You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

  “We can go,” I said to Dave. “Where are the boys?” A jug of gin sat on the mail on the dining room table. “We should go, we should go,” I said. This was my father’s house, so none of this chaos was really a surprise. But my father had wanted so badly for me to get married and have kids, and here I was, delivering something so close after all these years. With this visit, we were finally going to transform into a normal family unit. In my mind, I had swept out the mess, edited out the vulgarity. How could I have been so naive?

  “I feel like we have to make sure he’s okay,” Dave said.

  “GODDAMMIT!” a man yelled, and Donny stirred.

  And there he was, my father, rolling in from the back room in his wheelchair, trying to stub up over the track of the sliding glass doors.

  Dave went to help him. He knelt and pulled on the wheel that was stuck. My father struck him on the shoulder.

  “What,” my father yelled, scowling. He looked as mad as I had ever seen him. “What the hell are you people doing in my house?”

  “It’s Dave, Heather’s Dave. It’s your daughter,” Dave said. “See? It’s your Heather.”

  Dave took a step back and knelt down again to look up at Fred. I did not come closer. I was worried about where the boys were.

  Fred was drooling. Since his stroke, he was always in shambles, tilted. He looked like he was a pile of pieces of a man. His hair was white strips to his shoulders, stiff and unwashed. He jerked his head back and looked into my eyes. Tears came streaming down his cheeks, and he smiled and then grinned wide. He pointed with his good hand.

  “She fat,” he said. He laughed hard. “What the hell took you so long?”

  I said I was sorry we were late, and sorry we had to leave so soon, but Mom was expecting us. “I’ll be back,” I said. And I took his damp, cold hand and pressed it between my hands. I wasn’t sure the boys should see him.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll be right back.”

  “No,” he said. “No, no, no, no.”

  Donny sat up, but he did not appear to wake up.

  “No,” Fred said. “Look at him. No.”

  My mother had designated a gas station near her house as the place from which to call her before I arrived, to give her what she always called “fair warning.” Dave and I found the gas station or what had been the gas station; it had been razed. Now it was a pile of concrete and rebar, rusted rods jutting out at crazy angles. Concertina wire surrounded the lot.

  “Now what?” Dave said.

  “Everything’s changed! This wasn’t like this before,” I said. “Could I use your cell phone to call her?”

  “You keep saying that,” David Junior said from the backseat. “ ‘Everything’s changed. Everything’s changed.’ ”

  “Boys,” Dave said. He never yelled at his kids. He whispered. When he had to give direction, he pulled them into a gentle hug and whispered into their ears. The wilder they got, the quieter he got, and the closer he pulled them to him.

  Dave handed me his cell phone so I could call my mother. She needed this specific amount of time, the time from here to her house, to be ready. I’d always called from here; she counted on it. Meanwhile, Dave turned us down a street I didn’t know even existed. It was pitch-dark, but the night sky over Orlando looked awake and sparkly, like blue velvet.

  Dave said he wanted a beer. I tried not to look at him when he said this. When I first met him, he was in AA. Now he drank a beer or two every evening. I usually joined him and it felt okay to me, casual, in check. Plus, Dave was an ardent Libertarian. He put great stock in leaving people to themselves, not making policies and laws. Most laws were, in his words, redundant and unnecessary. Trust each person to do the right thing—that was his philosophy. Mind your own business. Let people make their own choices and live with the consequences. He had a code. He talked about it quietly, with a kind of regard that made me trust him. I knew he would never cheat on me. His code included loyalty, caring for his family, and doing the right thing. Dave carried a copy of The Federalist Papers in his glove compartment. He knew the Bill of Rights by heart. He knew when and how and why America went off the gold standard, and he worried about integrity and how people could be raised and educated to think for themselves. He was in the NRA, which concerned me: I didn’t want to sleep in a bedroom where there were guns. If we fought about these things, he always won because he knew countless facts. He’d been on the debate team in high school, going to State. I’d never known anyone who cared so deeply about the right thing. So, when it came to drinking, I didn’t worry about him losing control. This man collected coins and stamps and vintage toys. And Hazel Atlas kitchenware from the 1930s. This was a man who, though he didn’t cook, adored green glass dishes and who believed we should back up our promises with gold. Beer was not a problem.

