In The Cards

A girl—let us say she is a young teen—sits in the dining room of her New York apartment playing solitaire. “Playing” may be the wrong word because of what’s at stake. If she wins out in this game called patience, if she ends a game with four piles—one for each suit and in order from ace to King-- her father will come home on time after work and he will not be drunk. Patience is the right word; she knows the odds of winning in any individual game are stacked heavily against her, so in order to bring her father home she must play many, many games— this evening and every other weekday evening for the foreseeable future.

This girl is, it turns out, incredibly lucky. For the moment, we are not talking about the cards themselves. She is lucky because, despite the years obsession and ritual, she does not in any obvious way turn her superstitions inward. It would be so easy to play the game out on her body and not on the cards. How is it that her rituals do not involve starving herself? It could so easily have been different, worse: not merely “If I win the game, daddy will come home,” but “If I don’t eat during the day daddy will come home at night?” How is it that the ritual does not involve other forms of self-mutilation like cutting, although these are the days before cutting was spoken of as something young people do to control the world around them. It would be so easy to do what some of her friends and classmates have done: turns to drugs or alcohol. Has she somehow dodged the alcoholic gene that some books tell her is responsible for her father’s behavior? Or is this great exemption a matter of will—and of patience?

The solitaire is, by definition, hers alone. The girl and her mother do, however, share other homing rituals. Each night, her mother calls her father at the time tv sitcoms say is the end of father’s workday: 5 o’clock, or, if her mother can hold out (patience again), 5:15. There are no cell phones, so this is the last chance of contact if she does not want to call the bar at the Delegates’ Lounge in the United Nations building where her husband is probably having one drink or many with his colleagues. This is not an attractive option and reserved only for emergencies: a call to the bartender is humiliating and not always productive. Often, if her husband answers the phone in his office she puts her daughter on the phone. “When are you coming home?” the daughter always asks, loathing herself. She and her mother have identified a pattern: If her father says he will leave in 15 minutes, or 10, or some smallish number under thirty, they know in all likelihood he will be home in time for dinner and an evening of playing games and watching tv. If he says “I’ll be home soon,” his arrival time is ambiguous: there is no telling when and in what state he might appear. If he says, not always thickly, “all is well,” he will likely be out almost all night. The card playing will be less effective then, although it will be continued just in case. The card playing works best, the girl feels, as a preventative, but she cannot stop playing just in case it is a talisman against accidents. The one time her father fell in the street coming home—the one time, in her memory at least, he was physically hurt—she had stopped playing patience.

The girl is lucky, but not undamaged. In late middle age she no longer plays solitaire, but she still defaults to rituals of homing, a word she has learned to use in her own way only in her sixties. The word means many things to her, but one of those meanings involves ensuring that everyone who should be home is present in the house, reeling them in through forms of magical thinking. It involves an inability to rest until the home is full. The form it takes in her adult life is marginally more benign because the people she homes (it is an active verb, even a kind of violence) are not alcoholics and there is rarely if ever drinking involved. Eliminating, as it were, the alcohol from the picture, reveals the bones of the homing process, the skeleton of its  desires and demands.  

Again, she is lucky. Although she has married a man who reminds her of her father in many ways—his affinity for making things, his felicity with writing, his uncompromising adoration of his children—he does not have what her mother called “a drinking problem.” How did she escape choosing an alcoholic life partner? The repetition happens elsewhere, somewhere inside of her, triggered by a decision or a feeling that her husband is “late.” Lateness has little to do with the clock, although it is tethered to the diurnal rhythms of his comings and goings. She tries—how hard she sometimes has to try-- to take into account the fact her husband is a man who likes to explore and wander, that he takes longer to do errands than she does. She remembers that once he went out for basil and came back with a dining room set—two sideboards, a table and eight chairs. She tries to take into account that when he goes fishing he is always later than he says: if he is catching fish he will always stay to catch more, and if he is not having any luck he will stay to see if he has any. She knows these things, and all is well for a while. At some point, however, something snaps and he is in a car accident or drowned. He is never drunk.

And then, of course, there are her sons, now adults. When they are staying at home as they sometimes do, she homes them.  Although she is delighted when her sons visit friends and have adventures, there is always a moment, usually but not always after dark, when her body and her psyche decide they should be home—or more accurately that they should already have come home. There is no logic to this moment or to the calibration of it: she can only control the eruption of this by asking them to name a time when they will be back. Almost always, her sons cooperate. They make room for her anxieties. She must describe the feelings that way—as a weakness or a pathology—for them to be legible. 

Technology helps to a point. The world has changed and there are cell phones and GPS tracking. One of her sons shares her iPhone account; she can, in an emergency—however she might define the word-- track his movements: see him, or rather his phone, moving south on Highway 288 or north (and towards home) on Interstate 45. Her older son and her husband have different kinds of phones; that son has disentangled himself from the family cloud accounts, but has patched together for her a less-than-perfectly accurate tracking system that often claims he is in Atlanta. There is no technological tracking of her husband, who also sometimes leaves his phone at home. The tracking is something like the card playing, although more useful. Or perhaps it is more like the phone call to the bartender, the emergency step that the girl (a woman now of course) uses only when she feels so terrible she can’t resist. Perhaps tracking is actually a drug: she can resist to a point but willpower is never enough. Perhaps she has inherited the addiction gene after all. 

The woman who is writing this remembers in the act of writing that the word “tracked” in her family predated the invention of the cell phone and GPS. It was her mother’s word—not, oddly, for trying to trace her wayward husband, but for her efforts to locate her daughter, first as a girl and then as a woman. The word, shorn of its technological associations, reminds the woman that she was once the tracked as well as the tracker. This was of course when her mother was alive, when part of her own contract with an anxious parent was always to check in, always to answer the phone, always to call. Sometimes the effort to reassure her mother actually put her in danger: she remembers crossing a lake at night in a canoe without lights to call her mother from a phone booth on the opposite shore. She remembers the dark journey back to her camp, and a wind that came up that blew her canoe around. She remembers a ritual of nightly calls that lasted until her mother’s death. She remembers resenting the calls and making them, no matter what else was going on.

Sometimes the woman and her husband imagine what it might have been like if her mother had survived into the age of the cell phone. She would, they agree, have loved the idea of a daughter always on call. She would have battled her discomfort with technology to learn to use it at the service of homing. But of course, technology has its limits. It cannot tell you if a moving dot is a person or a phone, for example. What after all, is the phone’s relation to a body? Phones have survived car crashes that have killed their owners; phones can be stolen, lost, misplaced, run out of juice, be offline. People can turn them off. Technology cannot solve the fundamental problem at the heart of homing: the terror that a loved one will not come home at all.