Last semester, one of my students asked me to change his grade on a quiz. The way I’d phrased a particular question wasn’t clear, he said, which is why he earned a 95 instead of a 100. I explained to him that the quiz was one of four, which together totaled twenty percent of the semester’s overall course grade. In other words, a five-point difference on a single quiz was meaningless.
He was having none of it. He was clearly worried about his permanent record. No matter what I might have told him, I know that he wouldn’t accept that the grade on this quiz, or any quiz, has no bearing on who he is as a person. That no school administrator is going to come roaring into the room with his grades from middle school. That for the rest of his life, no one is going to judge him on his GPA.
But who teaches him, or me, about how to judge ourselves as people? Parents, to start with. Teachers, perceived as proxy parents, even if we don’t want to be. I’m thinking here of my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Moye, who left us to our own devices while she stepped out for what I realize now was a smoke break. For however long she was gone—and it couldn’t have been terribly long—the noise level in the room rose to a solid wall of released energy. I was the kid who hunkered down to read ahead in my textbook, wishing I were as audacious as the over-excitable boy who managed to climb out of the classroom via the transom over the door. When Miss (I have no idea of her actual honorific—in Atlanta in 1971, all adult women were addressed as Miss) Moye was on her way back to the classroom, the PA speaker over our heads would click on. From the principal’s office, she’d whisper, “teacher’s comin’.” No matter what we’d been doing, judgement came from above the coat closet. Act right even when you’re on your own, because someone’s watching you.
Now that I’m a teacher, I love her for this. She must have cracked herself up.
I wonder when I stopped believing in the power of the Permanent Record that loomed over school like a wagging finger. Earn a bad grade and see my “permanent record” forever scarred. Get caught passing notes or miss my turn feeding the classroom hamster, and be told by someone (A teacher? A principal? A game of telephone on the playground?) that these temporary oversights will haunt me throughout adulthood and possibly into the afterlife. The permanent record that no one ever actually saw? It would follow me to the grave.
My elementary school grades, on their flimsy pink paper, have vanished into the ether. My high school adhered to the trend in “alternative education” by disdaining traditional letter grades. Instead, our teachers, with whom we were all on a first-name, Frisbee-tossing basis, wrote paragraphs-long assessments of our personal growth and individual strengths. I have no idea what happened to these dispatches from the barefoot and bell-bottom jeans front, but I appreciate the attempt to broaden the interpretation of how a person becomes whole. My college transcripts were useful only as items in my graduate school applications. My graduate school studies resulted in my first book, which was written as a kind of permanent record of a place, a time, and a family in crisis.
What is my permanent record, if it’s not decades-old grades and well-meaning teacher commentary? On every elementary school report card, I was given a checkmark beside the “uses time wisely” criteria, verifying that I had done just that: used my time wisely. That checkmark made me proud. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is what it means to use time wisely as an adult, if it’s not reading ahead while the teacher’s out on a smoke break. Who teaches us a viable template for a “wise” use of time? When do we learn to do that for ourselves?
•••
When my father was dying, he asked me to forgive him. As I sat by the crank-up hospital bed in his living room, my impulse was to list every act of his for which I could not forgive him. “What about this?” I wanted to say. “Or that?”
Instead, I lied. I said that I forgave him. Nothing good would have come of telling him otherwise.
My father had turned sixty-seven that month. After a lifetime of four-pack-a-day smoking and decades of drug abuse, he had been diagnosed with cancer a year or so earlier. At that moment, he had less than a week to live.
When I was a child, my father intoned over the Passover Seder plate, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” All the adults at the table laughed, and I did, too, believing this was the actual prayer. Of course it was, spoken by the irreverent, fun, charismatic version of my dad, acting like the kid who climbed out of the transom while the teacher was out of the room.
But this not why my father asked my blessing.
A few months ago, I awoke unsettled, because I felt that my father was in my bedroom. I could smell him. Pall Mall cigarettes and anxious flatulence. He had been dead nineteen years, but he was somehow present.
“Why are you here?” I asked the air near my husband’s nightstand.
“Forgive me?” my father asked. He was wheedling, like a child.
I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “Go away. Maybe later, but I’m not ready yet.”
Proud of having told even a ghostly version of my father to leave me alone, I went back to sleep.
•••
My real permanent record is written, in part, in my father’s hand. That same hand that held an electric carving knife to my throat at a family dinner. I was about ten years old, and my laughing made sounds that grated on my father, especially when he was very, very high.
I wondered for years if I’d created a false memory from a roast, a carving knife, and my father’s instability. When I reconnected with a childhood friend last year, I got proof that it had happened. My friend described my mother frozen in fear at the table, unable to pull my father away from me. I remember my father’s face so close to mine that I could see his pores, his pupils spinning like pinwheels. I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s on acid.” I remember believing that was a reasonable excuse.
This is the same man who brought me, at eight years old, to Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral. As we made our way through the solemn, slow moving crowd outside, and then inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, my father, gentle and grieving, lifted me to eye-level with the adults and turned me toward the first open casket I had ever seen. He wanted me to see Dr. King’s face up close, not on television as I had so often. What he wanted was for me to absorb the need for justice in the world.
Within a year, my father tried to shove me out of a moving car. When I tell this story, I laugh and say, “It was only in second gear,” but the irrationality of his act, his absence of judgement—or the presence of his cruel judgement of me—is what strikes my listener. My attempt to make this into a funny anecdote doesn’t land well.
I am trying, here, to reconcile a permanent record that can’t be graded. My father tucked me in at night when I was small and sat at my side reading poetry in the same elegant baritone he surely used defending his clients in court. The ballad meter of Countee Cullen’s “Incident,” telling of a child stunned and hurt by racial violence, and the mystical images of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lulled me to sleep.
The last time I saw my sister Susie alive, my father was cradling her in his arms as he rushed her out of our shared bedroom to the hospital. She had been ill with leukemia for a year, and died a few days later. Through my lashes, I watched him run with her. He was terrified, my mother was terrified, Susie was terrified, and so was I.
After my father died, my husband and I helped his second wife sort his possessions. My husband found my father’s Twelve Step workbook. He will not let me see it. “He blames you,” my husband says, “because you’re too much like him.” Throughout the workbook’s pages, my husband says, my father blames other people in his life, but he never accepted his own role in his permanent record.
It’s become clear to me since my father died that he lived with a mental illness that may never have been diagnosed. Within its rapid cycles, he treated himself with amphetamines and Scotch. That the amphetamines were (sometimes) legally obtained and that the Scotch was eighteen-year-old single malt is immaterial. His emotional and psychological turmoil escalated as my two sisters died of illnesses, as he brutalized my mother for failings only he imagined, as whatever had transpired in his own childhood ensnared his mind. Abuse is real, no matter the ZIP code, no matter if the clothing hurled to the floor is a Brooks Brothers’ suit or coveralls.
My aunt, my father’s sister, told me the other day that her mother once refused to let a woman wearing green nail polish into her house. I can’t corroborate this, but I believe it. My father’s mother, was, as the phrase of the time went, uptight.
What I’m saying is that my father must have been harshly judged, and then judging himself harshly, turned that blade to me. I am the first daughter, the oldest, the one in whom he saw himself.
•••
A few years after my father died, my husband and I vacationed in Memphis. We visited Graceland and Stax Records, and we toured the National Civil Rights Museum. It was there, in a display of photographs by documentary photographer Benedict Fernandez, that I came face to face with an image of an unsmiling young man in a suit and tie, sitting on a curb beside another similarly attired and equally serious young man. The Black man held a placard reading “Union Justice Now!” The White man held one reading “Honor King: End Racism.”
The White man was my father.
I knew the placard. It’s framed in my house. My father had given it to me the night he came home from the vigil in Memphis in 1968. I had never seen the photograph before, never known of its existence, and there in the museum, I screamed. A group of middle-schoolers, touring the exhibit, stopped and gaped at me.
“That’s my father,” I said, pointing at the image on the wall. I began to cry.
One of the students approached me. She peered at the photograph, then at me, then at the photograph again.
“You do favor him,” she said.
•••
My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.
I don’t know if I can forgive him, entirely. I can’t grade an abusive father’s relationship to a daughter. If he gets an A for some things and an F for others, does that really average to a C? On the days when my own fist splits my lip to silence his taunting voice in my mind, I’d say no. On the days when I turn to a poem and physically, truly, feel his longing for words, I’d say yes. If I wrote an assessment, as my high school teachers did for me, would I implore him to get the help he needed, or would I suggest something benign like learning to meditate or taking up a musical instrument?
Perhaps I should be grading myself, since I’m the one living with this permanent record.
I am trying to understand how to create a permanent record for him and for me. For us together. I want to teach myself to judge him fairly. I don’t know if I can forgive him, as he asked, or if doing so is a requirement for his, or my, final grade. But in trying to learn this, to read ahead in the book that he’s put down, I want to believe that I am using time wisely.
•••
JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance “Okra Pick.” Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,Full Grown People, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing. www.jessicahandler.com.
Tarzan. Tonto. Tuvafana. These were the passwords that my father used for all his accounts. I learned this during the stage of his dementia when I had to manage his accounts. Guessing his passwords wasn’t too hard. I just had to go through these three possibilities and maybe add a 1 or a 2.
The bigger mystery was what the hell Tuvafana was. Tarzan and Tonto were self-explanatory since he was a fan of Tarzan and The Lone Ranger. But what was Tuvafana? I asked him right away, but it was already too late. He didn’t remember.
I thought it might be Hebrew, since Tuva is close to the word for good, Tov.
My dad had been interested in languages all his life and had many stories, which I didn’t necessarily believe, about his surprising proficiency at unlikely languages. There was the time as a boy that he was visiting a friend, whose family was Greek, and had impressed the boy’s mother by speaking Greek. Or the Chinese restaurant where he spoke fluently in Mandarin, and in Cantonese, just in case.
But I had no clue about fana.
During the years that I was managing my father’s accounts, I made many attempts to solve the mystery. Was it a character from a book? The name of one of his relatives?
But the mystery remained.
One thing about having a parent with dementia is how much of the past becomes a mystery, and how abruptly it seems to happen. It made me realize how little I had tried to get to know him when he was mentally whole. My life with my father was dominated by his stories, but they were both endlessly repeated and apocryphal. I think that over time I was worn down by his narrative and didn’t really have the energy or desire to start up more conversations. But as his dementia progressed, he grew quieter and I started asking questions to fill the void. Sometimes he talked. I have a collection of voice memos on my phone of the conversations that did take off. But a lot of times he didn’t want to.
I was losing my only remaining parent, little by little, and with him was going all the knowledge of a different, but related world, where people who looked like me spoke Yiddish and wore long dresses and ran a corner grocery store. Which relatives did he visit in New York as a child? What led to the failure of his family’s grocery store? Why did his father have different countries and years of birth on his passport and life insurance application? Nothing huge. Just little things that started out as facts and then became questions. And then, when there was no way to answer the questions, they became mysteries.
•••
It’s a well-known phenomenon in my family that people tell me everything. I might ask one casual question, and complete strangers tell me about their first marriage, their cigar business, the novel they’re writing, the time they were homeless. I think it’s because I find people interesting, and they can tell.
But somehow that interest didn’t extend to my father, at least not in action. I guess I thought I’d have time for questions later, and then I didn’t.
•••
Solving mysteries has got to be one of our most fundamental drives. From Encyclopedia Brown to Nancy Drew to Sherlock Holmes to Jessica Fletcher, when they solve a mystery, they solve it. There’s no half-assery involved, no lingering doubts. That’s the kind of mystery solving I like. You find a hidden staircase. You catch the thief as he tries to execute his heist. You ask that one question that forces a confession. Everything clicks into place like a puzzle that can only be solved one way, or a meticulously maintained old clock. Clean.
•••
As my father’s dementia progressed, not only could I not solve the mysteries I knew about, but there were more mysteries every day. He often told me about things that were clearly dreams, or tv shows, but he thought they had happened.
I was learning to meet him where he was. This is the way you’re supposed to communicate with people with dementia. You don’t tell them that they’re wrong. You just let them talk and respond to what they say, as if it’s real.
He was in a continuing care facility, but in the “independent living” part of it. I knew that he would need to move to a memory care unit, or something like that, with more security, but, when? He actually functioned just fine in his apartment, with lots of help and supervision. I was there a lot, and there was also someone who came in twice a day to make sure he took his pills, and someone else who helped around the apartment a couple times a week. He told me every day how much he loved his apartment, especially the recliner I had bought him. It truly was the happiest I’d ever known him to be.
When is the exact moment that it’s best to make someone measurably safer but at the cost of making them immeasurably sadder? He seemed okay for now, but I knew that the decision was bearing down on me. I envisioned the decision like two arcs on a single graph. When do they cross? It’s a wrenching calculus.
One August morning I got a phone call from my dad. He said that he had returned my magazine to the library but had forgotten to put my note in it. There was a library in the facility where he lived, and he regularly borrowed magazines from it. I hadn’t borrowed a magazine and I hadn’t written a note, but I said, “Thanks for returning it. Don’t worry about the note. It wasn’t important.”
I had met him where he was. He seemed relieved, and I felt good that I had responded to him kindly.
Then, late in the afternoon, someone called me from the front desk of the care facility. Nobody had seen him that day. Was he with me?
When an 86-year-old goes missing, it’s an emergency. He had never walked away from the facility before. Not once. Not a step. He couldn’t have been less interested.
It took several hours under the blistering sun, and the help of a what seemed like a whole precinct of police officers, but it was ultimately the GPS signal from his Jitterbug phone that led us to his body. He was lying in a clearing in an overgrown wooded area near his apartment, with his hands crossed on his chest, his eyes open to the sky.
I don’t think anyone comes out clean when their parent dies. There’s always something to feel guilty about. But when you were the person who was supposed to keep them safe, and you didn’t, no matter what the reason, it hits hard.
