her own. She loved the way his lower lip hung like a squashy comma. Every time she went to touch him it was like a courtship, she was wooing him for the honor of having contact with something so beautiful. When he crawled to her and pushed himself up onto her lap, when he grabbed at her and smiled, she could feel her heart pounding. Each time it was a first kiss. He was so exquisite.

Can we get a dog?

They lived alone with each other, in an apartment, she was doing well at the magazine, they had given her maternity leave and had Fridays off; she knew it would be nice when he started school to have that day to herself. Now those days were just the two of them, going out around the city, or sometimes just lying together in the sun on her bed while he looked at everything for hours until he fell asleep. He loved sweet potatoes.

His father came to visit, more often now that he was back in the city after Teaching for America and before whatever else he was going to do. They had never talked about getting married but neither of them were seeing other people; both had tried on and off in the past two years but they were young.

Once they had almost slept together again but it had been strange, because they had really meant it that time. She imagined someday he’d visit and they’d finally sort it all out and, for once, it would make sense.

Once he had been there with other friends; and those who knew about him were angry later, angry at how she was just letting him go, that he wasn’t there for them. She knew he would be, and besides, it was her friends who were there, they helped her all the time. Samuel laughed around them, they held him and sang to him and she was so glad that they were not alone.

Why are girls different from boys?

When they were alone she would talk to him, all the time, even though he wouldn’t understand. She would read him poems or her articles, and he would stare at her, just stare and stare as if he knew everything. Or she would gossip with him, tell him what was happening at work or with her friends, who were stumbling through young adulthood in a world that seemed so far removed from her now.

She told him, “You’ll get old, Ten, and you’ll learn to ride a bike and write sonnets and you’ll fall in love with a girl who wears too much makeup and consider desperate things to be with her. You’ll hate me for a while, and you’ll color pictures, and lose your keys. You’ll fall off a horse and I’ll drive you to the hospital, you’ll go on picnics and learn about dinosaurs and get muddy and cold and eat marshmallows and love curry and be held close, so close, and you’ll feel loved.”

She said, “There will always be someone there for you even if you don’t know it.”

She said, “This world is insane, Samuel, and we’re insane too, and that makes us sane. We can’t see even an inch into the future but we don’t stop moving, our blindness never stops us from taking a step forward. If we could stop and go back we wouldn’t. There are all these stupid terrible things that we’d love to stop, we’d love to, but we won’t because we’d have to go backwards. It’s like riding a bike at night or sliding down a hill on a sled; you can’t stop and your voice streams out behind you and you can’t see where you’re going but you love it. We’re happy to be alive. We make mistakes, we’re sorry, but we don’t stop making mistakes. Even if you never make the same mistake twice your life will be full of them. We don’t see each other and we bump into people, we make each other road-kill and we trample on each other’s dreams and thoughts, we steal and cheat and lie and kick each other even if we don’t mean to.”

Where do babies come from?

She said, “People are cars without headlights.”