by Dana Canedy
It was not just her attention I craved. It was the physical closeness. I do not remember her ever reading me a bedtime story. At times my mother’s ways could be cruel and confusing. After my sister Lynnette took my father’s side in an argument between my parents, my mother punished her by making her go to school with her hair unkempt. “Let your father comb it,” my mother said to her, knowing he had already left for work. My sister was only six or seven.
When I was a teen and given to being obstinate, my mother would regularly admonish me that “you’ll need me before I need you!” The words hurt as much as any spanking, and I have spent much of my life determined never to be needy.
My siblings and I learned to provide whatever nurturing our parents could not. We huddled the night my father broke his thumb punching our mother in the chest. After one of us got a “belt whipping,” another would sneak into the bedroom with a washcloth full of ice to ease the sting, or a handful of toilet paper to dab at tears. The ice was especially soothing when one of us—usually me—tried not to cry during one of those whippings. Such behavior was considered an act of defiance that would be met by harsher lashes until we wailed.
Of course my siblings and I fought over whose turn it was to clean up the yard after Major, our Doberman pinscher, or which one of us was entitled to the last slice of mom’s pineapple upside-down cake. We never stayed mad long, though. We made Barbie houses out of shoeboxes, decorated the cut-out windows with curtains made from scraps of fabric, and glued together Popsicle sticks to make furniture. My brother occasionally joined in with his G.I. Joes but was more apt to pull pranks. Once he caught a cricket and kept it in a box to use to torment me. He sneaked it under my bedroom door, and I screamed and gave him a quarter to remove it. The next day he did the same thing. At the end of the week he had a lot of quarters. His scheme only ended when our mother decided he had fooled me out of enough of my babysitting money.
We had our idiosyncrasies, we Canedys, but our family remained intact, and, eventually, when I was about twelve, we made it from the army base to Radcliff My parents had both grown up poor in inner-city Indianapolis, met when she was seventeen and he was twenty, and married less than a year later. They dreamed of one day living in a newly constructed house with a yard and enough basement space for a family room. The house they finally saved enough money to buy was on a quiet middle-class street with one Asian, three black, and four white families. While it was understood among the neighbors that subjects like politics and race were not to be brought up, all the children on the circle played together, and the parents made easy conversation about the weather or the lushness of their chemically treated lawns.
Because of his climb up to a middle-class life, my father would admonish me not to forget where I came from or who had made possible whatever success I attained. It was that admonition that kept pulling me back to the house in Radcliff long after I had left, seeking a career as a writer. I was the first child on either side of our family to attend college and felt guilty when my father would scoff, “You act like you pulled yourself up by your bootie straps.”
And so, on Father’s Day 1998, when I was thirty-three, I went home once again in hopes of rewriting the role my father had cast me in, the ungrateful child who would not appreciate him until he was “dead and gone.”
It was early Saturday afternoon and I had just arrived from the hotel where I was staying. When I walked into the living room a gorgeous man was standing there, holding a framed picture. I could not help but stare. I do not quite remember what I noticed first. The soft light brown eyes outlined by long black lashes? The skin the color of smooth caramel? The thick black mustache flecked with gray? I could see the outline of his beautiful body, even hidden underneath an oversize, faded T-shirt and baggy jeans cinched tight with a belt. He had swollen biceps and a hulking chest and shoulder muscles. His waist was so tiny it seemed out of proportion. Even the muscles in his hands bulged.
The combination of his sculpted body and gentle face made the spot behind my navel flutter the way it always does when I crave a man. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way he lowered his head, too shy to look directly at me. I wondered how a man blessed with so much beauty could possibly be bashful.
“Well, hello,” I said, walking into the room and extending my hand. “I’m Dana.”
“Hi, I’m Charles,” he said, nodding in my direction and briefly taking my hand.
I was close enough now to see the picture he was holding. It was a black-and-white collage of images of my father as a drill sergeant, created with thousands of tiny dots of ink. It must have taken hours of patient, exacting work. There my father was, smiling proudly near a tank and, in another image, carrying a company flag and leading his troops to their graduation ceremony. I had never seen anything like it.
Charles was holding it with some measure of pride, so I asked whether he had drawn it.
“Yes,” he said, lowering his eyes. He seemed embarrassed.
“That’s incredible,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I admired the portrait as Charles stood there in silence, smiling, until a few minutes later when my mother walked in. It turned out that it was a gift to my father, and she had been looking for the right place to hang it.
After excusing myself to get a glass of water, I found my father in the kitchen.
“Dad, who is that guy?” I whispered.
“Oh, that’s Charles,” my father said. “Nice looking, isn’t he?”
I took a long drink of water and waited, self-conscious, for my father to tell me more. He said Charles was stationed at Fort Knox and that he was an artist who specialized in pointillist portraits in ink like the one I had just seen. He also used pencils, charcoal, and watercolors. Charles drew portraits of black tankers from World War II, Bedouins, cowboys, and African mothers in native dress holding their children.
“We met him on post when he was showing his art at an exhibit,” my father said. “Nice man. Talented, too.”
“Is he single?”
