by Lily King
He looks at the clock when I come in with his tray, but he doesn’t complain about how long it took me.
He sits up and puts the plate in his lap and says, “This is terrific.” He picks up one of the pink-gray tubes of pig intestine, dips it in the mound of ketchup, and raises it to his open mouth. It makes a pop as it splits between his teeth.
“You have yours already?”
I realize I’m hovering.
“No, I—”
“Want some?” He pushes his plate toward me.
“No, I don’t—” eat meat, I want to finish, but can anticipate the mockery too well. “Thanks anyway.”
He confuses me. He disgusts and compels me. I don’t want to stand and watch him eat three hot dogs (I had to use several different utensils to get them out of the package and in and out of the boiling water without having to touch them) and yet the sight of his fingers, the tip of a pencil embedded since kindergarten above the knuckle of his first finger, the long yellowing thumb steadying the plate, keeps me in place.
“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.” He says it in a bad New York accent. Noyvus. He points to the wooden chair in the corner. I pull it up to the bed.
He cleans the plate, then puts it on the bedside table. He lies back on his pillows.
“Dad, will you tell me what’s been going on here?”
He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “You can’t imagine what I’ve been through.”
I wait.
His eyes flash open. “Do you know what that ungrateful asshole brother of yours said to me?”
“No, but let’s start at the beginning. What happened with Catherine?”
He looks at me blankly for a moment, as if there’s only room for one enemy at a time in his head. Then he smiles before shaking his head again, even more slowly this time. “Now there’s a real beauty. There’s a real little cunt for you.”
“You had a big fight?”
“No we didn’t have a big fight.” He isn’t one for narrative unless it has a punch line. “She just took off and I said good riddance.”
“Were you home?” Did Catherine leave in the same way my mother had, on the sly, a note on the kitchen table? It seemed the only way.
“Yes. I was in the poolhouse. She drove right past me.”
“What time of day was it?”
“About nine in the morning.”
I figured she’d left in a drunken midnight rage, not on a sunny Saturday morning.
“She came crawling back, too, the next day. But I had a gun and told her to get off the property.”
“A gun?”
“Damn right.”
“A BB gun?” I try not to smile.
“If you aim it in the right place, that thing can do some damage.”
“Dad, you and Catherine have been together a long time.”
“Worst years of my life.”
“Really?”
“Well, some of the worst.”
“I’m going to talk to Catherine. I know you can work this—”
“If you do that—” he struggles to sit up and point a finger at me—”if you do that, if you go anywhere near her, I’ll call the police. You can get out of this house right now if that’s what your plan is. I want nothing, nothing to do with that woman, do you understand that?” His eyes are small and yellow.
“Yes,” I say thinly. The walls of my stomach begin to buckle. I feel myself rise, put back the chair, lift his plate, and move quickly out of the room and down to the kitchen. Over my shoulder, as smoothly as I can, I tell him to have a nap.
It’s been years since I’ve triggered my father’s temper. I learned my way around it long ago. I do not bring up politics, history, literature, lawyers—especially Jewish lawyers—or any other subject that can be linked, however loosely, to my mother. I do not tease, and I receive teasing with a smile; I keep my thoughts and opinions to a bare minimum. I ask questions. I make myself useful. I do not discuss my interests, my relationships, or my goals. He and Catherine find me dull company, and tease me for that as well, but it is a small price to pay for peace.
It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t want Catherine back. He’d wanted my mother back, or at least I thought he had. I have no Plan B.
I pick up the phone, the old one that’s always been there, with the long cord and rotary dial. Jonathan answers before the second ring.
“It’s just me.”
“Hey, just you.” His voice jiggles; he’s flopped on the bed and smashed a pillow beneath his head. He’s settling in for a long conversation. Suddenly I don’t have that in me. “So how is he?”
“He’s okay.” It feels like too much to explain: Garvey, the hospital, the loss of Plan A. “I miss you. I want to be on Paloma Street with you.”
“Nine and a half days. Here. I was just thinking of you. Listen to this. I’ve been reading Go Tell It on the Mountain again.” There’s a muffled scraping sound. “Okay, here it is.”
It’s a long quote and I try to concentrate, but the words just bounce off me.
“I like that,” I say when he’s done, but I don’t have anything more to say about it. “There are these plates here. I remember coming back from my grandparents’ that summer and seeing them in my kitchen: Catherine’s good china. The kids ate off of plastic, but Dad and Catherine always used these plates. She didn’t take them with her. She doesn’t seem to have taken much of anything. That’s probably a good sign, right?”
“You want her to come back?”
“It’s my father’s only hope, I think. He can’t cope alone.”
“How about some sort of housekeeper?”
“He doesn’t like people he doesn’t know.”
“Did you really come from the loins of this man?”
“Please don’t put it that way. How was class today?”
“Two more to go.”
“They’ll hand in their papers next week?” Once he got those papers and graded them, he could leave.
“Wednesday morning. You know, this Baldwin book probably means more to me than anything I’ve read in any philosophy class. Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.” It’s weird to hear his voice and the words Baldwin and philosophy and narrative coming through the same phone line we used to use for prank calls. Is John Wall there? Are any Walls there? Then what’s holding up your house?