I think about the things he missed in the two years that he’s been gone. He missed his granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah and his grandson’s college graduation. He missed the isolation of the pandemic, which he would have hated. He missed Trump losing the election, which he would have loved. Mostly, though, he missed the free fall of decline he was about to experience, and the loss of freedom. There was some medical event, maybe a mini-stroke, that had confused him and set him to walking. He missed going into a nursing home or hospital. Maybe he did this just the way he wanted to. Who knows.
“Who knows?” seems to be both the question and the answer to everything, the only response to a mystery that will never be solved. Who knows what he was talking about when he called me about the magazine? Who knows where he was when he called me? Who knows where he thought he was going? Who knows why he lay down in that clearing, looking exactly as if he was going to take a nap? Who knows.
I wish I had tried harder to solve his mysteries years ago, when they would have been easier to solve. Maybe the biggest mystery isn’t even about him. Maybe it’s about me—why I didn’t try to know him better when I could. Why I assumed that we were just too different to really connect.
I’ve been learning Yiddish for a few months. When I work on it I think of him. Although I doubted some of his stories of language acumen, he was definitely a fluent Yiddish speaker. His family spoke it when he was growing up. I keep wondering if I’ll come across Tuvafana but I haven’t. I’ve worked my way through “food,” “friends,” “complaining,” “leisure,” and “office,” but no Tuvafana.
The other day I googled Tuvafana again, and this time I got a hit. It wasn’t a definitive explanation. It was no smoking gun, no invisible inked message with a code I cracked. I don’t know if this was actually something my dad, a lover of languages, once came across and then forgot where it was from. I don’t even know if the translation I found was correct. But for now, I’ll take it.
It was a word in someone’s Facebook status, in an unfamiliar language. I typed it into Google Translate, which identified the language as Shona, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe.
The translation was “We are the same.”
•••
JODY MACE is a writer and website publisher in Charlotte, North Carolina. Several of her essays have appeared in Full Grown People.
As I slipped away from the city lights on the four-lane highway, the land opened up like a collapsible box. The sides, filled with trees and undulating rises, slowly flattened to make room for the prairie, the sky as wide as intention. In my beat-up Riviera, I drove towards our abandoned farmhouse, suffering from nostomania, an irresistible compulsion to return home.
The ache for my family and our farm—torn apart by my father—radiated through my body. After twenty-eight years of marriage, my father walked through our farmhouse, took his clothes from the closet, and left—an action so out of character that over twenty years later I still struggle to reconcile the man I thought he was with this moment. I’ve no idea how long my father cheated on my mother before he moved in with his mistress, four miles away. The veil of secrecy my parents created about their marriage, and the deceit my father displayed leaves the events of my memory out of focus, a grainy film that never uses the correct camera angle.
After my father left, and my mother was uprooted, I walked through campus as if a piece of bailing wire were tied to my breastbone. Suddenly something pulled the wire taut, and I’d drive away from Greeley, Colorado—the ugly stepchild of the Front Range where I attended college—to the prairie. I could be eating a bagel for dinner, studying at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend on the phone and a moment later find myself in my car headed east to an empty house.
On this particular night in the fall of 1998, it was almost ten, and I had classes in the morning. I knew it was dangerous for a woman to drive alone down deserted roads—a flat tire would mean I’d spend the night in my car waiting for enough daylight to change it and risk who might stop to help. I also knew if I drove fast, I could make it to the farm in two and a half hours. Usually people drive as quickly as they can through the prairie. They want to get somewhere. I drove the speed limit to take my time.
These moments are the impulse of youth, the moments I fear for my young twin sons who I hope never have to make such pilgrimages to their childhood home. Somehow, back then, part of me felt that if I returned, even for a few hours, I might make the divorce, the abandonment less real, that my presence could conjure my family’s existence. But maybe I just wanted to float out to the deepest part of my sorrow and wallow.
While I’d lived in Greeley attending college for several years, I hadn’t adjusted to the horizon obscured by houses and businesses, the streetlights and traffic, the fast talkers and strangers living on the other side of the wall of my apartment. The house became a Siren, something I couldn’t pull myself away from. I traveled the prairie like an ocean.
•••
Houses nestled next to the road became less and less frequent. Sweet grass grew in wisps like cats’ tails around the posts of barbed wire fences. Purple thistle filled pastures on either side of the road. In the moon’s white-gold glow, clumps of yucca and sagebrush gleamed like forgotten glass ornaments fallen off covered wagons years ago.
Occasionally, I passed iron gates with family brands and cattle guards marking the entrance to large ranches. The gravel driveways led to houses, outbuildings, and barns far enough off the highway to be covered in darkness. I imagined the people in these houses asleep in front of the TV or in bed, curled up like kittens beside each other, just like my own family is now if someone were to drive by our stucco house in Albuquerque.
On the interstate, a stream of headlights greeted me heading in the opposite direction, towards Denver. The farther east I drove, the more traffic thinned. I passed Ft. Morgan as steam billowed from the two concrete columns on the south side of the interstate. I breathed the decayed fumes from the beet processing plant, a smell as stale as dog breath.
After fifteen miles, I took the Yuma exit and followed the two-lane road. I thought about turning around, heading back, but there was nothing waiting for me in Greeley, either.
•••
Wide stretches of pastureland lined the highway. Every few miles, at an intersection, I saw mailboxes. Some sat on top of fence posts like ours at home. Others rested on homemade wrought-iron stands. Yard lights dotted the countryside. I saw few cars. I knew my friends from college, all city girls, would be nervous driving for miles without seeing another car. The isolation comforted me. There are times now, living in Albuquerque, when I still long for this isolation, for space around me and for the comfort of solitude.
In sixty miles, I passed through two small towns, each only a few blocks long. Clustered streetlights glowed like a lighthouse miles before I approach the town. Pickups lined the main street outside the local bar. In Yuma, at one of three stoplights, I turned north onto Highway 59.
I rolled down the window; the cold air smelled like plowed fields. Short blades of green wheat sprouted out of dark soil near the edge of the road. Once in a while, I spotted evergreen windbreaks. Some sheltered foundations of houses that fell apart years ago.
Highways in the country are narrow; few allow for a shoulder. Reflectors, paced every hundred yards or so, lead the way. I watched for deer. Almost everyone I know has hit a deer or had a close call. I’ve been taught never to swerve. It’s better to pump the brakes, take the blow—swerving might cause the car to slide into the ditch, flip. Maybe that’s what these late night drives were about: facing the hurt head on.
After twenty-five miles on asphalt, I reached Clarkville, an abandoned community.
Thistles and sunflowers grew waist high around the two remaining buildings. White paint peeled and cracked on the siding of the church and left boards exposed to the harsh sun, the cold winters. Maybe it’s all changed now. Maybe the church collapsed. Maybe the trailer’s gone.
I left the solid feel of pavement underneath the tires and turned onto gravel roads.
•••
As I drove closer to home, stories attached themselves to places void of meaning for most: the corner where my brother and sister wrecked their car, putting both of them in the hospital; the airstrip on the edge of a field where Mr. Hadler landed his spray plane in the summer; the old Holcomb place where the bus picked up children for several years and then one day the family disappeared, blown like chaff to far away places. Their house, like so many houses in this area, still stands empty.
Even though it was one in the morning, I worried about seeing another vehicle on the narrow gravel road. I might meet someone checking cows or getting home late from the bars. Great-uncles and aunts, countless cousins and neighbors will recognize my car. They’ll tell my dad or my grandparents they saw me. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want my grandparents, who live just four miles away from our house, to worry about me driving so far alone at night. I didn’t want my dad to call me. If they found out, I’d lie. I’d tell them I forgot something I needed, which wouldn’t be as much of a lie as intended.
Eventually, I saw three silver bins like metal cairns on the left hand side of the road. I’d reached our field.
•••
Rounding the corner, my chest swelled. I knew every inch of this mile. I ran on this road when I was in high school and the past two summers when I returned from college. I jogged in the morning before I started chores. As the sun came up, wild sunflowers in the ditch raised their heads towards the light. Rabbits and field mice scampered across the road. Cows bawled as I passed by, and the gravel crunched beneath my weight, my breath labored but even.
Sometimes, I ran at night. I could only see a few feet in front of me. The maintainer’s blade left a strip of dirt on either side of the road. I used it to navigate the road’s edge. Every noise—crickets chirping, wind blowing through milkweeds, coyotes’ calls—magnified itself in the darkened silence. From the ditch, the glow of stray cats’ eyes followed me; at least that’s what I told myself. It could have been skunks or coyotes or raccoons. At night, I only went to the nearest corner, a quarter mile away, and back several times. Fear held me back from pressing further into the darkness.
To most people, there’s hardly a dip in the road. But I knew every washboard, every soft shoulder, every drainage route. I’m home.
The elm trees my great-grandmother planted stood like guards beside the road. I entered the driveway and toke note of the wild mustard, at least a foot tall, growing up through the lava rocks in front of the house. There must have been a storm because part of the gutter over the garage hung off the roof. Small branches had fallen onto the overgrown lawn. The elm tree my parents planted on the south side of the house had doubled in size. As I followed the driveway around back, I noticed the suckers growing at its base.
The headlights glared on the large deck my father and brother built. My mom talked about buying whiskey barrels and loading them with flowers to put on the deck. She never did. She’d say, “We should put lights along the sidewalk” or “We should plant new trees.” Action was never her strong suit. She also didn’t realize everything would fall apart so quickly.
I got out and heard the echo of the car door shutting. From the glow of the yard light, I noticed dandelions and sandburs growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Buffalo grass encroached the gravel driveway. The deck needed another stain. I paid attention to these things because they were my jobs—weeding, mowing, staining.
Cows gathered in the corral. A few bawled. When I look up into the sky, the Milky Way and a thousand other stars seemed strewn across the sky like seeds thrown by a pioneer from a grain bag slung over his shoulder.
I unlocked the door with one of two house keys we ever had made. I’m not sure how I ended up with one. I walked through the garage, up the wooden steps to the side door.
•••
During the divorce settlement, my mother had a choice: keep the house or sell it to my father. With all the siblings’ consent, my brother said, “Sell it.”
We assumed my father wouldn’t let go of the house—there’s little market for farmhouses. He didn’t need the house. The day he left my mother, he moved in with his girlfriend, Susie. I knew nothing of their relationship. She’s a ghost who has stolen my father and haunts the rest of us.
Three months after my father left, my sisters and I helped my mom move to Greeley, into an apartment. We took essentials—her bed, sheets, a few pots and pans, her clothes, the kitchen table and chairs, a love seat and recliner. My mother wandered around the house, unsure what to take, unsure what to leave. She’d point to the TV cabinet or the floral living room sofa, and ask, “Do you think this can fit?” We’d shake our heads, compromise on something smaller. By afternoon, we loaded all we thought could fit into the small two-bedroom apartment my mother and I’d share for two years.
The apartment never felt like home. In fact, even with a husband and children of my own, nowhere has ever felt so truly like my home except the farm. But the apartment my mother and I shared felt like a stopping point on the way to somewhere else—somewhere better. Living together while we both went to college reversed our roles. She relied on me to help her adjust to college and living in town. From day to day, I didn’t know what to expect. Some days we’d talk and laugh about classes like roommates. Other days, I’d find her sobbing at the kitchen table. I’d talk her through getting flipped off in traffic or prioritizing the myriad projects due for her classes. Most of the time, she couldn’t be a mother. I didn’t expect her to.
•••
When I visited the house, I wanted my mother to be at the table sipping a cup of tea, reading a book, waiting. I wanted my father to be asleep in his chair like so many other nights. Always, I imagined the idealized version of my parents, the version I’d actually had for many, many years, rather than the desperate pair I last witnessed: the woman who locked herself away from us; the man stumbling home, drunk.
I opened the door to darkness. Staleness filled the air like in an empty grain bin. I turned on the hallway light and wandered from room to room like a sleepwalker. I don’t know what I was looking for—I don’t know what I expected to find.
From the garage door, I walked into the kitchen. A towel hung in the refrigerator door. A teacup and plate rested in the dish rack. A 1996 calendar on the wall showed the month of March, the month my father left.
•••
I could’ve grabbed the cookie sheet or the over-sized pan my mom talked about missing. I could’ve taken the flower-print sheets for her bed from the hallway closet filled with towels, sheets, and linens. But I didn’t. I wanted it to stay the same like a shrine or museum. If I took something back, my mother would know I visited the house. She thought I was out with friends having fun.
We had an understanding—I can come back to the apartment whenever I want without question, as long as no boys stay the night. I didn’t want to see the men my mother might have stay the night at the kitchen table in the morning, either. Yet, I shouldn’t have worried. My mother has never been on a date. I’m sure she worried about me, but it would’ve compounded her worry to know I made trips to the house.
As I wandered into the combined living room and dining room, the absence of the table, chairs, and recliner reminded me everything had changed. Shannon’s basketball and track pictures stood on top of the TV cabinet, though the TV is missing. I walked into the hallway to my parents’ room.
I saw the imprints in the carpet where their bed had sat. I looked at the long, oak dresser with a mirror attached. On top, my mother always placed a crocheted runner, her Chanel perfume, our school pictures, and a framed wedding picture to one side. As things deteriorated in the marriage, she took everything down but the framed 8 x 10 wedding picture in the center of the dresser.
My parents stand at the altar facing empty pews of the congregation. They are young; my mother holds a bouquet in manicured hands; my father looks stiff in his white jacket and black dress pants, a crew cut. It’s the only picture my mother ever displayed of their wedding. They had an album, but my mother rarely let us look at it. She didn’t want us to put fingerprints on the pictures. She wanted it to be perfect. Though so many times, even before my father’s affair, her distance and moods created strange obstacles we carefully navigated like cows walking on ice.
I don’t know why she left the wedding picture on the dresser. I like to think she wanted my father to see it, that she wanted to show she’d always been committed, that she’d done her best.
