James Whorton Jr.

James Whorton Jr.

Ownership of the Moon

I was thinking today of a professor I had in college: a woman over six feet who had published several books. Once at a reception, away from the classroom and under the influence of beer, I mentioned to her this idea: that love is a seizure of the brain. The normal condition of life is a lull—“a lullul,” I’d said, it being a difficult word to get out of my mouth just then—until that lull is broken by the seizure of love. You cannot make the seizure happen. You just have to wait around until it comes. Nor can you make the seizure last. Nor can you choose with whom you seize. She looked at me a little while, then laughed and said this was nonsense.

A confused sophomore, I trusted her. She had been kind to me at various times. She was the type of professor who would not humiliate you if what you said was stupid. I was grateful. She was holding a glass of wine, and I recall how she stood almost hunching in her elegant clothes. She was so tall. We were standing next to a table with cheese on it.

So I abandoned this idea. Still, I was subject to the brain-seizing love attacks, intermittently. They came and went—the love was real, grabbing my head until it let go—and these events were what I had been trying to explain to myself. During the fits, promises were made that would have to be broken or else kept.

Years later, one of these spontaneous love events got me in deeper than I should have allowed. I kidded myself that nothing was happening, until one thing led to another and I committed an act of unfaithfulness to my wife. It was the first time. By now I was thirty-three, several years into marriage. The guilt was tormenting and discolored my thoughts. I was cross and miserable. Finally, Carisa said, “Why are you so darned crabby anyway?”

“I was with another woman!” I said. I told Carisa everything.

We were at the kitchen table eating our usual Saturday breakfast of quesadillas. I had made this table. It was nothing fine. The top was yellow pine, which I had sanded and polished with oil, and the soft, broad bands in it glowed under light from the window. Someone who knew better would have called it junk, but I loved that table I had made from cheap wood, especially on a morning like this: when the sun from the window had warmed it. Pine is not prized because it is common, but I liked the small dents left in it by mugs, etc. Now, the home I had made this table for had been carelessly ravaged by me.

Carisa didn’t say anything. She put down her food, got up, and went out the front door.

I sat, waiting. I put the food away and tidied the kitchen then went outside. She was tugging the hose across the front yard to water the beds. I stood on the porch in my socks and watched, feeling more and more impoverished. Though I had loved someone else for a moment, I loved only Carisa again! This was the suffering that I had knowingly prepared.

Before my confession, at breakfast, we had been talking about driving into town to a well-known home improvement warehouse-type store to shop for a door with a window in it. I was very surprised now when Carisa, after she shut off the hose, turned to me, shading her eyes and said, “Are we still going to look at doors?”

I said, “Yes,” and I ran inside to get my shoes.

“We are going to talk,” she said in the truck, “but not now.”

“OK,” I said, grateful for anything. I meant to stop there, but I had to also ask, “When are we going to talk?”

“When I say.”

We got to the store, the name of which I am barred from using. I followed my wife across the bright, dangerous parking lot. Inside, the floor was buffed concrete. Sparrows flew between the high racks of shelves. We went to where the doors were and worked quickly down the aisle, examining each until Carisa said, “This one.” We had been there not five minutes. I said, “Are you sure?”

“Will it fit?” she said.

I studied the label. From my pocket I brought out a folded index card, which I consulted. Our place was an old farmhouse in Washington County, Tennessee. Everything about it had been rigged in some way by farmers over the decades. I told her I could make it fit.

“That’s the one I want,” she said.

So I said, “OK” and went off to get help. The store was busy. I found a man in an apron with a name tag. He was talking to another customer, so I backed up against a stack of plywood and waited. There was a “CAUTION” sticker on the propane tank of a yellow forklift nearby, and I stared at the sticker. Then I stared at the dusty concrete under my shoes. I had often wished we had concrete floors in our house, since they would be easier to sweep than the old, split hardwood ones that rolled and sagged and had grit in the gaps.

I still felt fully shocked at myself, mortified, hot with shame—but not quite as hot now, because I judged from Carisa’s reaction that there might be some hope of my getting off easy. Perhaps what I had done was not such an awful crime. We were adults. This thing had happened: this spasm of faithlessness. I had certainly been hard on myself. As penance, I was about to spend the ridiculous amount of six hundred dollars on a “prehung entry door” that we did not even need, since our old door did function; it was only banged up and wouldn’t stay closed without the deadbolt.

