I loved my girls too much to let Chuck anywhere near them. I don’t know what happened to him. Probably he shacked up under the bed with the Bionic Woman. Superstar and Ballerina gradually became more eccentric and unstable, rather like the Edies of Grey Gardens. They lay around disheveled and half naked most of day, destroyed by the unfulfilled promise of their beauty. Their prince had never come.
As for me, I found a life-size Ken doll to date in my teens, and found revenge in my father’s expression every time he saw us together.
“Your mother is very upset about this,” he said gruffly, when word reached him that I was seeing “Ken,” a twenty-five-year-old part-time model and ski bum who was nearly ten years older than I. Whenever a conversation with one of his daughters stirred up uncomfortable feelings, my father would stiffen and summon “your mother” to speak through him, like he was channeling Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old man. I tried to look concerned. I doubted my mother had caught wind of it, having moved away to study law, taking my preteen sister to live with her. I had insisted with typical, pain-in-the-ass, teenage defiance that I wasn’t going anywhere and was, to my astonishment, allowed to stay. I was boarded with a family who my mother mistakenly hoped would act as surrogates, and our house was rented out, since Dad was supposed to go abroad on sabbatical. He drifted instead between friends, relatives, and hotel bars, from which he presided over the occasional father-daughter conference. I came and went from my landlady’s house as I pleased, hanging out in bars, skipping class, and sleeping at my boyfriend’s place. I was not quite seventeen, but as far as I could see, I was on my own. It was a little late, I thought, sitting across a table from my father in the plush mauve lounge of the Holiday Inn, to be laying down the law.
It’s one thing to not get what you want from your parents. That’s the grist of anecdote and of character. To not get what you need, that’s another matter, less readily transformed from its raw state. Through the mirrored lens of teenage cool, I could see my father was drowning, unable to save himself, let alone take care of anyone else. I could see that pursuing her career was probably my mother’s best, last chance at pulling away from the whirlpool that had begun to swirl around him; that there was no time to lose by fighting me or waiting a few more years. In my mind, I saw all that, and I understood. But in my heart, my parents had left me. And there was no magical misfit to pin it on, or turn it into a funny story.
“Is that your dad?” a playmate asked me once, regarding a huge painted portrait of my father that hung above our living room sofa, a flurry of thick black brushstrokes for his long hair and wild beard, his fierce brow.
“Yes,” I replied. Her eyes widened.
“Aren’t you scared of him?”
Sometimes, yes.
“Of course not,” I said.
His poems were in our readers at school, his books, in the library. Teachers and classmates were always asking me, What’s it like having a poet for a father?
I never knew how to answer that question. How should I know what it’s like? What’s it like having your father for a father?
It was wonderful. It was terrible. It was all I ever knew.
He wasn’t like other fathers, and ours was not like other families, at least not in my small hometown in the seventies, when the paper mill was still thriving and the little college where he taught English was brand-new.
“Mrs. Collins,” I marveled to my third-grade teacher one morning, “when I woke up, there were eighteen people asleep on our living room floor.”
My parents had hosted a party the night before, and our living room had been turned into a temporary hostel. At dawn, I tiptoed over the blanketed bodies in my flannel nightgown, counting the fallen like Florence Nightingale on the fields of Crimea.
There may have been eight. It may as well have been eighty, to judge from the elevation of my teacher’s eyebrows.
In elementary school, most kids reacted to these glimpses of bohemian home life with curiosity, but in junior high, they branded me a freak. Hardly any of my classmates would have anything to do with me by then. My parents couldn’t appreciate how desperate I was to fit in, and my yearning to be ordinary baffled them. They had raised an intelligent, worldly child. I could make a French omelet and recite Shakespeare. I read Ms. magazine and Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was hip to marketing propaganda. I could understand the concept of peer pressure. So why did I suddenly want to let Jordache advertise on my backside for free? People weren’t meant to be used as billboards, they said. You’re smarter than that. You’re special.
But I didn’t want to be smart or special anymore. I wanted to be normal.
I tried to pass with a disguise. Parents, teach your children proper makeup application at home, or they will learn it on the street. My tutor was a petite, busty eighth-grader named Nicki, who was rumored to have Done It, and was a self-proclaimed expert in cosmetology. I was well beneath her social standing, though a grade older, but she couldn’t resist such an acute makeover challenge. She came home with me after school one day, her book bag stuffed with beauty products and tools, and went to work. She covered my pimply face with bottled foundation from the drugstore, a noxious-smelling pink suspension of chalk and oil. Over this base, powder blush was applied in dark welts. “Contouring,” Nicki explained, making me suck in my cheeks as she colored them the brownish-purple of an old bruise. Thick kohl liner and frosted shadow was applied to my eyes, and my glasses were set aside, though I could barely see without them. My hair was gelled, feathered, curled, and varnished stiff.
I squinted into the mirror, and saw a miracle.
I bounded down the stairs to show my mother. “What do you think?” I asked, eagerly.
My flawlessly complexioned mother, whose own cosmetic bag held a tiny vial of rouge and one pan of blue-green eye shadow from 1966, reacted with equal parts horror and amusement.
