True, as much as these desolate images appealed to us, we also pictured our fathers happy. We imagined them with castles and pools and huge wooden tables of food and beer. We imagined them lounging nude in hot tubs and saunas with women half their age, women we'd never seen before, women who maybe were already on the moon when our fathers arrived. We imagined the climate of the moon to be temperate, and we imagined our fathers singing songs in praise of the lives they had there. We sensed that there was music on the moon. Sometimes, we imagined, a man—one of our fathers—would glance down at the earth and feel a vague memory and the sting of loss, but we knew that such moments would be rare. As we grew older and the men stayed away, such images of happiness became stronger and seemed more realistic. We saw our fathers in a paradise. We could not escape these images and certainly we could not escape the truth—men had disappeared, and their sad lives became happy ones.
Sometimes, when we drank too much and such thoughts angered us in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, we threw stones and bottles at the moon, and we imagined that we were tearing the hearts from our chests, sending them hurtling through heaven where our fathers could see them and know this: we, their sons, were below them, bleeding.
2. Some Memories of My Father
I MISSED MY FATHER'S cheese sandwiches, the way most nights around nine o'clock he'd go to the fridge, take out two slices of Wonder bread and two pieces of individually wrapped American cheese, and make a sandwich. The process by which he did this was nearly surgical and it yielded a perfect sandwich, square and neat, nothing falling out from the sides. He never left a crumb on the counter. He simply put the perfect sandwich on a clean plate, set a pickle down beside it, and returned to the television, where he was watching, no doubt, PBS or the evening news. Such methodical operations my father sometimes had, and I missed them. I missed the smell of his breakfast in the morning (one poached egg, dark rye toast, Nescafe). I missed the way he folded his newspaper, leaving it, finally, at day's end, open to the crossword puzzle (which he always seemed able to finish, every slot, using a green felt-tip pen). I missed the slippers at his bedside, the smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the bathroom, the cracking of his knuckles, the precise way he folded towels.
Yes, it's true that I missed my father, but in a larger sense, I missed all the fathers. I'd drive into other neighborhoods, neighborhoods with names like Quail Ridge and Oak Hills where people could not even imagine the mass exodus we had experienced, and I'd watch the fathers washing cars or practicing golf swings. In these neighborhoods, fathers could be seen strolling up and down driveways, monitoring the progress of the landscapers and deck-builders and sprinkler-system-installrs. Neighborhoods like this could have been a million miles away from us.
What I missed most was the collective drone of our fathers' lives, their big and clumsy presence. I even missed their cussing and their labored breathing from too many cigarettes. I missed the roar of the sick engines inside the hoods of the hobby cars that would never run quite right. I missed their beer and coffee breath, missed their cheap aftershave that stunk up the church on Sunday mornings. I missed the cranking of their power tools on Saturday afternoons, and the roar of their voices while watching the Lions play on television. I even missed the yelling, the arguments gone over the edge, the occasional sound of a fist going through the door.
Still, in truth, I could remember very little about my father. Already, in a matter of less than a year, his image had grown vague and hazy. I listed the few memories I had in a notebook, afraid they might leave me:
I am three years old, my father is smoking and sweating, swearing at some sort of machine, while I sit on a concrete floor, banging an old coffee can with a screwdriver.
I am four. My father and I are stacking firewood at the side of the house. A hornet swirls around my head and lands on the small log that I am holding. My father says nothing, puts his hand out. I give him the log. The hornet doesn't budge. My father takes his pocketknife, flips it open with one hand, and sticks the blade into the hornet, pinning it to the wood. I hear an anemic buzz and the hornet falls to the grass in two pieces.
Five years old. We are at a wedding. It is late. Ambulances have arrived. Somebody has had a heart attack. Some adult, a mustached man with floppy gray hair, pours beers on my head. I start to cry. My father grabs the beer-pourer by his necktie and throws him to the floor.
When I am six, my father lives in the basement for a week. He sleeps on the couch, does not shave, never goes to work. Sometimes my mother and I hear him vomiting in the bathroom down there. My mother says he is sick. We sometimes hear him crying, loud sobs. I am not allowed to go downstairs. He stays there for another week, a third week. My mother goes downstairs only after I am in bed, and they yell at each other so that I can't sleep. One night there is the crash of a broken mirror and the sound of a hole being kicked into the wood paneling. In the morning, my father joins us for breakfast and, clean-shaven, returns to work.
When I am seven, my father disappears for a weekend. Eventually, my mother calls the police, who find him hitchhiking on I-75. My mother asks: Where were you going? My father says: Maybe Florida?
When I am eight, my father announces that he is breaking the Good Friday fast, and that he doesn't want any goddamn fish, what he wants is kielbasa and ham. He rips into our Easter meats and sits at the table, drinking beer and eating pork. My mother yells at him; she tries to call the priest on the telephone but he doesn't answer. My father inhales the smoky smell of kielbasa and offers me a piece. I take it, eat it, then eat several more. My mother yells for me to stop. My mother begs me, but my father laughs and so I laugh with him. Later, my father leaves the house, and it's me and my mother in the kitchen. She is trying to salvage what's left of the meat for basket blessing the next afternoon. She says I've done a horrible, sinful thing. In my room that night, I stay up as late as I can, crying and saying the Rosary, begging the Virgin Mary to ask Jesus to forgive me, although, because it is Good Friday, I am not sure if Jesus is available.
