MOCCASINS
The accident happened about two months after Christine and I split up. It was almost midnight and I was sitting at a table in a cheeseburger joint. College boys, drunk and silly, roughhousing at the counter, trying to knock each other off their stools, knocking instead a jar of ketchup to the floor. I watched it fall, saw the glass shatter, the ketchup ooze down the tile; and out came a mop, landed plop in the mess and started swirling around when a bare foot appeared and lodged itself right in the ketchup. A reddened foot: ketchup splash, I thought, B-movie blood; and then I saw the red running down, down into the ketchup and the glass, and I followed it back up to its source: up a calf it went to a large maroon explosion in the thigh. Gradually, bits of clarity accreted: the thigh belonged to a young woman; the young woman had been shot or stabbed in the leg; she had hobbled into the cheeseburger joint to get help, call the police, whatever, and she had stepped right in the mess. But my mind had stuck at the foot in the ketchup and glass, and I couldn't move forward. Foot, ketchup, glass, leg, glass, ketchup, foot, and suddenly I knew something had happened, something to Christine and the kids, something terrible.
They had been in a car crash, a bad one.
As it turned out, the accident had occurred hours before, on the Jersey Turnpike outside Elizabeth. She'd been driving to her folks' house. I left the restaurant at once and called them from a pay phone on Broadway, despite the hour, to ask if anything was wrong; her mother gasped and burst into tears: "Randall!? How did you know?!" By this time Christine was dead, Vincent dying, Corinna critical but stable.
I wish everything after that were more a blur than it is. It is almost a year now. Corinna can almost walk again, but it's painful for her to try and painful for her to think about. She doesn't like her crutches, but she tries to joke. "Now I'll never be able to drive the Flintstone car," she says. That's my car, my old car, the one I gave her for high-school graduation. It's a Nash Rambler—I think they last made them during the Eisenhower Administration—and I used to say that I'd kept it running all these years by cutting a hole in the bottom of the chassis and Flintstoning my way around. The minute we got up here she konked out, slept for ten hours. We checked into a roadside motel outside Lisbon, Maine. She rode up with me the whole way, two days ago, the same interstate on which the crash happened, I-95. It's supposed to be kind of a vacation for her; Christine's folks heard I was coming up here and suggested I bring Corinna, do her some good. Fresh salt air, they said, beautiful harbors. Maybe drive up and down the coast. Hm. They think Lisbon's on the shore. We'll send them some lobster postcards. They'll be happy.
I'm not sure why I came here. I know I decided to, but I don't know what for. I told Christine's folks I was quitting the graphic arts biz, going to hole up in Maine and paint landscapes for tourists for the rest of my life. "That'll be nice," her mother said. "And a good steady living," added her father. Sometimes irony has to be bitter to work, even if nobody gets it. Or maybe the joke is on me; maybe that is what I came here to do. I don't know. I was born here, near here, but that's not turning out to be a very good excuse. Maybe I just wanted to check to see if all this still existed.
*
When I first met Christine I was absurdly impressed that she had a safety deposit box for excess jewelry and valuables. I came to New York in the early ‘50s, and the thread that kept me there was thin. If my paycheck was held up one week, which it often was, well, then I didn't have any money for a few days, and with my roommates I'd have to get by on charm. And here was Christine, who not only had a beautiful apartment and money to pay the gas bill, but also had a safety deposit box underneath it all. To me it meant that Christine would never fall through the cracks: something underneath—a good steady job, or parents, or a safety deposit box filled with ultimately pawnable items—would catch her. And that maybe before I fell through the cracks she would catch me.
Not that I married her for her money. And I wasn’t walking around at the time in fingerless gloves and a purloined overcoat, either. But if I fell I was going to fall far, down between the cracks and out of sight. This was especially terrifying when I first arrived in New York, before I trained myself not to try to notice everything or deal with everybody, when I was pierced by the awareness that the membrane between me and destitution, like the membrane between me and random lethal violence, was flimsy and translucent. And if I fell between the cracks nobody would know. My parents were gone; I was their only child. That was the main thing: I wouldn't register, there would be no ripples. My life was only mine, and I was only somebody's accident.
