After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  “He’s so strong,” Patty offered. “Other people might not be able to handle it but Dad’s different.”

  Italy would be good for him, she said. We’d ride in one of those boats, with the men in striped shirts, paddling down the canals and singing. We’d finally have our father back.

  THE TRIP NEVER HAPPENED, BUT while he could still drive, our father came over to our house more than he ever had. There were times that fall when I could imagine the four of us were still a family—our mother, Patty, me, and our father, playing cards around the kitchen table, having popcorn together. Our mother came out of her room more during those months.

  “You know the problem with your mother, girls?” he said to us once, as she sat there, studying her hand. “She was too smart for me. She’s the only one that never bought any of my lines. Even when I bought them myself.”

  Our mother stared at him over her fanned-out cards. It was the first time in my life I’d seen tears in her eyes.

  “You’re as good a woman as they come, Lillian,” he told her. “If our girls turned out this great, I know where credit lies.”

  Sometimes, those nights, the four of us talked about the old days. He liked to imagine we had all these great traditions—Candlestick Park, North Beach, the Marin Headlands, the cable cars, Shirley Temples at the Top of the Mark, jumping in the waves at Stinson Beach. None of us wanted to say, We went to each of those places exactly once.

  “Remember that French song we used to sing?” he asked one time. “Remember the Flamingo Hotel?”

  Patty and I didn’t say anything.

  “That must’ve been with someone else, Anthony,” our mother said.

  Patty and I knew who.

  HE WANTED TO TEACH ME how to drive. I knew it was against the law for me to be behind the wheel at my age, but I wasn’t about to argue with my father, even if he hadn’t been a police officer.

  He set the date for a Saturday morning in November, and for once, that day the sun came out. He wanted to drive with me up Highway 1, through Stinson Beach, past Bolinas, into Point Reyes, he said. We were taking the Alfa.

  Most people’s fathers wouldn’t start them off driving a stick shift, much less on a road with so many crazy turns and drop-offs that it had been used in numerous sports car commercials. But nobody had a father like mine.

  “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, when he picked me up. His old line. Not that it was necessary.

  I sat in the passenger seat until we were safely down the road, where we changed places. When we did, I took in the full effect of how thin he’d become since his diagnosis. His pants fell from his belt like a set of drapes, and his hands, that I’d always loved, looked like bones with a little skin pulled over them. He got up from the bucket seat as slowly as an old man, holding on to the side of the car as he pulled himself to a standing position. I could hear every breath that went in and out of him.

  “Never keep your eye on what’s directly ahead of you, Farrah,” he said. “You want to focus on what’s a hundred feet up the road.”

  “Don’t brake on a curve. Downshift. That’s how the pros do it.”

  “If you want to look cool driving, which you do,” he said, “you don’t grip the wheel that tightly. Me, I imagine I’ve got my hands on the shoulders of a beautiful woman. I leave it to you to come up with your own mental picture for this one.”

  He wanted to stop at Stinson Beach to look at the ocean, though I could see when we got there that this visit would be harder for him than he’d anticipated. Still, we got out of the car and made our way up the path and onto the sand. He didn’t ask, but I bent down to untie his shoes for him. I knew he’d want to be barefoot.

  We passed Bolinas, the town where the citizens kept taking down the road sign to keep the tourists out.

  “Hippie town here,” he said. “The women here don’t believe in shaving their armpits. No argument from me there, you understand. Every woman needs to claim her own style of beauty. It’s my curse to love them all.”

  We kept driving north. Olema, Point Reyes Station, Marshall. I knew my father was tired—more than tired—but he wanted to keep going. He’d put Dean Martin in the eight-track, and though we talked sometimes, and now and then he’d offer some pointer on my driving, for long stretches we rode without speaking—my father in the unfamiliar position of passenger, me at the wheel, listening to the music.

  In fact, I did grip the wheel tightly for the duration of that drive, I believe, but not simply because I was an inexperienced and underaged driver.

  I gripped the wheel because I understood that what was happening at this moment was another one of my father’s onetime deals, and I didn’t want to forget a second of it. I recognized that this would be the only driving lesson my father would ever give me. I also knew the reasons he’d taken me out that day went far beyond the desire to provide me with driving instruction.

  “My mother wasn’t around when I was growing up,” he said. “I guess I could have been mad at her about that, but I wasn’t. I figured she had her reasons. I didn’t question what they were.”

  My fingers stayed clamped around the wheel. Eyes on the road. Best that he not see my face just then, nor I his.

  “I could handle it,” he said. “The hard part was seeing what it did to my old man.”

  More silence. Tony Bennett now: “My Foolish Heart.”

  “It would be a good thing if your mother could get out a little,” he said. “Meet someone. A normal guy. She deserves that.”

  This wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t say it. The first and last man our mother ever kissed was him.

  “I don’t lose sleep about your sister,” he said. “There’s a girl who knows how to tell a guy he’s full of shit. Yours truly included. She’s not going to let anybody mess with her. And she’ll be a beauty too, once she gets those teeth fixed.”

