dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof

andrew furman

So I was just about to tell Joan that I was leaving—we were eating our breakfast oatmeal at the granite bar in the kitchen (we ate a lot of oatmeal those days)—when she suggested between spoonfuls that we finally break down and start watching all seven seasons of that popular fantasy TV series before the final, eighth season dropped. I said sure (I said sure a lot those days) and resolved that I’d tell her I was leaving after we completed our media adventure. Sitting through the seventy or so hour-long episodes, I reasoned, would at least give me time to work out exactly how to break this news to my wife of nearly thirty years, news that I knew would shock and upset her.

The challenge, as I saw it, was to minimize the shock and concomitant upset by couching my position in a carefully constructed and cumulative series of sentences and paragraphs detailing (by the second paragraph or so) the slow but steady cooling of the once warm hearth that was our marriage so that by the time I told her that I wanted—no, needed—out (the penultimate paragraph), and that I would soon move into one of the newish condominium complexes closer to our mirrored downtown, where we both worked (the final paragraph), she would have practically arrived at the same conclusion (or at least anticipated said conclusion). Perhaps here I should mention that I’m an attorney.

The particular fantasy TV series in question, I should clarify, was more than merely popular. Rather, it was so wildly popular that to remain utterly oblivious to the main characters, their virtues, weaknesses, and peccadilloes, and the essential plot goings-on, amounted to an act of civil disobedience on par with, say, refusing to stand for the National Anthem or carry a smartphone. Or if it wasn’t quite so grand a gesture, per se, not watching the wildly popular fantasy TV series at least left us nonplussed on countless occasions as work associates, friends, politicians, journalists, and TV news program hosts increasingly slipped references of it into the dependent and independent clauses of their sentences to elucidate or underscore this or that statement. I mention all this mostly as a point of clarification about Joan and me, as we weren’t the type of people to watch a wildly popular fantasy TV series, or to partake of a fantasy anything. My wife was an ophthalmologist, which may be neither here nor there.

We decided to stream the first episode on the TV set in the bedroom after dinner, turning off the lights, brushing and flossing our teeth, and emptying our bladders in advance so that if the wildly popular fantasy TV series failed to engage us, or one of us, we, or just Joan or me, could simply nod off to sleep. I know what you’re thinking. That’s their problem right there, watching TV in bed. Beds, everyone knows, should only be used for sleeping and sex. All I can say to this is that a) loss of consortium ranked rather low on my list of grievances by this point, b) some of my fondest childhood memories involve crowding with my two siblings onto my parents’ creaky, queen-size mattress to watch classic TV programming—The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, I Love Lucy reruns, that sort of thing—and, c) some of my best memories as a husband and father involve Kayleigh’s occasional presence between Joan and me on our queen-size bed, smelling her apple juice breath and the more musky odors of her scalp as we watched some insipid TV program together, or slept, or tried to sleep, Kay between us in the still-dark morning. At this time, she was a junior at a small liberal-arts college two time-zones away, our younger daughter.

The first few episodes of the TV series didn’t put Joan or me to sleep, I’ll say that much for it, although I think we were both expecting a more elevated, if not quite high-brow, entertainment. The show seemed principally to involve a diminutive female heroine in a desert clime, who suffers repeated rape by her barbarian husband, the marriage having been forced upon her by her wormy brother. Inexplicably, however, she grows to love her rapist-husband, and vice-versa, the two of them rather seamlessly transitioning from rape to various lovemaking calisthenics, all the while cooing cosmic endearments at each other until the barbarian’s violent demise.

Ridiculous, Joan uttered beside me a few nights into our adventure just as one of the steamier, and consensual, love scenes between the diminutive female heroine and her former rapist, but now doting, husband cut to a secondary plot set amid lush deciduous trees in a more temperate land across a narrow sea.

I didn’t disagree with my wife on this point, yet something about her critique, its pithy certitude, roused oppositional sentiments, regardless. It was a different time, I rehearsed the ludicrous retort in my mind. You can’t just superimpose our own culturally constructed values on the complex sexual politics that obtained in whatever desert-y place this was. Who are we to doubt the verisimilitude of their love? But I held my tongue (I held my tongue a lot those days) and raised the incline on my side of the bed, instead, so that I could follow the wildly popular fantasy TV series more purposefully, should the occasion arise to have it out with Joan on some future point of contention.

