My Father Reading Chekhov

He’s waiting in the red Colt to pick up Rachel from her teaching job. She’s good with the seventh graders, the bright ones sprinting toward Ohio State, the ones who will drop out in a few years, the ones who will be pregnant soon, the ones who will die early in knife brawls or absurd small-town shootouts, the ones dull from parents smacking iron skillets against their skulls.

He wrote a poem for her once—he knew it was sappy—as a young man first dating a young woman: Many a man / has jumped off the pier / all for the love / of Rachel dear.

Now he reads in the red Colt. The brand plate says Dodge Colt, but he knows that, underneath, it’s a well-made Mitsubishi Colt. Satisfying, that well-made things come from all quarters. He waits, because they have the one car and people like to talk to Rachel. Why argue? A long time ago, they’d agreed that they’d call it quits only if one stopped lov- ing the other.

As my mother tells it on the way to the IGA store, she and my father were done with all their arguing by the time I came along. My mother’s fantasy, I know, is to be locked in a public library with a cot and a hot plate to heat up cream of mushroom or tomato soup. My mother says my father will leave his job soon—made into a pencil pusher, he said. We have to be prepared for that.

I think of him sitting in that car, afternoon after afternoon, head bowed.

Over Chekhov. It’s a portable reader. He wants the stories, not the drama. The details of person that dovetail with circumstance. Hadn’t he been asked to tend bar because he didn’t drink? Hadn’t he sung in the quartet because his basso cantabile had the range? Didn’t both he and Chekhov—he knew the comparison was silly—recognize the worth of a gooseberry?

The book is worn. I imagine him resting it against the steering wheel in the snug car, turning the pages, turning down the corners of pages, turning down the same street as the Lady with the Dog, at a distance but keeping her in sight.

For four of those years he waited for me, too, as I fed on yearbook, track, art club, anything my high school of three hundred farmers’ kids could serve up. I am the last child, spinning my cocoon, shifting into self, emerging damp and ready. Never returning.

Chekhov and—at home in our gray farmhouse on four acres with an orchard that blossomed with pear, mulberry, sour cherry, apple, and crab apple—a biographical novel of Freud. I begin to realize, as I sit at my own dining-room table late at night, head bowed over a student’s first draft of a story, how the waiting begins.

Read more from Issue 15.1.