But I also want to know what’s kept him away. I want him to be part of my life, I hear myself saying, sounding like Mariel Hemingway in the final scene of Manhattan, frail and yet lucid, as lucid as one can be with another person.
And then something gets stuck in his throat, a small hunk of the over-hard meat catches in a particular place, as it has before without him being able to swallow it or vomit it back up, it’s a condition he has, he says, and if he can’t cough it up now it might take several days, awful days when he won’t be able to control his saliva because he can’t swallow, drool down his chin, he doesn’t want that on an airplane. His head turns completely white, panic in his eyes, he goes to his bathroom to bring it out, but it’s probably best for me to walk around outside while he’s taking care of it. The sounds can be very dramatic, he says.
I go outside and stand at the fence beside the barn, trying to gather myself, watching the brown mare and dwarf mule. During my residency last year in New York, I recall, there was also a brown mare that was followed around by a dwarf mule. This mule isn’t nearly as barrel-shaped, but it’s just as in love with the brown mare. I look at them. The brown mare trots along, and the dwarf mule follows, when the mare stops, so does the dwarf mule. And my question, then as now, is the same. Does the mare even know the dwarf mule is always standing right behind it?
I don’t want to think about what’s happening inside the house, my dad with meat stuck in his throat, and whether or not it’s my fault. When I was four or five, my grandfather took me to daycare. I ran down a short slope, a shortcut that my mom and I would take, and my grandfather ran after me, fell, and scraped his hands. At the daycare they washed his hands in a bowl of warm water, the water turned bloody, and one month later my grandfather was dead. Due to something in his brain, a blood clot, they said, but secretly I knew I was to blame. If anything happens to my dad, if the meat doesn’t come up, if he doesn’t catch his flight, it will be my fault. Not that he’ll ever say it, not that he’ll ever think it. But I’ll know it. I shouldn’t have asked about his wife. But you must know she is not right in the head. It was shocking to hear him say it, to hear it out loud. That it wasn’t just my imagination that’s she’s not right in the head. That maybe it’s always been this way. Or maybe it’s become this way, the not-right-in-the-head has sneaked up on her, and the realization of it has sneaked up on everyone around her.
When I visited my dad two years ago in her house in Belgium, he picked me up from the train station in Eindhoven. His wife had come along, not to pick me up, but to use the occasion to shop at one of the large malls. We were waiting with my luggage in the basement of the mall when she came down the escalator, erect as a flagpole, her hand resting on the railing, her face stony. I hadn’t seen her in six years, and I was shocked when she drew close, when she offered her hand, her face stiff and distorted like a plaster mask. It looked as though she’d been in a car accident and had been sewn together in such a way that her skin had lost the resilience and expressiveness you normally find in a face. A face destroyed by too many plastic surgeries. She was wearing a skirt and slippers and a pair of slack nylons in the same too-dark beige that I recall she always wore, and beneath them, on her shins, rested or hung two rows of cotton batting. My dad had told me that she’d had an operation on her legs and couldn’t walk; it was the reason he couldn’t visit me in Denmark as otherwise planned, he’d said, so naturally I asked how her legs were. My dad’s emails had practically left the impression that the surgery would be so disabling his constant presence was required. Oh, it’s nöthing, she said, a routine operation for varicose veins. She’d had the operation many times. It’s no trouble at all. I have to vear these bandages for a veek, that’s all.
There was also something else. When I stood across from her in the mall basement and stared into her face, I understood that she was lost. I saw a three-year-old lost in a seventy-three-year-old woman in saggy panty hose and slippers and a permanently startled expression on her face. How could I have overlooked this as a child? Or had it appeared since? Back then I thought she was mean. That her flow of words came from a determined intention in there, a direction, a force of will. But when I saw the great open confusion in her face that day at the base of the escalator, it became clear there wasn’t any direction to any of what emerged from her mouth. It was more like beads of grease popping in a frying pan, or rather an entire stove of frying pans. Just as dreams are byproducts of the inner processes that are always sizzling and bubbling down in the depths. Like that. Like talking in your sleep, wide awake. Nothing connects to anything real. Like portholes at the bottom of the boats that sail tourists out to sea so they can gaze at exotic fish, her mouth is a window to the thoughts that rise from the darkness, a direct view down into the great blubber boiler of the unconscious.