I feel like I should say something more here about the bed, itself. By this point of the marriage, such as it was, our bed was one of those high-end numbers you see advertised everywhere as a “sleep system.” Me, I would have been fine with another Serta, but shortly after Kay graduated high school and decamped for college, Joan insisted that we shell out the big bucks for this top-of-the-line mattress in a California king-size that took up most of our room’s square footage. The behemoth sleep system somehow monitored our slumbering patterns (or claimed to do so), issuing daily reports online, while the mattress was adjustable in every way imaginable: firmness, temperature, and angle of repose, bow to stern. Joan even insisted that we pay a bit extra for the model that allowed each side to be adjusted as independent territories.

Maybe we should just get separate beds while we’re at it, I quipped at the mall-store, the only mild protest I offered that day. This made Joan scowl at me. The pretty sales lady struggled to maintain a neutral expression on her face, having noticed Joan’s scowl or, perhaps, having detected the darkness of my stupid joke that maybe wasn’t a joke at all.

Our elder daughter, Rachel, I might have mentioned earlier, used to visit our old queen-size bed, too, but she didn’t quite have the stick-to-it-ness Kay had when it came to these nighttime visitations or when it came to anything. She tended mostly to creep down the stairs and encroach upon our master bedroom in the middle of the night to use our bathroom, which she, for whatever reason, preferred to the bathroom she shared with her younger sister between their upstairs bedrooms, flicking on the light switch in both our room and our adjoining bathroom to do so. The piercing white light aggravated me to no end (I aggravated quite easily those days) and made me holler at her half-asleep from the bed to turn off the lights, which might have been why these nighttime visitations ceased. Rachel never could quite absorb verbal discipline in the manner in which it was intended. The mildest reprimand from Joan or me, or from one of her teachers or coaches, would wound her to the core, raising the blood to blotch her cheeks and neck and making her eyes quiver in their sockets, while the more serious chastisements tended to ricochet off her like seeds sprinkled across hardest earth.

I’m not quite sure what I would have done had Joan made it clear after those first few nights we spent watching the wildly popular fantasy TV series that she hated the show and that we wouldn’t be watching any additional episodes, after all. I braced myself for this follow-up to her Ridiculous assessment. Would I have forced matters to a crisis by telling her that I wanted out of the house and marriage right then and there, or would I have waited until our morning oatmeal at the granite bar to launch into my carefully constructed and cumulative series of sentences and paragraphs, detailing the slow but steady cooling of our once warm hearth? In the end, it didn’t matter, because Joan made no gesture one way or the other about the series that night, just returned her expanse of overpriced mattress to “Flat” with her remote control, fluffed up her pillow, turned her pajamaed ass toward me beneath the sheets, and issued one of her weary exhales that may have contained a multitude of meanings, but which I decided not to press her on, tired as I was.

The next night it was Joan who set us back on our schedule of watching the TV series.

Let’s go to bed, she suggested shortly after we consumed our chef-designed, meal-kit dinner of salmon, herbed couscous, and broccoli. We received the meals mail-order those days in insulated cardboard boxes (meals which featured far too many roasted cruciferous vegetables as sides). Now, twenty-some odd years earlier, Joan’s suggestion that we go to bed just after dinner might have been a euphemism for let’s enjoy a good screw. But I somehow knew that let’s go to bed only meant let’s start in early on the next episode of the show and maybe we’ll have time to watch two or three episodes before we fall asleep. All the same, there was a timbre of actual excitement to her voice as she rose from her chair to clear her plate, which weirdly jolted me. It had been a long time since I’d detected that lively sound from my wife’s throat.

Joan, I might mention here, hated her ophthalmology practice, and often came home from work with a joyless expression painted across her face. Her practice, as far as I could determine, mostly entailed negotiating the outsize demands of her geriatric patients or their adult children-chaperones, arguing with insurance company medical directors or their underlings over their ever dwindling coverages, and managing a rotating assortment of inept or downright thieving front-office staff.