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You okay, Dales?”
“I should probably go check on him.”
“You sure?”
I wish I hadn’t called so soon. It’s never a good idea to try and mix the world of my father with any other world. I’d learned that over and over. “I’ll call you when I get on the road again.”
“I love you,” he says. It sounds dutiful. But I know that’s the Doppler effect of being here in this house.
The minute I hang up I want to call back.
“Who was that?”
I flinch. He can really creep up on you when he wants to. “A friend of mine. She’s moving to California, too.” The impulse to lie is instinctive, like one of those desert cats hastily burying its kill in the sand.
He’s changed into bright red pants. His hair is damp, combed neatly in ridges. “When do you have to go?”
“The day after tomorrow. I have a professorship at Berkeley that starts in ten days.” I don’t know if Garvey mentioned this to him.
He moves past me to the door where the dogs are scraping to be let out. They move in a runnel of fur through the opening he makes. He stays looking out the screen door. The little dog remains beside him. He nudges her with the toe of his topsider. “Well, we don’t have a professorship, do we, Maybelle?”
He moves with sudden purpose to the bar. It’s not yet 2 P.M. I’ve never tried to control my father’s drinking, never suggested that he not have a drink when he wanted one. It would be like trying to separate a snake from a mouse.
&
nbsp; It’s all done with such precision: the ice into the monogrammed glass, the snap of the paper across the cap of a new bottle of Smirnoff’s, the splash of vermouth, the tiny onions jiggled out so carefully. Then the pause, and then the sip, his eyes pulled shut by pleasure. I’ve never noticed what an act of love it all is.
Alcohol has never done anything for me. The first time I got drunk was with Mallory in eighth grade. My mother and Paul were out, and we mixed Grand Marnier with Hawaiian Punch. Mallory got giggly and I got sick. When my mother came home I was still bent over the toilet. She seemed more relieved than angry. “I think you’re like me, honey,” she said, rubbing my back. “You’ll never be able to hold your liquor.” She was right.
The afternoon, the evening, the night spreads out before us. Outside the sky is wide and blue; the sun beats on the grass, on the fur of the dogs on the back porch. Inside is cool and dark.
“Backgammon?” I say, slightly desperate.
“Sure.”
We go into the den, to the cabinet where the games are kept. A hot cedar smell spills out. Backgammon is on the bottom, the fake leather case stuck to the wood. I have to give it a good tug. He takes his seat on the sofa and places his drink on the end table, a fluid gesture I have seen a million times. I pull around an armchair to face him, the game between us on the coffee table. The pieces are heavy, marbleized. The dice thud in their felt-lined cups. I haven’t played a game with him since I was a very little girl.
We set up. There is no confusion about which side is home, my left, his right. He does not say, as Jonathan always does before any kind of game, I am going to whup you silly, just to up the tension. But I can tell by his breathing and the careful straight rows he makes that he is thinking about winning. I never think about winning at the beginning of a game. At the start I am always just thinking how happy I am to be playing a game, what a particular old pleasure it is, what a wonderful detour from regular life, regular conversation. My desire to win comes later, when I recognize that my delight has not put me in the lead. Then I become focused and anxious. If I lose, it feels like more than losing a game, and if I win, the elation is momentary—the other person’s discouragement makes my own enjoyment impossible.
My first roll is a six and a five, lovers’ leap. He tries to blockade my remaining man, but he doesn’t get the rolls. I hit him several times on my way out. Soon I have trapped four of his men in my home.
When I win, he moans, falsetto, but he isn’t angry. He’s barely taken a sip from his drink. We set up the board again.
The dice are with me again. I double him after my third roll and he accepts.
“You’re a little whippersnapper, aren’t you?” he says. “You and your professorship. But I’m not as dumb as I look, you know.” He gets double fives and knocks off two of my men. “I was pretty good at school once upon a time.”
“Were you?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not. I know you’re smart. Maybe not really smart in backgammon.” I come in on a four and a three, and bump off two of his men.
“You know what I loved in school?” he says.
“What?”
“Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare?”
“We had to memorize something from Julius Caesar once.”
“A soliloquy?”
“I think so.” It’s his turn, but he doesn’t roll. “O conspiracy, sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, when evils are most free?” His neck lengthens as he speaks, reddens, the Adam’s apple sharp as ever, cutting its pale path. “O, then by day where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage?”
“Wow, Dad. Good memory.”
He looks at me like he used to look at Catherine sometimes, a defiant go fuck yourself look. And then he takes a long sip of his martini and the blush drains out of his face.
The next game he beats me. He gets up and makes another drink. He beats me again. He drinks faster when he is winning.
“I used to play this with my mother,” he says.
I wait for more. It’s rare for him to talk about his childhood.
“She used to send me to the kitchen to fetch the maid and she’d change the board around. She was a terrible cheater.”
She was a terrible drunk, my mother told me.
“I’d say, ‘Ring the bell for the maid.’ There was a button under the carpet beside her chair, and all she had to do was step on it and it would ring in the kitchen. But she’d say ‘The maid’s going deaf.’ There was no contradicting my mother. I learned that early enough.”
