I. LOST

THE LOGIC WAS PERFECT AND COMPLETE; there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was love, then came marriage, then two children even before I got out of graduate school and got a real job. There was even a baby carriage, a real one, the blue-black kind with great rubber wheels, chrome bright-work, and a brougham top with a silver scroll on the side to raise and lower it. I wonder where it is now.

The next story element, therefore, was divorce. She with the kids, I with the job (it wasn’t logical but as a story element it has verisimilitude, meaning that it was always done that way then). I taught. I taught American poetry to children, to college students, and over time began to forget why. I thought about it a lot; I did little else but reason out why I did what I did, and whether it was useless or not, why they should be interested, why I should try to capture their attention.

None of this intellection helped my chances for tenure. The word was that I wasn’t a team player; I wasn’t. I was an Atom. I had no reason beyond physics for anything that I did.

Then she showed up again. With the kids, she and he. She had a lot of plans. She was moving, she told me, to Hawaii. She’d already shipped over her cycle, and the rest of the guys were waiting for her over there. The kids were going to love it, she said. Water and fishing and cycles.

And when would I see them?

Whenever you can come out.

Money?

Somebody had told her somebody was opening a speed shop in Maui and she might work there.

It’s odd how quickly two people who have seemed to be practically one person since before they were wholly out of childhood can diverge as soon as they part. I was awake most of that night, lying beside her (old times’ sake), and by dawn I’d made a decision. I wanted the kids. She couldn’t take them. She said she sure as hell was taking them. I said that I would take her to court and get custody before any judge: I worked, I was a college teacher, I had a suit and tie, she was a biker, or could be made to seem one. It might not have been true, that it would have been so easy; but I made her believe it. She wept; she talked it out; she hugged them a lot; she left them with me.

And when I went back to classes in September I had, instantly, a reason to teach American poetry to adolescents, and do it well, too. Love costs money; so love makes money, or is willing to try. What I could not find a reason for doing in itself became quite easy to do when I did it for them. I went and talked all day about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to put bowls of oatmeal before them, bicycles in the garage for them. And oddest of all (maybe not so odd, how would I know, I’ve only done all this once) I think I was a better teacher, too.

Unfortunately I had stumbled into all this—ordinary life, I guess, the thing that had kept all of my colleagues at their work and playing for the team—just that little bit too late. Despite my new need and my new willingness, I got turned down for tenure. And that in academe being equivalent to dismissal, I now looked into a kind of abyss, one I had heard about, read about, been touched by in stories, and had not thought was possible for me to encounter, though a moment’s thought would have told me that countless men and women live facing it all the time.

Did I think of shipping them to Hawaii? No, never. Some doors cannot be gone back through.

So the next scene is the dark of the woods.

I used all my contacts to get a job that almost no one, it would seem, would want to have, thereby entering into another level of this thing, where the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, grows desperate not for release but for more water to draw, wood to hew, so his kids and he won’t have to beg.

An inner-city enrichment program for no-longer-quite-youthful offenders, which had tenuous state funding and a three-story house downtown that had been seized for taxes. They were given courses in basic English and other work toward a high-school equivalency diploma, and seminars in ethics and self-expression. They got time off their probation for attending faithfully. Do you have better ideas?

The group I taught English to was about the same age as my old students, a group who had appeared ordinary enough then but now in hindsight and from here appeared as young godlings awash in ease and possibility. Days we worked on acquiring the sort of English language in which newspapers and books and government documents are written, a language different from the one most of them spoke, though using many similar words. We diagrammed sentences, a thing I am the last teacher of English on the continent to remember how to do; they liked that. In the evenings we met again. We were going to write stories.

They have stories, certainly. They tend to spill them rather than tell them. It seemed grotesque to try to chasten them, and make them shapely, make them resemble good stories; but that’s what I was hired to do, and simply to listen is too hard. “A beginning, a middle, and an end,” I say. “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot. Who, what, when, where, how.” And they listen, looking at me from out of their own stories, inside which they live, as street people live within their ragged shelters. Not one grew up with a father: not one. I know what crimes some of them committed, what they have done.

Late at night then I bus over to the adjacent neighborhood, one small step up in the social ladder, and climb the stairs to my apartment; let myself in, awake the sitter, asleep before the glowing television, and send her home.

They grow so fast. In the city even faster. Most of my salary goes to their private school, called fatuously the Little Big Schoolhouse, but really a good place; they love it, or did. They’re getting restive, weirdly angry sometimes in ways they never were before, which leaves me hurt and baffled and desperately afraid. They don’t want sitters anymore. I am going to come home and find them gone; or find one of them gone and the other silent, looking at me in reproach, can’t have her, couldn’t keep her.

