by Pamela Ribon
My body relaxed, and my breath rushed out of me. “Thanks for waiting, Dad,” I said to the room. I smiled. “I’ll miss you.”
My right hand felt warmer. I closed it into a fist, to hold on to whatever it was that was touching me at that moment. I stood quietly and closed my eyes. I breathed in the last moments of my father that lingered in that room.
That’s when I was able to really look at him. He was so tiny compared to the last time I saw him. His cheeks had emptied out, and his skin seemed darker, like he had just gotten back from a vacation. His hair was thinner, his skin looser than I remembered. My father was much older than I ever realized he had become. When did all of that happen?
When I walked out a few minutes later, my body felt different. My face, my bones, my back—everything had suddenly aged. I felt much older. I looked at my hands. The skin seemed tighter. Weathered.
It was Thanksgiving morning, and I was thankful that my father’s spirit was strong enough to wait for me.
000040.
I didn’t know just how solitary my family could be until that first day home without Dad. We walked in the house and tossed our luggage in different corners of the living room. All four of us stared at each other, standing in silence. Only Shannon was still crying. We stood in this living room that none of us grew up in. We’d spent only a few holidays there, and it was rare for us to be in that room at the same time. I didn’t remember the room being so big before, so full of furniture I didn’t remember. It looked like someone else’s house. Only Dad’s recliner, all hunched and worn in the corner, felt familiar.
Mom spoke first. “I want to be alone. Are you girls going to be okay?” Her voice was different, mechanical. She looked past us toward the stairs.
We nodded, and Mom went up to her bedroom. Every once in a while we could hear her sobs and the sound of moving upstairs.
Meredith went straight to sandwich making. Mere ate all the time, so it wasn’t inappropriate for her to pull out some turkey and cheese and ask if we wanted anything.
“I want soup,” Shannon said. She was mostly speaking to the pantry, which contained no soup at all.
“How’s school, Shan?” Meredith asked as she cut the crusts off her sandwich.
Shannon was a junior at Rice University in Houston. All three of us spent our high school years in Texas, but only Meredith moved up north a year after my parents did. Mere was always close to my father and openly Dad’s favorite, but none of us minded.
“School’s school,” Shannon said, as she opened the cabinet where Mom kept the junk food. “Pringles? When did Mom and Dad start liking Pringles?” She opened the can and sat at the kitchen table.
“Who’s going to cut the turkey?” Meredith whispered. Shannon and I looked at her.
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“Can we not right now, Mere? Huh?” Shannon put the lid back on the can of chips and stood up.
“We should probably go to bed,” Meredith mumbled.
“It’s daylight,” Shannon said. It was close to ten in the morning. I could still hear my mother weeping upstairs. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep ever again. What would a nightmare feel like in the middle of all this sadness?
“I’m not tired,” I said.
“Me either,” said Shannon.
Meredith got up and hugged Shannon. “Well, I’m going to go to sleep. I’m exhausted. I was at the hospital much longer than you guys were.”
She walked out of the kitchen. Once we had heard her close the upstairs bathroom door, Shannon whirled toward me, whispering feverishly.
“She’s such a bitch. Like she worked harder or had a sadder day because she was there longer? We’re bad daughters because we couldn’t fly in any sooner? Because we’re not psychic and didn’t come home yesterday?”
“Just ignore it, Shannon.”
“I hate her so much. She’s so self-righteous. With her perfect job and her perfect little friends and her perfect little apartment.”
I realized I was drinking coffee out of the mug I bought Dad for Father’s Day a very long time ago. It said, “Daddies Are the Best!” The lip of the mug was chipped and I ran my tongue over it.
Shannon pulled back her hair and I saw how much she looked like my mother. Her eyes had that tired look around them, as if she’d been worrying about the entire world all day long. Her hands were older than she was. Shannon was an engineering major at Rice. I really had no idea what she did, but I knew she was good in math and physics. She tried to explain once, but I actually fell asleep while she was talking.
“Let’s go smoke,” I said.
“Brilliant.”
We walked into the backyard and sat on the swing set.
“I need to bum one,” Shannon said.
“You always do.”
We smoked and stared up at the bright blue sky. I squinted against the sunlight glaring off everything around us. My eyelids were heavy from crying. My face felt swollen, my tongue rough. It was cold out, but the cold felt really good, reminding us how crisp life can feel. How opposite of dead we were right then. The irony of smoking a cigarette at that moment made me laugh.
“I miss Dad,” Shannon said quietly. She wasn’t crying, just staring at her feet, breathing heavier than normal. I hated feeling so helpless. Worthless. What were we all going to do in that house all weekend? It felt like everyone wanted to be alone to mourn. We were keeping each other from feeling anything.
The swing set creaked under the weight of our bodies, moving back and forth. I could see my breath long after I exhaled the smoke from my cigarette.
“Are you going to write about him?” It almost didn’t sound like Shannon. Her voice sounded younger. Soothing.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your webpage. Your journal. Are you going to write about him?”
I stood up.