“I think you look ridiculous,” she blurted.
“You don’t know anything!” I shouted, running back up the stairs. Her insistence that I was fine the way I was proved just how little she knew. I was teased for the clothes she liked on me, the embroidered peasant dresses and bib overalls. My classmates sniggered at my unusual name. I wasn’t special. I was strange. And I was anything but fine the way I was.
Nicki was still sitting on my bed, peering into a compact. She wore tight blue jeans and an off-shoulder angora sweater. It was said she owned over a dozen of them, and had dated an eighteen-year-old. She glanced up at me through lush curled lashes, surveying her own artisanship with cool satisfaction, then raised one perfectly tweezed eyebrow.
“Never mind,” I said, apologetically, tipping my head backward in the direction of the stairs. “I love your sweaters. Where do you buy them?”
Then I shut the door behind me and pushed off, chasing normal.
It’s unsettling to me, now, to realize what a dark view I took of being misunderstood by my parents, and how silently I nursed those resentments, both petty and grievous. I’m sure I’ve already disappointed my own kids more than I know, and they haven’t got to middle school yet. We’re not even at the hard part. The questions I put to my mother about past maternal misdeeds aren’t intended to make her feel bad, but to make me feel better. If I can let her off the hook, maybe there’s clemency down the road for me.
When the boys were babies, and crying was their only vocabulary for complaints, I longed for them to learn to talk, to tell me exactly what was wrong. But as their language has grown more complex, so have their needs and desires. The list of solutions used to be a short one: there were few problems a snuggle, a snack, or a change of clothes couldn’t solve. Once, I had the power to stop bad dreams just by laying my hand on the back of a troubled sleeper. Now the older two can read newspaper headlines about suicide bombers, car crashes, and cancer, nightmares I can’t banish, monsters I can’t promise aren’t real. Longer stretches of their days are spent away from me, of which I only hear selected highlights. They have interactions with friend
s, teachers, neighbors, and strangers that don’t involve me. Just because children can use their words doesn’t mean they will. When I consider what proportion of my own childhood lay hidden beneath the surface of my days, the transparency of an earsplitting wail is a relief in a way. At least it’s quite obvious that something is the matter.
My middle son, in particular, keeps his cards close to his chest. Quiet and enigmatic by nature, I call him our stealth child. He is extremely sensitive to all input, sensory or otherwise. Sounds are louder, tastes are stronger, smells are smellier, feelings are, well, feelier. Turning inward is his way of taking care of himself in a world that is sometimes too much with him. Prying gets me nowhere, but there’s a sweet spot, somewhere between backing off and standing by, where he comes out into the open. Sometimes I meet him there.
A month after starting second grade, he burst through the front door, crying. He and his big brother were tearing across the yard, when he tripped over a tree root and fell, most uncomically, on his funny bone. I ran his arm through a series of highly scientific wiggle tests, and applied an ice pack, but when he was still crying after twenty minutes, and unmoved by his big brother’s entreaties every five minutes to “come see this!” I decided a trip to the emergency room was in order. It wasn’t like him to stay down for so long. Maybe he had a hairline fracture.
Sitting in the hospital examination room, waiting for an X-ray order, afforded us some rare one-on-one time. I struggled to keep something like a conversation going, never a problem with his chatterbox brothers. I asked him about his arm, and where he was running in such a hurry, and how school was going. We had been in our new neighborhood all summer, long enough for him to make friends with kids in his grade, but I knew it was taking him a little while to find his place.
His answers were typically brief and noncommittal. He was bending and flexing his arm freely, but I still read pain on his face.
“Honey, you look so sad,” I said finally. “Are you sad?”
He shrugged. “Not really, I guess.”
Just like the kids have learned that Mommy’s “maybe” means “probably,” and Daddy’s “maybe” means “unlikely,” I have learned that my son’s “I guess” means “you guess.”
“Are your feelings hurt about something?”
“No.”
“Are you missing something or somebody?”
“I guess.”
It didn’t take a full round of twenty questions to find out that he was grieving for his best buddy from his old school. My guy cried quietly into a tissue as I stroked his hair and tried to tell him what I know about friendship and life changes, which is that sometimes it’s really hard, and you cry. The elbow was completely healed. I was never so grateful to have wasted an hour on a Sunday afternoon in the ER. Who knows how long my child would have held that grief inside?
Me, me. I do.
A very long time.
I put my arm around him while he wept. I promised we’d call his buddy when we got home, and that I not only understood his feeling sad, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if he felt mad at us for making him change schools.
I felt him uncurl. He twisted a damp piece of tissue in his hands.
“Better?” I said.
“Yeah, but there’s just one more thing.”
When a child like my child is about to give you something of himself, of his own accord, you sit very still and you breathe very carefully.
“What, honey?”
“I wanted to buy the house we looked at that had the creek in the backyard.” I had to think a minute before I could clearly picture it, one of the dozen or so properties we’d looked at in a whirlwind couple of days, over six months before.
The things we hold on to, the length we hold on. His mother’s child for sure.