I didn’t stay long in my parents’ room; I couldn’t make myself. I turned off the hallway light and headed downstairs.
I entered my room at the foot of the stairs. I scanned a few framed photos of high school friends on the wall and wandered over to my bureau. I opened the top drawer and shuffled through papers: canceled checks, notes from an old boyfriend, and birthday cards from my grandparents.
On top of my bureau sat a jewelry box with a small drawer for earrings or bracelets. Because I only have a couple pairs of earrings, I put cash inside. When I opened the drawer, a wad of bills spilled out. I counted thirty-seven dollars. I shoved them back into the drawer. I must’ve been saving for something. I don’t remember what.
I scanned my closet filled with old clothes. I hadn’t had time to pack them for Goodwill the day we moved my mom. After a while, I switched off my light.
I knew it was late. It must have been close to two in the morning. I should go back. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though it was abandoned, even though only memories lived there, even though I couldn’t actually stay, I longed for the place even more.
•••
Upstairs in the kitchen, I pulled out drawers filled with silverware, dishtowels, and recipe books. I rummaged through the junk drawer filled with duct tape, Christmas bows, and birthday candles. I opened each cupboard. I looked at the canned soup and vegetables, Tupperware, plates and glasses. I stopped in the hallway just before the garage door and looked at the bulletin board on the wall.
An old school menu and a few jokes clipped out of the newspaper were tacked to the board. Our kindergarten pictures lined the bottom of the bulletin board. But at the top was a family picture, one of only two we ever had professionally taken.
I’m about two. I sit on a stool beside my father’s chair. My father is in the middle of the photo holding Shannon on his lap. Lisa props herself up on her hand on the floor by my father’s feet. My brother and mom stand behind my father on either side, their hands on his shoulders. We wear our best seventies outfits in the color of tangerines and avocados.
While Shannon and I have blank expressions because we’re too young to know what’s going on, the other four seem happy. Darren smiles as though he’s heard a joke. Lisa’s heard the same joke but won’t allow her teeth to show in her smile. My parents look bright, content. They seem to have no inkling of what’s to come—the joys, the heartaches, and everything in between.
I locked the door behind me.
•••
In August 2000, my sister and I were back in mom’s apartment in Greeley for the summer when my father called. He decided to rent the house to a couple with twins. The young man had moved back home to work on his family’s farm, like my father had, over thirty years before.
I hadn’t visited the house for almost two years. To accommodate the renters, we drove from Greeley to the farm three times in one week. Darren had to work; Lisa lived out of state. On the first trip, we wandered around for hours putting a few items in boxes, but mostly we were mesmerized. One of us would find an object—the cast from when I broke my wrist in fourth grade, my mother’s wedding china, the dress Shannon wore for prom—and we told stories.
The next time we made a plan to work room by room. It helped us focus. The third trip, we brought a moving truck. Like a cowboy trying to zip a winter jacket with too many layers underneath, we crammed the truck full, barely leaving space to close the door. We left odds and ends inside—an old bookcase, bunk beds, a broken record player, among other items. We figured my father could move the rest.
After we loaded the truck, each of us took one last walk around the house. Near dark, Shannon said, “We should go.” My mother asked for a few more minutes. She went to the front living room, pulled back the sheer curtains and looked out across the lawn. It hadn’t been mowed. The limbs of the elm trees swayed slightly. The pasture across the road was brown from the August sun. Tumbleweeds caught in the barbed wire fence dangled and thrashed against the barbs, trying to break free.
The setting sun left brush strokes of orange and red across the horizon. My mom turned from the window and said, “I’m ready.” Before we walked out the door, I put the key on the kitchen counter.
•••
Last June, my husband Miguel and I drove by the house with our boys. We were traveling through on our way to work a summer teaching job in Nebraska. I hadn’t been back inside the house since that August, almost fifteen years before. I asked Miguel to slow down as we approached. Wild irises bloomed at the lawn’s edge. A large flowerpot filled with petunias sat on the cement steps leading to the front door. Fewer trees stood in the backyard, and a plastic infant swing swayed in the breeze on an elm bordering the road.
Because Miguel drove slowly, the boys thought we were stopping and said, “We get out Papí? Get out?”
“You have to ask your Mama.”
“Get out Mama? Get out?”
I leaned over to look at them in their car seats, their hazel eyes wide with anticipation then turned back to the house. I scanned the yard, the line of trees, and the outbuildings. I examined the front window and envisioned the formal living room the way we left it so many years ago: the piano against the south wall, the couch tucked between two lamp tables facing the large windows, the swivel chair to the side; a place just big enough for everyone to return.
I thought of all the secretive trips—how I couldn’t stay away. I want to talk to that girl standing in the kitchen. I want to tell her she needs to stop holding on to everything with clenched fists; she needs to let go. But I’m sure if the younger version of myself and I could be in the same room together, she might say the same thing back to me.
What would that girl think if she knew years later she’d still be troubled, that she’d be married but have paranoid moments when she thought her husband would leave, that no other place had yet felt like home? What would she think if she knew she’d so internalized the shape and feel of the land that memories would never satisfy her?
I knew if I asked, the family who lives there now would open their door, would let us wander through each room. But it would be their furniture, their pictures on the wall, their memories filling the house. I want my sons to see where I grew up, to somehow understand, but that would mean breaking the spell, the one that holds my childhood family suspended in time, just beyond the sheer curtains in the front windows.
I turned and said, “No, not yet. Not yet.”
•••
DANA SALVADOR’s work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and has been featured in Fourth Genre, Cold Mountain Review,North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, among others. Additionally, she’s the recipient of a Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the recipient of the 2016 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She sometimes leaves posts at www.danasalvador.wordpress.com.
The last of my winter unemployment checks came today. Two hundred eight-three dollars. My husband, Dreux, worked one day this month, three last. It’s not his fault—the bed and breakfast where he cooks is newly opened and just not pulling in the customers. The harsh winter storm didn’t help, leaving the town without electricity for two days, us for four. The paying guests scheduled to come, didn’t. He could look for other employment, but his choices are limited: working with the developmentally disabled or busing tables. At the docks, the fishing boats come less and less often, the better catches are elsewhere. A year before, the lumber mill closed down: the last two-hundred fifty employees laid off. While the air above the town became clearer, the pall about its future did not.
I teach at the local community college—every week I am told that I’m lucky, that working there is one of the best possible places in this town of eight thousand. I am lucky—mostly because I have fabulous students and I like to explore the world with them through our English and Creative Writing classes. But, the full time, tenured instructors on that campus teach four classes a semester—I teach five and make a third of what they do. I have no retirement, no benefits, and no office. Rural community colleges across California are faced with an enrollment crisis. While urban two-year schools almost burst, small town colleges beg for students to attend each semester. It wasn’t until today, the second day of the spring semester, that I signed a contract for the term, but the contract isn’t binding: The college has two weeks to cancel classes, if the enrollment doesn’t hold.
I recently did an editing job for a timber faller. It’s a book about high climbers and the big trees—the redwoods that stagger with their height and impossibility. The work is a series of vignettes about what it’s like to work in the woods here. Or what it was like—those jobs are mostly gone. This logger/storyteller once said to me when he was dropping off pages, “This town used to have everything a working man needed. Now, it’s got everything he doesn’t: lattes, bistros, and yoga studios.”
It’s four in the morning and the buoy two miles away mourns its call through the chill air. The Mendocino Coast stuns with its rugged sweep of cliffs and moody, dangerous surf. In the spring, red tails ripple the headwinds while gray whales break the Pacific’s surface with puffs of air. Two miles away, redwoods stand in vibrant dignity.
The buoy sounds at ninety-second intervals, piercing the quiet and fog with an eerie regularity. For every third buoy keen, our neighbor’s cow answers, two pitches lower. Our daughter, Hope, sleeps between Dreux and me. She’s almost three, but after the accident, we’ve kept her with us, close, nested, sheltered. I hold her warm foot, listening to the back and forth of the buoy and the cow. I wonder if we need to move.
•••
When I was eight, my father bought sixty head of cattle that were delivered to the bottom of our dirt road, a half-mile from our rented house. He and my grandfather drove the frightened beasts, and I stood on our front porch, watching the cows herd together as they approached the open pasture gate. Once they stepped inside our fenced valley, they broke apart from each other, spilling over the land with a new earthiness I will never forget: dung and large bodies and damp friendliness.
That night, trying to sleep, the summer air was heavy with the smell and sound and shape of those animals: calls and shifting bulks and snorts. Next to me, my three siblings breathed deeply, each dreaming a separate world I would never know. The cows lowed to each other, filling the darkness with their sound, keeping me awake as I wondered whether Dad and Grandpa’s plan to make it in the cattle business would pan out. Dad’s smile had been so satisfied earlier that evening as he and Grandpa talked of the branding, ear marking, and worming that would need to be done. Maybe this time, they could make it work.
•••
Almost three months ago, my toddler daughter slipped on a tiled bathroom floor at the community college and did the splits. One second she was upright walking toward me, and in the next, she lay in an impossible puzzle. In that instant of impact and torque, her left femur broke in a spiral fracture. She whimpered like an injured puppy. My own heart hammering, I sat to comfort her. She wouldn’t put any weight on the leg and she cried in a horrifying new way, faint and breath half-caught. My stomach churned with the intuitive knowledge that her leg was broken. Bile gathered in my mouth, and my head swirled.
I interrupted the classroom nearby and a friend, an EMT, tried to gauge Hope’s injury. He was almost positive that she couldn’t have broken her leg because she hadn’t fallen, but alarm still fired through me. He had an ice pack in his car, which soothed Hope a bit. I took her home, and laid her on the couch. Even though I covered her with a blanket, she kept shivering. I finally understood: She’s going into shock. I bundled her up and whisked her to the hospital. When the nurse cut away Hope’s pants, the leg sat at a sickening angle, a hematoma building in the thigh. My body waved with shame because I hadn’t come to the ER immediately.
The rural hospital didn’t have anyone on staff capable of dealing with the injury. A quick call determined that the leading orthopedist in the county—thirty-three very curvy miles away, wouldn’t touch her. My two and a half-year-old daughter—this tiny, tiny person—would need to be flown, by helicopter, to Children’s Hospital in Oakland. A doctor eyed me and said, “You won’t be flying with her. She’ll need go into surgery immediately.” My husband was in San Francisco, attending a weekend graduate program for writing. I didn’t want to have to leave my daughter—she was so incredibly vulnerable. I didn’t want to watch the helicopter ascend without me holding her slight hand. Teary, I asked, “What are the risks of transport?” thinking she might die in flight and I wouldn’t be there. The nurse replied, “There are always risks in transport. But if she doesn’t go, she will be disabled for life.” She rushed away.
I tried to take a deep breath, tried to call my husband again on my dying cell phone. The nurse returned. “A helicopter is coming with an extra seat. Can you promise to sit on your hands the entire flight?”
I nodded then—and the five other times I was asked the same by other hospital staff and employees. Yes, I will not touch my daughter if you just let me go with her.
•••
In her sleep, Hope calls out to make it stop. I don’t know if she’s dreaming of the leg break pain; of the fear of being flown through the air in a metal, thumping, whirr; of the terror of not having control. I soothe her. The buoy sounds and the cow answers. Through the darkness, I stare at the ceiling. Two days ago, I called my sister and asked, “You live in the city, right?” I’ve been to her apartment in Brooklyn, the small one she shares with her husband and two cats; I’ve been to her work in Manhattan, followed her through the subway system.
“Yes,” she said slowly, as if maybe I’ve suddenly lost my intelligence, evidenced by stating the obvious.
“And you do okay, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
I paused. “I’m wondering if I can do it, you know, live in the city.” Where the tenured jobs are, where Dreux can find reliable and meaningful work, where we might have health benefits.
“You’ve lived in cities before.”
“Not with a kid.”
My sister remained silent.
I asked her, “Don’t you ever worry about something like Hurricane Katrina happening in New York?” No one on this planet understands like she does the deep fear our mother’s religion planted in us about apocalyptic events. “I mean, here, I know where to find fresh water. In the city, I’m not so sure.”
“I think about it all the time,” she said.
•••
The sixty percent body cast came off after six weeks, and Hope’s recovery is a delight to watch. She’s learning to walk, run, and dance. Yesterday she rode her tricycle down our country road and we stopped to look at the cows, see how their large nostrils expand as they breathe. They sniffed at us, and Hope smiled back. After she studied them, she tried to pedal backwards away from the fence and her leg wasn’t strong enough to do it, so I pulled the tricycle and set her on her course. Her little legs churned and she moved across the dirt, building her confidence again.
If Hope’s accident had happened a week later, we would have had no low-income coverage, and we would face a mountain of medical bills. The helicopter ride itself was over thirty-thousand dollars. My family and I are barely surviving. We have no savings, no investment in a home, no retirement, no inheritance, no access to career networks. What we have is a wealth of landscape, the smell of ocean air, the hush and lull of the sea. I have a graduate degree—shouldn’t I use the opportunity it might afford me to provide her with more stability than I had?
•••
Twelve years after the arrival of his cowboy dreams, my dad rounded up his remaining cattle in order to come up with the earnest money for the property I grew up on. In the moonlight, he herded those now rangy and wild beasts, and browbeat them to the corral. He got the money he needed and traded one dream for another: cowboy for landowner—first time in America for the Gullicks. He died at home fourteen years later, on the land he loved almost as much as his children, without medical care and without hospice. I know that part of his choice to die at home had to do with dignity and being in a familiar place, but a larger part of his decision concerned medical bills. Simply put, dying at home was less expensive. And already there was so much debt.
When he was twelve, his mother sent him north from East Los Angeles to remove him from the violence he was courting. He was “running” with the kids he looked like—Mexican Americans, other young people caught in the politics of identity and poverty we do so well in the United States. A knife fight happened at a dance, then someone’s mother was shot. My grandmother searched inside and decided he’d been safer in the country.
