by Lily King
“There’s no one who could support you in this?”
“This is not a man who can change.”
“Anyone can change, given the right tools.”
“I challenge you to this one. You take him on and call me when he’s all fixed.”
“California can wait a week or so. Your father needs you.”
“California cannot wait a week or so. I am a full-time professor and my job starts a week from Wednesday.”
“Where?”
“Berkeley.”
“Nice.” He puts down his pen. He is suddenly seeing me as a compatriot. I am in his league now. And I am a woman, I see him also realize. “What department are you in?”
“Anthropology. I’m going to go in and say goodbye to my father now.”
I move down the hallway, blue under the fluorescent lighting. I feel stiff. You’re worse than your mother, you little bitch. Seven aspirin, for fuck’s sake. He had everyone jumping around for seven aspirin. I hope he’s asleep.
But he is not. He lies there with the sheets tucked up to his chin, his eyes wide and staring at the door before I come through it. I stand several feet from the bed, keep my hands in my pockets.
“I’m not doing so well, elf.” He bunches the sheet up in his fists. His face turns a raw red and he begins to cry. “I’m not doing well at all.”
I really don’t know where he should begin. The man needs so much. I squeeze the car keys in my pocket. I have to go. This is a sick man. This is a sick man whose problems I cannot remedy.
“I’m not doing well at all,” he whimpers again.
“You’re not, Dad. You need help.”
“I do need help.”
“But not my help.”
“Yes, I need your help.”
“No, you need professional help. You’re sick.”
“I’m just … I’m just … I don’t know what I am.” The crying turns to sobs. His chest pumps up and down and his mouth opens crookedly. His teeth are yellow and gray.
“Dad, let’s get you some doctors who can help you.”
“What can doctors do? Perry? Perry can’t help me.”
“Not Perry. You need to go somewhere where people are going to take care of you and help you get better.”
“Where?”
“Some beautiful place. Maybe Colorado or Arizona.”
“No.”
“Maybe nearby. Vermont.”
“You’re talking about that place Buzz Shipley went to.”
“Maybe someplace like that.”
“That guy came back a fairy. He went in a perfectly nice guy and came out a fairy.”
“You need to stop drinking. You won’t be able to see anything clearly before you do.” I wait for him to lash out.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “But I won’t go anywhere.”
“Dad, you can’t do it on your own. No one can. A program is the best way. You go away and you get a lot of support and therapy.”
“Therapy? You mean a shrink?”
“Someone who can help you figure out—”
“No shrink. No way. That stays on your medical record for the rest of your life. It ruins people. Remember that wing nut McGovern picked for vice president? Never. I will not give her the satisfaction.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t have anyone talking about me the way they talked about Buzz.”
“No one’s going to talk—”
“Oh yes they will. You don’t know how this town talks.”
“We can say you’re coming to California with me. No one will have to know.”
“I’m staying in my house. If I leave she’ll come and take everything from me. Everything.”
“What about AA?” Julie’s uncle is in AA. He hasn’t had a drink in over twelve years. “I bet there are meetings nearby. Will you do that?”
He nods.
“Every day?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Dad, I know you’re not going to do this.”
“I am. I need to. I know I need to.” He is not convincing.
“I’ll leave and you’ll just go back to your old patterns.”
“So stay and watch me.”
“I can’t.”
A nurse comes in. She pads across the room like a child pretending to be a nurse. Her hands move efficiently, though, changing the IV bag, making a ripping sound with Velcro, sealing everything back up.
“Let me show you how the bed works, Mr. Amory.” She taps the blue and red buttons on a remote with a long fingernail. “This will sit you up and this will make you lie back down. Would you like to sit up a bit now with your daughter?”
“Yes, thank you. Ah, that’s much better. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Amory.”
“You’ll come back before one and show me how the tube works, right? The Sox are in Cleveland this afternoon.”
“Oh I know just where they are. And Clemens’s ankle’s worse, and they’ll probably start Ryan, Lord help us all.”
“Oh, c’mon. Six-point-five’s not good enough for you?”
