Funny, that’s what I’ve always told my therapists. Just because the other fifties fathers were assholes, that’s no excuse. Now it seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation. Like my father, most of my friends’ dads ruled their families without deigning to engage in their day-to-day functioning. Why did I expect my father to transcend the dictates of time and place?
Some fathers did. I clung to the ones I found. I chose my third-grade best friend, Elaine, for her dad, a newspaper cartoonist who worked from home. Dave was as involved with Elaine’s life as her mom was—maybe more. He had a sports car and he drove us around Washington Heights after school, two squealing eight-year-old girls squeezed into the tiny backseat of his forest-green MG.
“Your brother,” my dad says. “He’s the kind of father I wish I’d been. He’s such a great dad. And you’re such a terrific mother.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“See what I mean?” Pat, pat, pat. “You’ve got to start seeing the good in yourself.”
My father’s voice is louder, suddenly. He pats my hand harder and faster.
“I won’t always be around to remind you,” he says.
It seems ridiculous now, but I haven’t actually thought this through. My dad won’t be the first to call me when my byline appears in his morning newspaper. My dad won’t be around to tell me the same boring, self-aggrandizing, comforting stories he’s been telling me all my life.
I’ll still come to this apartment to see Lina, but my dad won’t look up, delighted, as I walk through the door. Who else is as pleased by my presence as my father is? No one. Who likes me as much as he does, just the way I am? Only this guy, once my harshest critic, now my greatest fan. I want sixty more years of this.
“Take care of Lina, okay?” my father says. “You know she never asks for help.”
“We will.”
“She thinks you’re all going to drop her when—”
“We won’t.”
My father closes his eyes. He stops patting my hand, but he leaves his hand, soft and hot and heavy, resting on mine. I close my eyes, too, telling myself to be here now with him, not in the future without him.
My dad startles like an infant. He jerks alert, eyes panicky.
“What about your marriage?” he asks.
Arrow to my heart. I can’t lie to him. I can’t give him the good news he wants. I have the craziest fantasy: my dad calls my wife and tells her that his dying wish is for us to get back together, and it works.
“We’re getting divorced,” I say.
“Oh, no. Why don’t you try marriage counseling?”
Here’s the dad I know, suggesting the obvious as if it’s genius, trying to talk me into taking his advice. The last time he gave me words of wisdom like these, I was bemoaning my financial woes and he said, “Can’t you put your politics aside, for once, and write a bestseller?” His advice-giving has always felt like it’s more about easing his anxieties, making him feel like a hero, than it was about helping me. Now that distinction seems utterly insignificant.
“It’s not going to happen, Dad. I already filed for divorce.”
“Oh.” He draws his lips together, a tight white line. I’ve disappointed him. Again.
“I’m sorry. I know you love her. I love her, too.” My belly sends up a small flare of familiar anger. This is my divorce, my pain. I’m his daughter, not his mother. Why is it my job to make him feel better about it?
Because I want him to die in peace.
“We tried,” I say.
“I know you did.” My father’s face softens. He looks . . . thoughtful. This is not a face I’ve seen on my father before.
“Dad. Couples counseling isn’t a miracle cure. You’re not married to anyone you went to couples counseling with. Neither am I.”
“How did I get such a smart daughter?” He starts patting my hand again. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Sometimes you can’t have the thing you want most. But you can still have a lot of good things. And you will.”
His eyelids droop. “Whatever happens,” he mumbles, “make sure you keep writing. No one can take that away from you.”
“I will.”
“Promise me,” says my father, who wrote dozens of unproduced plays until my mother got pregnant with me and he stopped writing to support his family, because that’s what responsible fathers did in 1951. He didn’t have the advantage I had, coming of age in the question-everything 1960s.
“I promise,” I say.
“I’m leaving you a little bit of money to build yourself a place to write,” my dad says.
This must be the dementia talking. My brother and I assumed that Lina would inherit whatever savings our father had, which was as it should be. Lina is seventy, with no other means of support.
“I love you, Dad,” I say, for maybe the tenth time ever. Why haven’t I said that to him every damn day of my life?
“I love you, too, sweetheart,” my father says. Why has he never said that to me before?
I talk to God most of the way back to Los Angeles. Thank you for this miracle, I tell Him. Begging Him to keep my dad alive seems unrealistic. Instead I pray that my dad’s slide out of this world is smooth and easy, and that his next world is full of calorie-free, mile-high pastrami sandwiches and winning bets.
—
A FEW DAYS LATER my brother calls. He’s crying.
“Dad’s gone,” he says.
His voice seems to be coming through a long metal tunnel. “I’ll be right there,” I say.
Without saying anything to anyone, I gather my things and walk out of the office. I get into my car and drive toward the 5. The traffic is worse than usual. I look at my dashboard clock. It’s rush hour.
I call my stepmother. “It’s over. Finally, it’s over.” Her voice is frozen. “He went peacefully. For him, this is better. But for us . . .”
“I know,” I say. “I’m on my way. I love you.”