  I had never heard either of our parents mention Patty’s teeth, not once. It struck me that even now, as he finally acknowledged the problem, he did so without any sense that he’d be paying for the solution. He just knew Patty was a sufficiently competent person that she’d figure it out. Maybe he actually understood, even then, that his twelve-year-old daughter possessed a kind of self-discipline and strength he himself did not.

  “It’s you I worry about, Farrah,” he said. We were all the way to the Russian River now—the town of Jenner, where the river meets the ocean. Though the day had turned cool, we had all the windows open, which made it even harder to hear his words to me—coming as they did now so much more softly than they once did, and between labored breaths. The way he took in air now, it was as if my father were sipping from the smallest cup, with only the smallest quantity of liquid remaining, and no possibility for refilling it once that was gone. One drop at a time. Not that, even.

  “You’ll be the real beauty, of course,” he told me. “That’s happening already. Men will come after you your whole life, it won’t matter how old you are. You need to be sure, when they do, that there’s something in it for you. Don’t let it be a one-way street.”

  WE WERE ALMOST TO MENDOCINO County when he told me to turn the car around. He had put his seat in the reclining position and closed his eyes, and as I made my way back down along the winding highway, I wasn’t even sure my father was awake. I could have worried what might happen if a cop pulled us over and asked to see my permit, but I wasn’t even thinking about that part.

  I had to keep my eyes on the road, but sometimes, for a second, I would look over at my father, asleep beside me, and tell myself to freeze this moment. Never forget. I pretended I was a grown-up woman—thirty years old, or maybe thirty-five, out promoting my bestselling novel, and my father was retired from the police force, and (because my sister would have children, I knew) a grandfather now. Maybe we were driving to some important dinner for authors. Maybe my sister had become a professional basketball coach for some undefeated Division I school and we were heading to one of their games.

 
Maybe I was even older than that—the age that I have now reached, in fact: halfway through my forties—and my father was an old man. If this was so, it wouldn’t seem so bad that he looked the way he did, or that he seemed to be having so much trouble breathing. He would just be old, that was all.

  When we got back to Marin County—the turnoff on the freeway that would take us back to Morning Glory Court—my father opened his eyes in a way that made me realize he’d never actually been asleep, just resting.

  “I need to ask you to do something for me, Farrah,” he said. “I want you to drive me to Margaret Ann’s.”

  THE PLACE WAS CALLED VALLEY View, though in fact the only view revealed from that location featured the highway.

  As my sister and I had guessed back on that day we saw his car parked outside this place—a hundred years ago, it felt, but really just a few months—the person who lived there was Margaret Ann.

  The last time we’d visited Margaret Ann—the last time Patty and I had accompanied our father on a visit—I was nine years old, Patty seven. I remember how proud we were of him when—wanting to surprise her one time—he’d done a pull-up on her balcony. The place she lived then was so pretty, we imagined he had brought us to Disneyland, and she was Cinderella. I remember wishing, for a moment, that we could live in this place ourselves, partly because it was so nice, but also because our father seemed so happy there. I remember the feeling I had, after: the awful guilt at liking her and betraying my mother by feeling that way.

  Never forgive you.

  Pulling into the parking lot of Valley View that day, with my father in the seat beside me, I felt myself hoping Margaret Ann lived in a ground-floor apartment, so he wouldn’t have to deal with stairs.

  The old place had window boxes and a clubhouse, a turquoise pool and a hot tub where Patty and I had sat one time while our father and Margaret Ann stretched out on lounge chairs nearby, sipping a drink she’d made them that was pale green, with little paper parasols that we got to take home after.

  The pool at Valley View had been drained, and there was a scummy layer of some kind of mold along the bottom. Only a few cars sat in the parking lot—most of them pretty beat-up looking, and a chicken-wire fence enclosed one whole section of the building that did not appear to be inhabited.

  One car he recognized, evidently: a very old Volkswagen with a bumper sticker that said “Nobody’s Perfect Until You Fall in Love with Them” and another that said “There Is No Shortcut to Anyplace Worth Going.”

  “Looks like she’s home,” he said quietly. Evidently he hadn’t called ahead. He’d been taking his chances.

  He made no attempt at explaining to me what we were doing here, and none was required. “I should have picked up a snack for you,” he said, though I wasn’t hungry. “You don’t even have one of those notebooks in the car, for your writing.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I can listen to the radio.”

  It turned out she lived in a second-floor apartment, accessed by an outdoor staircase leading from the parking lot to a long, narrow balcony where some of the remaining tenants had set out plants or beer bottles to turn in for the deposit money. There was a stationary bicycle set on this balcony, positioned in such a way as to give the person sitting on it a good view of the highway, and a kitty litter box, a broken stroller, and somebody’s Christmas tree, ornaments and all.

  I knew my father would not want assistance on the stairs. But I had to watch as he climbed them, in case it looked like he’d need help. Twice he stopped to catch his breath. Then he started in again. When he got to her door, I saw him pull his shoulders back and run a hand through his hair. He stood there for a moment before ringing the bell.