“Not by a long shot.”
My father laughs. She pulls the door shut and then he looks back at me and seems to remember he’s supposed to be suicidally depressed.
“I know you need to go. I’m proud of you. I really am. I know this is no way to show it but I am, Daley.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what I keep thinking about is that time we went to get your mother a painting in Wellesley. Do you remember that day?”
“No.”
“You weren’t more than four or five. We snuck out of the house early so we didn’t have to tell her where we were going. You’d gotten yourself dressed in a little pink dress and you’d put some sort of bow in your hair all crooked, and we went to a gallery where there was this painting of the swan boats that your mother liked and we walked in, and the man there said hello and you lifted your dress up all the way and you weren’t wearing anything underneath. You should have seen the man’s face!
“You know, the saddest day in my life was the day your mother drove off. Saddest day of my life. I never thought she’d do something like that. And take you with her. Take you away from me. I know it was tough on you, but it was tough on me, too. My daughter was gone. I kind of went off the track then, you know. I shouldn’t have hooked up with Catherine so quickly. It wasn’t right. It was never right. She wanted me to be someone else. They always want you to be someone else. Even you want me to be someone else.”
“No, Dad. I want you to get sober and then see what things look like from there.” It’s slightly hallucinatory, the whole idea of him being sober, becoming self-aware.
“Oh Jesus, you sound like that girl Garvey brought home one time. What was her name? Lynnette? Lianne?”
I don’t supply the name, Lizette. I don’t say anything.
“I’d go crazy if I had to see things any more closely. Ever since Catherine my brain has been gnawing on itself.”
I know that feeling. “And you drink to stop feeling that way?”
“Oh Christ, I suppose so. If I stop with the booze, I just don’t want to turn into a guy like Bob Wuzzy. Remember him with his diet sodas? Jesus Christ.”
I can’t help smiling. “You won’t become anyone else, Dad.”
He looks out the window. I study the fine crosshatching near his eyes, the thin straight ridge of his nose. “I know you’re right,” he says without looking at me. “I know you are.” His hands are folded neatly in his lap, like a sad little boy in church. “But you’ll go and I’ll go home and it won’t feel like you’re right anymore.”
At least he knows himself this much. I have to be on campus on July ninth, ten days from now, to start an urban kinship project. I can skip the stops to see friends in Madison and Boulder. I can drive straight through, taking catnaps along the way.
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay for six more days. You go to AA every day. You have one dr
op of alcohol and I’m gone. On top of that, you will not make racist jokes or objectifying remarks about my body. Plus you will not be allowed to insult me or my mother, or anyone else for that matter. Deal?” I put out my hand.
He unthreads his fingers and clasps my hand tightly. “Deal.”
“You’re going to be miserable.”
He gives me a thin smile. “I know it.”
13
We take a cab back to Ashing. It turns out my father coached the driver’s son in Little League three years in a row, a team called the Acorns.
“You remember that coach for the Pirates, big guy, big paunch?” he says to my father, looking at him intensely through the rearview mirror.
“The one who always ate the peanuts?”
“The very one.”
“He was a real beauty.”
“Prison. Five to ten.”
“Jesus. For what?”
“Nearly killed his girlfriend.”
“Jesus.” My father looks out the window a moment. We’re off the highway, going past Shining Saddles. Little girls in hard hats, no longer velvet-covered, more like helmets, are posting in a ring. He turns back to the mirror. “You remember that game against the Astros?”
“When we were down by seven?”
“And that little scrawny kid, never hit the ball in his life, Barry something—”
“Barry Corning.”
“That’s it, Barry Corning; he popped one right out there over the fence. You couldn’t wipe the grin off his face for the rest of the season.” My father rubs his hands on his pants, one of his happy gestures. “He was a good kid.”
The dogs, hungry, distraught at the disruption of their routine, circle my father even closer than normal as he comes through the door. He presses down their heads, speaks gently to them, gives them each a long rub, then squats in the middle of the kitchen to receive all their licks and nudges. Finally he gets up and goes to the pantry for their cans, and they leap and shake in excitement, their nails skittering to keep their bodies pressed to him as he moves.