  “Excellent idea,” I said, regarding the beer. “But not to take inside, right? And not to drink in the car.” He’d have to drink it in her driveway, on the sly; my mother wouldn’t let alcohol in the house. I was happy for her to think he was a non-drinker. She would love the Libertarian stuff, the march-to-your-own-drummer routine, the almost militant privacy stuff. She would eat it up, and I was pleased about this connection they would have, but I could see slipping out myself for a sip of beer to take the edge off. More than a sip.

  With my encouragement, we pulled into a Texaco. The gas station speakers blared Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Three scruffy stringy men, red-tan Orlando men, crystal-meth jittery, stood by the gas pump smoking. It was one of those places that looked like it was on the verge of explosion.

  Dave patted my leg three times with his palm. Okay, now. He reached under the seat for his wallet, feeling around with both hands.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “A little tense,” he said. He laid his palm on my knee and squeezed. “It’s okay,” he said. I hadn’t told him about what the boys had seen in my father’s house. I had found them out in the garage, where Fred had a VCR and a computer, and on both screens there’d been porn playing. I’d steered the boys gently to the car, apologizing. How had I not understood this kind of thing was going to happen? That the boys would see exactly this?

  “Do we need anything else?” Dave said after a moment, chocking his chin.

  I thought, Yes. We need anything else. We need everything else.

  The phone rang and rang in my mother’s house. I shivered in the weirdly warm air next to the car. I envisioned us seated around her dining room table, playing Password. A family experience, a fun night for the boys. I loved looking at the words in the slim red and brown sleeves, the little blue window magically revealing the one word you could not say. Eating Chex Mix like we used to do, me and my mom and my brother. I think we ate Chex Mix. I remembered making Chex Mix, vats of Chex Mix. Didn’t I?

  I didn’t see Dave in the store. A tiny elderly woman at the counter, nervous, was staring at me, hard. She looked angry, angry at me specifically.

  I leaned in the back window. The boys fanned themselves with Magic cards tucked between their fingers.

  “Are you starting with a human character?” Jacob said to Junior.

  “Half human.” Junior was a stick, a daddy longlegs.

  “Half?” Jacob said. Dave said he and Jake looked alike, but I couldn’t see it for the life of me. Jake had long blond hair, thick bones, huge steel-gray blue eyes, the kind of eyes that said, Please. Not a question. A reminder.

  I didn’t know if I could leave the boys alone in the car here.

  A couple of days ago, Dave had run into Sarah, their mother, in a convenience store near home. She’d asked him for three bucks. He had tears in his eyes when he told me. I leaned against him and whispered, I’m so sorry, and felt his heart beating scared-hard. Not fast. Hard. I hadn’t met Sarah yet. Part of me hoped I wouldn’t ever have to. Large parts of me hoped this. Almost all of me. I was afraid of her, afraid she’d try to kill me for taking her sons, making them my own.
“A lot of guys say their ex-wife is psychotic,” Dave had said to me once. He’d pointed to his chest. “My ex-wife is psychotic.” At first I’d been alarmed by Dave’s story: Sarah had been in the state mental hospital; he had to leave her in order to keep the boys safe. But he understood mental illness; I loved how he talked about it. I’d been obsessed with R. D. Laing and radical psychiatry in college, and Dave had similar views. Diagnoses, Dave thought, were rough guesses, blunt tools, always more inaccurate than they were helpful. Dave said mental illness was not really anything separate from who the person was; it wasn’t illness as much as it was intensification. He believed mentally ill people had a lot more control than they let on. They partly made themselves crazy, intentionally, because there was a kind of power and freedom in abandoning this reality, these rules. They enjoyed it sometimes. He said some mentally ill people you feel really bad for. Some, he felt, would have been very difficult people anyway. Mental illness didn’t really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.