I think about that every day: a mother’s love so great as to send a son away. From the city where both opportunity and ruination circle an individual, depending on their resources and choices. My father fell in love with the landscape of Mendocino County, let that terrain take up residence inside of him as he took up residence upon it.
I love so much of my childhood: the stretch of time a quiet country day gives to a child’s imagination; the purr of bees flirting with apple blossoms; a creek slipping over mossy stones as it works its way to the wider world. I was given the gift of a deep relationship with the elements that sustain us: water, earth, gardens, orchards, clean air. But to offer my daughter the same requires a layer of cushion my husband and I don’t have. Like so many others, we are faced with the choice of country versus city. I feel that binary in my body, a pressing building. Strong enough to break bones.
•••
Dawn has begun to break, the darkness relieved of its burden as the sun creeps toward rising.
So much of me wishes that the beauty of this place was enough to sustain us. If we do move, will Hope remember her first five years filled with towering trees, the open possibility of sky and ocean? Will the landscape of her imagination have had enough time to make roots? I think about my father, rounding up one dream in order to pursue another.
The buoy has stopped, but the cow calls on, lowing a message I don’t yet know how to understand.
•••
CHARLOTTE GULLICK is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator, and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. In May 2016, she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was published by Blue Hen Books/Penguin Putnam, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pembroke, Pithead Chapel, and the LA Review. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award. For more information: charlottegullick.com
My body is being weird today. Hands tingling, forearms squishing. I stop typing for a moment and arc my arms in the air, a quick sun-salutation. The movement takes me back to a time I can barely remember, when I could squeeze in one yoga class per week between days of weight lifting and four-mile runs. That person I used to be glimmers like a ghost in my memory. Even when I squint hard, I can barely see her.
I haven’t run or practiced yoga consistently for years because my joints ache. Or the room spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl. Or everything in the distance looks like it’s melting. Today, thank goodness, there’s none of that. Just pins and needles in my hands and weakness in my arms. I can finish grading. I can teach my classes. I can get through the day. A few fingers on my left hand have started shaking. Stress, maybe?
When a friend walks by my office, I call for her to come inside. We’re work sisters, bonded by more synchronicities than I can count, including losing people we loved to the same illness when we were younger.
“Do your hands ever twitch while you’re grading?” I ask. I massage my right forearm. There’s a stabbing pain that started up two weeks after my flu shot. Now it feels like a needle straight to the bicep.
Work Sister slumps in a chair across from me. Every day we discuss my mysterious medical symptoms. Early waking. Anxiety. Insomnia. Vertigo. Nailed-to-the-bed exhaustion. What diseases do I have? Or is it all in my imagination? Symptoms, unattached to firm diagnoses, float like giant question marks over our heads.
“Maybe carpal tunnel?” she says, and I nod. I hope so. Something relatively simple. Something else to ask my new GP about when I see her next week.
Like me, Work Sister is tired this morning. She didn’t sleep well last night and might have a cold. As always, our fatigue comes at the worst time, at the tail end of our semester, when our grading load quadruples. She slinks toward her office and closes the door. If I need her, I can call. I don’t think I’ll need her today, but it’s nice to know she’s there, on the other side of the wall, like my own sister once was.
I go back to grading. My students are trying to make sense of Hillbilly Elegy, a book I find mildly irritating, but assigned because this year I’m trying to stop tuning out people I’ve written off. Like my father, who I was estranged from for eleven years. My father is from rust-belt Ohio, like the book’s author. And he voted for Trump, and I didn’t think I could ever understand this choice. But I’m trying. We’re talking more now. The last time, he did most of the speaking. He told me a story about his cat and then told me I worked too much.
Perhaps he is right. Is my arm-hand-shoulder malfunctioning the equivalent of tennis elbow for writing professors?
( )
My father and I have plans to talk tonight. I take his phone call in bed, even though it’s eight p.m. on a Friday. I worked a twelve-hour day, advising a student publication that almost didn’t make it to press. Now I cannot sit up. Also, my husband left this morning for a weeklong meditation retreat, and I am not feeling very Zen about his absence at the busiest time in my semester. Yet our ten-year marriage works because we hold space for each other and we make space for the other’s individuality. I’m more envious than resentful of his absence. I wish I could check out of real life, too.
Tonight it’s just me and a dog in the bed, and my father on the phone, talking about neutron bombs. He asks me about the basement bomb shelter we inherited from the previous owners. Have I gotten it repaired? How much canned food do I have down there? What about water? What is my plan?
“It will be every man for himself,” he tells me. This sentence comes after he has suggested I install a wooden wishing well over the manhole cover in my backyard, to hide my bomb shelter’s exit from marauding gangs. He will not be coming to save me. What else is new?
For a moment, I think of asking his opinion on Trump’s latest baiting of North Korea on Twitter. But I’m too tired to argue. I focus instead on the fallout in my body. I tell him a doctor has recently diagnosed me with shingles, but the rash and pain have since migrated, so it’s not that.
“I’m going to see a new doctor on Tuesday,” I say, leaving out that she’s a woman recommended by a friend who lives with chronic pain. My father still uses words like “hysterical” to describe my mother, dead now sixteen years from juvenile diabetes. I suspect he distrusts women in authority. I don’t tell him about what happened at the last appointment with my former GP, either.
(I left the former GP because he told me my shingles-ridden body was a threat to pregnant women. He went on and on about this until I stopped him. I didn’t tell him how his comment hurt me because I miscarried my first pregnancy and fell apart afterward. I didn’t tell him how I feared he believed my non-pregnant body was less valuable than a pregnant body. But I called the office the next day.)
“I won’t be needing a follow up appointment,” I told my GP’s receptionist. “I’m leaving this practice.”
Silence. And then, “We’re sorry to hear that.” Then, click. Why didn’t I speak up in the appointment or demand an apology from the doctor? Why was I satisfied with silence, a simple click?
The day I told my father about my miscarriage, he said, “Well, I have to go.”
I shook when I hung up the phone, and then walked fast out my front door, as if I could shake off his inexplicable apathy. But I called back the next day, too.
“I told you I had a miscarriage,” I said. “Why didn’t you respond?”
He claimed he hadn’t heard me, and I wondered if that was true. I wondered if me being real with him was too threatening, or if I was afraid he’d reject me each time I asserted my version of the truth.
Last year, when my husband and I joined the Women’s March on Washington, I told my father I’d be “out of pocket” that day. He never asked what I’d be doing, just like I never asked him if he actually voted for Trump. I simply assumed so because of the giant Trump sticker on the rear window of his car.
Out of pocket. My choice of words does not surprise me.
A thousand pockets line mine and my father’s conversations. Countless unvoiced words cram inside those pockets. They form sentences I’d stuff inside parentheses if I were writing everything out.
Parent, a root of parenthesis, means “to bring forth.”
Ironically, a parenthesis holds back. A parenthesis suggests sub-vocalization or even silence. At best, a parenthesis is the grammatical equivalent of muttering under one’s breath.
From the Greek para “beside” and tithenai “to put, to place,” parenthesis reminds me of another conversation my father and I had, when he was working the ninth step in AA.
He talked then about how he and my mother had separate roles in their marriage. He was the worker, the earner. She was the unpaid domestic. They “wrestled” because they did not agree on those roles. He used his fists, his buck knife, to put her into place. She almost died leaving him. But he still said they “wrestled.” His language made her a complicit partner in the violence he inflicted against her, as if they stood in a ring and shook hands after a coin flip. He towered over her, but he still insisted they had wrestled.
When my mother was dying, she begged me never to tell my father that she was sick. Her hands trembled when she said his name, although they hadn’t lived under the same roof for twenty years. Did she teach me how to hide a secret in the middle of a sentence? Did she write my first parenthesis?
Now, whenever I see the word “parenthesis,” I see the word “parent.” I see myself standing between them, like I did on the night of the buck knife, when as a toddler I pushed against him and said, “Stop.”
“ ”
A rash has erupted on my neck. It looks fungal, like ring worm. But also like acne. It wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. I notice red splotches spreading to my clavicle when I use the Ladies Room before class. I adjust a scarf Work Sister lent me when I texted her about the rash. I fix my lipstick, as if that matters.
The person looking back at me in the mirror is me and not me. Illness distances me from my body. I, or the person I used to think of as “I,” is no longer in charge. And I don’t know who has taken over.
Because I wear bright lipstick and dangly earrings and stylish clothes, I appear “healthy.” No one can see that my legs wobble as I walk. My calves have been tingling since Thanksgiving and are starting to numb. For the first time in my life, I’ve wondered if I might lose my ability to walk, but I tell no one of these suspicions. If I say them out loud, I’ll have to face them. Right now I prefer mystery, a sensibility I inherited from my mother.
When she and I were living into her last days, she liked to say, “It’s in God’s hands.” And she believed that. She believed in a mysterious force pulling the strings, choosing whether she’d live or die. She did not believe her suffering was a result of random chance or bad luck or biological determinism. Her God concept, I think, gave her hope and a sense of purpose. God relieved her of self-blame. I am glad she died hopeful.
A few years ago, when I went to Al-Anon once a week, we used to say, “Let go and let God.” Even though I didn’t believe in God anymore, I’d say these words with everyone else because I liked their rhythm, the way the right quote can ease anxiety, can feel like a prayer.
Back then, I was trying to understand the toll of my father’s addictions and abandonment. I wanted to believe in the possibility of okayness when everything was not okay at the moment. The closest I could come to believing in God was believing in hope, which lit a path toward okayness.
At the end of the Al Anon meeting, when we held hands and said The Lord’s Prayer, I choked on the first few words of the prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.” Sometimes a quote can hit like a punch.
The quote that gets me through my days comes from the New York City street artist, James de la Vega: “You are more powerful than you think.”
I have taped these words to my office computer. I say them quietly before class, as if I am trying to make myself remember something important. I try not to think about my father, who I’m fairly certain has never needed a mantra to remind himself of his physical power.
The “you” I am talking to is not the daughter who interrupted his fists years ago.
The “you” of my mantra is the “me” I used to be, the one who could trust her legs, the ghost glimmer of a self I hope to meet again. I wish I could welcome in my new self, this emerging sicker self. I want my words to make room for her in my body. I want to speak her into being, make her worthy, visible.
…
It’s a Sunday night, and I’ve spent the day grading. All I want to do is binge watch Christmas movies. But an unknown number flashes on my iPhone screen. A twitch in my gut tells me to answer the phone.
On the other end of the line, my new GP greets me. I saw her earlier in the week and agreed to more bloodwork. Now the tests have come back, she says.
Oh shit. My belly cramps hard. Doctors do not call on weekends with good news. Beside me, the dog shifts. I rub his belly, soothing him when I cannot soothe myself. My husband’s still away, meditating in the mountains.
“Your autoimmune tests are normal,” the doctor says. “You have Lyme disease.”
A pop releases from my jaw. I never saw a tick on me, never had the bull’s eye rash. Lyme disease? Is she sure?
The doctor assures me that my tests are conclusive and tells me I might be on antibiotics for a long while. I need to get over my fear of them, my assumption that they’re a modern scourge.
When my symptoms started a few years ago, my former GP tested me for Lyme. The tests showed some abnormalities, yet he dismissed them without suggesting follow-ups. I didn’t contest him. I wanted to be healthy, and he told me what I wanted to hear. My doctor was bigger than me, like my father. And a part of me suspects I didn’t challenge him because I still freeze up around large men with loud voices. I still wonder what menace lurks behind bravado. I shrink into silence. I defer.
Now the power of silence, of what is omitted, overwhelms me. Until it received a name, my illness was a silence whose form I could not trace, a deadly omission, an absence intent on destroying me.
My diagnosis punctuates that silence.
To punctuate means “to interrupt,” or “to mark,” or “to divide.” There was a healthy me, now there is a sick me. A before. An after. A self that is marked, not only on medical charts or insurance claims, but psychologically, emotionally. And yet, I am less sick now than before my diagnosis, which put me on the path toward recovery. Another mystery.
For my mother, diagnoses were question marks and exclamation points and, finally, periods, when she learned her transplanted kidney was rejecting seven years after the initial surgery and she would likely not have another organ transplant in time to save her.
My illness was an ellipsis for years, a disease hiding in plain sight, a disease with no words attached to it, no name, an ever-present absence.
__
For days after my diagnosis, I walk around imagining bacteria swimming through my blood stream. I picture sea monkeys dying, one by one, inside of me. Still on retreat, my husband texts me a photo of the metta prayer.
May I be happy. May I be well. I cannot complete the subsequent verses, the ones addressed to “you” and “sentient beings.” Borrellia bacteria colonized my body for at least two years, possibly longer. I will not bless a stealth infection that hides in my heart, my eyes, my nervous system.
I want my diagnosis to be a different form of punctuation –– a dash that forms a channel between the former and present me, allows me passage back to a healthier self who’s become a shadow, a ghost.
How many selves live inside of me? How many more will come? I used to live more than a thousand miles from my father. I once plotted a PhD in Renaissance literature and read Shakespeare for hours each day. When every doctoral program I applied to rejected me, my father sent me a box full of smaller boxes containing inspirational messages and trinkets. (I did not see the metaphor at the time.)
On one box, he taped an envelope with a poem inside. I’d spent months obsessing over variants of Hamlet’s soliloquy, the questions that form entry points in the play, all the dashes belying paralytic ambivalence. So the silly ABAB rhyme scheme poem by Linda Ellis, made me chuckle. Eight years later, I can’t remember more than the first five lines of Hamlet’s most quoted speech, but I can remember couplets from “The Dash.”
“For it matters not, how much we own, the cars … the house … the cash. / What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.”
The academic in me wants to deride the poem’s platitudes, but I can’t. All those years ago, my father reached out to me. He tried to impart guidance, tried to teach me how love matters. I read this poem as evidence of his potential to be a father, and his longing to connect.
Maybe that’s why it’s so much harder when I stand in his kitchen one night and try to talk about my treatment, my fears of relapse.