The secondary plotline of the wildly popular fantasy TV series, set amid deciduous trees in a more temperate clime, involved a virtuous lord of a northern parish (or whatever those land holdings were called), who loses his head to a sadistic little prick of a child-king after the lord’s wife makes a series of astonishingly stupid tactical decisions without consulting her husband. The sheer inanity of the woman over several episodes and nights enraged me out of all proportion to her ill-conceived actions or to the level of significance that any fantasy TV series—no matter how wildly popular—should have held over my emotions.

You have to communicate for Christ’s sake! I cried at the screen from the bed one night, just as the virtuous lord’s severed head kerplunked against the wooden stage, which elicited a snort from Joan’s nose. I didn’t know exactly what she meant by that snort, but I was able to interpret the sardonic gist of it, at which point I instantly redirected my ire toward the rival parish that was the other side of our sleep system.

What? I pressed. What’s so funny?

I stole a glance at my wife across the broad expanse of mattress. The blue light from the TV in our dark room danced across her eyes, which remained on the screen. The producers, writers, or directors of the show were nattering on from a small quadrant as the credits rolled, offering their Cliff’s Notes version of various scenes we had just watched, in case there was something we missed. But I wasn’t listening to what they were saying and could somehow tell that Joan, even though her gaze remained on the screen, wasn’t really watching or listening to the TV, either.

I wouldn’t say that communication is one of your virtues, she finally said.

Well it certainly hasn’t held me back.

Now, this was cruel of me to say as it wasn’t merely a reference to my thriving estates and trusts practice (a byproduct of certain fortuitous changes in the tax laws governing inheritance) but a rear-guard assault on Joan’s foundering ophthalmology practice that brought her no joy.

I wasn’t talking about work, she replied, responding to my cruelty in kind.

Her words pierced me. I couldn’t quite look at her anymore so I gazed absently, instead, at the TV screen, which had segued to clips of upcoming episodes. The room grew very quiet, even though neither one of us had done anything to the TV volume. I could hear my breath travel the reed of my throat and could hear, too, the overgrown branches of our oak tree scratching against the aluminum gutter of our roof, reminding me of my household neglect.  

I know you weren’t, I said.  

Joan was talking about my parenting of our girls—Rachel, specifically. I’m not sure how exactly I knew that that’s what she meant, as her snort over my comment about the episode we were watching and her subsequent remarks were the closest she’d come up to that point of reprimanding me outright for my fatherly failings. Which is partly to say that I don’t think Joan was ever so great at this communication business, either. In any case, I steeped in this bitter marinade for several moments. Yet my initial anger at her oblique criticism turned into something else as I lay there. I felt something shift inside me as the oak branches I ought to have trimmed with the pole saw weeks ago continued to whine against the second-story gutter, as my wife’s side of the bed groaned upon her command to return to “Flat.” All this time Joan had felt this way but spared me the knowledge, just soldiered through crisis after crisis the best she could, and mostly on her own.

I don’t think it was ever a matter of me not caring for or loving our elder daughter when she was a child. I wasn’t lacking in fatherly feeling, is what I suppose I mean to say. I just couldn’t quite translate these feelings into commensurate words or actions most of the time, or at all. That I somehow lacked the equipment pained me, and this pain sometimes manifested itself at inconvenient times and in odd ways. There was a laminated, letter-size card of gradually shrinking text that Joan used in her office to test the efficacy of her patients’ readers. I remember the first time I scanned the card after I walked down the street to my wife’s office, middle of the workday, to pick up my new progressives. It was right around the time that Rachel was nine or so, when the solitary predilections her teachers worried over as early as preschool, which we tended to write-off as innocuous, gave way to her deep-seated anomie, which we could no longer ignore.