When I am nine, my father announces that we are moving to Arizona, and he and my mother stay up all night fighting. My mother says, "What do you hope is different for us in goddamn Tucson, Roman?" And my father says, "Everything." But by morning, my father no longer mentions Arizona, and we never move or discuss it again.
When I am ten, my father kisses a woman at an office party. He confesses this to my mother, moves out for a week, and then comes back home, bearing two large pizzas and a jug of root beer.
When I am eleven, my father gets a ticket for drunk driving. My mother threatens to leave him.
When I am twelve, my father grows a beard and mustache and begins to work in the garden, bird-watch, and listen to opera. He quits drinking for six months and buys a family pass to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
When I am thirteen, while we're eating cheeseburgers at a White Castle, my father tells me that I should prepare myself for disappointment. "This is the way our lives turn out, Mikey," he says. "Disappointing."
When I am fourteen, my father and I drive to Florida after his uncle Five dies. We think we are set to inherit nearly half a million, but instead, we find that Uncle Five has spent all his money on his widow, a thirty-one-year-old waitress who won't let us in the house. On the way home, my father says, "This is what I mean by disappointment."
These were my fragments of my father. I could remember only his many phases, his fleeting obsessions, and his periodic bouts with depression. I'm not saying there was no happiness in my childhood. No, I remember my father as a loving, bighearted man capable of hitting low points that lasted for weeks. I remember him often looking confused and broken, as if he'd just woken up from a long sleep plagued by sad dreams. Still, although I tried and I tried, I couldn't retrieve a single extended memory: there was no camping trip that we took alone, no long talk in which he offered me advice, no fishing from a metal rowboat, just us guys, our lines in the water and the sun barely starting to rise. And t
his is one of the things that I was afraid of: that my father was gone for good and that my memories of him weren't clear and lasting. Perhaps my memory was just bad. My memories of my childhood were pleasant ones, mostly. But they were dim, and my father was a shadow in them all.
Now only one thing remains:
When I was sixteen, my father went to the moon.
3. Summer 1992
IT WASN'T UNTIL the next summer that we sifted through the chaos of our lives looking for order. The women in Maple Rock were holding yard sales—"memory sales" they called them—joking and furious at the same time. Our mothers, your wives, made signs with poster paints on the lids of pizza boxes—MEMORY SALE: EVERTHING MUST GO! People came from all over the city to try on your old coats and pants, to buy up your old tools, your bikes, your bowling balls. They even bought your half cans of latex paint and your opened bottles of Goo Gone. What was left went to Goodwill, as if you were dead relatives we barely knew.
And then there was the warmth of that summer, long endless days with a burning omnipresent sun, and the women in Maple Rock began to crave something: newness. They fell in love with all things new—new cars, new jeans, new haircuts. They took on new loves, new jobs, new facial expressions, new joys and sorrows, new personalities. Our mothers consulted with lawyers and filed divorce-by-abandonment papers, eager to wipe their slates clean.
All things new; it was overwhelming.
I was over at Tom's place during one of the many yard sales and his mother offered me Mr. Slowinski's old Carhartt jacket. I tried it on, and it fit perfectly. I had just been through a cold winter with a thin coat, and so I accepted it. "Thanks, Mrs. S," I said.
Just then, Tom came out on the front lawn.
"What the fuck are you wearing?" he said. He was barefoot and shirtless and looked even smaller than he was, as if he were sinking into the crabgrass patches on the lawn.
"Tommy," Mrs. S said.
"A jacket," I said.
"That's my fucking jacket," he said.
"Thomas," Mrs. S said, "it's way too big for you."
"It's not," he said.
It was. Mr. Slowinski was nearly six feet tall. The jacket fit me perfectly, but I was six inches taller than Tom.
"Try it on," I said, and Tom stormed off.
When I found him, he was talking my mom into giving him my father's old drafting pencils. I let him take them all. The metal pencil box was sticking out of his back pocket as he walked away, as if he'd been collared and tagged by some zoologist.
I WAS STILL DATING Sonya Stecko, and she was spending the summer getting ready to go to college in Ann Arbor. She had worked hard in high school, pulled off a 4.0 GPA, and scored highest in Maple Rock High on the ACTs. She had a list of recommended reading for freshmen, some list they had sent her for the Honors College, full of novels and history books and poems, and every Monday morning we'd go over to the library in Livonia, which was ten times bigger and cleaner than the library in Maple Rock, and she'd check out more books.
We were sitting there in the library one morning. I was reading magazines, and she was reading The Odyssey. She had her long brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, and she twirled her hair around one hand as she read. She caught me looking at her. Her eyes were bluer than mine, and with the mix of daylight coming through skylights and the fluorescent glow of the library, they looked like tiny round mirrors submerged in water.
She said, "You really should read this. You'd like it."
"What's it about?" I said.