  From where I sat in the parking lot, I could not see her standing in the doorway—only the look of him when he caught sight of her. She must have put her arms around him then, because he stood there a little longer, and I could make out one pale arm wrapped around his neck, mussing up his hair. Then he was stepping into the apartment. The door closed after him.

  I sat in the car almost an hour, waiting. Under other circumstances, this would have felt like a long time to be sitting in a parking lot waiting for your father as he paid a visit to a woman who was not your mother—a woman about whom I had once issued the warning that if he ever had kids with her, I’d never speak to him again. If he ever made any life that wasn’t with us. But as it was, I felt only happiness that he was gone that long. Whatever number of minutes he spent in that apartment, I figured, those would be the best minutes he could have right about now. I would have sat there all day if he needed that.

  It was starting to get dark when he emerged from her apartment. Once again, he stood there in the doorway for a moment before leaving, and I could tell from the glow of light behind him that she must be standing there again, saying something to him, or maybe they were kissing. Hard to know. I begrudged him none of this now.

  He made his way very slowly down the stairs, looking up one more time when he was partway down, but the door must have been closed by then. The glow of light was no longer visible.

  When he got to the car, I reached across to the passenger side to open the door for him—as much help as he’d want from me. He lowered himself into the seat with a sigh that went on so long it could have contained every molecule of air in an inflatable mattress.

  “There is one beautiful woman,” he said, facing forward, as if he was the one who had to keep his eyes on the road.

  I had never backed out of a parking space before, or even driven in reverse, and my father looked so exhausted now I knew I couldn’t ask him to help. I started the engine, shifted the gear, and turned the steering wheel too sharply . . . smashed into a Dumpster with enough force that later, when I checked, I saw a significant dent. Once this would have caused my father regret, but now he seemed not to notice.

  “We won’t be back to this place again,” he said, as I pulled out onto the highway. “You want to leave things on a good note.”

  HE WENT IN FOR THE surgery that January. He was supposed to stay in the hospital only a week, but after the operation, they moved him to a different floor, and a few days later, he asked his friend Sal to bring him a portable stereo and a stack of his records. That was when we understood he wasn’t going home anytime soon.

  When Patty and I came to see him, he showed us how the hospital bed worked—the buttons you could push so you could sit up or lie down at more of an angle. Easier to get to the bathroom that way, though later that wasn’t possible either.

  “You girls,” he said. “I did one thing right, anyway.”

  THAT LAST WEEKEND, WE SLEPT in chairs by his bed.

  Mr. Armitage took us to the hospital, and later our mother came with food for us and she sat with our father, though only briefly. She had never been one for the big drama moments.

  Patty and I stayed by our father’s bed all the rest of that weekend, and when Monday came there was no thought of school, or any awareness even of what day it was anymore. Our father was beyond speech now, his mouth gasping, palms open in the gesture that, for a police officer, signaled that he was carrying no weapon. At one point the pain appeared so terrible that I thought, if he had his gun now he might just end it here.

  We didn’t leave till Thursday, and then only because he’d died.

  I remember how it felt, stepping out the entrance to the hospital after they’d taken his body to the funeral home. You’d expect it to be raining in Northern California in February, but that day the sun was out, and it seemed to me so bright I had to shield my eyes. I’d been in his dark room for six straight days at that point. My pupils probably needed to adjust, though there was more to it. The world, with our father no longer in it, protecting us, seemed to be an unrecognizable and unbearably lonely place.

  PART THREE

  Never gonna stop. Give it up.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  They would have held a service for my father at St. Mary’s in the city, wit
h an honor guard from the Marin County and San Francisco police forces, and a flag draped over the coffin for my sister and me to bring home afterward. But at our father’s request, there was no service. He had asked that his body be cremated.

  He left me his gun—the Chief Special—and the Alfa Romeo. Other than those, my father didn’t own much: a wardrobe of great shoes, a medal for valor in the line of duty, the leather jacket, his gold watch, and every album Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Dean Martin ever recorded—and one Dusty Springfield album that brought back memories of a long-ago afternoon, Kool-Aid from bendy straws, and that closed bedroom door. One item I had looked for among his possessions and failed to find: his father’s haircutting scissors. Strangely enough, those would have mattered more to me than the medal.

  There had been a savings account in which he had told us he’d been putting aside money every month for the long-imagined Italy trip. At the time of his death, this account held just under eight hundred dollars—not quite enough for two round-trip tickets to Italy, so Patty and I could scatter his ashes in his family’s hometown of Lucca. This was the place he’d always said he would take us. There, and Venice.

  We didn’t make the trip that year, or for some time after that. We waited until a few weeks after my high school graduation, when Patty was sixteen, to make the trip—and by then we’d saved up enough extra that we were able to see Florence and Rome too. In Venice we met a couple of beautiful Italian boys—one of whom turned out to be a fair basketball player, who didn’t mind it at all that my sister was several inches taller than he was. Neither Patty’s height nor the fact that she totally destroyed him on the basketball court got in the way of their kissing, which Patty described to me as excellent. She had her braces by then—paid for with paper route money, and later a busgirl job, augmented by a gift from Mr. Armitage. The braces proved not to be an obstacle for Vincenzo and Patty.