My bag is still near the table, where I dropped it that morning. I look out at my stuffed car in the driveway. I don’t understand why I’m not in it. The dogs receive their food, and their collars begin to clank loudly against their blue ceramic bowls as they jerk down their smelly clumps of brown.
My father stands against the counter with the can opener in his hand, looking at me. He looks older now, as if the years have just descended on him, as if for the first time I am seeing him not as the forty-year-old man of my youth but as the sixty-year-old man he really is. The skin beneath his eyes is dark gray, while the rest is green-gray. His eyes are bloodshot.
“Thank you, Daley. Thank you for being here.”
“You’re welcome, Dad.”
I see him glance at the clock. It’s late afternoon and he wants a drink. I cross the room to the bar. I take two bottles at a time, by their necks, to the sink. My heart is pounding, my body tensing itself, preparing for violence. But he does not strike. The can opener does not come smashing into my head as I pour all the alcohol— first the vodka, then the vermouth, then the gin, the bourbon, the scotch, and the rum—down the drain.
I make us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, the first time I’ve fixed him something I can eat, too. Afterwards, while my father watches the second of the Red Sox’s doubleheaders, I make some calls and locate the head of the region’s AA chapter, a man named Keith who tells me the times and locations of nearby meetings.
Then I call Jonathan.
“Hey there.” His voice is rich and happy. “How far have you got?”
He thinks I’m calling from a pay phone. He’s entirely certain I have been on the highway all day.
“I’m still in Ashing.”
“Very funny.”
“My father tried to commit suicide.”
“What?”
“We’re home now, but he’s a little shaky. I think it was more a gesture than anything else.” I listen to the silence, then say, “I have to stay for a few more days.”
“You’ve got to get yourself across the entire continent in your car.”
“I know. I’ll make it. But I think you’ll beat me out there. I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“I promised I’d stay for six more days, just to—”
“Six more days? You don’t have six more days. You have to be there on the ninth.”
“I know that. I’ll drive straight through.”
“You can’t arrive having not slept for three days. I’m coming right now and airlifting you out of there.”
“No, Jonathan.”
“I think you’ve lost your grasp on reality.”
“He promised to stop drinking.”
“Of course he did.”
“He admitted it was a problem.” Didn’t he? “He’s never done that before.”
“You are living on a big pink cloud.”
The AA meetings in Ashing are held in the rectory of the Congregational Church every evening at seven. I drive my father there the next night. I need to see him walk through the door. I need to make sure he stays there the whole hour. He’s quiet in the car as we go down the hill and through town, and the silence in the car at this time of night reminds me of the Sunday evenings when he drove me from Myrtle Street to Water Street. I pull right up to the stone path.
“This is going to be good, Dad.”
He nods and gets out of the car. He takes his long splayfooted strides up the path, a handsome well-groomed man in his light blue cotton pants and navy blazer. His hair is still damp from his shower, combed down neatly. I glance at my watch, and when I look up I see him glancing at his. Two minutes to seven. I wonder if he’ll wait out the two minutes, but when he gets to the door of the rectory, he doesn’t pause. He pushes down the brass handle and disappears. Other people come after that. A man in a T-shirt and work pants stops outside the door to finish a cigarette. Two elderly ladies come up and speak to him and then he holds the door for them and they all go in. A woman with long stringy hair comes running up five minutes late. She fixes her sandal strap while holding onto the door and then swings through.
It’s only then that I realize what an absurd amount of faith I’ve put into this idea of AA. Where did it come from? Linda Blair and that Afterschool Special? Bob Wuzzy? Julie’s uncle? I’m not sure, but it now feels like I’ve always believed that if I could just get my father through the door of an AA meeting, all would be well. But when I imagine how it must be in there, a small room with a stained carpet and the smell of old coffee grounds, metal chairs, and a motley group in a circle speaking of their feelings, I see what a complete disaster it’s going to be. I can hear Garvey laughing at me already.