I was staring at the man in the apron, making sure he knew I was next, when he looked my way. “Go!” he yelled. “Move!”

I said, “What? I’m next.” I thought he was angry at me, and that made me angry.

“Move! Move!”

“No, I’m not moving! Why don’t YOU move?” And then a stack of plywood fell on top of me.

What happened was the boy running the forklift had gotten the load hung up on a sign overhead. Two vertebrae in my neck cracked. Also, my shoulder was torn, and one ear was cut nearly all the way off, among other things. Technically, the stuff that fell on me was not plywood but what is known as “oriented strand board.” I was unconscious until the next day, after surgery.

While I was out, I had vivid dreams, including a long, many-sectioned dream in which Carisa and I had two daughters named Elizabeth and Sue Ellen. I saw Elizabeth born. She came out bald, clean, and happy-looking, a strong baby who gazed right into my eyes. In my dream, I wept like I never have in my real adult life. I was hiccupping, gasping, hugging nurses, and dashing around the delivery room. I dreamed of her getting older, choosing her own outfits, painting her fingernails. Then Sue Ellen arrived, with red hair and a birth defect, and all three of us loved her immensely. I would drive home from work, in my dream, thinking, I’m going to hug Sue Ellen.

I dreamed of weather, conversations with Carisa, whole rooms of furniture, family trips, meals, and playground accidents. It was a full life. Everything felt real except that in the dream, I looked different. In the mirror I saw a tanned, superbly handsome, white-haired fellow in a denim shirt. I was Ralph Lauren.

Then I woke up. Beside the bed, a woman in scrubs stood pushing buttons, clicking through channels on the TV. She looked at me and said, “Oh, hello.” Real life started up again.

Carisa sat with me for days reading books and talking to people who came by—doctors, well-wishers, strangers who popped in for reasons unknown. The boy who’d been operating the forklift visited. He said that his manager had promised to fire him if he spoke to me.

Once, I’d been napping and opened my eyes to see Carisa at the foot of my bed with a man, kissing him. I’d seen him before. He worked at the hospital. Shirt and tie, trim physique. A badge around his neck. She kissed him lightly on the mouth then stayed with her face almost touching his for many seconds. He moved his fingers along her hair and guided her out of the room. An hour or more went by before she returned. I told her what I had seen.

“You dreamed that,” she said. “No, I didn’t. I’m pretty sure.”

Carisa stared at me with her serious eyes, outlined, as always, with a thick, black pencil. This was a holdover from high school days, when she was a lonely rock and roller in Greeneville, Tennessee. Nobody ever asked to be from Greeneville. I didn’t know her back then, but I imagine the eyeliner must have started out as a way for her to tell the world, including her parents, “You don’t understand me.” She no longer wore the motorcycle jacket with safety pins through it, but she still had that look about her, daring anyone to try and figure her out.

She’d purchased a sandwich from the hospital cafeteria. The brittle plastic container made creaking noises as she opened it. She ate the sandwich, watching me. I considered my pain medication, an opioid that I was going to have to stop taking at some point. Would my vivid dreams go away too?

Carisa said nothing. I’d thought I was properly regretful, but now I saw I had more to learn about regret.

Three years scooted by, and we went to China to adopt a baby. We bought a stroller from an underground department store and pushed her up and down the crowded sidewalks of Nanchang, a city of four million people. We met no for- eigners. The girl had spent her first eleven months in a government orphanage, so the city was new to her, too. Sometimes I would stop the stroller and step around to check the look on her face. Eyes wide open, startled at so much to see.

This was the summer of 2003. We were there when the first taikonaut went up, making fourteen orbits. His face was in the newspapers. Folding cell phones were a popular accessory, and the favored men’s street shoe was a black loafer with a small, chrome-plated Playboy insignia on top. I was in sneakers.

People stared at us, many saying, “Hello!” or “Beautiful baby!” in English. I would respond with “Ni hao,” my poor Mandarin provoking hilarity.

