Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Heidi Julavits

Author:Heidi Julavits [Julavits, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The navigation in this area is chancy business. The tide runs hard and there are few bells and whistles. The landmark from the west is the brilliant light on the Cuckolds. If you come on a clump of lobster buoys, bear off to southward, stop, and listen.

Usually, the woods are emerald green and magical. Usually, the moss is soft and bouncy but there’s been no rain again. It snaps like little bones underfoot.

My son and I wait in the dirt parking lot. We’re going on a hike with a conversational antagonist and his daughter. The antagonist, as always, is late. Finally, he arrives. My son and I strike out for the trailhead while he searches for his daughter’s sweater in his trunk and complains about the traffic at the bridge. The rangers who manage the nature preserve still print paper maps, and then camouflage them in a wooden cubby nailed to a tree. A person needs a map to the maps. While I don’t need a map—I’ve been here a hundred times—I take one anyway, if for no other reason than to put it in a pocket to be found a year or two or ten from now, like a receipt to prove how I’d spent this day.

When the antagonist and his daughter catch up, she sprints ahead to join my son, hopping from rock to rock along the water’s edge. Soon the two of them are out of sight. The antagonist tries to make small talk with me, but I know his game. He’s scanning the harmless chatter for an objection. Suddenly, we hear yelling. Maybe someone fell in the water. We run ahead, prepared to perform a rescue. The tides around here are tricky and swift.

When we find our children, they’re on a rock and dry.

We crouch at the rock’s edge to look at the squid they’ve found. The squid’s eye regards us with alarm. I grab a stick to free it from the seaweed. It returns and gets retangled. I free it again; it returns. I finally leave it alone to die, or calm down, or procreate, or hide.

The girl runs ahead again. The antagonist chases her and requests her, in a roundabout fashion, to wait. (I would really like to walk beside you.) She ignores him. In her defense, she’s refusing to listen to what he’s refusing to say. She’s been allowed, since birth, to do whatever she likes, because her parents, following the advice of a child-rearing book, don’t believe in saying the word no to her, which might explain why her father is so contrary with his friends, given he’s forbidden, when he’s with his daughter, from expressing any opposition.

As he hurries off to find his daughter, my son tells me about a new boy he met at camp.

We’re LBGFFs, he says. Do you know what that means?

I hazard some guesses. Linebacker Bob Gamely Follows Frog. Lemon Beard Giant Finds Fiancé.

No, he says. Little Bit Gay Friends Forever.

He’s cheerful as he says this. Possibly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.