She’s trapped in a dream, we are all caught in it. It must be terrible for her, I thought that time at the base of the escalator and again, now, here on the prairie, as I watch the brown mare and the dwarf mule, it must be terrible for her to observe the menagerie she’s set in motion, unable to wake herself. My own role in the dream is minimal, but it’s probably not as small and inconsequential as she would like. Like the others, my dad and my siblings, I’m unable to resist her gravitational pull. When I stand before her, I defenselessly transform into what she imagines me to be. We are images flitting on the walls of her mind. How will I be able to stand firm when Morpheus stirs his pot? How do I find the scissors to snip the threads and lift the curse? That’s what I’d like to know.
Is that why, after all these years, he’s still with her? Is that why he’s never divorced her? Because of decency? Because you can’t divorce someone who isn’t right in the head?
I go back to the house, and my dad walks around with the moist eyes of gripe, relieved, the meat is out. We pack the car and drive to the airport.
I sit silently on the passenger seat, depleted, with nothing more to say. I’d hoped that something would have lifted me into place, made my longing bearable. It didn’t when I was little. Now the longing reaches back in time to create something that wasn’t there. What would it have been like to have had a dad who knew the name of your school? The wordless understanding that I always felt between us, and which I ruined by asking the question that ruined his dignity. Regardless what the answer was. What has changed? The question could only elicit the answer of meat getting stuck in the throat. I’d hoped I wouldn’t be that child again, the child that always looks at him with dewy eyes. It must be awful to be looked at that way by your own child. I wish I were less greedy. I wish I could lean back more Zen-like. Blow at it just as the Buddhists in Tibet blow their sand mandalas away. Take pains to go in the direction of the good and the beautiful, and then blow away with a calm heart.
On the way to the airport, he stops at a gas station near the highway overpass to pump air in the tires before I return the car tomorrow morning. He asks me to do it. I get out and grab the air hose and hold it idiotically while I search for the tire valve. I know how to pump air into bike tires, but I’ve never done so to a car tire. He gets out and takes the thingy from my hand, squats, and fills the tires with air, then bounces up like an elastic or a spring, up and down, up and down, until all four wheels are filled. A short distance away, Kubrick’s astronaut observes him. Maybe he stands far away, so far away that he can’t see my dad at all, can’t recognize him, and believes that the man filling his tires with air is a young or an almost-young man. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to me.
We stop just outside the departure terminal. My dad wants to take the gps device with him to St. Louis, so I pull it down and shove it into his suitcase. In the suitcase are his new underwear, socks, shirts, and the fold-out cane I’d brought. We hug outside, I love you Sweetie Pie, take care, and I walk to the other side of the car and climb into the driver’s seat, while he remains at the door of the departure terminal, waving without going in. I can’t look at him. I don’t want to see him become small aga
in and vanish into uncertainty. I fiddle with my cell phone to find a map. He remains standing there, a few feet from the car, with his rolling suitcase, waving and waving. Maybe he wants to see me become small. I don’t look up. I signal, set in motion, and shift into traffic without looking back.
i sit alone on the porch and stare at the horizon without realizing darkness has settled around me. Suddenly it’s just dark. Anna Wagner sets a tray on the table before me. I thought you might like some dinner, she says, there’s some chicken and a little salad, and then she crosses the lawn in her tattered boots and jeans and is gone.
As I sit eating in the dark, I hear a Skype call on the computer. I go inside the house. It’s my dad. The connection is bad, it keeps buffering until I return to the rocking chair outside, with the computer on my lap. We can’t get the video to work, but the sound is fine.