“Yes, but—”
He could not finish because suddenly there was Charles to say that he was leaving. There was no time to waste; I needed away to get his attention before one of my single sisters noticed him. We had a rule that any man was fair game until one of us claimed him.
I hastily announced that I had checked into a hotel near Fort Knox, a place I often stayed when I visited to give myself a bit of solitude at the end of emotionally charged days. “Would you mind giving me a ride if you’re going that way?” I asked Charles.
“No problem,” he said. Charles followed me out the front door, past the giant oak tree and down the pebble driveway to his black 1989 Mustang. He stole glances at me as we drove in silence and I searched for something to say. Not only did he not speak, he didn’t even have the radio on. For someone like me, who loves to talk and fire off questions—and does that for a living—it was excruciating. Charles seemed the opposite of the gregarious alpha men who have always stopped me cold. He had an eagle feather hanging from a cord on the rearview mirror. (Was it a good luck talisman? I never did find out.) He drove agonizingly slowly, and I could feel the tension rising in my head and legs. I wanted to press on the floorboard with my foot, as if that would make us go faster. Who actually drove forty-five in a forty-five-miles-per-hour speed zone—with both hands on the wheel?
I was born a month premature, which is to say I have always been in a hurry. What I wanted was an instant connection with this polite artist-soldier who was clearly used to taking his time. He had gotten my attention without words, but for all I knew he had a type, too, and it might not be a curvy, career-driven woman whose last trip to the gym was for a massage. I have turned a head or two with my long, honey-colored legs and almond-shaped eyes, but most of the men who have been attracted to me have been drawn to my smile, exuberance, and wit, not my well-padded abs. I had no idea whether Charles was available or interested.
“Do you have time to si
t with me by the pool for a little while?” I asked as we pulled into the hotel parking lot.
“Sure, I guess,” he said, sounding surprised.
He walked around to open my door, but I was already halfway out of the car; I made a mental note to stay put if there was a next time. He followed me through the hotel lobby, stopping at a vending machine to buy sodas. I opened the glass door leading to the indoor pool, and the humidity and chlorine hit me in the face. I took off my shoes and sat with my legs dangling in the pool. A group of children splashed in the shallow end. Charles knelt next to me with his running shoes still laced up, watching as I wiggled my toes in the water and hummed. He seemed amused by my spontaneity. I could have sat there all afternoon except that water began to soak through my pants, so I moved to a pair of plastic chairs and Charles followed along.
I asked him how well he knew my parents, and he told me they were like family to him. “I’ve been going through a lot,” he said.
“I’m sorry. What’s been going on?”
He was quiet for a long while and then came out with it: he was divorcing his wife. This was the most painful period of his life, he said. He also said that my father had been a good listener and my mother had invited him over on weekends for her barbequed ribs. “They’ve really been there for me. I’m so grateful.”
After watching my parents hurt each other so often, I had spent much of my adult life protecting my heart and not trusting most men. That my mother and father should have anything to offer a person in a crumbling relationship struck me as laughable.
“That’s nice,” I said, keeping a straight face.
Part of myjob as ajournalist is to take stock of people quickly, and I somehow knew that Charles was not the kind of man who would open up to a stranger without prodding. So I asked where he was from.
Cleveland, and he was forty-one, with a younger sister. His parents were churchgoing folks from Alabama, a nutritionist and a nurse. In the journal he would later write:
Maybe he was nervous or had somewhere else to be. In any case, he stood up and abruptly said he would be on his way. He said he would stop by my parents’ house in the morning to wish my dad a happy Father’s Day and offered to pick me up at 9 a.m.
I did not tell him that I rarely got out of bed before noon on weekends and certainly not before I had read the front section of the Times. It was one of the benefits of being single and childless.
“Great,” I lied. “I’ll be ready.”
I saw him off and then called one of my sisters to drive me back to my parents’ house. I had not actually wanted to go back to the hotel, of course. But I had needed information about Charles. And now, according to the sisterhood code, I had the right of first refusal.
Charles intrigued me but, as I saw it, he had at least two obvious negatives. He was a military man like my father, and, worse, his friend. What girl wanted to be romantic with Daddy’s buddy? The ride home in the morning, bleary though it might be, would provide an opportunity for more probing.
The former drill sergeant arrived precisely at 9 a.m. and called from the lobby. I was nowhere near ready. Would he mind waiting on the balcony of my room overlooking the pool? I asked. Was I sure I wanted him to come up? he asked, which made me smile. Having grown accustomed to big-city men who assumed that tickets to a play, even off-Broadway, entitled them to a personal performance after the curtain came down, I considered this refreshingly chivalrous.
Charles arrived wearing a better-fitting shirt, but his jeans still sagged. He was carrying two cups of coffee and handed me one. It was the opening I needed, and I took a chance and gave him a thank-you hug. He was not as surprised as I had expected him to be and leaned in to meet my embrace. I held him there a moment more and breathed in his scent—musky, sweet. He briefly took my hand on the way to the car, and I liked the way my fingers felt in his tight grip. I let him open my door, proud of myself for remembering.