I did have this one friend, Emilio Martín. That's not his real name. We used to help each other home, late at night, paydays. Sometimes I'd stand him the last few rounds, but he'd help me out every so often, too. He was a member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party—not one of the guys who shot up the Capitol in 1954 (they were in jail), but he knew them, all right, and the FBI was after his ass most of the time. There were whole weeks he'd disappear, I had no idea where, and then show up suddenly at my table in the Cedar Tavern where I was slinging the shit with painters who were on the verge of being world-famous, or I’d find him just standing at 3 in the morning in a local deli, staring at the meats and cheeses. The days I was courting Christine he was the closest friend I had, and naturally I asked him to be my best man. Christine's family didn't like him. No, not much. They were working hard to put the Depression behind them, like a lot of people their age—they were among the first to flee to the suburbs of New Jersey and set about constructing a comfortable existence full-time—and they didn't like the riffraff I was bringing to the wedding. Riffraff, my ass. Emilio was a terrorist. The card-carrying kind. But Jesus, did he look funny in a tux. It was a small wedding, real small, just Christine, her folks, Emilio and me, but he insisted on renting a tuxedo for the occasion. The whole way out on the bus to Teaneck he wouldn't show it to me, wanted to keep it a surprise. And that it was. Powder blue, lapels the width of your hand, ruffled shirt fringed with dark blue something-or-other, and his fat half-shaven face pudging and grinning out on top of it. It was a scream. That was the day Christine's folks took out the legal pad and started their list: Things We Will Never Forgive Our Son-in-Law For.
We were married in April of 1961. The sky was harsh and gray and looked like it should've been strung with barbed wire. Christine and I decided against a priest—we were each long gone from our childhood-habitual Church and didn't want hypocrisy's aftertaste in our mouths—and the JP I'd picked was jocular and inappropriate and late, and the items on her folks’ legal pad started to pile up. Two days after we got back from the honeymoon the G-man appeared for the first time. I was riding the 4 train up in the Bronx, reading the paper or something, and he stopped me as I got off and inquired into the possible whereabouts of the alleged perpetrator Martín who had been charged with felonious et cetera.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I haven't seen him in a month."
He gave me a card. Would I be so kind as to contact his office when I had information as to his whereabouts?
"No, I'm afraid I can't do that."
A month passed and the G-man appeared for the second time, and inquired into the possible whereabouts of the alleged perpetrator Martín who had been charged with conspiracy to and so forth.
"Sorry, can't help you."
And then another month passed and we had to move out of our apartment, for Christine was pregnant and the folks didn't want her raising a kid in a five-story walkup in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side, so they looked around and found us a six-room deal in Brooklyn. It needed some fixing up, but it had a lovely room for a nursery, and it was in a nice neighborhood, and right down the block from a very good public school, and so on and so on, and I'll be damned if they didn't have the poor little bastard's life planned for the next six years. And when I went down to the hardware store to buy some paint and things who should I run into but Emilio Martín driving a gypsy cab. Actually, he crawled up behind me, opened the front door, and said with that silly grin, "Where you goin', m'fren?" I piled in, he drove me to the hardware store, we picked out some paint, stashed it in the trunk, and rode off to get us a few drinks. At seven or eight I convinced him that I really had to get painting, we rode back to the apartment, hauled up all the paint, and found out that the electricity hadn't been hooked up yet. We set in painting the place anyway. When it got too dark to see Emilio ran downstairs and fished out of his trunk some flares, and some Bacardi, and by flickering pink lights we painted on through the rest of the night, swigging rum and killing hordes of summerbugs that kept flying around our heads and landing in the paint and going crunch, crunch when we stepped on them, paint-sogged. We were drunk as lords, and lousy house-painters even sober, and when we woke up the next morning I discovered that we'd painted the nursery a dark blue.
I never saw Emilio again. And when Christine saw the apartment she shrieked, but when she saw the nursery she just cried. And no one ever forgave me for that one, not even me.
Years later when I told her, in a let's-look-back-on-it-now-that-it's-funny kind of way, that Emilio had been wanted by the Feds the whole time, she stared at me goggle-eyed. "What in the …? Why the fuck didn't you tell them where he was?" Christine was not given to such language.
"Honey," I cried, "I really didn't know where he was."
"Not when he ruined our apartment? And why did you have to tell them you wouldn't cooperate? We could've been in serious trouble! You fool!"
"And what the hell are you, an FBI fink?"
She didn't speak to me for the rest of the day. Or the next day, or the day after that.
