The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry(40)

“You took that turn a little fast, darling,” Daniel says.

She thinks about driving them both off the road and into the ocean, and the thought makes her happy, happier than she would have been if she’d only killed herself. She realizes in that moment that she doesn’t want to be dead. She wants Daniel to be dead. Or at least gone. Yes, gone. She’d settle for gone.

“I don’t love you anymore.”

“Ismay, you’re being absurd. You always get like this at weddings.”

“You are not a good man,” Ismay says.

“I’m complex. And maybe I’m not good, but I’m certainly not the worst. It’s no reason to end a perfectly average marriage,” Daniel says.

“You’re the grasshopper, and I’m the ant. And I’m tired of being the ant.”

“That’s a rather juvenile reference. I’m sure you can do better.”

Ismay pulls the car over to the side of the road. Her hands are shaking.

“You are bad. And what’s worse is, you’ve made me bad,” she says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A car whizzes by them, close enough to rattle the walls of the SUV. “Ismay, this is an insane place to park. If you want to argue, let’s drive home and do it properly.”

“Every time I see her with A.J. and Amelia, I’m sick. She should be ours.”

“What?”

“Maya,” Ismay says. “If you’d done the right thing, she’d be ours. But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.” She looks steadily at Daniel. “I know that Marian Wallace was your girlfriend.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Don’t lie! I know that she came here to kill herself in your front yard. I know that she left Maya for you, but you either were too lazy or too much of a coward to claim her.”

“If you thought that was true, why didn’t you do something?” Daniel asks.

“Because it isn’t my job! I was pregnant, and it wasn’t my responsibility to clean up after your affairs.”

Another car speeds past, nearly sideswiping them.

“But if you’d been brave and come to me, I would have adopted her, Daniel. I would have forgiven you and I would have taken her in. I waited for you to say something, but you never did. I waited for days, then weeks, then years.”

“Ismay, you can believe what you want, but Marian Wallace was not my girlfriend. She was a fan who came to a reading.”

“How stupid do you think I am?”

Daniel shakes his head. “She was a girl who came to a reading, and a girl I slept with once. How could I even be sure the child was mine?” He tries to take Ismay’s hand, but she pulls away.

“It’s funny,” Ismay says. “Every last bit of love I had for you is gone.”

“I still love you,” Daniel says. At that moment, headlights catch the rearview mirror.

The hit comes from behind, knocking the car into the center of the road so that it is crossing both lanes of traffic.

“I think I’m okay,” Daniel says. “Are you okay?”

“My leg,” she says. “It might be broken.”

More headlights, this time from the opposite side of the road. “Ismay, you have to drive.” He turns in time to see the truck. A twist, he thinks.

In the first chapter of Daniel’s famous first novel, the main character is in a catastrophic car accident. Daniel had struggled with the section, because it occurred to him that everything he knew about horrible car accidents had come from books he’d read and movies he’d seen. The description he finally settled on, after what must have been fifty passes, never much satisfied him. A series of fragments in the style of modernist poets. Apollinaire or Breton, maybe, but not nearly as good as either.

Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes.

Horns, flaccid and come too late.

Metal crumpling like tissue.

The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere.

Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn’t been as bad as he had thought.





PART II





A Conversation with My Father


1972 / Grace Paley

Dying father argues with daughter about the “best” way to tell a story. You’ll love this, Maya, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go downstairs and push it into your hands right now.

—A.J.F.





The assignment for Maya’s creative-writing class is to tell a story about someone you wish you knew better. “My biological father is a ghost to me,” she writes. She thinks the first sentence is good, but where to go from there? After 250 words and a whole morning wasted, she concedes defeat. There’s no story because she doesn’t know anything about the man. He truly is a ghost to her. The failure was in the conception.

A.J. brings her a grilled cheese sandwich. “How’s it going, Hemingway?”

“Don’t you ever knock?” she says. She accepts the sandwich and shuts the door. She used to love living above the store, but now that she is fourteen and Amelia lives there, too, the apartment feels small. And noisy. She can hear customer downstairs all day. How is a person to write under such conditions?