The sledgehammers in Nanchang had handles made of bamboo slats. I saw some men using them to beat on concrete. They would grip the handle just behind the head and then flop the hammer down, making an advantage of the bamboo’s springiness. This non-rigid hammer handle was a new idea to me.

Carisa, the baby, and I were crossing a city park when we were mobbed by interested and friendly Nanchang people. In the course of things, I was questioned by a female college student who called me “Sir.”

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: Sir, I am curious, what is your reaction to the Chinese space travel?

ME: I’m happy it turned out well.

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: And sir, I am curious, are you concerned about possible military applications of Chinese space technology?

We stood in a broad, tiled plaza. Sixty curious bystanders pressed in. We were strangers, Westerners, come to take one of their babies. A thirty-foot statue of a soldier with his rifle loomed in gray stone. Women sold balloons, newspapers, and kites.

ME: I don’t see the space trip as a military thing. It’s more of an exciting project of discovery for you all.

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: And sir, in your opinion, does the United States own the moon?

ME: Own it? Could we do that? I never thought of it before.

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: Yes, sir. And sir, will your daughter live with you?

ME: Of course.

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: And sir, I am curious, will she have a job? ME: First, she will go to school.

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: If I may say, many times, Chinese babies are spoiled. Chinese people may give everything to the baby and love the baby too much. So I think you should not spoil her. And sir, many times, in China it is difficult for young people to move away from their parents, if a girl would like to have an apartment with her boyfriend. What is your opinion?

ME: I won’t want her living with her boyfriend for a while.

FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENT: Sir, I hope your family is happy, and I wish that you will come back to China.

She had wire-rimmed glasses. She wore jeans, a brown sweater, and leather shoes, and she only smiled once, when she said goodbye. Carisa gave me the signal it was time to march on back to the hotel.

In the room, our new child had a crib. She slept well, filled her diaper like a champ, and ate whatever we gave her: chicken, rice, green beans, whole bananas, plus her bottle four times a day. We had been warned by the agency to expect dirty fingernails, psoriasis, and even skin mites, and thus had not prepared ourselves to find her so absolutely perfect. There was nothing wrong with her, not one thing. She had a squarish head and eight teeth, four on the top and four on the bottom.

I kept thinking about that college student. What was her day like? I pictured her frowning into a textbook, her window blocked by an electric fan, fussed at and spoiled by her overly loving Chinese parents.

I wanted to sit and talk with her. Were she and this boyfriend actively apartment-hunting? How did one do that in Nanchang? I was plagued by idle thoughts of this woman I would never see again. Smart and self-possessed, she had her mind on real estate, both in town and in the sky. I admired and was confused by her, and by my feelings. In short, I had a bad crush. It would last a few days, causing me to be grumpy during this wonderful time in our lives.

From Nanchang we flew to Guangzhou. On the plane, my leg went off. Since the accident, this was something that happened sometimes. It is like having a set of jumper cables clipped to the back of your leg, the other ends connected to a car battery. Someone is trying to jump start your leg. OK, it hurts, and afterward you are sore. I was limping for days. According to Carisa, it looked like I was trying to kick a hole in the sidewalk with my right foot.

Finally, it was time to go home. We flew to Hong Kong, spent a night in the airport, then almost missed an early flight to Seoul. We were punchy and tired. As we settled in for a nine-hour flight to Los Angeles, I asked Carisa, “How come we have never talked about my unfaithfulness?”

“I think the reason is obvious.” “Because of my accident,” I said.

“No. Because I did it, too.”

The flight attendant served our meal: a “famous Korean Cuisine,” the package said, called bibimbap. It came with instructions. There was a packet of sesame oil to dribble over the ingredients and a small tube of red paste so spicy it made my eyes fill up and burn. Emily Rongguang Tucker had gone to sleep on the seat between us.

Because of the baby, certain rights that had been well established in our house were gone. The right to be alone sometimes, for example.

The right to finish a meal. The right to never hear certain bodily processes referred to during a meal.

The right to a solid night’s sleep. The right to have no talking when the news is on—these prerogatives sound trivial until you’ve had them snatched away. I found my brain changing as a result. Sometimes, I could not get through a sentence. I would be talking on the phone, moving through the house, and I’d see a white package on the windowsill that I recognized to be a used diaper, which I myself had put there and forgotten. Then the rest of my sentence would be gone. I was cursing more. Meanwhile, Carisa turned out to be a wonderful mother.