Faz is dead, he says. Uncle Faz. My dad came home to the message that he’d died in the Istanbul airport. I’m in a state of shock, he says. Faz had been in Bangladesh with his wife and nine-year-old daughter to visit family, and on the way home, between Dhaka and Istanbul, he’d had several heart attacks. They’d revived him each time. But when they reached Istanbul, he died. That was it.
It takes me several moments to understand what my dad’s saying. Uncle Faz. The one who was supposed to call me if anything happened to my dad. Exactly one year ago, almost to the date, we sat eating sushi in Illinois with him and his wife and his then eight-year-old daughter, and my dad said: We’re showing off our daughters. He didn’t look like someone close to death. Now his wife and daughter are waiting for his body to be sent home from Turkey. I can’t help but think about the girl. Polite and smart, a voracious reader, eternally curious, good at playing the violin, sitting next to her dad on the plane with her black braids, Uncle Faz, as he undergoes several heart attacks before finally dying during a layover. My dad got word from his research colleagues, in short order, emails were sent around the globe. It feels as if they have known each other always. Since they were postdocs together at Princeton, he says.
I gaze through the darkness. Before we end the call, I tell him, resolved to focus on what he’s given me, what he does, and not on what he hasn’t done or doesn’t do, that I’m so glad he came down for our ten days in Texas. It means a lot to me, I say.
This will be one of my best memories, he says. I will cherish it always. He tells me that the trip reminded him of the time when, as a young man, he’d returned to Texas with my mother. They’d stood in a field of bluebonnets, and it was one of the happiest moments in my life, he says.
afterward, i think about the little scene where my mother buttons a button on my father’s shirt. It was my fortieth birthday, and what I didn’t know was that it would be the last time my dad would be allowed to visit me. This was before the guests arrived, during preparations. I’d been to the bathroom, and I opened the door, and there they stood, right in front of the door, less than three feet from me. The terrace door was open behind my mother. John, she said, and leaned forward to button the button on my dad’s shirt, which he’d forgotten. It was a simple and straightforward act. The sunlight from the open door, filtered through the cherry tree outside, rested softly on my mother’s back and neck, and on my father’s chest and face. My mother, who buttoned the forgotten button with great care, and my father who willingly and naturally let her. At that moment I understood that my mom and dad were real people, not just by and for themselves and in their own worlds, but in the same world. That they had really shared a life before me. At that moment it was as if they’d been married for forty years. With a simple gesture, my mother buttoned two otherwise completely separate worlds together. At that moment the world was whole and round. It is my finest moment. It’s that simple. My mother buttoning a button on my father’s shirt.
I get up and go inside the house and open the three plastic bags of letters that I’ve been saving in my suitcase for when I got home. Two of the packages turn out to be my mother’s. One is her mother’s letters, the ones she didn’t take with her when she left St. Louis with me under her arm. My dad has saved them for all these years. In the other package are my mom’s letters to my dad during the time they were, as he says, courting. Those are none of my business, either, belonging as they do to their private lives. In the third package are my letters to my dad. Childish drawings and letters written in large, clumsy handwriting that eventually becomes mine. I had hoped I’d somehow be able to infer my dad’s letters from mine, like a kind of mirror reflection or a negative, but I’m absorbed by things kids are absorbed by, friends, toys, homework, and when I’m older it’s more complicated. I also find The Letter, and even though there’s residue in it that I still recognize, it’s no joyful reunion, so I put the letter down quickly without reading it all the way through.
It’s the letters my mom sent to my dad as I was growing up that call my attention. Notes that here and there show up between my letters, the way in which the handwriting slants across a sheet torn out of the planner she always carried in her bag and which kept her life in order, a message to my dad, scribbled hastily on a train on the way to or from work. John, the check is late again, if you have forgotten, please send it as things are rather tight.