“It’s okay if you don’t,” she said. She wiped her nose like she’d been crying, but her eyes were dry.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, please. It’s the Internet. You know you’re one of the more popular journals out there.”
“I am?”
“There are links to your page everywhere. Of course I was going to find it.”
“Wait. When did you find it? What other journals? You read other journals? Why didn’t you tell me you’d been reading? I can explain.”
“Calm down. I think it’s funny. I was reading some girl’s weight-loss journal and she linked to that Billy Blanks thing you did. I read it and laughed and read another entry and you were talking about Ian, and then I knew. I knew I was reading my sister’s diary. I totally freaked out.”
“Holy shit.” I sat back down on the swing. “Really?”
“No. Dale was just going to explode if he didn’t tell somebody about it. But don’t tell him I told you. I promised not to say anything. Anyway, once he told me about it, I read the entire thing that night. I wanted to call you, as if you somehow didn’t know other people could see it.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to face the wrath of Dale. And it’s really none of my business. It’s not like you were writing about me. Now the Ian thing’s a little weird, that you pretend you’re still dating him.”
“I’m starting to feel bad for lying about it.”
“Don’t be. Those people don’t need to know the truth. You don’t owe anyone anything. At least you sound like you. You’re not really lying anyway, since you actually dated him. You should see the other journals out there. One girl is writing about how she’s a stripper with a drug habit. It’s such bullshit. You know she’s not, because if she was really doing all of the drugs she was bragging about, then she’d be too blitzed to figure out how to post a webpage. Actually, hers is really more like a blog.”
“What’s a blog?” I asked her.
She looked at me, amazed, her eyebrows shooting upward toward her scalp. “Yo
u really don’t know anything about this, do you? Didn’t you read any journals before you started your own? Did you think you were the only one doing this?”
I hadn’t even thought of it. “Why would you read something like that, like the stripper website?” I asked her.
“I take study breaks,” Shannon said as she blew out another puff of smoke. “I get bored. They’re like soap operas. I can’t stop reading some of them. I can’t wait to see how they’re going to mess up their lives next. There’s this one guy who is totally stalking his ex-girlfriend, and he doesn’t seem to realize it. He keeps going on about how much he loves her, posting shitty poems, and the next day he’s whining about some restraining order she’s filed. It’s hysterical. I love him because he’s so clueless.”
“That sounds awful.”
Shannon kicked up her feet and started swinging slowly. She was wearing a pair of my shoes that I thought I had lost two years ago. “It’s so much fun. Either you’re reading someone like you, who writes about everything you can identify with, or it’s this total train wreck you can’t stop reading about. You just read about their pain and thank God you’re someone else. It really puts things into perspective knowing you’re not some poor bastard fired from his job because of a porn addiction.”
“There’s a journal like that?”
“There’s a journal like that. And he has a thing for you.”
“Gross.” I wondered how strangers described my journal to their friends and family. Was I one of the train wrecks? What would Shannon think if she knew about LDobler?
Shannon laughed and lit another one of my cigarettes. “Anyway, it’s fucked up.”
“Do people feel sorry for me?”
“No. You’re one of the other journals. You make people feel better about themselves because you tell them it’s okay to dork out. Like your Betty haircut. That entry you wrote about breaking up with her? So funny. Look at me, all proud of my big sister.”
“I get fan mail.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Thanks.”
“Dad would have been really proud of you, too.”
I smiled. Shannon patted me on the back. “Hey,” she said, leaning in. “Can we scan those baby pictures of Meredith in the bubble bath and put them on your website?”
The turkey was ready just before midnight. It was already carved when Mom brought it to the table.
000041.
Having a holiday weekend without a family member felt like putting on a sweater that had an extra arm. Nothing fit right and there was all this extra fabric and you just wanted to be normal again. Not that I’d ever worn a sweater with an extra arm, but I’d never had a holiday with a dead family member before, either.
I was in the living room when Mom brought me a cup of tea. “I was thinking,” she started, carefully.
“Yes?” I was ready to listen to her talk for a while, to help her grieve. I wanted to be a good daughter, to be there for her when she needed me. I felt bad that I wasn’t going to be able to stay for as long as she might need and was glad she was able to talk to me about all of this so soon. “Sit down, Mom.” I patted at the couch I was sitting on.
She stayed where she was and smiled nervously. “Have you called Ian?”
“No.” I said it quicker than I wanted to. Angrier.
“Don’t you think you should?”
“Why?”
“Honey, you were with him for a long time. Your father liked him a lot.”
“He did?” That was certainly news to me.
Mom took a breath. “We all did,” she said, not bothering to hide the guilt trip. She left the room.
I grabbed the cordless phone with as much exasperated noise as I could. I made every movement as deliberate as it was elaborate, so from whatever room Mom had snuck into, she could hear that I was obeying her wishes, despite my best interests.