He busies himself by spooning leftover Chinese food into Tupperware containers. His back stays turned, like a jammed door. He says nothing to comfort me. Again, it’s as if he hasn’t heard. In this moment, I am reminded of the dash’s double meaning, how a dash can connect –– and separate. On either side of his kitchen, my father and I form two ends of a dash.
He can only connect at a distance, and I cannot mediate all that divides us.
I stand before the mirror in the hotel room with my legs planted wide and my arms outstretched in a V. I’ve never attempted a power pose before, but I’ve heard it’s a great way to boost your confidence. Apparently, just mimicking the stance of a powerful person can make a poser feel powerful, too. It’s also been suggested that the pose can raise testosterone and lower cortisol levels and that the subsequent hormonal adjustment will reduce anxiety. Since, at this moment, my mouth is parched, my palms are clammy, and my heart is palpitating wildly, anxiety reduction seems like an excellent idea.
I hold the pose for a full minute. It occurs to me that this is the body language equivalent of a positive affirmation, a fist-pump, a Go get ’em, Tiger. And while I’m normally skeptical of pep talks, tonight I’m willing to suspend disbelief.
As I stare at my expanded self in the mirror, I am reminded of the time I was hiking in Glacier National Park. Posted along the trails were warnings of mountain lion sightings and instructions on what to do when confronted with a big cat. “Make yourself appear as large as possible,” the signs directed. “Act defiant, not afraid.”
The three men I am about to meet are not mountain lions, I tell myself.
Nor am I easy prey.
Nonetheless, I have never felt more vulnerable.
Now I’m in the elevator, in a free fall of floors passing too quickly. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen… I’m tempted to push all the buttons to buy time, to catch my breath. Somehow, even after decades of waiting, I’m still not ready.
But it’s too late: The elevator doors open onto the ornate marble lobby. I’d chosen this majestic old hotel for its substantial heft, its art-deco grandeur, its storied history and roster of illustrious guests. But Winston Churchill and Elvis Presley are no longer on the premises, and at this moment, I’m surprised by the seeming-ordinariness of the hotel.
Clusters of people stand laughing at the entrance of the restaurant, others peer at their phones from overstuffed chairs. The clerks behind the desk don’t even bother looking up as I stand alone for the last time. A neighboring elevator arrives with a ping! and I step out.
The inevitable awaits.
There, at the far end of the lobby, are my mystery dates. They are bigger than I expected, solid, strong presences, a triumvirate of maleness. Ruddy-complected. Short-cropped, grey-blond hair. Button-down shirts. Shifting stances. Anxious smiles.
And now I am walking towards them, a preordained gravitational pull, even as I am conscious that each step brings me closer to a place I’m not sure I want to be. The lobby feels, at that moment, insurmountably vast. As I finally approach them, I look quickly from one face to another, struck suddenly by the pairs of dark blue eyes regarding me. There’s something disconcertingly familiar about those eyes, the blue a hue I recognize, a hue I know from seeing it every day. Those eyes, their eyes, are the same as mine.
Because, after all, the men are my brothers.
To be precise, my half-brothers.
Now I am hugging them, one at a time, and they give good hugs, full squeezes, no holding back. They start to introduce themselves but there’s no need—I know them already. I’ve studied their faces, their photos, the images that have filled my computer and mind since all this began.
•••
A few months earlier I had sent three identical letters to three separate addresses:
“Dear ___,
I’m writing to you—and concurrently to your brothers—as your half-sister. I have no idea if you know of my existence; if not, I will explain that my mother was your father’s first wife. Their marriage was short and soon after my mother remarried it was decided that I should be adopted by my stepfather.”
In the letter I explained that I’d had no contact with anyone from my biological father’s family since the 1960s and that, in fact, I had done my best to obliterate reminders of my early life, specifically those relating to my father. It was only recently—when, surprising even myself—I’d spontaneously searched the Internet search and discovered his obituary.
What I didn’t explain was that I closed and re-opened the laptop three times before making it to the end of the death notice. The most difficult part to read? Not that my father had been young when he died or that his type of cancer would likely have been protracted and painful. No, the worst part was the list of survivors. Specifically, the absence of my name from that list. Could there be any wound deeper than a denial of my very existence? None perhaps, save the revelation of three other names, those of my father’s sons.
For a long while, I told no one of my discovery. It was too big. I was uncertain what to do with the information, uncertain, even, of how I felt. Yet I whispered the names of those unknown men to myself and I doodled their initials on the backs of envelopes, just as I’d done years earlier with my first crushes. According to the obituary, they all lived near one another, in the same state where my father had died. Other searches revealed little else. Who were these guys? What did they know about me? Why had they never been in touch? And, alarmingly, what else didn’t I know? I began to wonder if our paths had ever crossed. And if so, would we have recognized each other? Were there traits we shared? Interests, predilections, hopes, fears? Not even Detective Google could help me there.
I allowed myself to imagine what it could be like to reveal some version of the truth: Oh, yes, I have three brothers. I’m the eldest of four, with three younger brothers. Even though we live far apart, my brothers and I are very close.
Until one day, tired of imagining and yet preparing myself for the worst, I mailed them each a letter.
•••
Now we stand grinning at one another in the hotel lobby, talking at once about my trip and their traffic and how it was so easy to recognize me, until finally, it’s clear that somebody needs to take charge, and I guess that should be me because after all, I’m the oldest in the family and even though for my whole life—at least until now—I was an only child, one with a distinct lack of experience in birth order dynamics. I’ll do it, I’ll take charge. That is the role of the eldest, right? Which I hope does not come as too much of a surprise to the oldest brother, the one who’s used to taking charge in the family.
“Should we head out?” I say and we start toward the stairs before one of them asks, “Okay, where should we go?”
I find this deeply unsettling. They haven’t thought about this before now? We’d arranged this date nearly a month ago and yet no one has thought beyond this moment? It hasn’t occurred to them that something needs to happen, that we can’t all just remain here in the pretty lobby of this hotel in Cincinnati all evening?
Five minutes in, this sister is already exasperated with her brothers. And it occurs to me that perhaps this lack of planning is just the beginning of the things that are different about us.
“Well,” I say, “How about somewhere we can go for a drink?” It’s clear to me that one of us, at least, could really use a drink.
There’s a brief conference. It’s obvious that none of them frequents the bars in town, which is, I decide, probably a positive. There’s a little bit of bickering: “No, that place’s no good,” “Not on a Friday night,” “Nah, we’d have to get in the car to go there,” before the youngest says he knows a place a few blocks away. And so we step out into the warm spring evening.
Arranging ourselves on the sidewalk proves awkward. Demonstrating gentlemanly politeness, they all want me to go ahead. Or maybe they’re just afraid to walk with me. Finally, after a bit of jockeying, we pair off and start down the street.
“Man, you’re tall,” my walking partner says, and it’s true that at five feet eight, I’m not a small person. At this moment, though, standing next to his six-foot plus stature, I don’t feel tall at all. In fact, suddenly, I feel like a little girl.
And I’m reminded that the last time I was part of their family, I was a little girl.
What remains of that child wants to put our her hand to be held, to feel safe and reassured that taking this risk has been the right thing to do. But I don’t yet know that, nor do I really know these men and so instead, I tuck my hand into my pocket and try to keep up with them as we head down the street.
•••
As it turned out, my letters proved to be lit firecrackers that had landed in their mailboxes. No real damage was done, but a lot of commotion ensued. “It was quite a shock for me and still is,” one of them wrote. Another explained that, “I am … trying to face this as reality.” It was surprisingly reassuring to know that they had been unaware of the circumstances all these years, and to know, too, that unearthing that long-ago secret felt significant to them as well. A third wrote, “Your letter did indeed catch me and my brothers by surprise. We did not know any of this. We are all … trying to process this information.”
And thus began the exchange: emails, letters, photographs, confidences. Giddy, I sent off friendly notes and flattering photographs. There was so much to know, to discover. Like the little frisson that accompanies flirtation, it felt exciting and strange to have new people interested in my life story. And for those long-married men, I suspect it was similar. After all, when was the last time that anyone had expressed genuine curiosity about what they thought, how they felt, who they had wanted to be, and who, in fact, they were?
•••
We settle into a booth and order drinks. Thankfully, everyone is drinking, even the one with a medical condition that makes it unadvisable. “Except every now and then,” he tells me. I’m both glad that this is one of those times and worried that it’s a genetic disease I’ll eventually inherit.
They reminisce about the day my letters arrived. “Thought you were after Dad’s money,” one of them admits. “I thought there was no way this could be true,” one says. When confronted, their mother, my stepmother—a woman I vaguely remember meeting but had never really known—eventually confirmed my story. Their father hadn’t wanted them to know, she told them, although she now regrets having kept quiet. Dad was a very private person, the men tell me. Secretive, even.
We order another round of drinks.
I bring out a photo album I’ve put together, a highlights reel of my life. This photographic history seemed like a good idea when I was planning the trip, a way to catch them up on my last fifty years. There are pictures of what I now think of as my “real” family standing in front of houses in California, in Chicago, in St. Louis, and in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And much earlier, worn snapshots from when I was a toddler, although none with our shared parent. I hear myself chattering a monologue, eager to fill them in, introduce them to everything I’ve been and have become. That’s me on study abroad, have you ever been to the south of France? And here’s my college graduation, and, oh, yes, that’s my wedding day. San Juan Capistrano? It’s in Southern California, where I was living at the time. And here’s Henry as a baby, what a rascal, and here he is holding Andrew at the hospital, nearly four years later. I know, they don’t look much alike. That black Lab? Let’s see, that would be Lucy, or maybe Stanley, hard to tell, but both really great dogs.
It suddenly occurs to me that this compilation of photographs will come in handy at my funeral some day. I’ve seen slide shows like that, Kodak moments commemorating a person already gone. Hell, maybe that’s happening right now. The person in the album has already disappeared, an only child replaced—tonight—by a woman with three (half) brothers.
The men flip through the album quickly, occasionally glancing up as if to check the resemblance of that younger person in the photo to the woman now sitting across from them. Stop turning the pages so fast and pay attention, I want to tell them. There will be a quiz. Who is my younger son named for? How did I meet my husband? Where did we last go on vacation? It worries me that they might not appreciate the importance of backstory.
But as the night goes on, the possibility of catching up with one another’s lives seems increasingly remote. As we continue talking I have a hard time remembering which one of their daughters is a karate black belt and which is studying to become a nurse. Whose job requires travel? How old are their boys again? Which one of them likes to ride motorcycles? (That one, at least, is easy: It turns out they all do.)
When we order food, I learn that one of the brothers has a shellfish allergy. For a moment, I marvel at the vagaries of biology. How is that the other two – and me – have been spared? Accustomed to singularity, I feel awakened to the idea of commonality.
One of them has ordered a Scotch egg as an appetizer and I am offered a bite. I hesitate, not wanting to be rude, yet reluctant to press my lips onto the same surface that his touched. Suddenly this all feels uncomfortably intimate. Dad was a very private person, I hear them say.
My husband has sent along a list of questions to keep the conversation flowing. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done? Is there a family tradition that’s meaningful to you? Which song do you play really loud when you’re alone in the car? As much as I’m grateful for his thoughtfulness, as much as I want this to be a light-hearted romp of a family outing, I can’t help but wonder if the situation is actually less comic than tragic.
For what does this meeting represent, anyway? The word “reunion” has such a cheery lilt. Are we reunifying? But we are not East and West Germany, although it strikes me as portentous that my separation from their family was approximately the same length of time as those two states spent apart. Nor are we a band that is getting back together thirty years after its records went golden. The cheesy lyrics to a song, “reunited and it feels so good,” float across my mind and I swat at them with an inward, Nope, not exactly. Which feels like a betrayal because the men sitting here with me right now are kind and decent. They are funny and sincere and, I suspect, dependable. They are, indeed, solid. I bet they’d help me build a backyard deck or teach me to shoot a gun. In fact, if there were a Dating Game equivalent for choosing a brother I would want to pick all of them. Plus they seem ready to welcome me into their clan. Maybe I’d like to bring my family to their Thanksgiving? I’m asked.
But when I try to imagine my husband and our two sons giving up our own holiday traditions—abandoning the neighbors with whom we always share the meal, relinquishing the special tortellini soup we have as our first course, foregoing the after-dinner walk, the cheese course, the assigned seating we’ve tweaked for years—the concept of What Might Have Been veers abruptly into What Will Never Be.
•••
When I was a girl, an only child growing up in a lonely house, I yearned for siblings. How much better life would be if I had someone to catch my Frisbee, to deflect my parents’ focus, to help me understand boys. I was aware of the sacrifices I’d have to make: the endless arguments about the bigger piece of cake, riding shotgun, or being the first to press the elevator buttons. I knew from friends that familial arguments would likely include the phrase, “That’s not fair!” and that, as an only child, I’d have to become less spoiled and more adept at sharing. That was all fine with me. I’d have traded my frilly canopy bed for one with bunks any day, especially if it came with a brother or sister to giggle with in middle of the night.
But I am no longer that girl.
While I like these men, and while I have tried so hard to make myself likeable, nay, loveable, to them, I’m not sure there’s a space we can all inhabit. I’m suddenly skeptical that the overlap between my life and theirs is enough for a real relationship to ever develop. Not now, not after so many years. Any scientist will tell you that blood is a weak binding agent. Without the underpinning of a shared history, does our kinship offer anything other than a possible source for a replacement kidney?
•••
Now the meal is over. Before we head out, I ask to take their picture. And because they’re still willing to humor me, they huddle together at one end of the table, pressed closely against one another and yet comfortable together. They smile and I click. Is it significant that the only photo I have from that night is one in which they are apart from me? No matter. I will text the photo to my family back home who are waiting to hear how my night has unfolded. “Those eyes!” my son will immediately text in response. “They’re your eyes!”