Vincent was born in January 1962, and the folks never forgave me for that, either. Figured I'd knocked her up and then shotgunned her to the altar. I suppose in their world view that makes sense. I mean, it would explain to them why in the world she married me. I spent a month covering over the job in the nursery with an elaborate mural—all shapes and angles jostling in and out of focus, with effervescent dripping clouds in silver and pale red as the backdrop. Spray paint for the clouds, everything else latex paint and charcoal for the accents. Textured but not thick. Just the kind of thing I'd have liked if I were an infant, I thought, and the best piece of work I'd ever done. Christine loved it. Her folks liked the dark blue better. Vincent never saw it; the folks found us a better place in Queens, in a nice neighborhood, and right down the block from a very good public school, and so on and so on, and I was too sad ever to tell him about it, pointless as that would've been anyway. But we were happy, Christine and I, practically the whole time she was pregnant and when Vincent was young. We were ... attentive. I even helped make dinner. That doesn't sound like much nowadays, but all I knew from at the time was deli food and Stewart sandwiches. One afternoon when Vincent was two we decided to have ourselves a picnic in Kissena Park. I was in charge of the potato salad. I pulled out the bag of potatoes and practically every one was sprouting. They looked like little octopus-potatoes with wood-arms. "Throw 'em out," said Christine, peeling onions.
"Can't we just cut these things off and use the rest?"
"Nope. Poisonous."
"The sprouts?"
"Tubers. No, the whole potato. Throw 'em out."
"So wait,” I said. “We have to throw out a whole bag of potatoes just because they're tubing?"
"Of course, silly. What do you think? They're not edible forever."
"But that's ... it doesn't seem right somehow."
"Sure it's right! They have to grow their little potato-children, don't they?" in a squeaky voice, pinching my cheek and shaking it on "little potato-children."
"And that's what they do? And then you have to eat the potato-progeny before they tube?"
"That's right." Pause, hands on hips. "You really did grow up in a parking lot, didn't you."
"I guess. I don't know. It just seems so pointless, sprouting all the time without being eaten."
She shrugged. "Well, we humans do it all the time," pointing at Vincent who at that point was methodically stacking and knocking down blocks.
"Yes, well." I laughed; I thought it was rather clever, something about potatoes I hadn't bothered to think of. I suppose I'd assumed that being eaten was the high point of their little lives, serving the food chain. But further up the food chain come dangers, dangers that you'll recognize your offspring as yours, right up to the point where you'll call them Chip or Junior, to the point where you'll check every fifteen minutes to make sure that your little Vincent is still breathing when he first comes home from the hospital, or to wonder anew that something so small and tenuous works and has capillaries and fingernails and ears. It was his ears that got me when he was born; they were so ... finished, as if the angel-subcontractor in charge of ornamentation wouldn't let the baby out of the shop until the ears were rounded and textured and polished. And it was his ears, those tiny chiseled infant-ears, that were all I could visualize of him when I heard about the crash.
*
Corinna wanted to know all about Lewiston. She hadn't been here since the last time I visited, almost fifteen years now, when she was just four or five. "Not much to tell about it," I said. "It's a depressed New England mill town. There's the mill and a few shoe factories."
"But what was it like? Growing up there, I mean."
"It was like waiting to get out."
"That's all?"
"That's all."
But I showed her the picture of me in Lewiston. I'm four months old. My father is holding me up against the sky; his face is half in shadow, and he has something like a proud smirk on his face. You'd never know it was taken in Lewiston, though, because the background is nothing but sky. It was originally in black and white, but I could still tell that the sky that day was brilliant: the clouds are the sharpest thing in the picture, and they stand out, clear, whole. I'm half-silhouetted, a bald, fleshy baby against a deep sky. It's the only picture—no, it's the only memory I have of my father. And it's not even a memory, really, so much as a document. He left not long after he hoisted me against that sky. Long ago I took magic markers to it, colored in the sky in cerulean, my jumper in lemon yellow, my father's shirt in pale green. I think of Lewiston now like that, like I have to color it in. The folks from high school are still here, most of them; the people laid off from the mill are still laid off; Peck's department store—an enormous art-deco job on Main Street, first thing you see when you come in from Auburn, over the Androscoggin—is still empty. It closed just after I left. That's thirty years ago. More.
