by Lily King
Julie and her father argued about the ceremony. Alex disapproved of the bridesmaids, the poetry, and homemade vows. He took a sudden interest in Orthodox rituals. He wanted her to circle the chuppah seven times and to enter it alone with her face fully covered. He wanted the rabbi to read the traditional wedding contract in Aramaic. She said it would take forty-five minutes and was nothing but a pre-nup, all about how many cows Michael would have to pay to divorce her. At least, Alex insisted, Michael would smash a glass as a warning against excessive joy. “I want excessive joy!” I heard her scream at him.
She got married in the small garden of the house she and Michael had just bought. The guests filled the seats outside as I helped her dress, slipping the satin buttons through their holes, threading flowers through her hair.
We stood side by side, me in a dark blue silk dress, she in white tulle.
“My dissertation was called ‘Women and Rites: The Misogyny of Custom,’” she said. “How can I explain this white dress to my students?”
“They’ll never have to know.”
Then she looked at me closely. “You look so beautiful, Daley.” She said this as if it were an important day for me, and not her.
I shook my head. “You’re the beautiful one. You are stunning, Jules.” And she was. She was glowing with excessive joy. But I still didn’t understand why she wanted to be married.
And then her father called up to us. It was time.
I didn’t see him right away. He was sitting behind the big hats of Julie’s aunts, and I was under a frilly chuppah. Alex was in front, beaming, teary, all the tension between them already forgotten. And then one aunt leaned over to say something to another, and there he was. My shock broke his nervous face into a wide grin, and that sun hit my face after years in the shade. I couldn’t help the tears. While her cousin read an Emily Dickinson poem, Julie squeezed my hand and whispered, “You see, there were many good reasons for me to get married.”
After the ceremony we met in the middle of the garden and held each other for a long time without a word, our bodies slotted together in the same way. Everything—his smell, his skin, his thudding heart, his breath on my neck—was what I knew, familiar as a season. So this is what happens to me next, I thought, and I finally understood what my mother had meant about falling in love. It was the surprise, the recognition that everything had been moving in this direction without your ever realizing it.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” I said.
He pulled out four invitations from his jacket pocket. “How could I not?”
Despite what I’d said, Julie had sent one anyway. And Michael had sent one before that. And so, it turned out, had Alex. All these people, looking out for me.
“I knew this would happen,” he said in my ear. I wanted his mouth to stay there, right there. There wasn’t anything else left in the world to want but this.
“What?”
He slipped his hand between us to rub his chest. “All these feelings.”
“You don’t sound so pleased.”
“You know I like a little more control over myself than this.”
I did know that. There were so many things I suddenly knew.
We got married in that spot in Julie and Michael’s garden a few years later. Jonathan’s mother and brothers, Garvey and Paul, were our only other guests. I never knew before that moment that you can feel love, like a slight wind, when it’s strong enough. You can do this, they all seemed to be saying. This is where you can put your love safely.
After I hung up with Hatch, I stood in the door of Jonathan’s study.
“My father is in the ICU.”
“What happened?”
“Stroke.”
He came and put his arms around me.
“They think he’s going to die.” I laid my cheek on his collarbone. I didn’t feel sad because my father was in the hospital. I felt sad for his entire life.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, after a while.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t go alone. I’d need you there.” This is what had happened to me in eleven years. I’d learned to need him, to lean on him, which is separate from love.
I could feel him taking that in. “Then I think we should go. All of us,” he said. “We’ll find a hotel with a pool. The kids will love it.”
“Really?” We were saving for a trip to visit his father’s relatives in Trinidad.
“We have to allow for emergencies.”
“I don’t know, Jon. I don’t know if I can do it.”
“He’s unconscious, right? You’ll be able to say whatever you need to say to him without rebuttal.”
“I’m not sure I have anything to say.”
“Then you can say goodbye. You didn’t get that chance with your mom.”
And he didn’t get it with his dad. “But it’s so complicated.”
“Of course it is.”
“I don’t think I’d regret not going.” I’d have to take personal days at work; the kids would miss school.
“But there’s a chance you will be glad you went, an outcome that has a far greater value than nonregret.”
“Said the philosopher.”
“I knew that PhD would come in handy someday.”
Neither of us ever became professors. I teach middle school social studies—ancient civilizations and world history. I like those grades, sixth through ninth, my students still open, willing to reveal their curiosity and imagination and humor to me, willing to allow me mine. Jonathan works part-time for his brother building houses, and writes fiction. He and Dan were nominated for, and lost, the same prize last year, but it’s his first novel that gets the most attention. I see paperback copies of it around school in the fall because a colleague of mine teaches it in the high school. It’s based on the year after he left the terrace on Myrtle Street and roamed the country in his truck, working when he needed cash, moving on when he’d made enough, his careful plans destroyed. He was as itinerant and broke as his father when he first came here from Trinidad, and his life was threatened more than once. It’s a hard book for me to read.
We decided to drive up to Massachusetts the next morning.