Later, back in the hotel elevator, a friendly couple will ask if I had a good evening. “Oh, you know,” I tell them. “Just a family thing. Out to dinner with my three brothers.” They nod and smile and I smile in return. I don’t acknowledge how long I have anticipated being able to speak those words or how exquisite they feel as they spill carelessly from my mouth.
And maybe, for now, that is enough.
•••
DEBORAH LINDER writes fiction and creative nonfiction in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Remedy Quarterly, Rapportage, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Smithsonian.com, and the margins of her favorite cookbooks. More of her writing is at www.deborahlinder.com
“So, Dad,” I sit down at the kitchen table, face him, and speak loudly so he can understand me. “I think it’s time to go through Mom’s clothes. What do you say?”
My eighty-nine-year-old father puts down his cup of instant Maxwell House coffee laced with Sweet ’n’ Low and stares at me. “What?” he asks.
I give him a look. We both know that despite his hearing loss, he knows what I just said. It’s been four years since my mother left us for what she called the great Sak’s Fifth Avenue in the Sky and I ask my father this question every time I visit. And each time I ask, my father answers: “Not yet,” in the tone of voice he used throughout my childhood, which always signaled the end of discussion.
I repeat my question even louder, and my father surprises me by not offering his usual response. Instead, he says nothing for minute. And nothing for a minute longer. And then he lets out a huge sigh as if he’s finally admitting that my mother is never coming back. “I suppose,” he sighs again, “it’s time.”
While my dad turns on the TV and settles down in front of a blaring Yankees game with a can of salted peanuts and a glass of diet Coke, I trudge up to my parents’ bedroom. Off to the side is my mother’s “boudoir” which contains a makeup table, a fainting couch, and two enormous closets, each one bigger than the sixth-floor walk-up I rented in Manhattan four decades ago when I first graduated from college.
Where to begin? I had tried over the years to get my mother to at least start cleaning out her clothes but she wouldn’t let me touch a thing. “If it can’t hurt you and you don’t have to feed it,” she’d say, shaking a sharp red fingernail at me, “just leave it alone.”
I enter the closet on the right, lined with double racks on either side, and I’m immediately overwhelmed by blouses, skirts, sweaters, slacks, dresses, hats, belts, scarfs, gloves, stockings, slips, and shoes. I gaze in wonder at stripes, polka dots, plaids, paisleys, sparkles, sequins, lace, and leopard print. I run my hands along silk, velvet, velour, wool, cotton, leather, suede, and satin. I take a deep breath and inhale my mother’s unique scent: a combination of Chesterfield Kings, Arid Extra Dry, Chanel No. Five, and Aqua Net. Suddenly, I understand my father’s reluctance to let any of this go. Everything in this closet contains my mother’s DNA. Every blouse at one time was filled with my mother’s pale, plump arms. Every skirt swished around her short, shapely legs. Every pair of pants cradled her zaftig belly and hips. Standing here, I can almost pretend my mother is downstairs with my father, screaming at him to turn down the damn TV. Getting rid of all this is like saying goodbye to her all over again.
But as my father said, it’s time.
I head to the back of the closet where I come face to face with six hanging shoe bags, each one with sixteen pockets, which according to my quick calculation, adds up to ninety-six pairs of shoes. My mother’s love affair with footwear started long ago when she was a young bride working in the shoe department of Orbach’s. All day long, squatting on her heels, she measured feet and fit them into fancy footwear she couldn’t afford. Plus, she and my father lived in a tiny basement apartment in Brooklyn. “The windows were above my head,” my mother told me. “I looked out at the street day after day and all I saw were shoes.” At the time, my father was a law student at NYU and, as he has told me numerous times, my parents were so poor they “didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” My father promised my mother that when he became an attorney, he would buy her anything she wanted. And clearly what she wanted was an Imelda Marcos-size collection of shoes.
So many shoes! One shoe, two shoes, red shoes, blue shoes, black shoes, white shoes, left shoes, right shoes. I feel like a character in a Dr. Seuss children’s book. Or like the child I was once, clomping around in my mother’s high heels with one of her beaded evening bags slung over my shoulder. How I wish my mother were here to tell me the story of all these shoes. For surely each pair has a story to tell. Here are the pink satin pumps dyed to match the gown my mother wore to my brother’s Bar Mitzvah in 1966. Here are the gold lamé tassled flip flops she always wore to the “beauty parlor” when she went to get her monthly pedicure. Here is a pair of red stiletto sky-high heels that showed off her stunning calves (it’s not for nothing she was known as “Legs Levin” during her salad days). And here are the most heart-breaking shoes of all: the flat navy blue sneakers she wore when the cancer made her feet so swollen, she couldn’t squeeze them into anything else.
Just for kicks, I take down a pair of black patent leather three-inch heels with a bow across the toe, and, feeling like one of Cinderella’s ungainly step-sisters, try to stick my feet inside. I know they won’t fit. Unlike me, my mother had lovely feet. Size six and a half. Baryshnikov-worthy arches. Alabaster skin. Delicate toes. Toenails expertly trimmed and buffed and polished candy apple red. I have no idea where my mother got her gorgeous feet.
Her mother’s feet were a sight to behold. Squat, flat, wide. Flaky, crusted skin. Gnarly prehistoric toes. Thick yellowed nails. Great big bunions. Still, like my mother, my grandmother loved shoes. When she moved into a nursing home at the age of ninety-nine, she marched in on white open-toed, high heeled T-strap sandals. The nurse took one look and told me to bring her some flats. “The last thing she needs is to fall,” she said. Since my grandmother didn’t own a pair of flats, I returned the next day with a pair of my own. My grandmother slipped on the moccasins, took two steps, and promptly fell down. “Please mameleh, can I have my heels back now?” she begged. I returned them and my grandmother wore them till the day she died.
How I wish I had my mother’s dainty feet! “Mom,” I say aloud, “I could wear your shoes as earrings.” Standing in her closet, my mind wanders back to the last day of my mother’s last hospital visit. She was lying in her hospital bed on top of the blankets in a sweat. “You have such beautiful feet,” I said to her, for even at that point, her pedicure was perfect. “I wish I’d inherited them,” I went on. “I have your mother’s feet.”
“And her face,” my mother said, gazing at me with love for the last time. “You have my mother’s beautiful, beautiful face.” And then she shut her eyes. And now I wipe at mine.
No wonder my dad didn’t want to go near my mother’s closet. Though we buried my mother four years ago, this feels like a burial all over again.
“You can do this,” I tell myself. I step out of the closet to fetch a cardboard box big enough to sit in and start chucking my mother’s shoes into it. Each one makes a dull thud that reminds me of the sound made by the clumps of dirt we dumped onto my mother’s coffin on that blistering August afternoon long ago. That was the saddest sound I’d ever heard. Until now. “I can’t,” I say aloud. My mother’s voice appears in my head. “One step at a time,” she says, as she reminded me so many times when she was alive. “Brooklyn wasn’t built in a day. You can do anything you set your mind to.” And she was always right.
Somehow the afternoon turns into evening, and by the time my father comes upstairs to tell me that the Yankees have lost, I have seven huge boxes of shoes and pocketbooks, fifty enormous plastic bags of clothing, and two empty closets. I am exhausted. My dad is amazed.
Since we scheduled my mother’s clothes to be picked up the next morning between seven a.m. and noon, I set my alarm for six. When it jars me awake, I leap out of bed, pull on some clothes, and lug everything out to the driveway. Then I drag myself back inside, crawl between the covers, and try to go back to asleep. But a minute later, I throw off the blankets and creep outside again. I can’t leave my mother’s clothes out there by the curb waiting to be picked up like trash. Soon I hear the front door open and see my father coming towards me. We stand side by side, each of us with one hand raised to shield our eyes from the glare of the morning sun, as if we are saluting my mother’s wardrobe. Neither of us says anything, for what is there to say? My head tells me that these are only things, but my heart disagrees: these are my mother’s things. There’s a big difference.
An hour passes and my father goes inside to get ready for work—though he is about to turn ninety, he’s still practicing law. I stand guard over my mother’s clothes until ten a.m. when a big yellow truck pulls up to our driveway. “Thank you for choosing Big Brothers/Big Sisters,” says the driver as he tosses bag after bag into the back of the truck. It takes him all of five minutes, and then he is gone.
And so is she.
•••
LESLÉA NEWMAN’s seventy books include the poetry collection, I Carry My Mother which explores a daughter’s journey through her mother’s illness and death, and the children’s classic, Heather Has Two Mommies. From 2008-2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. Currently she is a faculty member of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing program. Her newest poetry collection, Lovely will be published in January 2018 by Headmistress Press. More information here: http://www.lesleanewman.com/newbks.htm
Is it weird to anyone else that so many of the processes of our body occur in the dark? In my mind’s eye, I’m watching things happen the way they would in an educational film in high school science. Everything: digestion, oxygen exchange, salivation, ejaculation, menstruation.
I mean picture it: a woman releases an egg, it travels down the fallopian tube, if no sperm find it, it dies and passes through the body with the rest of the uterine lining. If it’s fertilized, that egg changes, grows, and moves into the uterus and usually embeds in the right spot. Now imagine that in the dark. How the hell does this happen?
Hormones. Temperature. Luck. All regulated by biochemistry and stuff I can’t see at all. Why do I care? Is it because I’m logical and scientific? Is it because I run a little anxious?
The corpus lutem is a little watchmen that waits for any sign of a fertilized egg implanted in your body. It’s the part of the ovary that the egg bursts out of. It waits in the dark for a wave of heat—estrogen—to signal that the uterus should hold on to its lining if you are pregnant. You know the rest: the mystery of life and really if you think about it, death. Something happens and cells thrive or something happens and cells die and it all happens inside us.
It’s embarrassing how hard I tried to have a baby. How badly I waited. I thought I would be laid back and spontaneous. Finally, we can just have sex and not worry. Like Sally Albright, I thought we’d bang on the kitchen floor whenever we wanted but the truth is, it really is a cold, hard, Mexican ceramic tile and super uncomfortable. I really did take the fun out of it.
In every month, you spend three weeks waiting to find out. Waiting to ovulate, waiting to find out if you are pregnant and waiting to start again.
I had months and months of starting over. I wasn’t medically outside of normal limits. We were told that getting pregnant within a year of trying is normal. I absolutely break for people who endure this for years.
After six months and eight cycles, I woke up in the middle of the night. I felt like I was riding the tiniest tidal wave of heat. I felt a vibration—like a buzzing, happening in me. I sat wide awake in the dark and smiled. This was unusual enough, chemical enough, that I absolutely knew I was pregnant.
I was right. The next day, a few days before my period was due, I took a pregnancy test and yep, two lines, that little heat wave was the start of a baby.
I rode other waves too. Like the nausea wave. That is no joke. I texted my Dad who had recently stopped chemotherapy for what we had just learned was terminal throat cancer. We joked about puking first thing in the morning, how much we puked, how gross it is, all the different weird words for it: Puke, barf, vomit and his favorite an onomatopoeic RAAAAAALPH.
But at my first OB appointment I found out, I would be starting over again. My baby had no heartbeat.
It’s a thousand tiny deaths … all those steps from there to here. Cell death. Death of what you thought would happen. The death of your father.
When they showed me the tiny form on the screen, all I could think was that it was dark inside my womb. I didn’t want my baby in there alone and unseen when they turned the monitor off.
The body works along, without our consent whether living or dying.
I endured a few very hard weeks hoping for a natural miscarriage and, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I scheduled a D&C.
I found myself really curious about how the D&C procedure is performed. I asked the doctor to explain the approach in detail to me. Why does a physician go in blind when they remove the fetal tissue? Wouldn’t it help to have the procedure guided by ultrasound? Why do you do it in the dark? Why can’t you see?
When I asked the OB these questions, a lady I had never met but had already spoken to on the phone, she seemed offended and sort of scuffed when responding. “Um, I’ve done this before. We don’t use an ultrasound because we don’t. We know how to do it.”
Is it so much work to educate a patient about your methods, about the risks? I pressed on. “How are your outcomes? What are the risks?”
Again, annoyed and terse. “They’re good. There is a small risk of puncturing your uterus and therefore of bleeding, of hysterectomy, and, of course, even death.”
“So I could wake up without the ability to have children?”
“It’s possible, but what else are you going to do?”
She actually said that to me.
The first nurse couldn’t get an IV in. Another nurse came in and got it. She offered her condolences to me. The office was plastered with pink and red hearts. Fresh roses sat proudly at the nurses station. It was Valentine’s Day, after all. My husband offered a thankful nod and the nurse left. He held my hand and waited with me, assuring me it would be okay. He was an ocean of calm.
A small-framed man walked in, the anesthesiologist. We pulled his chair close to mine and started with this:
“My wife has sat where you are sitting five times. We joke that we have two only-children because there are nine years between our first and second living children.” He had kind eyes and a friendly energetic voice. “I’m going to talk you through the risks of anesthesia. The procedure involves sedation, no intubation or ventilation but there is a risk, less than a lightning strike, that I would need to intubate you, okay? It’s safer to do this than to drive home. You could have a bad reaction to the medication but again, these are old meds, very well studied and I am an excellent doctor.” He went through a few other risks, including the tiniest risk of death, which he said was like suffering two lightning strikes in the same day and told me I’d wake up a little groggy.
He consistently addressed me before addressing my husband. He put his hands on mine and said he was so sorry I was suffering and he wished me well, hoping that I would fare better than his wife. As he was leaving the room he turned and said “After this, you can start over and try again.”
I wrote him a thank you note later. That man is why I let them wheel me into the room, let the somewhat rude OB scrape the baby out of my body without even looking.
He was right. I did get another chance to start over. Two months later, they peeked again and saw a strong heartbeat and a tidal wave of heat with their machines. I was ten weeks along when Dad passed away in the dark of morning. And the mystery of that baby growing in the dark accompanied the grief, the way the sun rises even if you didn’t sleep great. I had a daughter that December, she has my Dad’s curls.