I give to all good fathers and their mothers, but in trust for their children, nevertheless, the largest print at the top of the card read, all the good little words of praise and all quaint pet names, and I charge said parents to use them justly, but generously, as the needs of their children shall require. . . . The text continued its bequeathals in ornate and antiquated language for several shrinking lines. The words thickened my throat as I sat there on the padded stool beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, as treble notes from the voice of Joan’s receptionist on the phone out front seeped through the walls, for I had begun to struggle, even then, to locate and deploy good words of praise and encouragement when it came to our elder daughter, so perplexed was I by her every mood and action. I was aware of Joan lingering in the doorframe, her visor with its magnifying lenses propped up on her forehead, waiting for me to tell her whether my new prescription was okay. She had squeezed me in between appointments.

Well? she finally asked, her voice tinged with what I took to be impatience, if not annoyance. Something wrong with the lenses? Did the lab screw them up?

Here I might have shared with Joan how moved I was by the words on the laminated card she had just handed me. I might have made inquiries about where she found this curious poem or Bible passage, or whatever it was. I might have asked, Have you read this? or simply recited the rest of the passage out loud to her, or part of it, anyway, so that we might together affirm its earnest and heartfelt verities. I leave to children exclusively, the shrinking script continued, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. . . .

But something, I don’t know precisely what, kept me from saying or doing any of this. She seemed unusually busy that day, and I had my own grasping clients to deal with, plus I felt the first stirrings of doubt over my initial high opinion of the purple prose on the laminated card. These might have been hackneyed sentiments culled from some mass-produced greeting card. Anyway, Rachel’s condition required a greater measure of masculine toughness on my part (didn’t it?), not this wallow in fatuous feeling. I cleared my throat to bring myself to and sniffed back the tears I hoped Joan would mistake for my allergies. I might simply have been embarrassed.

The glasses are fine, I answered.

I think that both of us began more and more to look forward to the long, dark evenings we shared in bed over those weeks and months, watching episode after episode of the wildly popular fantasy TV series. Ready for bed? Joan would ask, or I would ask, while we scraped clean our dinner dishes and filed them in the rack of our dishwasher. And Joan, or I, would say, Yep!

The secondary plotline involved the young daughter of the virtuous lord of a northern parish, on the lam in the frightful woods ever since her father’s abrupt demise. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or so, small too, yet she manages across several episodes and seasons to evade all manner of lethal threats—thirst, starvation, roving bands of scoundrels and thieves, the prick child-king’s assassins, carnivorous wild beasts—to survive and even thrive. Her combat skills grow considerably by the fourth season. At one point, she manages to kill a miscreant bent on raping and murdering her by stabbing him about the face and neck with several staccato blows of a dagger she’d secreted beneath her leather shirt-sleeve.

Jeez, the kid has moxie, I uttered, as the audaciousness of her actions seemed to require some sort of utterance. The light rain outside offered the child its soft applause, as well, against our metal roof.

I’ll say, Joan replied. Yes. Something about this last bit, this Yes, maybe the slight pause prior to its utterance, told me she wasn’t thinking anymore about the precocious girl on the TV, and suddenly nor was I.

It’s not really something you can teach, I said. Moxie. Grit. Whatever you call it.

Maybe not.

We lay there listening to the rain as the episode segued to the primary plotline of the diminutive female heroine in the desert clime. Her story now involved dragons, which I imagined was obligatory of the fantasy genre. Dragons were bound to show up, eventually, is what I suppose I’m saying, and once they did it sort of lowered my appreciation for the show. The computer-generated creatures were rather young and small at this stage of the series and so adorable that I expected Joan to comment upon their adorableness. That she remained silent told me that her attention still hadn’t returned to the episode. The rain outside intensified and began to pound against our metal roof, making it difficult for me to hear the TV. The diminutive heroine was knitting her dark eyebrows together to betray fierce resolve over something or another. She had moxie too. I considered raising the volume on the TV so that we could hear, but then reconsidered.