We agreed to stop at a store so that I could buy a card for my father, and he drove—well within the speed limit—to a supermarket. As I watched Charles walk, soldier-straight, to the bakery for pastries, I thought about the promise I had made to myself years ago to stay away from military men.
I knew I was getting ahead of myself, but I was drawn to Charles, and that unnerved me. I had never wanted to pack up my home every few years to follow a man to yet another military base. Most of the military wives I had known growing up in the 1970s had little control in their relationships. The soldier’s life came first, even when that required his wife to be a single parent for a year while he served a “hardship” tour of duty in Korea. If you were inclined to work outside the home, you had to be prepared to resign if your soldier was restationed. You had to believe him, or pretend to, when he told you that one of his troops needed him in the middle of the night.
There were rules for the children of military men, too. You did not fight too often with the ranking soldier’s kids down the street. You got used to your father being gone for weeks in the field to train. You learned to sleep through the sounds of machine guns and tanks firing at night because you knew it was only a drill.
The thing I hated most about military living was the “quarters,” as government family housing is called. For years we lived on Fischer Avenue at Fort Knox and those quarters reminded me of cages—rows of brick-and-wood units divided by too-thin walls, with yards not much larger than parking spaces. You could hear your neighbor’s toilet flush. Everyone on the block knew if your parents were having an argument, which mine often were.
Once, our next-door neighbor came over and asked to borrow a roll of toilet paper. Nobody had much money, but even at ten or eleven I was embarrassed for her. Another night, my mother knocked on that neighbor’s door in urgent need of her own favor. I had been throwing up and had a dangerously high fever, and my mother needed to borrow a car to take me to the emergency room. (My father had come home hours earlier, unlaced his combat boots, changed out of his uniform, and driven off for the night.)
We were at the hospital until well after midnight, and I still remember lying on the backseat of our neighbor’s car, weak and tired, after we left. I could tell we had taken a detour on the way home and lifted my head to see where we were. My mother was driving around the parking lot of a nightclub on the base, a place where countless soldiers had found and lost wives. I knew she was looking for our car. It was not there. I knew what that meant, too.
I am sure there were military wives who had good jobs and stable marriages, but I did not know any.
Being an army brat was not entirely bad. We played kickball with the other brats on the block until the streetlights came on. On hot days, when school was out, we aimed water hoses at one another. But I never got used to playmates packing up and leaving when their fathers got orders to report to Georgia or Germany. Within a month, there would be a new brat or two moving into the unit to replace the kid who had promised to call or write but never did.
No, life with a military man was not for me, and yet there I was, standing next to one in a checkout line and thinking that his gentleness and modesty affected me in a way that few people had in my life. Years later, when I read the journal, I learned that he felt the same, although he phrased it with his usual gentlemanly simplicity:
At the time I could tell that Charles was curious about me, amused even. He looked at me as though he had never seen someone say so much without taking a breath.
“So do you want to go somewhere for breakfast?” Charles asked when we were back in his car. He had already eaten a pastry. I smiled broadly. He was interested!
At a diner we ordered pancakes, and Charles bowed his head to pray before he ate. I was already chewing. I stopped and set down my fork. I prayed over my meals, too, when I remembered.
The sunlight streamed into our booth and we lingered long after we were full and our coffee had cooled. I braved the topic of his marriage.
Charles spoke vaguely of heartache so intense that he had sought m
edical treatment for what he thought at first was a heart attack but turned out to be anxiety. He had not been sleeping well, was lonely and worried about how to explain the unraveling of a family to an eight-and-a-half-year-old daughter who adored both of her parents.
“All I ever wanted was a family,” he said.
I told him that I could relate to his pain. Not long before, I had broken up with a boyfriend who immediately fell in love with a woman who looked like a supermodel and had a Harvard MBA.
“Who gets all that?” I asked. “You either get the model or the Harvard MBA, not both!”
I didn’t know then that Charles’s wife, Cecilia King, was stunning, too—tall and spaghetti-thin, with skin the color of cocoa beans, brown doe eyes, and round cheekbones the size of walnuts. Charles had fallen for her the moment they met, before he joined the military, when they were both doing catering work in a hotel banquet hall in Mobile, Alabama. Their daughter, Christina, had her mother’s good looks and her father’s tenderness. He seemed lost without them, grateful to have someone to sit across a table from at breakfast.
There was a silence. The waitress had cleared our table and stopped asking if we wanted more coffee, but we did not move.
“So what made you join the army?” I asked.
Charles said he was drawn to military service because of the discipline, the travel, and the mental and physical challenges. He had been in the army for nearly eleven years and planned to serve at least twenty before he retired to teach and pursue his art.
I learned he was a sergeant first class who helped run a platoon. He taught soldiers military doctrine and actually enjoyed leading them on uphill hikes carrying twenty pounds of equipment in the summer heat.
This was the same man who could barely look at me. The man, I would later learn, who took a sketch pad to Iraq during the First Gulf War and, between missions, sat on the hood of his tank drawing the local children.
Charles finally worked in a few questions of his own. What was it like, he asked, to live in New York City?