  I started telling the boys how excited my mother was to have something akin to grandchildren—she would treat them like princes. I was pretending the Fred stop hadn’t happened. Junior said he could go for a pop.

  “You’re already finished with the last one?” I said.

  “Heather,” Jacob said. “You keep buying smalls. We drink liters. We drink liters!”

  I didn’t want the boys to move. I didn’t want to lose them. I told them to stay put and I scooted across the greasy parking lot, past the smokers and the pumps, leaping across the oily blurs on the cement. I opened the door, and the hard-staring, tiny woman flew out, shaking her head, gaze fixed on the sidewalk just before her. She had on a hat, sunglasses, thick new white sneakers, and a jacket; she seemed ostentatiously incognito as she clutched a gallon of milk and her purse to her chest. She dashed past me, and I could feel the heat coming off her body. She didn’t look back. She ran to the edge of the parking lot and disappeared into the night.

  I went in the store. The clerk behind the register had kinky red hair, brushed into submission. Her pale pink T-shirt read I COULD GO FOR A NICE STIFF ONE. The I in STIFF was a martini glass, tilted. I strode directly to the back. The area was labeled with big red plastic letters, spinning on fishing line: C O L D B E E R. Three men stood with the fridge doors open, moving as if in slow motion, pulling out their cases. I called out, turning around and around, “Dave? Dave? Dave?” I peered down the hall that led to the bathrooms. I had the cell phone in one hand and the walkie-talkie in the other. I’d bought walkie-talkies for the trip because I was afraid we would lose each other, that I would not be able to find the boys.

  I decided to stay in one place to be easy to find. I waited for Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights” to end, but it was one of those songs that ends three times, and each time I got faked out. Even though I knew all the words by heart, I really didn’t.

  No Dave. Finally, I went back out.

  Dave was behind the wheel, pulling away from the pump, inching up to the store, his face a messy mix of worry, impatience, confusion, doubt. Behind the wheel he held up his arms, as in What’s wrong? combined with I gave up. I got in.

  “You saw me,” he said. “You were looking right at me. And then you just walked right past me like I was a stranger.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t see you.”

  “You were dissed, Dad,” Jacob said. “It happens.”

  I buckled myself in and kissed Dave on the cheek and tucked myself into my family feeling, and very quietly, without a word, we drove to my mother’s house.

  Four

  Set inside my mother’s front door was a tiny wood door-within-the-door, a little window with spindles. I knocked and it flipped back, as if by itself.

  “Can I help you?” My mother’s wary voice came out of the tiny door-within-the-door.

  “Mama, it’s us!” I said. I had my arm around Dave. “So sorry we’re so late. We just tried to call. All these delays.” Why wasn’t she opening up?

  “Hi, Pat!” Dave shouted.

  “Grandma!” Junior sprang from his kneeling position at the doorbell and plastered himself against the front door. He poked his fingers between the wood spindles of the little opening and wriggled them inside. “Gammy!” he said, in the voice used to summon a very small child or a new puppy. “I see you! Yes I do!” he yodeled. “Peeka peekaboo!”

  I loved that Junior called my mom “Grandma,” although I knew she’d be startled and unhappy. I wanted her to see his crazy sweetness for what it was, nerves and love. This was a kid who hugged strangers, who talked to everybody, who took a bow when he entered a shoe store, the dry cleaners.

  With both hands, Dave pulled Junior back from the door. “Slow down, big fella,” he said in his soft voice. “Easy now, son.”

  “Kind of awkward,” Jacob said quietly. “I don’t think she wants us to come in there.”

  “Shh,” Dave said. He cupped my shoulders in his big hands and whispered into my ear, “It’s okay. She leads a real quiet life. Three big Michigander men banging her door down—give her space, sweetheart.” He was holding me back. He was talking very slowly. Dave was a quality engineer for Steelcase, the largest office furniture manufacturer in the world, but he had worked in construction before, and before that he had worked the night shift as a security guard at Pine Rest, the mental hospital in Grand Rapids, where Sarah had later ended up as a regular patient. I imagined him using these skills—loud and slow speech, creating space and time around the person, entering very slowly and possibly sideways—in his previous line of work. In his marriage. Now with my family.