I wonder what would have happened if Rachel stuck with the viola, I said over the rain, as if that would have made all the difference. I detected through my peripheral vision the slightest bobbing of Joan’s head as she weighed the merits of this comment. We somehow managed to coax Rachel into giving the viola a try after she jettisoned in short order the manifold other constructive, extra-curricular activities we foisted upon her: painting, ceramics, ice skating, karate, ballet, Zumba, soccer, basketball, swimming, piano, girl scouts, lacrosse. (Our Kay, by contrast, fell early in love with lacrosse and captained the women’s team at her small college.) The wife of one of my law partners was a professional violist and for a small fortune administered lessons, privately. To our surprise, Rachel stuck with the instrument for most of her middle school years, even practiced some days without being prodded. I think it gave her a charge to play an instrument that she perceived as oppositional to the more ballyhooed violin, opposition being Rachel’s métier. She managed within months to play classical songs that I actually recognized; the arrangements might have been on the simple side, but still. I had worried that Rachel’s hand tremor, on account of her medications, would complicate the requisite movements of her fingers to strike the proper chords, but her tremor somehow disappeared while her hands were so usefully employed. I used to marvel during her recitals at the strange expression of placid concentration on her face above the chin rest. Her expression intensified—her nostrils dilated and she seemed to grip her teeth with her lips as if to hold them inside her mouth—as she summoned the viola’s most resonant, somber notes with the well-rosined horsehair bow.

All this only bolstered my conviction that the viola was the perfect pursuit for our elder daughter. Once high school started, however, Rachel claimed such mental fatigue from negotiating the complicated personalities and demands of her teachers and peers that it was impossible for her to continue her viola lessons if (I anticipated the strategic threat before it escaped her mouth) we wanted her to finish all her homework, too. We weren’t happy about her giving up the viola. We consulted with Rachel’s therapist, who took our daughter’s side (she ever seemed to side with Rachel, which enraged me) and suggested that we just give her a break from the lessons for a while and then “reevaluate.”  

It’s not like we didn’t try to make her stick with it, Joan finally said. We could only push so much. She knew how we felt about her viola. How proud we were at the recitals. Besides . . .

Joan let her next thought, whatever it was, linger there in the flickering blue darkness between us. The rain ceased, as it tended to cease shortly after such strong downpours. It seemed that we would just watch the rest of the episode now that we could hear the words emanating from the screen. Two men rather new to the series were canoodling with each other in a brothel on a large bed festooned with shimmering linens, wine goblets, oozing cheeses, and exotic fruits that vaguely recalled the Middle East. There was a surprising amount of homoerotic male sex in the show (complemented by an unsurprising amount of homoerotic female sex), enough casual and sporting homoerotic male sex to make me wonder, if only for an instant, whether I had too hastily dismissed an entire realm of carnal activity that might have brought me pleasure. Then I tasted Joan’s Besides once again in my mouth, which could have meant, a) it’s pointless to ask what-ifs about the past, b) Rachel’s musical gifts, her instructor implied, were not overly prodigious, anyway, c) I really thought she’d pick it back up after we “reevaluated” during the summer, or, d) can we talk about this later, I’m trying to concentrate now on the two canoodling men in this episode of the wildly popular fantasy TV series? 

Goodnight, Joan, I said once the producers, writers, or directors of the show appeared in their small quadrant and the credits began to roll, returning my side of the bed to “Flat.”

She said goodnight back, her soft voice lilted by surprise, as if she wasn’t used to hearing me say goodnight, which I supposed she wasn’t.

Williston Fish. He was the fellow who wrote the lines on the laminated card in Joan’s office. It took me all of five seconds to locate the passage online in my office after picking up my new progressives from Joan’s office. The piece was first published, apparently, in Harper’s Weekly magazine in 1898. Reading the words aglow on my computer screen moved me for the second time that day. . . . And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, with the dragon-flies that skim the surface of said waters, and the odors of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees. And all the meadows, with the clover blooms and butterflies thereof; and all woods, with their appurtenances of squirrels and whirring birds and echoes and strange noises, and all distant places which may be visited, together with the adventures there found. All the snowclad hills where one may coast, and all the streams where to skate. . . .