I'm always amazed to think that it's actually part of the United States, that something that happens "across the nation," like hula-hoops or Watergate, happens in Lewiston too. And then again sometimes it's as if the place doesn't exist at all, has no past tense. I remember when Muhammad Ali fought there, the second Liston fight, the “phantom punch” fight. Ali was my teenage hero: antiwar, civil rights, outspoken Black man, and a brilliantly inventive boxer. The shuffle, the guard down, taunting, the butterfly and the bee. I boxed for a few years when I was a teen in Lewiston. I was in the building the night he beat Liston. I boxed in that building. I screamed with delight when Ali won. But when you look at Ali’s history, there’s no mention of Lewiston at all. As if the fight has been erased from the tapes. That's what it's like in Lewiston sometimes, as if I'd gone back to review the movie of my life and found out that all reference to the Lewiston I grew up in had been expunged, un-made, and would have to be re-shot or culled from the cutting room floor.
The first thing Corinna and I saw, coming in from Lisbon, even before Peck's, was a movie marquee, reading "R U SAVED JESUS IS LORD." I groaned; not here, please Lord, not here. And then there were the video rental stores and the USA Today boxes and the 7-11s.
I looked at Corinna. "Welcome to Anytown."
"Didn't you say you wanted to get lobster for tonight?" Sweet girl, she was trying to help. "Where's the lobster place?"
"Auburn. We'll have to turn around."
"Can we take out?"
"I'm, I'm not sure. Yes. I think so. Is that what you want? Might be a messy hotel meal, after all."
We drove around for a while, up Apple Sass Hill, by the hockey rink, the high school. All over, all pretty much as last time, except the rink, which was closed. Figures. We stopped on Bartlett Street for sodas, sat on the hood of the car, drinking Tab. Corinna lit a cigarette, one of those clove things that stink to high heaven. "What's that building back there?" she asked. "The one with the Taj Mahal facade and funny windows?" It was hideous. But I didn't know what it was. Shriners maybe. "And is that your church?"
"Ah, the church. Yes. L'église St. Paul et Peter,' see? They give the French name first."
"It's beautiful." It was beautiful, too.
"Did your parents get married there?"
"I don't think so."
"Why not?"
"I don't know." I heard the irritation in my voice. Why didn't I know? Why hadn't I ever asked? "Maybe. I was baptized there, though." A fib.
"It's really gorgeous. I'd love to get married in it."
"Well, maybe you will. Who knows."
We piled back in the car, headed out to get the lobsters. Corinna hadn't ever eaten real Maine lobsters. She was excited. "How do you cook them? They're alive, aren't they? Do you kill them first, or do you just throw them in the water? I hope you don't just throw them in the water."
"No," I laughed. Christ, it was wonderful. It was like she was six or seven again, like when I took her and Vincent and Christine to Coney Island and she wanted to know how the roller coaster stayed on the track. Ah, but I'd told her it didn't always stay on. What an idiot. Vincent said "wow," and Corinna got scared and wouldn't go on, not even when I promised to hold her, and Christine thanked me for ruining a nice trip. Which I had. "No, you don't throw them in. You put them to sleep first."
Corinna giggled. "You tell them one of your jokes. Right?"
"Right. No, you stroke their tails, and they go to sleep."
"And next thing they know… ?"
"WHAM! Yep."
"That's cruel!"
"Well, I guess you're right, now, it is cruel. Guess we'll have to go eat meat pies instead."
"What are meat pies?"
"What are meat pies!? Only the traditional French-Canadian dish!"
"Where do you get them?"
"I have no idea." And then to top it off, I couldn't find the lobster place, either. I thought it wasn't quite so far up, and I doubled back, and that was wrong, we wound up back at the river, by the Quoddy moccasin factory. So I started again, tried a different route, and that was wrong, and we wound up right back at the Quoddy factory again. "This is just like Alice," Corinna said.
"Hm?"
"Alice Through the Looking Glass? Remember? She tries to get out of the house, but keeps winding up walking back to the house? And then she has to walk toward the house to get away from it?"
"Oh, yes. Yes. Just like Alice."
"You used to read that to me."
"Yes." I'd forgotten. I’d totally forgotten. "I wish I'd brought it with us. It might help."
We eventually found the place. It was so far up, after all, and we could take out, but then Corinna thought better of it, thank goodness. So we decided to eat there.
"They let you pick your own lobster, too, you know," I said. "They're over here in the tank."
"But I want to see you put one to sleep," she said, just loud enough for the maitre d' to hear. But he was very obliging. "If you would like," he said, and motioned us over.