I got to try again two years later and have a son. We named him after my dad. He was born as fast as a lightning strike into a unlit hallway of the birth center. The midwives turned on the lights later and we all laughed at the trail of blood I left from the lobby to the spot he emerged. “That looked a lot better in the dark,” the midwife said. That was true. When I play the video of his birth in my head, I see nothing. I don’t need to see it. I had gone through enough life and death by then to trust what I can’t see.
I feel the power of his body moving through me. The weight of him leaving me, the people bustling around me, I hear myself yelling out, I hear splashes of liquid hit the floor. A nurse tells me to squat, which I ignore and deliver him standing up. I don’t even see him yet, he is just pressed against my abdomen screaming. I hold him to my belly. I feel his squishy shoulders, his tiny frame. At that point, we didn’t know it was a boy. I did have to move out of the dark hallway to confirm that.
•••
CARLY BERGEY is a Speech-Language Pathologist, singer, and writer currently crafting a memoir about her work as a voice therapist. Her creative and academic writing has been published in Intima, Pulse, the ASHA leader, ENT Secrets and CHEST. She lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with her family.
On our fridge, there’s a pair of grainy black-and-white ultrasound stills, held up with a small plastic duck magnet and looking back at me and my husband every time we open the door for half-and-half or orange juice. In the photographs, our baby looks like a fuzzy cashew. A lima bean. A smudge on a window you could wipe away with Windex and a rag. It’s hard to believe this is where we all begin.
You may be daydreaming about having a boy or a girl, but the external genitals haven’t developed enough to reveal your baby’s sex. (Try our Chinese gender predictor for an early guess!) Either way, your baby—about the size of a kidney bean—is constantly moving and shifting, though you still can’t feel it.
I am going to be a mother, and all I can think about is my father.
My dad and I haven’t talked in nine years. But I’m the one it seems to bother. Closer to a decade than not. No phone calls, but also no letters, no emails, no texts. Not that I can imagine my dad—or the practical, literal, somewhat-adverse-to-technology engineer who was the father I used to know—texting. When I was a teenager, he was morally opposed to call waiting; in my early twenties, I alarmed him with my fumbles at blogging. I’m not alone in this—my parents had three daughters, and my younger sisters don’t have contact with our father either. It’s been so long since we’ve last talked that I have to stop and count, skip back like I’m flipping through a photo album in reverse, tallying up the times we missed. Graduations. Christmases. Birthdays. Father’s Days I avoid thinking about by giving the card section at Target plenty of distance starting right after Memorial Day.
It is surprisingly easy as an adult to go through everyday life not talking about the person who contributed half of your genetic makeup. When other people talk about their fathers, I smile or nod and hope the conversation moves on to weather. Or I talk about my father-in-law, or I cast my mind back to some time when my dad and I were talking, the more distant and innocuous memories papering over more recent unpleasantness. It’s as if I have one half of a family tree and simply painted over the other side. As if I’m walking around tilted, weighed down by one branch heavy and rich with boughs and leaves and fruit, and on the other, there’s nothing but air.
•••
There are some big no-no’s when it comes to activities for expecting moms. Some of them are pretty obvious—no bumper cars, no new tattoos, no hot tubs—but others may surprise you.
I tell my mother I’m leaning toward sending my dad a letter. I have specific reasons. A letter is quieter. It does not demand but asks. Informs but does not interrupt.
And then, of course, I make excuses not to write it—I’m busy with grading, with talking to my students about their writing, with planning a friend’s wedding shower. In early March, I wake up, and before I can change my mind, I write to him, still in my pajamas, standing up in my kitchen, early spring light bathing the wooden countertops as I blow toast crumbs off the page. What I have to say is short and straightforward, more of a note, really, scrawled on a bright green handmade paper card from a long ago Christmas stocking. The paper feels fibery, alive, like skin; I think this card will be good luck. This feels like a special occasion, the right time to use it, but I have to use two because I ruin the first by splashing tears onto the ink.
I tell my father if all goes well, he will have a granddaughter around Labor Day. Maybe I make a bad joke about planning my pregnancy that way, evidence of a nervous tick I can’t seem to avoid even when I have the chance to edit it out. I write that I am thinking of him. That I don’t expect anything in return.
But the truth, of course, is I do expect something. I can’t not expect something even as I try to let him go. The letter itself is an extension of a hand, even if it is hesitating and trembling and uncertain. In that small envelope, I have sent part of my heart.
•••
Your pregnancy: 15 weeks! Your growing baby now measures about 4 inches long, crown to rump, and weighs in at about 2 1/2 ounces (about the size of an apple)…although her eyelids are still fused shut, she can sense light. If you shine a flashlight at your tummy, for instance, she’s likely to move away from the beam.
Each Monday, cheery pregnancy email newsletters arrive in my email inbox comparing our baby’s growth to something edible: this week your baby is the size of a kumquat, the size of a mango, of a rutabaga, of an ear of corn. One week, my husband will receive a digital bulletin comparing our growing child to a pot roast. I’ll get an eggplant.
Included in these newsletters is no advice on how to talk to your estranged father.
My father and I stopped talking for reasons that now make us both look foolish. Maybe we have that in common. Perhaps I can stash this away in the basket of traits I’ve inherited from him: overly thick and unruly dark hair! hazel eyes! stubbornness and the inability to admit we’ve been wrong about something!
I’m sure, too, he has his own version of events, but here is how I remember it. Nine years ago, my youngest sister was graduating high school. To celebrate, my mother’s family planned a party. What my father said after he was invited: he was just there for the ceremony, flying down from New Jersey for that and only that. What he didn’t say: he had done the calculus, the return-on-investment, and the three children from his first marriage were not on the winning end. I remember pleading with him outside the newspaper where I worked at the time, my face hot and sweaty from being pressed to my cell phone. I paced up and down between hydrangea bushes, attempting to appeal to his most logical side, what rhetoricians, or people who study language and communication call logos, as in logos = a waste of time and money to fly five hundred miles only to sit in a hotel room. And then, because this was always a second and often less successful tactic with my dad, I attempted to appeal to his emotions (pathos = come on, it’s his daughter, my sister, we’re talking about here). He was unmovable as a boulder, which made me a foaming, irrational kind of furious. He grew calmer. I grew angrier. Mistakes were made, as they say. He cancelled plans to come at all. Maybe he mailed me a card, maybe followed up with phone call or two—all of this is lost in the fog of anger and hurt I was determined to wallow in—and after that we settled into a firm standoff of silence.
Here’s an addendum. The way my husband recalls it, I was also trying to persuade my dad to stay a few days longer. I was proud of the life we were building: the old bungalow we were renovating, our careers, our promise. We had 401(k)s! We had health insurance! What more can you ask of your adult children, especially if you happen to be into logic? He declined. He had to get back for Father’s Day, he said, to spend the day with my two younger half siblings.
Even now, right now, when I Google these dates and re-Google them, I’m shaking my head thinking, no, no, memory, you have it wrong. Memory may be slippery but a calendar isn’t. In 2008, my sister’s high school graduation ceremonies were on June 14. Father’s Day was the day after.
•••
Your pregnancy: 16 weeks! Get ready for a growth spurt. In the next few weeks, your baby will double his weight and add inches to his length. Right now, he’s about the size of an avocado: 4 1/2 inches long (head to rump) and 3 1/2 ounces. He’s even started growing toenails.
The pregnancy newsletters are silent, too, on when you will know you’re bonded with your unborn child. Will it be when they are the size of a turnip? Of a butternut squash?
Early in my pregnancy, I hope I wake one day and find my instinct to be a parent waiting for me beside my bed with my glasses. Instead it feels as if I’m walking around with a low-grade flu for two or three months. It’s a malaise that spreads to my head and my heart. My body changes but not in a way that delights me; most mornings, it’s time for another nail biting game of “what clothes will fit me today?” The first and only time I enter a maternity store, I ease around racks of tee-shirts declaring in chubby script “Happiness is On the Way” implying that, at least to the wearer, happiness had never existed before and indeed could not without the prospect of becoming a biological parent. “It’s a miracle,” a friend says of my pregnancy. I shrug. Isn’t it just nature?
Science assures me indifference is normal. According to anthropologist Meredith F. Small, prenatal bonding usually happens during the second trimester. This is when mothers begin to feel their babies move; the moving it seems, makes things more real. The attachment changes with experience, too. In one study, women who have given birth and raised a child for one year felt a stronger bond with their offspring than when they were still pregnant. And this attachment isn’t solely a matter of sharing a body. It leaves room for fathers and non-biological parents to bond with their children because they want to, not because they have to. Logically, this all makes sense. Still, I study the grainy image of the cashew on the fridge and try to name what I’m feeling, testing it like it is a twisted ankle. Is it love yet? Now? Now?
What is messy and confusing about with my relationship with my father is that there is so much good I can’t wipe from my hard drive. It isn’t possible for me to just pack these childhood memories away, like old books or toys or faded clothes that really should be taken down to the Salvation Army for a donation. I replay them even when I don’t want to: the tree house he outfitted with a crate and pulley system so I could haul up my books and less compliant passengers, such as my cats; the handle he engineered out of duct tape and cardboard so I could carry cupcakes to school without squishing them; the eight-foot tall bookshelf he designed and built me after college. The nights when I had a stomach bug and he sat with me on the bathroom floor, holding back my hair as I wrapped my arms around the cool, slick sides of the toilet bowl. The wide-mouthed Cheshire cat faces he sketched in red marker on paper bags when he packed my lunch, or the songs he made up to sing to me when I had nightmares. The time, more than a year after I graduated college and should have been better able to take care of myself, when I called him from the side of a Pennsylvania interstate because my ten-year-old Nissan Sentra’s alternator had given out and I had no idea how I was going to pay for the towing let alone the cost of repairs.
Perhaps we all keep a running tally of how the people we love the most hurt us. And our parents, because they often are our flesh and bone and blood and the first humans we know, they are the ones destined to be at the top of that list. A plus in the black here for something that makes us feel loved. A row of red minuses for the things that really tick us off. Are we ever really even? When do we understand our parents as people?
•••
Your pregnancy: 20 weeks! Your baby weighs about 10 1/2 ounces now. He’s also around 6 1/2 inches long from head to bottom and about 10 inches from head to heel—about the length of a small banana. You’ve made it to the halfway mark in your pregnancy, so celebrate with a little indulgence. Need some ideas? Try a new nightgown or pajamas, a prenatal massage, professional pictures of your pregnant self, a beautiful frame for your baby’s first picture after birth, or a piece of clothing that makes you feel really good.
For years, I thought a letter was the key to crack the silence. It was all I needed to pick this lock: a handful of magic words, a password, just like in a fairy tale. But now that I’ve sent it and it’s gone and nothing comes back, a letter also gives me license to imagine what could have been and what might have happened. What if it got lost? I wonder if I should email instead. I wonder if I even still have his email address, if he is even still working where he worked eight years ago, if he is working at all, because he could be retired. What are other ways of reaching out to your estranged father? Hallmark doesn’t make cards for this. I weigh the emotional pull of an ultrasound, the possibility of a birth announcement. “Should I send another letter?” I ask my husband. “What about certified mail?” I’m not even sure how certified mail works; will he have to go to a post office to sign for it? It seems aggressive, to send a letter that way. Demanding to be read, or least to be seen. The certainty appeals to me, though. How else do I know he knows?
What I did not write my father: I didn’t tell him it took me a long time to get pregnant, longer than I thought I should have to wait, as if becoming a parent was my right. At first, we told ourselves all the things other people were telling us: to be patient, to not worry, which, as the anxious among us know, worrying about worrying is really the most futile game a human can play with their mind. After two years, we began to see doctors. I didn’t tell my father I tried to see my life without being a mother even as we were so bent on having a child we were on the verge of starting in vitro fertilization. And we knew—we didn’t talk about this much but we knew—once we opened that box we would keep throwing money we didn’t have into it, as bottomless as it might be.
I didn’t tell my father, either, how friend after friend gave birth to one kid, then another, in the time we were trying for just a first. The few I knew were struggling, I avoided like they had a disease I could catch. How, when I heard one couple was starting IVF with an egg donor, I scoffed out loud it was going too far but inside, I was envious of their choices. I didn’t tell him what it was like to be jealous of your friends’ miscarriages, because, if you miscarried, at least you knew you could conceive. I didn’t tell him how I stopped going to baby showers. How I laid on the crackly, tight paper of an exam table at my infertility doctor’s office gazing at a poster of a Caribbean beach taped to the ceiling. There, I waited three separate times for a nurse to insert a catheter loaded with my husband’s sperm and three separate times it was in vain even though the sperm and the egg were right there, we were setting them up on a date and pulling out all the stops, a view of sugar white sands and palm trees and everything, so how could this not happen?
I didn’t tell him how infertility tests showed nothing wrong. How, for me and my husband, trying to make something together began to feel like it was cracking us apart. How we blamed each other and then when we were tired with that, we turned back to blaming ourselves. How phantoms hovered over our bed as we tried, again and again, to bend our bodies to our will and create the image of a family fixed in our heads.
How when I missed my period just after Christmas, I took five pregnancy tests over a week, so uncertain I was by then that my body could even do this.
If I could say something to my dad now it would be that I’m lingering in the doorway of parenthood, peering down the hall and trying to see down its dimly lit walls and understand where to walk and what to do. A letter, I realize now, also gives us an exit.
•••
Your pregnancy: 23 weeks! With her sense of movement well developed by now, your baby can feel you dance. And now that she’s more than 11 inches long and weighs just over a pound (about the size of a large mango), you may be able to see her squirm underneath your clothes. Blood vessels in her lungs are developing to prepare for breathing, and the sounds that your baby’s increasingly keen ears pick up are preparing her for entry into the outside world. Loud noises that become familiar now—such as your dog barking or the roar of the vacuum cleaner—probably won’t faze her when she hears them outside the womb.