On another note: I’m looking for a new job, this one is impossible, and I don’t earn a dime slaving here. I’m born for something better (I hope!).
On a third: I’m rather overworked as I’ve been working till 11:00 pm every night for the past two weeks. Mathilde has been staying with my mother.
On a fourth: I’m now looking for a cheaper apartment, I hope to get one soon, because I can’t stay in the one we have.
The small testimonial such a note provides about the life around you. How she made all the pieces fit, commuting on a train, working, was a mom. She was a secretary, a stenographer, she typed on machines, archived, answered telephones, bought groceries, washed clothes, was a mom. She conjured a world out of her sleeves, a dad, and here’s a brief glance behind the curtain. It’s been my mother. It’s always been my mother, I realize. My dad and I, we aren’t each other’s act of will, in any case, not at the beginning, in the early years we are my mom’s act of will. She wanted me to have it all, including a dad, and when that didn’t work out, she would give me one anyway.
On a fifth she writes: John, please write her. I want the both of you to be close …
And on a sixth:
John, would you please send Mathilde something and tell her that it is from Mexico—she has been so excited about it, since your letter—so I wouldn’t like her to be let down. Love and hugs, Karin.
He hadn’t bought the butterfly brooch in Mexico while thinking of me. He’d returned home having forgotten that, in an earlier letter, he’d promised he would send me something from his trip to Mexico. My mom was dead set against promising kids something and not following through. The butterfly brooch, which had once been evidence from outer space for me, hadn’t been purchased in Mexico but St. Louis, maybe in the same campus bookstore where they sold all sorts of things. It had never been my dad’s idea, it had been my mother’s. The kite must have been my mother’s idea too—who else? At one point I told my siblings that he’d flown a kite with me. They didn’t tell me flat out that I must be misremembering. They said he’d never flown a kite with them, nor could they ever imagine him doing so. I might as well have claimed he’d skied across Antarctica or taken a bath in money. Gotten a tattoo, a frigate on his chest. Something wild and crazy and unbelievable.
But we ran across the lawn with the kite, my dad and I, undeniably. Scenes, images that I have in my head, and it occurs to me that my mom must have directed all of them. My dad needed to be helped and directed, and my mom helped and directed, and he played his role as well as he could. She created him in my imagination, and he let her. She traveled home with me under her arm and tried to resurrect the lost father so that I would never realize he was lost, a man who both resembled my dad and the image of a dad. Beca
use what is a dad? He is someone who runs across the grass flying a kite. He is someone who buys his daughter a brooch in Mexico. Who thinks of his daughter when he’s in Mexico, and buys her a brooch. My dad was my mother’s creation, not his own, not mine, but hers. The image remained on my retina, stronger and weaker than any other, more recognizable than anything I know, more mysterious, more compelling. She drew him for me with a moist finger in the air.
no matter how much i pack, I don’t have enough room for the skull in my suitcase, so I pack the clothes I’d brought from home, and the letters and books, and carry the skull in my hand. Outside, I call out to Roy. He’s lying in the grass with his back to me. Roy, I call out, I want to say goodbye to him, but he won’t turn around. I can’t get him to look at me.
The following works are quoted in Lone Star:
paul auster: The Invention of Solitude. Penguin, 1988.
ingmar bergman: The Magic Lantern, translated from Swedish by Joan Tate, Chicago UP, 2007.
w.j. cash: The Mind of the South. Vintage Book Edition, 1991.
joan didion: “Where I Was From,” in: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. Everyman’s Library, 2006.
siri hustvedt: “My Father/Myself,” in: Living, Thinking, Looking. Sceptre, 2012.
dany lafferiére: The Enigma of the Return, translated from French by David Homel. Maclehose Press, 2009.
rainer maria rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, translated from German to English by Michael Hulse, Penguin Classics, 2009.
marilynne robinson: Housekeeping, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1980 (2005).
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