“Trust me,” I said, on the day we made the offer on a different house. “Aw,” he said quietly, his disappointment barely registering above radar. I was surprised by it, but not deterred. Spring runoff aside, that listing was all wrong for us: bad traffic, a failing school zone, wall-to-wall carpet. It was never a serious contender. I knew he’d forget all about it as soon as we got settled at our new address, a secluded suburban valley teeming with kids, a short bike ride away from a great school and a real creek. I did.
Trust me is what parents tell children when the needle goes in, when the classroom door shuts, when the wish is denied. Don’t be afraid, don’t worry, don’t cry. Someday you’ll understand. You’ll see.
“Trust me,” my father said, standing at the foot of the crumbling stucco stairs where I bolted on our first night in Tobago, upon seeing the concrete box that was to be our home for the next several months while he wrote a play. Lizards clung to the mildewed ceiling and walls. It felt like a cave inside. Outside, it was too dark to see anything but the white wash of stars across the black sky. Spilled milk.
“Trust me,” he said, leading me back inside and tucking me in bed. When morning came, I got up quietly, tiptoed past my sleeping family, pushed the louvered door open, and stepped out into a paradise. I was ten years old, and I was living on Robinson Crusoe’s island. Who cared what it looked like indoors?
“Trust me,” he said, the last time I saw him alive, when I begged him to go to the hospital, because he was dying in a dank cave of an apartment, and there were no stars in that darkness, no hope of seeing things differently in the morning, only the pain and squalor and madness of late-stage alcoholism laid bare. It wasn’t going to be all right. The monster was real.
“Trust me,” he said, as it devoured him. Don’t be afraid, don’t worry, don’t cry.
Daddy.
“I’m scared,” my five-year-old says, not wanting to sleep alone.
“What are you scared of?”
“That something will get me, and you won’t know.”
I’m scared of that, too.
“Not going to happen,” I say. “Trust me.”
The words are a prayer, not a warranty. I understand that now.
In the end, the tooth fairy finally comes through, something under the Christmas tree always makes up for what isn’t there, and the Easter bunny gets away with all kinds of twitchy behavior as long as he leaves chocolate. Maybe for the kids, these are early exercises in doubt and faith. Or maybe the practice is for me, a way to wean myself slowly from the fond and fierce delusion that it’s within my power and duty to see into their hearts, grant all their wishes, and prevent them from ever being hurt or disappointed in life.
The power that comes with being a parent is both awesome and minute. We get to be vanquishers of nightmares, granters of wishes, and readers of minds, with eyes in the back of our heads, and kisses that heal. We are also poor gods, petty dictators, and bad Santas. We are helpless to keep the world, or even ourselves, from ever inflicting pain on our children. Love isn’t enough. Instinct isn’t enough. Our good intentions aren’t nearly enough. The best we can hope for is that it all counts for something, when the jig is up, when someday comes around, when our children finally do understand, and see.
11.
Southern Man
Hell, I got my faults. I admit it.
But hell, I got my ways, too.
—HENRY MOON, in the movie Goin’ South
My oldest son came to me one weekend afternoon, anxious, because he had a Cub Scout woodworking project for which he needed his dad’s tools and assistance, and his father did not share his sense of urgency about getting started. The best way to get help from somebody, I explained, is to clearly state what you need, and to ask them nicely. Then I set a trap. I went to Patrick and casually mentioned that Cub Master Chip had invited all the Scouts and parents to come use the power tools in his workshop, the implication being that Cub Master Chip’s workshop, power tools, and genitals were infinitely superior to anything we had at home. It worked.
“Cub Master Chip is a pussy,” my husband declared, marching to the garage to fetch his saw and ordering our son to bring his building materia
ls. A few minutes later, I heard the buzz of a saw outside and felt a surge of satisfaction and pride at the thought of my man teaching our son in the ways of tools and their safe usage. Of course, I had to ruin it by taking a look.
Patrick sat cross-legged on the porch, the vibrating handle of a small power saw positioned vertically in front of his groin, the reciprocating blade parallel to his midriff, the tip pointing straight to his Adam’s apple. With one bare hand, he was feeding a block of pinewood to the rapidly moving saw teeth. There were so many major organs and arteries in play I was stunned speechless for a second. A cloud of fine sawdust surrounded him and our three enraptured children.
“Boys, get back!” I shrieked, moving in to shield them. “Oh my God, the banister!”
My husband turned off the saw and rubbed his eyes. “What?” he asked, coughing and blinking.
I hardly knew where to begin. I pointed to a fresh gouge in the porch rail that suggested he had tried traditional methods before rejecting them, using the rail for a sawhorse. “Do you have to do this out here?” I said.
Patrick looked annoyed and bewildered by my objection. “Well,” he said, licking his thumb and rubbing the gash in the rail with it, “where else would I do it?”
“The garage? Don’t you have some kind of workbench with a clamp or something? And shouldn’t you be wearing safety goggles?” I was trying not to be inflammatory, but I couldn’t help adding, “The Cub master probably has a workbench.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll just bet he does,” scoffed Patrick. He turned the power back on and returned to aerial freestyle jigsawing. The boys resumed watching and coughing in the dust. I had overplayed my hand. Safety goggles and workbenches, indeed.
Planting Dandelions Page 12