Barbara and I eat lunch in the cafeteria. She thanks me for coming. Her crumpled face crumples even more. “I know it means so much to him, Daley.”
“I’m not sure he has any idea who I am, but I’m glad I’m here.”
“He knows. He’s missed you.”
I don’t know that I believe her, but I’ve missed him too. We missed each other. We aimed and we missed.
In the afternoon my father dozes, loud and rattling. They are short naps, sometimes only a few minutes long. And then his eyes open. They move to the TV first, then to me and Barbara, then to the nurses’ station where all the action is, doctors picking up and dropping off paperwork, people tapping things into computers.
“Okay, then, you do that,” his favorite nurse says into the phone. My father imitates her without opening his mouth. He catches her inflection perfectly. He is like a parrot with its beak shut. Barbara takes out her needlepoint and urges me to read my book or get some magazines from the waiting area, but I don’t want distraction.
Visitors pass by on their way to see patients farther in, and again on their way out. They appear briefly, cross our six-foot stage from curtain to curtain, and are gone. A tall young woman in a cape and long black hair passes by. She looks a bit like Catherine did, years ago. My father’s head snaps toward me, eyes wide. I laugh. He tries to speak but it’s just a long croak, a hopeful croak, almost like he wants to say hello to her.
“I don’t think that was her. But it looked like her, didn’t it?”
He nods, still looking at the place she disappeared from.
“Who looked like who?” Barbara asks.
I decide not to answer.
He dozes off. Fifteen minutes later he wakes up and says, very clearly, that Chad Utley came to visit that morning.
“Oh, Gardin
er, no, he didn’t,” Barbara says. “Chad Utley is dead.”
My father looks at me. “Deh?”
I shrug. I’m sorry to hear this. Mile High Mr. Utley. He was always kind to me. But I don’t think my father needs to be reminded of his death right now.
“We went to the funeral,” she says.
My father takes the news hard. He stares at his hands. They’re folded on his belly. Barbara and I are at cross-purposes. She needs him to meet her in the present, and I am happy for him to remain deep in the past.
His mouth slackens and he falls asleep again.
“You know, Daley,” Barbara says quietly, “your father lost a lot of friends by marrying me. They all sided with Ben against us. It was very unpleasant. We were alone. Totally alone. Hatch was about the only person who would visit. And Virginia Utley was the worst of them all. But when Chad died, your father was the first one over to her house that afternoon. And she has never stopped thanking him for it. I know you two have had your difficulties, but I don’t think you have any idea what a good man he is.”
I can see her assembling another vignette, so I ask about her needlepoint.
“It’s the ship your father and I took to France when we were first married. It was honestly the most romantic trip. We danced every night. They had a wonderful band.”
“What kind of music did they play?” I have to speak loudly. My father is making a racket in his sleep.
“Oh, all stuff before your time. Our song was ‘It’s Like Reaching for the Moon.’ They played it every night, the last song. Out on the deck. Beneath all the stars.”
“I don’t know it.”
“You don’t? It’s lovely.”
“How does it go?”
You never know, from someone’s speaking voice, if they will be able to sing or not. Barbara has never had a mellifluous way of talking, but she sings beautifully, surprisingly low and rich.
It’s like reaching for the moon,
It’s like reaching for the sun,
It’s like reaching for the stars—
Reaching for you.
At first she sings down to her needlepoint, but soon she lifts her face to me. I do not hide my pleasure from her. Then she looks at my father and she stops short. “Oh, sweetie, oh, sweetie, don’t do that.” She leaps up and goes to the other side of the bed to wipe the tears from my father’s face with her hand, but her own fall on them both. She holds my father’s hands. “That was our song, wasn’t it?”
My father nods. His face is red and wet.
“It’s strange,” I say to Jonathan that night in the hotel room. “They’ve had a life together. I always thought it was such a desperate act, but I think he grew to really love her. And she has many stories in which he’s the hero.”
“How was she to you?”
“Very kind, appreciative that I came.”
“I’m glad.”
We’re on the big bed in our hotel room. Lena and Jeremy are on the floor in front of the TV, hair wet from swimming, surfing the two hundred and eighty channels. I’ve got an eye on the screen, unsure what might flash on next.
Jonathan tips my face toward him with a finger, away from the TV. “It’s okay,” he says. My overprotectiveness is something we struggle with.
“My father is so entirely himself, that’s the weird thing. You can strip someone of so much, but he’s still there. Just the way his hands rest on the mattress.”
“It must be hard to see him like that.”
“I know it should be. But it feels so much safer with him in that bed. I never thought he could be felled.”
“I didn’t really either,” Jonathan says.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and kiss the hollow below his ear. “Thank you for being here with me.” I feel the defenselessness of my love for him, an utter vulnerability, all my guards down and gone.
It took me several years to agree to marriage. Julie listened to all my fears and said, “You seem to think that once you get married your love for each other is going to start draining out like it’s in a bucket with a leak, like you get this one tank of gas and can’t stop for more. You aren’t allowing for the possibility that love doesn’t always start dying, that it can actually grow.” I thought she was delusionally optimistic.