"See, you grab them like this," and I snatched one by the midriff, holding it out over the tank, "and you just pass your hand over, gently…."
"Pardon me," interjected the maitre d', "but you must put them on the table. They will not fall asleep in the air."
"Oh." I handed the creature over. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Another defeat. "We'll just have two, then. Pound-and-a-quarter."
"Very well." We sat down. Corinna was sad. I felt worse than useless. Just when I needed something, anything, even an overgrown water insect, to tell me that this was home.
*
After I called Christine’s folks that night I knew I couldn't go back to my apartment, it wouldn't do, nothing would suffice. Instead I rode the Broadway local all night, trying to feel covered, riding along with some of the homeless people I'd been afraid of becoming. But I'd forgotten that the 1 train turns elevated in Inwood and the Bronx, and before I knew it I was out again, open under expanse, riddled. And then a few days later I took the bus out to the funeral. It wasn't raining, and I'd wanted it to rain. The folks were unbearable. I'd thought wakes were supposed to structure grief, apportion it, but as I sat with them next to me, watching this old man, this old woman, watching them bent over, crying, shaking uncontrollably, I knew they didn't want my arm, my words. It was as if this were their loss, all of it, and being polite to me was just draining their very last resources. But they were polite, and that's what was unbearable. I couldn't ask them not to be polite, couldn't ask them to be angry instead, if that would help, couldn't ask them just to go ahead and feel the way they felt. So they sat with their inexpressible grief and I sat with mine.
And when Vincent's name was spoken I lost the reins completely. All I could think was, I hadn't gone to his college graduation. I hadn't even gone. Just to be polite, if nothing else. We had fought for months, ever since he announced that he wanted to go to business school and I had fallen back, stunned, and I taunted him, called him J. Pierpont Morgan all day, all week, told him he could go pound Broadway in a three-piece suit begging for quarters to pay his tuition, told him I'd buy him a monogrammed briefcase and backpack set, horrible, spiteful things I could never unsay.
Christine was fed up, the beginning of the end. We split up a month after that graduation—for her, the last straw. "Why don't you just let him alone? Why don't you just let him do what he wants to do?"
I was in my high ironic mode. "Slow, steady growth, my boy!" I canted, yelled. "Hard work and persistence!"
"Dad," Vincent tried, plaintive. "It'll help all of us."
"All of us! Yes indeed, son, all of us! When the harbor goes up," I clapped him on the back, "all the boats in it go up!" He ran from the kitchen.
"Randall, he's only thinking of his future." She was talking softer the louder I got. "And ours, I might add."
"And ours!" Ah, that was it. The indictment at last. I wouldn't carry us through our golden years, no, Vincent had made the only reasonable choice. No, no, not everyone is Willem de Kooning, and not everyone is Norman Rockwell, either; and those of us in between who never wanted to try to paint apple-cheeked boys in Midwestern luncheonettes but knew we could never even begin to try to paint something like Woman 1—we just muddle about with our half-developed talent and the casings of the ambition we'd had before we realized that our heroes are our heroes precisely because we in-betweens know just enough, and only enough, to stand in awe of them. And some of us are irresponsible enough to go and have families, even after we know what we know, and then we have sons who grow up and want to provide.
Christine was in tears. "And is that so terrible?" And she left the room too, covering her face, her eyes.
No. It is not so terrible.
Christine had two different colored eyes, one green, one blue. The first time I asked her out, back when we were both working at some ad agency, and she turned to speak to me, I saw those eyes and I almost forgot why I was standing at her desk. They disconcerted me, almost as if they were looking in two different directions. "Good Lord, woman," I finally said over coffee, after we'd seen a lousy play, "you would've given Mendel a fit."
"Mendel?"
"A monk. Discovered genetics one day. Your eyes. See, you're not supposed to happen."
"Yes, I know," she smiled. "I'm a mutant."
"Funny," I smiled back, "I'm a mutant too."
And the first time we made love she never closed those eyes. We just gazed at each other the whole time, until our eyes seemed to be half our beings. And we were sick and silly over each other, we would say good night for hours, she would back into her apartment and I would float home to mine, and then we'd call each other not fifteen minutes later. Or we would dispense with good night and sit up all night talking and drinking her wine, or the vastly inferior wine I'd brought with me. "Before I met you, my love," I said one night as we curled up on her couch, "I stayed out all night, I drank beer, I babbled till morning."
