The Old Road
I don’t want to read another story about two people divorcing, about the way things break down,
a missed coffee date, a missed evening conversation, the subtle shift of someone’s eyes when
they’ve stopped listening, started composing a shopping list, a mortgage claim, the children’s
forms for school.
Instead, I want to read about a child flying on a broom through the unfolding darkness, soaring
above the cut glass of a river, above the city’s string of lights, the distant moon, a lure bobbing in
the sky.
But then I am stuck there as the writer. With the person on the broom holding steady, wondering
if the broom and dark filigree of sky are derivative of stories I’ve been reading the children. Just
like that, the image of the broom fades, the person, now claws at air, now falls, as they disappear
into the recesses of my mind.
I look out the window of my second-floor apartment at the small distillation of life visible in this
rapidly gentrifying city—yellowing deciduous, the geometry of power lines, a row of fat birds on
a wire that look like cowled monks, waiting for the sunlight to brush their heads, to call them to
morning prayer.
Inside, I have nothing but the sad lean of a Rosemary plant my daughter has named Rosy,
nothing but the solitary beer bottle, label slowly peeled, as I argued about whether I’d get the
divorce.
Divorce. I didn’t mean to write that story, but the literature of the real keeps interfering with
fantasies I’m concocting. And so, I’m writing from life as we pass our quotidian days, carving
out little lives quite apart from whatever we’re being told about the president, about the polar
ice caps, about the increased risk of malaria, the rise of our tech overlords. We are tending
to the children’s lunches, watching baking shows, folding mountains of laundry before sipping wine.
Our lives hum along, carrying their own private sorrows and small joys through the hours of this
late summer’s evening of purple air.
But what to make of the divorce, which circles my thinking as vultures used to circle over the
quiet roads during my California youth. Back when my red-haired mother, sweet and loving,
would reach across the car and tenderly cup my cheek in her hands. Above the car, their huge
shadows would career across the road, across the landscape of sun-whitened sky, across the rice
fields filled with water, before descending in the distance to some unknown feast.
Years ago, my wife and I drove those same quiet roads outside of town. She’d gotten a summer
internship two hours from my childhood home, and we were driving home in our rental car,
where, in summer, the insects pinged the windshield as abundant as sacrificial rain. We were
talking about our lives, about traveling to Italy, slowly reconnecting after months of drifting
apart. The car’s headlight cut ribbons of light through the velvety darkness. The sky was full of
leaden clouds, and the rain was beating down on the roof of the car as fingers thrumming a desk.
The road was slowly filling with water, inching from tire bottoms to wheel well as we sped on.
The road dips several times before it leaves the old river, and after we splashed through the first
part, water fanning out beyond the car, I paused and asked her if I should continue.
In the morning, we’d awake to a picture in the newspaper of a car floating in the river. But that
night, we kept driving, kept pushing through the arcs of water, our breath tight as we willed the
car to pass through the rising waters, to speed us home.
I see the metaphor so clearly, the rising waters, our choice to drive on. When they rose again, we
paused in the night, doubted ourselves, turned around, got lost in the dark and the rain, sped into
different lives.
This evening, on my way back to the apartment from the house, my son ran out on the porch to
say goodbye, red-gold hair, six, gentle and kind. As I walked home through a small patch of
grass, through rows of weeds, dandelions, clouds of mosquitoes, regret, he yelled to me from the
harbor of light over and over, goodbye dad, goodbye dad, his voice so bright and clear, following
me through the oaks, through the evening air, still following as I rounded the corner and took the
road home.