Vanpelt who played him, I’d identified with Maple Fields completely.
“On that website,” I said. “Believe it or not, Travis has also listed out the plots of every single episode. In order. Several paragraphs apiece.”
“Talk about time on your hands.”
“Too bad we didn’t video that woman back at the airport for him. ‘Travis Appaloosa’ meant something to her. That’s a dying breed.”
“She was about forty-five? The right age. Probably watched every season. It’s a whole cohort, Panda Bear. They’re not that old, and they’re not all dead yet.”
“Only a few names from the shows you grew up with stick in your head,” I said. “As a rule, Travis’s isn’t one of them.”
“You’d be surprised. You don’t use his surname. I still get asked about the geeze more often than you’d think.”
In point of fact, I had gone by Pandora Appaloosa for a while in college. A little lost, I imagined that if other people thought they knew who I was, then I would know, too. But before long, the very query I was courting—“Any relation to Travis?”—began to seem not only like cheating but counterproductive. My classmates at Reed would only want to hear about my dad the TV star; in contemporary terms, I had reduced myself to a hyperlink to someone else’s Wikipedia page. So I reverted to Halfdanarson when I moved to Iowa. In recent years even fans of retro TV were unlikely to recognize my father’s pseudonym, which disuse was returning to the goofiness that had first sent my mother into peels of laughter. But I was mostly glad of having resumed the ungainly Swedish singsong my father had shed because Halfdanarson was my real name.
I’d usually have savored ragging on our father with Edison, that ritual touching base with our sick, stupid history. I rarely discussed my childhood with Fletcher. I hadn’t even let on that my father had been a television actor in a wildly successful show until months into our relationship, and when I finally let it slip I was relieved to learn that Fletcher hadn’t watched Joint Custody when it was on in prime time. Yet no matter how firmly I’d emphasized that my offbeat upbringing in Tujunga Hills was an arbitrary footnote in a life otherwise ordinary by design, Fletcher always took reference to the program as a pulling of rank, and I avoided the subject. Only with Edison, then, could I access a past that, however loath I was to depend on it for a sense of importance, I was reluctant to jettison completely. It was my past, whatever it meant, the only one I had.
I grew up with a set of parallels that expressed varying degrees of distortion and caricature. I didn’t only have a father named Hugh Halfdanarson, but one who doubled ludicrously as Travis Appaloosa, who played another father named Emory Fields, a fake dad who was a far more successful paterfamilias than the self-absorbed monomaniac I saw only occasionally at home. I wasn’t simply Pandora Halfdanarson, but could choose to be Pandora Appaloosa if I wished, and on Wednesday nights for eight years I recognized an idealized version of myself in Maple Fields, a sweeter and more altruistic little girl than I who was always trying to get her parents back together. In turn, Maple Fields was played by one of those rare child actors who wasn’t unendurable, either on-screen or off-, even if Floy Newport was probably not her real name either. I idolized her and sometimes thought they should have kept filming the show and canceled our real family. So you can see how my fashioning mocking duplicates for a living might have seemed almost inevitable. After all, my favorite episode of Night Gallery was “The Doll.”
This time driving back to New Holland our traditional sharing of notes—first and foremost, on whatever crackpot strategy Travis had recently devised to restore himself as the apple of the public eye—felt diversionary and dishonest. As we continued to discuss the latest on Joy Markle and Tiffany Kite, I could get with the program only so long as I trained my gaze on I-80. Side glances at the unaccountable mass in the passenger seat broke the spell, and it would suddenly seem a bit rich for Edison in this condition to be deriding anyone else for having failed to live up to youthful promise. For that dizzying sorrow on glimpsing the large gentleman in an airport wheelchair had only intensified, and I’d no idea how I would make it through the whole evening to come without falling apart.
Calling, “We’re ho-ome!” in the hallway, I tinged the announcement by descending into a minor key, a note of warning that my family would fail to pick up on. Here I’d hoped to present Tanner with a member of his extended family whom he could plausibly “look up to,” but with my brother’s spine compacted two inches Tanner was already too tall. Nothing about being obese diminished Edison’s accomplishments, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the way Tanner would see things.
When Edison trailed me to the kitchen, Fletcher’s face mirrored what my own must have looked like when I turned to my brother’s voice at the airport: that flat smack against plate glass, the shock of having your expectations so thoroughly thwarted. My husband is not an impolite person, but when he looked up from the stove he said absolutely nothing and forgot to close his mouth. Time stretched. He was dying to look at me, but cutting away would have seemed unwelcoming. “Hey,” he said feebly.
“Hey, bro, good to see you, man!” Edison clapped Fletcher’s shoulder and attempted that double handshake up the elbow, but my husband was too dazed to do it right, and they settled on a pat of an embrace. Edison might not have precisely enjoyed this brand of encounter, but he must have had frequent enough experience with meeting someone who’d last seen him at about 165 to have learned to take a compensatory satisfaction in other people’s transparent hypocrisy. They couldn’t say anything, and whatever they said instead was so extravagantly and obviously at odds with what was going through their heads that the disparity must have stirred a sour internal smile.
“Tanner?” I led Edison over to where my stepson slouched at the table, taking in the scene while dawdling at his laptop. I could already read in the twist of his mouth the ruthless description of our new houseguest that he’d post on Facebook. “You remember your uncle Edison?”
“Not really,” said Tanner warily.
“Hell, kid, you’ve really shot up,” said Edison, extending his hand. “Can’t say I’d recognize you on the street, Tan.” Nobody called Tanner “Tan.”
Tanner continued to slouch, so when he extended his arm to limply shake Edison’s hand it was from as far away as possible. “Can’t say I’d recognize you, either, Ed.” Nobody called Edison “Ed.”
“So you’re seventeen? Figure my son Carson’s about your age,” Edison supposed.
Tanner exclaimed, “You don’t even know?”
That’s when Cody filtered into the doorway. With fair flyaway hair and a diffident manner, she was a shy girl, as I had been. Responding to her natural modesty and diligence, I’d tried for years not to show her any partiality over her more arrogant brother. Although no prodigy at the piano, the girl had a precocious sensitivity that would either be the making of her or would doom her for life as an easy mark. This was one of those moments in which she distinguished herself, for her instincts were pitch perfect. Cody took a mere instant to assess the situation, after which she ran to my brother crying, “Hi, Uncle Edison!” and gave him an unreserved hug.
He hugged her back, hard. I wondered how many times recently anyone had held him like that—with joy, with affection, with no trace of distaste. I wished I’d hugged him that way myself.
“So what’s cookin’?” asked Edison, hovering by
