Do You Know Where You Are? : Part 2

Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table
by Cameron Stracher

(Page 2 of 2)

But no one owns New York; we just rented it. The city was no place to raise a family, despite the proliferation of strollers on the sidewalks. Kids needed space, light, grass, and schools that didn't cost twenty-five thousand dollars and require IQ tests, achievement tests, blood tests. Their parents needed peace. On West Eighty-sixth Street, my son's first word was "loud." My daughter played in a sandbox without sand. And so, after eight years in Manhattan, we bade farewell to our tight quarters, telling ourselves we were headed for a better, more spacious abode, with room for us and a table for dinner. We went north, as so many had before us, venturing into southern Connecticut where Mr. Blandings had built his dream house and John Cheever had torn it down. We would be content with a serviceable kitchen.

With a fifty-five-mile commute, however, getting home in time to eat, let alone cook, was a practical impossibility. I rarely returned before eight or nine o'clock at night, which was simply too late for our children. Sometimes my wife waited for me; more often, I picked up something at Grand Central and ate on the train: pizza from Two Boots, samosas from Café Spice, a turkey sandwich from Junior's. Some nights I didn't come home at all. In addition to teaching at New York Law School, I was working for a media insurance company in Kansas City, which required frequent trips to the Midwest. The travel to Kansas, along with the commute to Tribeca, made me feel like a man without domicile, an itinerant mercenary, a nomad.

I never imagined, when I was stir-frying in my Iowa City kitchen, that I would become the father who left for work in the morning before the sun rose and returned after his children were asleep. As a man who taught his wife to make risotto ai funghi, I assumed I was safe from the dull conformity of suburban life, the stratified gender roles of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Yet here I was, trudging to the train station to catch the 6:01, the newspaper clutched in one hand, a half-eaten bagel in the other. That was me wandering around the parking lot trying to find my car in the darkness. One day I stopped cooking dinner, and the next day I woke up in a gray flannel straitjacket. What was a father to do?

I leave the train at Green's Farms station. A dozen other men and one woman exit with me, all of them from the rear car like battle- hardened veterans who know the exact location of the stairwells and the shortest distance between two points. My doppelgänger is nowhere to be found, and I assume he departed at an earlier station, proximity to New York being a direct reflection of the size of a man's wallet. Westport, where I live, is not exactly the golden mean, but it is more affordable than Darien or Greenwich, and certainly better than Rye, Scarsdale, or Larchmont, the hallowed Westchester suburbs where the commute is at least thirty minutes shorter and houses are proportionately more expensive.*

By the time I arrive at my home, it is 8:55. My daughter is asleep, but my son is awake, and lies in bed reading Archie comics. He has gone through two boxes of his mother's old comic books, and is now rereading his favorites. His long legs stretch across the blankets, and he wears a dozen "Live Strong" bracelets of various colors on his left wrist and a seashell necklace around his neck. Nine years old, with size nine feet, a mop of sandy brown hair, and as skinny as a broom handle.

"I thought you said you were coming home early," he says.

"I was, but I got stuck on a conference call."

"What's a conference call?"

I wish only for my son that he will never experience a conference call, that the world of corporate machinations will forever remain foreign to him. Lately, he has been IMing me in my law school office. I find it both startling and depressing, like a man who has discovered hairs sprouting from his ears.

I describe my telephone conversation with the insurance claims handler I was counseling, but he has already returned to his comics. I kiss the top of his head and tell him lights out in ten minutes.

Across the hallway his sister is asleep, one arm splayed above her head, the other clutching a stuffed puppy. She wears a pair of her mother's old pajamas, which are nearly thirty years old but fit her perfectly. Her hair is bleached a summer blond from chlorine and salt, and she wears a rope bracelet around one ankle. I brush a damp lock of hair from her mouth and tuck her gently back into the blankets, then close her door behind me.

I go downstairs and retreat to my office, where I reply to

e-mail for the next forty-five minutes. When I emerge, it is nearly ten o'clock, and I startle my wife in the kitchen.

"I thought you were upstairs," she says.

"I was checking my messages."

"I was about to come up."

Instead of responding, I thumb through the mail on the kitchen counter.

"How was teaching?" she asks.

"Okay," I say, ripping open the electric bill.

"Are you coming to bed?"

"In a few minutes."

I'm not exactly sure why I can't put away the bills, or why I have to check my e-mail compulsively, or why I sequester myself in my home office with the door closed. These are things that I should probably talk about, but I can't.

My wife shrugs, and leaves me there in the kitchen. I wish she would try harder to coax me upstairs, but given my unresponsiveness, I can't say I blame her. I have become untouchable in the last few years, immune to expressions of affection, until my wife and children have begun treating me like a cantankerous uncle, tiptoeing around my bad humor and swollen feet.

I finish separating the payment demands from the catalogues and credit card offers. I throw the former on my desk, and the latter in the trash. I remember, as a kid, wishing I could receive as much mail as my own father did; now that I do, I realize all he received were bills.

Finally, I trudge to the bedroom and find my wife asleep with the lights on and a book splayed across her chest. Her glasses have slipped crookedly down the bridge of her nose. As she lies there, the tension drained from her brow, I can see the faces of our children in hers: the broad plane of my son's forehead, my daughter's high cheekbones, his freckles, the swoop of her lips. I lift the glasses from my wife's face and set the book on her nightstand. Then I brush my teeth, swallow an Ambien, and climb into bed beside her.

Copyright © 2007 by Cameron Stracher.

About the Author

Cameron Stracher is the author of Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies, and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair and a novel, The Laws of Return. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His essays and articles on family life (and other topics) have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Parents, The American Lawyer (where he is a contributing editor), and many other publications. During the day he teaches at New York Law School and practices media law, and at night he rushes home to his wife and two children in Westport, Connecticut.