It did not surprise me when she got up for a third time in the night to see to the crying child. What surprised me was that she did it eagerly. When the child had a cough and couldn’t sleep, Carisa would be carrying her around, loudly humming some Joan Jett song, and I would be lying in bed thinking, Can you please comfort the child more quietly?

Who knew Carisa had such kindness in her? Such angelic solicitude? Was this the same Carisa who had growled at me for not unloading the dishwasher?

Then I understood: she had fallen in love with the baby. So had I, but it was a different kind of love than I had experienced before. We had been tamed by this child and were now her satellites. Our thoughts circled Emily always, our days shaped around her meals, her baths, her naps, and the glorious, noisy sessions of playtime, when her shouts of laughter delighted us and made us simple-minded. We were hers.

Today, Emily came out to me. “I like a girl,” she said.

She is thirteen years old. She was wearing a light-blue Nike ball cap that I bought her at Kohl’s over her long, black hair. “What are you talking about?” I said. “What girl?”

She said a name.

“I don’t know this girl,” I said. “Since when do you like her? What are you telling me? Have you told your mother?”

Carisa, whom I had not known was standing behind me, said, “It has been apparent for some time.”

No, it had not been apparent. I am wrong about many things, but I think I know when something is apparent to me.

We were in the kitchen. It’s a different kitchen than the one I mentioned before. With the help of a settlement from the home improvement store, we moved, and the homemade table is gone, all the charm and hassle of the old house replaced by uglier, more reliable things. These days we have more money to spend. We’re older. Life should be easier, and is, mostly, except now.

Right there on the spot, I had to do introspection. It was a dangerous moment because our beautiful daughter was coming out to me, and all three of us would remember for the rest of our lives whatever I was about to say.

I told Emily that I wanted her to be happy (which is true, very true). I told her I hoped I would soon get to meet this girl. Maybe we’d invite her to dinner! “That can’t happen because she doesn’t know I like her,” Emily said in her gruff, trademark way that includes both resentment and jollity.

Emily is what we used to call a tomboy. I had noted that before. Maybe I hadn’t seen everything that was in front of me.

“It’s just—” I began.

From her back pocket, Emily’s phone chirped. I waited for her to reach for it. This is a continual thing: the chirping of the phone vs. the droning of me. Usually the phone wins, but this time she left it.

“I worry that—”

“Dad, I know. I’m a Chinese lesbian in East Tennessee.”

“Well, there’s that, but also . . .” And this is when I recalled the conversation with my old professor, that scrap of suspect wisdom I thought I’d discovered about love being a seizure of the brain. Now, I understood why my professor had laughed: not because the idea was wrong, but because it was so obvious that only a sophomore would feel surprised to have noticed it. Of course love is a disaster. A powerful force pulling you from your steady place, your home. And yes, ninety-nine days of any hundred can be hard to tell apart, but that is when the good, slow things happen, like studying for that French exam, enjoying the breakfast someone cooked. Safe, productive time.

“Emily, I worry not that you love a girl, but that you love anyone.” “Hold up. I didn’t say I love her. I said like.”

“Well, semantics. People get hurt, you know? It’s the same as when I steer the car with my knees because I’m eating, and you tell me ‘That’s dangerous, Dad,’ and it is, sweetheart. It’s very dangerous. This worries me. You have school, you have soccer.”

For support, I looked to Carisa. I found that she was staring at me, you might even say glaring. I’m taller than she is, but those serious, eye-linered eyes can still push me around.

What had I done? What truth had I cluelessly exposed? “He’s not wrong,” Carisa said at last. “Stuff can happen.”

Emily looked at her mother. She looked at me. Her phone chirped again, and she slid it from her hip to her cheek. “The rents are cray cray,” she said.

“Rents?” I said and freaked out. “My daughter is apartment hunting now?

You’re thirteen!” And so on.

Emily did this thing she does, holding her mouth open like she’s so bored it’s causing her to pant. Then she turned and left us in the kitchen.

Carisa touched my arm. “Rents means parents,” she said. Which I knew but had forgotten.