“How? What would she do?”
“She’d put clothespins on my ears.”
“What?”
“She’d put clothespins on my ears and I’d have to walk to school like that.”
“Dad, c’mon.”
“They hurt like hell, too.”
“Oh my God, that’s so twisted.”
He laughed at the word. “She was twisted all right.”
“Have you ever lived alone before?”
“Let’s see. I had a single my senior year of college.”
“And you ate in the dining hall?”
“I ate at my club.”
“And your laundry was done for you?”
“Every Monday morning.”
“Before I leave, I’m going to show you how to wash your own clothes and make a few meals.”
“I know how to make steak and hot dogs. That’s all I need to know.”
“There’s nothing you want to learn to cook?”
He thinks about it. “Hollandaise sauce. Catherine’s was awful.”
He wants my mother’s recipe. He’s saying he misses my mother’s hollandaise. Even now, I thrill when I find a chink of light in the great wall between them.
When he comes back into the room with another drink, he says, “This is nice.”
“What?”
“Playing backgammon.”
“It is nice.”
“I wish you could stay longer.”
These are words I’ve never heard from him, simple words. This is nice. I wish you could stay longer.
“Me too.” It feels true and then, after a few seconds, completely untrue. Two nights is all I can handle. And I know what he’s doing, how he can put on the charm when he needs something from you.
I beat him the last game, backgammon him, and he laughs as I do it.
“You’re a good player,” he says, packing up the case.
Afterward I drag him up to the laundry room. It looks just the same, the ivory-colored machines, the hampers, the cabinet with the safe inside.
I explain the separation of lights, colors, and darks. There are enough of his tennis whites in there to make a small load, so I toss them in, measure out the powder detergent, read out the cleaning options, and pull the knob. Water rushes in and I shut the lid. We move to the dryer and I show him the dials. I scrape the lint tray clean. He says Mm-hmm and Okay at all the right times, but he isn’t paying attention. He’s behaving as if it’s all hypothetical, like I’m preparing him for an emergency situation that will not actually come to pass.
He points to the old hair dryer standing on its wheels in the corner, a gunmetal-gray helmet my mother used to spend hours under, deaf to the world. I go over and touch the thick metal lip. I can see her foot bobbing, hear the pages of Time magazine snapping. I feel my ache for her grow and then freeze—I can’t miss my mother in front of my father. But she once stood here; we’d all once been a family in this house. It’s like a story, a fairy tale, something told to me, not remembered. Once upon a time a beautiful lady lived with a handsome man in a big house near the sea. They had two lovely children, a boy and a girl. But the beautiful lady was not happy, and one day she took the little girl and all the jewelry and disappeared.
11
Since there is no space for groceries in my car, I take my father’s to the market. Going down the hill into town, I get behind a Volvo who
se bumper declares they’d rather be windsurfing. A Saab at the fish market says it would rather be skiing. I laugh as if Jonathan were beside me and had made a joke. Yeah, he’d say, where I grew up we put stickers on our asses that said I’D RATHER BE DRIVING A CAR. At the sight of my father’s beige sedan, hands rise from steering wheels to wave and then surprised eyes peer in. They do not know me, but I know them: Mrs. Utley, chain-smoking in a green station wagon; Mrs. Braeburn, pursing her stiff lips in a navy Jeep; small Mrs. Wentworth leaning forward in a van, only her forehead visible; Mr. Timmons, who inexplicably retired in his early forties, parking his powder blue convertible outside the post office with the concentration of a leader of a small military operation.
After my mother died, I came to Ashing seldom and briefly. Two nights a year with my father and Catherine was enough. On the way, I’d think of all the people I wanted to see, old friends who might by chance be back visiting at the same time, friends of my mother’s who’d written kind letters to me after she died. I’d plan to go to all the shops, poke my head in at the Mug and the penny candy store. I wanted to visit people because I missed them and because I knew it would be healthy to break up the intensity of seeing my father. But my father’s house was not one you could flit in and out of. It sucked you in until it spat you out. It was seductively familiar, my father greeting me in the driveway, his scratchy voice animated, full of stories he’d seemed to save just for me. I rarely managed to time my visits with Patrick’s. After college he moved to Miami with a woman named Hill and her three children, and they didn’t come north much. Frank ended up in New York City and Elyse in Wyoming, and I never saw them, either. So I’d sit with my father and Catherine the first night and wonder why I didn’t come home more often. My father would get drunk, but he seemed happy, playful. That first night I never thought to go downtown to the bars like other people my age did when they came home to visit. I went to bed when he and Catherine did, and fell into a heavy sleep. But the show would always be over by the next afternoon. My father’s good mood never lasted long. Catherine would have said something that pissed him off, or a neighbor would have come over uninvited, or someone from work would have called. His anger would ramp up, and by nighttime he was seething and muttering, while I just tried to dodge as many insults as I could. I never ended up seeing anyone else in Ashing. He made me forget my attachments to others; he made me reptilian. To go see other people meant they would see my scales.