"And now you've met me?"
"Ah, well. Now I stay out all night, I babble till morning. But I drink wine."
"Is that so?" Laughing. "And where do I fit in?"
"You fit in here," and we collapsed into hugs.
"I think I fit perfectly," she said.
"Mmmm."
The night we fell in love I'd taken her to see Dave Brubeck. We both sat rapt at Paul Desmond, thinking my God, he must breathe this way. And it became the date like no other. She enjoyed it, she enjoyed being out with me, she even enjoyed putting up with the goatees and the murmuring. "I think I could live in that saxophone," she said afterwards.
"I think I'd rather have your apartment, myself."
She touched my arm. "No—don't you know when you hear or see something that keeps calling you back? You know, some of them you visit, often maybe, but there are the ones you just want to live in like houses?"
"Yes." Our eyes met. "That's exactly—. That's very well put."
She never believed I fell in love with her then. She believed I fell in love with her a few hours later, as we played darts in a pub somewhere near the Hudson, and she beat me, time and time again, and I made her laugh for reasons I cannot for the life of me recall. And then we stood out on the street, looking at what stars we could see, in an October midnight's bracing chill, and she recited "Dover Beach" to me, and we were eye-moist, ecstatic.
She asked: “Have you ever painted anything you want to live in?"
I smiled. "No, not yet, never quite," I said. "Just a thing or two to visit. So far."
Her throat said, "So far." We swooned into each other.
We were married, Vincent was born, she quit copywriting, she miscarried, Corinna was born, almost wasn't born, my stuff sold, my stuff didn't sell, I had day jobs, I didn't have day jobs, we loved each other, we didn't love each other.
They are almost all gone from me now.
*
Corinna and I had trouble with our lobsters. They didn't want to be dismembered, not without a struggle, and the longer the meal went on the more Corinna's back bothered her. She took it well, as usual. "Pizza tomorrow," she half-smiled. "Pizza lying down."
"OK. We'll call for delivery and have them lower it into our mouths. Roman pizza."
"Dad?" she said as I tried to crack the claws. "Randall's not a French name, is it?"
I snorted. The claw shattered. "Hardly. About as un-French as they come. Here," holding out the nutcracker, "do you want me to do yours?"
"Thanks." So little food under such enormous shell-skin. "How come you didn't give us French names?"
"Why? Don't you like your name?"
"I think Corinna's a beautiful name."
"Well, so do I. Eat your lobster." A beautiful name. It was Christine's choice, and Vincent was Christine's choice too. Randall was my father's choice. And when he left my mother changed it to Roger, which could sound French if you wanted it to, but these were the days when nobody wanted it to, when the idea was to Anglicize: Francois became Frank, Maurices turned into Morrises, Michel Nadeau became "Mike" for the rest of his life. And I was stuck with an English Roger. So when my mother died I changed it right back, and when Christine was expecting I was so afraid of picking a wrong name I let her do the choosing instead. And she chose beautiful names, and she had beautiful babies.
"Why do you ask, anyway?" I asked. "You going to give your children French names?"
"No, I was just asking. I don't think I want children."
After dinner we drove back to the motel. We were going to see a movie, but Corinna's back was bothering her, and we decided to settle for the motel's newly-installed HBO. We rounded Minot Street, on our way back through Auburn, and at the top of a steep hill I pulled the car over, and we looked out over the river valley, steeples and factories poking barely out amongst the trees. "This is lovely," sighed Corinna.
"It's a nice view," I admitted. "But the river is filthy."
"Some sightseer you are," she said, and there was a sharp disappointment in her voice.
The air fell still, hushed. Twilight was seeping from the east over a late-summer evening, washing over the valley and its filthy river, and at once the streetlights below us switched on, marking lamp-paths in and out of dark, fading hills. Immediately below and to our left hulked the Quoddy factory, a corner of it silhouetted against the lights of Auburn's Route 4, a corner of darkness suggesting the rest of the shadowy mass. I got an idea.
"Hey, Corinna, you know what?"
"What?"
"How'd you like to get you a pair of Quoddy mocs?"
"Moccasins?! Seriously?"
"Sure! Look, the factory beckons us. It's beckoned us all evening."
She frowned. "It's not open, is it?"
"Sure it is! It's a factory outlet, it keeps late hours. Let's go in and look around."