I call my wife’s cell phone. At least one thing, her phone number, is the same. She doesn’t answer. She probably thinks I’m calling about the divorce. I leave her a message. “My father just died.” I don’t know what else to say. “I thought you’d want to know.”
I call my therapist and leave her the same message.
My brother calls again. He’s not crying now. I am.
“I don’t think you should drive right now,” my brother says. “It’s getting dark. And you’re upset.”
I pull over to the curb. I see that my gas tank is almost empty. The thought of finding a gas station, finding my credit card, pumping gas is overwhelming. I ask God what to do. He says my brother’s right.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
“No hurry,” my brother says pointedly. “Drive safe.”
Now what?
I’m sitting in my car on Sunset near Vine and I have no idea what to do, where to go.
My dad isn’t alive anymore.
What does that even mean? I want to call my stepmother, tell her to put him on the phone so I know he’s still on earth, where I need him to be.
I read somewhere that when people die, their souls hang around for a while. I close my eyes. I feel that my dad is still with me. Or maybe that’s God. What if the God who’s been holding me was actually my dad, and now my dad is gone?
I ask whichever of them is listening, “What do I do now?”
I feel him—my dad or God—tell me not to be alone.
I want to be with someone I really know and love, and I don’t really know anyone in this town. To be specific, I want to be with my wife, who adored my dad, and whom my dad adored.
Outside my car window, a homeless woman slowly pushes a shopping cart across the intersection of Sunset and Vine. Drivers scissor around her, nearly hitting her, honking angrily. She doesn’t lo
ok up or stop. Finally, she reaches the curb. She tips her cart up onto the sidewalk and stops next to my car, bent over her pile of rags. I start my car. I drive until I can’t see her in my rearview mirror anymore.
Cheap trick, I accuse God. If that was your way of reminding me that other people have it worse than I do, it’s not working.
My dad isn’t alive anymore.
My wife isn’t my wife anymore.
I’m not anyone’s anyone anymore.
I must know someone in Los Angeles. I scroll through the recent calls on my phone, trying to remember who I know. Hannah would be wonderful, but she’s on the Westside. At this time of day, she might as well be in New York. Nichole and Donna? I dial their home number. Donna answers on the first ring.
“My father died,” I say. “Can I—”
“Come right now,” she says. “Do you need us to pick you up?”
The two of them are waiting at their front door. They pull me into a three-way hug. Holding them is like holding on to an oak tree. They walk me into their pale, calm living room. Donna hands me a cocktail and sits on the couch right next to me. “Dinner in a few,” Nichole calls from the kitchen.
Donna puts her arm around me. “How are you, honey?”
I shake my head silently. Donna nods as if I’ve said the world’s wisest thing.
“It’s a terrible thing, losing a parent,” she says. “It’s like losing your place in the world.”
My phone rings. “Oh my God,” I say, staring at the number on the screen. “It’s my wife.”
“Answer it!” Donna says, and I do.
—
“HI,” I SAY, in the voice that only my wife has heard.
“Hi,” my wife says, in the voice she uses only with me.
Nichole and Donna are sweet and kind, and so new to me. Who could deeply comfort me in this moment? Only my wife. My wife who laughed at my father’s dumb jokes, thanked him for making me, always told me I had his beautiful lips. The day after my wife and I met for the first time, my dad and I reconciled after our eight-year estrangement. My wife knew only the happy story of my dad and me. “The two of you are practically the same person,” she said when she met him, naming our blessing and our curse.
I’m dimly aware of Donna walking me to their office, settling me into an easy chair, covering me with an impossibly soft blanket. She puts a box of Kleenex in my lap and closes the door behind her.
“I’m so sorry,” my wife says. “He was a good guy, your dad.”
Just as it always did, her voice pulls me in from where I’ve been drifting, anchors me to earth. Is this the trade-off? I lose my father, but I get to hear my wife’s voice?
It was her voice that first caught me. Melodic, sexy, smart. And mysterious, always mysterious. Following her sideways thoughts, her poetic phrases, felt like tracing a curving path through a secret garden. I never knew what I’d come across, rounding the next bend, only that it would be surprising and beautiful and wild.
How can such a terrible thing and such a wonderful thing be happening at the same time? My father is dead. And I’m having a conversation with my wife, speaking the long-lost language of us.
“If you think it’ll be okay with your family,” my wife says, “I’d like to come to the memorial.”
Her voice fills the hole in my heart. “Really?” I weep. “You’ll come?”
—
WE CELEBRATE MY DAD with his idea of a perfect day, at the racetrack with every member of his family and the closest possible approximation of his favorite racetrack foods. We sit in his spot in the cheap seats and eat two-inch-tall pastrami and coleslaw sandwiches and tomato pickles like the ones he used to get at the Gaiety in Times Square, and dollar hot dogs and beer from the greasy grandstand shack. Sierra, his seven-year-old great-granddaughter, wins twenty bucks on a long shot. We all agree that this is Grandpa’s work.
My wife texts me to say she’s in the parking lot. I run to meet her. When she sees me, she stands still and waits. She wraps her arms around me, holds me long and close. I close my eyes and hold my breath. I’m home at last. All I want is to stay right here.