I can’t say that reading these lines impacted my actual parenting at the time in any constructive or lasting way. As Rachel’s difficulties escalated, I tended to withdraw rather than engage foursquare with whatever crisis befell her and us. I pretty much left things to Joan. Partly, I reasoned to myself, because Rachel was a girl and I felt ill-equipped as a man to negotiate the tricky emotional terrain. And partly because Kay (almost ten years younger than her sister) had become such good company, by contrast. And partly because my work demands escalated as my practice took off, and there was suddenly a lot riding on my success as Joan’s practice had started to teeter. This was right around the time that Rachel was sixteen or so, when it had been clear for quite some time that medications and therapy would never “cure” our elder daughter, per se, but only help her “manage” this world that wasn’t quite set up to accommodate her personhood. It hadn’t occurred to me—I wouldn’t let it occur to me—that saddling Joan with the lion’s share of our parental duties might have exacerbated her career difficulties. Joan didn’t complain about her lost time at work, those numerous occasions she had to chaperone Rachel to this and that doctor, therapist, acupuncturist, or herbalist (if I recall), or scurry off to Rachel’s school to retrieve our elder daughter after one of her outbursts or other disciplinary infractions, and advocate for her to whatever principal or vice principal threatened suspension or expulsion. Nor, as I’ve suggested, did Joan ever tell me outright that it might have helped matters if I could only shift some of my energies from Kay and my work to extend a greater measure of love, affection, or simple encouragement toward our foundering elder daughter once in a while.

A tertiary plotline of the wildly popular fantasy TV series involved a handsome, shaggy-haired bastard son of the virtuous (though now deceased) lord of a northern parish and his peregrinations across the frozen tundra of an even more distant north as he seeks bravely to meet his fate, which may involve either, a) true love in the heteronormative romantic fashion, b) steadfast guardianship of the entire civilized realm against a gathering horde of undead as a member of a vaguely sinister brotherhood, which involves lifelong celibacy for reasons never fully explained, c) roaming the known and unknown world as a lone wolf, seeking the pecuniary, erotic, and alimentary rewards that come his way, d) gaining credibility somehow as the rightful heir of this or that prestigious house, parish, throne, or, e) some combination of the above.

I say that this handsome, shaggy-haired character’s plot was tertiary, but the genius of the series (if I might concede that it possessed a certain genius) was that you never quite knew which plotline, character, or characters were primary, secondary, tertiary, and so on and so forth, or if these particular terms were at all apposite to the universe evoked in the wildly popular fantasy TV series. As soon as Joan or I latched on to a particular character and his or her associated plotline, that character was murdered or killed in some other fashion, unmasked as a fraud, or simply “disappeared” by the writers of the series, and we were left scrambling to reconsider and redirect our attentions and sympathies. All of which made me wonder by the fourth season or so whether there might be an analogue to pursue in my decidedly less fantastical existence.

Although I hadn’t thought about my life in quite these terms, it also involved a plot, a cast of major and supporting players, and a few climate-control interiors for its setting. That is, I was living out a narrative—however unpublished and obscure—that at least brought a sense of mental order to my experiences, if not much by way of happiness. What were all my grandiose plans to leave my house and long marriage if not an attempt to alter the trajectory of my plot and introduce new characters and settings to the narrative that was my life? While this insight might have bolstered my resolve to forge ahead as planned, the way the wildly popular fantasy TV series kept upsetting my initial expectations gave me pause. Perhaps the real trouble in my life wasn’t what I took it to be at all, not at all. What if I was every bit as wrong about what I took to be my primary plotline as I was repeatedly wrong about the wildly popular fantasy TV series? Perhaps the source of my malaise was that I had been wildly misreading my own story.  

It had been years since I located online and read that extended passage from Williston Fish, but, for whatever reason, watching the wildly popular fantasy TV series summoned the piece to my mind. It might have had something to do with how many of the plotlines on the show involved bequeathals and inheritances, the sanctity of bloodlines, the scattering of family members and their desperate attempts to reunite, the fierceness of family love. I looked up the passage again and read it in its entirety once, twice, three times. I still wasn’t certain whether this Fish fellow wrote it in a serious or slightly satirical spirit, but it moved me all the same, just as it moved me years ago. . . . I leave to children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the Night and the Moon and the train of the Milky Way to wonder at; and I give to each child the right to choose a star that shall be his, and I direct that the child’s father shall tell him the name of it, in order that the child shall always remember the name of that star after he has learned and forgotten astronomy.