"I don't think it's open, Dad. Let's go back to the motel."
"C'mon, it's always been open this late. This is the Quoddy place, all the little Quoddies come from here. We'll just look." I started up the car and made our way down the hill. But when I pulled in and checked the door to the outlet—a little shop tucked in the side of the building, under four factory floors with four floors of tremendous, hundred-paned opaque factory windows—she was right, it was closed.
"We can come back tomorrow," I said as I got back in the car.
"Da-ad," Corinna whined. "I don't really want moccasins. I don't even need moccasins. If I were walking it would be another thing."
"Oh, Corinna."
"No, Dad, I need the support. I can't—. I mean, what I am going to do with little leather slippers?"
"Oh, but they're not! These aren't moccasins like that kind of moccasins; they've got soles! Support!" And I realized I was pushing these stupid moccasins as if I were working on commission, and I wondered: why am I doing this? For whom?
"Soles?" Corinna snickered. "And when they die they go to little moccasin heaven?"
"That's right, chickie," I snapped in an Edward G. Robinson voice. "The happy hunting grounds."
We sped out of Auburn, out of Lewiston, back to the motel. "Are they comfortable?"
"Are they comfortable?! Are they comfortable!?!" I let the wheel go, gestured with both hands. "Not only are these moccasins the pinnacle of footwear comfort," I hawked, jabbing a finger in her arm, "but the purchase of just one pair will probably save some poor schmuck's job at the end of the week!"
She rolled down the window. "Well, I guess it would be fun to look."
Next morning dawned clear and chill. We drove to Auburn after a perfunctory breakfast, and the Quoddy outlet was open and empty. We had the store to ourselves.
"I believe we have the run of the mill," I said as we stepped inside and carefully made our way down the half-flight of stairs.
"Very funny, Dad," Corinna singsonged.
And then we began to shop for moccasins as moccasins have never been shopped for. Corinna would pick out three, four pairs at a time, then sit down on one of the stools, and I'd try them on her. The shop was bigger than it looked from outside, and all the aisles were immaculate, row after row of boxed mocs, biege, brown, tan, white, black, even red, green, yellow, fringed, beaded, soled and unsoled, and the clerk smiled at us and let us have our fun, and Corinna picked out pairs and pairs, and I walked, half-ran up and down the aisles with armload after armload of moccasins. "QUODDY MOCS WILL LAST FOREVER," read the sign with the squatting Native girl, and, in smaller print, "if you do not wear them."
"Now, these," I said at last, coming back with only one pair, a pair I decided I liked, deep brown with black soles and hide-leather laces, "these are the moccasins of a lifetime. Try these." I knelt and slipped them on, tied the laces for her. "Now, we can get these, or those others you liked, or we can get both, or we can buy out their entire inventory. There. How's that?"
She wiggled her feet. She stood up. She took a few halting steps, then turned around. And when I looked up into her face I saw her eyes, her eyes that were half Christine's, blue, her blue and mine but with a streak of green in the left iris, running from nine to eleven o'clock, and there were tears in her eyes. She swept back her hair with her hand. "I love you," she whispered, with a sweet, wistful smile. I could feel the reins start to slip, and I wrestled to keep a hold, reached for the stool, something solid. I cast down my eyes, stared at the thin carpet, red and black, as she sat back down and held out her feet; cast down my eyes as I unlaced the moccasins, put them back in their box, folded their tissue-wrapping over them for what seemed like all day, finally just stuffed the wrapping in clumsily and closed the box quickly over it. "We'll take these then," I tried to say to the clerk, but my voice came out old and hoarse, and it cracked at "these." I got up, knees creaking, helped her to her feet, handed her the crutches. The clerk discreetly appeared and disappeared, rang up the moccasins as Corinna waited by the door. We left, me holding the moccasins under my left arm, wanting, not wanting, to hold onto her with my right, and when we reached the car at last I mumbled and opened the door for her, and held her crutches, and handed her the moccasins dumbly, slowly, watching my hands administer themselves, watching this hand holding, giving Corinna her moccasins as if they were they only thing I had left to give. And then I looked up and saw Corinna clear and whole, and there was no more as-if to it, and I stopped wrestling and dropped the crutches and cried under the chill open sky, and she held me and she cried and I cried, I cried at last for the stupid moccasins and for Corinna, for all the accidents I'd caused, for all the accidents we were.