By the middle of my fifth month, my belly has the tight, round heft of a basketball. If I lie very still on my back, I see my skin vibrating like a drum. The pregnancy updates remind me this may be my baby hiccupping. I picture her turning and tumbling in her amniotic sea, flipping like a fish. As soon as nineteen weeks, the prenatal newsletters suggest, a fetus can start to perceive sounds outside the womb. Talking or singing to your baby is encouraged. Instead, I talk to my father. I tell him how I think I see my husband’s nose on our child in a more recent ultrasound, how she was leaning on her right arm and the ultrasound technician whacked my belly to get the baby to move so she could be sure that arm was there. I tell him I am scared. Not just of labor but of what happens after, of trying to be a good teacher and a writer and a mother and still hold onto myself, my adult, fully-formed-if-flawed self who drinks a little too much bourbon and stays up a little too late reading in bed and probably doesn’t eat enough vegetables, even at thirty-seven. I tell him there are things you hope for your child, and in my case, in addition to all fingers and toes, I hope she doesn’t inherit my anxiety and my deep desire to please and fix. I tell him how I hope she will be braver and better and more curious than me, and I wonder if every parent feels that way, if that’s why we keep on going.
I ask him what he hoped for me, when I was a piece of stardust, floating peacefully inside my mother.
I also ask my father questions. I start with the normal kind of questionnaire-like, the catching up conversation starters you might ask a college roommate you’ve fallen out of touch with. Do you still go to Maine each summer? Do you still run? Do you still love trees and know how to identify them by their leaves as well as their bark? Did you ever make that trip to the Grand Canyon? Am I even remembering that right, that you wanted to go there? If and when you went, were you as disturbed by the herds of gawkers with selfie sticks as I was? Because if so, here we can pause, laugh, hold onto something we have in common. We can take another sip of our beers before we move on to the more difficult questions, the ones he will never answer. In complete sentences, please consider how can a parent just give up talking to his children. For extra credit, what does my stepmother think of all of us? Does she urge you to contact us? Or, because it’s the easier thing to do, because that would open wounds and vulnerability, does she just not talk about it, as you surely do not talk about it, nor encourage my half siblings to talk about it. What are my half-brother and -sister like? Do you text them? Come on, really? You can’t not text with a teenager now. Do they wonder about us? Do you see us in them? What, to you, is family?
I tell him I want the lightweight freedom of forgiveness—for me and for him—but I’m mired in the thick, dark mud of anger. I tell him we can see each other’s broken places now, the cracks all of us as adults try to glue back together. The places where cracks have become invisible parts of us, the scaffolding that carries us through life with resilience and experience. The places where the workmanship was more hasty.
•••
Your pregnancy: 30 weeks! Your baby weighs almost 3 pounds (about the size of a large cabbage). You may be feeling a little tired these days…you might also feel clumsier than normal, which is perfectly understandable. Not only are you heavier, but the concentration of weight in your pregnant belly causes a shift in your center of gravity.
At a friend’s wedding in April, surrounded by a circle of new spring leaves, she and her new husband turn to each other and to his two teenage children from his first marriage and then all four of them pledge to love and support each other. It is the opposite of trite—it feels true and real, a very public way of making a new family. Later that month, I stop by my neighbors’ house, a lesbian couple who have each had a baby within a year and a half. I am there to go through hand-me-down baby clothes. In their living room, I fold tiny shirts the size of my hand, socks smaller than my thumb. The two mothers sit cross-legged on their polished wooden floor and ease their babies into their laps and at some point they both begin to breastfeed. So here is another kind of family. One block over, there’s a family with two white parents, one from France and one from Indiana, and two adopted black teenagers, and that is another kind. There is my middle sister, who has lived with her boyfriend for years. My single friends who bought houses for themselves and their dogs. Divorced couples with kids who still make a point of eating some meals together, or buy houses close enough for their kids to walk between, or don’t. All of these are families.
A few weeks later, my husband and I drive across the country. I am headed to write for a month at a residency in Washington State and we combine it with a route through the Southwest and then up the California coast. We stop in Los Angeles, and my aunt, my father’s sister in-law, insists we stay with them. They are good and generous to us; my uncle, my father’s younger brother, keeps saying, “We’re all family here,” and each time he does my heart opens and breaks all at once. Maybe the boughs on one side of my tree aren’t dead. Maybe they are leafing out. My husband likes my uncle, appreciates his collection of antique corkscrews and bottle openers, his home brewed beer, his stories and photos of camping and traveling with his kids throughout the West. I wonder what kind of father-in-law my uncle will be someday. What kind my father would have been.
•••
Your pregnancy: 37 weeks! Your due date is very close now…While you’re sleeping, you’re likely to have some intense dreams. Anxiety both about labor and about becoming a parent can fuel a lot of strange flights of unconscious fancy.
I sometimes forget what is happening to my body in these final weeks but then I will be doing something ordinary, like getting dressed, and I catch myself in the mirror, all round and curve, and I’m surprised what I’m now feeling in my heart and my womb is so physically evident to the rest of the world. My immediate future is written for all to see—motherhood, parenthood—inviting speculation and soothsaying from strangers. She’ll be a princess, she’ll be sweet. I just want my daughter to be. I trace my fingers down my linea negra, the dark, pigmented line that appears on many pregnant women’s stomachs, dividing their bellies into two tidy halves like the neat crease of a peach. My daughter inside, her head down low near my pelvis, positioned to eject. The scrape of her arms, the lean kick of her limbs. She’s becoming more fully formed each day. She is no longer a fish; she is a human with all her parts still safe inside, still unwounded, unbroken, unscarred. Still all possibility.
•••
Your pregnancy: 39 weeks! Your baby is full term this week and waiting to greet the world! He continues to build a layer of fat to help control his body temperature after birth, but it’s likely he already measures about 20 inches and weighs a bit over 7 pounds, about the size of a mini-watermelon.
On the late August day when my daughter is officially full term, a short letter from my father arrives sandwiched between a West Elm catalog and a Home Depot credit card offer. In romantic comedies and beach reads, this might have caused me to go into labor. Instead, I leave it unopened on the dining room table for a few hours while I pace around the house, making up things to do. When I finally tear open the envelope, I see his familiar tight, tall script, the handwriting of the Cheshire cats, the handwriting I’ve known since I could read. He says he has been meaning to respond, that he has been carrying around my letter. Happy for us. Small steps. Send details when you are ready.
Instead of a resolution, I’m left with more questions. Is it is too late to be a parent at any point? When is the damage done, or when can the relationship between a parent and a child be saved? Does forgiveness have an expiration date? When can I stop looking for hurt and harm?
Sometimes when we decide to have a child, we put a lot of faith in its power. We impose incantation on what is really just biology. Foolishly, we think it can save a marriage. Make us stronger. Make us kinder, more empathetic, more patient, into people we aren’t really, at least not all the time. We all know this in our hearts this isn’t true, and yet, as a species, we do this again and again. I knew having a kid would mean I would be a parent. But I also thought it would be the spell to have both my parents in my life. But even this, this growing person inside of my body, all these cells dividing and folding and weaving their way into someone new, a beautiful magic chronicled by ultrasounds and fetal heartbeat readings and genetic tests where we breath hope toward that deep, dark salty sea inside of me—even this isn’t enough to repair my relationship with my father.
The truth is I want to turn to my own parenting now, to my daughter and my chance. I want to push into the future rushing toward us like a wave. When people ask if we are ready, I am now saying yes, and yes, and yes. Yes, in that her crib holds a mattress and yes, her car seat is installed and inspected, and yes, we have built a fort of readiness out of diapers and pacifiers and tiny hand-me-down onesies, but also our hearts are ready, so ready, so open. Yes and yes and yes.
There is so much I don’t know about being a parent right now. I’m pausing here on this curb of pre-parenthood, waiting to cross a busy street to the other side, a street I will never cross again and corner I will never return to. But I carry this image in my head in these last hours and minutes. It’s of me and my daughter together working in the garden on an early spring day a few years from now. We dive our bare hands into the soil, turning over the dirt to wake it up. We knead in compost. We count earthworms. Then we feel bad and nudge them back into their dark homes. We rip into colorful paper packages, the seeds inside as small as periods at the end of sentences, all these tiny promises of radishes and lettuces and peas. We sprinkle them with a soft blanket of soil as if we were putting them to bed.
I will tell my daughter each seed is like a little wish for the future. I will tell her we plant them, and we hope, and then we just have to wait.
•••
LAURA GIOVANELLI is an essayist and writing teacher. Her other personal writing can be found in The Washington Post. She was a newspaper reporter for nine years and has an MFA from NC State University. She now teaches at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Punch the number sequence on the garage-door keypad with increasing agitation until you get it right. Slide into your supercharged Mini Cooper—red, with white racing stripes—and start it up, engaging “sport” mode so the exhaust backfires when you take your foot off the gas. You like this feature. It makes you feel like a renegade, just as when you drove your first car, a loaner from your father. You were sixteen, and he’d known you for less than a year. He hadn’t a clue about your lead foot when he handed over the keys for a 340-horsepower, four-barrel Dodge Challenger. It was orange, with black racing stripes.
Turn on the radio, harumph at the commercials, and plug in your phone. Scroll through the dozen or so playlists to find one of the only two that you ever play anymore: The Tragically Hip, whose song lyrics have replaced mitochondria in the cells of one out of every three Canadians, or Little India, a band you adore both despite and due to your nephew’s role as bass guitarist.
Crank up the tunes to drown out your next-door neighbor, who near-permanently idles on the front porch to chain smoke and cough a wretched aria that crescendos with him hocking multitudes of loogies over the edge. Sometimes he coughs so hard he vomits, and you almost vomit. Sometimes you want to swear at him, but the menace of the teardrop tattoo on his face keeps your words in check.
Throw the gearshift in reverse. Inch back until you clear the garage; hit the gas and rocket to the driveway’s end. Execute this maneuver by looking over your shoulder, a habit ingrained since your Young Drivers of Canada lessons. It strikes you as ironic that your father paid for the program; it hadn’t struck him as necessary to help with food and rent when you first fled your psychosis-afflicted mother and had nowhere to live. Your sister intervened, negotiating two hundred bucks a month from him so she could move into a bigger apartment and you could have a bed. Once you saw how it worked, you started scheduling your own appointments at his office to plead for what you needed: cash for your senior high school trip; cash to buy a prom dress; cash to see a therapist. He squirmed and flinched and cleared his throat. You took his money.
Hit the brakes hard.
Turn the music down a notch so the neighbors don’t think you’re a tool, though you’ve always loved the adrenaline whammy of operating a moving vehicle while rocking out. You even remember the song that was playing the moment the Dodge Challenger slammed into a lamp post, after your attempt to beat Mike in his silver Honda turned into a fishtail on a corner. Your father was upset that you wrecked his car. You pretended you didn’t care. Physically, you were fine, aside from glass in your hair and a bruise or two. Your cassette tape had a permanent warp at the moment of impact. It was in the middle of Black Cars by Gino Vannelli.
Avoid looking in the rearview mirror. You don’t want to be reminded of the dark circles under your eyes.
Look in the rearview mirror to check for chia seeds between your teeth. Notice the dark circles under your eyes.
Roll back past the perimeter hedge and scout for the sibling set who always seem to be traipsing past your driveway but won’t make eye contact with you. Their mother doesn’t, either. It all started one sweltering day in July, eight years ago. Your husband walked three lots south to their house and asked the patriarch to turn down his music. Its booming bass broke your concentration while you worked on the eulogy for your father’s funeral. Papa was drinking. He swore at your husband for coming onto his property without a shirt on and disrespecting him. Meanwhile, you were trying to write something that was respectful. The anecdotes all originated within the last decade; it had required that much time to cease being merely transactional with your father, for you to pull back on your condemnation of what he wasn’t and allow some acceptance of what he was. Loving is more difficult than driving, you’d discovered. But you were determined to stand in the front of the hall at his service and demonstrate—to his friends, business associates, yourself—that you’d been an attentive enough daughter to speak to his character and accomplishments.
A cursory check for traffic.
Pull out into the street. As you shift from reverse to first, let your car roll before you hit the gas so anyone who’s looking can tell you own a standard, thus putting you in an elevated category of drivers. It’s also vital to impress upon the young man across the street that middle age doesn’t equate to boring and feeble. And yes, you admit, you advance this point with your loud music, too.
Drive off, taking both hands off the steering wheel to fasten your seat belt. The German engineering in your British car makes it so it practically steers itself.
Keep the speedometer under thirty until you turn the corner, otherwise you will be one of the many your husband curses at for speeding on your street.
Head for the highway so you can push the needle on your tachometer past five as you shift into sixth. This is when you need to hang on to the wheel. Right now.
Pull out into the left lane to pass a taupe Toyota, and another taupe Toyota, and an orange Dodge Challenger with black racing stripes. The model was restarted in 2008, a year before your father died. You feel a familiar pang of regret, wishing once again that you’d dropped by a dealership with him and taken the car for a test drive, an homage to how far the two of you had come, outdistancing expectation and obligation. And yet, still not far enough. You would have appreciated the chance to rack up another hundred thousand miles with him before his engine gave out, even knowing the limits of his responsiveness: As much as you itched to bring up the old days—when you were a six-year-old at Christmas and he didn’t show up, and a thirty-three-year old on your birthday and he didn’t show up—if he couldn’t address his failings as a human, neither could you. Emotional limits have an upside, though. In your father’s shortsightedness, he didn’t see your failings.
Sing as you drive. Even if you don’t know all the words, sing. Emulate the vocal stylings of Adele mashed up with Dave Grohl, and scream and thrash your head around and drum on the steering wheel until your conscience is deaf.
•••
LAURA ZERA’s work can be found in Catapult, Quartz, The Washington Post, and other places. She has completed a memoir and is working on a novel set in South Africa. Website: laurazera.com. Twitter: @laurazera.
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