“You’re gooey,” Jonathan says. It’s Lena’s word for when she feels all floppy with affection.
“I am.”
“Stop hugging!” Jeremy says, his head popping up at the foot of the bed. And when we don’t move away from each other, he climbs up and tries to pry us apart. But he can’t budge us.
I have no memory of ever seeing my parents touch. I suppose it is a luxury, his aversion to our affection with each other. I hope someday he will see it differently.
Lena clicks on CNN. The primaries don’t start for four more months, but they’re playing clips of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigning in different parts of Iowa, as if the caucuses were next week. Jonathan and I look on, but we don’t have our usual argument about them.
“Is your father going to die?” Lena asks after we shut out the light and lie, all four of us, in the king-sized bed. They have no name for him. He is my father, but not their anything.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Are we going to come with you to the hospital tomorrow?” Lena asks.
“Briefly. Daddy will bring you over mid-morning, and if your grandfather is stable you can say hello.”
“Hello and goodbye,” Jeremy says. Death hangs lightly on a six-year-old. Then he thinks more about this. “Do you like your dad?” It’s new to them, me having a dad. They’ve always known that my father lives in Massachusetts and that I haven’t seen him since long before they were born. But he was never real to them until now.
I don’t know how to explain it all to them. “Yes, I like my dad.” I try to think of why, because that’s what they’ll ask next. “He is so familiar to me.”
“Yeah, because he’s your dad,” Jeremy says.
“That’s right.”
But he wants more. “Why is Granny the only grandparent we see?”
“Because Daddy’s dad is dead,” Lena says. “Mom’s mom is dead, and Mom’s dad is dying. That’s why.”
“But he wasn’t always dying.”
I assumed that once I had children I would get in touch with my father. I thought it would feel important to me for them to know their grandfather. But in fact it was just the opposite. “Here come the little pickaninnies,” I could hear him say under his breath as we approached the house. It wasn’t just the possibility that they would overhear a racial slur, or see him drunk and raging. When I became a parent, even moments I had once thought of as tender went rancid: ridiculing Mr. Rogers, pummeling my stuffed animals at night. Once, when the kids were younger, our neighbor, Maya, who was eleven, came over to bake cookies with us. She had a rope bracelet around her wrist, the first hint of breasts beneath her T-shirt. I realized that she was the age I’d been when my parents divorced, and Lena was Elyse’s age. They were both just little girls. My throat squeezed shut and I had to rasp out my instructions. “Why are you talking so funny, Mommy?” Lena asked. Once the cookies were in the oven I went into the bathroom and pressed a washcloth to my face. I had been a little girl, too, with a rope bracelet and breast buds and a father who was reading us Penthouse at night.
The next morning my father is back in restraints. He has had a rough night, hollering and thrashing. A nurse is walking around in a neck brace, and I fear he’s responsible.
Barbara is nearly done with the sea in her square of needlepoint. All she has left is the red hull of the ship. My father is sleeping. He has worn himself out.
A new nurse fiddles with a machine. She changes his IV, then pokes his finger for a drop of blood. He wakes up screaming.
“All right, drama king, settle down,” she says. “You want those restraints off?”
My father nods with pleading eyes.
“You gonna
behave yourself?”
He nods again.
With routine dexterity she unfastens and removes the stiff bands of cloth. “You’re sort of smooshed down at the bottom.” She turns to us. “Wanna help me get him up?”
She and Barbara each take an armpit and I am told to push his feet. My father is alarmed.
“Na,” he says. “Na!”
“You have to help us now, Mr. Gardiner,” the nurse says. She pulls up the bottom of the covers to his knees. “Now, your daughter is going to have her hands right here on your feet and you are going to push with your legs.”
It is strange to be called a daughter. I put my hands on his bare feet. They are all bone, every toenail long and gray and bumpy. His calves are nearly as thin as Lena’s and the same shape, doubly familiar to me.
“Push. Push,” Barbara and the nurse say to him. “Push!”
As soon as his torso is lifted from the bed, he starts to wail. “Bacafumee,” he says. I don’t know what he means. “Bacafumee.” It’s the first time I can’t understand him.
“What’s he saying, Daley?” Barbara asks.
“Bacafumee!” His face is squinched and red.
We get him a few inches higher in the bed. He is covered in sweat. Be careful of me, he was saying. I think of his drunk mother staring at the wall. Isn’t that really all we’ve been saying to each other, generation after generation: Be careful of me? I am trying so hard to be careful with my children. I look at my father. He’s still whimpering a little. I’m sorry, I say silently. I’m sorry we couldn’t be more careful of each other.
Afterwards, he sleeps again. I try to read, pretend to read, but mostly I watch him. I find him as intriguing as a painting. His body tells me a long story that I have, in the past fifteen years, nearly forgotten.
My phone dings.
“They’re here,” I say to Barbara, after I read the text.
