Chapter 7 #2
“Yeah, they’re bad right now. Only one way to save yourself,” says Nina, swinging her arms and diving from the edge of the dock.
She breaks the surface in a clean line and disappears, barely making a splash.
I drop my robe and follow her, clenching as I am swallowed by the icy water.
By the end of summer, the pond will reach an acceptable temperature of seventy degrees.
But now, in these early summer days, it hovers closer to sixty.
Some call it bracing; some call it torture.
Nina and I pop out of the water and scream, as is our custom, cracking open the quiet of the morning.
For a moment, I forget that I’ve been away.
It feels like we are just kids again, flipping around like otters, churning up the water to keep the pond monsters at bay.
I can hear my mother telling us we’re too far from the dock; I can hear my father telling her to let us be.
My parents were married for twenty-seven years, and my mom used to joke that they fell in love in the New York City sewer system.
When they met in 1988, my mother, Tish, was a twenty-six-year-old management consultant and my father was a thirty-eight-year-old engineer who worked for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection.
A work project brought them together: my mother’s firm was tasked with streamlining my father’s department, and my father was called in to help inform where cuts should be made.
In the end, he made such a compelling case that my mother’s firm recommended the city expand his budget, and somewhere along the way, he and my mother struck up a flirtation.
They were an unlikely couple from the outset.
Armed with an MBA, my mother had come to New York brimming with ambition.
As the only female in her division, she was determined to both play the game and beat the odds, and she approached the early years of her career as if she were storming a fortress.
Along the way, she had a tumultuous relationship with a fellow consultant who was not her boss but not her professional equal.
A pinstriped yuppie, he found unending ways to remind her of his relative superiority.
Sexism was so rampant in her workplace that she took it for granted, and when she met my father, she was jolted by his sense of egalitarianism.
As she put it, “He wasn’t trying to be a hotshot”—and she liked that about him.
Much later, she would come to wish he were more financially ambitious, but at first, she was comforted by what seemed to be his innate sense of integrity and balance.
For his part, my father was taken by my mother’s moxie and curiosity.
Known to his colleagues as the “water whisperer,” he could troubleshoot anything from a faltering dam to inadequate storm-surge systems. His work could be dry, but Tish absorbed it with interest, asked creative questions, assessed the challenges that faced his department, and then gave what amounted to a meticulously researched and fair recommendation. He was as impressed as he was smitten.
They began dating, and soon after, my father sold his first patent.
Their lives appeared to be opening up, and within a year, they married.
It was the late eighties—my mother was energetic and irreverent; my father was warm and witty.
Her hair was permed; his khakis were pleated.
As newlyweds, they settled on the Upper West Side, not far from where my father had grown up in Morningside Heights, but a considerable distance from the small Midwestern town that my mother had left behind.
For a few years, they tore around the city like it was their own personal playground.
But my father’s favorite thing was to take her up to his camp in the Adirondacks, where he taught her how to paddle a canoe, scale a fish, and identify the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt.
It wasn’t her comfort zone, but at first, she did her best to summon enthusiasm for the deep-woods life that he loved so much.
She considered the camp a quirky addendum to their real life in the city.
A few years later, Nina was born. My father loved parenthood right away; my mother was more ambivalent.
Her maternity leave made her feel claustrophobic, and when she finally returned to work, she found that her position had been downsized and her path to promotion all but blocked.
Outraged, she left the firm and resolved to find a new job, but doing so with an infant proved harder than she thought.
A year passed, then another. She promised herself she would return to work when the time was right, and in the meantime, she tried to embrace her role as a stay-at-home mother.
In the following years, my father sold a few more patents, and my mother was heartened by their expanding financial horizon.
Six years after Nina was born, I came along, and a few years after that, my father secured a licensing deal for his latest invention: the nanofiltration membrane.
At this point, my mother suggested moving into a bigger home—a townhouse, at last. But my father thought our original apartment was adequate, and he preferred to put any extra capital into the maintenance of the camp.
He hoped to retire early from his job with the city, explaining that they could live off his patents, as long as they lived within their means.
“What more do we need?” was my father’s outlook.
“Where do I begin?” was my mother’s.
When it came to material wealth, my father had already achieved what he thought necessary; my mother was just getting started.
But more importantly, my mother was perpetually frustrated by her own unrealized earning power.
My father was happy to provide for her, but she had never wanted to be reliant on him financially.
She still clung to the idea that she would restart her career; she resented that my father seemed to have forgotten she ever had one.
When I was seven, my father retired early in order to spend more time at the camp and more time with us.
That same year, my mother finally landed a job that would put her squarely back on the corporate path she had abandoned a decade earlier.
As my father’s career wound down, my mother’s ramped up.
He wanted to spend more time in the Adirondacks; she wanted to spend less.
He wanted to give his daughters large swaths of unstructured time in the woods; my mother wanted to give us the resources she believed would lead to conventional success (good schools, high-paying jobs).
It wasn’t long before my mother’s income far exceeded what my father’s had ever been.
As the financial power balance shifted, their divergent values came to the fore, and cracks began to form.
At first, they were determined to make it work, despite their conflicting priorities.
Summer remained my father’s domain. We spent the whole season at Catwood Pond, with my mother visiting for just one week each August before returning to work in the city.
Conversely, during the schoolyear, my mother called the shots and set the schedule.
This divide-and-conquer approach worked well enough, but eventually, it was clear that it wasn’t just a parenting strategy.
My parents were leading separate lives. The unraveling of their marriage happened over time, as it often does, until the winter I was sixteen, when the tenuous thread binding them together finally snapped.