“Let’s retell a story,” I told my students. “Just to get our chops. We’ll all write the same story. Not long. Three pages max. A story you all know. All you have to do is tell it, from beginning to end, not leaving anything important out.”

But it was not a story they all knew, and so I had to tell it to them. They listened with both eyes and ears, as my children had once. My own son, at the point in the story when the two lost children understood that the new protector they had found intended them not good but mortal harm, had cried out It’s their mother! Which seemed to me to be an act of literary criticism of the highest order; and for the first time I noticed that indeed the mother, like the other, is dead at the story’s end.

A girl named Cyntra wanted to know: Was I going to do this, too?

I said yes I would. I would do it in three pages. I hadn’t thought of doing it but yes I would.

I know this story. I know it now, though I didn’t before. I will write mine for me, as they will write theirs for themselves; we will trade them and try to read them with eyes and ears.

Three pieces of mail in the box on this night when I got home. A postcard from Hawaii. An official letter telling me that the enrichment program is being zeroed out, and my services will not be required. An answer to my personal ad in the Free Press, written in a clear strong hand. A picture, too.

My children still there, asleep but not undressed, unwashed and sprawled over the couch and the floor: they would not permit a baby-sitter, said they could take care of themselves. They are at least still here.

I will write my story with a beginning, a middle, and no end. No bread crumbs, no candy, no woods, no oven, no treasure. No who, what, where, when. And it will all be there.

Where will they go, those kids?

II. ABANDONED

POVERTY IS NOT A CRIME. Infatuation is not a crime either; and when a man who has loved his wife dearly, and had two children with her, boy and girl, children he loves deeply and in whose eyes he sees her every single day—when that man falls helplessly in love again, those children might find it in their hearts, if not then perhaps later on, after a period of transition, to forgive him. And to love this new woman, too, as he loves her, without ever forgetting—as he himself cannot—the other and earlier woman.

Children, though, spring from but one mother; and they, even if they cannot remember her, can’t forget her either. The fact that he can see in their eyes the reflection of the woman who bore them can come to seem a reproach. Perhaps it is a reproach. That’s certainly the way the woman who comes to replace her in their home might see it: a constant reproach, a claim never able to be made good and yet never withdrawn. And it’s possible that—she being as infatuated as he, filled up with that domineering love that allows no rival (no crime; it happens); might scheme somehow to remove them, shut their eyes, shut their mouths for good. Especially if there weren’t enough for all of them.

Was it a crime that he listened, that he chose between her and them? That was a crime, and he knew it when he abandoned them. Abandoned: went away from them when he thought they could not return, though at the same time he brought them back with him, of course, he would have to, have to bring them with him back home where they would trouble his sleep thereafter.

But we are always abandoned. We abandon our parents as we grow, and yet it seems to us that they abandon us; that’s the story we tell. And often—usually, not always—we discover that abandonment is flight, too: our flight away. We leave a trail to guide us back, but it can disappear behind us as we go on.

Harder than it seems, abandonment; they who are to be abandoned are often more resourceful than we who abandon expect them to be or than the act or the name of the act (abandonment) allows them to be. Often enough they will not suffer being abandoned, must be shed or forced out or tricked into remaining behind when we go. Often they must be abandoned not once but more than once, each act of abandoning hardening our hearts further, until in the end the logistics of the deed are all we can think of, the awful logic, just get it over with.

Abandonment implies redemption, the finding of the lost, not always but sometimes: safety discovered in the midst of danger, altering the new equation of loss and abandonment again, and posing a question usually, a judgment to make though we aren’t wise enough to make it; we make it anyway because we have no choice. Look how wonderful, all sweet, all good, and we so hungry and needy.

Finding out then that we have made a wrong decision, the worst possible decision, one we can’t help having made and that we know as soon as we have made it was the wrong one, and that it can’t be taken back. Finding out that this is what abandonment means: death at the hands of those we have relied on. They taught us to rely on them, on the two of them, their love, and then abandoned us: but still we only know how to rely on others, and have done so, and we were wrong, and now we will die. We didn’t know this about life.

Only perhaps it isn’t death, perhaps there is an exit from the cage, the death; perhaps we know better than we thought. Perhaps we have ourselves got reserves of cleverness, and will, and cruelty. Yes we have. We, too, can fool. We can do as we have been done by. And it is abandonment that taught us.

So this is life not death after all. It’s even profit. We didn’t know this about life either, what can be won from it by need and the willingness to be cunning, and cruel.

It was a long time ago. You find that even if you have lost the way home there is a path that reaches out to you from there, a path that you are bound to discover like it or not: and then, when you return there with what you have won, it isn’t the place you left. You can forgive them, if they are still there to forgive: or you can refuse to. What you did and learned from abandonment—yours of them, theirs of you—has made home different. Now you can go or stay.