I hear a thin voice calling my wife’s name. It’s Sierra, galloping in our direction. She pries us apart, leaps into my wife’s arms. Whenever my wife and I stayed at her parents’ house, Sierra jumped into bed with us in the mornings.
“I miss you!” Sierra cries, burying her face in my wife’s neck.
“I miss you, too, sweetie,” my wife says.
God? Or my father? I don’t care. Here’s the miracle I’ve been waiting for.
TWELVE
Driving back to L.A. the day after my dad’s memorial, I feel an old weight lifted and a new weight laid down.
There’s no need to worry about my father anymore. No check-in calls to make to Lina or to his doctors, no scouring the web, researching his latest symptoms. There’s nothing to do about my dad now except feel it: he’s gone.
The miles blur by. Already the world feels quieter, lonelier, grayer without my father in it.
I turn on the radio. Mexican corridos, country and western ballads, Top 40, the audiobooks I stash in my glove box for these L.A.–San Francisco treks. One rattles me more than the next. I turn the radio off, summon my short list of self-soothing strategies, starting with focusing on the bright side.
No more suffering for my dad.
No more caretaking overload for Lina.
No more panicked phone calls or emergency trips to San Francisco for me.
No more seeing my father’s face light up when I walk into a room.
Hello, God? It’s me, Meredith. Where’s my serenity?
—
PASSING GILROY, even through the closed car windows, I’m inhaling garlic air. It’s always like this, passing Gilroy. Summer or winter, rain or shine. Drive past Gilroy, smell garlic. Why do some things, stupid things that don’t even matter, stay the same, but the most important things, the best things, won’t?
Change the channel. Think of something good.
My wife yesterday, in the racetrack parking lot with her arms around me. The familiar scent of her skin.
My wife.
I want more of that.
I phone my wife.
I listen to her outgoing message. It’s good to hear her voice. I don’t know what’s going to happen between us, but I do know this: She showed up for me. She still loves me. And I still love her. I leave her a message. “Just thinking of you on Highway 5.”
I slip into a reverie. Maybe we’ll start talking again. Forgive each other. She’ll come to L.A. to visit me.
I imagine my wife in my little Silver Lake deprivation cell. In my lonely exile bed. Pulling her to me. Kissing her. Both of us saying it again and again. I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry.
Five hours later I pull into my alley, shoehorn my car into my tiny garage, emerge into the balmy L.A. night. The 7-Eleven compressors are still chugging. The purple bougainvillea still pours over the fence. So much has changed since I left L.A. three days ago.
I call my wife again. I get her voice mail again. I leave her a message, thanking her for her kindness, asking her to call me back when she’s ready. I know she needs her space. The way she came through for me makes it easier to give it to her. I squeezed her too tightly when we were married, I know I did. But now I’ve walked through the fire. I’ve been alone. I’m not so needy anymore. I can do better than I did before. She’ll see.
—
LOSS IS A SLOW, slow walk. I’ve been sad about my dad for a long time. Now I miss him every day. I wish he could have lived another five, ten, thirty years. But his death fits into the natural order of things. A daughter is supposed to outlive her father. A daughter hurts her father and makes him happy, and he does the same to her. We forgave each other and thanked each other, and then he slipped from here to
there.
Losing my marriage is different. Worse. When I lost my wife I lost the person I was with her. I lost the woman and the life I loved. I lost the history my wife and I made together, the future I’d counted on, the future we’d planned to share.
Accept the things you cannot change; change the things you can. Unlike losing my father, losing my wife is something I might be able to change. Living without both of them feels impossible. So I’m going to try to get my wife back. I’m going to try.
—
WHEN I WAKE UP in the morning I leave my wife a message. “Just saying hi.”
The next day I call my wife from work and leave her a message. “Call me when you can.”
I e-mail my wife at bedtime the next night. “Left you some voice mails. Haven’t heard back. Hope you’re okay.”
Days go by. I don’t hear from her.
She’s having drinks with friends on Facebook.
Weeks go by. She’s on a beach in France.
Months go by. I don’t hear from her.
—
I’M UNTETHERED AGAIN, drifting through space. How deluded was I, interpreting a moment of shared grief as a reconciliation. My wife and I are not getting back together. What we’re getting is divorced.
The V in that word: that’s my wife and me. Two sides, joined at the bottom, broken apart at the top. My magical thinking can’t put us back together again. My marriage is over. It’s time to face my demons, my new life, my future. Alone.
—
A YEAR AFTER I MOVED to L.A., my wife e-mails to say she’s moving out of the house we lived in together, the house I own. She takes the things that are hers alone and leaves everything else, pending our legal settlement.
I call Naomi, my Bay Area realtor. She tells me the real estate market is smoking hot. “But you have to get your house on the market now,” Naomi says. “No one buys a house in Oakland in August. Can you empty it in the next two weeks?”
“Of course,” I lie. I haven’t set foot inside that house since the day I left for L.A., and it’s full of twenty-five years’ worth of stuff.
The New Old Me Page 12