I got Ian’s machine and stumbled out a mess. “Hey. Hi. Hey. It’s me. Um, it’s Anna. Hi. Hey, Ian. Um, this is…this is not what you say when you get an answering machine. Or is it a voice mail? Do we not say ‘answering machine’ anymore? Like, do I still say ‘I got his machine’? You don’t have to answer that. Hey, listen. My dad died. That’s not a graceful way to say that, but there isn’t really any grace in saying someone has died, and I hate saying the word passed like we ate bad chicken. I’m still talking. I should hang up. I’m in Hartford. My dad’s dead. Happy Thanksgiving.”
Classy.
Meredith flopped down on the couch next to me a few minutes later. “I hate these cushions,” she said. “Why do Mom and Dad still have these stupid flower cushions?”
“They’re from the last couch.”
“I know, Anna. I’m not stupid.”
Meredith was always three steps away from a fight.
“You asked,” I said carefully.
“I hate their new furniture. I tried to talk Mom out of buying it, but she said that it was the first pattern she could find that Dad actually grunted about. She didn’t know if it was a good grunt or a bad grunt, but the fact that he showed signs of life about a swatch of fabric gave her hope that she…”
Meredith stopped talking and lowered her head in her hands. She leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees. Her brown hair fell down around her arms. I put my hand on her back.
“I don’t need you to do that,” she said. It sounded like she was crying.
“I don’t mind.”
“Oh, well, thanks. Don’t want to put you out.” She flipped her head up and I could see that she wasn’t crying. Her face was flushed and her brown eyes were sharply focused in anger.
I bit my upper lip. “Meredith? I’m just trying to help, okay?” My voice had risen and we were already in a fight. I didn’t want a fight. These things just happened with Meredith.
“I know. You’re always trying to help, aren’t you? But you and Shannon are going to leave here in two days and go back to your lives and I’m here with Mom. I have to take care of her now.”
“Mom will be okay, Mere.”
“No, she won’t! Nobody’s going to be okay!”
She stood up and grabbed a handful of Skittles from Mom’s candy bowl. I hid my smile. Shannon and I find that bowl to be the most disgusting thing in the house. Mom never cleans it and it’s always full of loose, dusty candy. Meredith was the only one who ate every piece.
“I don’t know what else you want Shannon and me to do. Dad didn’t want any kind of service—”
“I know that.”
“I know you know that. I’m not arguing over how well you knew Dad. Jesus, I’m trying to comfort you and you’re making it so fucking difficult.”
“I’m sorry. It’s all my fault I don’t grieve the way you want me to, Anna. We can’t all be precious like you.”
I couldn’t deal with her anymore. “Sorry I bothered.”
I walked out of the house and sat on the front steps. I lit another cigarette. My lungs were aching from all of the smoking, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing left to do. I wish Dad had left us with some kind of option. He said he didn’t want a funeral. He always felt that the only people that would really want to mourn his death were the four of us. All of his relatives had already died, and he didn’t have many close friends. But because of this we had no reason to be in the same room with each other and no real reason to talk about our pain. This was his memorial service. Mom wandering with a lost look on her face, Shannon watching MTV up in her old room, and Meredith bitching out anyone who tried to comfort her. Rest in peace, Dad.
000042.
Subject: …
AK,
I’m so sorry about everything. I’m sorry you’re in so much pain. I wish there was something I could do, something I could say. Fuck. It feels so helpless over here…close enough to do something, but too far away to do anything real.
Even though I never met your father, I know he must have been a remarkable man. Half of his genes c
reated one of the most spectacular women I’ve ever known.
Take care of yourself. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. At any time. I’m here. Always.
-LD
-----
000043.
For Dad
21 NOVEMBER
Why is it that when we cry our mouths salivate? Is it because the back of the throat swells up? Is it to clean out our mouths—we cry when we’re in pain and the tears are an antiseptic? Is it because our tongues swell and rest on a salivary gland?
I think it’s so we have a harder time talking when we cry, to prevent us from saying things we don’t mean when we don’t know how to express exactly what we’re feeling. It might also be a defense mechanism. People stay away because we’re weepy, drooling messes. The ones who love us no matter what let the snot and drool get all over them while they hold us.
I’ve been pretty snotty and drooly this weekend.
My father died today, on this holiday when we traditionally give thanks, and I’m very thankful to have been this man’s daughter. Because of this, I feel the need to tell all of you a little bit about him.
He was a good man. He tried to be a better man. He changed over the years. Became a quieter version of himself. I heard many stories about crazy things he did back when he was my age. Back before he had to be responsible and become an adult. Back before his daughters forced him to become a father.
I’m not going to go on about him because he wouldn’t have wanted it. He wouldn’t have wanted to waste your time. My father isn’t the type of man who is going to be missed by hundreds of people. He kept to himself. He minded his own business. He made sure he took care of the people who mattered most to him. You can bet your ass that the handful of people he loved and cared for are going to miss him tremendously.
It’s different here at home without my dad. He was a part of this house as much as any wall or room. I rarely saw Dad outside of this house over the past few years. In fact, I rarely even saw him standing. He loved sitting in the living room, his recliner kicked back, remote in one hand as he watched television, his head leaning back more and more as he fell asleep to the sound of football. He had his routines. He had things that made him happy.