The handsome, shaggy-haired bastard son of the virtuous (though now deceased) lord of a northern parish soon developed a love interest, who fast became one of our favorite characters. The ginger-haired gal, quick and true with a bow, sure had moxie. Moxie was sort of a requirement for all the female characters, it became clear, if they were to survive for any appreciable amount of time in the manifold cutthroat environments of the wildly popular fantasy TV series. This particular female character also possessed impeccable bone structure and a winning Scottish dialect (it might have been an Irish or Welsh dialect, for all we knew). In any case, Joan and I tended to perk up on our sleep system during the couple’s shared scenes across the frozen tundra. One scene involved their passionate lovemaking among and between a series of thermal baths inside a mood-lit cave that resembled an upscale Icelandic day-spa, or at least what I imagined an upscale day-spa probably looked like in Iceland. We felt certain that this comely, ginger-haired lass chock full of moxie would survive at least three or four seasons and perhaps till the end of the series. We settled in to enjoy their nubile bodies and bristling repartee.

Imagine my astonishment when a rather random arrow to her back during a nighttime skirmish erases her presence from the series. I turned toward my silent wife to see whether she was left as slack-jawed as I was and was astonished afresh to notice a tear skid down her cheek, just barely aglow in the dim light of the nocturnal TV battle still raging. It wasn’t like my wife to cry over something on TV, or over anything.

Now Joanie, I said, don’t take it so hard. You know that’s how it goes. Most of the characters die sooner or later.

It’s not that.

What then?

My innards seized for the split-second before my wife’s response as the possibility flashed that Joan might ask me for a divorce, that she might have been preparing to do so all the while of our media adventure. But this wasn’t what she said.

It’s Kay. She got that summer internship at EPI.

My innards scrambled to process this unanticipated nugget of information, my visceral dread (which was a surprising feeling to feel, in and of itself) replaced with . . . what?

Well that’s good news isn’t it?

I had no idea that Kay had applied for a summer internship at EPI. I had no idea what EPI even stood for and Joan’s blithe utterance of the acronym stung a bit as I thought about it—that Kay had confided all along in her mother but not in me. I didn’t advertise this small hurt in the midst of what seemed to be Joan’s greater hurt.

Yes, she replied. It’s good news. But. . . It took her a moment to gather her next thought. I could hear the muted glottals of the producers, writers, or directors of the show, who were now discussing the episode we had just watched. I could hear the overgrown oak branches as they whined against the roof gutter. I could hear a mockingbird outside our window chattering away as these crazy birds tended to do from the shrubbery and fence-posts, even in the middle of the night certain times of the year. But I wasn’t really listening to the crazy bird or the oak branches or the voices on the TV.  

She’ll never live here with us again will she? Joan finally asked.

No, I replied. Probably not. I’m sorry, Joan. And then I realized too, in a way I hadn’t quite realized yet, that our younger child would probably never live with us again, that she was off on her own adventures that no longer included her mother and father.

I like to think that Joan and I reached a silent understanding at that moment, as the screen grew dark awaiting our next command, that we would soldier through this thing together, by which I mean the rest of our lives (which weren’t without daily satisfactions and even joys), and that we reached this understanding even before we heard the complaint of the stairs as our elder daughter, Rachel, descended from her bedroom, even before we heard the three raps of her knuckles against our door and we simultaneously declared, Come in!—both of us more brightly than usual—to see what it was that we could do for our adult daughter at this hour, what we could do for her tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. She poked her round head inside the narrow crease between door and jamb, which reminded me for whatever reason of something I hadn’t thought of in many years, a good memory that brought a curious smile to my face. I lifted my fingers to my bristled mouth in the darkness of our bedroom to feel the smile. It was her birthday that I remembered, her original birthday, when our elder daughter descended so quickly down my wife’s birth canal that she crowned before the nurses even thought to check Joan’s nether regions, much less summon the obstetrician. She was anxious even then, our darling Rachel, as she remains now, to be in our loving presence.