Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey With His Wordless Daughter - Hardcover

1
Kalamazoo
Julie’s pregnancy wasn’t a huge surprise to us. I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. We’d been married a few months, and we’d been discussing the future, one with fabulous new jobs in some exotic new location that was in no way Kalamazoo, and that future had kids in it, too. Julie was young, in her early twenties, and I was starting over after a childless first marriage had sucked the life and the better part of a decade out of me. I’d left Texas after twenty-nine years to be with Julie, and I was still adjusting to the upper Midwest. So many changes were afoot, why not a baby, too? How hard could it be? With a merry chuckle and a total lack of any sort of intelligent consideration for the future, we began “trying.” It didn’t take long.
Kalamazoo, Michigan, is our setting, a town located in the strangest place I’d ever experienced, the narrow strip of land running up the western side of the state about thirty miles inland from Lake Michigan. Here’s the Mister Science explanation. During the winter, which in Michigan lasts roughly six months, big fat clouds suck up moisture from Lake Michigan and then move to the east over the landmass of the state. About thirty miles in, the moisture starts to freeze and dumps snow on the poor exposed earth below. This is called “lake effect” snow, and it is extreme. The first time I experienced it, I woke up one morning to discover that thirty-two inches of snow had fallen in the hours I had been sleeping, warm and ignorant, in my bed. Thirty-two inches. I took pictures.
My point about this little factoid is not “Wow, it sure snows a lot in western Michigan,” but rather that it tells you something about the people who lived there. Long ago, when fur trappers and Indians were the only humans who were trudging through this thirty-two inches of lake effect frostiness, settlers arrived, saw this meteorological weirdness and said, “Jebediah, by golly, we’ve found our home.” It wasn’t just Kalamazoo, either. Grand Rapids, which is neither grand nor possessing rapids, falls under the lake’s crazy spell, too. Michigan is a state founded by masochists, and probably not the fun kind, either.
When I look back on our days in Kalamazoo, I find myself missing it more than I ever would have thought possible at the time. I’d had a rough start a few years before, the first time I tried to move to Michigan. The computer sales job I’d secured a few weeks before vanished before my eyes, followed shortly by an impacted tooth in my now uninsured mouth. My boss back in Dallas graciously offered to give me my old job back, but my failure sent me and my swollen mouth limping back to Texas through an actual, honest to goodness blizzard within about a week. I never quite got over the idea that Kalamazoo was trying to kill me just a little.
Truthfully, however, the winters were bad in a way that still thrilled me; when I called my best friend, Joe, who still lived in Dallas, and confessed that having my ass handed to me by such extreme winter conditions was still rather cool, he referred to it as “the pleasurable irritation of the new.” The Kalamazoo summers were pleasant enough, with Lake Michigan so close. The city was home to Western Michigan University and had a funky little college town feel to it, which was a refreshing change from the rustic “Michigan Militia” ambience enjoyed by much of the rest of the state. The town’s most visually striking landmark was a century-old, sinister-looking water tower on the grounds of the state mental hospital, and the park at the center of town was surrounded by tall, grim-faced churches and featured a fountain full of what appeared to be petrified children. Perhaps most impressive, the Burger King near the campus was the site of the very first sighting of Elvis after his death. Or his “death,” if you prefer.
Kalamazoo was a peculiar little town. Even when it was trying to kill me, it charmed me a little.
“Do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, of course, I want to know.” Pause. “Don’t you want to know?”
“I want to know,” Julie replied quietly. “I think I already know the answer. I think I knew it when I ordered the surf and turf at dinner.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. So. You want to know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s find out.”
And so it happened that on Mother’s Day 1999, Julie peed on a stick and changed our lives forever.
The story behind Schuyler’s name isn’t nearly as interesting as you might think. I actually considered making something up; judging from the questions we received when she was born, you might think we just chose some random term right off the table of periodic elements. It’s not all that unusual; pronounced SKY-ler and often Americanized as Skyler or even Skylar, it’s a Dutch name meaning “scholar.” I’d like to say we chose it because we wanted to predetermine our child’s great mind (or inexplicable Dutchness?), but the truth is even less impressive.
About a month after we were married, before that fateful, peeful Mother’s Day, Julie and I went to dinner at a fancy restaurant called the Great Lakes Shipping Company. Well, it was fancy for Kalamazoo. None of the vehicles in the parking lot had snowplows attached to the front bumper, and Elvis hadn’t been sighted there just yet. We’d been given a gift certificate for a free dinner for two by Julie’s parents as a “we can’t stop this or have the groom killed so we might as well give them some food” wedding gift. It was the holiday season, we were in love, and we were hungry.
As we sat at our table, trying not to look like goobers, our waitress walked up and introduced herself. Her name was Schuyler, and she was friendly and pretty and funny. Mostly, though, she had a cool name.
“Schuyler,” said Julie as we drove home, repeating it softly. “Schuyler. I really like that name.”
And there it was.
Later, during the pregnancy, Julie decided that when the day came for us to have the sonogram and The Answer, she didn’t want to know. I, on the other hand, wanted to learn every single fact I could. I didn’t want surprises; I was scared enough as it was. On the day of the sonogram, we saw the baby but had no idea what we were looking for. I found myself squinting and thinking, “Is that a penis? Oh, surely THAT’S not a penis. . . .” After we explained that I wanted to know and Julie didn’t, the lab technician led me out into the hallway and whispered conspiratorially in my ear, as if Julie might hear from the other room.
“It’s a girl,” she said. “Congratulations.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure. She gave us a pretty clear shot of the goods.”
The goods. I was shocked that our baby even had goods already.
When we started talking about names, I found myself in a strange predicament. I had to consider boy names with as much seriousness as I did the girl names or I’d give away the big secret. The problem was, we both realized almost immediately that if we had a girl, we wanted to name her after a waitress. A girl was going to be Schuyler; we knew that all along.
Boy names, however, were a matter of contention, and I had to be something of a jerk about fighting the ones I didn’t like in order to protect Schuyler’s secret.
So Schuyler, if you’re reading this one day, know that your mother loved you very, very much, but if you’d been a boy, you might have been named...