I brace myself for him to come sprinting out of the building. I stare at the green door, the institutional handle, the black mat on the granite stoop. I wonder if there is another exit, if my father is already halfway home. The sky dims. Streetlights come on. A few teenagers walk by, look sidelong into the car, speak loudly. Mallory’s old piano teacher, no longer young but still brilliantly blonde with her excellent posture that we used to imitate, passes by with a limping greyhound. At 8:09 the green door swings open and a cluster of eight or ten people emerge, my father among them. Several of them shake my father’s hand. He nods goodbye to the group of them.
“Okay, let’s go,” he says before he’s all the way in the car.
I decide not to ask him about it and he volunteers nothing.
I fix him a steak and french fries for dinner. I make myself a salad with avocados and put some on his plate, though I know he won’t touch it. He is at his place at that table without a drink by his plate. It’s dinnertime and my father is not drunk.
“Good steak. You get it from Brad?”
“Brad wasn’t there. It was Will behind the counter.”
Usually any mention of Will Goodale, the third of the Goodale sons, is enough to launch him into a tirade. Will i
s a crook, a pig; they shouldn’t let him within twenty yards of the place. He is going to singlehandedly sink the business that his father started in 1933. Old Mr. Goodale. They don’t come any better than him. There was a gentleman. Always wore a coat and tie to work, every day. He didn’t deserve a slob like Will for a son.
But all he says is “Huh,” and returns to his steak.
I want to say encouraging things, but to make a fuss might be the wrong move.
Over his ice cream and chocolate sauce he says, “I think I’ll go over to the club tomorrow and hit a few balls.” He looks up. There is a terrible amount of despair in his face. “Do you want to come?”
“I’m sorry, Dad.” How am I going to say this without starting a fight? “I can’t go to the club.”
“Sure you can. I know you’re not a member, but you’re under the roof.”
I take in a breath. I try to speak as gently as possible. “I can’t support an institution that chooses its members based on their skin color, religion, and bank accounts.”
“All right.”
All the fight has gone out of him.
He does the dishes and goes to bed.
The next night I drive him back to the church. The woman with the stringy hair is outside smoking. My father says something that makes her smile and then goes inside. I watch her lean against the wall and blow smoke up into the trees until the library clock across the street says five past seven and she goes in, too.
I get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk. I have no idea what to do with myself. After my mother died, I started studying. I’d never really studied before, never applied myself, as my report cards in high school always suggested I do. But I worked hard my last two years in college to get into Michigan’s graduate program in anthropology, and I worked much harder there, my sights on Berkeley from the start. For so very long, my life has been about deadlines, weeks at a time indoors, nights without sleep, reading, writing, and typing. I have been a slave to professors, to students, to the computer room, to syllabi, and then to my dissertation, a behemoth at five hundred and eighty-six pages called “Spirited Play: Zapotec Children’s Understanding of Life and Death.” When I was finishing it in the spring I didn’t see anyone for twenty straight days. I stayed in the apartment of a friend who’d gone to Nagasaki for her fieldwork on the hibakusha, the “explosion-affected people.” I stocked up on rice and beans and water and chained myself to the desk. I slept in the chair, head on a book, for a few hours at a time. When I ran out of toilet paper I used a sponge, which I scalded with hot water afterward. I had only the vaguest sense that that was disgusting. At the time it felt efficient. When I was done and had defended it, Jonathan took me to the Upper Peninsula for a long weekend, but talking was difficult, and everything in the natural world seemed to be moving at an alarming velocity. The wind felt so heavy against my body, the new leaves whipping around so fast. I had a sense that some force was at work, not a neutral force but an angry, aggressive force that made me afraid of the physical world. Jonathan expected me to relax, to luxuriate, but I didn’t know how to anymore. I felt as detached and remote from my life as I had when I came back from my fieldwork in Mexico. He was patient and took me on long walks in the woods and across sandbars, and I did slowly, slowly, let down, but within a few weeks I was back on deadline, with three articles to revise for publication and a hundred final undergraduate essays to grade.