  The little gate in the door clicked shut, and I heard bolts sliding back, a chain, clicking, unlocking.

  My mother looked so tiny, so rigid, like wire. Her face was very, very wrinkled, like crumpled paper, very tan. She looked a dozen years older than when I’d last seen her, not two or three. She cowered, tiny, afraid. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to rub lotion on her and feed her pudding and air out this house, which smelled of old clothes and bug spray and dust. It was seventy degrees outside and she had the heat on.

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t look at me. She kept her eyes on the floor. “I was a terrible, terrible mother. I know you don’t like me. It’s okay.” She hunched her shoulders and gave a wan smile. She looked bereft, so frail. I wished I’d come down more often, sooner. How much time did she have left?

  I said, “Well, it’s so great to be here and to see you. I’m so happy for you to meet the boys.” They were waiting, just out of sight, on the other side of the door. Dave thunked the suitcases onto the stoop.

  She shook her head and looked at me suspiciously as though she knew me from somewhere dangerous, America’s Most Wanted. “No,” she said. “No, Heather. But it’s okay. You’re embarrassed of your old mom. Who wouldn’t be? I’m not blaming you. I was just surprised. Did you have a wonderful time with your father? How is he? I need to get down there. I’ve been remiss.”

  “Mom,” I said. “I’m not embarrassed of you.” I could hear the edge in my voice.

  Dave poked his head in the door. “Hello there,” he said, soft and friendly. “We just saw you at the store, I think. Good to meet you.” I thought: He’s making this up. I assumed he was trying to be extra nice, to make her feel at home.

  She ran. She ran from the door back into the depths of the house.

  And then I saw her shoes. Those boxy white shoes. How could I not have recognized my own mother?

  The table out in the Florida room was set for four, goblets and silver and pale blue linen napkins, her best dishes. She had a vase of fresh flowers—camellias—and at least six empty serving dishes set out, each laden with a silver spoon or serving fork.

  She came back out, looked stressed and wary; she was all business. She set Jacob to peeling cucumbers. Junior filled glasses with ice. In the living room, I noticed she’d s
et stuffed animals on fresh pillows, and she’d turned two sets of bed linens into welcoming rolls.

  “So, honey, I got back from the store in the nick of time. I quick ran out and got an extra gallon of milk! I’m a little flustered, I guess.” She was poking rolls in the microwave, bending at the waist to be on eye level with it. “I thought: Boys! Boys need milk! They need milk! I remember how much your brother used to go through, my gosh in heaven I should have invested in a cow!” Her eyes glittered. She leaned against the counter as though holding it up against great force. Then she hopped back to the oven. “What was I doing?”

  After dinner, Dave took the boys on a walk around the neighborhood so my mom and I could get caught up. He whispered to me, “Let her be how she is, be nice, honey.” She closed and locked and chained the door behind them and turned to me and said, “Do you help him with his grammar? Did he go to college? You know how I value education. I was so surprised to hear grammar mistakes coming out of such a nice man! I know you can be so diplomatic. It’s one of your best qualities. The teacher! Your father and I are so proud. If only you had a job that paid you what you are worth! Have you considered trying to find something more lucrative?”

  I looked into her taut face, turned up at the ceiling, all serious and imperious. I’d seen her wince and purse her lips when Junior said “aksed” and Dave said “we seen.”

  “Why don’t we clean up and we can talk,” I said, taking the higher ground.

  In the kitchen she said, “I can tell you are a big help with those boys. What’s the name of the big one? Remind me.”

  “David Junior?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, David. Of course. I’m not one to call people ‘Junior.’ ” She smiled and plunged her hands into the sink full of clear, clean water. “It’s akin to Bubba. Or Jimbo! What are some people thinking? I’m one to go by just the proper names. Not nicknames.”