"It's about Odysseus, who wants to get home to his family, but he can't, he's kind of being held prisoner on this island. So his son goes and looks for him."
"It's good?" I said.
"It's a classic," she said.
"So? Big fucking deal. I know it's a classic. Is it good?" I said.
"You won't understand it, on second thought."
"Maybe I'll read it when you're done."
Sonya looked back down at her book. I flipped through my copy of Rolling Stone again.
"When you go to college," I said, "will you have a roommate?"
"I don't know yet," she said. "Hold on a minute. I'm almost done with this chapter."
I WAS TRYING TO check out a few books on the sly—Huckleberry Finn, Walden, Moby Dick—just some stuff I knew I was supposed to read if I wanted to be anybody in life, the kind of stuff I figured Sonya might read in college. The librarian was a chatty old lady who had to provide a running commentary as her shaky hands scanned each book and stamped it with a due date.
"This is a very impressive reading list," she said. "You're an ambitious young man."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You know, Jack London used to read dozens of books every week. He never had a formal education."
"Really," I said. "I didn't know that, ma'am."
I had then—and still have—a tendency to be overly polite in places like libraries, bookstores, or art galleries. I've always felt, for some reason or another, that somebody would eventually come after me in a place like that, and inform me that I wasn't welcome.
"Thank you for telling me that, ma'am," I said. "Maybe I will read one of his novels next."
"What does your father do?" she asked.
It was the kind of question only an old lady would ask. I ran through the options in my mind. My father lives in a small cabin near Escanaba where he handcrafts stringed instruments and snowshoes. My father is employed by the federal government and drives a Lincoln from city to city, inspecting institutions for fraud and general incompetence. My father went to Nashville to make a country music album which is due to hit stores in January. My father disappeared into a thin mist one morning while walking along the rocky shores of the North Atlantic. These are all lies I have told at some point in my life. Even now, at the age of thirty, I tell people these kinds of lies when they ask about my father. But back then, I was seized by honesty.
"My father," I said, "is on the moon."
"How's that?" she said. She adjusted her hearing aid while sliding my stack of books across the counter. I took the books and walked away.
"Those are due in three weeks," she called after me.
WHEN SONYA WAS DONE with The Odyssey, she checked it out again and gave it to me. For a week, it sat on my nightstand. Finally, one night when she was out with her mother in Ann Arbor (they were "exploring the city") I opened the book.
My mother saw me reading it. She'd come downstairs to get a load of laundry from the dryer, and she said, "Are you reading Homer?"
"Yeah," I said. I sat up in bed, a little embarrassed. I don't know why. I felt like she'd caught me flipping through a copy of Hustler.
"Great," she said and went into the laundry room.
When she came out again, she was holding a white basket full of dark clothes. She sat on the edge of my bed without setting down the laundry. She was resting it on her knees.
"Have you thought about going to college?" she said. "Sonya seems pretty excited about it."
"I don't know," I said.
"You should think about applying for colleges early," she said. "For scholarships and all that."
"I know that, Mom. Goddamn, I'm just trying to read a book, not become some professor."
She set down the basket and started folding the clothes while she talked. "What do you think you want to be, Michael?"
"I don't know," I said. And she waited, not saying a word, just folding my clean clothes. I knew I had to say something. "A writer, I guess."
I don't know why I said that. But my mother's face had lit up and she was smiling at me.
"Really?" she said. "A writer?"
"Yeah," I said. "Really."
It had just occurred to me, but suddenly it sounded right. It was what I wanted to do.
My mother handed me a stack of folded jeans and sweatshirts, my socks and underwear resting on top of them. They were still warm from the dryer.
"Wonderful," she said. "I think that's wonderful. That's the d
ream you're chasing. We all have one."
"What's yours?" I asked.
"Mine?" she said. "Right now, I'm just trying to get this house cleaned up."
In fact, the whole house was already clean. Once it had been cluttered with the debris of nineteen years of marriage, but it seemed like a new place that summer. We'd had at least three yard sales by then. The attic and basement were almost empty, the closets spare, the rooms—free of the extra couches, armchairs, and end tables we once owned—were airy and open. My mother had painted the walls white. She had pulled up all the carpeting to reveal hardwood floors that she swept and mopped until the oak planks reflected the light from the windows. She never used the air-conditioning anymore, and instead kept the windows open, day and night. A breeze moved constantly through our home. My mother lit candles in every room, like she was trying to get rid of some primitive scent, a territorial marking that no longer had meaning.
STILL, WE DID REMEMBER the coats you wore, the musty smell of the cars you drove, the brands of cigarettes you smoked.
We remembered how your voices sounded, singing in the back of St. John's Church, low and monotone, but reverent and aching with confession and regret. We remembered how you sometimes laughed, loudly and suddenly, while we were down the hallway in our bedrooms, trying to sleep.
We remembered how some nights, we'd find you alone at the kitchen table in your pajamas, drinking, and your faces were haunted and lost.
We remembered how you walked with a mix of arrogance and caution, and how sometimes your shoulders would slump and your hands would plunge deep into your pockets.
Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Page 3
